Over six weeks, from May to June, Indians went to the polls. They returned a resounding rebuke for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP won just 240 seats out of 543 in the Lok Sabha (House of the People), India’s lower house of parliament. In India’s parliamentary system, which is derived from the British Westminster model, the leader of the parliamentary majority becomes prime minister and heads the government.

India’s elections operate in five-year cycles. In 2019, the Modi-led BJP won 303 seats and formed the government on its own. Modi emerged as an all-powerful leader who ran the country like a CEO. This time, the BJP won 63 fewer seats than in 2019. More importantly, Modi had declared “Abki Baar, 400 Paar” (“This Time, Over 400”) and set a target of 400 seats for the BJP. Clearly, Modi and the BJP fell quite a bit short.

The Modi-led BJP is part of a coalition named the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which has many smaller regional parties. Alone, the BJP falls short of the magic figure of 272 in the Lok Sabha, but the NDA coalition has won 293 seats, enabling the BJP to form a government. As a result, Modi has won a historic third term. Only Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, won a third term as prime minister before; Modi has definitely made history.

However, Modi’s victory is Pyrrhic. He set expectations so high that the reduced NDA majority feels like a defeat. How did India’s popular high-flying, first backward caste prime minister come crashing down to earth?

In a nutshell, the Modi government lost touch after ten years in power. The BJP — literally the “People of India Party” — was a grassroots movement for decades. Note that the opposition Indian National Congress (INC), is a top-down dynastic party. It is ruled by the Nehru family with fifth-generation Rahul Gandhi, Jawaharlal’s great-grandson, in charge. Also, the INC ruled India for most of the period from its independence in 1947 to Modi’s historic victory in 2014. In contrast, the BJP has a long tradition of internal party democracy.

The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party, which was largely formed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, literally National Volunteer Organization). They have been called India’s fascist khaki shorts but they are really the Hindu version of Jesuits. Largely single men, disproportionately from humble Brahmin families, spend their lives as community organizers. They are headquartered in Nagpur, a city in western Maharashtra that is geographically almost the center of India.

Historically, the BJP has relied on the RSS cadre to turn out the vote. This ground game has given the party an organizational edge in Indian politics. Modi’s popularity led him to sideline the RSS, state-level BJP leaders and even local party workers. Emulating the Nehru family model, Modi began appointing favorites and former bureaucrats to top positions such as ministers in his cabinet and chief ministers of BJP-run states. In short, Modi, his number two, Home Minister Amit Shah, and the BJP president Jagat Prakash “J. P.” Nadda have grown out of touch with their own party base. This top-down model cost the BJP heavily in these elections, particularly in the north and the northwestern Hindi heartland of Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh (UP). 

In a move reminiscent of Aesop’s “Goatherd and the Wild Goats,” Modi ignored his traditionally loyal upper caste base to make populist overtures to the lower castes. Modi offered them a cereal dole (five kilograms of wheat or rice every month), cooking gas and other goodies. However, Rahul Gandhi promised rather generous monthly cash transfers. All parties are now engaging in a race of competitive populism that the Modi-led BJP can’t win. So, the BJP lost some lower caste and class votes while alienating the middle and upper castes and classes, who pay most of India’s taxes.

Modi alienated upper castes and state parties

In UP, the most populous Indian state, and neighboring Rajasthan, Modi turned off upper-caste Rajputs and Brahmins with his high-handed style of leadership. For example, he declined to give tickets to the candidates chosen by popular UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Rajput, and instead ran outsiders and even turncoats from other parties. Rajasthanis and UP walas disapprove of the Gujarati elite ordering them around like peons. So, many of them stayed home when it came time to vote.

Local party leaders feel that they have no opportunity to move up, as Modi and Shah have filled the top spots with bureaucrats. While they may not have exactly turned against Modi, they were less incentivized to whip up their voters very enthusiastically. The Modi government’s new Agnipath scheme — army soldiers are recruited for only four years and only 25% of them are retained — proved enormously unpopular in these states, which provide large numbers of large soldiers. The fact that the Modi government did not follow a consultative approach angered many traditional BJP voters who sat out the elections in protest.

Modi, Shah and Nadda not only got the Hindi heartland strategy wrong but they also erred in their southern strategy. In Maharashtra, home of India’s financial capital, Mumbai, the BJP earned enormous ill will by turning against its ideological cousin, the Shiv Sena. This Marathi Hindu nationalist party that venerates Chhatrapati Shivaji, the local leader who began the demise of the mighty Mughal Empire, has been a natural BJP ally for decades. Note that the RSS headquarters are in Maharashtra too. So, this family feud cost the BJP dear. The BJP compounded this error by welcoming highly corrupt local leaders into the party and losing credibility as a result.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP could have entered an alliance with All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a local party that has historically been a part of the NDA. Instead, the BJP decided to fight the elections alone. As a result, both the BJP and the AIADMK were wiped out in the state. 

In short, Modi falsely believed that he was so popular that he could rely on his national brand to win votes without relying on the RSS, state party leaders, local BJP workers, regional parties and caste constituencies. The disappointing result has proven Modi’s presidential model of politics wrong.

Modi underperformed among lower castes and classes

In Modi’s defense, he has presided over ten years of competent administration, infrastructure investment, India, and economic success. Why did India’s poor not vote en bloc for the prime minister? Yes, 810 million Indians are getting free food grains and many others have benefited greatly from Sanatan Socialism, which is Modi’s version of the socialism India adopted after 1947. This means less theft by intermediaries and more targeted delivery of benefits. However, this does not mean more jobs. Economic growth rates might be high but so is unemployment. In fact, Modi’s 2016 demonetization of high currency notes destroyed small industries and the informal sector, worsening the jobs crisis. Hence, many poor voters whose expectations have risen in the last ten years turned away from Modi.

The lives of Muslim voters, many of whom are poor, have improved under Modi’s administration. In particular, Muslim women have benefited from Modi’s welfare programs and banning of triple talaq, the practice by which a Muslim man could divorce his wife by saying “divorce” thrice. Yet Modi’s inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric turned off Muslims who overwhelmingly voted strategically for candidates best placed to beat the BJP.

Simultaneously, the INC-led opposition appealed brilliantly to Dalits, the lowest castes in Indian society. Since independence, India has expanded a constitutionally enshrined policy of affirmative action to promote social justice in a historically stratified society. The opposition spread the rumor that the BJP would change the constitution and roll back reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. No political party in India would dare do such a thing because demography is destiny in a democracy. The Dalits and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) — who are poor, but not quite as poor as the Dalits — form a majority of the vote, and the BJP does not want to commit political suicide. Yet the charge stuck.

In UP, the OBCs and the Dalits have had a fraught relationship. After independence, the INC used to rely on the Brahmin-Muslim-Dalit (BMD) alliance to win votes in North India. Over time the Brahmins left for the BJP, the Muslims started voting for regional parties and the Dalits flocked to their own parties. Thanks to the INC and the Samajwadi Party allying in UP, the Muslims, Yadavs (arguably, the most powerful of the OBCs) and Dalits voted together for the first time in decades. The Samajwadi Party won 37 and the INC six out of UP’s 80 seats. They had won five and one respectively in 2019. The BJP fell from 62 to 33 seats in UP in these elections. The Bahujan Samajwadi Party, a Dalit party in UP, went from ten seats in 2019 to zero this time around. Whoever wins UP has a good shot at running India and the BJP lost in India’s most populous state.

Modi is still prime minister but losses in UP and Maharashtra are big blows. His power not only in the country but also within the party is now greatly diminished.

What happens next?

What does this result mean for Modi, for the BJP, for India, and for its international partners and adversaries?

For the moment, there will not be a major policy shift. Modi has kept his cabinet unchanged, although Nadda will step down as party president. The government though weakened will carry on much as usual for now. However, the party will go through a period of soul-searching. The RSS and the BJP still have a strong will to power. They are already seeking to improve feedback loops and communication with various stakeholders. Obviously, this includes business leaders. More open channels could potentially prevent missteps like Modi’s poorly thought-out  2016 demonetization mentioned earlier.

The third Modi government is likely to push public infrastructure investment less aggressively. While this investment is necessary and will pay dividends for decades into the future, it also has a tendency to crowd out private investment. In Modi’s third term, there should be greater private investment and even consumption, creating new opportunities for US, Japanese and other foreign businesses. The French luxury sector, as well as Swiss businesses —  following Bern’s recent massive free trade agreement with Delhi — are also likely to do well in India.

Also, India will need to look for new sources of arms imports because Russia and Israel are both preoccupied with their own wars. France is likely to emerge as a big supplier, as it places fewer restrictions on its arms than the US does. 

China may see a weakened Indian government as an opportunity to put further pressure on India in the Himalayas or the Maldives. Conversely, China may also decide that now is the time for détente. This decision lies with Beijing and we will have to watch the smoke signals at Zhongnanhai carefully.

As far as Modi is concerned, he remains prime minister for now. However, political leaders both in the BJP and in other parties will be out for his blood. The INC may woo away one of Modi’s coalition partners by offering the leaders of regional parties the position of the prime minister. The INC has broken coalitions before and regional leaders might want their names in the national history books, even if they become prime ministers for just a month or two. 

The bottom line is that Indian democracy is far healthier than what many Western and Indian pundits proclaim. These observers had been sounding the alarm bells about Hindu fascism and democratic backsliding in India. Many treated a Modi supermajority as inevitable. However, Indian voters proved these Chicken Littles wrong.

Like Indira Gandhi, Modi is a powerful prime minister, but he is not powerful enough to control elections. Indian voters have shown they remain in charge. Furthermore, BJP leaders, workers and voters have shown that Modi is not even in charge of his own party. Today, as it has for three quarters of a century, India’s big, messy democracy is still going strong.

[Peter Choi edited this podcast and Anton Schauble wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.