India’s political paradox: The enduring popularity of Narendra Modi
India’s political paradox: The enduring popularity of Narendra Modi
WRITTEN BY SRIJAN SHUKLA
30 September 2021
Over the past few months, the second COVID-19 wave has been the most lethal reminder that in India you need to know someone — who in turn knows someone else — to access the most basic public goods. Ask a political scientist, and they will put this another way: India lives and breathes on entrenched patronage-based networks.
COVID-19 is merely the most recent of several crises that have affected the masses since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. However, while Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled provincial governments have lost several elections since 2014, at the national level, the Modi-led BJP has consistently consolidated its position as a political hegemon. Approval ratings and predictions by political scientists show that even the havoc wrought by the pandemic and the central government’s fatal negligence in key matters are likely to lead to only marginal political costs for the prime minister. So, what explains this political paradox?
Some popular explanations have attributed Modi’s success to the continued decline of key opposition parties, the BJP’s ability to increasingly attract backward caste groupings into its fold, the enduring appeal of the Hindu-nationalist project, a largely favourable media, the backing of big private capital, and the party’s formidable electoral machine. However, the complexities of India’s current political paradox, and Modi’s ability to emerge politically unscathed from crisis after crisis, are best explained by the concept of “patronal politics”.
Patronal politics and India
A large number of developing countries, including India, are patronal to some degree and are marked by three related features. First, in ‘patronalistic’ societies, people’s economic and political needs are met through patronage networks. The distribution of public goods and services takes place in a discretionary fashion in such political systems. Politicians and political brokers use patronage networks — which can help citizens navigate the complex and often arbitrary systems of the state — to ‘buy’ votes. Second, in such societies, a leader or a party needs to win the support of several kinds of informal networks that include patronage networks, cultural brokers, the media, etc to stay in power. Third, periodically, patronalistic societies experience ‘political closure’: the coalescing of all networks around one leader, shrinking political competition.
Modi is not only changing the nature of the polity but is also ensuring that he remains central to that change. This is significant because all Hindu-revisionist cultural networks consider Modi and his presence in the central government integral to the success of their agenda.
Essentially, in order to stay in power, any leader or party in a patronalistic regime needs to ensure the support of a majority of the country’s patronage networks. This is exactly what Modi has done over the last seven years; a diverse set of networks have rallied behind him, including his newly-established welfarism patronage network, non-dominant backward caste groups, big media and corporate houses, key institutions such as the election commission, and several Hindu nationalistic local and national religious-cultural networks.
Modi and the art of welfarism
Let’s begin with Modi’s idea of ‘welfarism’. Most evidence suggests that politicians struggle to gain electorally by providing public goods and services. But Modi has sought to resolve this contradiction, by unleashing a new model of welfare politics — ranging from free toilets to household gas cylinders. For the masses, a key appeal of these welfare programs has been a supposed reduction in the bureaucratic hurdles required to acquire these goods in the past. In turn, Modi made every effort to ensure that it was amply clear to the voters that he was directly responsible for the provision of those goods and services. Take, for example, India’s universal vaccination program. From posters across the hinterlands claiming political credit for the program to vaccine certificates themselves, they all flash Modi’s photos underscoring the fact that he is responsible for free COVID-19 vaccination for everyone.
It is less significant whether the goods provided by his government are indeed universalistic and policies have actually done away with bureaucratic hurdles. What is important is that the delivery is at least somewhat better than in the past, and the continued perception that Modi is directly responsible for it. By doing so, Modi has been able to cut through existing patronage networks and build an entirely new network, which connects the masses directly to him. The support of this network is the defining feature of India’s new political order under Modi.
How is this different from the welfare politics practised by previous governments?
In the pre-Modi era, the link between welfare services and voting was rather weak. This was due to several factors such as the limited ability of brokers to monitor votes due to secret ballots, the increasingly marginal impact of electoral handouts on election outcomes, and growing voter agency with respect to claim-making on the state. However, the fundamental driver is the country’s historically shoddy record in providing public goods. Therefore, Indian citizens have come to expect less and less from political parties.
Modi has changed this model by ensuring that some tangible goods such as gas cylinders, toilets, bank accounts, housing finance, and most importantly direct cash and crops during periods of crisis (such as the pandemic), are consistently provided to people. This is different from traditional ideas of welfare, which emphasises public goods such as healthcare and education. Whether the central or the state government is responsible for providing these tangibles is meaningless, because Modi makes every possible effort to claim credit for every initiative. Regardless of how bad a crisis gets, the security of those public goods promised by Modi is what ensures his enduring popularity. However, as Neelanjan Sircar has highlighted, this has begun to politically hurt the BJP’s state-level governments as constituents credit the central and not the state government.
Networks coalesce around Modi
Modi has also ensured that a majority and a diverse set of networks support him. The BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — which have traditionally been perceived as representing only the upper castes — have for decades worked towards including the subalterns within its fold. And as Rahul Verma and Asim Ali argue, Modi has only strengthened this trend. For instance, in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP has managed to corner over three-quarters of the seats by garnering the support of non-dominant backward and scheduled castes. Until a few years ago, only the populous and more dominant backward castes found political representation, which created resentment among other backward groups that felt left out. The BJP leveraged that sentiment and managed to corner the majority of their votes by providing them with representation for the first time.
Similarly, by introducing the completely opaque campaign finance instrument of electoral bonds, Modi has made it easy for big corporates in the country to almost unanimously donate to just the BJP. For instance, in 2019-20, the BJP received 75 per cent of the total campaign finance raised via electoral bonds, as compared to just 9 per cent by the Congress Party, according to the country’s Election Commission. Modi has managed to create a self-image comprising three overlapping identities: a Hindu nationalist politician who managed to rise through the ranks despite hailing from a backward caste, and a leader who promotes business activity, especially illustrated through his years as the chief minister of the industrial state of Gujarat. While this image has allowed various patronage networks to coalesce around him, it is hard to miss the fact that their support is largely contingent on Modi’s continued presence.
Finally, along with welfarism, the idea of culturally reforming the country forms the bedrock of Modi’s political strength. He has tried to move the country away from Nehru’s idea of cultural secularism — whereby the state or its ruling party does not overtly favour any particular religion — to a wholesale embrace of Hindu nationalism as the predominant defining idea of the Indian republic. But even in trying to redefine the cultural underpinnings of India — from the citizenship amendment bill to building the temple in Ayodhya — Modi is not only changing the nature of the polity but is also ensuring that he remains central to that change. This is significant because all Hindu-revisionist cultural networks consider Modi and his presence in the central government integral to the success of their agenda.
Power and politics
It is important to stress that the Indian polity has not necessarily become more patronal under Modi’s rule — India was arguably always a very patronal society. But few regimes have succeeded in resolving coordination issues like Modi’s. During the previous era, when the government was led by the Congress Party, political power was distributed among party President Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and several other senior Congress Party leaders. Far from resolving coordination problems, such an arrangement amplified them. But under Modi, there is no such perception; everyone from across the spectrum believes that power now lies with the Prime Minister’s Office.
Going by Hale’s model of patronal politics, it becomes obvious that India is currently going through a phase of political closure. Modi has succeeded in convincing a majority of networks to support him, which substantially reduces the level of political competition in the country. Until this begins to change, India remains set to be locked into the current political paradigm.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Srijan Shukla is pursuing a Masters in International Relations at New York University. He currently researches international political economy and has studied Political Science and Economics at McGill University. He subsequently worked as a foreign affairs reporter for ThePrint. Image credit: Flickr/Narendra Modi.