The shock results of India’s general elections in June brought Narendra Modi back to power with only a coalition. This is the first time ever that Modi is running a coalition government, whether as prime minister or chief minister.
When you go from majority to coalition you appear to be politically weaker, no matter how much you pretend otherwise.
Politically, Modi has always focused on projecting power. It seemed surprising at first that his choice of cabinet ministers hardly changed. But it made sense that he wanted to project continuity as a way of projecting power. He was saying nothing had changed.
That’s also the sense coming from Modi 3.0’s policies, working style, objectives, political messaging and everything you can think of. It’s as if nothing has changed.
And yet, everything has changed. From the moment the election results came out in June, the government seems to be facing crisis after crisis, even if these crises aren’t so big that they would be destabilising.
From medical entrance exams to capital gains tax, from lateral entry in the bureaucracy to being caught off guard by a revolution in Bangladesh, the Modi government seems to be permanently in crisis management mode.
It tells you of the disconnect between projecting continuity and the ground reality. In its third term now, the Modi government will obviously face insurmountable anti-incumbency. Not many even get a third term, not even in states, leave alone the centre.
A deficit of ideas
Showing voters a future vision of a developed India by 2047 is not working. The trick of postponing aspirations has run out of its novelty.
The idea of “double engine government” — asking voters to vote BJP in both centre and state has not been working either.
The change of political mood is felt across the board, from judiciary to media to a new spring in the step of the opposition parties. Yet the greatest change is in the public mood. The public can longer be made to believe that India is on its way to long-term one-party rule with an invincible BJP. The curtain of invincibility has come off. The Teflon is scratched.
This is why the BJP is making the mistake of projecting a continuum when it needs to show a fresh start. The Indian term “anti-incumbency” isn’t only about people being unhappy about governance or unfulfilled promises or economic disenchantment. It is all of that, but also a sense of boredom. People get tired of the same faces, the same elites milking the system, the same “polarisation”, the same Congress-bashing, the same ministers, the same style of functioning, and the same slogans.
Nowhere is this fatigue as stinging as in the paucity of ideas. The July budget promised to reduce fiscal deficit but the quick fixes it tried to find for the unemployment problem showed it didn’t fix the deficit of ideas.
The BJP manifesto for the 2024 general elections was also devoid of any interesting new ideas, in contrast to a Congress manifesto bubbling with thought-provoking plans.
Thinking Fresh
Here’s a thought experiment for the BJP. What if this wasn’t the third term of a BJP government but its first term? What would it do?
This question cannot be answered if we keep harking back to 2014. The government tried to push lateral entry into the bureaucracy in a big way, something it tried earlier without much success. The plan recently had to be withdrawn as even coalition allies raised concerns about the lack of caste reservations in lateral entry.
Once again, the government is trying to do what it sought to do in 2014 but could not. This shows a stuck-in-2014 mindset. 2024 is not 2014. The BJP needs Vision 2024, wants Vision 2047, but all it has is Vision 2014.
It is difficult to think of Wednesday as the start of the week. Even if you do, all you can think of is the tasks you could not finish with Monday blues.
The only radical way to do this would be for PM Modi to put himself in Rahul Gandhi’s shoes and ask what Rahul Gandhi would have done if the INDIA alliance had won this election and Rahul Gandhi had become prime minister. What kind of policies would he have come up with?
This is not about Rahul Gandhi. This is about rethinking the governance paradigm in 2024. If Rahul Gandhi had become PM, it would have been his first term, not his third. He would have appointed many technocrat ministers and taken on board ideas from civil society.
The first step for the Modi government to move in this direction would be to start talking to experts, intellectuals, academics and researchers outside the right wing ecosystem. Today the ideological polarisation game has made the BJP itself a prisoner of ideological walls. It needs to throw the windows open and take the best ideas in national interest — and its own self-interest.
