India’s Modi rides out political turbulence

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/02/2025 (220 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Many commentators last summer figured India’s populist strongman, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was doomed.

He and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were struggling to govern in a coalition for the first time. Both Ottawa and Washington were irate over India violently targeting Sikh nationalists on their soil.

Meanwhile, a billionaire tycoon close to Modi faced allegations his conglomerate, one of India’s corporate champions, was defrauding investors and faking its financial data — possibly with the prime minister’s knowledge.

Amid all this, Modi’s approval rating fell below 50 per cent, unprecedented in his 23-year political career. But India’s 74-year-old leader seems to have weathered the storm.

Modi co-hosted the recent AI Action Summit in Paris alongside French President Emmanuel Macron. Two days later, he was embraced — literally and figuratively — by Donald Trump while visiting the White House. Trade tensions and the fact that India is a large source of illegal migration to America took a backseat to pledges of increased bilateral co-operation on defence and technology.

Earlier this month, the BJP even won local elections in New Delhi, giving the party control of India’s capital for the first time in 27 years.

It was a stark contrast to the middle of 2024. In a year where a quarter of the world’s population went to the polls, India delivered the biggest shock. It was assumed Modi — in power since 2014, supported by a vast cult of personality — would easily clinch another majority government. Instead, he was dealt a stunning setback.

The BJP was reduced to minority rule as voters punished it over a glaring lack of jobs in a nation that has averaged seven per cent annual GDP growth for the past two decades. Over US$1 trillion in foreign direct investment has poured in during that same time.

“Rural Indians have just taught Modi and the stock markets a tough lesson,” wrote an Indian-based editor for Bloomberg in the post-election aftermath. “Millionaires are no measure of a country’s prosperity.”

Indeed, while India has climbed to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and abject poverty levels are falling, some 800 million people still rely on free government grain handouts. Around 1.5 million graduates in engineering and IT enter the labour force each year; only a small fraction find stable work.

Yet those with government and business connections are thriving. The number of ultra rich in India — with wealth over US$30 million — is growing faster than anywhere else.

In a country of nearly 1.5 billion people, the top one per cent claim one fifth of all new income.

Much of this stems from Modi’s dream of turning secular, multicultural India into a Hindu-first nation by sacrificing equitable development options. In doing so, he’s rendered the world’s largest democracy into what Harvard University political scientist Steven Levitsky calls “competitive authoritarianism.”

These systems differ from full-blown autocracies because “opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and the often seriously vie for power,” Levitsky writes. “But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt or sideline their opponents — disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power.”

Nevertheless, India’s electorate still retains obvious agency. And Modi seems to have absorbed the lesson of last year’s electoral embarrassment. Indeed, a middle-class tax cut announced on Feb. 1 — while insufficient in the big picture — displays a newfound sensitivity to voters’ concerns.

Modi has also largely maintained India’s geopolitical autonomy in the contest between the West and China.

He has positioned India on the world stage as the unofficial spokesperson for the Global South. This includes ushering the African Union into membership in the G20 when India hosted the forum last year. New Delhi has also refused to apply sanctions against Russia, knowing the consequence would be a spike in global food and energy prices that hurts poor countries the most.

New Delhi’s ambivalence toward China has also vexed Western leaders desperate to court India as a lynchpin in their plans to contain Beijing’s regional influence and decouple from Chinese supply chains. For example, India is a cornerstone of “the Quad” — an informal military alliance with Australia, Japan and the U.S. aimed at countering China in the Indo-Pacific.

Altogether, Modi’s vision of muscular Hindu nationalism that elevates religion and culture above liberalism, combined with India’s self-ascribed leadership role within the developing world, forms what Ravi Agrawal, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy calls “the new idea of India.”

Having now recovered from his election scare last year, expect Modi to double down on that idea going forward.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and political risk analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.