Barely four months after returning to power with a reduced parliamentary majority, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government looks tired and shaky. However, a surprise electoral win in Haryana, an agrarian state of 30 million people in northern India, has steadied the Hindu right-wing leader’s hold on national politics.
Although more important regional polls lie ahead, the Haryana results would give pause to Modi’s rivals inside the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as his political opponents outside. It would not be easy to stop the 74-year-old from completing his third five-year term.
Election surveys — and even exit polls — got the outcome wrong. Voters handed a defeat to Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress (INC) party, which was hoping to capitalize on the simmering disaffection with the BJP’s decade-long rule in Haryana. In February, the state closed its border with New Delhi and dropped tear-gas shells from drones on farmers marching to the national capital with their demand for legally guaranteed crop prices.
Popular anger against the BJP was supposed to be amplified by high youth unemployment, curtailment of retirement benefits from armed-forces jobs, and the Modi government’s shoddy treatment of the state’s popular women wrestlers, eulogized in Dangal, a 2016 Bollywood hit.
The wrestlers have accused a former chief of the sport’s governing body of sexual harassment and intimidation. The official, an influential BJP politician, has denied the charges. A three-time Olympian, who left her awards on a pavement in New Delhi last year as a mark of protest, joined politics and defeated her BJP rival in Haryana. In the aggregate, though, an overconfident INC came up short. Instead of shrinking, the BJP’s tally in the state improved to 48, compared with 37 for the INC.
Modi’s fading personality cult did not play much of a role in ensuring this surprise sweep — he addressed fewer rallies in the state than during the previous two elections. Nonetheless, the verdict would bolster his government’s chances of completing its full term. An enthused BJP cadre might now make a stronger-than-usual bid to retain the party’s hold on Maharashtra, home to India’s commercial capital of Mumbai. Pollsters are predicting a defeat for the state’s BJP-controlled coalition government. They are also penciling in a less-than-even chance for the BJP to win Jharkhand, a mineral-rich state in the east.
These contests would decide if Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, next door to Jharkhand, would shift his support to the opposition. Kumar has a history of switching sides, and his party’s 12 members in the federal parliament are crucial to the survival of Modi’s government.
All of these regional polls, including Bihar and Delhi, a ministate that hosts the national capital, would have taken place by around this time next year. That is when the contest to succeed Modi would open up. Indian Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari has already let it slip that opposition politicians told him before and after the parliamentary polls that they would back him as Modi’s replacement.
“Becoming prime minister is not my ambition,” Gadkari is reported to have said.
When politicians feign disinterest in the top job, usually the opposite is true.
Gadkari may not be Modi’s only internal rival. Yogi Adityanath, the saffron-robe-clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state more populous than Brazil and poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, might also be keen to test his chances in national politics. For him, too, the key would be to retain power in his own state in 2027. The more economically prosperous and socially progressive Indian south does not care much about Modi’s politics of religious polarization; it is the less developed north that has a bigger say in deciding who gets to rule over 1.4 billion people.
State elections matter. The defeat in Haryana might slow the growing momentum behind Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in India’s parliament and Modi’s biggest challenger. To be sure, Gandhi’s INC did succeed in the recently held local elections in India’s restive, northernmost region of Jammu and Kashmir. However, a chance to govern there as a junior partner of a local party is not much of a victory. Five years ago, Modi downgraded the region, India’s only Muslim-majority state, to a territory controlled by New Delhi. The newly elected lawmakers would have limited authority.
Of the two poll outcomes on Tuesday, Haryana’s result is more important. A win there for the BJP suggests the ruling party has more room for maneuver than analysts believe.
Perish the idea that this would embolden the government to pursue tough reforms. If anything, the prime minister might feel less pressure to give a better deal to farmers, soldiers, women or young people. Nor does he need to cut the tax burden on the middle class to stay in power.
With superior election management and some luck, Modi 3.0 might just muddle through to 2029.
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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