During his election campaign, the Indian prime minister, re-elected in June, had announced an action plan for the first 100 days of his third term. The deadline arrived on Tuesday, September 17, with poor results. Narendra Modi, 74, is no longer the leader who reigned unchallenged for 10 years over the world’s most populous country.
Although Modi has made numerous trips abroad – to Italy, Russia, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Brunei and Singapore – the intensity of his diplomatic activity has not matched his commitment at home. The past three months have been marked by political weakness and relative inertia.
The first parliamentary session, which ended in mid-August, showed the narrow margins for the action of a government with no majority of its own, obliged to form an alliance with two fickle regional leaders, the “chief ministers” of the states of Bihar (north) and Andhra Pradesh (south). On three occasions, he had to abandon projects. The three texts, drafted without consultation, were aimed at Muslims, underprivileged castes and the independent media, his usual targets. His allies did not follow suit, anxious not to alienate the Muslim community and the lower castes.
On the defensive
The parliamentary landscape has changed radically, with a stronger opposition putting the executive on the defensive. “These U-turns show that Modi’s political authority has been undermined,” said political scientist Asim Ali. “He has not been able to impose a consensual program that could bring the population together, which partly reflects the limited nature of his leadership skills.”
The only major reforms mentioned by the prime minister in his annual Independence Day speech on August 15 – the introduction of a uniform civil code and reform of the electoral calendar to combine general elections for the lower house and regional polls in 28 states on the same day – are unlikely to see the light of day: Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) does not have a qualified majority. The days of the second mandate (2019-2024) seem long forgotten, when the all-powerful prime minister unexpectedly decided to abolish Article 370 of the constitution, giving semi-autonomy to Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region disputed since partition between India and Pakistan, and perpetually subject to internal unrest.
Urgent projects – such as the decennial population census, an essential tool for determining the real state of the country and adjusting redistribution programs, which should have been started in 2021 – have still not begun. In early September, the 14-member Standing Committee on Statistics, headed by the eminent economist Pronab Sen, expressed concern about the delay and the impact of the lack of recent data on its work. In response, the government decided to dissolve the body abruptly.
For Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political scientist and former director of Ashoka University, “the prime minister is giving a sense of being in a total funk – unable to diagnose the reasons for his defeat and unable to chart a new course.” According to the Indian Express columnist, the prime minister has lost the ability to control the situation. “For the first time in his political career,” he wrote, “the ability to intuit popular sentiment has disappeared and he seems like a broken record, living on the power of his past slogans that have outlived their freshness and usefulness.” The government has, however, prepared a reply to its detractors, by circulating a list of projects and social aid programs, to be decided on within the next 100 days, including road projects, rail links and aid for farmers.
Youth despair
According to the International Labor Organization, unemployment predominantly affects young Indians, with 83% of the unemployed under the age of 34. Such is the desperation of young people that they are willing to apply for under-qualified government jobs. The government of Haryana, for example, received 395,000 applications for contract sweeper jobs paying 15,000 rupees (€161) a month. Of these applicants, 6,112 were post-graduates, 39,990 post-graduates and 117,144 had studied up to the end of secondary school.
The budget adopted at the end of July is supposed to support youth employment and the acquisition of skills, India’s major pitfall. But much greater efforts will be needed to give young people reasons not to leave the country.
Even the most prestigious institution, Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology, was only able to place 75% of its class of 2024. “Unemployment is a ticking time bomb, and the Modi government has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to defuse it since June 9,” accused Palaniappan Chidambaram, Congress MP and former economy minister.
The rift between Modi and his original political family, the powerful far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is becoming increasingly obvious. RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat once again mocked the prime minister, without naming him, who had declared himself God’s messenger during the campaign. “Through one’s work, anyone can become a revered figure. But it is others, not ourselves, who will determine whether we have reached that level. We must not proclaim that we have become gods.”
During the election campaign, Bhagwat had already criticized Modi’s arrogance and his inability to bring peace to the state of Manipur, which has been plagued by inter-ethnic conflict for the past 17 months. “The RSS’s public distancing has clipped his wings,” said Asim Ali.
Brutalization of the public sphere
Over the past three months, Modi’s weakening has been combined with a brutalization of the public sphere. In the BJP-ruled states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Assam, heads of government have launched a campaign of Islamophobic one-upmanship. Mosques and houses bulldozed, stigmatizing legislation… the Muslim community is clearly designated as the enemy of society.
In these regions, hate crimes have increased in recent weeks, committed in particular by “cow protection” brigades. A young Bengali worker was beaten to death in Haryana; near Mumbai, an old man, a 72-year-old Muslim, was beaten up on a train. Each time, the same rumors were spread, and the victims were accused of eating or trading beef.
“The escalating official violence and rhetoric against Muslims may come as a surprise since Modi 3.0 is struggling with coalition and a loss of absolute control. But that may precisely be the problem”, said Samar Halarnkar, one of the founders of the independent news website Article 14. “Allowing his chief ministers [in BJP-ruled states] to continue business as usual when it comes to physical and verbal abuse of Muslims is not just a signal of defiance but a signal to his core constituency that their desire to subjugate Muslims has not been forgotten.”
source : lemonde