Modi bolsters grip on power, pulls India to further right

Bloomberg

If anyone had any doubts about Narendra Modi’s popularity, India’s masses just put them to rest.
His Bharatiya Janata Party swept to another single-party majority, a margin that surprised political watchers who expected him to return with a weakened mandate. A combination of economic populism, Hindu nationalism and air strikes against arch-rival Pakistan earlier this year proved unbeatable.
“This is a stunning reaffirmation of Modi and the BJP and, conversely, a sharp rebuke of the opposition,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The BJP will have wide latitude to redraw the boundaries between religion and politics in a way that favours the Hindu majority.”
In a speech to thousands of party workers in Delhi, Modi denounced parties that campaigned on secularism and said the electorate had rejected the idea while handing him a
landslide. Peppering his speech with references to Hindu gods, he said his victory will be recorded as the biggest event in the political history of the world.
“You must have seen how from 2014 to 2019, those who brandished the tag of secularism have stopped speaking,” Modi told cheering supporters.
“In this entire election, political parties wearing the veil of secularism couldn’t misguide people.” Investors pushed India’s benchmark stock indexes to new highs on May 23 before the rally faded late in the session. The prospect of a coalition government, which was previously the norm for decades in India, had sparked concerns that the nation would see a return to the policy gridlock that led to Modi’s first big win five years ago.
The big question now is where Modi takes India over the next five years. After his 2014 win, he promised voters staples like jobs, toilets and affordable housing in a bid to bolster an economy where one in five people live on less than $2 per day.
This time around, his presidential-style campaign focused more on stoking patriotism and appealing to Hindus who make up about 80 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
“I worry that the communal bitterness unleashed in this campaign will make it hard to heal,” said Alyssa Ayres, a former US diplomat and now senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Modi of five years ago spoke about development for all and inclusive growth. That message sounds pretty faint today.”
Modi’s immediate task will be revving up the economy. Economists forecast growth in the three months through March at the slowest pace in almost two years, and fiscal space is limited to pay for promises like cash handouts to farmers and hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure spending.