The World's Largest Democracy Goes to the Polls

June 7, 2024 1:54 PM

The Votes are in, and Narendra Modi has won a third term as Prime Minister of India. However, in a surprising upset, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to win a majority, much less the supermajority Modi had predicted.

People are still trying to figure out why the upset, but reasons include: while India's economy has grown over the last 10 years, so has social inequality and unemployment, the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, which looked painfully fractured earlier this year, pulled itself together,, dissatisfaction among younger voters, concerns over freedom of the press, religious freedoms, and human rights in general.

An explainer on the logistics of an election for just shy of a billion potential voters.

Podcast: Looking for Modi -- An overview of Modi's career from an Australian journalit whose visa renewal was denield by the Modie government. (5 episodes) (via user d-no in a previous thread)

Podcast: Modi's India -- asegment of the larger CBC podcast Understood, this CBC production digs deeper into the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada. (4 episodes)

If you are a The Economist subscriber, they have a podcast, too.

Podcast: Behind the Bastards did 2 episodes on Modi Part 1 Part 2

Previously -- Amit Shah, Modi's right hand man
Previously -- Assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar
Previously -- Modi in 2021
Previously -- Election 2019
There are quite a few more, if you search for them

posted by GenjiandProust (19 comments total)

This was a really hard post to make, as I've only been looking closely at Indian politics for a bit, and I feel uncertain that Anglophone journalism captures all the nuance of what is both a very complicated (there are a lot of parties and a lot of issues for a lot of people) and simple (the BJP and Modi are Hindu Nationalists with an appalling track record in government). I hope some of our better-informed members can add detail I cannot.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:57 PM on June 7 [23 favorites]

Thank you very much for this post, GenjiandProust.

Those are some great links, and I really appreciate you putting this together for us - it definitely helps fill in the gaps in the headlines I've been reading.

I'm disappointed to see Modi staying in office, but I'm really heartened that BJP didn't get a majority. That's good news.

I hope we do get some good comments in here, especially from MeFites in India.

Many thanks for this - I'm looking forward to following this thread over the next few days.
posted by kristi at 2:07 PM on June 7 [6 favorites]

Thanks Genji! I’m moving to India and also struggled to put something together. Thank you so much, great job!

For longer reads, Modi’s India, has been absolutely amazing to understand the history of the Modi movement shaping “the world’s largest democracy”, and prescient enough I connect it to themes in the United States and the Near East. Very informative, but definitely a long read.
posted by rubatan at 2:39 PM on June 7 [11 favorites]

Thank fucking god they didn't get their supermajority.

(deep breath)

OK, I'm not gonna go on a rant about That Guy, just gonna breathe and let the relaxation flow.

Side bonus: fewer stupid BJP WhatsApp memes lighting up my phone at 3am local time!
posted by aramaic at 4:28 PM on June 7 [13 favorites]

At work someone observed this means BJP forms a collition with more right wing. It's surely more hopeful than a significant supermajority of course.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:48 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]

I hope it's a good sign. Is it possible that if Modi requires a coalition to govern, it could enable the far-right even more, much like what has happened in Israel?
posted by SPrintF at 6:17 PM on June 7 [3 favorites]

John Oliver covered the lead up to this election.
posted by Orthodox Humanoid at 6:19 PM on June 7 [4 favorites]

I mean, the BJP is far enough Right that only one other party of their alliance seems like it might be further right. Which is kind of cold comfort, honestly, because the BJP is openly genocidal towards Muslims (and Sikhs and Christians to a lesser degree) as well as openly trying to subvert the courts and the media, but….
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:32 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

Side bonus: fewer stupid BJP WhatsApp memes lighting up my phone at 3am local time!

I need more memes that express everyone's surprise at how Uttar Pradesh went tho (compared to how the South is doing, being a region known to have no love for BJP) + I only caught a couple of headlines, but it seems that while Tamil Nadu is still firmly anti-BJP, there're inroads made in the seat count? From my understanding that has more to do with regional politics tho.
posted by cendawanita at 7:38 PM on June 7 [4 favorites]

Back in April, The Hindu published a short history of every Lok Sabha election since India's independence. For anyone else who, like me, knows less about modern Indian political history than they should, this could give some nice context for this election's results.
posted by biogeo at 10:15 PM on June 7 [6 favorites]

They were expecting more than 400 seats, let's see what happens now.
posted by stuartjames7845 at 10:19 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

This is a great thread from Shiv Ramdas, one of my favourite Bluesky follows and currently posting a LOT about cricket for USAians who want to learn
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:11 AM on June 8 [6 favorites]

-Rural vote fall cost India's Modi a decisive election win
-Billionaire-Friendly Modi Humbled by Indians Who Make $4 a Day
posted by kliuless at 7:21 AM on June 8 [3 favorites]

For a moment there, I thought "The Hindu" was akin to "The Buddha". :)
posted by VTX at 7:27 AM on June 8

Yes, my coworker also said this transfers power to regional parties, not purely other far right parties. It's possible those regional parties have a strong moderating influence?
posted by jeffburdges at 10:32 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]

I spent about 4 months living just outside New Delhi overseeing the build-out of some facilities and the bring-up of an enormous remote team. I got to spend a lot of time rubbing shoulders with locals in the C-suite, as well as the network of financiers bankrolling us all.

At that time, publicly showing support for Modi and the BJP was not at all optional. It was not uncommon for various people in positions of power to get into little sparring matches trying to out-do one another with displays of support. This terrified me. I had India coded in my mind as “the world’s largest democracy” but I had seen this behavior and encountered this exact dynamic before. Specifically, I recalled every senior meeting I attended while living in China, where business and government are not quite separate the way they are in the West.

I do not know if this was selection bias, and economic winners were being pulled from the buddies of people in power. I do not know if it was survivorship bias, and any company or executive who had not show sufficient ardor in their loyalty had been weeded out long ago. What I do know was at the time, it was NOT OK to criticize or question Modi.

I remember asking one particular high-up to explain what had happened in Gujarat. I had a Western perspective, and I was interested in the local perspective, so I feigned ignorance of the details as I knew them. To say their account of those events was somewhat rosy would be an understatement. They went into great detail about the history of crimes from the hated minority, and very much glossed over the specifics of the atrocity and collective punishment meted out in response. They did acknowledge that Modi may have been delayed in sending state aid, but that wasn’t such a huge issue because “they deserved it.” I let my guard down for a moment and asked “even the babies?” Wrong move. For that individual at least, it was clear I was persona non grata from that point on.

There’s a lot of focus on Muslim issues when discussing the continual power of Modi and the BJP. These are definitely very real and very much a part of the dynamics at play. I remember being about a month into my deployment before I was able to access payroll records, and I immediately noticed that the very few Muslim engineers on my team were not being paid anything close to what their Hindu peers made. I went straight to the CFO and told him to fix that immediately. He gave me a long spiel about the hand of the free market and how it actually was good compensation because they’d be lucky to get a job like that anywhere. I argued that these engineers were doing exemplary work, as good if not better than any of their peers, they absolutely deserved consummate compensation for the value they were creating, and even if the CFO didn’t believe that, I needed to retain them – if we lost one and had to re-hire, that would take time, and the critical work these engineers were currently doing would not get done in time for the company as a whole to meet deadlines. (Oh pro-tip for anyone negotiating salary: your compensation is only partially based on the value you can create. It is also based on how much damage you can do by departing, which is often a larger number).This had no effect. It escalated to the point where I had to threaten to leave if he didn’t adjust comp immediately. There are so many evils in this world that are completely out of my control, but comp for the people under my care was not one of those, and I categorically refused to work on a team where one of my engineers was supporting a family of 5 on $600 a month.

However, in addition to religion, I think it’s really important to also consider caste issues when discussing the rise and continuing power of Modi and the BJP. Which I don’t know how to do well. Even with a bit of immersion I still do not understand all the dynamics at play. The caste system was formally abolished quite some time ago, but man oh man it echoes into so many aspects of life today. It doesn’t come out in anything like the way the legacy of racism does in America. It’s super-subtle in many cases, and also mixed up with a sort of regional/language hierarchy that was just absolutely impenetrable to me as an outsider. I knew my teammates from Kerala liked to hang out and speak in Malayalam. But there was just so much going on that was functionally invisible to me. I had one real ally in the C-suite out there who sat me down one day and tried to explain what was going on. He made a big list of common last names, all of which looked Indian to me, and then he tagged which ones belonged to different castes. And then he asked me to compare that list to the last names of people in the office, and the last names of Indian expats I had known in the US. Growing up in a preppie enclave of New England, people made jokes about Boston Brahmins. In that meeting, I learned that I had really only ever interacted with Brahmin-Brahmins. This realization was not comfortable, but very obvious in hindsight.

There are so, so many ways the sort of societal capture the BJP and Modi have effected plays out. It seemed like every gatekeeper to every resource had been hand-selected to carry out purity tests before administering those resources. At the senior level, I saw myself iced out from that one contact (and presumably, all contacts of that contact) for a subversive question. But this is occurring at all levels. During the lead-up to India’s 75th anniversary of its independence, Modi was promoting a “Har Ghar Tiranga” campaign to encourage every patriotic Indian to hang a tricolor in their home. One way this encouragement manifested was a not-so-subtle requirement to buy a tricolor flag if you were trying to receive free or subsidized food. My understanding of the situation was that the citizens most in need of free rice did not particularly care about who was head of state and were the least able to afford a discretionary flag they could not eat. Too bad, no flag no rice. Still, it’s hard to blame the merchants completely when they were given quotas of flags they must sell.

There is so much I loved about my time there. Riding motorbikes over rickety bridges stretched across deep ravines. Meter-tall Tiffin carriers to feed the whole office. Going two months before pulling into a Burger Singh and realizing I hadn’t eaten meat the entire time I’d been there and had not noticed, the food had been so damn good. Visiting holy cities far off the beaten path, where no shoes were allowed in the entire damn city and getting to dip my toes in the ice-cold Ganges while the men around me focused on full submersion to wash away their sins. A whirlwind romance with a minor Bollywood reality star. A weekend spent tracking down artisans in the fabric markets of Jaipur in a quest to make a ream of fabric covered in traditional wood block prints featuring robots so everyone on my team could get cool shirts they could be proud of. An absolutely magical moment when my soft-spoken head of electrical engineering pulled out a guitar late one night in the office and performed a rendition of "Hotel California" for the whole office which brought me to tears. OMG celebrating Vishvakarma day – Vishvakarma is the craftsman god who crafted tools and machines for the other deities and holds a special place in the heart of Indian engineers. On Vishvakarma day, all the machines get the day off. A priest came through and blessed our robots, blessed our 3d printers, blessed our oscilloscopes, and then he gave me a banana and it was over. I deeply adore the people I met and worked with, and so much about that country, its culture as a whole, and the seemingly endless regional sub-cultures I got to experience. All of this has made watching the rise of populism in that part of the world especially heartbreaking.

I’m definitely scared that the BJP will be entering a coalition with greater whackadoos, but right now I’m going to take anything that fractures their stranglehold on government as a good thing. At the very least, having to coordinate with a partner will introduce friction in their legislative efforts and decrease their ability coordinate effectively. It’s a bit of hope.
posted by 1024 at 12:07 PM on June 8 [16 favorites]

Re-reading my comment, I’m a little concerned that the last bit in particular might have come off as exoticizing. To be very clear, India has many deep problems that I saw firsthand beyond Modi and the BJP. Inequality is batshit insane. Spirituality is preyed on and monetized by people pushing “Ayurvedic research” as well as an entire competitive guru economy in which blinged-out “wealth gurus” are winning. Life is extremely, extremely difficult for anyone with a visible disability; accommodation is pretty much non-existent and societal attitudes towards people with disabilities are pretty horrendous (I’m forgetting the exact term people used, but it meant something like “broken”). The landscape for anyone trans is even more horrendous, seeing first-hand how trans women are treated and what they have to do to survive in that environment shook me, it is an absolute living nightmare and is a big part of what keeps me in the fight at home. When I falter, my memories from India push me once more unto the breach.


But that said, I still cannot say enough good things about Vishvakarma. I remember the first picture I saw of him. He had four arms and four hands, one holding a balance, one holding a book, one holding a hammer, one holding a chisel. He was riding a goose. 10/10. Best. God. Ever.
posted by 1024 at 2:48 PM on June 8 [6 favorites]

I’m moving to India

Oh man rubatan you are in for an adventure. Please reach out if there might be something I can help with! I’m not a native, but I did play expat for a bit.

For posterity and for anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation, I developed a simple 4-step plan to charm people in that part of the world as a foreigner:

1) Show everyone you meet respect and dignity
2) Get to know them as individuals
3) Learn their culture through their eyes
4) Shit on the British relentlessly
posted by 1024 at 1:33 AM on June 9 [6 favorites]

Actually, that last bit really serves as an amazing contrast to the first bit. And, woooooooo boy was that a roller coater! Someone connect this user with a screen writer and work up a script! A story going back and forth contrasting those extremes and a genuine whirlwind romance included so Hollywood doesn't have to try and shoehorn one in! Maybe a small indie film. I'd totally watch that.

Seriously though, excellent comment, very insightful and relatable. I will say that the echoes of the caste system are not all that different. Not all of it but I think a lot of Americans will recognize similar elements. You paint a really good picture of how everything gets expressed locally and on the ground, though I'm sure it takes on different aspects in different regions.

The tradition of giving the machines a day off is also a really kind and sweet tradition. I love it.
posted by VTX at 11:11 AM on June 9 [2 favorites]