The great global election year continues. And this time it is up to the largest mass of voters on the planet to choose their political destiny. Next Friday the elections start in India, the most populous country on the globe, and a rising economic and geopolitical power, in a corresponding vote: of enormous size. Some 970 million people are summoned to the ballot boxes deposited in more than one million polling stations in 543 constituencies. The process, which begins on April 19, will last 44 days, until June 1, and will extend across the vast Asian subcontinent in seven phases. Results are expected on June 4. More than 5.5 million electronic voting machines will be mobilized.
Beneath the dizzying figures, however, lies a polarized climate. Polls and analysts give the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party of the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who has been in power for a decade, as the comfortable winner. Meanwhile, various international organizations criticize the country’s democratic regression and the discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims. And the opposition denounces being the victim of political persecution by state institutions, and warns of the risk that constitutional secularism could be compromised in the name of Hinduism if the BJP wins again.
Modi, 73, has set himself the threshold of reaching 370 seats out of the 543 at stake in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, which will be in charge of investing the Government. There would be 67 more deputies than those obtained in 2019. And his formation would command a coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, with a hyper-qualified majority of more than 400 seats, which would give him room to undertake reforms with hardly any counterweights.
In front there is a block of opposition formations led by the Congress Party, with Rahul Gandhi at the head. Gandhi, 53, is the latest exponent of a key lineage in Indian politics: son of the assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and former prime minister Sonia Gandhi, grandson of the also assassinated former prime minister Indira Gandhi and great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, first head of Government after independence. The party obtained only 50 deputies in 2019, and Gandhi was expelled from Parliament in 2023, after being condemned for calling the prime minister a “thief.” The leader of a group without which today’s India cannot be understood has tried to turn around the polls by touring the country on walks and also by bus: between 2022 and the beginning of this year he has carried out marches and treks of about 11,500 kilometers to take the pulse of all the States of India and explain their vision. A recent India TV-CNX poll, however, gives Modi’s coalition 399 of the 543 MPs; The opposition alliance remained at 94, with the Congress Party at a minimum: 38 seats, a result even worse than in 2014.
Modi has his fiefdoms in northern and western India. His success is among the middle and popular classes. He has the sympathy of the lower castes, from which he claims to have come himself (a claim that is disputed). And he enjoys a special pull in the call cow belt, the strip where the Hindu religion has a determining weight. Some see him as a deity.
“He is a person that people not only respect, but revere. And that veneration can be very useful for the ruling party to achieve a large number of votes,” says Harsh Vardhan Shringla, former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs between 2020 and 2022, in a telephone conversation. Although he is not affiliated with the BJP, he is close to the formation. He assures that his success is due to numerous factors that begin with Modi’s own leadership. He cites everything from the millions of people who have left poverty (almost 250 million in the last nine years, according to NITI Aayog, a government institute) to infrastructure projects. “In all areas there has been great development” and “many efforts to serve the most disadvantaged sectors,” he says. “In general, there is a feeling that the Government has kept its promises.”
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Shringla was the coordinator of the G-20 held in India in 2023, an event that has raised the profile of the country, says Shringla. In recent years, India has become a pivot, a kind of third way close to the West in the face of the rise of China. “Our position on the international scene is not the same as it was ten years ago.” If a decade ago it was the tenth economy in the world; today is the fifth. Its growth rates are among the highest of large nations, and it has a legion of workers: around 65% of the Indian population is under 35 years of age. “One thing is certain,” the diplomat concludes, “today we are at the decision-making table.” And all that influences choosing a party.
But under the mantle of rock star that has been conferred on Modi during his state visits, one also perceives a discourse that has divided Indian society. This is what university professor Apoorvanand Jha, a common voice among critics of the presidential Cabinet, denounces on the phone. Modi, he explains, came to power in 2014 with language that was already destined to polarize, talking about development and nationalism and, unlike other leaders, he was able to express his Hindu nationalist position “without complexes.” He took over the Executive thanks to the “desire and hope” of the citizens. “What has happened in the last ten years is the complete collapse of the Indian state as we knew it. Because democracy is not just about holding elections, but it is also about a fine balance in the institutional framework.”
Apoorvanand assures that the Government is making “almost impossible for the opposition to even participate in the elections”, and lists recent examples that the opposition also clings to to denounce the alleged harassment of institutions co-opted by the BJP. Since 2014, as many as 25 prominent opposition politicians facing corruption allegations have defected to the ruling BJP; In 23 of these cases, his change of jacket has resulted in a pardon, according to recent research by The Indian Express.
Another example provided by critics: in February, the Congress Party announced that its accounts had been frozen due to an alleged case of non-payment of taxes. “We cannot support our workers, and our candidates and leaders cannot travel by plane or train,” Gandhi denounced in March, according to the AP. “This is a criminal action (…) carried out by the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior.” Another example: the Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, who leads the second party in the opposition coalition, has been in prison since March, accused of corruption, which has prevented him from participating in the campaign.
“The repression of peaceful dissent and opposition by the Indian Government led by the BJP has reached a critical point,” Amnesty International recently denounced, whose accounts in the country were also frozen and which was forced to close its offices in the India in 2020. Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed concern in March about “increasing restrictions on civic space – with human rights defenders, journalists and critics perceived to be targeted – as well as the incitement to hatred and discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims.” And according to Human Rights Watch: “The discriminatory and divisive policies of the BJP Executive have led to an increase in violence against minorities, creating a widespread environment of fear and a chilling effect on critics of the Government (…). Instead of holding those responsible for the abuses to account, authorities chose to punish victims and persecute anyone who questioned the actions.”
One of the most recent episodes in this tension between Hindus, who make up 80% of the country, and Muslims — 172 million people, 14.2% of India’s population — was the inauguration, by Modi, of a Hindu temple on the disputed site of a centuries-old mosque. This was destroyed in the nineties, in an attack by a Hindu mob that caused thousands of deaths and set a precedent of impunity in cases of violence against Muslims in the country. The inauguration just before the elections was a calculated move, according to journalist Sandeep Dikshit, associate editor at the newspaper The Tribune: “The prime minister wants to take credit for recovering a cultural symbol that, he said, had been taken by Muslims 600 or 700 years ago.”
Pratishta Singh, a member of Rahul Gandhi’s team, says on the phone that the last 10 years have been a necessary “shake” to wake up. “Our democratic institutions, our [poder] judiciary, the media, the bureaucracy… have been diluted beyond recognition.” And he believes, like other analysts and institutions defending civil rights, that a good part of the responsibility lies with the acts of hatred and lynching against Muslims that go unpunished or have the approval of BJP leaders. “If there is no punishment for these crimes, what kind of democracy and institutions do we have?”
With the accounts frozen, Gandhi’s formation is operating through donations or contributions from its members, says Singh. But the opposition alliance has overcome the cracks that appeared and assures that things are looking good. In his words: “I don’t like to predict elections, but, in terms of the Congress Party gaining ground, our calculations point in that direction.”
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