Modi’s 2014 victory not a ‘black swan’ event

It is very difficult for many political pundits to digest how Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a huge mandate this time compared to his mandate in 2014. Many political pundits and Modi-baiters denigrated his 2014 victory as a 31 per cent victory claiming that 69 per cent of the people voted against him, deliberately hiding the fact that most of the Union and state governments in India since Independence are elected with about a 30 per cent to 40 per cent vote-share. Then the term black swan event was used to define Mr Modi’s victory in the 2014 election to reinforce that it is a one-time unexpected event and nothing of that sort would be repeated in the future. Again, these people conveniently forgot the successive wins of the BJP in various state Assembly elections like Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Tripura after the 2014 general election. Tripura was a classic case of the BJP entering a state with a big bang. The BJP was nowhere in the earlier Assembly election with just a 1.5 per cent vote-share and it went on defeat the CPI(M) left, right and centre and made the Congress the new BJP with just a 1.5 per cent vote-share from a 40 per cent vote-share in Tripura. Modi-baiters assumed that all this happened with some extraterrestrial divine support. Along with Mr Modi’s blitzkrieg in Tripura, the BJP cadres worked very hard for three years before the Assembly elections in the tiny state and this made the BJP go from nowhere to being the ruling party.

It is not that the BJP did not make mistakes and as a result faced losses in between as in the cases of Bihar and Delhi. If the Bihar loss was because of the gathbandhan between the JD(U), the RJD and the Congress and the failure to project a charismatic BJP face as the BJP chief minister against the incumbent performing chief minister, Nitish Kumar, the BJP was routed completely by the exorbitant faith people had on Arvind Kejriwal in the Delhi state Assembly elections. When the Gujarat Assembly election results were out, the same political pundits failed to see the 49 per cent vote-share of the BJP, the highest vote-share it got in the history of the Gujarat Assembly elections, despite anti-incumbency against the Gujarat state government, and to some extent, the Union government. Mr Modi pulled off the victory on his own in the Gujarat Assembly elections, which would have gone otherwise to the Congress. Even in the Karnataka Assembly election, the BJP managed to get 104 seats thanks to Mr Modi’s popularity.
Had the chief ministerial face been Mr Modi instead of Yeddyurappa in Karnataka, the BJP would have romped home. In the December 2018 Assembly elections held for Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP was neck and neck in poll percentages and seats with the Congress. The BJP does not have to use any unfair means to capture power in these two seats now as even by-elections for a few Assembly seats in the future would tilt the majority in favour of the BJP and that is the decent option available to the BJP. The only state Assembly election where the BJP was routed was in Chhattisgarh. However, even in Chhattisgarh, the BJP completely regained its ground by winning nine out of 11 parliamentary seats in the 2019 general election. This clearly shows that Mr Modi is a completely different political material who connects with people like a magnet beyond barriers and he could change the mandate in his favour in no time. This is the lesson Modi-baiters have not learnt since 2002 and there is no sign that they will learn it in the future also.

This humungous victory of Mr Modi also makes alliance partners know their position in an alliance with the BJP. The cantankerous Shiv Sena cannot show their peevishness to the BJP and Mr Modi anymore. At least the Shiv Sena has no ideological differences with the BJP and are in fact more aggressive than the BJP. The issue till the 2019 elections was that the Shiv Sena was not ready to accept the BJP as the big brother, although the BJP proved it by contesting independently of the Shiv Sena in the 2014 Assembly elections and emerged as the single-largest party in Maharashtra. With the 2014 general election results, the big brother issue was once and for all settled for the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance will fight the impending Maharashtra Assembly election with the BJP as the big brother and seeking a mandate for the incumbent Devendra Fadnavis — there is no option left for the Shiv Sena. With such a huge victory for the BJP in the 2019 general election, the JD(U) cannot function on parallel tracks on issues like triple talaq, Article 370 or the Ram temple and it must abide by the decisions of the ruling dispensation. Any break-up with the BJP would cost the JD(U) and Nitish Kumar dearly in the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections.

With inroads being made in Odisha and West Bengal, Amit Shah or the new national president of the BJP may now have to concentrate on developing the party in Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala.

With great expectations, people have voted for Mr Modi. The expectations of the people are much more than in the first term. Mr Modi, either as the chief minister of Gujarat or as the Prime Minister in his first term, did not take the representative compulsions in all forms very seriously although he also yielded to such compulsions to a limited extent. Since all the 353 seats that the NDA got were voted for Mr Modi alone, he can completely brush aside all compulsions of representation to regions, religions, castes, coalition partners, etc. He is free to induct people outside his party if he believes that they could bring substantial value addition to the administration. He can choose his Cabinet like the US President, based on who could perform and add significant value to his dispensation. Unlike the first term of Mr Modi, where economic growth was about 7 per cent, economic growth would now touch 10 per cent in Mr Modi’s second term without the corresponding spiralling inflation. This cannot happen without every ministry and department contributing significantly to the Union government. Reforms did not embrace the ministry of railways as liberalisation did in the ministry of highways, the ministry of civil aviation, the ministry of shipping, the ministry of power, etc. Mr Modi does not have the habit of changing his ministers on whims and fancies and gives enough time for the ministers to perform. Whether Mr Modi will take the NDA to the level of 50 per cent votes in the 2024 elections boils down to how Mr Modi chooses his Cabinet colleagues when he takes oath as the Prime Minister of India a few days from now.

The writer is a public policy analyst