radhika desai

P E A K H I N D U T VA ?

O
n 4 june 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into
which its corporate leaders had cast it. Bankrolling by ‘India,
Inc.’ had created a mystique of invincibility around the Prime
Minister. This was further inflated by India’s godi [lapdog]
media, which parroted claims that Modi was the most popular leader
in the world.1 Beloved of billionaires and Bollywood stars, yet pure and
pious, never forgetting his modest origins, bringing happiness to the
humblest homes, he had unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian
economy, now set to overtake China’s as a world powerhouse, a high-
tech and service-centre hub, while showering cooking-gas cylinders and
flushable toilets upon the grateful poor. It could not last. The economic
policy demanded—and received—by India, Inc. required imposing
economic pain of a scale and severity that could not be electorally cost-
less. The money- and media-driven inflation of the Modi cult could not
defer payment forever and in 2024, votes finally dispelled the vapours
money generated.

The 2024 election campaign was launched in January with the spectacu-
lar consecration of the newly built Mandir [Temple] of the god Ram in
Ayodhya, in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, constructed on
the site of the thirteenth-century Babri Mosque which Hindutva mobs
had demolished in 1992. In the bjp’s most overblown aestheticization of
politics to date, Modi starred as both prime minister and priest, playing
solo lead in a lavishly choreographed ceremony, watched by a glittering
array of movie stars and much of the country’s ruling class, not to men-
tion hundreds of thousands of devotees and a national tv audience in
the hundreds of millions.

The Electoral Commission had helpfully scheduled the second longest

election ever, seven phases extending over 44 days, so that Modi could

new left review 147 May June 2024 89

 90 nlr 147

campaign in each bloc of constituencies in turn. The election was cast

as a plebiscite on Modi’s persona alone: his was the sole face of the bjp,
at rallies, on posters, in ads and the media, as if he alone was running
for his party in all the hundreds of seats. Modi’s triumphalist slogan was
‘This time, over 400!’—‘Ab ki baar, 400 paar!’ The bjp’s electoral bloc,
the National Democratic Alliance (nda), was supposed to surpass 400
seats and the bjp itself to win 370, a two-thirds supermajority. Winning
a third term would equal the record of the country’s first Prime Minister,
Nehru, and the supermajority would surpass it. Opinion polls suggested
the bjp would easily top even its hubristic goals. Only those who stood
beyond the swirling vapours argued that the electorate could deliver a
substantially different verdict. Psephologist Yogendra Yadav had pro-
posed on the last day of polling that in these circumstances, ‘anything
below 300 would be a moral defeat; a tally below 272’—the halfway
mark—‘would be a political defeat for the bjp and below 250 would be a
personal defeat for Modi.’2

Rural discontents

With a final score of 240 seats, Modi suffered all three. The bjp’s tally was
63 fewer than the 303 seats it had won in 2019. The trend of its increas-
ing vote share went into reverse: having risen from 18 per cent in 2009
to 31 per cent in 2014 and 38 per cent in 2019, the bjp dropped to below
37 per cent in 2024, even though it contested more seats each time. Even
Modi’s nda allies put him to shame by increasing their tally slightly. The
nda bloc as a whole took 293 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, compared
to 234 seats for the Congress Party’s bloc, india. Congress itself carried
99 seats, nearly doubling its 2019 tally. These dramatic changes in seat
tallies rested, however, on small shifts in the parties’ vote shares —an
outcome of India’s Westminster-style first-past-the-post system. The bjp
dropped just 1.2 percentage points from 2019, while Congress rose by
1.49 points, from 19.7 to 21.19 per cent.

In the Hindi heartland, however, there were, as Yadav and his colleagues
pointed out, small but critical shifts towards Congress/india among

1
Thus a December 2023 Morning Consult survey declaring Modi the world’s most
popular leader could be widely reported as fact, without mentioning that the survey
was conducted entirely online and, in India, confined to the literate population.
2
Yogendra Yadav, ‘Getting the Numbers, Not the Mandate’, Indian Express, 7 June
2024.
 desai: India 91

landed peasants—Jats in Haryana, Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—

while the rural poor in those regions, the so-called ‘extremely backward
classes’ (ebcs) of landless agrarian and manual labour, swung against
the bjp by 10 percentage points, a measure of the crisis in the Indian
countryside. Congress also improved its proportion of the Dalit vote, ris-
ing from 25 per cent in 2019 to 32 per cent, while the bjp’s share fell
from 41 to 36 per cent, its Dalit support only holding up in Gujarat and
Madhya Pradesh.3

The bjp retained most of its core vote bloc: upper castes—a vote bank
that more than matches Congress’s Muslim bloc—as well as middle-
class Hindus, a solid majority of urban voters and a large section of the
ebcs. The bjp actually increased its vote among Adivasis and tribal peo-
ples, where Congress trailed by 20 per cent, and among ebcs in the
southern states of Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala.4 Beyond this, how-
ever, the bjp failed to make significant inroads in the south, despite great
effort and expense. Tamil Nadu kept Hindutva out altogether, although
the bjp contested many more seats there. Kerala conceded one seat, per-
haps because the bjp ran a film star who steered clear of Hindutva in a
multi-religious state where Hindus are a bare majority. The bjp incurred
significant losses in its traditional strongholds in the Hindi heartlands
and even lost a seat in Gujarat, which it has never done under Modi.
Worse, it lost its giant Uttar Pradesh bastion, falling from 71 seats (out of
80) in 2014 to 33 seats in 2024.

That blow was particularly hard. The Modi regime had invested on a
pharaonic scale, both financially and politically, in the Ram Mandir. Its
consecration was supposed to be 2024’s electoral big bazooka, deliver-
ing ‘400 paar!’ principally by keeping Uttar Pradesh securely in the bjp’s
pocket. However, the opposing politics of ‘Mandal’5—which ‘Mandir’
appeared to have vanquished in recent decades—returned with a venge-
ance, sponsored by an opposition more keenly aware of the importance

3
Yogendra Yadav, Shreyas Sardesai and Rahul Shastri, ‘The Sociology of 2024 Lok
Sabha Elections in 10 Charts’, The Print, 13 June 2024. The analysis draws on post-
poll surveys conducted by Lokniti–csds.
4
Yadav et al., ‘Sociology of 2024 Lok Sabha Elections’.
5
‘Politics of Mandal’: named for the 1980 Mandal Commission report, which called
for quotas in government jobs and education to be reserved for ‘other backward
castes’ (obcs), in addition to the 22 per cent reservations formally provided in
the Constitution for Scheduled Castes (scs or Dalits) and Scheduled Tribes (sts),
though often scanted in practice.
 92 nlr 147

of caste oppression and more effectively united than it had been since
2014. Ill-equipped to meet this challenge, the bjp lost the Faizabad seat,
of which Ayodhya is a part, to a Dalit candidate. Modi himself was re-
elected from the holy city of Varanasi (Banares) with a humiliatingly
modest margin of 1.52 lakh (152,000) votes, compared to his 2019
margin of 4.79 lakhs (479,000). Rahul Gandhi, current scion of the
Congress dynasty, managed 3.9 and 3.64 lakh margins (390,000 and
364,000) in Rae Bareli and Wayanad, the two seats he contested.6

With a victory that looks like defeat, Modi now faces challenges he is
unaccustomed to handling. Having been cut to electoral size, he was
obliged to seek compromises with two parties—Janata Dal (United) from
Bihar and the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh—whose leaders
have their own agenda and a record of resisting Modi’s Islamophobia.
The new relevance of caste-based social-justice issues throws a spanner
in the works of Hindutva’s long-term ambition of symbolically uniting
Hindus, across deeply material caste divides, by targeting Muslims. A
reinvigorated opposition is determined to keep the government account-
able. It has made a start by demanding a joint parliamentary inquiry into
Modi and his lieutenant Amit Shah’s ‘investment advice’ to buy stocks
before June 4. More unnervingly for the weakened Modi, he may now
face opposition both within the bjp and from its organizational parent
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), a hard-line Hindu-nationalist
paramilitary organization, whose leader Mohan Bhagwat has already
pointedly attacked Modi for lowering the standards of public discourse
in the campaign.7 How well Modi will succeed in governing in these
circumstances remains an open question.

Saffron strategies

To begin to answer it, we might examine how that miasma was created
in the first place and what remains after its dissipation. To do so, we
need to grasp the changing role and functions of the Hindutva political
project, and how India, Inc. inaugurated a distinct new stage of it. First,

6
Congress, meanwhile, is opening inquiries into the reasons why it did worse
than expected in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Telangana and
Haryana.
7
Scroll Staff, ‘rss Says Overconfident bjp Leaders Got Reality Check during
Election, Decorum Was Not Maintained’, Scroll, 11 June 2024.
 desai: India 93

then, a brief recap of the previous stages of the rss–bjp advance.8 Formed
in 1925, one of a plethora of Hindu-nationalist groupings, the distin-
guishing mark of the rss from the start was the muscle of its uniformed
cadre.9 To this was added a wide array of affiliated organizations—for
youth, women, culture, labour and so forth—known as the rss’s Parivar
[Family]. Entering parliamentary politics after the shock of Gandhi’s
assassination by a sympathizer in 1948, the rss instructed its militants
to take a softly-softly approach.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (bjs), as the rss
party was then known, was confined to upper-caste, petty-bourgeois
pockets in the Hindi heartland. Its ideology was virtually indistinguish-
able from modern Brahmanical Hinduism, which privileged the upper
castes, around 10–15 percent of the population. Such ideology and poli-
tics were redundant in the era of the Congress Party’s overwhelming
hegemony in the first two decades of independence, when upper castes
effortlessly dominated politics and Congress itself was led by an elite
Brahmin family.10

There things might have remained, had it not been for problems within
Congress. Not only did the upper-caste Congress high command disdain
the increasingly powerful and prosperous ‘dominant and middle-caste’
land-owning peasant farmers who delivered the party’s votes in the
electorally critical countryside. Worse, the Congress Party’s plans for
industrialization required transferring rural surpluses to manufacturing
investment. While this could have been accomplished by mass mobiliza-
tion around a political programme capable of creating consent for it by
underlining how industrialization would benefit agriculture, and ensur-
ing that it did, this was precisely what Congress lacked the will and the

8
I examined previous phases in ‘Forward March of Hindutva Halted?’, nlr 30,
Nov–Dec 2004; see also ‘Hindutva’s Ebbing Tide?’, in Sanjay Ruparelia, Stuart
Corbridge, John Harriss and Sanjaya Reddy (eds), Understanding India’s New
Political Economy: A Great Transformation?, New York 2011.
9
Marzia Casolari, in ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence’,
Economic & Political Weekly, 22 January 2000, examines the inspiration the rss
drew from Mussolini and later Hitler. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh translates lit-
erally as ‘National Volunteer Union’.
10
Achin Vanaik offers a striking comparison of the similarities and contrasts in
Congress and bjp modes of rule in ‘India’s Two Hegemonies’, nlr 112, Jul–Aug
2018.
 94 nlr 147

competence to do. The result was the failure of Nehruvian industrializa-

tion at its agrarian nexus and an exodus of these groups from Congress
under Nehru’s daughter and political heiress, Indira Gandhi.11

Since the resulting ‘crisis of planning’ of the late 1960s, Indian eco-
nomic policy had consistently defaulted to marketist options—a trend
reinforced by the adoption of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, followed
by imf led structural adjustment in the 1990s. The political upshot, the
decline of Congress, was inaugurated by the 1967 election, when the
party lost eight states, including big ones like Uttar Pradesh and Tamil
Nadu, to new regional formations. The bjs was among the beneficiar-
ies of this anti-Congressism, jumping from the 14 seats it had won in
1962 to 35 seats in 1967. Mrs Gandhi’s response—turning sharply to
the left—added an urban middle-class revolt to the rural one. Sensing
an opportunity, the bjs diluted its Hindutva and joined the motley
anti-Congress jp movement, led by ‘Gandhian’ railway-union leader
Jayaprakash Narayan. Backed by both the rising rural middle castes and
the largely upper-caste middle-class urban opposition, the newly merged
Janata Party swept to power after the Emergency ended in 1977. bjs lead-
ers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, members of the rss
since their teenage years in the 1940s, became respectively Minister of
External Affairs and Minister for Information and Broadcasting.

When the Janata government disintegrated in 1979, the bjs was re-born as
the bjp. Remaining initially in its Janata Party mode of diluted Hindutva,
it was reduced to 2 seats in the 1984 elections, with only 7 per cent of the
vote. Now it returned to Hindutva, throwing itself into a broader Sangh
Parivar campaign of mass agitation—backed by immensely popular tv
dramatizations of the mythological Hindu narratives—to replace the
Babri Mosque in Ayodhya with a temple to Ram.12 The new approach
took the bjp’s seat count to 85 in 1989 and 161 in 1996, its share of
the popular vote rising to 11 per cent in 1989 and 20 per cent in 1996.
Sociologically, this electoral rise involved hitching the Hindutva wagon
to the dominant- and middle-caste exodus from Congress. By the 1980s,

11
I discuss this more fully in ‘The Slow-Motion Counterrevolution: Developmental
Contradictions and the Emergence of Neoliberalism’ in Kenneth Bo Nielsen
and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, eds, Social Movements and the State in India: Deepening
Democracy?, Basingstoke 2017.
12
Sangh Parivar mobs destroyed the Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992, taking
India across the Rubicon of secularism.
 desai: India 95

these layers had evolved into what K. Balagopal called ‘provincial prop-
ertied classes’, with business interests beyond agriculture.13 They began
forming their own parties, state-level formations such as the Telugu
Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh or the Biju Janata Dal in Orissa. These
are usually referred to as ‘the regional parties’ but are more aptly seen
as parties of the provincial propertied classes, which vastly expanded the
reach of Indian capitalism in this period.14

The bjp’s growth in the 1980s and 90s involved absorbing these middle-
caste formations into itself. This was easiest in Gujarat, where there
was little history of Dalit and lower-caste struggle against Brahmanism,
and capitalist development had reduced the social distance between
the upper castes and propertied ‘dominant’ castes, like the Patidars.
Elsewhere, thanks to the combination of leftist and anti-Brahmanist
legacies, as in much of the south, or to tensions with the upper-caste
propertied, as in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, these strata formed parties of
their own and the bjp advance was more restricted.15 The three princi-
pal trends in Indian politics in these decades—the decline of Congress
(masked by the massive ‘sympathy wave’ after the assassination of Mrs
Gandhi in 1984, which brought Congress its highest seat tally and vote
share ever), the rise of the bjp and that of the parties of the provincial
propertied classes—made single-party majority governments a thing of
the past. Deepening neoliberalism in economic policy, accelerated by
Congress Finance Minister Manmohan Singh from 1992, also meant
that no government was re-elected after completing a full term.

The bjp had already emerged as the largest party in the Lok Sabha in
1996, though the Left managed to engineer a coalition government of
the provincial propertied classes that kept the bjp out of power. It proved
short-lived, however, and the bjp was able to form a coalition with many
of these parties after winning 182 seats on the strength of 2 per cent
of the vote in 1998. In office from 1998 to 2004, the bjp deepened the

13
K. Balagopal, ‘An Ideology for the Provincial Propertied Class’, Economic & Political
Weekly, vol. 22, nos 36–37, 1987.
14
P. Patnaik, C. P. Chandrasekhar and Amartya Sen, ‘The Proliferation of the
Bourgeoisie and Economic Policy’, in T. V. Satyamurthy, ed., Class Formation and
Political Transformation in Post-Colonial India, New Delhi 1996.
15
As discussed below, three regional parties that have never allied with the bjp are
the Samajwadi Party in up, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Nationalist
Congress Party in Maharashtra.
 96 nlr 147

neoliberal turn that Singh had begun and fell to a shock defeat in 2004,
overtaken by Congress and a briefly resurgent left.16 During the decade
of Congress rule from 2004–14, the bjp was wracked by uncertainties,
not only about who would succeed the ageing Vajpayee but how to break
beyond a quarter of the electorate. Indeed, the bjp vote fell to 19 per cent
in 2009. The question was not solved in any organic fashion, through
internal party debate or electoral experimentation. Instead, in the early
2010s, the party was caught up in a storm not of its making.

Enter India, Inc.

Its winds blew from India, Inc. Over the decades of neoliberal policy,
India’s capitalist class had expanded beyond the handful of long-standing
Parsi, Marwari and Gujarati trading families and now included the rising
provincial entrepreneurs. By the early 2000s, a novel trend was visible:
concentration—and of a distinctive sort. In 1990, India’s top twenty
firms had generated 14 per cent of total profits; by 2010, that figure had
more than doubled.17 Among India’s new billionaires, as Raghuram
Rajan noted, three factors—‘land, natural resources and government
contracts’—were the predominant sources of wealth.18 India, Inc. had
arrived. By 2014, its need for government largesse, contracts and coop-
eration in getting access to resources, not to mention soft loans from
public-sector banks, had mired the Congress-led government in massive
corruption scandals, giving rise to a huge middle-class anti-corruption
movement, undoubtedly aided by the bjp.19

If the crisis had been limited to this, we might have seen the bjp return to
power in another coalition, probably led by Advani. But it was not. With
the explosion of the corruption allegations, India, Inc.’s normal channels

16
With 43 seats, though only 6 per cent of the national vote, the cpi(m)’s Left
Front was vital in pushing through the nrega programme of support for the rural
unemployed.
17
See Pranab Bardhan, ‘The “New” India’, nlr 136, July–Aug 2022, p. 20. ‘Market
competition has withered’, Bardhan notes. ‘In most sectors—telecoms, airlines,
steel, cement, aluminum, paints, synthetic fibres, cars, trucks, tyres, consumer
electronics—there are only two or three players, dominating over 50 per cent of
market share’: p. 21.
18
Rajan, Raguram, ‘Is There a Threat of Oligarchy in India?’, Speech to the Bombay
Chamber of Commerce on its Founder’s Day, 10 September 2008.
19
On the banks, loaded with non-performing assets that cast their solvency into
doubt, see Ashish Gupta and Prashant Kumar, ‘India Financial Sector’, Credit
Suisse: Equity Research, 2 August 2012.
 desai: India 97

of communication with the government froze up. It began complaining

loudly of ‘policy paralysis’.20 Casting about for an alternative, it hit upon
Gujarat’s bjp Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. Over the previous decade,
he had demonstrated that he could combine doing their bidding with
winning elections and avoiding allegations of corruption. The former he
accomplished by consolidating an authoritarian Hindu majority against
Gujarat’s 12 per cent Muslim population, through a deadly combination
of the state’s coercive and administrative power, the shady organizations
of its Sangh Parivar and the ideology of Hindutva. Meanwhile, Modi
managed to avoid accusations of corruption by the simple expedient of
deregulating so aggressively that practically anything India, Inc. wanted
became legal.

Though India’s billionaires had disapproved of the 2002 pogrom against

Muslims with which he had inaugurated his long innings as Gujarat
Chief Minister, Modi not only prevailed upon India, Inc. to do business
with his state but soon emerged as their darling. As investment poured
in, there was talk of a ‘Gujarat Model’ that India should follow (later
debunked not only for its inegalitarian consequences but also for its
mediocre growth record). India, Inc. could not shower enough praise
on him. ‘Gujarat is shining like a lamp of gold and the credit goes to
the visionary, effective and passionate leadership provided by Narendra
Modi,’ enthused Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani. Banking
boss Chanda Kochhar described Gujarat as the growth engine of India.
Adi Godrej, head of the eponymous consumer-goods conglomerate, gave
Modi top marks for ‘sustainable and inclusive policies’. Ratan Tata, the
steel and engineering tycoon, marvelled that Modi had overseen not only
industrial growth but rural development. Some—including Sunil Mittal,
head of the Barthi Group and Anil Ambani, another scion of Reliance—
were referring to Modi as a potential prime minister as early as 2009.21

The bjp’s internal debate about Vajpayee’s successor inclined towards

Advani. As the crisis of Congress’s ‘policy paralysis’ mounted, India’s
corporate capitalists demanded it name Modi instead. Without this
corporate anointment, the phenomenon that is Modi would not have
happened. Once he became prime-ministerial candidate in 2014, India,

20
Maitreesh Ghatak, Parikshit Ghosh and Ashok Kotwal, ‘Growth in the Time of
the upa’, Economic & Political Weekly, 19 April 2014.
21
itgd Bureau, ‘Industry Leaders All Praise for Narendra Modi’, India Today, 12
January 2011.
 98 nlr 147

Inc. rained money on him. Corporate donations to the bjp in 2014 at

over Rs 400 crores (some $5 billion) were more than three times those
to Congress.22 Once elected, Modi enacted the infamous Electoral Bonds
scheme, a tax-deductible method of funnelling money from big corpo-
rations to politicians with no public-disclosure requirements. This was
supposedly to promote transparency in election financing, but func-
tioned to ensure that any businesses not yet funding the bjp could be
enticed or threatened to do so. This pushed election expenses in India
even higher than the notoriously expensive us campaigns.23 Without
India, Inc.’s money there would have been no Modi decade, no Modi
third term. It inaugurated a new stage of Hindutva, distinct from the
path and pattern of bjp advance before it.

Electoral assets

While India, Inc.’s billions may have been Modi’s main advantage, he
had others. First, a ready-made ideology. Hinduism and Hindutva—
there is little to distinguish the two in practice—had long been shaped
as instruments for majoritarian rule. Once Congress’s developmental-
ism, more intellectually coherent than it is sometimes given credit for,
failed the political test, Hindutva was the ideology closest to hand for
forging a cohesive political force, providing a sense of purpose behind
which India’s propertied classes could prima facie unite. Second, thanks
to Modi’s funding advantage, the Sangh Parivar cadre were augmented
by hundreds of thousands of hired workers, while the bjp claims to
have clocked up 235 million members, making it a formidable electoral
machine; with 98 million members, the Communist Party of China
comes a distant second.

Third, corporate India’s extensive media assets were placed at Modi’s

service. The slavish quality of the broadcast media, in particular, knew
no bounds. Modi consolidated this advantage by refusing any unscripted
media or public appearances. He famously never gave press confer-
ences while the public broadcaster carried his monologic Man ki Baat
[Speaking My Mind] radio show. He never answered questions in
Parliament, while giving long speeches in it.

22
Association for Democratic Reforms, ‘Analysis of Donations from Corporates &
Business Houses to National Parties, fy 2012–13 to 2015–16’, 17 August 2017.
23
‘Why India’s Election Is the Most Expensive in the World’, Economist, 11 May
2024.
 desai: India 99

Fourth, the parliamentary majority enabled by India, Inc.’s money was

used to bulldoze the opposition. Parliamentary discussion was restricted
to an absolute minimum, legislation was rammed through without
debate and leading opposition figures such as Rahul Gandhi were dis-
qualified from the Lok Sabha. This only deepened the contrast between
a Modi made ubiquitous in the public sphere by the godi media and a
nearly invisible and defanged opposition.

Fifth, Modi has deployed the machinery of state for political and electoral
purposes with impunity, its institutions being sufficiently saffronized
and undermined. More than ever, on his watch, the state and judicial
apparatuses have raised baseless corruption charges against opposition
politicians, which drag on without resulting in convictions; mounted
tax raids against critics in civil society or the media; threatened the
same to compel politicians to cross the floor to join the bjp or lead their
faction into the nda; a record quarter of the bjp’s candidates in 2024
were defectors.

Sixth, Sangh Parivar goons and party militants don’t just bring out the
vote during elections but also act as vigilantes, creating and maintaining
the boundaries of permissible discourse and action, often using violence
with impunity. Their principal targets are Muslims, who have been sys-
tematically marginalized, they and their property the targets of routine
brutality by state agencies or Sangh Parivar thugs. The bjp has stopped
paying even lip service to secularism, cancelling traditional Iftar parties
and giving no tickets to Muslims for elections while their homes, com-
munity buildings and mosques are routinely bulldozed. From Muslims,
the circle of bjp targets has widened to include all opponents, creating
a pervasive sense of fear in civil society and media. The prosecution of
Dalit activists attending the Elgar Parishad commemoration in 2017,
the harassment of critical journalists, the murder of those organizing
against caste oppression by a shady Hindu organization, stand as exam-
ples to anyone contemplating public opposition to the regime.

Finally, the bjp has transformed the barebones national social safety net,
inaugurated by Congress in 2005, into a system of ‘patrimonial welfare’
to serve electoral purposes.24 Rather than expanding the provision of

24
Yamini Aiyar, ‘Citizen vs Labharthi? Interrogating the Contours of India’s
Emerging Welfare State’, Indian Seminar, 5 December 2023.
 100 nlr 147

public goods—schools, hospitals, roads, services, employment—Modi’s

new welfare regime provided a bewildering range of private goods at
public expense, whether gas cylinders, bank accounts, toilets, homes or
health insurance. Modi’s image is plastered on every available surface
of these goods, and beneficiaries are repeatedly informed through the
godi media that the source of this largesse is the Prime Minister, not the
taxpayer. At election time, bjp workers with access to the government’s
centralized registries of recipients ensure that the resulting gratitude
takes electoral expression.25

Myth of the Modi boom

So, with money, media, muscle, majority, state machinery, Hindu ideol-
ogy and welfare schemes all going Modi’s way, how did he fail to realize
the ‘400 paar!’ goal? Where did things go wrong? Where they usually
do: in the economy. Few have questioned the Modi government’s claim
that it has turned India into one of the world’s fastest-growing econo-
mies—faster than China, in particular—and that gdp will hit $5 trillion
by 2047, the centenary of Indian independence. The godi media ignores
evidence that every measure that should be rising with growth—invest-
ment, exports, credit—is in decline, and fail to mention high inflation,
unemployment, acute agrarian distress and falling caloric intake.26
Coverage of inequality, which soared under Modi’s ‘billionaire Raj’ to
surpass British Raj levels, was sidelined. Anglo-American commenta-
tors, reflecting their governments’ hope that India would emerge as a
pro-Western counterweight to China, were no better.

At the same time, there has been a serious erosion of India’s once impres-
sive statistical capabilities. The National Sample Survey Organization’s
critically important records of employment data have been discontin-
ued.27 Changes in gdp methodology have systematically overestimated
growth rates for the Modi years by 2–4 per cent. Once corrected, India’s
growth is lower than China’s and quite unspectacular, particularly for

25
Nalin Mehta, The New bjp: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political
Party, New Delhi 2022, p. 72.
26
Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Once More on Poverty Figures of India’, ideas Blog, 25 March
2024.
27
Sona Mitra, ‘Why the nsso Employment Surveys Shouldn’t Have Been Done
Away With’, The Wire, 25 August 2018; ‘India’s once-vaunted statistical infrastruc-
ture is crumbling’, Economist, 19 May 2022.
 desai: India 101

an economy considerably less mature than China’s.28 Poverty data are

manipulated to appear more flattering. The 2021 census stands indefi-
nitely postponed. Inconvenient reports are suppressed.

However, no matter how many illusionists are in your pay, the reality
cannot be suppressed forever. Notwithstanding the rhetoric about devel-
opment for all, Modi has a simple one-point economic programme: do
what India, Inc. wants. The Modi decade accounts for 72 per cent of
all privatizations since 1991.29 It has taken the deregulation of capital,
labour, farming and the environment to previously unimaginable levels
while making taxation more regressive than ever. Legislation was often
tailor-made for specific businesses and projects:

Adani’s rise was aided by a relaxation of prior regulations and veiled threats
against business rivals by government investigative agencies. After com-
plaints about predatory pricing practices by Reliance Jio (run by another
tycoon, Mukesh Ambani) in the telecom sector, the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India hastily amended the previous rules: No foul, no harm.
Similarly, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry amended the regulations
governing special economic zones to benefit Adani’s coal-fired power plant
in Godda, and environmental regulations were waived for Adani’s mines.30

The bjp also pushed through laws that increased corporate dominance
over the Indian economy while squeezing not only the msme sector
(micro, small and medium enterprises) but also the lower echelons
of the capitalist class, whose interests Modi neglected in favour of the
largest Indian and foreign conglomerates.31 While spending on welfare,
public health and education fell, infrastructure spending boomed: gigan-
tic contracts for corporate cronies permitted lucrative cost-overruns
and rentier incomes from the assets thus created, as from the land and

28
Arvind Subramanian, ‘India’s gdp Mis-estimation: Likelihood, Magnitudes,
Mechanisms and Implications’, Center for International Development at Harvard
University, cid Faculty Working Paper no. 354, 2019; Prabhat Patnaik, ‘India’s gdp
Growth in the Recent Period’, International Development Economics Associates, 21
June 2019; Ashoka Mody, ‘India’s Boom Is a Dangerous Myth’, Project Syndicate,
29 March 2023.
29
Sharad Raghavan, ‘Govt not in business: Modi govt accounts for 72% of all disin-
vestment since 1991, data shows’, The Print, 31 October 2022.
30
Pranab Bardhan, ‘Unmasking India’s Crony Capitalist Oligarchy’, Project
Syndicate, 13 February 2023.
31
Rohit Chandra, ‘cfos to bankers to sme owners, what India’s business class says
about Modi govt’, The Print, 1 October 2020.
 102 nlr 147

resources to which the government eased access. Under Modi, India,

Inc. has continued its debt-fuelled expansion: ‘Even heavily indebted
favoured businesses can easily raise domestic or foreign capital, because
their political connections facilitate regulatory approvals and an implicit
“sovereign guarantee”.’32 All this was accompanied by the catastrophic
mismanagement of the Covid crisis, during which between 2 million
and 9.4 million Indians lost their lives, according to the Economist (or
500,000, according to the Modi government).33 Two further wilfully
inflicted disasters—demonetization and the Goods and Services tax—
also devastated already ailing msmes.

The results were soon clear. Most sectors became dominated by a few
giant corporations. Concentration increased the profitability of the big-
gest. The number of Indian billionaires soared, as did inequality. India,
Inc. and the richest layer of the population have never had it so good;
the rest have been through economic purgatory. Modi neglected the vast
informal sector and the msmes that generate most jobs, while encour-
aging capital-intensive and import-intensive corporate ventures.34 Even
though India’s labour-force participation rate has fallen below 50 per
cent, unemployment remains high and youth unemployment is reach-
ing incendiary levels, with literally thousands of applicants per job.35
Public and private-sector jobs have been casualized, with life-long careers
replaced by four-year contracts, even for soldiers in the Agniveer [Fire
Hero] scheme. The scandal of question papers in competitive exams for
government jobs being leaked to insiders has got worse. Education has
been deregulated, permitting thousands of questionable private insti-
tutions to emerge, and initiatives for giving schools computers were
turned into more opportunities for corporate profit. Rather than help
India reap a ‘demographic dividend’, these policies on jobs and educa-
tion are tying the country to a demographic time bomb.

The Modi government has intensified the already acute crisis in Indian
agriculture, indicated by the spate of farmers’ suicides. The 2006
Swaminathan Report indicated what was needed: further redistribution

32
Bardhan, ‘Unmasking India’s Crony Capitalist Oligarchy’.
33
‘India’s once-vaunted statistical infrastructure is crumbling’.
34
Prabhat Patnaik, ‘The Growing Crisis of Unemployment’, ideas Blog, 13
November 2023.
35
ceic Data, India Labour Force Participation Rate.
 desai: India 103

of land, restrictions on the diversion of agricultural land for other uses,

solidifying grazing and other common rights and, above all, public
investment in water management and conservation, soil testing and
so on. Instead, the bjp’s deregulatory and corporate thrust has only
increased input prices and depressed output prices, even as the final
consumer experiences food inflation. The beneficiaries were a handful
of conglomerates and middlemen. Modi reneged on minimum support
prices, turned crop-insurance schemes into a corporate-profit bonanza
that left farmers unprotected and proposed the notorious farm laws
that would have dismantled what remained of price protection, opened
the way to contract farming for big corporations and permitted them to
manipulate prices. While the farmers’ epic resistance in 2019 and 2020
forced Modi to back down from these laws, they are being introduced
piecemeal, prompting a new round of farmers’ mobilizations this year.
The farming crisis was a crucial factor in Modi’s loss of rural votes.

The much-touted ‘Make in India’ programme—aimed at raising the

share of manufacturing in the economy to 25 per cent—has flopped.
Despite generous subsidies and deregulation, it failed to incentiv-
ize much investment, either foreign or domestic. Manufacturing has
shrunk from 15 to 13 per cent of gdp since 2014, and manufacturing
investment has fallen as a proportion of total investment, as has the
share of the private sector within it. The reason is simple. India was
already a demand-constrained economy, neoliberalism made it more
so, and Modi’s unbridled neoliberalism has depressed demand more
acutely than ever before. In these conditions, investment, which relies
on buoyant market expectations, cannot be expected to revive. Without
much of a demand stimulus, and a dismal export performance, what
growth does take place is reliant on the activity of large corporations
which, in turn, are reliant on government borrowing, typically to pay for
overpriced work contracted to them.

India’s public debt is now over 80 per cent of gdp, alarming the imf.
This does not include the large amount of off-budget borrowing the
Modi government has used to fund corporate activity. Easing India,
Inc.’s access to foreign capital, no matter how frivolous its purpose,
would have led to a balance-of-payments crisis had it not been for remit-
tances from low-paid Indian workers abroad, services exports—often
relying on equally low-paid workers at call centres and the like—and
 104 nlr 147

fickle capital inflows into grossly overpriced Indian financial markets.

The withering of the productive economy also lies at the root of soaring
inflation, according to the Reserve Bank of India.36

Bread and wages

Thus, as the 2024 election approached, Modi’s many advantages were up

against a decade’s worth of economic damage. His most important asset
was still working for him. Although the February 2024 Supreme Court
ruling that electoral bonds were unconstitutional added to the stench
of bjp corruption, Modi’s access to India, Inc.’s money was greater than
ever. Total election expenditure in 2024 is estimated at more than dou-
ble that of 2019.37 His ability to silence the opposition in parliament
and use state machinery to political advantage continued unabated. The
extended voting period, whether or not it was due to rigged appointments
to the Electoral Commission, permitted Modi to campaign around the
country at his convenience, while the government froze many Congress
Party bank accounts on flimsy grounds.

Other advantages seemed less certain. While the godi press and tv
remained on side, social media and alternative news sites were hard
at work, fact-checking Modi’s lies (he told a lot of them) and sending
up his stentorian pretention. Relations between Modi’s bjp and the rss
have soured; emboldened by his access to India, Inc.’s money, Modi
had begun to disdain his former brothers and reports of rss workers
‘sitting on their hands’ in this or that constituency peppered the cam-
paign coverage. Nor did the system of ‘patrimonial welfare’ yield votes
as designed. Poverty and inflation prevented families from buying refills
for the cooking-gas cylinders, for instance, while funding shortfalls left
many intended beneficiaries empty-handed.

Finally, the ideological advantage of stressing ‘Mandir’ style symbolic

politics took a hit, as ‘Mandal’-style economic and caste issues became
central to the campaign. The india bloc went on the offensive, presenting
these as constitutional questions. When the lower caste/class electorate

36
The Hindu Data Team, ‘What Causes Inflation in India: Demand or Supply
Issues?’, The Hindu, 22 December 2023. I owe the principal points in this para-
graph to C.P. Chandrasekhar.
37
‘2024 ls Polls pegged as costliest ever, expenditure may touch Rs 1.35 lakh crore’,
Economic Times, 25 April 2024.
 desai: India 105

woke up to the possibility that the bjp had made ‘400 paar’ its goal so
that it could amend the constitution, deleting the formally guaranteed
quota of reserved jobs and college places, the constitution became a bat-
tle cry, with Rahul Gandhi brandishing a pocket edition at rallies.

At the same time, the opposition was more united for the 2024 cam-
paign than it had ever been. The india alliance brought together the
Congress, what’s left of the Left parties and most, but not all, of the par-
ties of the provincial middle-caste/propertied-classes. The importance
of working together has become clear to all. The regional parties were,
of course, formatively associated with Mandal politics. While most of
them had been willing to ally with the bjp in the nda coalition as well as
with their erstwhile party, the Congress, in its upa coalition, three par-
ties had never allied with the bjp: the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh
and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, where economic underdevelop-
ment entrenches caste divides; and the Nationalist Congress Party in
Maharashtra, where the countryside remains poor, anti-Brahmanism
remains strong and Congress held on much longer. While these excep-
tions show that middle-caste anti-Brahmanism still has legs, two new
developments have reduced the regional parties’ permissive bivalence.

First, the bjp’s alliance politics became more aggressive—refusing coa-

lition partners a due share of election tickets or ministries, depriving
them of power, refusing to consult with them on their key concerns,
as with the Punjab’s Shiromani Akali Dal on farmers’ issues, and even
splitting them, as with Maharashtra’s Nationalist Congress Party. After
all, the bjp’s aim has always been to absorb the middle and dominant-
caste provincial parties, as it has done in states like Haryana or Assam.
Such treatment would lead any party wishing to retain a political pres-
ence to fight shy of alliances with the bjp. As a result, apart from two
necessarily rather prickly allies, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and
Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam, the provincial parties in the nda
coalition are insignificant.

Second, after a decade of Modi’s crony-corporate neoliberalism, the acu-

ity of the economic crises facing Indians has given a new salience to
the politics of reservations, as Indians call the affirmative-action quotas
for Dalits, Tribals, ebcs and obcs. This became clear when the Bihar
government conducted a caste census in 2022, which revealed that ebcs
and obcs constituted nearly two-thirds of the state’s population and led
 106 nlr 147

to calls to repeat the operation India-wide. Even in Gujarat, where the

bjp has long incorporated the dominant- and middle-caste propertied
into its social base, the marriage has turned rocky, as the recent agi-
tation for reservations among the relatively privileged Patidars shows.
When the bjp is unable to fulfill the material aspirations of even its core
supporters, there are political consequences. Though the bjp has oppor-
tunistically endorsed reservations, they make the work of consolidating
a ‘Hindu’ electoral majority to support a Hindu upper and middle ruling
caste/class more complicated. The latter, moreover, will not be eager to
dispense material benefits in the form of reservations to those enumer-
ated as ebcs and obcs.

Congress, too, appears to be changing. With the exodus of the provincial

propertied classes from 1967 onwards, it had been left with an electorate
composed predominantly of the lower castes, minorities and scheduled
tribes. However, its desire to regain the status of the preferred party
of the Indian capitalist class committed Congress to a broadly neolib-
eral policy orientation. Though its reliance on the left parties in 2004
meant diluting its neoliberalism with initiatives like nrega, Congress
remained committed to serving the Indian capitalist class, now hyper-
trophied into India, Inc., as was clear from the corruption scandals that
plagued it before 2014.

Yet, perhaps stung by the eager turn of India, Inc. to Modi, dropping
Congress like a hot potato, Congress leaders have targeted the India,
Inc.–Modi connection. Beginning with Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Suit Boot ki
Sarkar’ jibe—a reference to the suit Modi wore during Obama’s 2015
visit to New Delhi, whose pinstripes spelled out his full name, Narendra
Damodardas Modi—they have kept up a running attack on his relations
with the conglomerates. As this peaked during the election campaign,
the attack so panicked Modi that in one rally speech he accused Gandhi
of being the recipient of Ambani and Adani cash, delivered in ‘tempos’
(small trucks). Gandhi’s retort—that if this were the case, why weren’t
the government’s normally hyperactive agencies, such as the dreaded
Enforcement Directive, investigating it?—was repeated by many even in
the bjp and rss.

In recent years, Congress has made more of an effort to turn in a popular

direction. Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra [Unite India Justice Pilgrimage], a
trek from India’s southern tip to Kashmir in late 2022 and early 2023,
 desai: India 107

and then his Bharat Jodo Nyaya Yatra from the troubled northeast to
Bombay in early 2024, were helpful in energizing Congress Party
workers and perhaps in suggesting the need for new policies. With
Gandhi braving all kinds of weather, talking to ordinary people and giv-
ing speeches that assailed the manifest injustices of Modi’s corporate
agenda, the yatras were extensively posted on social media. They were
followed by a Congress manifesto and Platform containing promises
of legislating an urban employment guarantee, reviving the rural one,
conducting a caste census, expanding public health and education and
reversing the casualization of employment.

Perhaps most important of all, Congress’s coalition tactics improved.

The party had long remained in denial about its long-term decline,
assuming that the next heave would reinstate it as the natural party of
government. It had to form its first coalition government in 2004, how-
ever, and suffered its worst electoral performance ever in 2014—just 19
per cent of the vote and 44 seats. Even after that, its attempt to form a
mahagathbandhan [grand coalition] in 2019 fell through, chiefly because
it insisted on running in a higher number of seats than allies thought
its due and having a Congress leader named as the coalition’s prime-
ministerial candidate. Such behaviour could not but appear like a new
version of the upper-caste high-handedness that pushed an earlier gen-
eration of middle-caste politicians out of Congress. In 2024, Congress
was remarkably abstemious, contesting only 328 seats compared to 421
in 2019, and the india bloc did not name a prime-ministerial candidate.
These changes were good for the india bloc as a whole. They revived
Congress from 52 seats in 2019 to 99 seats, its vote share rising from
19.7 percent to 21.19 percent. The provincial parties also did better as a
category, with their total, irrespective of alliance, rising from 138 to 161
seats, while their vote share went up marginally from 23 to 23.5 percent.
Notably, those aligned with the bjp generally did worse than those allied
with Congress.

Back to earth

Modi was able to win in 2014 thanks to the mystique created around him
and his ‘Gujarat model’ by India, Inc.’s money, combined with Congress
disarray and the powerful anti-corruption movement. Further advance
in 2019 was helped by Modi’s orchestration of a military stunt against
Pakistan, just weeks before the election—the bungled bombing of an
 108 nlr 147

empty hillside in Balakot, revenge for a suicide bombing that took out
46 special police at Pulwama in India-controlled Kashmir—portrayed as
a magnificent feat of arms. The bjp could also count on a fragmented
opposition and a further influx of corporate money after it changed the
party-funding laws to permit anonymous ‘electoral bonds’.

In 2024, the consecration of the Ayodhya temple was expected to create

an even greater bounce than the Balakot strikes. However, as the cam-
paign work got going, many on the ground were reporting that there was
little ‘temple’ effect to be observed. Perhaps the bjp had killed the goose
that laid the golden egg, transforming the eternal campaign to com-
memorate Ram’s ‘birthplace’ into just another tacky temple. Certainly,
many voters were more concerned with economic issues, saying ‘You
can’t sing bhajans [devotional songs] on an empty stomach’ and pointing
out that temples don’t provide rozi-roti [daily wages–bread].

bjp pollsters soon found out that things were not looking too good.
Alarmed, Modi opened the floodgates of anti-Muslim hate. Beginning
with his rally in Banswara, Rajasthan, Modi claimed that the india
coalition would expropriate Hindus’ wealth and distribute it to ‘those
who have more children’, implying Muslims. Already well known,
Modi’s coarseness plumbed new depths as the campaign went on, call-
ing Muslims ‘infiltrators’ engaged in a ‘vote jihad’, likening Congress to
the Muslim League, claiming it would distribute reservations in educa-
tion and jobs to Muslims while depriving needy Hindus, and so on. The
Election Commission refused to reprimand the Prime Minster for his
hate-filled lies, just as it blocked requests for turnout data on each of
the seven phases—and the Supreme Court refused to address questions
about the reliability of Electronic Voting Machines raised by sections of
the india bloc and civil-society groups.

As the election campaign trundled on, Modi saturated the media with
lengthy interviews with approved journalists, each one advertised as
an ‘exclusive’. These interventions were noteworthy only for his claim
that he had become convinced, particularly after his mother’s passing,
that he was not ‘biological’ but had been sent to earth by the Parmatma
[Supreme Being] to carry out certain tasks. Since the Parmatma has not
responded to our queries, we have no way of fact-checking this. What
we do know, however, is that Modi was sent to New Delhi by India, Inc.
to perform certain tasks. Indeed, Modi’s time in office has been nothing
 desai: India 109

if not ‘performative’. Every public appearance is carefully managed,

with his sartorial, gestural and verbal communication meticulously
staged. Through this dutiful devotion, he was able to deliver a reason-
able facsimile of his assigned tasks for a decade. Finally, he could do no
more. On June 4, India emerged from the Modi miasma brought to it
by India, Inc.

The Modi that has had to stoop to coalition government will also face a
re-energized opposition with a recognized leader (the bjp had refused to
recognize a leader of the opposition since 2014, on dubious grounds),
a more critical media, a less cowed state apparatus, opposition from
within his own party and an irate rss. He will inevitably be a much more
‘biological’ figure than the Modi of the past decade. And yet, though it
is a victory that looks like a defeat, it remains a victory. Modi has been
sworn in as Prime Minister. The tdp and jdu, the bjp’s most critical
coalition partners, have pledged their support. Both will demand special
status and financial compensation for losing key territories when new
states were carved out of their territory: Bihar lost some of its mineral-
rich land to Jharkhand; Andhra Pradesh had to concede the rich city of
Hyderabad to Telangana.

Modi’s third Cabinet contains many familiar faces: Amit Shah as Minister
of Home Affairs, Rajnath Singh at Defence, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar
as Foreign Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman as Finance Minister. The coa-
lition partners have bagged just one Cabinet position each. The bjp
remains by far the largest party in the Lok Sabha and Hindutva the most
effective political ideology. While India, Inc. may not get quite the same
bang for its bucks, its need for a compliant ruling party will not lessen.
The miasma may have been dispelled, but that only leaves India face to
face with the ugly reality it had obscured.