India under way

The year’s biggest election – indeed, the biggest election ever held – has begun. India is going to the polls in a general election spread over a month and a half in seven separate phases, to try to mitigate the logistical challenges involved in a country with almost a billion eligible voters. The first phase was held on Friday, with polling in about a hundred of the 543 constituencies, including the whole of Tamil Nadu and parts of such major states as Bihar, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

Prime minister Narendra Modi, of the right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is seeking a third term in office. At the last election, in 2019, the BJP won 37.3% of the vote, but because voting is first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies it won a substantial majority, with 303 seats. Smaller parties aligned with it in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won another fifty seats.

In opposition is the Indian National Congress (secular, centre-left). The unfairness of the system can be seen in the fact that with 19.4% it had more than half the BJP’s vote but it won only 52 seats; its allies won another 39. A multitude of small and mostly regional parties collected the remaining seats. Past attempts to construct an alliance of left-wing parties that would operate as an effective third force have come to nothing.

This time, Congress is running at the head of a broad-based alliance called simply INDIA (standing for Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance). It has consistently trailed in the polls; the formation of the alliance led to a rally late last year that brought it to within a couple of points of the NDA, but since then the gap has widened again to something like ten points.

In his decade in power, Modi has moved India appreciably in the direction of an authoritarian Hindu ethno-state in place of the secular democratic republic that its founders envisaged. Many have expressed concerns about whether in the circumstances a free and fair election will take place: Priya Chacko in the Conversation earlier this month gave a good summary of the different ways in which democratic backsliding has occurred.

On the other hand, it should also be noted that the BJP government has been very successful on many measures, with high economic growth and increased recognition of India’s international status. There is no doubt that Modi enjoys genuine popular support, and it would be no great surprise if even in an impeccably fair election he would have the measure of Congress’s veteran leader Mallikarjun Kharge.

But popularity doesn’t justify autocracy, and for many of India’s people, particularly its non-Hindus and ethnic minorities, Modi’s rule has been a dark period to which the rest of the world has mostly turned a blind eye. There not much sign that things will improve.