Making Sense of India’s Historic 2019 Elections

The people of India have returned the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government to power. On May 23, after seven rounds of voting, and a turnout of 67.1 percent, the highest ever for an Indian election, the Election Commission of India (ECI) released the results of the general election for the Indian parliament’s lower house (the Lok Sabha). The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 351 seats, while the main opposition alliance, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by the Indian National Congress (INC), won only 81 seats. Meanwhile, regional parties won 112 seats. The BJP itself won 303 seats, a strong improvement over its 2014 tally of 282 seats, while Congress won 52, slightly more than its previous tally of 44 seats. The Congress Party is now tottering on the brink of irrelevance, and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, lost from his family’s traditional stronghold of Amethi, though he won a safe seat elsewhere.  

Before the election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist right-wing party was widely expected to garner the largest share of seats, but it was unclear if the BJP was going to win enough seats to form a government on its own. Nonetheless, the party performed well, and exceeded most expectations. The landslide results indicate that the BJP is still widely popular, and that Indian voters prefer Modi to Rahul Gandhi as their prime minister. Modi represents the sort of strong, assertive personality that Indians, in survey after survey, have indicated they are looking for in a leader. While this bodes well for the BJP, it is worthwhile for the party to consider how well it would fare in the future, after the Modi era.

Regardless of policies, an increasingly media-aware public understands the benefits of having a leader like Modi advocate for India in a world that features Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Policies aside again, Rahul Gandhi, despite becoming a better politician over the past two years, has proven utterly unable to compete with Modi on this front. The Congress Party needs to reflect on its purpose and its ideology, and consider if a post-Gandhi leader would be better able to restructure the party so that it remains relevant. After all, the party has the national infrastructure to compete with the BJP, and there is ample space on the center-left in the Indian political spectrum. 

While the BJP functioned as a disciplined party, denying many of its incumbent parliamentarians seats for other, more dynamic candidates (not related to their predecessors), Congress often continued to prize dynasty and continuity. Rather than reflect on this, prior to the election results being announced, Congress alleged that the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used to conduct the elections might have been compromised – a near impossibility since the machines are not connected to a wireless network and are offline; furthermore, the Elections Commission of India is known for its high level of professionalism and impartiality. Instead of engaging in such speculation, the Congress Party needs to find a way to pitch good ideas without pushing anachronistic policies or turning into a coalition of minorities mathematically unable to win elections.

Economics and Identity

Going into the election, there were numerous concerns – both social and economic. Social concerns included the BJP’s rhetoric against Muslims, while economic concerns included rising unemployment, especially among skilled workers, and a botched demonetization in 2016. Yet foreign investment and infrastructure spending increased during BJP rule from 2014 to 2019. As red tape was slashed, it became easier to do business, and many Indians were impressed by Modi’s more assertive foreign policy. As the the chairman of a family-controlled conglomerate told the New York Times: “If the Modi government is re-elected, as it is likely to be, you will get economic reform as well as social challenges… it’s a package deal, whether you like it or not… on a net basis… many like me would buy that package.” That captured sentiments shared by many Indian voters, especially the rising (mostly Hindu) middle class, for whom caste and regional identities are less relevant, 

While much of the Indian and global media, prior to the election, focused on some of the extreme rhetoric coming from the Hindu right, Indian voters do not seem to have been greatly impacted by this narrative, though it was picked up on and amplified by much of the opposition, such as the All India Trinamool National Congress, the ruling party in West Bengal. This may have backfired for the Trinamool Congress’ vote share, however, as the BJP consolidated much of the Hindu vote, due the the perception that the Trinamool Congress and its leader, Mamata Banerjee, were overly focused on the Muslim minority. While the Trinamool Congress, long established in West Bengal, won slightly more seats than the BJP, the BJP’s victory in over 40 percent of West Bengal’s Lok Sabha seats is major victory for a party that was previously marginal there.

Caste also mattered less, and did not much help the opposition, despite the BJP’s erstwhile reputation as the party of high caste Hindu privilege. It is important to remember that dalits and other backward castes (OBCs) are Hindus too. Despite conflicts between these caste groups and medium and upper castes, all Hindu caste groups share many common religious and historical experiences.

The consolidation of Hindu castes into a solid Hindu voting bloc has been a policy of the BJP’s, and lately it has been succeeding, both because many dalits and members of lower castes have not particularly benefited from caste-based parties, and because the BJP has promoted lower caste leaders, including Modi himself. At the social level, caste matters less than it has in centuries. While the BJP has a reputation for social conservatism, is it by no means ultra-traditionalist, and in fact likes to portray itself simultaneously as a force for both modernization and the revival of ancient Hindu values, which now ostensibly include merit-based social roles over hereditary caste and women’s empowerment. Caste calculations seem to have receded from their high point in Indian politics in the 1990s: In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 parliamentarians to the Lok Sabha, a grand alliance (Mahagathbandhan) of two caste-based parties, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), failed to secure even a third of the seats that the BJP did (despite non-upper classes constituting 60 percent of the state’s population). These parties may remain more relevant on the state level, but it is hard to see how they can impact the national discourse anymore.

For most Indian voters, the ground reality was shaped by existing economic issues, not social ones. The average Hindu farmer, a demographic that is still half of the nation’s population, cares about electricity, water, schools, and roads, and was hardly impacted by the constant news reports about concerns about tolerance in India. There is some evidence that social dynamics between religious communities in rural India have not actually changed much since the BJP first came to power in 2014, and that other than a few widely publicized lynchings, violence in India has not spiked; India is definitely not at the incipient stage of a genocide. According to Reuters data, in India, only 28 people were killed in vigilante attacks against Muslims between 2010 and 2017.

Yet in some ways, 2019 was an election also shaped by identity and narratives, and Congress simply did not have a good one, despite some talk about unemployment. Particularly since the economic policies of the parties, regional and national, do not differ widely, voters have selected the parties that combine some sort of pride in a national or regional identity with slightly greater economic delivery. Both the BJP and some of  India’s regional parties have been able to play to their respective bases on this front.

India is transitioning from thinking in the terms, political and economic, laid out by its independence leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Because of India’s economic reforms over the past two decades and globalization, most Indians now are at least somewhat familiar with what life might be like in a developed, modern economy. That is the life that they aspire to – not the handouts, rural focus, and glorification of poverty associated with the Congress. The Left, likewise, is mostly decimated now, except in the southern state of Kerala. Voters in India know by now that the BJP can not, and will not, run India like a Singapore-style technocratic party, if that is what they even want. Indian voters, especially rural ones, still love their handouts and guaranteed employment schemes. But they also want the economy to be reformed in a more liberal direction. Some economic reforms – not too much for India’s people to handle all at once – combined with nationalist rhetoric and Hindu pride, seem to be a winning formula that the BJP has honed well, and is particularly attractive to the growing middle class. Unlike “conservative” parties in the West, the BJP did well with urban voters and young people for these reasons, whereas the “leftist” Congress Party is in many ways the party of the old gentry, whose time has come.

It is common to hear something along the lines of “the idea of India is in danger.” But perhaps the “idea of India” that many in the media and Western-educated elite – which traditionally dominated Congress – had in mind is very different from the ideas held by many other Indians. The average Indian is no secular liberal, even though they may aspire to a globalized middle-class lifestyle. Rather, there is a sense of civilizational continuity for many Indian voters not especially exposed to a constant stream of Western ideas. The victory of the BJP embodies this. India will modernize, but not Westernize much more.

Regional Politics

The BJP’s 2019 sweep, while historic, is not total. India is too large and diverse for there to be excessive political uniformity. The NDA’s vote share was only 45 percent, which, while double that UPA’s 22 percent, still leaves a third of the vote share for regional parties. The BJP and its allies continue to dominate the mostly Hindi-speaking north, as well as the western states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, and have made inroads into the east, but the regional dynamics are different in most southern states, as well as some other states like Punjab and Odisha, where they did not win a majority of Lok Sabha seats (in local assembly elections in Odisha, the BJP also failed to make an impact). The BJP made gains in West Bengal, but the Trinamool Congress still remains that state’s strongest player.

Regionalism has proven to be particularly devastating to the Congress Party. As the names of many regional parties — Trinamool Congress, Yuvajana Sramika Rythu (YSR) Congress — indicate, many such parties splintered off from the national Congress Party because of its inability to foster competition and talent and allow regional leaders to emerge as viable challenges to the party’s family-oriented leadership. It is not inconceivable that popular regional Congress leaders, like Punjab’s Amarinder Singh, may also decide to follow suit.

Many southern parties did well in their respective states to the detriment of both the BJP and the Congress Party. These included the YSR Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu. The political map in south India is very different than in the rest of India, except in Karnataka where the BJP and Congress are among the major players.

The BJP has almost no presence in the southernmost states of Tamil Nadu – dominated by two local “Dravidian” parties since the 1960s – and Kerala, which gave the Congress Party almost half of its members of parliament in the recent election. Kerala is notable for its unique demographics – it is almost half Muslim and Christian – and local Congress leader Shashi Tharoor is possibly the best option outside of the Nehru-Gandhi family for the party’s leadership.

The most interesting political changes going on in the south, however, occurred into the two Telugu-speaking states, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, which split from the former in 2014. Andhra Pradesh held legislative elections concurrent to the national ones in 2019. After the split, Andhra Pradesh was dominated by the formerly popular Chandrababu Naidu and his Telugu Desam Party (TDP). During the split, Andhra Pradesh lost its capital of Hyderabad, and much of the information technology (IT) industry located there. Despite attempts to build a new capital and attract investment, Naidu’s policies proved to be laggardly, and he failed to obtain a special economic status for his state. Meanwhile, the TDP broke from Modi and left the BJP-led NDA, leaving it largely rudderless. As a result, a new regional rival, the YSR Congress Party, trounced the TDP at both the national and local levels. This being the first time the party will rule, it will be interesting to see what policies it pursues, and if it can attract investment to Andhra Pradesh.

Meanwhile, Telangana is on its way to achieving more normal politics, five years after achieving a several-decades long struggle to obtain statehood. While the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), a single-issue party formed to achieve Telangana statehood, remains dominant, the BJP, previously an almost nonexistent player in the state, obtained the second largest share of the state’s 17 Lok Sabha spots. If the BJP can build on this to be competitive at the legislative level in Telangana – which does not yet have a major opposition force to the TRS, the Congress having abdicated this role – then it can expand its presence in the south from its Karnataka foothold.

India will have a BJP government until at least 2024, if not beyond. This is Modi’s era. How he decides to govern, and what policies he pursues, will undoubtedly make a mark in the same way Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies shaped India for four decades. What is to be seen is how much Modi decides to focus on economic reform, and if he decides to push more aspects of the Hindutva agenda. Regardless of his specific actions, though, it is likely that India will continue to proceed on a path that will be markedly different from its first half-century after independence.