India’s autocrat falters

The biggest of the recent elections was also the biggest election ever held: more than 640 million people voted in India’s parliamentary election, held over seven phases from mid-April to 1 June. Prime minister Narendra Modi has been returned for a third term, but in a less than convincing fashion.

It’s unfortunate that so much of the (entirely justified) anger against colonialism is directed against things like statues and place names that have little current impact on the colonised people, rather than against colonial legacies that still do major harm, such as fundamentalist Christianity and bloated military establishments. In the case of British imperialism, a leading example is bad electoral systems.

India votes by first-past-the-post in each of 543 single-member constituencies. Averaging more than a million voters in each, they can hardly be said to provide local representation. They are also badly malapportioned to favor small states, so the relationship between votes cast and seats won is variable. In a country of enormous diversity, the system encourages centrifugal tendencies by rewarding parties with a strong regional concentration and penalising those whose support is broad but thinly spread.

Last time around, in 2019, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 37.4% of the vote but collected a substantial majority with 303 seats. The alliance that it heads, the National Democratic Alliance, won rather less than half the vote (45.3%) but almost two-thirds of the seats, 353. This time, the BJP’s vote dropped slightly, to 36.6%, but it lost 63 seats – thus losing its absolute majority.

The NDA in total has won 293 seats, still more than enough to keep Modi in office, but the need to depend on coalition partners will probably limit his power and has certainly dented his prestige. Whereas in 2019 the BJP benefited from lower expectations and its result was seen as a great triumph, this year expectations were higher, and even a small adverse swing appears as a major setback.

Why did a swing of just 0.8% produce such a big loss of seats? The key is what the opposition was doing. In 2019, the non-NDA vote was about evenly divided between the opposition coalition, led by the Congress Party, and non-aligned parties. Congress’s own vote was just 19.5%, its second-lowest on record.

This time, however, Congress not only improved its own vote modestly, to 21.2%, but it did a much better job of alliance building. Its alliance, called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), collected about four-fifths of the non-NDA vote for a total in the low 40s, only a couple of points behind the NDA. Since the voting system penalises vote-splitting, that made a big difference to its performance on seats: INDIA won a total of 234 seats, leaving only 16 for non-aligned parties and independents.*

So India seems more than ever to be moving to a two-party system. The shift should not be exaggerated: both alliances are fragile creatures, embracing a wide ideological range, and parties come and go with some regularity. Although Congress almost doubled its tally of seats, to 97, it still contributes less than half the total for the INDIA alliance; the BJP is much more the dominant partner in the NDA. But it does appear that Modi’s controversial style of governing has polarised voter opinion, leaving less room for the uncommitted.

The result is a positive sign for the health of Indian democracy. Despite Modi’s authoritarianism, it has proved possible to put together a coalition to seriously challenge his power. Turnout was 65.8%, down only slightly on 2019’s record figure – it doesn’t look as if the country’s voters are ready to give up on democracy just yet.

Modi’s project of dismantling India’s secular democracy in favor of a Hindu autocracy is not yet dead, but it has suffered a real setback. And with the prime minister turning 74 later this year, a post-Modi future is starting to come into focus.

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* The vote totals should be regarded as approximate; the official figures are here, but there are no grand totals and a number of very small parties are not separately listed. I have had to reconstruct some numbers, partly with the aid of the table at Wikipedia.