By Nagesh Bhushan
A governing strategy built on polarization is winning elections while quietly corroding the institutions it needs to deliver on its promises
When Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power
in 2014 with a parliamentary majority no single party had achieved in three
decades, its strategists believed they had discovered something durable: a
coalition assembled not around shared material interests but around a shared
identity that could transcend caste, class and regional loyalty. The strategy
worked, emphatically, in 2019. In 2024 it produced something rather different —
a governing coalition dependent on regional partners for its majority, facing
an opposition that had not been buried as intended. The BJP still won. But the
nature of that win revealed the limits of the playbook.
Those limits are not primarily electoral. India's politics
may yet produce another landslide. The more serious question is what a decade
of polarisation as governing strategy has done to the institutions whose health
is a precondition for India realising the ambitions its leaders so frequently
articulate. The answer, across several domains, is not comfortable.
BJP in numbers
Lok Sabha seats, 2019
303
Lok Sabha seats, 2024
240
Majority threshold 272
Press freedom rank, 2014
140th
Press freedom rank, 2024
159th
Youth unemployment rate ~45%
The arithmetic of attrition
The 2024 result was the first empirical signal that the
mobilisation model had reached a ceiling. Falling from 303 seats to 240 — 32
below a majority — meant that the Telugu Desam Party and Janata Dal (United)
acquired leverage they had not possessed since 2014. A coalition government
that must manage partners cannot govern the same way as one with an outright
majority. Controversial economic reforms that carry short-term pain, judicial
appointments that require insulation from political pressure, foreign policy
manoeuvres that demand bipartisan cover — all become harder when the governing
party's survival depends on partners with their own constituencies and demands.
More revealing than the seat count was the regional pattern.
The BJP lost ground in Uttar Pradesh, its most important state, where the
Samajwadi Party ran on a caste-arithmetic platform that cut through the
Hindu-nationalist offer. Younger voters, who entered adulthood during
demonetisation, a poorly implemented goods and services tax, a catastrophically
managed second covid wave and stubbornly high youth unemployment, proved less
susceptible to cultural mobilisation than their predecessors. The party's own
internal analyses, according to those familiar with them, acknowledged that
economic anxiety had begun to compete with identity politics in ways it had not
before 2020.
"A state that provides security reliably to some
communities but not others is not a strong state. It is a partial one."
The institutional cost
The BJP's apologists argue that it has strengthened India —
built infrastructure, expanded welfare delivery, projected national confidence
on the world stage. These claims have substance. The roads are better, the
digital public infrastructure is genuinely impressive, and India's diplomatic
footprint has grown. But strength in some domains coexists with degradation in
others, and it is the degradation that compounds.
Consider the media. India's ranking on the Reporters Without
Borders press freedom index has fallen from 140th in 2014 to 159th a decade
later. The index is an imperfect instrument and the criticism that it reflects
Western assumptions deserves to be heard. But the structural fact of media
consolidation — major television networks and digital platforms increasingly
owned by conglomerates with close government relationships — is not a matter of
contested methodology. It is a matter of corporate record. Governments that do
not reliably hear bad news tend to make worse decisions; the costs of those
decisions are borne by citizens.
The judiciary has faced sustained pressure on its
independence. The ongoing conflict between the executive and the Supreme Court
over judicial appointments has left the collegium system in a state of
unresolved tension that serves neither party's long-term interest. The
selective use of sedition law and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
against journalists, academics and civil society organisations has created a
legal environment that chills legitimate dissent. Bail, in politically
sensitive cases, has increasingly become the exception rather than the rule.
The border question
India faces genuine and longstanding strategic challenges on
its northern and western frontiers that no government of any ideological
character would find easy to manage. The question is whether the current
approach — projecting strength rhetorically while managing actual territorial
situations with significant opacity — has served the national interest. The
2020 Galwan Valley clash with Chinese forces, in which Indian soldiers died and
positions shifted, was handled in a manner that prioritised narrative management
over parliamentary accountability. A state that cannot have an honest public
conversation about a military confrontation with a nuclear-armed neighbour is
one whose strategic culture is being distorted by its governing party's
political needs. That distortion has costs in military doctrine, alliance
management and the quality of civilian oversight that are difficult to measure
but impossible to miss.
Wealth, growth and the missing middle
India's headline growth figures have remained respectable by
global standards. But the distributional picture is considerably more
complicated. Research by the World Inequality Lab finds that wealth
concentration at the top of the income distribution has risen sharply over the
past decade, while formal employment growth has lagged population growth in
ways that official unemployment statistics, which count subsistence farming as
employment, tend to obscure. The billionaire class has expanded; middle-income aspirants
have found their mobility constrained. Youth unemployment, by more candid
estimates, runs at close to 45%. This is occurring under a government that came
to power partly on a promise of economic dignity for those left behind by its
predecessors.
"Permanent polarisation may consolidate power. It
cannot build a state."
The social contract frays
Underlying the specific failures is a more fundamental
question about what citizens can reasonably expect from the state. That
contract, in its most basic form, involves an exchange: citizens accept the
authority of the state; the state provides security, impartial justice and the
institutional conditions for a decent life. When those goods are provided
selectively — when the rule of law applies differently to different
communities, when the press is structurally compromised, when the feedback
loops that allow governments to correct errors are disrupted — the contract is
not broken all at once. It frays gradually, in ways that do not appear in any
official statistic but are visible in the decisions of the professionals who
emigrate, the investors who divert capital, and the communities that stop
trusting their neighbours.
None of this is irreversible. India has demonstrated,
repeatedly across its history, a capacity for institutional self-correction and
democratic renewal that has surprised pessimists. The 2024 result itself is
evidence that the electorate retains a healthy scepticism of overreach. The
opposition, however weakened, continues to function. The courts have not
entirely capitulated. The press, though constrained, has not been silenced.
India in 2026 is the world's most populous country, its
fifth-largest economy and the possessor of a young population whose demographic
dividend, if realised, could make it a transformative global force over the
next three decades. The scenarios in which that dividend is actually realised
share common features: effective state capacity, an impartial rule of law,
communal stability that allows the energies of all communities to be channelled
into productive activity, and a media environment that allows errors to be
identified and corrected. The scenarios in which it is squandered also share
common features. They look uncomfortably like the current trajectory.
The question for India's governing class — and ultimately
for its electorate — is whether the strategy that has delivered successive
victories in the short term is compatible with the institutional conditions
required for the longer-term rise that virtually every Indian, across political
lines, sincerely desires. A decade of evidence suggests it is not. Outrage is a
finite resource. Institutions, once degraded, take a generation to rebuild.
India cannot afford to spend both at once.
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