Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered India’s general election projecting supreme confidence. “Ab ki baar, 400 paar” went his party’s slogan, meaning this time his side aimed to surpass 400 seats in the lower house of Parliament, a staggering majority.
But as the seven-week voting period enters its final stretch, with results expected on June 4, India is witnessing something unusual from its powerful leader. It is seeing him sweat.
As Mr. Modi crisscrosses the country for rallies in 100-degree heat, he has often appeared on the defensive, and sometimes rattled. He has frequently set aside his party’s main campaign message — that India is rising under his leadership — to counter his opponents’ portrayal of him as favoring business and caste elites. He has resorted to stoking anti-Muslim sentiments to fend off attempts to split his Hindu support base, only to deny his own words later.
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., is still a heavy favorite. But it is finding that the political opposition, counted out after big losses to Mr. Modi in the previous two national elections, has some fight left in it.
The opposition has found traction in challenging Mr. Modi’s control over the national narrative. With the broadcast media cowed by him, opposition leaders have turned to online platforms to find an audience for a pitch focused on economic and social justice, painting the prime minister as a primary culprit in India’s growing inequality.
Before the election, often-bickering opposition parties united in a grand alliance to confront a shared threat: what they call Mr. Modi’s mission to cripple them and remake the country into one-party rule. The alliance lost precious time in the months before the vote, bogged down by internal differences. But it has largely held together despite Mr. Modi’s efforts to lure away some of its members and sideline others with legal actions.
The alliance hopes that this translates into an improved electoral showing, after scattered votes for opposition parties in the 2019 election worked to Mr. Modi’s advantage. To have any hope of cutting significantly into the governing party’s existing strong majority in Parliament, the opposition will have to flip a large number of seats in the more populous north, where the B.J.P. is well entrenched, and hold its ground in the more prosperous south.
“The opposition realized it was now or never,” said Arati Jerath, a political analyst in New Delhi. “It had to fight Modi with all the weapons it could muster or face certain death.”
Analysts say elections that focus on local issues favor the opposition. This spring, Mr. Modi has again made a parliamentary election, contested across more than 540 seats, into a presidential-style national referendum on his own huge popularity and his achievements.
But it has become clear that, a decade into his rule, his ability to steer elections away from local concerns — and cover for his party’s parochial…
2024-05-22 23:53:56
Article from www.nytimes.com