No country is more besotted with politics than India, and for good reason: the architecture of a system designed to give three-quarters of a billion people a free and fair vote can’t help but be fascinating. Each Indian general election is the “world’s biggest,” and each one feels primal and vital, as if the electioneering itself were the stuff of nationhood. But, even allowing for this obsession, the election campaign that ended on Friday, which has held the country in thrall for nearly a year, has been unusually absorbing. I’ve been at dinner parties where hours were spent in state-by-state analysis of the prospects of candidates, and I’ve watched friends take out pen and paper to break down the electorate with charts. India’s television news channels, whose ruminations on politics are never placid, worked themselves into a lather of speculation, night after night. The election consumed the country in a way that managed to be suffocating and exhilarating at the same time.
On Friday, as the results were announced, it became clear that almost all of the prognosticators, amateur and professional, had got it wrong. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) had assessed its chances confidently, and it was commonly expected to amass enough seats to lead a coalition of allies into government. But few expected Narendra Modi, its candidate for Prime Minister, to romp home in such a blistering manner. No single party had won an outright majority in the Lok Sabha, Parliament’s lower house, since 1984. Of the five hundred and forty-three seats, the B.J.P. won a stunning two hundred and eighty-two; with its coalition allies, it controls a dominating three hundred and thirty-four seats. The Congress, India’s oldest party, has led the governing coalition for the past decade. Although its members acknowledged in private that they were likely to be voted out, they suspected that they would secure roughly ninety seats—which would have been a record low. Instead, they took a miserable forty-four seats. What looked a few weeks ago like a mere dramatic change of government now appears to be a seismic shift, arguably the most significant in India since 1977, when the Congress was voted out after three decades in power. Even in that election, held after the Congress government, under Indira Gandhi, declared an emergency and suspended constitutional rights for two full years, the party managed to win a hundred and fifty-three seats.
Any election can be spun as a tussle to define the very soul of a country, but that has truly felt like the case for the past year in India. Both the Congress and the B.J.P. framed their campaigns as plebiscites on the fate of the country. The Congress asked voters to examine whether they wanted to elect Modi, a man who had ruled the state of Gujarat when more than a thousand people—mostly Muslims—were killed in religious riots, in 2002, who was known for his autocratic temperament, and whose political education was shaped by Hindu nationalists. In one campaign speech, the heir to the Congress dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, explicitly compared Modi to Hitler, warning that he would discard democracy altogether. “Hitler thought there was no need to go to the people,” Gandhi said. “He believed that the entire knowledge of the world was only in his mind. Similarly, there is a leader today in India who says, ‘I have done this, I have done that,’ and behaves arrogantly.”
Gandhi was referring to Modi’s claims to have delivered unprecedented economic progress in Gujarat—the sort of development that seemed to have seized up elsewhere in India in the past few years, amid the economic downturn, a growing litany of corruption scandals, and the government’s policymaking paralysis. Modi skillfully projected himself as efficient and clean, a friend of free enterprise as well as of the poor, a man who knows the value of a good road and of plentiful electricity. (None of this went uncontested, of course, and there is a bounty of evidence to suggest that Modi and his party have flaws—and flawed records—quite similar to those of the leaders whom they will now replace.) In his campaign, Modi adhered carefully to these issues of development, bypassing almost entirely the pet concerns of the Hindu right, such as the construction of a temple on the site of a mosque that zealots demolished in 1992, a project that nevertheless found its way into the B.J.P. manifesto.
At the crossroads of these narratives lay the dilemma that the parties presented to the voters, the question that, precisely for its essentialist simplicity, invaded conversations for many months: Did India consider itself so starved of decisive leadership, and so exasperated by its faltering progress, that it wished to take a chance on a polarizing leader who has been charged with tacitly encouraging riots against his own citizens, and has been backed by majoritarian organizations with little regard for civil liberties? The answer, as the results have now clearly shown, is an overwhelming yes.
In this big and simple story, there are hundreds of nuances: micro-trends and regional variations, caste and class preferences, the quality of individual parliamentary candidates from each of the five hundred and forty-three constituencies—the sort of complexity that makes Indian politics such a wearying, brain-busting labyrinth. In a Westminster-style parliamentary system, elections rarely feel like a referendum on one person. That Modi managed to transform this one into such a contest is his greatest feat.
Even for Modi’s critics—and these are not necessarily all Congress supporters—there may be some grim solace to be taken from the results. For one, this charged election passed with barely any violence at all. For another, Modi did not win by being the demagogue that, in the past, he often appeared to be. The fundamentals of moderation and accommodation that undergird Indian politics compelled him to reach out to Muslims—at least rhetorically—and to talk about building the economy rather than building a temple. The best outcome for India will come to pass if Modi is now forced—by his party and by his allies—to live up to the image that he has projected for the past year. It would not necessarily exonerate him of past sins, but it would be the reward that India deserves for having poured itself so unreservedly into this election.
Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National. His new book, “This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lanka War,” will be published by Penguin Books India this summer.
Above: Narendra Modi waves to supporters; Varanasi, India, April 24, 2014. Photograph by Kevin Frayer/Getty.
