Resurgent Modi paves way to keep power in India well beyond 2030

NEW DELHI – In India’s sweltering summer of 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stumble in a national election signalled that his decade-long rule might be coming to an end. Now, he appears poised to keep power well into the next decade.

Mr Modi’s breakthrough victory last week in a West Bengal election, as well as losses for incumbents in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, left his opponents in tatters and extended the reach of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) beyond its northern strongholds.

A Bloomberg analysis of voting patterns shows Mr Modi, 75, is seeing success with a playbook aimed at restoring the BJP’s parliamentary majority during a national vote due by mid-2029, which would position him to become India’s longest-serving leader.

“Three years is a long time, but I think that the BJP is simply in a very strong position now to go into those elections as the heavy favourite to win a fourth term,” said Mr Michael Kugelman, resident senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “This is one of Modi’s biggest political wins in quite some time.”

Since taking office in 2014, Mr Modi has expanded his grip on power in part due to his efforts to consolidate the votes of Hindus, who make up about 80 per cent of India’s population but have traditionally been split along caste and regional lines.

That trend appeared to reverse in the 2024 national election, which saw Mr Modi lose his single-party majority as the opposition, including caste-based parties, roared back in Hindu-dominant areas.

But last week’s state election results showed that his bigger vision of uniting the Hindu vote still remains broadly on track.

Mr Modi has successfully reframed the BJP’s campaign around religious identity, national security and welfare delivery while portraying his opponents as “minority appeasers”. That message has been amplified by an ongoing purge of voter lists, an exercise that critics say targets the poor and Muslims.

With his party or allies in command of two-thirds of India’s states, Mr Modi now has momentum to push for more business-friendly economic policies while also advancing key planks of the Hindu right: removing special rights for Muslims and other minorities, expanding Parliament in a move that may give the Hindi-speaking northern states more influence, and boosting federal power by holding national and state elections at the same time.

“The results show a strong consolidation of the Hindu votes both in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu,” said Mr Sudhanshu Mittal, a national spokesman for Mr Modi’s party. “The BJP will naturally look to expand in southern India after having complete dominance in the western, northern and now eastern part of the country.”

While India does not release voter data based on religion, a Bloomberg analysis of constituency results shows the BJP is steadily fortifying its hold over voting districts with higher Hindu populations in West Bengal, accelerating a trend first seen in a 2021 state election.

At the same time, the analysis shows constituencies with larger Muslim populations saw votes spread across multiple candidates, preventing any single opposition party from emerging as the main alternative.

The results add to evidence that Mr Modi’s worse-than-expected performance in 2024 has only galvanised the BJP. Since then, the party wrested power in the economic engines of Maharashtra, Haryana and the capital region of Delhi, which voted the BJP into office for the first time in two decades.

Liberal democracy ‘under threat’

Mr Modi staked his personal prestige in the West Bengal election, spearheading an aggressive campaign against incumbent state leader Ms Mamata Banerjee.

She ruled for 15 years and was seen as one of the few opposition leaders capable of uniting disparate parties against him at the national level, which is typically the only way they can prevent the BJP from forming a government.

Mr Modi’s party has also been successful at exploiting ideological differences of opposition parties.

Just two weeks before the West Bengal vote, the Election Commission removed about 9 million names – nearly 12 per cent of the electorate – from voter rolls in the state, saying the exercise was aimed at weeding out duplicate entries and illegal migrants.

Opposition groups alleged the process disproportionately targeted poor and Muslim voters, tilting the election in the favour of the BJP.

“Liberal democracy is under threat,” said Mr Kapil Sibal, an independent lawmaker in the Upper House who was a minister in a previous Congress-led government. “What is even more disturbing is that there isn’t an immediate solution to this.”

Mr Modi served as the star campaigner in West Bengal, criticising Ms Banerjee’s government for being soft on illegal migration, favouring minorities over the Hindu majority and failing to tackle corruption.

He made appeals to women voters and unemployed young people with promises of jobs, higher cash handouts and better law and order.

Bloomberg’s analysis of voter trends pointed to a growing, seat-level polarisation in West Bengal, where the BJP went from winning only three seats a decade ago to 207 last week, giving it a two-thirds majority in the state assembly.

The analysis found that the BJP’s gains were not evenly spread across the state, but rather clustered in majority-Hindu constituencies where it was already relatively strong.

The Bloomberg analysis is based on constituency-level trends, not how individuals voted, and relies on research by Professor Raphael Cohen Susewind, who specialises in qualitative methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

His work uses names from West Bengal’s electoral rolls to estimate the likely religious makeup of each constituency, and the results are best understood as a proxy in the absence of a recent census.

The BJP’s victory immediately provides Mr Modi some flexibility in handling the economy as rising oil prices due to the war in Iran start to stoke inflation. Mr Modi on May 10 appealed to citizens to cut fuel use and avoid unnecessary travel in a bid to avoid straining foreign-exchange reserves.

The victory also gives him momentum to revive politically sensitive economic reforms aimed at attracting more manufacturers such as Apple, part of his efforts to turn India into a developed nation by 2047.

Although Mr Modi’s government has recently simplified the national sales tax, eased labour rules and opened more sectors to foreign investors, “a lot more still needs to be done”, according to Ms Sonal Varma, an economist with Nomura Holdings.

That includes improving the competitiveness of manufacturers, clarifying rules on land acquisition and retraining workers displaced by AI.

“The uncertain and volatile global environment has increased the urgency for India to strengthen its domestic economic defences through reforms,” she said. “With the next general elections due by May 2029, the window to implement some of the tougher reforms is the next 18 months, before political considerations begin to dominate the agenda.”

Not all is lost

For now, Mr Modi lacks the votes in India’s bicameral Parliament to make more sweeping changes. His government failed in April to push through a constitutional amendment on giving women more seats in Parliament, while the opposition has stalled a proposal to synchronise federal and state elections.

Still, the victory may give Mr Modi confidence to pursue long-pending ideological initiatives, particularly at the state level.

Chief among them is a uniform civil code for marriage, divorce, adoption and inheritance, which are now governed by multiple religious and customary laws. The move is opposed by minority groups, including tribals and Muslims.

Not all is lost for the opposition.

Elections in 2027 in Gujarat, Punjab, Goa and Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state – provide a fresh opportunity to regain momentum ahead of the 2029 national election.

The previous one in 2024 showed that Indian voters can shift quickly even after handing Mr Modi victories in state elections, including in traditional BJP strongholds, which scuttled Mr Modi’s predictions of a two-thirds majority in Parliament and instead forced him to rely on coalition partners for the first time.

But with the opposition further weakened, long-time political observers such as Mr Sandeep Shastri see Mr Modi’s biggest threat coming from within his own party. He likened it to the Congress party’s dominance of Indian politics in the 1960s and 1970s, when various competing factions emerged from within the organisation.

“A similar trend is likely to be seen within the BJP also,” said Mr Shastri, vice-president of the Bangalore campus of Nitte Education Trust, who has written several books about Indian politics.

Even India’s opposition parties are not optimistic they will pose a challenge to Mr Modi anytime soon.

Mr Hannan Mollah, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who has been elected as a lawmaker from West Bengal to the national Parliament eight times, said he does not see anyone unseating the BJP for at least a decade.

“The opposition hasn’t been able to get its act together and continues to be fragmented,” Mr Mollah said. “As long as the opposition cannot find common ground, I don’t see a credible opposition to BJP or Modi at hand.” BLOOMBERG