Since India booted out the British in 1947, the country’s elections have been one of the democratic world’s great marvels.
Any election in a large country poses logistical challenges — just look at some of the lines at polling places in the US. Those challenges were multiplied a hundred-fold in a post-colonial country full of villages without electricity or running water. Yet India’s nonpartisan Election Commission has somehow managed to run consistently well-regarded contests for decades.
The 2024 election has been a lengthy process. Voting began on April 19 and has proceeded in seven stages until a conclusion on June 1. Results are expected just three days later, on June 4.
India has a parliamentary political system: control of the prime minister’s office is determined by majority vote in the Lok Sabha, the legislature’s lower house. This means that, outside of Modi’s own constituency in the northern city of Varanasi, Indian voters aren’t directly casting ballots for him. Instead, they’re voting for the local members of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or its many rivals.
But there’s no doubt that the prime minister is taking center stage in this contest. He’s running for a third term, which is exceptionally rare in Indian politics. Only two other prime ministers — Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the most influential leaders in India’s post-independence history — have won three separate elections.
There’s reason to believe that Modi belongs on that “most influential” list, for better or (more likely) for worse. Since first taking office in 2014, he has aimed to transform the very identity of the Indian state. He has already made a lot of headway.
Post-independence India is a formally secular state. Nehru and India’s other founding leaders, like the jurist B.R. Ambedkar, believed that such a complex and diverse society — India has 22 official languages and multiple religions — could not survive on sectarian lines.
Even before independence, however, a counter-movement called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) took the opposite position: that India is a state for Hindus, with Muslims and other religious minorities positioned as interlopers (or worse). The BJP is the electoral wing of the RSS; Modi has been a member of the RSS since he was eight years old.
The principal goal of Modi’s time in office has been turning RSS ideology, called Hindutva, into the ruling doctrine of the Indian government. He has been remarkably successful: Longstanding Hindutva goals, once seen as unlikely extremist dreams, have become reality. Examples include passing a citizenship law that discriminates against Muslims and revoking the self-determination rights of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.
To ensure nothing can stand in the way, Modi has taken a sledgehammer to Indian democracy. His government has jailed opposition political leaders, helped friendly oligarchs consolidate control over the press, intimidated the courts, repressed protests, twisted election law, and undermined the independence of the Election Commission. His government’s repression has gone international: In a recent piece, I revealed the existence of an extensive campaign to threaten American critics of Modi’s human rights record into silence.
There’s every indication Modi’s crackdown on both democracy and minority rights will continue if the BJP triumphs in this election. Which means the stakes basically couldn’t be higher.
