Modi’s personality cult is under siege on four fronts

By Andy Mukherjee

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would very much like to pretend that his party’s diminished majority in parliament doesn’t mean a diminution of his authority. Nothing can be farther from the truth. He is under siege from not one, but four different quarters. His personality cult is unlikely to survive the attack.

On the surface, his Bharatiya Janata Party’s dependence on coalition partners hasn’t led to much power-sharing. Modi’s ministers of finance, defense, foreign and internal affairs are all unchanged. The same Speaker of Parliament who suspended an unprecedented 100 Opposition lawmakers last December, allowing the government to change the criminal code without debate, has returned to the job. And the Speaker is still being his old, partisan self when it comes to allowing discussion on things that matter to people — like botched medical entrance exams.

Nor have Modi’s critics had any reason to breathe easy yet. A government functionary recently cleared the legal deck for prosecuting Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize-winning author, under a draconian anti-terror law, for a speech about Kashmir she’d made 14 years ago.

All this is partly aimed at buttressing Modi’s muscular nationalist credentials at home, and partly to gauge Washington’s reaction. Amid allegations of Indian operatives’ involvement in political assassination plots overseas, Modi’s goal is not to displease the West any further. Days after being sworn in, he rushed to a Group of Seven meeting in Italy. He’ll soon be heading to Russia. At last year’s G20 summit in India, Team Modi went to work on his image as a global statesman who offers sage counsel to bigger powers. That strategy seems to be intact.

Dim the projector lights, however, and a larger-than-life Modi starts to look ordinary. His monthly radio monologue resumed Sunday, but his aura of invincibility is broken. Consider the four forces stacked against him.

A stronger opposition:

For 10 years, the Lower House of India’s Parliament didn’t have a leader of the Opposition. No party had the required number of lawmakers to claim that position. That has changed. Rahul Gandhi, the chief campaigner for the Congress Party, is now formally leading the Opposition. In Parliament, Gandhi, 54, is backed by Akhilesh Yadav of the socialist Samajwadi Party. The 51-year-old handed a big defeat to Modi’s BJP in Uttar Pradesh, the most-populous northern state. In contrast to these more youthful challengers, Modi will turn 74 in September. He doesn’t have a political heir to whom he can transfer the halo that he has assiduously built around himself.

A contender within:

It isn’t just the opposition that has younger leaders. The BJP itself may now turn to the saffron-robe-clad chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Unlike Modi, who had the advantage of leading a more industrialized Gujarat for 12 years, Yogi Adityanath’s supporters may point to how he’s turning around his underdeveloped state by improving law and order. His “bulldozer justice,” which his critics say muzzles Muslim dissent, has admirers as far away as Edison, New Jersey. If the 52-year-old retains power in his state in 2027, he could go national. By some accounts, even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the umbrella Hindu nationalist organization that helped create Brand Modi, is looking for alternatives.

A different polarization:

In his new book, Gujarat Under Modi, political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot shows how the prime minister, a full-time RSS worker by the early 1970s, shot to prominence as the “Emperor of Hindu Hearts.” As a political organizer in the 1990s, he stoked fear of a Muslim mafia don among Gujarat’s voters. He achieved much bigger results for himself as chief minister following the vicious communal riots of 2002. Two decades later, however, it isn’t clear if there is more juice left in religious polarization as an electoral strategy. The BJP even lost the parliamentary seat in the town where Modi had consecrated a Hindu temple built on the site where a 16th-century mosque was razed by mobs in 1992.

Sensing this exhaustion, opposition parties are highlighting a different fault line: caste. The southern state of Tamil Nadu has joined Gandhi’s call for a caste census, so that marginalized communities can gain from affirmative action in proportion to their share of the population. A showdown on this issue may hurt the BJP, which has under Modi worked hard to broaden its appeal beyond upper-caste, middle-class Hindus. During this year’s election campaign, Modi decried a caste census, which was last conducted by India’s former British rulers in 1931, as a left-wing idea to redistribute people’s personal wealth.

Future cracks in coalition:

Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi held the top political job for longer than 15 years. Modi will join their league if he completes a full five-year-term. That may depend on two coalition partners: Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar in India’s east, and N Chandrababu Naidu, who runs the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Kumar has started asking for vastly more federal funding. Naidu wants something similar. For now, the partners are ignoring Modi’s most recent governance troubles such as bungled exams, falling airport roofs, flooded cities, colliding trains, and collapsing bridges. However, if association with the BJP begins to threaten their own political standing, they might pull their support.

The business-as-usual look of Modi 3.0 is an illusion with no dearth of believers. Now that India has joined JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s emerging markets bond index, the stock market has gone back to dreaming about a cornucopia of foreign capital, gleaming new public infrastructure, accelerated private-sector investment, and world-beating economic growth.

Still, the political plates are shifting. Hemant Soren, the chief minister of Jharkhand, was released from prison last week by a court that didn’t find any prima-facie evidence for the money-laundering charges on which the 48-year-old tribal leader was forced to sit out the national election. Jharkhand will go to polls later this year, as will Maharashtra — another state where New Delhi’s alleged misuse of federal agencies against political opposition backfired in the parliamentary contest. If more states reject the BJP, Modi’s national stature will become smaller still.