Political battle to succeed Modi brews quietly in India

TOKYO — In the upcoming general elections in India, set to begin in April, a third consecutive victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 73, appears to be a safe bet.

If the BJP wins the election and allows Modi to stay in office, he will reach the party’s stipulated retirement age of 75 in September 2025, halfway through his third term.

Due to Modi’s dominant political power within and outside the party, there has been little open debate on who should be his successor, but various speculations and predictions have begun to emerge.

The BJP has an internal rule preventing politicians over the age of 75 from being nominated for elections and from holding party or government positions.

In the past, veteran politicians such as Jaswant Singh, a former finance and foreign minister, retired at 76. B.S. Yediyurappa, a former chief minister of Karnataka, a state in southern parts of India, stepped down from the frontline at 78, although he remains an exceptional member of the party’s highest decision-making body, the Parliamentary Board, at 81, due to his influence as the leader of a major caste group in a region important to the BJP.

According to media reports, local researchers and political analysts, there are two leading candidates to succeed Modi: Home Minister Amit Shah, 59, Modi’s closest confidant for over 40 years since their time in Gujarat; and Yogi Adityanath, 51, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the largest state with a population of over 200 million, and a cleric of Hinduism.

Other potential successors include Nitin Gadkari, 66, the minister of road transport and highways and former BJP president known for his policy expertise; and Devendra Fadnavis, 53, a former chief minister of Maharashtra, a western state and home to Mumbai, the throbbing financial and commercial center, as its capital.

India’s Home Minister Amit Shah, 59, has been Modi’s closest confidant for over 40 years. (India’s Ministry of Home Affairs)

Amit Shah, from Gujarat like Modi, is effectively the second in command in the Modi administration. Like Modi, Shah began his political career as an activist for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s ideological fountainhead and the premier support group, and led the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a right-wing all India student organization affiliated with the RSS. He met Modi in the 1980s, establishing a mentor-mentee relationship that has lasted for over 40 years.

In the 1990s, Shah worked with Modi to expand the BJP’s influence in Gujarat, breaking the rival Congress party’s support base by inducting many local magnates into the BJP. When Modi became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, Shah joined the state government the following year to support the administration.

Shah has especially excelled as an election strategist, leading the BJP to victory in the 2014 general election and becoming the architect of the Modi administration. He also mapped out effective strategies for elections of state legislative assemblies in various parts of India that were tailored to the local economic and caste-related situations.

First as party president and then, since 2019, as home minister, who is responsible for the public security and police systems, Shah has overseen some radical and controversial measures to promote the administration’s Hindu nationalist agenda. In compliance with Modi’s intentions, he has taken such hardline anti-Muslim steps as a citizenship amendment law that excludes Muslims and revoking special autonomous status for the state of Jammu and Kashmir to bring India’s only Muslim-majority region directly under the control of the central government.

While Shah has demonstrated his ability to maintain law and order from his time in Gujarat, he took on jobs behind the scenes. When he worked for the Gujarat state government, he reportedly cracked down brutally on organized crime, creating the impression that he might have a darker side.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, listens as Yogi Adityanath, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, explains the developmental plan of the city in Ayodhya, India, on Dec. 30, 2023. (AP)

Emerging as a prominent Hindu cleric in Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath was first elected to the lower house of the state’s legislature in 1998 at the young age of 26. In 2017, Modi handpicked him as the chief minister of the state.

Uttar Pradesh, which is often described as a microcosm of Indian society because it embodies many of the diverse cultural, religious and social elements that are found across India, including minority Muslims and discriminated castes, had never before seen a government win consecutive state assembly elections due to strong anti-incumbency sentiments.

However, Adityanath broke this jinx by winning the 2022 state assembly elections in his bid for re-election.

He made significant achievements in improving the state’s law and order with his uncompromising stance against organized crime, although his government’s hardline police enforcement has attracted criticism from the opposition.

Before becoming the state’s chief minister, he was a staunch opponent of the sale of beef, as cows are considered sacred in Hinduism. He has harshly criticized marriages between Muslim men and Hindu women as attempts by Muslims to convert their spouses, labeling it “Love Jihad.”

In 2022, he referred to Muslims as “followers of Jinnah,” sparking widespread controversy. The phrase is a reference to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a British-ruled Indian Muslim political leader and the founder of Pakistan.

He has promoted a project to construct a grand Hindu temple dedicated to the deity Ram on the site of a mosque in Ayodhya, which was demolished by Hindu hardliners. This project, completed in February this year, has the strong backing of the RSS due to its religious significance, and Adityanath enjoys overwhelming popular support locally.

Although he may appear stern, Adityanath has achieved significant success in attracting investment to the state and developing industrial infrastructure, earning high praise from Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, a sprawling conglomerate with interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom, retail and financial services. However, he lacks federal-level political experience and is a complete unknown in matters of foreign policy and international issues.

India’s Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, once served as BJP president. (India’s Press Information Bureau)

Nitin Gadkari, the minister of road transport, may seem unassuming, but he has demonstrated high policy-making capability, leading the work to draft the BJP’s manifesto for the 2019 general elections. Like Shah, he is a former leader of ABVP and has served as a minister in Maharashtra, his home state, and as the president of the BJP’s state branch from 2009 to 2013.

Besides his political career, he is known as a business owner involved in sugar, paper and furniture manufacturing. He was once embroiled in a scandal over alleged impropriety in companies run by his relatives and forced to resign as BJP president.

In his role overseeing the development of highway networks, he vigorously accelerated projects, achieving the construction of 10,000 kilometers of national highways annually before the COVID-19 pandemic.

He was rated “the best-performing minister” in a 2022 poll by the leading magazine India Today. An Indian political scientist commented, “Gadkari, of course, is watching for a chance to take the post of prime minister, but he is hiding his ambition and keeping low-key for a long time.”

In a major setback for him, however, he was dropped from the BJP’s Parliamentary Board in the summer of 2022, perhaps due to Modi’s wariness.

In a public opinion poll by India Today in February, Amit Shah led as the preferred successor to Modi with 29% support, followed by Adityanath at 25% and Gadkari at 16%.

Devendra Fadnavis is a former chief minister of Maharashtra, a western state whose capital is Mumbai. (Government of Maharashtra)

Devendra Fadnavis, serving as deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, became the state’s chief minister at 44 in 2014, emerging as a young, up-and-coming politician of the BJP. Although he enjoyed Modi’s trust, his failure to secure a majority in the 2019 state elections temporarily resulted in the state government being taken over by a coalition of the rival National Congress Party and the regional party Shiv Sena.

In the Indian political arena, crowded with elites such as political dynasties, lawyers and business owners, Modi stands out as an unusual self-made figure without a powerful backing.

Amidst this, the retirement of party elder Lal Krishna Advani, former deputy prime minister, and the successive deaths of Arun Jaitley, a prominent controversialist and former finance minister, and Sushma Swaraj, a leading female politician and former external affairs minister, have worked in favor of Modi.

A former lower house in the parliament member from Indian National Congress said, “it was lucky for Modi that rivals disappeared one after another in early time.”

Modi has installed Rajnath Singh, a 72-year-old party doyen, as the minister of defense, but the majority of key ministers now belong to the “Modi faction,” solidifying his power base within the party.

Surrounding himself with bureaucrats who share his vision and centralizing authority in the Prime Minister’s Office, Modi holds an unassailable position in leadership. It is hard to imagine him readily handing over power at the “retirement” age.

The BJP’s “75-year retirement” rule is not formally documented, and its application largely depends on Modi’s own will. If Modi were to serve as prime minister for full three terms, totaling 15 years until 2029, he would have the longest tenure after Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister who served for 16 years and 9 months, and his daughter, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who held the top post for a total of about 15 years and 350 days.

In his speech on Independence Day last August, Modi boldly declared, “I assure you that in the coming five years, Modi guarantees that the country will be among the top three world economies; it certainly will be.”

The discussion of his successor may become more concrete after he witnesses the fulfillment of this goal.

source : asia.nikkei