Narendra Modi faces historic third term as head of India amid unprecedented political weakness

The prime minister is committed to forming a coalition after the setback suffered by his ultranationalist campaign

The loss of the parliamentary majority alone makes his economic reform plans and the consolidation of his legacy difficult.

June 8 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, officially renews his position at the head of the country this Sunday in doubly notable circumstances: it will be the first time in 60 years that an Indian head of Government serves three terms, and the first time that Modi has to doing so in a coalition since he came to power after elections that, above all, have dented his symbolic status as the self-proclaimed national guide of the country as a bastion of the Hindu world, something unthinkable when he swept his way to power a decade ago.

Nothing exemplifies what happened better than Modi’s defeat in his own stronghold, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where his nationalist Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata or BJP) has ended up relegated as the second political force, behind the opposition Socialist Party, after losing 29 seats in relation to the 2019 elections.

Uttar Pradesh was the scene in January of Modi’s explosive campaign start, the inauguration of a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram on the ruins of a 16th century mosque. For his critics, the ceremony represented the culmination of the marginalization campaign that the prime minister has led against the country’s Muslim population and other vulnerable minorities since he came to power.

Modi hoped to silence the voices that accused him of inability to alleviate the serious economic crisis that devastated the rural communities of his state – and, by extension, the rest of the country -, many of them made up of the plagued caste of the Dalits, who decided to respond with their vote to the prime minister’s campaign objective: to win 400 of the 543 seats at stake in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. His party has been left with 240 seats and the coalition it supports, the National Democratic Alliance, has won 293. To put it in context, in 2019, only the BJP won 303 seats.

The recipient of all this discontent has been the INDIA opposition alliance led by Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress and heir to the great political dynasty from which he bears the surname. Gandhi, who a little over a year ago was little more than a political corpse – he was even banned from Parliament in a defamation case until the Supreme Court decided to postpone his sentence – has seen how his campaign, focused on accusing Modi of represent a threat to the country’s secular Constitution, has resulted in an extraordinary success reflected in 237 seats.

Thus, the first thing Gandhi did after learning the results was to appear before thousands of supporters with the Indian Constitution in hand and present himself as the brake on Modi’s ambitions to transform the country’s secular Magna Carta into an expression of his ultranationalist ambitions.

The prime minister has always rejected that his ultimate goal is to alter the constitutional text, but his critics have only had to remember what happened in the state of Jammu and Kashmir shortly after his second electoral victory in 2019, when he stripped this territory of Muslim majority of its status as a semi-autonomous region. The state now consists of two zones, Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir, both under the direct responsibility of the central government, the first time in Indian history that a state has been demoted to a federally administered territory.

THE FUTURE

Modi has promised that the results of these elections will not alter his great objective, to lay the foundations to turn India into a fully developed nation by 2047, the centenary of independence from the United Kingdom, but for now he has lost two-thirds of the Parliament necessary to make major constitutional reforms.

For the rest of the issues, you will have to sit down and talk with your two main alliance partners. These are the regionalist Telugu Desam (representative of the Telugu ethnolinguistic community, spoken by almost 100 million people) and the secular populist Janata Dal led by Nitish Kumar, chief minister of the state of Bihar and a born political survivor who once played with the idea of ​​becoming leader of the opposition against Modi.

The 28 seats obtained between them put the BJP in a very delicate situation because the withdrawal of its support effectively leaves it in a minority. At the moment, sources from the NDTV network assure that the Telugu Desam has asked Modi for the position of President of the Lok Sabha to guarantee his support, something that the BJP has rejected to offer the position of vice president instead.

This friction is the prelude to what awaits Modi and his party, immersed in an economic reform plan particularly focused on the field of agriculture due to the massive protests of 2021, when hundreds of thousands of farmers took to the country’s roads with the intention to blockade the capital to demand guaranteed prices for crops.

In addition, it must be remembered that allies of the BJP have openly questioned some policies of Modi’s party, such as his controversial military recruitment plan and even support a census to effectively count the country’s lower-caste citizens, an initiative that the BJP has not favored.

Pending his inaugural speech on Sunday, Modi has announced that, whatever happens, his third term will be one of “big decisions” and has warned that one of his main priorities will be the fight against corruption, a phenomenon ” shamelessly glorified in this country.

Furthermore, sources from his party have told NDTV that he considers the ministries of Economy, Interior, Defense and Foreign Affairs practically non-negotiable, basic pillars of his future vision that he hopes to continue once “it is finally confirmed as an understanding with the party’s allies.” , as described by BJP spokesperson Shazia Ilmi, who nevertheless acknowledged that the next few days were going to be a period of “soft transition.”