On 1 June, India’s 44-day election concluded with results announced just three days later. Nearly 970 million Indians voted for local representatives in the Lok Sabha, the legislature’s lower house. India’s prime minister is determined by majority vote in the Lok Sabha after the general election. All exit polls predicted a massive victory for the incumbent Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with current Prime Minister Narendra Modi at its helm. In what is being seen as a huge upset, BJP only won 240 of the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha, forcing BJP to depend on its coalition partners, National Democratic Alliance (NDA), to secure a parliamentary majority of 293 seats. The opposition alliance, India National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), with the previously popular Congress party as its largest member won 232 seats, greatly exceeding exit poll predictions. BJP’s failure to secure their desired supermajority of 370 seats indicates that the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology has begun to lose its hold for the hundreds of millions of Indians whose economic situation remains dire. SOMA KISAN reports.
BJP’s ambitions
Created in 1951, the BJP has been the ruling party in India since 2014. It was founded as the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right paramilitary organisation. Its policies adhere to Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist ideology. Weaving in and out of power for decades, Modi led BJP to decisive victory in the 2014 elections.
BJP’s 2024 election performance is especially embarrassing given its prevalence over the past 10 years. In India’s 2019 elections, BJP won 303 seats alone in the Lok Sabha and BJP-led NDA won 353 seats. The Congress party only won 52 seats and Congress-led United Progressive Alliance 91 seats. Hoping to build on this 2019 victory, NDA was preparing for a 400-seat supermajority win that would allow it to amend the Indian Constitution ‘especially laws that subjugate the Hindu community’, as stated by BJP Uttar Kannada MP Anantkumar Hegde in early March and pave the way forward to merging ‘Pakistan occupied Kashmir with India’, ensure the ‘abrogation of Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir’ and secure the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as detailed by BJP Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in May. Since 1949, Article 370 of the Indian Constitution has given near-autonomous authority to Jammu and Kashmir to conduct its own affairs. This article was scrapped in August 2019 with BJP’s majority, declaring Jammu and Kashmir a union territory, allowing India’s central government much more control over the area’s affairs against the wishes of the majority of the region’s population. This decision required a full lock-down of Jammu and Kashmir: over 10 million phone lines disconnected, public transport stopped, internet and mass media suspended and tens of thousands of Indian troops sent in. This move is particularly contentious because Jammu and Kashmir is a majority-Muslim region and has been the cause of three wars between India and Pakistan over decades. The Kashmiri people have been fighting for the right to self-determination since 1947 when India was partitioned. The region has several critical resources. It is the sole producer of India’s borax and sapphire, 36% of India’s graphite and 21% of its marble. It is situated in a critically strategic location between India, Pakistan and China. The revoking of Article 370 would allow Indians, most of whom are Hindu, to buy land in Jammu and Kashmir, a BJP strategy to gain control over the region.
The 2019 CAA similarly targets Muslim migrants, providing a fast track to naturalisation for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who fled to India from Muslim-majority countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, setting religious criteria for citizenship. Implementation of the CAA and ‘reviewing’ India’s secular Constitution to make ‘suitable’ amendments to further discriminate against India’s Muslim population under the pretence of defending Hindus of India were key parts of BJP’s national agenda.
Campaigning on these issues in 2024 played a significant role in BJP’s strategy. It focused on communal differences and counted on India’s 80% Hindu majority to secure electoral success. This strategy failed to divert India’s dispossessed from rampant unemployment, stagnant wages and unaffordable inflation.
The facade of economic growth
Throughout his campaign, Modi waxed poetic about India’s big economic numbers. India is the fastest-growing major economy, expanding by 8.4% in the last quarter of 2023, and moved past Britain to boast the world’s fifth-largest GDP at over $3.9 trillion. Modi further promised to make India the world’s third-largest economy by the end of his third term in 2029. However, spread over a population of 1.4 billion, India remains desperately poor with a per capita income of $2,700, ranked 136th globally. Combined with the fact that the richest 1% of India now holds 40% of the country’s wealth, the picture grows bleak for the bottom 50% who hold just 6%. Under Modi over the last decade, inequality has only grown worse.
India’s service sector makes up more than 50% of GDP and remains the fastest growing sector. However, the industrial and agricultural sectors employ a majority of the labour force. Over 45% of the labour force is employed solely in agriculture. BJP’s failure to generate jobs in the manufacturing sector, particularly medium and small-scale businesses, has left this labour force stuck in low-productivity employment. Foreign direct investments have plunged to an almost two-decade low as a percentage of GDP. BJP has focused on developing high-tech services and capital-intensive large business as drivers of economic growth. The catch is neither of these industries employs large numbers of people productively and furthermore, there are relatively few Indians who have the skillsets to work in these sectors.
The discontent of the largest section of India’s labour force, farmers, has been felt time and time again, most significantly in 2020 when 250 million workers, farmers and allied students, women and civil society groups protested and striked. These issues came to the forefront again in April and May 2024 when thousands of farmers protested for minimum support prices for their produce in the state of Punjab. From 2018 to 2022, over 53,000 farmers took their own lives due to crushing economic conditions and miniscule remuneration for their produce. Farmers’ issues had a direct impact on election results in key farming-focused states: in Maharashtra, BJP went from 23 seats out of 48 in 2019 to 9 seats in 2024; in Haryana (India’s bread basket), BJP went from 10 seats out of 10 in 2019 to 5 seats in 2024; in Uttar Pradesh (65% of its population depends on agriculture), BJP went from 62 seats out of 80 in 2019 to 33 seats in 2024.
Furthermore, instead of developing manufacturing, BJP focused on two large economic reforms: demonetisation in 2016 and the implementation of the goods and services tax (GST) in 2017. The demonetisation (withdrawal from circulation) of 500 and 1000 Rupee notes, which constituted 86% of the currency in circulation, was claimed to be targeted at curbing the black market, counterfeit currency and corruption. The shock removal of these notes led to a decline in GDP growth with particular impact on the rural sector and a shrinkage of the informal sector, leading to a rise in unemployment. The largest deposits of these currency notes came from super-rich individuals but no large-scale purges of unaccounted black market deposits took place. Due to this conspicuous lack of impact on corruption, it was later framed as encouraging the transition to digital transactions. GST was intended to simplify India’s complex system of multiple central and state taxes into a unified national market. Beyond massive upheaval in implementation, 67% of GST is now paid by 50% of India’s poorest citizens.
Nowhere were the consequences of this economic strategy better seen than in what was previously the Hindi heartland of BJP support. With a population of over 240 million, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh is a key constituency for Indian elections with a total of 80 seats in the Lok Sabha. In this key state where BJP had won 62 seats in 2019, BJP lost heavily, winning only 33 seats. In a particular humiliation, BJP lost Ayodhya, the very city where the Hindu Ram temple was consecrated on the ruins of a mosque early this year, a key component of Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda (see FRFI 300, ‘Bourgeois illusions mask capitalist rot‘). Constituents in Ayodhya and Uttar Pradesh complained that the Ram temple did nothing to provide jobs or uplift the poor and felt that religious polarisation was no replacement for the failures of job creation. Especially for the many lower caste communities in Uttar Pradesh, BJP’s agenda to change the Indian Constitution was unwelcome. Their fears that amending the Constitution would spell the removal of their own enshrined protections drove them to vote for the Samajwadi party, part of INDIA. Even in Modi’s own constituency of the holy city of Varanasi, Modi’s victory margin shrank from nearly half a million votes in 2019 to just 150,000 in 2024.
Infrastructure
Another key prong of BJP’s electoral strategy was its focus on developing India’s infrastructure. Over the last three years, BJP has spent more than $100bn annually on infrastructure. Much of this has been focused on India’s transport sector in which Modi has invested huge amounts to upgrade and electrify train tracks and expand road infrastructure. Over 500 Vande Bharat Express train services are expected to be launched in the next three years, boasting speeds of 130kph never seen in India before. Freight routes are also being upgraded from 25kph to 70kph in response to declining freight traffic in the decade to 2022. Modi’s government hopes new freight corridors will boost the share of freight traffic by rail from 27% to 45% by 2030, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on imported fuel as well as decongesting existing lines. At the same time, India is adding 10,000km of highway a year. The length of rural road network has increased from 381,000km in 2014 when Modi was elected to 729,000km in 2023. In the same period, the number of Indian airports doubled from 74 to 148.
BJP’s infrastructure investment prioritised transport over any other development on the assumption that transportation deficiencies have been the main cause of India’s economic failures in the past. To this end, India spent 1.7% of GDP on transport infrastructure in 2023, twice the level of the US and most European countries. So far, this rapid expansion of infrastructure has not spurred the increase in private investment in the Indian economy that was hoped for. In 2019-20, private investment was only 22% of GDP, down from 31% in 2010-11.
Infrastructure decay remains a severe challenge. India’s series of collapsing bridges, tunnels, metro lines, apartment blocks and airport roofs is endless, each killing or injuring anywhere from dozens to hundreds of people. Here again, India’s manufacturing weaknesses show up in the form of Indian manufacturing subcontractors ignoring basic quality standards for materials like concrete in favour of cheaper formulations that compromise safety standards. This combined with the corruption ubiquitous to the manufacturing sector’s regulatory agencies spells a future of continued infrastructure failures.
The most unpredictable threat to India’s infrastructure is climate change, a threat that will be exacerbated by India’s push to build its aviation industry. In June, Delhi experienced 40 days of over 40℃, followed immediately by torrential, once-in-a-century rains. A report by New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment said that India experienced extreme weather on nearly 90% of the days in 2023. Despite this, environmental issues and their inevitable impacts on the vast majority of the Indian population were largely ignored in politicians’ campaigns, a trend that did not go unnoticed by the millions of farmers in India whose livelihoods are contingent on reliable weather and water sources.
Welfarism
BJP’s previous electoral success has often been attributed to a new type of ‘welfarism’ which includes Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) wherein beneficiaries receive transfers from over 500 government welfare schemes directly into their bank accounts. Over the past decade of BJP control, the amount paid through DBTs increased over 25 times, from INR 60bn (~$718.8m) to INR 2.1 trillion (~$25.1bn), reaching over 1 billion registered beneficiaries as of September 2023. This ‘welfarism’ has included the extension of a free food ration scheme – to stave off starvation – to 800 million Indians for the next five years as well as several other programmes that include homes, toilets, and cooking gas cylinders. Overall Modi’s government has spent over $400bn on these welfare programs. Throughout it all, Modi has made it clear to all constituents that he is the driver behind welfare benefits, ensuring this ‘beneficiary’ class can be politically mobilised.
This type of welfarism has been pursued in lieu of serious investment in state healthcare services or state education because welfarism has quick electoral advantages. The working class of India continues to stagnate with no serious investment in the labour force’s productive capability which is the only sustainable route toward India’s long-term development. This comes as no surprise given the history of repression against working class movements in India (see FRFI 138/139 and FRFI 300) and BJP’s continued commitment to capitalism under the guise of Hindu nationalism.
The real winners
On the international stage, Modi has already visited Russian President Vladimir Putin since his reelection, promising to strengthen trade relations. India is the second largest importer of Russian oil just behind China despite western imperialist pressure to comply with sanctions against Russia. These actions signal other interests at play including India’s broader rivalry with China. At the same time, India has ensured it continues to be well-integrated with the west as a trade and security partner. As inter-imperialist rivalry between and within the western bloc and Russia heightens, India is positioning itself to gain in any scenario.
In the midst of this, it may cheer socialists that BJP did not win by a landslide and that INDIA contains parties like the aforementioned Samajwadi Party of Uttar Pradesh, the Communist Party of India-Marxist or the Communist Party of India who at least nominally tout socialism and won Lok Sabha seats based on this. This fails to face the broader reality that India has been subjected to the rise of a billionaire Raj. In 2022 just 16 Indians (0.01% of all Indians) owned 25% of the country’s wealth. This is exemplified by the gross display of wealth that was Anant Ambani’s July wedding in Mumbai. Anant Ambani is the son of Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in Asia with a net worth of $123.3bn. Politicians from both NDA and INDIA attended the four-day event, cosying up to a long list of international elite guests from Kim Kardashian to Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. Modi attended and even apologised to the Ambani family for accusing them of using black money in the election, demonstrating exactly where real political power continues to lie in India, no matter the ruling party.
