Narendra Modi gave it his all. He even lay down in the new temple in Ayodhya in January, three days before the opening, to pay homage to his god Rama. It was the start of an unprecedented election campaign that was tailored entirely to Modi as a person and cost record sums. Divine help was probably needed, because he only just managed to secure a third term in office. The 73-year-old is to be sworn in on Sunday.
Now his opponents and probably his party friends are asking what Modi did wrong. Why he missed his self-imposed goal of 400 seats in parliament by such a wide margin and will have to rely on coalition partners in the future. Was it his self-portrayal as the country’s highest spiritual leader? Was it the inflammatory speeches? Or the malaise of the many millions of Indians who have little to gain from economic growth?
One of the few who believed even before the last election phase that Modi would have to take a hit is Teesta Setalvad, 62, human rights activist, journalist – and staunch opponent of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled India under Modi for ten years. A few days before the end of the elections, Setalvad is sitting in the garden of her house in Mumbai, right by the sea. “I was lucky that my grandfather bought this house in 1933 and I inherited it, otherwise I would of course never be able to afford something like this,” she says.
Modi is held responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 Muslims
Setalvad has been trying for more than 20 years to help the victims of the Gujarat Riots to get their rights. In 2002, more than 1,000 people were killed in three days of unrest in the Indian state. Narendra Modi was the chief minister there at the time and to this day he is accused of at least failing to provide assistance when a Hindu mob set out to rape and kill Muslims. Teesta Setalvad and her organization have ensured that 174 people responsible have now been sentenced to prison terms, some of them life sentences. “This was only possible because we found lawyers for the victims.”
This is how the activist became Modi’s opponent. On June 25, 2022, she was arrested by an anti-terror unit on charges of fabricating evidence against Modi. That was a day after the Supreme Court dismissed a petition by Setalvad against the report of a special investigation team that acquitted Modi of involvement in the riots. She was in custody for three months, the case against her is still pending today, and the maximum penalty is threatened: the death penalty. Setalvad sees it as a typical attempt at intimidation by the BJP.
She remains unyielding, partly because she believes that Modi’s time is running out. In her opinion, even the people in the so-called Cow Belt, the northern agricultural states of India, who used to reliably vote for the BJP, no longer feel represented by a prime minister who has now become clearly aloof, as seen in the temple opening. The numbers prove her right: in the largest state of Uttar Pradesh, where people mainly live from agriculture, the BJP lost a surprising number of seats. “Only the media are portraying Modi as a savior,” she finds this shameful as a journalist.
Billionaires are getting richer, the middle class is getting poorer
The key to these elections, many now suspect, lay in the economic figures that Modi and the BJP used to promote themselves, showing the many unemployed and poor that the country’s growing wealth is being generated without them. Billionaires are getting richer, but the average income of the middle class is falling. “The most important question is: how do you measure economic success?” says Setalvad. “By the quality of life? By jobs or poverty? By how freedom in society is developing? We have become worse in all of these areas.”
And then of course there is the Hindu nationalist agenda, which secures the BJP core voters among the 80 percent of Hindus in the country, but at the same time damages social peace. Modi himself only met Teesta Setalvad once briefly, “I was already on the other side.” The then Prime Minister knew that she was committed to the Muslims in the camps where those who had managed to flee the “Gujarat Riots” lived and which Modi quickly described as “birth factories.” To this day, his favorite horror story is that the Muslims want to make the Hindus in the country a minority by increasing the birth rate.
So far, the big corporations have supported Modi, but for how long?
Setalvad remembers that work was easier back then, “it was a different India, there were independent courts, interventions were possible.” At that time, Modi was accused by India’s Human Rights Commission. That would no longer be conceivable after ten years of BJP government, Modi does not like being held accountable. “But how can someone like that rule in a democracy?” asks the journalist.
Like many critical observers, Setalvad hopes that democracy in India is strong enough to keep Modi in check. The opposition got off to a bad start in this election campaign, but was ultimately able to double the number of its parliamentary seats to almost 100. The leading candidate, Rahul Gandhi, won both seats he stood for with impressive margins. He has gently reformed his Congress party and increasingly put it on a left-liberal course, which has been to the detriment of the Hindu nationalist BJP. To do this, however, he must also continue to hold together the large INDIA alliance, which supported him as the major opposition in this election campaign.
The question now is how stable Modi can continue to govern. On the one hand, the BJP is not a party in the usual spectrum; it is based on the ideological backing organization RSS, which wants to transform India into a theocracy. “Modi is their instrument for this, which is why they supported him,” says Setalvad. But will the RSS do the same with a weakened Modi? On the other hand, the big corporations in the country supported him and co-financed his gigantic election campaign. It remains to be seen whether they now feel that the result was not a little meager for all the support.