The roots of Modi's 'vishwas politics' and rethinking Indian political science
Some reading material before election results come in.
Welcome back to India Inside Out.
The newsletter took a bit of a break as I came to the end of my visiting fellowship in Philadelphia at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania (though I’ll continue to be commissioning and editing CASI’s fortnightly publication, India in Transition. If you’re interested in writing for IiT, get in touch!).
We’re just a day away from getting the results of India’s 44-day long, brutally hot election campaign. Since the final day of voting is done, exit polls are out, nearly all of which are forecasting a massive victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party, as was expected before voting began.
(As I mentioned in the previous post, the narrative appeared to suggest a tightening of the race as voting got going, but some of those storylines appeared to be almost inevitable given the length of the elections and the way journalists and observers generally operate, which is not to say that there weren’t interesting takeaways to draw from the campaigning).
Two verdicts are in fact already out: Assembly results have been announced for state elections in Sikkim, where the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha was re-elected with a landslide victory, and in Arunachal Pradesh, where the incumbent BJP government got 46 of 60 seats.
There is little need for an examination of exit poll data, since we’ll have the actual results out soon enough. In the meantime, I have some links for reading and listening material that might interest you while you wait for those numbers.
On CASI’s India in Transition, we’ve been running a series called ‘CASI Election Conversations 2024, where I spoke to some of the most insightful scholars of India’s political economy on a whole host of subjects:
Louise Tillin on federalism in India
Yamini Aiyar on the BJP’s “Techno-Patrimonial” welfare model
Rachel Brulé on the promises and pitfalls of gender quotas
Pavithra Suryanarayan on the BJP and “anti-redistributive” politics
Francesca R. Jensenius on misconceptions about the Indian voter
Sumitra Badrinathan on misinformation in India
Here are the final two pieces in the series:
Where does ‘vishwas politics’ come from?
Neelanjan Sircar’s paper sketching out the ‘politics of vishwas’, meaning trust or belief, attempted to explain the Narendra Modi phenomenon in the aftermath of the BJP’s massive 2019 victory. It put forward a number of key concepts that offered a way to understand India’s current electoral moment, ideas that Sircar has continued to work on since that paper.
I spoke to Neelan about his attempts to examine the roots of this form of politics, its antecedents in regional party structures emerging in the 1990s.
“In a nutshell, the argument I've been interested in is that, as the Congress party declined in strength in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of small regional actors that were essentially the vehicles for particular political actors or political families, rose in the states. These were highly centralized parties with very low intra-party democracy. Many of them are the precursor to the kind of politics of vishwas that we see today. Many of the things that we associate with the Modi-led government at the Center today in terms of control of state institutions, media, relationship with large businesses, and of course, the personal branding, are things that we had seen in a number of the state elections and state parties and political leaders from the 1990s onward.
At times, we forget that Modi also cut his teeth as a very popular chief minister in the state of Gujarat. He picked up many of these tools as a chief minister. And he is, in many ways, the first person who really built his credentials as a chief minister and then became a prime minister. Where a lot of my thinking has gone is the evolution of the kind of politics that we see in India today. It did not emerge out of nowhere, or out of just some social anxieties, but it’s actually something that had been bubbling up for a long time, and something that we've been seeing at the state level from the 1990s onward. It has just simply been scaled up to national politics by a very successful chief minister, Narendra Modi, and a person that he has been associated with for a long time, Amit Shah, who is now the home minister in India.”
We also spoke about why you cannot study political centralization in India without engaging with the concentration of economic power:
“There are two directions in which our thinking needs to go. The first is that alongside political centralization, India has seen extraordinary economic centralization. Depending on who you talk to, 70 to 80 percent of all profits in India accrued to the top 20 companies. We're looking at income inequality numbers in terms that are rivaling Russia. We are nothing like eastern European or Eastern Asian or Southeast Asian countries. The question is, how do these two feed into each other? Increasingly, the income inequality and status inequality in society is becoming an issue. This was a large part of the farmer protest as well. The first thing they did was go and start boycotting Adani- and Ambani-owned shops.
But this kind of economic centralization is very core to the political model that the BJP has, because these large businesspersons require a national leader, and the national leader requires these kinds of resources to continue. We've already started hearing rumblings about estate taxes, and inheritance taxes, and whether farmers are being treated properly. To what extent does inequality—social inequality, economic inequality—emerge as a genuine problem for anybody who is in government in India? That's one thing I'm looking at.
The second thing is that, as we have this model happening at the center and at the state level, if increasingly politics is about building a relationship between the leader at the top and the citizen, then what is the point of having local representatives? What is the point of having choices in your representatives? And what does that say about the extent to which people are interested in parliamentary democracy or parliamentary debate?
One of the things that we've noticed about this national election is that it's very low energy. The first phase had a lower turnout—we're speaking just after the first phase—we'll have to see if that continues. Irrespective of what happens with turnout, it certainly doesn't have the energy of the last two national elections. Is it just the case that people simply don't raise their concerns through parliamentary politics anymore? If I'm a poor farmer today, is it better for me to take to the streets, because the government will bargain with me then, than for me to try to work through my political representatives and through the political opposition? It certainly seems so.”
Read the whole interview here.
What does political science get wrong about India?
A few years ago, a paper appeared in Perspectives on Politics seeking to change some fundamental assumptions made within the field (and, indeed, in conventional wisdom) about how politics works in India and what that tells us about Indian democracy. The paper, co-authored by 12 of the most insightful names working on Indian political science, took on things like the cliche of ‘vote buying’, the idea that Indians ‘vote their caste’ and the perceived weakness of Indian political parties.
To wrap up the CASI Election Conversations 2024, I spoke to Milan Vaishnav, one of the co-authors of the article, about where the paper came from, how those ideas are evolving in the age of the BJP – and what questions about the current moment in Indian politics he would like to see examined:
“There is an essay by Ravi Agarwal in the current issue of Foreign Policy, which I thought had a provocative thesis. We keep talking about Narendra Modi and the BJP as a supply-side issue, that they've become a hegemon, and they're reshaping politics in a certain way. Ravi's argument is that Modi's really a demand-side issue. In other words, the electorate has shifted, and he's meeting them where they are, as opposed to fundamentally moving the electorate in a more conservative direction. That seems, at first glance, to be perhaps an obvious insight, but I actually think it's a profound one. I don't think, as political scientists, we've really tried to disentangle this. In other words, is Modi the leading edge of something, or, in some sense, is he responding to changes that have been underfoot for a while? That's a big question that I have.
Second, it strikes me that we have these conversations about India's economy and how it is this anomaly. It has moved from a largely agrarian to a services-led economy skipping over manufacturing, with a delayed or stalled structural transformation because agriculture still accounts for 40 percent or so of the labor force. Yet there really hasn't been a lot of attention paid to contemporary study of Indian politics on agriculture. What is the payoff to farm loan waivers? What is the political efficacy of Minimum Support Prices? Even the question of inflation—we have this saying, "If you want to know who's going to win an election, look at the price of onions." But we don't have a single paper, as far as I am aware, that actually establishes that. One person who has tried to crack this, though he looks at it from a more historical lens, is Aditya Dasgupta, who has looked at the political economy of rural societies. His work looks at the political effects of the Green Revolution. But I think we need a lot more in this area.
The last thing is something that Aditya Dasgupta and Devesh Kapur have done some work on: the Indian state. We need to think more deeply about the state as an organization, how it works, and how the constraints the state is under can limit what politicians want to do. For example, MPs and MLAs have constituency development funds and they want to undertake local community-based projects to brandish their personal reputation. These are things that they have to do through the state. It's not something they can do on their own. But we don’t question enough what the capacity is of the state to respond, what the hindrances are, what ability do politicians have to actually make the state function better. There's a whole set of nested questions in there that I would like to see more work on.”
Read the whole interview here.
The Election Tricycle
I took two weeks off from The Election Tricycle, our little podcast tracking elections in India, the UK and the US, but that didn’t mean the trike stopped turning its wheels. In the most recent episode, Emily Tamkin and Tom Hamilton spoke about the big news from the UK – Rishi Sunak calling for snap elections, which will now be held on July 4.
The week before that saw Emily speak to special guest Karishma Mehrotra, South Asia correspondent for the Washington Post, about covering elections in India and the US, and the many interesting crossovers between the two.
Listen, subscribe, share – and look out for upcoming episodes on Indian results as well as campaign season in the UK.
Can’t Make This Up
I normally put humorous material in this section, but there are other more depressing developments that also can barely be made up:
Thanks for reading India Inside Out. Send suggestions, links and ‘can’t make this up’ material to rohan.venkat AT gmail.com.