WWRR Vol.2.017

1/4/2019 The struggle for India’s soul - The World in 2019
At the other end of India’s vast social scale, farmers, lower-caste Hindus and religious
minorities all have reason to have fallen out of love with the BJP. Mr Modi’s tenure has seen
an ugly surge in violence directed against India’s less privileged, often by groups or
individuals associated with the Hindu-nationalist right. The poor have also been hit by
rising global oil prices, a weaker Indian rupee and falling farmgate prices. Intellectuals,
journalists, academics and other opinion-makers, meanwhile, have been put o by the Modi
government’s dictatorial style: rather than upend the stu y dominance of a long-entrenched
establishment, as many had hoped, the BJP has simply inserted loyalists to run the same old
system.
All this works to the advantage of Mr Modi’s foes, most notably Congress, the legacy party of
India’s independence movement. And so too does a force often described as the most
powerful in India’s ckle political game, anti-incumbency. If this were the potent Congress
party of past decades, the BJP’s doom would probably have been sealed. But despite being the
only real national-level rival to the BJP, and indeed the only other party with a presence in
every Indian state, Congress is a shadow of its former self. Its leader, too, is no match for Mr
Modi in political skill: Rahul Gandhi may be younger, and may also have grown into his job
as “crown prince” of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has commanded Congress for four
generations, but he lacks the BJP leader’s street- ghting tenacity.
No one expects Congress to take on the BJP on its own, however, and Mr Gandhi has also
been coy about whether he would actually seek to be prime minister. The likely strategy is
for Congress to patch together a rainbow of anti-BJP forces, largely composed of the regional
and identity-based parties whose growing importance has been a salient development in
recent years. If Congress can hold together such a coalition—and that is a very big if—then
Mr Modi’s days might be numbered.
But that is not what makes this election so momentous. Beyond the struggle between parties
and personalities, Indians sense an underlying struggle over the country’s soul. If Mr Modi
wins a second term, his party may be even blunter in imposing its Hindu-nationalist vision
of a more muscular, less tolerant India. Should Congress and its multifarious allies capture
power, their critics fear, India will return to its bumbling, corrupt old ways. The more likely
result: whoever rules, India will remain too wildly diverse for any one trend to dominate.
This article appears in "The World in 2019", our annual edition that looks at the year ahead. See
more at worldin2019.economist.com
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