The New York Review of Books: Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered. [...]

These elections, reported the Centre for Media Studies, a non-partisan think tank in New Delhi, had been the most expensive “ever, anywhere.” In an election that was fought between six national parties, and many smaller ones, the BJP’s electoral juggernaut received an estimated 45–55 percent of the estimated 55,000 crore rupees (nearly $8 billion) that was spent on this election. Their main rival, the Indian National Congress (INC), accounted for an estimated 15 percent of the total spent. More than half of Modi’s war chest came from anonymous donors. Who these people are can only be guessed at, but since 2016 the BJP has received almost 93 percent of corporate donations, leaving the remaining 7 percent for the other national and state parties to fight over. [...]

The mainstream media, particularly cable news, amplified the BJP’s message and drowned out the opposition. They editorialized the news, started rumors, and spread lies. Truth was an illusion, and everything was propaganda. The INC’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was denounced as a fool and even a foreigner, while Modi, in a tradition that will ring familiar to people in Russia and China, was glorified as the great leader. [...]

And while Gandhi was the obviously better choice, he wasn’t, necessarily, a convincing one. For years, Gandhi dithered about whether he would join politics, enjoying the unheard of privilege, in India, of deciding if he wanted to apply for a job. When he finally accepted, standing for election in 2004, he positioned himself as a foot soldier. He failed to do anything significant to change the country’s oldest party, his family’s party. The Congress was rotting from the roots upward, its representatives seen as incompetent, corrupt, and out of touch, yet Gandhi appeared to shrug and roll his eyes as though to say, Can you believe these people? He officially took over the party’s leadership in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2019, less than a fortnight before voting was to commence, that he announced the main plank of his manifesto.

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Foreign Policy: It’s Modi’s India Now

Between 1984 and 2014, no single political party could win enough seats to form a national government on its own. There were simply too many, it seemed, and new ones kept emerging. In 2014, 464 political parties competed in the national elections—up from 215 in 2004—with most representing narrow regional, religious, or ideological constituencies. The system gave meaning to the famous catchphrase: “Indians don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.” [...]

The BJP’s 2019 campaign had to be different—after all, Modi was no longer the candidate representing change. Unemployment had hit a 45-year high under the BJP, and economic growth began to slow down. And so instead of Modi the reformer, Indians got to see Modi the performer this election season: He branded himself a chowkidar, or security guard, to emphasize his ability to keep India, and especially Hindus, safe. Across hundreds of campaign speeches, he carefully shifted the focus of his message to national security and identity politics. And it worked. The question now is what lesson the BJP will derive from its latest victory, and how those insights will guide it in the years to come. [...]

Meanwhile, as press freedom declines in India—Reporters Without Borders ranks India 140th out of 180 countries, and Modi declined to hold a single press conference in his first five years as prime minister—the media will struggle to challenge government reports of military action. For example, New Delhi has claimed that in a Feb. 27 aerial dogfight with Pakistan, it shot down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet. As Foreign Policy reported at the time, a U.S. count of F-16s sold to Pakistan found no missing jets, calling into question New Delhi’s account of what happened. But an increasingly jingoistic mainstream Indian media didn’t follow up. Future Indian governments now have a template for appearing strong in public—irrespective of what they actually do. [...]

And the lines in that fight were drawn clearly in 2019. The BJP’s party president Amit Shah—the chief architect of Modi’s reelection campaign—referred to Muslim immigrants living in India illegally as “termites” on the campaign trail last September, and he repeated the phrase this year. In the eastern state of Assam, the BJP has created a National Register of Citizens, a database that excludes 4 million people in that state, most of them Muslims. Shah has promised that the BJP would implement a similar database across the whole country, ostensibly to force a mass purge of Muslims deemed to have immigrated illegally from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

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The Atlantic: The Gandhi Dynasty Helped Found India. It Is Now in Demise.

As the great-grandson, grandson, and son of Indian prime ministers, Gandhi’s political pedigree is not in question. Nor does his loss in Amethi mean that dynastic politics are over in India, where a new generation of politicians can trace their positions directly to their parents and grandparents. (Indeed, both his mother and his sister easily won their seats.) But the electoral humiliation of a scion of the Gandhi family, indeed the leader of the party that led India to independence from Britain, is striking in a region where dynastic politics have dominated the landscape for decades: The Gandhis in India, the Bhuttos and the Sharifs in Pakistan, the Bandarnaikes in Sri Lanka, and the descendants of Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman in Bangladesh have all been integral parts of their countries’ modern history. This parliamentary election, and Gandhi’s loss in a constituency whose past is closely intertwined with his family’s, is the most compelling sign yet that India has moved into a new era. [...]

One possible reason for this is that while the Congress Party has inexorably linked itself to the Gandhi family, Indian voters have moved on. This is a young country where half the 1.3 billion people are under the age of 27. The overwhelming majority of them are from modest backgrounds. In such circumstances, the story of Modi, the son of a tea vendor who, with no political godfather, became the most powerful Indian prime minister in decades, is a far more compelling narrative than that of Rahul Gandhi, a man who has seemingly had success hand-delivered to him.

Another possible reason is that Indian voters prioritize performance, rather than the lineage of a candidate—in fact, several regional political families won resounding victories in these elections. For whatever reason, the Congress Party, which has ruled India for 51 out of 71 years of independence, and the Gandhis, who have ruled for 36 of those years, no longer seem to fit the bill.

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The Atlantic: Modi's New Challenge Is Embracing Urbanization

Five years later, the BJP has secured a new electoral mandate even more impressive than the last, a testament to Modi’s unmatched political prowess. Yet it has done so despite an economic record that can be described only as underwhelming. If Modi hopes to do more than simply stay in power, if he still aspires to bring his new India to life, he’d do well to heed the advice of a small clique of economists who’ve been calling on his government to more fully embrace urbanization. [...]

Modi and his advisers quickly came to understand that a combination of depressed demand in the mature market democracies and robust competition from other low-wage countries had essentially foreclosed the export-driven model of development, as Amy Kazmin and Lionel Barber report in the Financial Times. Instead, Modi reached for a grab bag of reforms and public investment, an approach one of his advisers described as “light many fires at once—to see if any of them would catch.” Modi’s policy mix has indeed succeeded in lighting many fires, though not all of them are burning quite as he might have wished. [...]

But all the latrines in the world won’t make India an economic dynamo. To pull off that feat, Modi must persuade Indians to embrace an urban future. Reuben Abraham and Pritika Hingorani, both of India’s IDFC Institute, a small but enormously influential think tank based in Mumbai, have made a convincing case that at present India’s state governments—which are each empowered to decide what qualifies as urban—systematically underestimate the urban share of their populations. According to the Indian Census, only 31 percent of the country’s population resides in urban areas. If, however, you were to adopt Ghana’s or Lebanon’s definition for what amounts to an urban area, India is almost 50 percent urbanized.

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Today in Focus: India is voting: will Modi win the world's biggest election?

The world’s largest ever election is nearing its conclusion in India, with voters in 20 states casting their ballots in the marathon six-week poll.

The election is being viewed as a referendum on the prime minister, Narendra Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist who rode a wave of popularity five years ago to become the first leader of a majority government in decades.

The Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, Michael Safi, has been out on the campaign trail and tells Anushka Asthana that following the suicide bomb attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir earlier this year, Modi has focused his campaign fully on his national security credentials.

Also today: the Guardian sketchwriter John Crace on his day at Nigel Farage’s rally in West Yorkshire, where the Brexit party leader’s anti-establishment message was rapturously received.

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Quartz: India’s top court won’t re-examine if mosques are essential to Islam

With a 2:1 majority, a three-judge bench consisting of chief justice Dipak Misra and justices Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer has declared that there is no need for a larger bench to reexamine a 1994 supreme court ruling that said that a mosque is not essential to Islam. [...]

Since the 16th century, the Babri mosque had stood on a site that some Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram, the protagonist of the epic Ramayana. Determined to build a Hindu temple by replacing the mosque, thousands of kar sevaks (religious volunteers) descended upon the mosque in December 1992 and tore it down. The incident sparked large-scale communal violence that killed over 2,000 people across the country, and raised concerns over the rule of law, freedom of worship, and the secular identity of India. The courtroom battle over the land has remained unresolved ever since, but the final hearing in the case began earlier this year. [...]

But the fact remains that, in the years since the mosque was demolished, the dispute has pitted India’s Hindu majority against its Muslims. When the final verdict does come for the closely watched case, it will have a bearing on the very identity of India, especially as it approaches the 2019 national elections.

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Scroll: Congress believes Modi won’t stay on as prime minister even if BJP retains power in 2019. Here’s why

Boosted by its performance in the Gujarat Assembly election in December and victory in the Rajasthan bye-polls this month, the Congress has come to believe that Narendra Modi’s days as prime minister are numbered even if his Bharatiya Janata Party retains power in 2019. The logic runs thus: the BJP will lose its majority in the next general election, which means its allies will get to decide the leader – and they will prefer anyone but Modi. [...]

Another top leader argued that the Congress’s “tough challenge” to the BJP in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat has demonstrated that Modi is not invincible. Moreover, Congress leaders believe anti-incumbency is rising against the BJP governments in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Haryana which, they said, will be reflected in its reduced strength in the Lok Sabha. The BJP had scored heavily in these states in the last election primarily because of the unpopularity of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government and Modi’s personal charisma. As a result, the Congress, was reduced to a paltry 44 seats in the last Lok Sabha election. [...]

The recent show of muscle-flexing by the BJP’s allies, Congress leaders believe, is another indication that the saffron party’s ratings are slipping. The Shiv Sena has declared it will not ally with the BJP in the next general election, the Telugu Desam Party is threatening to walk out of the ruling National Democratic Alliance because the Modi government’s promised financial package for Andhra Pradesh has not materialised, and the Shiromani Akali Dal has counselled the BJP to treat its partners better. While all this could well be put down to posturing before the next election, the Congress sees it as a sign of the BJP’s diminishing dominance.

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