What are the international implications of 563 million people casting their votes in the Indian elections? The Congress Party promptly conceded defeat and perhaps unexpectedly suffered an unprecedented drubbing in most of India's states. Exit polls revealed a huge victory for Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The rhetoric of pro-capitalist private enterprise clearly worked with India's burgeoning middle class Hindu constituency of the BJP electoral base. The victory was sensational: 284 seats that will perhaps total 339 when the seats of its traditional allies are included. The scale of the victory took India and the world by surprise and has not been witnessed since the Indian general election of 1984. The ruling Congress Party, in sharp contrast, is likely to be reduced to a humiliating 44 seats — its lowest ever. The Congress managed to hold fort only in Rae Bareli, the parliamentary constituency of Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi, and Amethi, of Rahul Gandhi, her charismatic son and heir apparent. Modi's drive from the airport to the headquarters of his BJP in the centre of Delhi was not so much a triumphant display of the Indian electorate's desire for change as the clever exploitation of the Indian process of democracy. Many political analysts claim that adopting a proportional representation system in India would resolve the problem of “first past the post” and “winner takes all”. India remains a country polarised politically, in spite of the landslide victory of Modi and the BJP. The upper echelon of India's political establishment is to some extent still controlled by princelings. Yet, the Indian democratic system permits self-made men and women, such as Modi, to overturn the dynastic stranglehold, as demonstrated graphically in the 2014 Indian elections where the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and their entourage had a poor showing. Modi skilfully won by bombarding the Congress Party with accusations of incompetence. In democracies with transparent institutions, conspiracy theories are easily dismissed. Not so in India. The BJP and its allies got about 38 per cent of the votes cast. The Congress Party and its allies got 23 per cent. Meanwhile, four major regional parties — Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Trinamool and Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a party that purports to champion the cause of the Dravidian population predominant in India's southern states — garnered a measly 14 per cent votes all together. The Left Front picked up a paltry five per cent. Advancing the cause of the underdog seems for the moment not so fashionable in India. Modi presided as chief minister of Gujarat, a state of 80 million people that has experienced exceptionally high economic growth rates in recent years. Modi's championing of private enterprise and the business sector, an entrepreneurial spirit that appealed to the young and ambitious Indian middle class, ultimately assured him national success, in the sense that all of India could follow in Gujarat's footsteps. I dare say Gandhi and Nehru would have been outraged by such reasoning. Gandhi, too, hailed from Gujarat. But the Indian collective national psyche was in his day diametrically opposed to liberal philosophy. Yet even Gandhi conceded that, “it is difficult but not impossible to conduct business honestly.” The measure of a politician's worth in contemporary India is how much the middle class identifies with him or her. Modi's real achievement was not electoral, but rather cultural, and by that I am not insinuating that Hindu nationalism was a key factor in the landslide victory of the BJP. Nevertheless, there were grumpy losers. Bahujan Samaj Party chairperson Mayawati Kumari, who served four terms as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, last Saturday pointedly blamed the Congress Party for the debacle of her party in Uttar Pradesh. She unequivocally held the Congress accountable for the massive trouncing her party got in the Lok Sabha (lower house of India's parliament) 2014 elections. “I insist Dalits could not be swayed away, despite the conspiracy of the opposition parties who tried to influence them to vote as Hindus in the communally sensitive west Uttar Pradesh,” an agitated Mayawati trumpeted in a widely televised nationwide address. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) purports to politically cater for the rights of the Scheduled Castes (SCs), the Scheduled Tribes (STs), the so-called “Other Backward Classes (OBCs)” and India's motley religious minorities such as Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Buddhists. The BJP amassed 20 per cent of the vote in Uttar Pradesh, but won no seats in the most important north Indian state where it held 21 seats in the outgoing Lok Sabha. To put the results of the landmark 2014 elections in proper perspective, the BJP benefited from key alliances with Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) in Bihar and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Indian democracy does have a fairly sophisticated system of checks and balances to shield losers from the misuses of the top dogs. In West Bengal, the Left Front got nearly 30 per cent of the vote, but had to be satisfied with just two seats. Anomalies such as the Left Front's predicament prevailed in this year's Indian general elections. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the DMK and its small party allies garnered 27 per cent votes and got no seats. Modi was considered persona non grata in the United States and blacklisted in several Western nations on the grounds that he masterminded the massacre of some 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. In the run-up to the 2014 Indian elections, the world started watching Modi's men and the man himself more closely. It is no secret that several shady characters were key in his political campaign. Amit Shah, Modi's trusted aide and a man facing three murder charges, who is considered responsible for the massive victory in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won 72 seats, is most likely to hold political office, a plum ministerial portfolio perhaps? Nitish Kumar, chief minister of the north Indian state of Bihar, resigned from his position after the Congress Party performed abominably in the 2014 general elections. “I respect the mandate of the people,” Kumar conceded. And so it seems does the United States that promptly lifted a visa ban on Modi, with the US State Department announcing that Modi would be most welcome in Washington and would be eligible for an A-1 visa. US President Barack Obama phoned Modi last Friday to congratulate him. Obviously Washington has decided to bury the hatchet. But will India's Muslims follow suit?
