It has been nearly two years since the 2024 national elections. How should we conceptualise the state of Indian politics today? Are there any significant reasons for concern?
In January 2024, as the BJP government inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya, it seemed as though Hindu nationalism had become the dominant ideology of India. But a little over four months later, there was a big change in the political climate. During the Lok Sabha elections campaign, the BJP declared it wanted 370 seats in Parliament and, including its allies, no less than 400 seats. It ended up with only 240 seats, while its allies contributed another fifty. The BJP could form the government, but its control over the political narrative slipped. The Opposition had the wind in its sails.
Several state elections later, and after a huge victory in West Bengal, the BJP has returned to a position of dominance. Although the two states the BJP won, Bengal and Assam, have a total of 56 seats in Parliament, and the two states it did not win—Tamil Nadu and Kerala—have 59 seats together, Bengal has basically transformed the political discourse in the country.
Tamil Nadu is only slightly smaller than Bengal (39 Lok Sabha seats as opposed to 42) and it witnessed, in these elections, the stunning rise of a new party and a new leader. The two dominant parties of the last several decades were decisively trounced. But Tamil Nadu’s results were read as regionally significant, whereas Bengal’s election outcomes were nationally salient.
Also read: BJP’s West Bengal win doesn’t mean 2029 Lok Sabha election is in the bag
Was it due to economics?
The divergence in political significance, it should be clear, has little to do with economics. Tamil Nadu has become an economic powerhouse, whereas Bengal, whose per capita income was the highest in India at Independence, is now far behind. By 2020, Tamil Nadu’s per capita GDP, more or less equaling Maharashtra’s, was roughly 140 per cent of the all-India average, whereas Bengal’s was a little less than 80 per cent. Economically, it is not surprising that a large number of Bengalis have of late migrated to Tamil Nadu (as well as to other Southern states) for work.
But, in these elections, Bengal punched above its economic weight. That is not only because of historical reasons, some of which I have already enumerated in a previous column (here), but also because the party that runs the government in Delhi will also now rule in Kolkata. This is a novelty for the state after nearly half a century. West Bengal is no longer regional; it has become national.
The political change also raises the intriguing prospect of some of the economic shine of the state coming back, especially if following BJP’s victory, private investors rush in. It may not be able to catch up with Tamil Nadu any time soon, but Bengal is too big, too historically important and far too equipped with talent to languish for too long. Even the critics of the BJP would welcome an economic turnaround in Bengal.
Also read: West Bengal has only had 9 CMs since Independence—and 5 phases of politics
Competitive authoritarianism
While the economic news could potentially be invigorating, it is the political news that is the cause of great concern. To explain the underlying source of the concern, let me turn to one of the important new concepts to emerge in the discipline of political science: Competitive authoritarianism. Given what happened in Bengal (as well as Assam), the concept illustrates what might happen to the larger Indian democracy, though it is clearly not there yet.
In a seminal essay published in the Journal of Democracy (April 2002), later turned into an influential book, Competitive Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2011), Steven Levitsky (Harvard) and Lucan Way (Toronto) argued that in the 1990s and 2000s, a new kind of polity emerged in several parts of the world. It was distinguishable from democracy on the one hand and full-fledged dictatorship on the other. It fell somewhere in between.
In such hybrid polities, “although elections are regularly held, incumbents routinely abuse state resources, … harass opposition candidates and their supporters and manipulate election results”. These polities “fall short of full-scale authoritarianism”. And “although incumbents may manipulate formal democratic rules, they are unable to eliminate them or reduce them to a mere façade.” The overall result is that the electoral playing field becomes tilted in favour of the incumbents, and the transfer of power—a routine phenomenon in democracies—can take an embattled form.
Gerrymandering in Assam and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bengal perfectly fit this description. The two electoral mechanisms are not the same, but their results can be quite similar. Gerrymandering re-draws electoral constituencies in such a way that those unlikely to vote for the ruling party are heavily concentrated in a few constituencies, and those likely to vote in favour are spread over many more constituencies. As a result, the ruling party wins more seats than it loses. This is what happened in Assam.
SIR does not redraw electoral constituencies, but it disenfranchises a certain community or class of voters. As has already been extensively discussed, the SIR in Bengal sought disproportionately to disenfranchise Muslim voters, only 8 per cent of whom have voted for the BJP in the last few elections. Of the 2.7 million (27 lakh) names struck off the rolls, not all were Muslims, but Muslims were more heavily targeted than any other group.
It has been argued that SIR is not the only, or the principal, reason why the TMC lost Bengal. The gap between the BJP and TMC vote was larger than the number of vote deletions. That may well be true, but it is true ex-post. Ex-ante, such interventions can’t fully predict the exact outcome. What they seek to do is tilt the electoral field, making pro-regime results more likely.
In sum, if such moves are made all over the country, India will have elections and it will not be a full-fledged dictatorship. But it will not be a flourishing and meaningful democracy either. Rather, it will take firm steps toward competitive authoritarianism.
Three factors can prevent the emergence of a full-blown national-level competitive authoritarianism. The first is federalism. The examples of Tamil Nadu and Kerala illustrate how what happened in Assam and Bengal can be forestalled, at least in some states. The second is whether the judiciary will remain a spectator, or it will actively oppose mass deletions from electoral rolls. The third is how hard—and with how much unity—the Opposition will fight back. As the recent defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary shows, if the Opposition can generate a huge wave of support, its victory margins can overwhelm the number of deletions.
It is unclear which way the national polity will finally go. One can only hope that India does not become the kind of political system, which is known the world over for competitive authoritarianism, like Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)