By Kiran Sharma/Nikkei Asia
New Delhi, March 19: In the final days of his 6,700-kilometer “Unite India Justice” march this month, Rahul Gandhi waved from the back of a fire-engine red jeep as it weaved through a crowd in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.
Gandhi, scion of the opposition Indian National Congress party, spoke about the vast gulf between India’s rich and poor. “The amount of money that [700 million] people have in their bank accounts, that same amount is there in 22 [wealthy] people’s bank accounts,” he said in Hindi, repeating a frequent critique of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s stewardship. “Do you understand this? Even this jeep can accommodate 22 people.”
But as India prepares for the world’s largest election, from April 19 to early June according to the schedule announced on Saturday, many experts believe Gandhi and the Congress party are fighting a losing battle. His nationwide trek has arguably failed to “unite” the opposition, let alone the country of 1.4 billion. A fledgling coalition of Congress and nearly two dozen opposition parties known as the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, or INDIA, is struggling to overcome disagreements and defections on top of legal difficulties and a huge funding disadvantage.
Skeptics see Gandhi’s march for “economic, social and political justice,” which ended in Mumbai on Sunday, as a last-ditch effort to revive the flagging fortunes of a party that once ruled post-independence politics. “Probably the only benefit Congress had with this march of Gandhi [was] that they kept themselves in media headlines, otherwise they would have been even more irrelevant,” Sanjeev K. Sharma, general secretary of the Indian Political Science Association (IPSA), told Nikkei Asia.
He said Modi’s BJP “has a psychological upper hand.”
Other analysts feel it is unfair to write off Congress and Gandhi. The grandson of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has been spending his days connecting with voters from a cross-section of India’s diverse society. “How many top ruling party politicians do you see taking out long marches and meeting people and listening to the common man’s problems?” asked Duru Arun Kumar, a senior professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during the launch of a redevelopment project in Ahmedabad on March 12. © AP
Few would deny that the opposition faces a tough road.
Poll after poll projects that the Hindu nationalist BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners will win the election. The only question seems to be by what margin.
A party or coalition needs a simple majority — 272 of 543 lower house seats for which elections are held — to form a government. In the last two elections, in 2014 and 2019, the BJP easily cleared that threshold, after no single party had done so in three decades. Last time around, the BJP secured its highest-ever seat total, 303, while Congress placed a distant second at 52.
That, at least, was a slight improvement over Congress’ worst showing, when it won 44 in 2014.
These days, Modi has been repeating an even loftier goal for the NDA’s seat count: “This time, above 400,” he says at rallies. He has also said he “hears” the BJP alone will cross 370 seats.
He has plenty of reasons to be confident.
The BJP has much fatter coffers, thanks in part to an electoral bonds program launched in 2018. The interest-free instruments allowed citizens and companies to make anonymous donations to political parties, at least until the Supreme Court last month struck down the program.
The BJP declared 65.66 billion rupees ($791 million) worth of the bonds between the financial year through March 2018 and last fiscal year, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a petitioner in the case. Congress took in only 11.23 billion rupees during the same period.
India’s economic performance has blown an extra gust into the BJP’s sails. Gross domestic product surged 8.4% in the October-December quarter, far more than expected.
“It’s a foregone conclusion” that the BJP will return to power for a third straight term, predicted Ullekh N.P., author of the book “War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology Behind Narendra Modi’s 2014 Win.” He told Nikkei Asia that the writing has been on the wall since Congress lost three crucial elections in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan late last year.
The dismal performance undermined Congress’ clout within the INDIA bloc, formed last July with the goal of toppling Modi. “Congress was hoping if they won these states, they would have had a greater say and bargaining capacity to seek more seats in the INDIA alliance, but the moment the party lost those polls, it almost withered away,” the writer said.
Lately, INDIA has appeared to be coming apart at the seams, unable to agree on unified candidates in key states.
One of INDIA’s most prominent leaders, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, on March 10 released a list of candidates for her state, which accounts for 42 lower house seats. It featured only hopefuls from her Trinamool Congress (TMC) party.
Congress party leader Adhir Chowdhury complained, “Mamata Banerjee is scared that if she continues with the INDIA alliance … Mr. Modi will send [the Enforcement Directorate] and [Central Bureau of Investigation] to the TMC’s doors.”
Investigators have been pursuing corruption allegations against several key players, carrying out raids, asset seizures and arrests. The opposition claims this is a pressure campaign.
Others appear to have soured on the alliance, too. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) declared its intention to go solo in Punjab — a northern state it currently governs — even though it agreed to seat-sharing in some other states. Janata Dal (United) party leader Nitish Kumar, chief minister of the state of Bihar and an instrumental figure in forming the INDIA bloc, rejoined the BJP-led coalition he had left in August 2022.
“It looks increasingly difficult for the opposition to be able to mount any significant challenge” at the national level, though there are local parties which could do well in their states, such as the TMC in West Bengal, said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.
For its part, Congress insists it is set to surprise. “For decades now, opinion polls have always predicted results against the Congress,” Gaurav Pandhi, All India Congress Committee coordinator at the office of the party’s president, told Nikkei Asia. “It’s safe to say that all such opinion polls are more or less designed to create a sentiment which is favorable for the BJP.”
Pandhi said that Gandhi’s march attracted hundreds of thousands of people daily for more than two months. “This itself is the display of the kind of support we are receiving. … We are fully prepared and confident that along with our alliance partners we are going to win the upcoming elections and form the next pro-people government.”
A statue of Mahatma Gandhi is pictured next to India’s new parliament building a day before its inauguration in New Delhi on Sept. 18, 2023. © Reuters
Nevertheless, the IPSA’s Sharma said that “it will be a big challenge for Congress to save the 52 seats it won in the last general election.” While Congress’ 19.7% share of all valid votes in 2019 was “not so bad,” he said that “the problem is it does not have a strategy to convert that … into electoral success, and it also does not have a vision and leadership.”
Gandhi, who stepped down as Congress’ president to take responsibility for the 2019 loss but remains a key face of the party, has tried to fill that leadership role. But Sharma questioned his decision to take a second cross-country tour, after making a similar 3,500-km journey about a year ago. Had Gandhi focused on rallying the disparate opposition parties to set aside old rivalries, “the INDIA alliance probably would not have fallen into this much chaos,” he suggested.
Seeking to overcome his elite image and claim the man-of-the-people mantle, Gandhi routinely accuses the BJP of failing to create enough jobs while doing the bidding of billionaires. His party has pledged, if elected, to ensure every graduate and diploma holder secures their first job.
Gandhi has also seized on the issue of electoral bonds. “Narendra Modi’s ‘donation business’ is about to be exposed!” he tweeted in Hindi last week. “Electoral bonds is going to prove to be the biggest scam in Indian history … exposing the nexus of corrupt industrialists and the government.”
The Election Commission late last week released hundreds of pages of data on its website, revealing the names of various companies but not the parties to which they donated. Analysts were skeptical that any of this would sway the BJP’s voter base.
The ruling party can drown out criticism by trumpeting the promises it has kept. In 2019, it scrapped the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir and now boasts that it has unified India and brought development to the region. This year, Modi inaugurated the expansive Lord Ram temple in Ayodhya on what was once a flashpoint of Hindu-Muslim conflict. And the government recently moved to implement a citizenship law that grants nationality to Hindus and people of certain other faiths who fled neighboring countries, despite criticism of an anti-Muslim bias.
BJP supporters watch a livestream of Modi at the consecration of the Lord Ram temple in Ayodhya, outside the party’s headquarters in Mumbai, on Jan. 22. © Reuters
Many voters say the BJP has delivered. “We support only Modi,” said Shiv Shankar Tripathi, 58, from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. He said lawlessness prevailed in his state before the BJP in 2017 dislodged the regional Samajwadi Party, which is part of the INDIA bloc. “Now residents feel safe, there is electricity almost round-the-clock, and roads of our state have become better than even those in the national capital.”
While INDIA struggles to stick together, the author Ullekh said the BJP has been stitching up regional alliances and plucking politicians from the ranks of other parties.
“They have the money, they have the resources, they are in power,” he said. “Most importantly, unlike all political entities we have had throughout the free India history, this party is on an election mode all the time.”
Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, a close aide, are “more focused on winning elections than governance,” Ullekh contended. “In fact, these people are framing policies with an eye on voters.”
The anemic opposition worries some who see a need for balance. Kumar at the Indian Institute of Technology said that “while it may be true that the lotus is blooming in most parts of the country” — a reference to the BJP’s flower symbol — “for a vibrant democracy, it is essential that there is a healthy opposition in place.”
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