--621x414.jpg "Narendra Modi, 63, will be sworn in on Monday, 26 May, as the first prime minister born after India won independence from British colonial rule in 1947.")
General Election 2014 verdict: The ‘Right’ Choice
8 min read . Updated: 23 May 2014, 12:43 AM ISTBy handing power to the Narendra Modi-led BJP, the Indian voter has swung decisively back to the political right. MintAsia examines the verdict
New Delhi: That Election 2014 would produce change was easy enough to predict.
But if anyone had seen how emphatic the verdict for change would be, it was one man—Narendra Modi himself. At a time when the commentariat was still buzzing with talk about post-election political realignments necessary for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to cobble together a government, the prime minister-in-waiting said on 8 May: “I will tell you, don’t waste your time in finding allies...BJP is winning with a clear majority and we will be forming the strongest and most stable government since Rajiv Gandhi’s."
Modi, 63, who will be sworn in on 26 May as the first prime minister born after India won independence from British colonial rule in 1947, made that prediction in an interview on Times Now news channel four days before the ninth and final round of voting and the airing of the first exit polls. He was bang on target.
When the results were declared on 16 May, the BJP had won 282 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha—the first time a party had won a clear majority since the Congress party under Rajiv Gandhi, who won two-thirds of the Lok Sabha seats in 1984 on a wave of sympathy after his mother and predecessor Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two Sikh bodyguards.
Together with its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the BJP won 336 seats. Only one exit poll, by Today’s Chanakya, got anywhere close to the numbers.
For the first time in eight general elections, the Indian voter saw it fit to give a single party the numbers it requires to govern the nation on its own, without having to labour under the “compulsions of coalition politics" that outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had often cited as a reason for the compromises required in governance.
After voting for the Congress party-led centrist coalition United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in back-to-back elections in 2004 and 2009, the Indian voter swung decisively back to the right.
“We had enough of an unstable and indecisive government. People wanted to give a decisive government which would provide single-handed leadership instead of multiple power centres," said N. Bhaskara Rao, a political analyst based in New Delhi.
The Modi wave that the Gujarat chief minister’s supporters said was sweeping India—Manmohan Singh had described it as a “creation of the media"—was only too real.
“The Modi wave was very distinct and those political leaders from various other political parties who did not see it only fooled themselves," said Mumbai-based political analyst Jai Mrug.
The numbers told the story.
The BJP won 71 out of 80 seats from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state; 26/26 from Modi’s home state, Gujarat; 25/25 from Rajasthan; 27/29 from Madhya Pradesh; 13/14 from Jharkhand; 10/11 from Chhattisgarh, and 7/7 from Delhi.
In Bihar, where it contested 30 seats, it won 22; and together with allies, 31 out of 40. Together with partner Shiv Sena, it took 42/48 seats in Maharashtra.
“India has won," Modi tweeted as the magnitude of the victory became clear. “The good times are coming."
The landslide buried the Congress party. It reduced the 128-year-old party to 44 seats in the lower house of Parliament—less than one-tenth of the strength of the House, its worst performance ever, and 162 down from its tally of 206 seats in the 2009 election.
“Our party has done pretty badly. There is a lot to think about," Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who headed the party’s election campaign, said in his first, bland reaction to the rout.
His colleague, Jairam Ramesh, was more candid.
“The scale of our defeat has been staggering. Most unexpected," he said. “We really have to understand why this happened— to what extent is this a Modi wave, to what extent is this an anti-incumbency wave?"
Both may have been equally responsible.
In its second term starting in 2009, the Congress-led government lurched from one corruption scandal to another. In the controversial allotment of natural resources like 2G spectrum and coal blocks, the government auditor had estimated notional losses to the exchequer at ₹ 1.76 trillion and ₹ 1.86 trillion, respectively, sums that boggled the public mind.
By the time the UPA entered its last year, the famed India growth story, too, had lost its sheen. The pace of economic expansion nearly halved from the average (8.43%) in the UPA’s first term to less than 4.5% in the year ended 31 March 2013 (it is estimated at less than 5% in the following year).
India’s swelling middle class, projected to rise from 160 million today to 267 million by 2016, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), was crushed by consumer price inflation that averaged 9.49% in fiscal 2014, compared with 9.8% in the previous year. Borrowing costs had shot up after a series of rate hikes by the central bank, taking its toll on consumer sentiment.
The UPA’s inability to create jobs for the rising number of educated young also disillusioned young voters, a significant demography—52% of voters are in the age group between 18 and 40 years.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) created 60.7 million jobs in 1999-2004. The UPA’s contribution in the following seven years was a quarter of that, 15.4 million.
Across the nation, of the 814.59 million registered to vote in the 16th general election, an estimated 100 million were first-time voters. The record 66.4% poll turnout helped the BJP on its way towards a clear majority.
“Obviously, the Congress imploded on so many fronts. The economy was struggling, inflation has been high, there was a leadership vacuum and abdication," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think-tank.
“We had anti-incumbency votes in the past like the 2004 vote was an anti-NDA vote," he said. “But the fact of the matter was that it took Modi and the BJP to crystallize it into a national political formation. The significance of this vote is that there is actually a pretty wide social base of support. Dalits have voted, scheduled tribes have voted. It is not a purely negative vote. It is a positive, affirmative mandate."
The Congress’s attempt to demonize Modi by pointing to the 2002 Gujarat riots that left 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, dead under his watch had no effect on the result. Modi, who was last year cleared of involvement in the riots by a special investigating team formed by the Supreme Court, has denied any wrongdoing.
Modi managed to harvest the anger against the Congress and the UPA, and offer himself and the NDA as a credible alternative by waging a tireless campaign that included almost 450 election rallies and 300,000km of travel across 25 states.
The BJP’s parliamentary board acknowledged the role he played, adopting a resolution that recorded “its deep sense of appreciation to the tireless effort and leadership provided by Shri Narendra Modi in this campaign".
“It was this inspirational and visionary leadership which caught the imagination of the people of India, and they reposed faith in it," it said.
Modi turned the polls into a presidential-style election, telling the electorate in a television commercial that every vote they cast would accrue directly to his account. The Congress, its allies and other Modi opponents only helped his cause by waging a negative campaign that focused on the man and his perceived flaws—his Hindutva bent, for one.
“This was a vote for or against Modi as PM. With the huge and brilliant marketing and advertising campaign, the only person that was in the fray was Narendra Modi," Mayank Gandhi, a member of the national executive of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), wrote in a 19 May blog.
“The candidates did not matter, a lamppost could have won in that atmosphere. All those who did not want Modi as a Prime Minister, then chose the second alternative—in most cases, the Congress. Thus, the votes for Congress were negative votes, and the votes for BJP were positive ones," wrote Gandhi, who lost the election from Mumbai-Northwest.
Modi trounced AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal by a margin of 337,000 votes in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. To be sure, the tough part is still ahead of Modi, who faces the risk of being weighed down by soaring expectations. He has to fix the economy, boost growth, revive projects that have been stalled by policy paralysis that gripped the outgoing government, create jobs, lower inflation to live up to his promise that “good days are coming".
The clear political mandate means people are dreaming about a better future rather than bothering about a sad past, according to Manish Sabharwal, chairman of staffing and training company TeamLease Services Pvt. Ltd.
“If there were nearly 100 million new voters this time, the new government should not forget that there would be a similar number of fresh voters in 2019 (next general election) as well," Sabharwal said. “So the new regime has to keep in mind the expectations."
Investors have their expectations up as well. Bank of America-Merrill Lynch (BofA-ML) raised its December target for the BSE Sensex, India’s most closely watched stock market index, to 27,000, and Citigroup Inc. to 26,300 points.
On Tuesday, 20 May, the 30-share index closed at a record 24,376.88 points, having gained 15% this year.
India’s equity markets “could well have struck gold", Citigroup analysts wrote in a note on Monday, 19 May. “Over the past decade, a fragmented coalition with differing economic ideologies had been the key reason for the economic malaise. The historic verdict, hence, justifies a re-rating of the Indian equity markets," they wrote.
The one advantage that a Modi government would have in pushing through with action to get the economy going again is a clear majority for the BJP in the Lok Sabha, which has removed the risk of resistance from allies impeding policy decisions.
“This means that the BJP has full power to do what it wants," Sabnavis said. “The government should start capital expenditure, which can add life to the industries and revive investor sentiments in a major way."
