Those watching the televised coverage of the victory in the 2014 Indian general election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Narendra Modi will have witnessed the sheer jubilation of his supporters. Modi was expected to do well and to emerge in a position where he would be able to lead a coalition government. As we now know, Narendra Modi at the head of the BJP secured an outright majority over the Congress Party, which had so long dominated post-Independence Indian politics, and the first outright majority since the 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi was elected at the head of the Congress Party. But that election followed after the assassination in 1984 of Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, Indira Gandhi, herself prime minister at the time of her death. The scale of Rajiv Gandhi’s victory was explicable to some extent in terms of popular revulsion prompted by this mother’s murder and sympathy for his loss, which is why it has been claimed that Modi’s victory in 2014 puts him a position of power more comparable to that of Indira Gandhi at the height of her popularity.

Some are hailing Narendra Modi’s election victory as a new beginning for India and portray him as an ascetic, charismatic, and competent political and economic manager. His critics have expressed caution, if not outright concern, about the links between Modi and the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteer Association). The RSS, which described itself as a cultural rather than political movement, has been the standard-bearer of the ideology of Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’, Hindu nationalism), since its creation in the mid-1920s. At the core of this creed is the contentious conviction in the setting of Indian society that Hindu culture is India’s ‘national tradition’, linked to a determination to foster a sense of Hindu majoritarian entitlement. Subsequently, a ‘family’ of like-minded organisations has grown up around the RSS, including the BJP, its only formally constituted political party. Modi’s critics remind us that, until faced with the imminent, political reality of his likely leadership of India, some international leaders had refused to meet with Modi who, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, had been accused of inaction when in excess of a thousand Muslims were killed in an outbreak of communal violence in 2002. For his critics, Modi remains a divisive and autocratic figure, tainted by life-long association with Hindu nationalist interest groups, who could well destabilise India’s multi-religious social fabric and the surrounding region, if he were to take a more confrontational stance when dealing with Pakistan and China on India’s borders.

Before long we shall have detailed breakdowns and analyses of Indian voting patterns by political scientists and psephologists. It already seems evident that Modi gathered more support among Muslim voters than had been anticipated, for without this his party could not have achieved the results it did in certain north Indian states. So what might the scale of Modi’s victory in an election whose outcome has surprised many observers, and media coverage of Modi and his life-long links with the RSS, tell us about the man in relation to the preoccupations of the Indian electorate?

During the recent campaign, Modi used a hologram seemingly to appear ‘in person’ in widely scattered political meetings. Not in any sense of the same magnitude, this nevertheless was reminiscent in a way of the popular impact of the broadcasting of the Hindu epic the Ramayana on Indian national television in 1987. On learning of his victory, Modi went to ask for his mother’s blessing and offered prayers on the banks of River Ganges, declaring ‘The day I filed my nomination I became the son of Mother Ganga [the Ganges].’ These highly charged symbolic actions would not have been lost on his Hindu supporters.

The formal disclosures required of any electoral candidate led Modi to confirm that he had long been married. His marital status previously had been unclear for many because he had lived his life alone, devoting himself to the cause of the RSS and then increasingly to national politics. His wife subsequently corroborated her husband’s explanation that this arranged marriage had been a marriage in name only.  Modi’s insistence on a life of celibacy and asceticism is consistent with the discipline imposed on their full-time workers by a range of Hindu nationalist organisations, including the RSS. This could be read as a reminder of the value historically attached to asceticism in India where since the struggle for Independence religious symbolism has been a potent force in popular politics; consider the popular image of M.K. Gandhi. But, in the current climate Modi’s reputation for his fierce work ethic and the austerity of his lifestyle chime more specifically with the Indian electorate’s exhausted patience with the Congress Party’s failure to address the problem of corruption in public life, and the perception of that party as complacently led by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty (unrelated to Mahatma Gandhi). By presenting himself as a leader without family interests, Modi could signal that nepotism would have no part in his administration. The son of a lower-caste family, Modi is said to have worked with his father as a tea-seller at a railway station. He appears very much a man of the people, unlike the privileged members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and his experience of life sustains hopes that he is better placed to understand and thus to address the prejudice of casteism.

Another major issue in the election campaign was the feeling on the part of many Indian voters, particularly among the expanding middle class and the ‘aspirational middle class’, that a new approach was needed to revive the Indian economy. Many less affluent voters have continued to look in vain to successive governments to raise their standard of living. The last government in which the BJP participated was voted out of office, having gone to the electorate in 2004 with the slogan ‘India Shining’, which clearly many voters failed to recognise as a reflection of their own experience. These issues, divorced as yet from the implementation of policy that might prompt accusations of seeming to favour one Indian community over others, are not peculiar to the self-interest of India’s Hindu majority. The election of the Modi-led BJP rests on a mandate wider than his reputation as an ardent Hindu nationalist.

The issues facing Modi have dogged preceding Indian government, which have paid the electoral price for failing to meet voters’ expectations. Such perceived failures on the part of successive governments undoubtedly reflect the immensity and complexity of the problems that India faces at this point in its development, as much as the varying degrees of competence and effectiveness of different administrations. Modi’s reputation for political and economic leadership stems from his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat, although his critics have insisted that his success there was of a limited nature. As head of the central government he will have less power to effect change directly than he had as the head of an Indian state. He has been elected on the crest of a wave of desire for change, not just in the way in which the fruits of India’s increasing power and wealth are shared across its population but also in the way that India is governed and the ethos that surrounds those who hold public office. Widespread disillusionment could rapidly follow, if Modi were to prove unable to make acceptable progress in fulfilling the BJP’s election promises. Were that to be the case, he might then invoke unflattering comparisons with the considerable economic and social change in India brought about by the now deposed, retiring Prime Minster, the publicly diffident and less charismatic Manmohan Singh.

There were similar misgivings voiced about the potentially divisive effect of a government led by a party allied to Hindu nationalist aspirations, when the BJP previously held power. The then leader of the party and Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, however, distanced himself from the influence that the RSS sought to exercise over his government, enjoying two terms in office from 1996 until 2004. But, it is possibly significant as we look to the future that Vajpayee has been regarded as representing the ‘soft’ version of Hindu nationalist ideology. The political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma has contrasted this with the ‘jihadi’ version of Hindutva ideology associated with Modi and others, here borrowing a term drawn from the study of radical Islamism.

The coming months will show whether and in what ways Modi once in office seeks to act on his past rhetoric, although this was less strident during the campaign; for example, driving illegal Bangladeshi migrants out of India, warning China that India will stand firm over any threat to its borders (with what this might imply for any dealings with Pakistan over Kashmir and India’s response to any future terrorist attacks launched beyond its borders), re-writing school textbooks with a more nationalist slant, and considering the future of existing special legal provisions for Muslims in India relating to family matters. On the other hand, perhaps Modi, as an acknowledged hardliner and as has been the case in certain other countries, will be more able to broker agreements with India’s neighbours and so reduce conflict. His invitation to Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, to attend his swearing-in ceremony, is intriguing in this respect. Will Modi take full advantage of his majority and push forward measures that reflect primarily the broad agenda of Hindu nationalists groups? If he does, but also is seen by voters to have made real progress in tackling long-term problems such as fostering and sustaining economic growth and spreading the benefits of this, addressing concerns relating to corruption and caste-based discrimination, and reassuring those anxious about India’s security, it will be fascinating to see what judgement India’s electorate passes on him at the next general election. Its outcome might be as revealing and in some respects as surprising as that of the 2014 election.

Gwilym Beckerlegge

Department of Religious Studies