That the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) politics and larger worldview is antithetical to the constitutional framework of the Indian republic is a charge often made by its rivals. That it is consistently undermining the institutional guardrails of maintaining democratic sanctity is another such.
Opposition parties cite the religion-based discrimination in conferring retrospective citizenship rights via the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as an example of the former. And they claim the Election Commission of India’s blatant singling out of West Bengal, and its Muslim majority districts, to put millions of voters, under a unique “logical inconsistency” based adjudication under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) which can disenfranchise temporarily, even if not permanently, is evidence of the later.
The government, while denying these, usually resorts to pointing out that things have been bad in the past too. The Emergency often comes up.
The point, as much as the political voices want people to do, is not to equivocate. It is to ask a larger question. Is there something unique about the current moment?
If one accepts the government’s assurances on southern states not losing their share in parliamentary seats, then the only difference on the ongoing debate in the parliament is limited clubbing women’s reservation with intra-state delimitation or gerrymandering. How is this linked to the question posed in the preceding paragraph? Here is a plausible explanation.
The BJP’s 2014 victory under Narendra Modi was historical not just in terms of a first non-Congress party winning a majority but also its aspirational nature. Modi’s 2014 campaign rhetoric was based on a non-zero-sum appeal where the nature of governance, and not larger political economy constraints, was the only reason India was not being able to realise its economic potential.
By 2019, this narrative had run into rough weather. The BJP entered the Lok Sabha campaign with losses in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and just a narrow victory in its biggest bastion, Gujarat. The headwinds were primarily rooted in growing distress in the rural economy. The Modi government drew the right lessons. It announced retrospective cash transfer for farmers in the pre-election budget. Coupled with tailwinds from national security front, all this culminated in an even bigger victory than 2014.
Modi’s second term, however, ran out of luck on the exogenous shock front. A once-in-a-century pandemic in 2020 and a war in Europe, just after the worst of the pandemic was over, took its toll on the Indian economy. The government had to pre-play its fiscal hand to avoid absolute destitution and was in consolidation mode by the time 2024 elections came. Buoyed by its state election victories, the Modi government erred in reading the latent sentiment. It did not do anything special in the pre-election budget. The BJP slipped below the halfway mark in the Lok Sabha and the Congress managed to just about reach triple digits.
Since 2024, all state elections have been based on a common feature — the give cash transfer and take vote model of electoral bargain – along with other state specific socio-religious issues.
This creates a problem for the government ahead of 2029. The state-level fiscal burden of this populist bargain is already threatening to overwhelm India’s debt management. There is no way the Centre can afford something of this kind at the all-India level in 2029.
Economic conditions, on the other hand, seem to be headed into a perfect storm where everything from AI disruption, energy shocks and the US’s behaviour will continuously administer a stress test to the Indian economy, especially its more exposed parts.
Personal attribution for material benefits delivered to the electorate – as seen in the proliferation of schemes prefixed with Pradhan Mantri – has been the proverbial oxygen for the current regime. More and more attribution which matters is now being diverted to chief ministers. The central government has the unenviable task of taking attribution for bad things, such as the fuel price hike which will likely follow the current election cycle.
What can the government do to carve out a narrative ahead of 2029 in such circumstances? Recent events, especially the ongoing legislative agenda, need to be seen under the backdrop of this larger question.
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By preponing the rollout of women’s reservation to 2029, the government, especially the Prime Minister, is hoping to compensate for lack of material attribution with metaphysical attribution for women’s reservation. By clubbing this bill with delimitation (and possible gerrymandering) and leaving assurances of keeping the parliamentary share of southern share’s intact outside the text, the government is hoping to make the rollout of women’s reservation not a bipartisan but a partisan achievement. The bills have been brought in a way that they can be opposed or supported together.
This may be cynical politics, but not really a first in India. Remember the Congress’s attacks on the communists during UPA I? Where opposing the Congress over the Indo-US nuclear deal was portrayed as supporting the BJP against the Congress?
As far as delimitation is concerned, there is no reason to believe that gerrymandering will not be attempted. Statements by the Assam Chief Minister during 2023 delimitation in the state, the SIR experience in West Bengal etc. all add credibility to such fears, but then, once again, it might not be the first gerrymandering in India.
While it is impossible to do a complete analysis of qualitative attributes of constituencies during previous delimitation exercises – we do not have caste-religion breakdown of electoral rolls – a quantitative analysis does suggest wide intra-state differences between constituencies. Also, delimitation is not the only ploy to game the first-past-the-post system in a polity divided on ethnic and caste lines. Multiple caste-based coalitions have targeted similar ends in the past. The fragmented nature of our polity has had many governments enjoy power with much lower vote shares than the BJP or many non-BJP governments have today in states.
It also needs to be underlined that some of the opposition’s attempts to counter the BJP’s political appeal rests, not on political universalism but resurrecting other fault lines.
What else explains completely unjustified demands of reserving seats for OBCs or Muslim women while rolling out women’s reservation while no such provision exists for these communities as a whole. Claims about the government rolling out women’s reservation early before a caste census is conducted are equally bogus. The 2011 census has data for SC-ST population, the only social groups which are constitutionally entitled to have reservations in the legislature.
What we have right now in the name of a democratic debate in India are competing strategies to carve out social coalitions – some Hindu-Muslim, some upper caste-lower caste – with an absolute agreement, at least on the intent side, on the economic strategy. The latter is going on raising the dosage of economic palliatives for an economy which is mired in deep inequalities and faced with increasingly turbulent external conditions. Intent notwithstanding, there are limits to which this economic palliative game can be played without compromising the fiscal parameters of the economy and retaining the political finance services of big capital.
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It is this growing imbalance between requirement and ability for economic palliatives which has increased the regime’s temptation for attempting a maneuver to usurp metaphysical attributions (in women’s reservation) and optimizing social cleavages in political support to exploit the first-past-the-post system to the hilt by a possible gerrymandering in the name of delimitation.
One can be an alarmist vis-à-vis the ongoing developments and call it destruction of democracy. This writer sees it more as a desperate attempt to front the social against the economic in politics.
“Views expressed are personal”
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