What Modi Can Learn From Indira, Rajiv, And Vajpayee’s Defeats

This is an excerpt of Ruchir Sharma’s ‘Democracy on the Road’.

India became a democracy when it was still very poor, and perhaps more than the rich, the poor cherish the vote as a great leveller, their memo to the powerful reminding them who calls the shots. We have often heard this undertone of Schadenfreude from Indian voters, relishing the moment the powerful incumbent will fall. Even if many toppled leaders stage a comeback, the fall is a chastening experience. Indian political power is hard won and fleeting.

For some political analysts, there is something inherently dysfunctional in the way Indian voters keep flipping governments. In many states, dozens of parties compete in the elections and the winner often needs only about a third of the vote to take a majority of the seats. Falling short of that, they find themselves scrambling for allies to help form a government.

But minority governments, built on compromises among rival parties, are not a special problem of Indian democracy. They are a standard feature of parliamentary democracy, particularly in countries that were formed by merging autonomous principalities into a unified state—as India was. A multiparty parliamentary democracy can produce serial political and economic crises, as it has in Italy, but also long-term success, as it has in Germany.

The economy limped along at the so-called ‘Hindu rate of growth’ under mostly strong Congress governments until the 1980s, then started to reform and pick up speed under the weak coalition governments that followed. India’s complex polity may make it impossible for any single leader to mobilize the entire country behind aggressive economic reform and double-digit growth, the way China has. But states from Bihar to Gujarat have achieved this feat, and more will. Together they are likely to keep the economy developing at a respectable if sub-miracle pace.

India has so many parties because it has so many different communities, separated by caste, religion, tribe or language and each one wants its own representative. This is a fitting arrangement for a democracy encompassing the ‘Many Indias’. While in some opinion polls Indians express a growing desire for a strong leader, unshackled from an often gridlocked parliament, the electoral reality is that the country rebels against domineering political bosses.

Ever since Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency, and fell in the backlash, no prime minister has been able to gain political momentum without triggering fears that they were growing dangerously strong, and inspiring the fragmented opposition parties to unite.

Supporters praise Modi for raising India’s stature in the world. But more than once we have seen Indian leaders—from Manmohan Singh to Chandrababu Naidu—lionized by the global elite from Mumbai to New York, only to be thrown out by Indian voters who care more about the government’s impact on their daily lives than about such cosmic concerns as India’s image in the world.

The more time you spend outside cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the better your chances of understanding how India really functions. We got the 2003 election wrong in Rajasthan because we didn’t get out of the big cities; if you miss the rural campaign you are likely to miss the story entirely.

Impressions gleaned on the road are inherently skewed by the route you choose, the voters you happen to meet, and the much larger pool of people and places you miss. We are now well aware of that, so we have tried to make sure we follow a carefully researched route through the most important swing constituencies, and the most important states. On our twenty-seven election trips to date we have typically covered between 1,000 and 1,500 kilometres over about five days.

In total we have driven a distance nearly equal to a lap around Earth. We have been to more than half of India’s twenty-nine states and to the ten most populous and politically important ones more than once.

Voters in all these states express impatience with the pace of progress, and anger at the unresponsive bureaucracy, but not all take it out on politicians with the same intensity.

Alongside these hotbeds of anti-incumbency are states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, which have been less hostile to seated leaders. At the far end of the spectrum lie Gujarat and especially West Bengal, which have given their chief ministers and ruling parties extended runs in the halls of power.

Excerpted with permission from Ruchir Sharma’s ‘Democracy on the Road’ published by Penguin India.

Ruchir Sharma is the author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Nations’ and ‘Breakout Nations’.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.