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A rude end to Modi’s honeymoon

From December 2013, Mr Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had a dazzling run at state elections in India, peaking with the parliamentary contest between April and May 2014, which gave the party an absolute majority and made Mr Modi Prime Minister. On Tuesday, the honeymoon ended — and rudely. In the Delhi state election, the BJP was not only defeated, it was humiliated.

AAP supporters holding portraits of Mr Arvind Kejriwal during post-election celebrations on Tuesday. Mr Kejriwal has emerged as the face of the opposition to the Prime Minister. Photo: Reuters

AAP supporters holding portraits of Mr Arvind Kejriwal during post-election celebrations on Tuesday. Mr Kejriwal has emerged as the face of the opposition to the Prime Minister. Photo: Reuters

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From December 2013, Mr Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had a dazzling run at state elections in India, peaking with the parliamentary contest between April and May 2014, which gave the party an absolute majority and made Mr Modi Prime Minister. On Tuesday, the honeymoon ended — and rudely. In the Delhi state election, the BJP was not only defeated, it was humiliated.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a two-year-old party founded by anti-corruption activists led by a former tax official Arvind Kejriwal won 67 of Delhi’s 70 legislative seats. The BJP was down to three seats — a tenth of its earlier strength — and the Congress, India’s oldest party, won nothing.

To put those results in perspective, it is worth noting that the Congress was in power in Delhi till December 2013, having won three successive elections: In 1998, 2003 and 2008. In that period — and for the preceding 60 years —Delhi politics had been dominated by the Congress and the BJP, which was once called the Jana Sangh.

In December 2013, an inconclusive mandate led to a hung House and a short-lived coalition government led by Mr Kejriwal. After it fell, fresh elections became inevitable.

This year, the BJP ran a rough, confused and defensive campaign, reflecting a paranoia about Mr Kejriwal’s appeal. It also paid for the fact that the Delhi state party unit is notoriously divided and lacks a compelling leadership. All these contributed to the debacle, no doubt, but there was more.

Beyond the bare facts, the statistics and sociology of the mandate merit understanding. They have implications for Mr Modi’s government, as well as for any analysis of India’s medium and long-term future.

The lesson for Mr Modi is a troubling one. His party has won 32 per cent of the vote in the Delhi election, about the same quantum it picked up in December 2013. While comparing apples and oranges — in this case, local and national elections — is hazardous, it is difficult to ignore the BJP had won 46 per cent of the vote in Delhi in the mid-2014 parliamentary election.

The entire “Modi increment” — the extra voters who supported Mr Modi in Delhi despite not being loyal to his party in the normal course, and who bought into his promise of an economic resurgence — has gone away. After eight months in power, in Delhi at least, Mr Modi has disenchanted his “incremental” voter.

The reasons could be many: Lack of traction on economic reform, jobs and opportunities; troubling voices from the BJP’s broader political family on identity politics and the status of religious minorities in India; simply, an avalanche of unrealistic expectations that nobody can possibly meet. But the nub of the issue is they have led to a perception that Mr Modi’s performance has been below expectation.

THE DELHI DILEMMA

Delhi is not quite a usual Indian state. It is a large urban sprawl built around the Lutyen’s Zone, named for Edwin Lutyens, the architect who designed British imperial Delhi. It has its rich and poor neighbourhoods, its gated communities and its slums, and its civic inequities. Even so, with a below-poverty-line population of only 9 per cent, it remains among India’s most prosperous clusters.

It is also a state where politics is increasingly defined by modern metropolitan aspirations and demand for public goods, for accountability of those in authority and freedom from petty, everyday corruption.

This has led to a loosening of voter mobilisation based on traditional political and community loyalties. Such a shift helped the Congress win big victories in Delhi between 1998 and 2008. It moved the swing vote to Mr Modi in 2014. This year, this emergent social trend has gone in the AAP’s favour.

Between them, the AAP and the BJP won 86 per cent of the vote in Delhi, with the former finishing much further ahead of course. This suggests Delhi is settling into a bipolarity between centre-left and centre-right parties. In a sense, this is a product of the politics of growth, of those who see value in India’s recent economic advance and those who feel they are not catching up fast enough and could be called the “discontents of liberalisation”, to borrow the label for India’s initial economic reforms in 1991.

In his messaging Mr Modi has said all the right things about encouraging entrepreneurship and a fair and regulated marketplace, as well as pushing for a more open economy.

The AAP, on the other hand, represents a catch-all, left-leaning economic idea. Its functionaries variously describe themselves as “socialists”, “welfarists” and advocates of “compassionate capitalism”.

While urban in its moorings and not rooted in the doctrinaire trade union politics of the communists, the AAP’s election manifesto promised a robust programme of subsidies and cheap electricity. It has presented itself as a coalition of the urban underclass, minorities and left-leaning middle class folk.

With an energetic campaign that used and manipulated technology and the mass media as much as Mr Modi’s 2014 national campaign had, Mr Kejriwal has emerged as the face of the opposition to the Prime Minister.

To be sure, his catchment area is currently limited to Delhi and nearby urban pockets. Nevertheless, in the coming months, the AAP can be expected to challenge Mr Modi’s government on policies and positions with that much more gusto.

For the BJP-led government, this makes the budget, to be presented on Feb 28, absolutely critical. Mr Modi has no option but to press ahead with economic reform. Delhi’s voters want him to step on the gas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ashok Malik is a columnist and policy analyst based in New Delhi.

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