India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party hit a bump in the road in 2024 when it lost its majority in the Lok Sabha general elections, held between April and June. The shock jolted passengers a little, but the big orange BJP bus continues to roll down the road to Hindutva, the promised land of a Hindu supremacist state.
The results of the seven weeks of voting were a surprise. The BJP went into the campaign headlining prime minister Narendra Modi and calling on voters to give him not just the 300 seats the BJP held in the old parliament, but an overwhelming majority of 400 seats.
Yet instead of gaining a hundred seats, the BJP lost sixty, forty of them in their usual north Indian stronghold of Uttar Pradesh.
After two terms of commanding majorities in the Lok Sabha, the party was forced into a coalition with a few of its junior partners in a loose alliance. The two largest partners are regional parties led by wily veterans who, like Modi, have been chief ministers of their states many times. They have already shown that, in return for suitable rewards, they are willing to keep the BJP-dominated government in power.
In the aftermath of its electoral setback the BJP quickly showed its vitality as a political organisation. It consulted with grassroots members of its vast cadre and firmed up its relationship with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Boy Scouts-cum-Brown Shirts organisation that founded the BJP, and of which Modi has been a member since adolescence. And it turned up the heat on its ever-simmering stew of anti-Muslim activities.
This strategic change was rewarded in November when the BJP won elections in two important states: Haryana, which borders New Delhi, and Maharashtra, the second-largest state in the union and home to the financial capital of Mumbai.
These surprisingly comfortable victories underlined the weakness and incoherence of the national opposition and the failings of the once-dominant Indian National Congress, still in the numbing control of descendants of Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
In these elections the BJP had an enviable economic story to tell. India’s economy has been growing strongly at about 7 per cent a year since 2021. Yet GDP growth has not produced the millions of new jobs young voters are desperately searching for, with their disenchantment over unemployment playing a part in the striking losses in Uttar Pradesh. India also performs worse on a number of quality of life benchmarks than its neighbours Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The problem for Indian governments is the structure of the economy, which does not generate enough “real jobs” — ones that offer predictable wages in profitable activities. India is still a relatively small player in global manufacturing. Its economy flourishes in service industries (especially information technology), domestic construction, real estate and finance — but these sectors employ a small proportion of the population.
India’s economy depends on relations with China and the United States. Most Indian exports are US-bound — products like diamonds and jewellery, pharmaceuticals and refined petroleum products. Most of its imports — manufactured goods, components, chemicals and pharmaceutical ingredients — come from China.
Modi and US president-elect Donald Trump appear to like each other. If their bonhomie extends to tariffs, the Modi government hopes Trump will make problems go away by granting waivers where needed. At the same time, heavy US tariffs on China are expected to shift investment from China to India. Apple and Foxconn are already making billion-dollar investments in plants in south India.
India appeared to be placing big bets on the Trump–Modi equation in December when the BJP accused the Biden administration of carrying out “a deep state agenda” to undermine India’s success story and besmirch the Modi government’s achievements.
In its own neighbourhood, India contends with a pushy China and the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s pro-India government in Bangladesh, where there is uncertainty about what sort of regime will succeed it. Aggressive Islam-first groups have attacked Bangladesh’s Hindu minority, giving Hindu supremacists in India an opportunity to call for Indian intervention. Sri Lanka too has a new leader who, though now seemingly a democrat, was once a member of a violent anti-Indian organisation.
For Australia, India looms larger than ever before. The Quad, that non-alliance of Australia, the United States, Japan and India, continues to search for ways to demonstrate its usefulness since it is avowedly not about “containing China.” Australia is also home to a million people of South Asian origin, three-quarters of whom are from India. With 240,000 speakers, Punjabi ranks fifth among non-English languages spoken in Australian households. This new diaspora puts human fibre into Australia’s relationship with India.
But the diaspora can cause political issues, as it has in Canada and the United States, where Sikhs — who form a large portion of Punjabi-language speakers — have clashed with Hindus over campaigns for an independent Sikh state referred to as “Khalistan.” There’s little doubt that the tangled and violent story of Khalistan is talked about in Australian homes too. Preventing old wounds from being opened will require Australian law to be enforced promptly and diligently.
Meanwhile, in India, the Hindutva bus will continue to roll confidently along, demanding deference to the RSS–BJP vision of what it is to be a Hindu and a true citizen of India, and, as a respected Indian analyst wrote, “pushing minorities into disempowerment and marginalisation.” •
This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.
