Are the Indian Election Results Familiar?
India’s elections ended in surprise. With a staggering 900 million eligible voters, voting takes six weeks and four days of vote counting. When the results were announced last week, it was clear that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), widely expected to win, failed to secure a majority in the parliament. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will continue to hold power through alliances. The BJP’s 10-year tenure and the lessons from the election in the “world’s largest democracy” are significant for all of us. Let’s delve into this.
Indian democracy has remained uninterrupted since its establishment, except for an emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Pakistan, which shares a similar colonial history with India, has a political history marked by coups. India’s continuous democratic performance is attributed to the robust institutional framework and bureaucracy inherited from the British. Indeed, the British, lacking enough officers to manage vast India, employed many Indians in the bureaucracy. These officials even administrated today’s Gulf and East African countries.
It’s important to remember that before Modi’s rise to power, the Congress Party, controlled by the same family, governed India for a long time. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of the nation’s founder, Nehru, was succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi, and after his assassination, his Italian-born wife, Sonia Gandhi, took over. Modi, whose father sold tea on the streets, came to power as an alternative to this established order.
Authoritarian leaders like Narendra Modi are often beloved for their ability to get things done, unlike democratic leaders who talk a lot but achieve little. Modi implemented several significant policies: he declared all paper money void, forced everyone to exchange their undocumented cash, and issued biometric digital IDs to the 1.5 billion population. He built one of the world’s most advanced e-government and financial technology systems on this digital identity infrastructure. In India, these advancements are more developed than in countries like Turkey. This made the system more inclusive, ensuring social aid reached those in need and integrating lower-income groups into the financial system, allowing them to start building wealth.
In the past decade, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2 a day) in India has dropped from 12% to 2%. General poverty has fallen from 50% to 20%. Millions of households without toilets now have access to them. To understand the importance of this, note that the leading cause of female homicides in the world is women being assaulted while going to outdoor toilets at night.
What did Modi fail to achieve? India has an elite education system producing engineers who sustain the tech sector domestically and internationally. Modi prioritized India’s strengths in digitalization and service exports, but the manufacturing sector progressed differently. Unlike China, whose economy grew based on manufacturing since the 1990s, India’s economy, now heavily reliant on digital and service industries, has yet to provide ample job opportunities for low-skilled labor to rise to the middle class. Consequently, the economy is polarized between well-paying global digital jobs and informal or agricultural work. The unexpected election results reflect this economic reality, combined with global food inflation and Modi’s overconfident candidate choices in several states.
Modi’s election results can be compared to the AK Party’s 2015 results in Turkey. Although he didn’t secure a parliamentary majority, Narendra Modi remains the leader of the largest party. We’ll see if he can rejuvenate himself, as he put it, overcoming “metal fatigue.” India has recently become one of the fastest-growing economies, strengthening its diplomatic position. It is central to new alliances like BRICS and QUAD (India, Australia, Japan, USA).
Given Turkey’s historical ties with Pakistan and Modi’s closeness to Israel, Turkey-India relations are somewhat strained. In a multipolar world, we must integrate into various relationship networks and closely engage with India.
This article is a translated version of “Hindistan seçim sonuçları tanıdık mı?” which was initially published in Economic Daily (Nasıl Bir Ekonomi Gazetesi) on June 14, 2024.
