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Ashutosh Varshney Professor of Political Science at Brown University, USA
It has been almost two years since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In such a situation, how should India’s politics be understood today? When the Ram temple in Ayodhya was inaugurated in January 2024, it seemed that Hindu nationalism had become the dominant ideology of India, but after just four months there was a big change in the political environment.
During the Lok Sabha election campaign, BJP had said that it wanted to win 370 seats in Parliament and with its allies would not bring less than 400 seats, but the party got only 240 seats. Even after this, BJP was able to form the government, but its hold on the political narrative weakened.
Then elections were held in many states and after the big victory in Bengal, BJP has again returned to a strong position. However, in the two states where BJP won – Bengal and Assam, it has a total of 56 Lok Sabha seats, while in the two states where it did not win – Tamil Nadu and Kerala, it has a total of 59 seats. Yet it seems that the direction of the country’s politics has changed.
Tamil Nadu is slightly smaller than Bengal – it has 39 Lok Sabha seats, while Bengal has 42 seats. In these elections a new party and a new leader emerged. Both the big parties that had dominated politics for the last several decades were defeated. Yet the results of Tamil Nadu were considered to be of only regional importance, while the election results of Bengal were given national importance.
While Tamil Nadu has become an economic power today, Bengal, which was at the forefront in India in terms of per capita income at the time of independence, has now lagged far behind. As of 2020, Tamil Nadu’s per capita GDP was about 140% of the national average, while Bengal’s per capita GDP was less than 80% of the national average. In recent years a large number of Bengali citizens have migrated to Tamil Nadu in search of work.
But now the same party running the government in Delhi will be in power in Kolkata also. This has happened in the state after almost half a century. In such a situation, Bengal has now become the center of national politics. This political change also raises the possibility that some of the state’s economic shine may return, especially if private investors start investing rapidly after the BJP’s victory. Bengal may not be able to catch up with Tamil Nadu any time soon, but it is a very large, historically important and talent-rich state, so it cannot lag behind for long.
While economic news may provide some hope, political news is a cause for concern. To explain this concern, we have to talk about a new important idea that has emerged in political science – Competitive Authoritarianism.
In an important article published in the Journal of Democracy in April 2002, Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of Toronto said that in the 1990s and 2000s a new kind of political system emerged in many parts of the world. On the one hand, this system was different from democracy and on the other hand, it was different from totalitarianism. This was a situation between the two.
Gerrymandering in Assam and SIR in Bengal are symbols of this idea. The two electoral methods are not identical, but their results can be quite similar. In gerrymandering, the boundaries of electoral constituencies are changed in such a way that communities that are not likely to vote for the ruling party are placed in greater numbers in a limited number of seats, while communities that are more likely to vote for the ruling party are spread out over more seats. In SIR, electoral constituencies are not changed, but the voting rights of certain communities or sections are reduced.
If such steps are taken across the country, then elections will be held in India and it will not become completely totalitarian. But will it then be able to remain a meaningful democracy? Three things can stop this – the federal system, the judiciary and the strength and unity of the opposition. Viktor Orbán’s recent defeat in Hungary shows what the opposition can do if it musters large-scale support.
Three things are very important for a meaningful democracy – federal system, judiciary and strength and unity of the opposition. Viktor Orbán’s recent defeat in Hungary shows what the opposition can do if it musters large-scale support. (These are the author’s own views)
