In the recent general election, many voters gave their material interests priority over Hindu nationalism, delivering a shock to the ruling BJP. In doing so, they demolished the hype about “India on the move”, propagated by both international and domestic elites. The hype—built on exaggerated GDP growth numbers and detached-from-reality declarations about the end of poverty—faced its most brutal repudiation in Uttar Pradesh.

Despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claims of Uttar Pradesh being on the “front line” of progress, that State remains the poster child for economic backwardness and poverty. Its voters rejected the notion that Hindutva should overshadow their demand for a better life, despite the seductive inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya earlier in the year.

Indian democracy deserves one cheer for this outcome, but more applause must wait. Voters emphasised their material needs mainly through caste-based demands, which are impossible to satisfy without a progressive social democratic agenda to expand opportunities—an option no party offered. The resurgence of caste interests reflects a lack of hope for a future that is at once expansive and inclusive.

While uplifting and giving dignity to the oppressed is crucial, the election fragmented the electorate rather than uniting it in the pursuit of good jobs and public goods like education, healthcare, liveable cities, fair judiciaries, and a clean environment. Dalits and Other Backward Classes in Uttar Pradesh, for example, and OBCs in Maharashtra share a sense of economic marginalisation, but their focus on reservation and representation is a zero-sum game among the intended beneficiaries.

While caste-based considerations did check Hindutva’s momentum, their transformation into electoral successes for the opposition INDIA bloc owed much to astute electoral strategies and the mechanics of the first-past-the-post system rather than to a coherent economic and social strategy.

As a result, despite its shock, the BJP managed with the help of its core Hindutva constituency and coalition partners to form a government. Hindutva’s hold persisted, diluted in a few places but with an iron grip in others. Additionally, Hindutva spread its geographic tentacles. The BJP and Hindutva could regain dominance with small vote-share shifts or better seat allocation.

Deepening pathologies

More worryingly, the election revealed deepening pathologies in Indian democracy, which gives voters limited political choices to enhance their material interests. While voters make generally well-informed choices, the self-serving political class cares little for the public interest. Barring rare exceptions, political aspirants treat politics as a business to enhance their power and enrich themselves. Voters can vote leaders in and out, but because one venal politician replaces another, they cannot enforce democratic accountability.

The result is a bad political equilibrium. Realising that they cannot expect any better from their leaders, voters have learned to demand immediate tangible benefits: not just reservation but also cash and in-kind transfers. This focus on the immediately visible overshadows the demand for the longer-term pursuit of jobs and public goods, which bolster everyone economically and promote social cohesion. As this election reminded us, no one has an incentive to change the system. Indeed, political leaders, freed of the obligation to improve people’s lives, have aligned with the interests of the elite. Authoritarianism in the form of the state’s use of coercive power blends with this elite-driven polity. While it is too early to give up hope, this election may well be remembered as a blip in the long-term erosion of Indian democracy.

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Disciplined seat sharing and allocation among the INDIA bloc partners helped voters voice their plight. This discipline allowed the alliance to benefit from the first-past-the-post system—traditional rivals in the alliance did not cost each other seats. Hence, small shifts of vote shares in their favour won them many seats. Put differently though, the durability of the opposition’s gains requires at a minimum that its alliance holds together and the BJP repeats its poor seat allocation judgments.

Regional politics interacted significantly with the first-past-the-post system, but the key national statistic remains the BJP’s 20 per cent loss of seats, down to 240 from 303 in 2019, despite only a 1 per cent decline in vote share, down from 37.4 per cent to 36.6 per cent. Seen in historical perspective, the BJP’s 2024 vote share was its second-highest ever, well above the next highest, which was 31 per cent in 2014 when it won 282 seats. And despite the BJP’s setback, Modi is now heading a National Democratic Alliance government, with coalition partners contributing about 50 seats, taking his parliamentary support modestly above the 272 halfway mark. Hindutva’s march paused but did not reverse.

Dalit shift

The BJP’s losses arose from an interplay between the first-past-the-post system and caste politics. In Uttar Pradesh, Dalits largely deserted the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the party that has represented them since 1984. By voting instead for the Samajwadi Party (SP), which has traditionally represented OBCs, they gave the INDIA bloc a big boost.

Also, in many closely fought constituencies where Dalits did vote for the BSP, they cut into the BJP vote, causing its loss to the SP. The anti-BJP Dalit vote, of course, gave the lie to Modi’s claim that he has worked for the poor. And, to the extent that the Dalit vote overlapped with the rural vote, where also the BJP lost ground, it exposed long-festering rural and agrarian economic distress.

But this is a fragile victory for the INDIA bloc. Can the new Dalit-OBC alliance endure, especially if its only glue is more reservation? In fact, in some Uttar Pradesh constituencies, the stand-alone Dalit vote (for the BSP) aided BJP victories.

The scale of the Dalit vote shift in Uttar Pradesh did not occur elsewhere, for which reason the voice of the poor and vulnerable spoke with less clarity in other States. In Rajasthan, the BJP lost less ground. And it swept Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand while making large gains in Odisha, all States with large numbers of poor voters.

Uttarakhand, through which runs the magnificent but young and delicate Himalayan mountain range from which springs the holy Ganga, is notable for the massive environmental damage inflicted on it under the direction of Modi’s Central government and the BJP-led State government.

Overwhelmed by construction projects, the holy town of Joshimath is sinking, and the Prime Minister’s Char Dham road project, connecting four sacred Hindu pilgrimage sites in the Himalaya, is causing untold damage to forests and hills, and thus to lives and livelihoods. Yet, Uttarakhand’s voters cast their lot with the BJP.

BJP advances

And while some might quibble that Hindutva’s advance in Odisha, where the BJP also won the concurrent Assembly election, merely reflected the voters’ desire for an alternative to incumbent Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s flailing State government, any shift to the BJP always bolsters Hindutva forces.

Hindutva also advanced in the south. It increased its vote share by more than 15 percentage points to 35 per cent in Telangana, doubling its seats from 4 to 8. It made important inroads in Tamil Nadu, where its vote share increased from less than four per cent to 11 per cent, but it failed to secure any seat since the once-mighty AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and other Tamil parties divided the votes.

In contrast, the Congress won only a 10 per cent vote share but nine seats; the Congress and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam together won over three-quarters of the seats with just over a third of the votes in another illustration of the power of the first-past-the-post system.

The same electoral system proved the BJP’s undoing in Maharashtra. In that State, people’s issues, such as drought, price hikes, the agrarian crisis, and unemployment, figured minimally during the campaign. The BJP maintained an almost unchanged vote share but haemorrhaged seats. Dislodging Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena State government and the State’s caste-based reservation politics cost it crucial votes.

For the INDIA grouping, its Maharashtra victories carry a warning. The State reflects the absurdities that arise when reservation becomes a substitute for job creation. The Marathas were once prosperous farmers who have fallen on hard times. They constitute 30 per cent of the State’s population and want reserved jobs and college admissions, for which reason they want to be classified as Kunbis (a community in the OBC fold and hence entitled to reservation).

The absurdity arises because the competition for jobs and admissions among the hundreds of OBCs is already so intense that many potential OBC claimants prefer to opt out and try their luck in the non-reserved general category. In trying to square this circle, the Shiv Sena-BJP government managed to offend both the Marathas and the Kunbis and incurred their wrath. That wrath awaits all parties who make caste-based reservation a central policy plank. This conundrum and wrath will only grow as farm distress increases around the country and urban/industrial jobs remain scarce.

Hindutva paused

In sum, the 2024 general election revealed an economic anxiety powerful enough to pause Hindutva’s advance. But Hindutva remains positioned to resume its ascendancy. The voice of those feeling economic pain relied on fragile alliances that succeeded in patches, helped by the first-past-the-post system.

The election abjectly failed to generate new ideas about how to improve the lives of people. Paradoxically, this lack of ideas to expand the economic pie—common to the BJP and the INDIA bloc—persists because voters cannot enforce accountability.

To stay focussed on this crucial accountability issue, we must distinguish between the voter and the politician. To be sure, there are good reasons to celebrate Indian voters. They have cast their ballots in large numbers and with great wisdom since the first election as an untested democracy in 1951-52 and especially in the aftermath of the Emergency in 1977, when they voted out Indira Gandhi before she could establish herself as an elected autocrat. This time, too, voters sought a correction. But, over the years, increasing dysfunction in politics has weakened the voter’s ability to demand and effect change.

The real reason to despair about Indian democracy is not the voters but political leaders who have deviated from democratic norms for so long that deviance has become their norm. Hindutva, the outcome of a charismatic leader bolstered by a mob fighting the other as an enemy, deflects from long-term economic and social well-being. Similarly, the flood of money in politics shifts policy choices away from the interest of voters to those of the elite.

MPs with criminal credentials

But the single statistic that symbolises the degradation of Indian politics is the share of legislators charged with serious crimes, such as rape, murder, extortion, and kidnapping. That share has risen to 31 per cent in the latest Lok Sabha, up from 29 per cent in 2019, and from 14 per cent in 2009.

Political parties seek candidates with criminal credentials because they bring essential black money for election campaigns. Voters rely on these candidates for their use of muscle power to access services that the state keeps in short supply.

Among major winners, the SP gets the championship ring for being infused with criminally suspect elements, who form 46 per cent of the party’s 37 Lok Sabha members. The SP stands out, but such elements also form 32 per cent of the Congress’ contingent and 26 per cent of the BJP’s. In Modi’s 72-member Council of Ministers, 19, or 27 per cent, carry serious criminal charges. They will guide this nation’s future.

The increasing presence of criminal elements in politics is only the most visible manifestation of the exponentially increasing money needed to fight elections. Treating politics as business, each aspiring legislator spends x amount of rupees on campaigning in the hope of earning 2x to recoup the investment and fight another day. Private enrichment, not public service, is the goal.

Voters, recognising that they can expect little from the people they elect, have learned to be content with promises of reservation and ever-larger handouts, which keep them beholden to their benefactors rather than help them stand on their own feet and shake off the patron-client relationship. And thus Indian politics has reached an ideological equilibrium, shared by all political parties: boost GDP growth as a metric of success, which in practice means aid the rich and powerful in installing mega, capital-intensive projects with limited employment potential, while appeasing the mass of voters with handouts, promises of reservation, and vague visions of jobs and public goods.

Recall that inequality grew on steroids in the decade of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) rule between 2004 and 2014 despite that government’s efforts at social justice. Those were the years when Lamborghinis and yachts became the symbols of success. Modi pursued a cruder version of the UPA’s inequality-inducing policies. The inconvenient truth is that no Indian political party espouses a social democratic agenda that champions jobs and public goods. When stripped of the electoral chatter about unemployment and inflation, the core contest in the election was about whose handouts were bigger and more credible. The BJP touted “Modi ki guarantee” for poor households; for the middle class, the young, and senior citizens; and for every imaginable constituency; the Congress listed its own fiscally outrageous giveaways. We speak movingly of voters’ intelligence, yet we believe that the voter is fooled by these scandalous promises.

Caste and handouts

Together, caste politics and handouts were dodges to duck addressing the lack of dignified urban and industrial jobs, agricultural distress, abysmal education and public health, unliveable cities, an unconscionably growing backlog of judicial cases, unending air and water pollution, and the catastrophic interaction of pollution with heatwaves, rising sea levels, and other effects of climate change.

I asked my deceased father’s former driver why—although voter surveys emphasised deep concern about the lack of jobs—the election campaigning had little reference to job creation. Speaking with the wisdom of the street, he replied: “Bhaiya, berozgari ka hal to kisike paas nahin hai [No one has the solution for unemployment].” Or for education, or any of the other things that matter to the lived reality of people. And so, while people demand action, all political parties address questions of long-term development only with lofty rhetoric.

As we look into the crystal ball, of this we can be sure: the basic developmental model will remain unchanged in favour of big business. Signalling that continuity, India’s two biggest tycoons, Gautam Adani (with wife Priti) and Mukesh Ambani (with son Anant), were featured guests at Prime Minister Modi’s swearing-in ceremony. There they mingled with Bollywood stars in an orgy of power, money, and glamour.

To keep the coalition partners in good humour, especially Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, perhaps new favourite tycoons will join the chosen few. But we should not expect action on agrarian distress, jobs, and public goods. No party promised anything because no one has any ideas about how to address these deep-rooted and intractable problems. Instead, invocation of a magical technology wand to leap-frog development deficiencies will continue.

In place of development, handouts will also surely increase, and as Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s presence in the ruling coalition might require, caste-based reservation will gain greater prominence in the name of social justice. Thus, unable to grow the pie, the political leadership will seek ways of dividing it into finer slices. Political tribalism will increase.

Surely there are limits on how finely the pie can be divided before running into budget realities and the incongruities of reservation, as the unending Maratha agitation has already revealed. Meanwhile, as high-minded reservation transforms into unmanageable social disorder, working conditions for labour will deteriorate further, as foreshadowed in the abuse of contract labour in factories and even in educational institutions that represent the India brand.

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Not recognising the intellectual vacuum within which Indian politics and economic policy operate, many progressive commentators are disappointed that the INDIA grouping failed to gain a parliamentary majority and a claim to form the government. The alliance partners, however, should count themselves lucky that they did not win. They have no solution to India’s immediate economic problems or its long-standing development deficiencies. Better to let the BJP fester in the mess which, although a product of several past governments, it made worse.

Question marks over Indian democracy

Bigger question marks hang over the practice of Indian democracy. The aggressive Hindutva agenda, characterised by lynchings of Muslims and persecution of Hindutva dissenters, may pause, although recent reports are not encouraging. All political parties have adopted a soft-Hindutva stance; competition for Hinduness has become more common among political leaders, films have an increasing Hindutva tilt, and H-pop has made cultural inroads. The notion of India as a Hindu nation has seeped in very deep.

Despite two secular coalition partners, the Prime Minister has no Muslim in his Cabinet, signalling a continuing bias against Muslims. The other authoritarian tendency, the prosecution of political opponents and critics by the state’s investigative agencies, could slow down but again, as recent evidence suggests, is unlikely to stop. Sadly, with so much money and criminality in politics, a plausible case for corruption is possible against virtually anyone. Recall that, as with the elite-favouring model of economic development, draconian preventive detention and money laundering laws predate the Modi era, and no party campaigned to repeal them. Modi lost no time in making his intention clear. He would, he said, “strike hard at corruption”. Translation: he will use the state’s coercive power against political adversaries.

As for suppression of critics, within days of the new government assuming power, the writer and activist Arundhati Roy was charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for a 2010 statement that Kashmir was not an integral part of India. Claiming sovereignty over Kashmir is always a politically winning rallying cry. Reacting to Roy’s prosecution, an editorial on the Article 14 website despairingly concluded: “What felt like a new morning for democracy after the general election was a false dawn.”

That despair is understandable. It applies not just to the state’s misuse of its coercive power but also to the economic model we can realistically expect and to the influence of Hindutva in politics and social relations. That said, the first-past-the-post electoral system having given the opposition deserved breaks, a dawn might yet break. We might look back at this election and celebrate it as the welcome early sign of a turnaround in Indian democracy and the start of a more inclusive economic strategy.

But in harbouring such hope, we must remember that the pervasive degradation of politics is hard to reverse. If everyone around behaves deviantly, doing otherwise threatens survival. We can expect a more fractious public arena with high drama, but we should not interpret the drama as indicating a healthy democracy. People’s lives could well get worse as the problems of the past accumulate.

Ashoka Mody recently retired from Princeton University. He previously worked for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today (2023).