Modi: From pariah to messiah?

In the parliamentary elections concluding in two weeks, one candidate, Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is fighting against some 7,500 candidates of various political persuasions in 543 constituencies — technically there are 542 other candidates of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), but in reality it is only Mr Modi that this election is all about.  Report after report from various regions, in print and electronic media, including many not BJP-friendly, confirm that people everywhere think voting for or against Mr Modi is the issue.  The opposition talks of little else.

This is extraordinary.  Not even in Indira Gandhi’s “India is Indira, Indira is India” heydays of the mid-1970s, the general election was ever about one individual.  In 2014, Mr Modi was the leader of a successful campaign, not the campaign himself.

But his impact on the BJP’s electoral fortunes was not always so benign.  The NDA was widely expected to win the 2004 general election hands down but narrowly lost it.  Most analysts blamed the India Shining campaign for the loss.  But that does not stand scrutiny.  India was indeed shining then, based on most objective criteria.  The economy was growing at an 8-plus per cent annual rate, inflation was mild and an optimistic view of the future prevailed.  The immensely popular Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the tallest leader.  So something else caused the shock defeat.

That something else was the Gujarat conflagration of 2002 under Mr Modi’s watch.  Officially over 750 Muslims died, out of a total of 1,000-plus.  Mr Vajpayee admonished Mr Modi publicly, but the BJP did not remove him as the chief minister, apprehensive of upsetting the apple cart of the faction-ridden party in the state, the only major one in its basket then.  Mr Modi won the state election later that year but was side-lined in the national polity.

Weather-vane allies such as Ram Vilas Paswan and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam quit the NDA in the wake of Gujarat, fearing rightly its toxic impact on their own prospects.  The BJP lost 44 seats, 37 in just Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, both with sizeable Muslim populations.  In these two states and Andhra Pradesh, the substantial anti-Modi Muslim vote caused the NDA to lose 80 of its 299 seats.  How the worst NDA liability in 2004 became its prime asset 10 years later is an enigma of Indian electoral history. 

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Mr Modi’s rehabilitation was long and arduous.  He won the 2007 Gujarat election handsomely as well, with little help from the BJP top brass (but considerable boost from the Congress’ negative maut ke saudagar campaign).  His stature and fame grew between 2007 and 2012 as the success of the so-called Gujarat model of development spread. Arvind Subramanian compared it to China.  The 2012 state election became a virtual referendum on Mr Modi (as is the current election).  Most BJP leaders visited the state but they could have saved themselves the trouble.

The Modi-as-the-BJP face for prime ministership bandwagon started rolling right after the December 2012 Gujarat verdict, but its progress was halting.  In April 2013, the late Manohar Parrikar mentioned to this writer the roadblocks he faced as the prime mover of the drive to get Mr Modi anointed the head of the 2014 campaign.  The deed was done in the June 2014 BJP executive meeting in Goa and the rest, as they say, is history.

Similarities between the Gujarat 2012 and India 2019 campaigns abound.  Mr Modi had then the undisputed command of the well-oiled state BJP machine as he does of the national party now.  He had then said that the contest was between the Congress and himself; he now says it is between the entire opposition and himself.  In his dozen years in Gujarat, dynamic double-digit agriculture growth contributed hugely to the Modi mythology.  Similar fortune lay in his stars (to turn the Bard upside down) with mostly benign oil prices and just-in-time occurrences of Pulwama, Balakot and the Azhar Masood blacklisting, to shift the focus away from more troublesome topics.  Further, those universally acknowledged oracles, taxi drivers and vegetable sellers, had then weighed in favour of Mr Modi, as they seem to be doing now.  Finally, the mainstream English media and punditry had in 2012 blinkered themselves to the evident ground reality and grabbed the straw of anti-incumbency to predict a Modi defeat.  Now the vociferous opposition campaign has similarly allowed many to entertain the possibility of a regime change shortly.  The Economist, while resigned to the BJP remaining in charge, considers this outcome not just despicable but also dangerous.

Mr Modi won 115 out of the 182 Assembly seats in 2012, a nominal loss of two seats from 2007.  His “referendum” netted him 48 per cent of the popular vote.  Does this mean that he and the BJP will win in 2019?  However much that prospect may discombobulate some of us, we must be prepared to anticipate it.  I have made a guess of the BJP winning 255+ seats, but I also remember that in 1948, the venerable New York Times had the ignominy of wrongly headlining the Republican Thomas Dewey’s victory over president Harry Truman, and so must be prepared to eat the omelette off my face come May 23. 

The writer is an economist