Indian leader’s win breaks records
NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi scored an overwhelming reelection victory Thursday, winning a second five-year mandate while fighting off concerns about rising unemployment and his divisive Hindu nationalist policies.
Results released by India’s Election Commission late Thursday showed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party winning in more than 300 of 542 parliamentary races and parties allied with the BJP leading in dozens more, with some votes still to be counted. A total of 272 seats are needed to secure a majority and select the prime minister.
That tally, if confirmed, would represent one of the biggest landslides in Indian history, besting the absolute majority that the BJP won five years ago and surpassing even the most optimistic projections of many of Modi’s partisans.
The result showed that Modi’s naked appeals to patriotism and his party’s frequent scapegoating of minorities, especially Muslims, resonated with Indians who believe that he has made Hindu-majority India stronger and safer.
His message gained momentum after a terrorist attack against Indian forces in February triggered a brief military skirmish with rival Pakistan and raised the specter of an all-out war.
“This election was fought not by politicians but by the people of this country — and it’s the people of this country who have emerged victorious,” Modi told a raucous rally at BJP headquarters in New Delhi, where supporters braved a driving rainstorm to sing and dance in the streets.
Modi’s chief opposition, the Indian National Congress, was on track to win barely 50 seats, the second consecutive dismal showing in a national election for what was once India’s most powerful political party.
The opposition’s disarray stood in stark contrast to the BJP’s massive fundraising advantage and the larger-thanlife persona of the 68-year-old Modi, the most popular Indian leader in decades.
Led by Modi’s chief political strategist, BJP President Amit Shah, the party waged what many critics described as a campaign of fear. Modi and other party leaders frequently portrayed the political opposition as being in league with Muslim majority Pakistan, and called on voters to honor soldiers who died in the February attack by supporting the BJP.
“Modi and Amit Shah ran perhaps the most polarizing campaign in Indian history, an acknowledgement that they didn’t think their policy record was adequate,” said Irfan Nooruddin, director of the Georgetown India Initiative at Georgetown University.
Their tactics “showed a willingness to pander to the most extreme elements of the Hindu right wing,” Nooruddin said. “A big win this week will be interpreted as vindication of this strategy, and, minimally, that there was no cost to the polarization caused over the past five years.”
Exit polls released this week had indicated that Modi would win comfortably in what has been described as the largest democratic exercise ever held, with 900 million eligible voters.
But few expected the BJP to do better than they did when Modi stormed to power in 2014, when the once moribund party won 282 seats out of 543, a rare single-party majority in a vast, fractious country most often ruled by coalition governments.
Modi’s second five-year term “will be the age of the BJP’s expansion,” Shah said.