Don’t expect a gentler Modi in 2024. He’s already sure of his place in history

Narendra Modi's supremacy doesn't work in South India. Unless the BJP's next victory is more national in character, the Hindi belt vs the rest problem will fester going ahead.

As 2023 draws to a close, what have we learned? What has politics been like and what should we expect in the year ahead? Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

Narendra Modi

If anybody had any doubt that Prime Minister Modi is the most popular Indian politician of the 21st century, this was the year that settled it.

As the assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh made clear, Modi is unbeatable in the Hindi belt. Given how many seats the Hindi belt accounts for—barring any unlikely or unforeseen developments—he will continue to be the Prime Minister after the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Those who believed that during the Bharatiya Janata Party’s third term, Modi would change his style and be more concerned with his place in history than with maintaining an iron grip on India, may be mistaken. The manner in which the Opposition was driven out of Parliament, and no serious debate was allowed over Bills with far-reaching consequences for India, suggests that Modi is already sure of his place in history and is losing patience with his critics. So, don’t expect a softer, gentler Modi in his third term. He will be more of the same.

The great divide

As popular as Modi may be nationally, there is little doubt that his appeal in the rest of India does not match his supremacy in the Hindi belt.

He threw everything he had into the 2021 election campaign in West Bengal, only to see Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee win by a landslide. He toured Karnataka incessantly in 2023 only to see the BJP go down in defeat. Neither Modi nor his party count for much in South India, and Punjab has remained resolutely immune to his appeal. He does well enough in Maharashtra but does not evoke the fervour he does in, say, Uttar Pradesh.

The one who rules the Hindi belt usually rules India. We tend to forget that the Janata Party won by a landslide in 1977, mostly based on victories in the Hindi belt. Indira Gandhi won most of the South. Even when the Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi, was defeated in 1989, it was because it lost the Hindi belt; it did okay in South India.

For better or for worse, the BJP has been seen as a Hindi belt party since the Jana Sangh days. It was expected to change under Modi; the BJP would make the transition to win over the South and the East.

The BJP has succeeded in Assam and its Karnataka presence pre-dates Modi. But the Hindi-belt party perception has yet to go away. When you have absolute authority – and Modi’s authority is nothing if not absolute– and your party draws most of its support from just one area, regional resentments will fester. Unless the BJP’s next parliamentary victory is more national in character, the Hindi belt versus the rest issue may be a problem in the years ahead.

The Congress

It is now clear that no matter what it does, the Congress does not know how to oppose Modi. It has tried various tacks, from attacking Modi’s integrity, trying to battle its caricature as an anti-Hindu party, focusing on the poor, to accusing the BJP of dividing India.

At the national level, nothing has worked.

Much of the blame for this has usually been laid at Rahul Gandhi’s door. And while it is true that Gandhi has often got it wrong – resigning as party president and then staying on as an extra-constitutional authority, pushing the ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ campaign, gifting away Punjab, etc. — it is now apparent that the Congress’ problems go beyond an individual.

For years, people said that the Congress focuses too much on one family. Let the party’s many competent senior leaders take over and the party will do better, it was suggested.

Well, that is exactly what has happened now. Mallikarjun Kharge is the full-fledged party president and the campaigns for state elections were ran by senior leaders. Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh in Madhya Pradesh, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan, Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh, etc. And guess what happened?

So yes, the Congress has a serious problem and I don’t think anyone knows what the remedy is.

Foreign policy

Remember Pakistan? The country that posed an existential threat to India, where all government critics were told to go, is hardly talked about these days. It’s funny, isn’t it?

Even the BJP supporters have given up on it. ‘Go to Pakistan’ is no longer the standard response from the party’s loyalists to any criticism. And the government has stopped blaming everything on Pakistan.

Why is that? Have diminishing returns set in? Does Pakistan-bashing no longer yield the same advantage in domestic politics? Are Indians less willing to see Pakistan as a major threat? Does New Delhi not want to draw too much international attention to our disputes with Pakistan, especially Kashmir?

I have no idea what the reason is. But it is undeniable that the BJP has shifted focus.

It’s the same with China. In the early years of the Modi regime, the government tried to make friends with the Chinese. Now, that hope has been dashed and we have instead cleverly recast ourselves as the West’s last bulwark against Chinese domination.

This approach suits us because we can get away with much more (well, nearly). The Chinese don’t mind it either as they don’t like us much anyway and continue to face us down on the border.

Though our inability to successfully fend off the Chinese on the border must rank as a failure, our foreign policy in the Modi-Jaishankar era has been a success in most areas. Most significantly, we have been able to do business with Russia and still retain the support of the West during the Ukraine war.

So far, we seem to have pulled off a similar balancing act on the Gaza conflict. We remain friends with Israel without losing our friends in the Arab world.

In fact, one of the ironies of Modi’s foreign policy is that, even while the government is often accused (by individual political leaders and the media in the West) of being anti-Muslim, India’s relations with the Islamic world have rarely been better. The government has realised that Islamic countries don’t really care about Indian Muslims; their interests are geopolitical.

However, they do care about insults to Islam. So, when a BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma dared to say in public what so many say in private, the government had no hesitation in throwing her to the wolves. “Fringe element,” they called her.

The danger with these foreign policy successes is that we may have become too smug. If the allegations made by the Americans (which have not been denied) about India using a hitman to try and kill a Khalistani leader in the US are valid, it means that sections of our external intelligence establishment are being run like the encounters division of the Punjab police.

What now?

I reckon that nothing much will change next year. The BJP will continue to rule, the Hindi belt versus the rest problem will fester, nobody will talk about Chinese incursions on our border and the Congress will continue to drift in search of a winning strategy.

It won’t be ‘change with continuity’. It will be more like continuity with very little change.

Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)