Currently, Modi faces no challenges, in parliament, in the courts, or at the polls. Street protests have failed to gain transaction. Rahul's INDIA alliance has been left with egg on its face because it was unable to fill all the seats at the Ramlila maidan today.
Modi lost his majority in the central parliament in 2024 but, since then, has increased his party's tally in the States. West Bengal was a historic win. The BJP runs 21 states which is 72% of India. If they retain UP in March of next year, they go into the General Election in pole position, more particularly if delimitation is implemented by then.
The Economist, for some reason, takes a gloomy view of Modi & the BJP's prospects. Sadly it is based on wishful thinking
| 25 years of Modi
Narendra Modi and the battle for India
India’s strongman has changed the country for good and ill. Now he is facing one of his sternest tests yet
Yogi is facing a test in UP. If he wins for a third time, he can be projected Modi's natural succesor- perhaps with Amit Shah managing the transition. The 2030s belong to him.
Does Modi face a vote of confidence? No. If his government falls, elections will be called. He will win. What about the courts? Is there any sword of Damocles dangling over his head, there? No. It is Rahul who faces charges under the Money Laundering Act.
IN EARLY OCTOBER India’s cabinet issued 11 pages of gushing praise to mark their leader’s quarter of a century in public office. As chief minister of Gujarat, a rich western state, then as prime minister, Narendra Modi had transformed “the lives of every citizen”, earning “unwavering support”. His dedication and honesty showed “the strength of India’s democracy”.
Nothing wrong with that. BJP will retain Gujarat. Will they also retain UP? The latest survey says yes. Like Bihar, voters don't want to go back to criminalised politics under a caste based, dynastic, party.
A month of celebrations was organised to mark Mr Modi’s silver jubilee, including exhibitions, tree-planting and grassroots events. It has not gone quite to plan.
It has gone exactly to plan. The core supporters are happy. Are they also enraged with Rahul & protests against the deletion of Muslim non-citizens from the electoral role? Probably. T
Throughout October India has been gripped by protest, as unrest over the leak of an exam erupted into a broader anti-Modi movement.
That's over. Now, the demand is for the resignation of the Election Commissioner.
Gen Z activists, student groups and opposition parties accuse Mr Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of rigging elections, and are agitating for education reform and jobs.
But they don't have the numbers. The opposition said there would be a million people at the protest today. The actual number looks closer to 40,000.
The 76-year-old strongman has appeared unsure how to respond.
Will Rahul hang himself on the 'votes for Bangladeshi Muslims' question?
At times he has tried to mollify activists, notably by sacrificing his education minister in July.
The Education Ministery fucked up. Pradhan may have wanted to return to Odisha in any case.
Now he is cracking down on them. In Delhi the authorities cut off the mobile internet, cancelled trains and blocked roads while police detained thousands of protesters, beating them with sticks. All of it has been streamed around the world.
All of this is popular with Modi's core supporters- not to mention ordinary Delhites. The condemnation of the NYT or the Economist, angers Indian nationalists and helps the BJP.
Mr Modi still has strong support, particularly among older voters.
He won big in Bihar which has a youthful demographic.
His ideology remains potent. Though opposition parties are now more unified, they lack organisational muscle and are yet to offer a coherent alternative.
i.e. Rahul is a moon-calf. However, Priyanka is looking good. Maybe she and Akhilesh can win in UP. That's what really matters.
Still, the unrest on the streets is a striking challenge to Mr Modi’s rule
it can be easily crushed. The farmer's protest was a different kettle of fish.
—both to a governing model that is no longer meeting many Indians’ aspirations, and to strong-arm methods that have closed down other avenues for opposition.
If 'opposition' means creating a nuisance, close down its avenues by all means. One worrying development is the victory of the film star Vijay in Tamil Nadu. The older dynastic parties may be displaced by charismatic youngsters. The BJP, however, is a cadre based party.
That makes it a good moment to reflect on Mr Modi’s 25 years in office. What kind of India has emerged under him?
One in which Rahul's stupidity hurts only his party. Akhilesh, however, is smart. It was he who should get the most credit for BJP losing its majority.
And what does his record suggest he will do next?
If the BJP wins in UP, Yogi will be promoted as the likely successor if this is helpful in the Hindi belt. Delimitation will go ahead a will the RBI's plans for getting big companies to go public, deepening nd strenghtening Indian financial markets. Strategic investment programs will go ahead. If, however, Akhilesh wins, the party will focus on welfare programs to bribe the voter.
Mr Modi’s arrival on the political stage was heralded by
an internal tussle within the BJP Gujarat unit.
an earthquake, which in January 2001 tore through Kutch in his native Gujarat, killing more than 20,000. The BJP’s ailing chief minister responded haplessly. His party installed a trusted apparatchik—a bearded, bespectacled 51-year-old who had never before stood for public office, let alone built a mass following. Few expected him to last long.
He didn't do conventional 'mandala' politics- i.e. keep his enemies close so thaat their enemies, outise the circle, would harrass them. Instead he acted like a CEO picking his Cabinet team on the basis of merit. Unexpectedly, he was able to deliver cheap (rather than free) electricity for farmers and then focussed on getting them Narmada water. Gujarat had balanced 10 percent growth in both agriculture and industry. Hindu-Muslim riots, which are bad for trade, were crushed.
He almost did not, as a result of horrific religious violence that took place in Gujarat the next year.
He benefitted from it. Muslims killed Hindu pilgrims. They would cease to have any role in Gujarati politics. This meant that the Congress KHAM formula (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) became unworkable. The casualty was Shankarsinh Vaghela- an RSS senior colleague of Modi who had gone over to Congress. The vitriol poured on Modi- as well as the Visa ban- meant he cornered the Nationalist vote.
After a group of Hindu pilgrims was burned to death on a train, vigilante mobs went on the rampage; more than 1,000 people died, most of them Muslims. Mr Modi never accepted responsibility or apologised for the bloodshed on his watch
being known as a killer of Muslim murderers is very popular in a mainly kaffir country. Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi's advisor, warned against this disastrous strategy. Virtue signal about minorities by all means but, if they are seen as a murderous bunch, keep your distance from them.
—instead, at an election later that year, he inflamed tensions with communal speeches. The BJP won a landslide. He has since won five elections in a row, two more in Gujarat and three nationally.
Why? He appeals to the majority community. That's a good thing in a democracy. It must be said, if Rahul had pushed aside Manmohan & led his party into the 2014 election, he would have got a majority. The lion of Gir would have roared, but the BJP would have put up Advani, who was twice Rahul's age.
One confidant from the early days attributes Mr Modi’s remarkable ascent to his long training touring villages as a foot-soldier in the RSS, a Hindu-volunteer group. “His advantage has always been his grasp of the average Indian’s psyche, their hopes and fears,” he says.
Fortunately for Modi & the BJP, Rahul's psyche is that of a cry-baby.
Steeped in Hindu-revivalist ideology, Mr Modi was particularly attuned to the victimhood many Hindus felt over policies that they believed had unfairly prioritised Muslims.
Kaffirs don't like being slaughtered by Jihadi nutjobs. America killed 1.3 million Muslims in revenge for 9/11.
In Gujarat he established a governing model. Styling himself as a
technocrat like Manmohan
Hindu hardliner and a “development man”, he aggressively courted foreign investment and forged close links with industrialists.
But when farmers changed their mind about handing over land, Modi cancelled the project. He knew that he was answerable to farmers, not industrialists in Mumbai.
He offered businesses land, tax breaks and subsidies. He kept the police, the courts and party cadres under tight control. All the while he projected an image of himself as uniquely incorruptible: ascetic, celibate and without a family to enrich.
This was the RSS ethos. It is likely that the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare succeeded because of RSS help.
As prime minister, Mr Modi applied this model to India. A country of 1.45bn is, in effect, ruled by a few dozen people in the prime minister’s office and around Amit Shah,
a possible successor. But he comes from a rich family & the suspicion will be that he has unjustly enriched it. Yogi & Modi, are celibate.
the home minister and Mr Modi’s longtime enforcer and strategist.
The country should be ruled by nice Italian lady- right?
Many in Delhi say that Mr Modi is rarely challenged, and cabinet ministers take direction. So do BJP chief ministers.
Oddly, he faces less pushback than even Nehru in his prime. But that is because he does sensible things.
Only twice before has India had such a dominant leader.
Only once before. That was Nehru.
The first was Jawaharlal Nehru, who over 17 years as prime minister forged a newly independent India as a secular democracy inspired by socialist economic thinking.
The country became unable to feed or defend itself.
The second was his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who took India leftward during her 16 years in office, often ruling as a populist authoritarian.
Her situation was always precarious. She never knew when a loyalist would turn on her. That's the problem with being a dynast. You have sycophants not genuine supporters. Still, if Modi loses his touch, he will be dumped as unceremoniously as Vajpayee or Advani.
One other point. Dynastic autocracy is tempered by assassination. Indira and Rajiv were killed. There's a good reason why Rahul did not want to be PM.
Mr Modi, born into poverty, defined himself against these figures. By promoting a mixture of Hindu-nationalism, pro-business reform and welfarism, he reduced their once-mighty party, Congress, to a husk.
Indira did that when she made it dynastic. Rajiv & Rahul have no political instincts.
Like Gandhi, though, he took a firm grip over his party, the media and institutions, and built a personality cult.
No. The RSS remains independent. Modi is good at his job and thus retains support. Once he starts fucking up, he will be dumped. Can Yogi (who isn't an RSS man) be his successor? Yes, if he gets a third term.
“Even Indira never had this level of control,” says Neelanjan Sircar, a political scientist.
Indira didn't have his core competence. Moreover, she didn't have an Amit Shah.
Chart: The Economist
What this chart shows is that the BJP continues to rise. No wonder the Opposition are running around like cockroaches.
The plight of the Left is particularly pathetic. The last time no Indian State was ruled by a Communist party was in 1977.
The BJP’s formidable political machine was on show in May when the party unseated Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, a populous eastern state.
Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration was a big issue. But it was Mamta's nepotism which doomed her. It must be said, the Bengal victory is particularly significant, since the RSS was inspired by the Bengali Anushilan Samiti revolutionaries.
More than 70% of Indians now live in a state run by the BJP (see chart 1). Yet five months on, Mr Modi is facing the most difficult test of his premiership.
Where? In Parliament? No. The Courts? No. At the border? No. On some streets in the Capital? No. The Opposition simply doesn't have the numbers.
“The BJP is in its strongest and its weakest position simultaneously,” says Rahul Verma of Shiv Nadar University, Chennai. It has never ruled more of the country, nor has it faced such fatigue and open discontent.
Why did it win elections in Bihar and Bengal earlier this year? Why do surveys say it will keep UP?
To see what kind of country Mr Modi has made, consider his impact in three areas: the economy,
Ministerial corruption appears to have been curbed in BJP ruled States
society and democracy.
The Economist doesn't get that Dynasticism is not Democratic. At one time, people said Varun and Maneka Gandhi, on behalf of the BJP, would challenge Sonia & Rahul. But Varun is now out of politics. The BJP brings forward fresh faced non-dynasts wherever possible.
On the first he has been a moderniser, though not the reformer many had hoped for. In 2014 he inherited plans for a national digital-identity and -payment system and a goods-and-services tax, to replace 17 state-level taxes. Weaker, coalition governments—long the norm before Mr Modi—had struggled to implement such changes. Mr Modi used top-down power to force them through, a massive achievement.
How do you use bottom-up power to implement Central Government schemes?
The result has been to knit India together with a stronger internal market, in which almost all Indians can access services and make payments online. The national highway network is 60% longer than it was when Mr Modi took power and rural households enjoy 22.6 hours of electricity a day, up from 12.5. Voters have been given free grain, electricity connections and cooking gas. Direct cash transfers have cut graft and reduced poverty, forging a direct link between Mr Modi and the poor.
To be fair, all parties now understand the importance of infrastructure, cash transfers, & 'last mile delivery'.
Pro-business more than pro-market, Mr Modi
needs to save Indian family owned businesses from their own propensity for internecine feuds
has tilted India towards a model of national capitalism.
Recent events have shown that there is no other choice for 'middle' powers.
Since Gujarat his rise has been bound up with that of Gautam Adani,
whose family got their first break under Rajiv Gandhi. All littoral states need ports & Adani appears to be good at building and maintaining them. He has plenty of projects in Congress or even Communist ruled states. The reason he is linked to Modi was because, like other Gujarat based, entrepreneurs, he wanted to diminish the power of the Mumbai based 'old money' firms. But, over time, Mumbai too was won over by Modi.
Interestingly, the US Secretary of State recently came to India to meet Mukesh Ambani. It appears, even the Americans need Indian industrialists.
who has built an empire spanning ports, airports, energy and defence. Tycoons like Mr Adani have, like Mr Modi, got hard things done and helped the economy grow—by around 6% a year (similar to before Mr Modi came to power). The Reserve Bank of India has largely kept inflation in check, too, avoiding the gyrations that undid previous prime ministers. Mr Modi has been unusually fiscally prudent.
More needs to be done to deepen and widen Indian financial markets and to improve Corporate Governance.
But the rewards have been top-heavy. The tycoons have done as well as ever.
Unless, like Anil Ambani, they have gone bankrupt.
Mr Adani’s wealth has risen from $7bn in 2014 to more than $100bn.Anil Ambani's wealth went from $42 billion in 2008 (when he was the 6th-richest person in the world) to effectively zero or negative by 2020.
Rural workers have not. Their real wages, which typically grew by 6% a year between 2006 and 2014, have since grown by 1%.
They may have declined. We really don't know.
Salaried workers have done worse still: adjusting for inflation, average pay for this group, accounting for around a quarter of the Indian workforce,
They have done very well in Tamil Nadu which is 60 percent salaried. The Dravidian model has worked. Maybe North India needs an Aryan model with Muslims replacing Brahmins as the villains of the story.
has fallen by 5% since 2017 (see chart 2).Chart: The Economist
This is meaningless. You have to look at each State separately.
Mr Modi’s failure was that he abandoned deeper land and agriculture reforms when they triggered mass protests
They can be done at the State level- as the Constitution envisaged.
. Ironically, giving in to that discontent has helped lead to the discontent now.
No. The Government sent a signal that it would put the farmer's first- i.e. tell the Americans to go fuck themselves.
There is no real discontent now. There is some careerist opportunism on the one hand & a rather pathetic attempt by the Left to rally its few remaining cadres. Rahul's histrionics are a separate matter. The hope is that his coalition partners will accept that voters are accepting him as a credible Prime Ministerial face. If so Akhilesh can say 'vote for me as CM and, in 2029, Rahul as PM, Inshallah!' But if Akhilesh loses in March, it will be a case of 'three strikes and you are out'. The age of the dynast (save in Jharkhand & J&K) will come to a close.
Despite steady growth, Mr Modi has not achieved the economic transformation he desired (and of which his cabinet boasts). The share of workers in agriculture has remained stubbornly at two-fifths; the share in manufacturing has grown only a little. Though India has been covered in shiny roads, informal labour remains ubiquitous. A huge expansion in higher education has not been matched by growth in salaried jobs, suppressing wages and creating a large cohort of frustrated youngsters.
The Hindi belt needs to learn from Tamil Nadu. The obsession with reservations has to end. There just aren't enough public sector jobs to make even the tiniest dent on the problem. What we are seeing at various protest sites is that casual labourers earn more than graduates. They can afford to take a day off to attend the protest and then go back to work. The wannabe cockroach isn't going to turn into a Social Media influencer or 'political strategist'. He has wasted his parent's money & will have to take any sort of work that he can get.
“What we are seeing is Modi reaching the limits of his governing model,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University near Delhi.
No. What we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the Modi era. The man is 76. If Yogi wins, there is an obvious successor. But he may not want to shift to Delhi. Can the BJP find a second 'Modi-Shah' jugalandhi? I don't know. Maybe they will go for a technocratic Cabinet, if they win in 2029. After all, it is CMs, not PMs, who really make a difference.
He has been able to push through big changes that require raw executive power. But he has failed in areas that require consensus-building or systemic reform.
So has everybody else. You can't have a consensus unless people want to agree.
The change to Indian society, the second area, has been more dramatic. Under Mr Modi India has become more brash, nationalistic and Hindu, and, bluntly, a more forbidding place for the country’s 200m Muslims (just under a seventh of the population).
Hindus are the majority. Virtue signalling is all very well but it doesn't win votes.
This is the most controversial part of his legacy. It is also where opposition to Mr Modi has been least effective.
Because Hindus are the majority- d'uh!
The most visible change is that Mr Modi has fused religious nationalism with politics.
This happened in the 1890s thanks to Tilak & Vivekananda & the Arya Samaj.
As prime minister he has regularly taken part in ceremonies and rituals—above all the consecration of the Ram Temple on the site of a former mosque in Ayodhya, fulfilling a decades-long campaign. The BJP has pushed through citizenship laws and begun to overhaul Muslim family law. Although the word “secular” remains in the constitution, Mr Modi has damaged the principle that India is a republic that treats all religions equally.
Nehru did lots of ethnic cleansing. Oddly, under Indira & Rajiv, Sikhs got it in the neck. Muslims were laughing their heads off.
This is unlikely to be reversed. “Hindutva [Hindu-ness] is still a powerful magnet for the middle class,” says Rajdeep Sardesai, a TV anchor and political analyst.
Hinduism is a magnet for Hindus. Sardesai is a friggin genius.
BJP chief ministers have emulated Mr Modi—and taken his ideology to new extremes. Opposition politicians have joined in “temple hopping” and “soft Hindutva”. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the youth movement at the centre of the protests, has notably steered clear of religious issues.
Because it is just a couple of AAM party hacks seeking to build careers as 'political strategists' or 'influencers'. The thing is a silly season story.
Since his fateful first year as chief minister in Gujarat, Mr Modi has fostered a culture of permissiveness around anti-Muslim bigotry and violence.
Everyone became bigoted after 9/11. Only the Americans took the trouble to invade Muslim countries and desecrate the Quran while sexually abusing Arab men.
BJP politicians call Muslims “infiltrators” and “encroachers” and issue threats against them.
Which has caused them to win West Bengal & those North Eastern States where this is an issue. Interestingly Owaisi's outfit won some seats in Bihar. But this was because of disgruntled elements kept out of Rahul's coalition. It is doubtful that he can accomplish much in UP.
Communal violence has continued to fall from its peak in the 1980s, a period marred by regular bloody riots. But there has been a rise in targeted attacks on Muslims by vigilante groups, which often meet with impunity. This will be the most damaging part of Mr Modi’s legacy—and it, too, will be difficult to reverse.
It is wholly inconsequential. Nobody gives a shit about rural mobs running amok.
Chart: The Economist
Why is Modi's current coalition so stable? The answer is that, if elections are called, the BJP is expected to win by a landslide.
With his blend of modernisation and religious nationalism, Mr Modi has been remarkably successful at unifying the Hindu vote. But how long can that go on if voters fret about the economy?
The problem is they may think Rahul would be worse in every way than Modi or Shah or Rajnath or Fadnavis. Yogi has been keeping a low profile but he is 54- two years younger than Rahul. Fadnavis is the same age as Rahul & is a good Hindi speaker but, though a 'Nagpur boy', he is not seen as a Hindu harliner. Also, he is a Brahmin. Yogi has broader appeal.
In the national election in 2024, voters angry about jobs turned away from the BJP, forcing Mr Modi to govern in coalition (see chart 3).
No. The Opposition had effective seat sharing. Akhilesh did good candidate selection. BJP messaging was poor. Many Dalits believed the story that Modi would end reservations. But the biggest problem was candidate selection. Too many turn-coats were given seats. Booth management suffered because local party workers felt let down.
A cynic might say, Modi needs Rahul to stay in politics. It is the unelectability of that hysterical moon-calf which makes him look so good by comparison. The problem is Modi's age. India did once have an 80 year old Gujarati as PM. But Morarji was a fucking disaster.
Praveen Chakravarty, an MP who leads polling for Congress, claims that age is now the main electoral dividing line, with under 30s—who make up almost 30% of eligible voters—turning against Mr Modi.
But it is still poorer women who will determine the outcome.
The focus of those on the street is the third area: Mr Modi’s handling of elections
They are handles by an independent Election Commission. The problem is, if Modi's supporters are in the majority, they will be happy if they think he is smart enough to have stolen the election.
and institutions. Protesters accuse him of “stealing democracy” through a voter-verification process called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), under which more than 130m names were removed from draft voter rolls.
Why are dead people not being allowed to vote? The fact is, if you are on the electoral roll, you are grateful for voter suppression since your vote now counts for more.
Still, if saying the election was stolen worked for Trump, shy should Stalin & Mamta & Rahul not take up the cry?
On October 14th Abhijeet Dipke, leader of the CJP,
formerly of an anti-corruption party which imploded because of accusations of corruption
sardonically compared the circumstances with “the Emergency”, a period when Gandhi cancelled elections, locked up political opponents and clamped down on the press: “Declare Emergency officially,” he said.
Why not say 'invade Poland' ? It would make as much sense.
The last revision of electoral rolls took place more than two decades ago, so one was overdue. The number of removals this time was much higher than before, at least some of which might be explained by higher internal migration or voters dying. Mr Modi’s defenders argue that only a small fraction of the 130m were eligible voters.
If the EC fucked up, let there be a proper inquiry into it. It is very difficult to impeach an Election Commisioner and he has immunity from prosecution. But, the Bench can reverse ultra vires rules they have made.
The problem is the way the process has been carried out, which has been rushed, opaque and—true to form—centralised.
because the Election Commission is a central body with independent constitutional status. The same is true of the Supreme Court.
Millions who were wrongly removed were not given a proper chance to appeal, leaving them disenfranchised (when appeals were completed, the vast majority were successful). Whereas previous exercises have been run by state and local operators,
i.e. the ruling party could rig things
this one was run centrally from Delhi, using software that allowed little transparency about who had been removed and why.
If the EC becomes timid, the BJP can entrench itself in 72 percent of the country.
To some, this is proof that Mr Modi is a would-be dictator who will break Indian democracy to cling to power. That is going too far. The SIR process has been murky, but there is no evidence that it has swung elections. The argument that Mr Modi holds power because he steals votes skims over the way the opposition has struggled to offer a more compelling alternative.
If the alternative to Modi is, the moon-calf, Rahul, the Opposition is bound to struggle. The bigger problem is that the INDIA bloc is ideologically very diverse. It includes Maoists like Neha Bohra, Islamists from the Muslim League, Dravidian chauvinists, Maratha chaunvinists, & various caste based dynastic parties. It is difficult to imagine a Cabinet composed of such disparate elements agreeing on anything at all- more particularly if the moon-calf presides over it.
SIR is better seen as an extreme example of Mr Modi’s strong-arm tactics.
It has nothing to do with him. The Election Commission is independent.
His government has extended control over Supreme Court appointments, weakening the independence of the judiciary,
No. The Collegium remains intact.
and has cowed the once-combative Indian media with a combination of takeovers and hostile investigations.
The media will be just as combative as the CM of the State in which they are in wants them to be. Thankfully, the Media doesn't matter very much.
It has similarly used the state to tie political opponents in legal knots. In all, Mr Modi has abused his powers more ruthlessly and over a longer period than any other Indian leader (though Indira Gandhi did suspend democracy, after 21 months she pulled back from the brink, called elections, and was voted out.)
No. Modi has abused power less because he is not a dynast. Sooner or later, he will be turned out to pasture like Vajpayee or Advani. Go by the book and the Courts can't throw the book at you. Anyone can allege anything. Proof is a different matter. Narasimha Roa was sentenced to jail for 3 years though this was overturned on appeal.
And yet, Indian democracy is more resilient than many make out. The country is vast, diverse and noisy; competitive elections, while flawed, are ingrained. The scandal over SIR has shown that Indians remain deeply attached to their vote,
Hindus are deeply attached to ther heads. They don't want them to be chopped off during the course of demographich replacement.
and that the media are still capable of holding the government to account. They have put pressure on the Supreme Court and the Electoral Commission of India to improve the appeals process for excluded voters.
There was pressure on them to get rid of bogus voters and non-citizens.That too will continue.
This is a pattern in other democracies, says Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “When you have a very strong leader, they can bend institutions to their will,” he says. “But when their popularity begins to fade, institutions tend to bounce back.”
The reverse is the case. If the leader is weak, institutions can't do shit. Why? The political will to enforce the decisions of the institution is lacking. Thus the Court may issue an arrest warrant for a gangster. The police won't act upon it because they don't want to be killed. The gangster rapes the Judge's wife. After that the Bench is quiet. The Home Minister blames the spinelessness of the CM. The CM blames the PM. Institutions become a joke.
What about a strong leader who, for some reason, prefers to act through existing institutions. They may gain the appearance of effectiveness. But, an appearance is all that it is.
Perhaps Vaishnav means that a strong leader prevents rival power centres from coming into being. But, in a parliamentary democracy, political power is the monopoly of the Cabinet. Part of the job of the Executive is to enforce the rulings of the Judiciary. But a weak Executive can't do this.
Mr Modi has never faced stronger headwinds.
They were stronger in 2024. Now, he has West Bengal. His party's footprint is expanding. Rahul is happy he has Kerala. This has boosted his confidence. But, if Yogi wins big in UP, the future will belong to the younger man.
At 76 he is—whisper many in Delhi—showing signs of ageing.
At 76, he is old. Full stop. There is no need to whisper it.
Still, he is unlikely to back down or change his approach.
His approach does not matter. Yogi's does. I think this means doubling down on law & order. More bulldozer justice. I suppose the next election in UP will be the last before caste census results are known. Whatever their outcome, the issue of reservations will dominate the politics of 2028/29.
Instead, he will continue to try to divide and weaken the opposition.
Put up the Cockroaches to split the INDIA vote? That would be a waste of money.
In private, officials say ministers have been rattled by the way a handful of kids with smartphones have seized the agenda.
Which officials? Ones who are imaginary? I supose so.
They will aim to stop the youth protests gathering steam by keeping leaders in custody or tied up in the courts, and channel discontent into opposition parties, which they are more comfortable fighting.
The BJP rules Delhi. They need to crush cockroaches. Rahul is the Leader of the Opposition. He is entitled to stage his little dramas.
It is not clear such tactics will work. So far protesters have turned crackdowns into viral clips. Attempts to brand the CJP—who wrap themselves in the Indian flag and talk of constitutional rights—as “anti-nationals” have failed. Mr Modi cannot easily take the sting out of the movement, as he did in 2021 by dropping the reforms that had angered farmers; many in his party regard more concessions as a slippery slope. But stifling legitimate dissent will also cause pressure to build.
Farmers genuinely exist. They have a lot of votes. Cockroaches don't really exist- at least as a political force.
The prime minister may look to shift the political debate onto more comfortable terrain. He could dial up the Hindu-nationalist rhetoric. Or suddenly table a controversial bill, say on delimitation, a thorny issue involving the allocation of parliamentary seats between states.
That will happen automatically on the basis of the census. Nobody has the numbers to block or dilute it.
The BJP will try to paint Rahul Gandhi, the grandson of Indira and leader of the Congress party who heads the opposition alliance, as a street agitator who wants “regime change” without winning elections.
Just stick to calling him 'Pappu'. At some point, the BJP will have to get behind Yogi in a big way. The UP election is simply too important.
The underlying sources of discontent—education, jobs, wages
which became sources of discontent in the 1890s
—will fester. But the opposition will need to show that it has better answers. Mr Gandhi often speaks as if the mood had already turned decisively (and he had not lost three elections in a row). “We are going to destroy them,” he said of Mr Modi and Mr Shah at a rally on October 6th. So far, Mr Modi’s approval ratings have only dipped. Some voters dislike the BJP’s authoritarianism,
No. Lack of authority is what is disliked. Modi is authoritative enough but not an autocrat. That's why nobody is trying to kill him.
but also worry about how an unwieldy coalition led by Congress, which has moved to the left under Mr Gandhi, would govern.
It will be shit. Then it will implode.
The next big test will come in the spring with elections in several states, including the largest, BJP-run Uttar Pradesh. That one looks to be tight. If the BJP wins, it will claim that Mr Modi’s enduring popularity has been proved and the opposition are sore losers. If it loses, it will be the surest sign that Mr Modi’s appeal is waning.
It will be a sign that there are internal problems. The Party has said that candidate selection will be on the basis of winnability but everybody says that.
For Mr Modi the risk now would be to believe what his outriders say—that the protests are just a small group of anarchists and anti-nationals who do not reflect Indians’ real grievances.
That is the case. The youth are not a cohesive voting block. My guess is Yogi will offer a big payout for poor women early next year.
For the opposition it is the reverse: to believe that a few months of street action mean that Mr Modi is in terminal decline.
Priyanka seems sensible enough. Maybe she can do a good seat-sharing deal with Akhilesh.
Over 25 years he has proved remarkably resilient. He is not going to go down without a fight.
He is going to bow out gracefully. कालो हि दुरतिक्रमः- Age is the enemy which can't be conquered. If he falls ill, Shah takes over & there is a sympathy factor. But if he remains in good health, it would be wise to build up a younger leader from a different part of India as the heir apparent.
Perhaps Shah will stay on to ease the transition. He is 62- ten years older than Yogi- and has tremendous organisational experience. Maybe, Yogi has his own Amit. What is certain is that the only way you get good at governance is by actually doing it rather, like Rahul, running your own mock parliament and conducting mock impeachments.
