• India’s April 2024 General Elections
  By Shashi P.B.B. Malla India’s General Elections: Impact on Economy, Democracy & Position in the Global South The election date for the world’s largest democracy is set to begin April 19 and last six weeks. India pundits are united in their prediction that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will sweep the polls, at least in the northern states. A third term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have a major impact for India’s economy, democracy, and position in the Global South. The Major Contenders India has a multiparty parliamentary government with a bicameral legislature. This year’s elections are for the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, which has 543 seats. The party or coalition of parties that wins a majority will nominate a candidate for prime minister and form the ruling government. Currently, the BJP rules with a coalition known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Recent opinion polls heavily favour the BJP and many of their allies to remain in power (CfR/Council on Foreign Relations: Manjari Chatterjee Miller, April 2). The main challenge to the BJP is led by the Indian National Congress, or ‘the Congress’ as it is popularly known, which is the only other party with a cross-national appeal. However, the Congress lost dismally in the previous two national elections, held in 2014 and 2019. To contest the 2024 elections, the Congress with a large number of regional parties formed an electoral alliance known as the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.). However, the INDIA-coalition is quite shaky. The All India Trinamool Congress, which forms the current government in the eastern state of West Bengal, has objected to the Congress’s insistence on putting forth its own candidates for many seats, including in states such as West Bengal, where the Congress is less popular among voters. Furthermore, one of the architects of the ‘INDIA-coalition’ – the state of Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) party – has defected to the BJP-led coalition. After the Election Commission of India (ECI) completes the complex electoral calculations needed to decide the election winner, the President of the Republic of India will invite the winning party to form the government, and the party’s/alliance’s leader will be appointed prime minister. If no single party is able to win an outright majority, the leading party will form an alliance with smaller parties. So or so, this will most likely be the BJP. As evident from the NDA and I.N.D.I.A, alliances are often formed in advance of elections, though they can shift before or even after them. Modi is poised to remain the predominant face of the BJP, while politician Rahul Gandhi will likely represent the Congress party’s opposing coalition. This leaves voters – who cannot directly vote for either – with a binary choice between two representative figures. The main issues driving voters’ concerns There are several significant issues in these elections and they can often vary from state to state. Some of the major concerns for voters are: Unemployment Across all of India, much has been made of the country’s youth bulge or demographic dividend, but many Indian youth are in fact left unemployed in a market that prioritizes highly skilled labour. At the end of 2023, the unemployment rate among youth ages 20-24 was 44.9 % percent, while the overall unemployment rate stood at 8.7 % percent. The Economy In agrarian states such as Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the rising debt of farmers and their subsequent protests has been an ongoing issue. More than 40% percent of India’s population is dependent on agriculture, and farmers feel left behind in India’s quest to raise living standards. Farmers’ demands include raising their stagnating incomes and setting price floors that guarantee farmers a 50 % percent profit from government purchases of certain crops. The health of the Indian economy is also at stake. On the one hand, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 8 % percent in 2023. But on the other, economists have argued that the growth does not accurately reflect India’s lack of progress in the Human Development Index (HDI), a U.N.-developed tool that measures a country’s development based on a combination of factors, including average life expectancy, income, and education level. They note that declining private consumption spending and contracting government consumption spending are worrying trends and say that other issues, such as unemployment and growing inflation, are cautionary signs behind India’s economic growth ( CFR/Miller). Welfare Programmes The BJP government has made its delivery of a new kind of welfare programme central to its election campaign. Governments, in general, typically supply public goods to their citizens, such as rudimentary health care and elementary education. But the Modi government has engaged in what economists, such as former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, have called “new welfarism”. That is, the Indian government has been subsidizing the provision of essential private goods such as electricity, housing, bank accounts, and cooking gas, as well as giving out cash payments. Furthermore, the creation of a digital public infrastructure system has allowed the government to eliminate middlemen and transfer benefits directly to voters. For example, mobile banking allows the government to directly pay citizens with cash transfers. Thus, the strength and continuity of the kinds of welfare programmes spearheaded by the BJP will be an important issue. Controversy surrounding Hindu-Muslim relations Hindu-Muslim relations are playing a clear role in the general elections. In personally inaugurating the Rama Temple at the very site of a violently torn-down mosque in the city of Ayodhya even before it had completed construction, Modi was attempting to consolidate his Hindu voting base. The inauguration of the temple – on the land believed to be the birthplace of the divine Hindu warrior-king Rama – marked the delivery of a long-ago promise made by the ruling BJP to restore the glorious Hindu past. It was celebrated as a momentous occasion across many parts of India, with school closings, half-days off work for national government employees, and huge Modi and Rama cutouts displayed everywhere. Discrimination against Muslims Similarly, fault lines between India’s dominating Hindu majority and its Muslims, the country’s largest religious minority, can be seen in the government’s decision to begin enforcing the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Announced last month, the implementation of the CAA allows the non-Muslim religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to apply for Indian citizenship. The BJP had campaigned on promises to implement the law, which it argues will protect religious minorities such as Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists from persecution. Critics contend that it deliberately excludes Muslim minorities who also face persecution, such as the Hazara community in Afghanistan or the Shiites in Pakistan, and that it sets religious criteria for citizenship (CFR/Miller). Furthermore, critics charge that the CAA, when combined with India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), will result in the expulsion of many Muslims. The registry allows the government to identify and expel undocumented Indian residents. [ However, it will be a quandary, since none of India’s immediate neighbours will accept such ‘immigrants’ ]. Moreover, many poor residents who have lived in  for generations have little to no documentation. This is a particularly acute issue for women, who are often excluded from ownership and inheritance documents because property and land are passed to male heirs. Thus, critics have pointed out that undocumented Indian Muslims could be rendered stateless by the registry and then blocked from citizenship by the CAA! For example, the Indian government contends that the NRC can help identify undocumented immigrants in the state of Assam, where about 20 million people have migrated from Muslim-majority Bangladesh. But a preliminary draft of the NRC excluded as many as four million Indians in the state who claimed they were, in fact, citizens. In theory, non-Muslims in Assam could apply for citizenship through CAA, but Muslims have no such legal recourse. Democratic Backsliding in India? Critics contend that in addition to the ongoing controversy about the rights of minorities, are controls on the media and the increase of disinformation on social media as signs of democratic backsliding in India. Miller of the CFR considers Indian democracy as paradoxical. India holds regular, largely free and fair elections with high levels of voter turnout. In 2019, nearly 67.4 % percent of Indians voted in the national elections. Furthermore, organizing elections for an electorate of more than 900 million people is no small feat. Indians cast votes electronically, meaning that election workers have to ensure that voting machines are present and monitored countrywide, including in geographically challenging and remote terrain. For example, Anlay Phu (Leh, Ladakh), located at more than 4,877 metres above sea level, has one of the highest-altitude polling stations in the world, with less than a hundred registered voters. But the BJP government has been accused of rolling back civil liberties in India, including by cracking down on the vigorously outspoken media. These policies, combined with the global expansion of disinformation across social media, has India watchers worried about the strength of Indian democracy. A Modi Third Term & India’s Foreign Policy India watchers are also speculating how another Modi term of office could influence India’s foreign policy. Above all, what bearing would it have on the country’s efforts to stake a role as a leader of the informal grouping of developing countries known as the Global South? While Indian foreign policy has had continuity between governments, Modi has certainly put his stamp on many aspects. Rohan Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics & Political Science states Modi is “creating a new policy paradigm based on self-defined Hindu civilizational values, a transactional approach to power politics, a willingness to use or threaten to use military force, and a desire to shoulder global responsibilities” (Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2024). The BJP government has promoted India’s global role by balancing a wide variety of seemingly clashing and delicate interests. In the Middle East, India has formed strong relationships with Arab nations as well as Israel. India leads the biennial multination naval exercises known as “Milan” [ = friendship ]; this year, the navy of India’s close strategic partner, the United States, participated in Milan alongside the navies of Iran and Russia, two countries considered antagonists by the U.S., but with whom India has long had cordial relations. India’s projection of its balancing role has also positioned it to claim a leading position among Global South nations – a stronger standing than that of Brazil, South Africa or Indonesia. At the Group of Twenty (G – 20) summit in New Delhi in 2023, India claimed that it had the ability to champion Global South interests and build bridges with the West. Modi himself has heavily advertised his own prime ministership and role to his domestic constituents as being instrumental in bringing about India’s prominent stature. This bridging role – which can be expected to continue under a third Modi term – has been duly noticed both domestically and internationally. Modi enjoys much popularity among voters as the champion of India’s national prestige, but the reception globally has sometimes been less laudatory. For example, India’s main adversary (even before Pakistan), China, called the Milan naval drill an exercise in “vanity”. And that is the crux of the problem for Modi and India’s foreign policy. There seems to be no window of opportunity for overcoming the simmering border tensions with China and Pakistan. And second only to the U.S., India is engaged in an intense overall competition with its northern neighbour. In this intense Sino-Indian rivalry, the immediate South Asian nations have chosen to take a neutral, non-aligned stance between the ‘Dragon and the Tiger’ – except for Pakistan, which is fully aligned with China, and Bhutan, an Indian ally in all but name. The ‘collateral damage’ of this state of affairs is that India’s ‘near-neighbour policy’ has been an utter failure. Most regional experts wonder why India is boycotting the ‘South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’ (SAARC), while closely embracing other multilateral forums like BIMSTEC and BRICS. It is indeed a question of injudicious and failed priorities. The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.