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It's been a nail biter of an election in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi vownd to continue as a country's top leader even after his party lost its majority. Now Mody will have to rely on allies to form a government.
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Diegana. That's Modi addressing supporters outside the headquarters of Badatia Junta Party Tuesday night. But this is far from the big win that Mody had promised and leaves India's politics in uncharted waters. Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm wanh today on the show what India's surprising election results mean for the country and the rest of the world. Hi, Sudi, it's a big day for India. Thanks for being here with us.
Thank you, thank you, indeed, very very big day.
Bloomberg Sudi run Jansen has covered India for nearly three decades. Tell me about what it's been like on the streets of Delhi today.
Well, I was there for the you know, the opposition headquarters of the Congress party headquarters.
Celebrations have already started there and rightly.
So, because of Congress from being reduced to forty odd seats in the last election, really making a comeback, so a lot of celebration in the Congress headquarters. It's kind of rejuvenation of the Congress, so to say. Similarly, BJP emerging as a single largest party, which was expected, but the win not as big as the BJP has claimed.
And therefore celebrations at the BJP headquarters.
Also, this election in a way is a very very big surprise, you know, for the ruling party from Prime minister more than you, and more so if one was going only by the exit poll results that came out a few days ago.
So Sudi, let's get inside the numbers a little bit. Prime Minister Mody and the BJP expected a much bigger win, right. Mody had even come out with a very specific goal for the number of seats that he said the BJP would win. How close did they get to that goalpost?
Well, I mean then nowhere near the goalpost. If you look at the Prime minister's target, the target was four hundred seats for the National Democratic Alliance that he leads at near three hundred and seventy seats for the party itself. So it's quite upset for Prime Minister Modi and for the NDA alliance and quite and therefore quite a big win in a way for the opposition alliance, which by the way, was very very confident of doing well, although very few people believed them.
The Opposition has done extremely well.
Really no matter how you look at it. It's disappointment for Moody and for the BJP.
The BJP wasn't kind of quite prepared for this situation.
It was kind of expecting a handsome and overwhelming win.
So there could be two possibility.
The BJP may decide that, you know, they may they may want a change in the leadership, which would then open up, you know, entire new avenue with other leaders being considered.
That is one possibility.
The other possibility, of course, is that they go with the Prime minister. They go with Prime Minister Modi with the allies that they have right now.
But then going forward.
Prime Minister Modi will be a much more weakened prime minist We will not see the assertiveness that we have seen in the past. Also, with the Opposition becoming stronger, with having you know, having around two hundred lawmakers in the Parliament, they will be playing a much more aggressive role.
It won't be like what we saw in between twenty eight nineteen and twenty twenty four, where the BJP could just you know, get any of the bills in the Parliament clear just because they had the numbers and it was a broof majority that they had.
Now let's also put some perspective on this, right, this is still a historic win for Mody and the BJP. Moody is only the second politician to win three consecutive terms. Do these results you think take away some of his swagger?
It very definitely takes a machine away from Moody because the Bartjanta Party, you know, never ever thought about a situation.
Where they would need allies to form a government and run a.
Government after the break. What India's election results mean for the world. India's election results are a stunning blow for Prime Minister or in their Modi. It was expected that Mody's BJP party would easily win a third term, putting him in office for another five years. We discussed the surprising results with Milan Vishnef, Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace Millan earlier this week. We had exit polls suggesting that Prime Minister Mody and the BJP were headed to an easy victory. Today things look so different. What's been your reaction as you've watched the results come in.
Stunning, I think is the word that I and many other friends have been using. These results are stunning, not only because of the exit polls that we saw in the past couple days, but because of the surveys that were done even before campaigning started, and just the general narrative that this was really the BJP's election to lose. And now we're in any situation where, yes, Modi's coalition
has a majority, it can form the government. But his party, the BJP, which has enjoyed its own single party majority in Parliament for two consecutive elections, was not able to meet that target, right, So it's going to be reliant on the help and assistance of some of its partners. So people have described this as a political earthquake, as an awakening. It's hard to find the superlatives to do justice. It really was just a stunning turn of events.
Stunning is definitely the right word to describe it, and certainly for Mody and the bj party, it's obviously a disappointment. No matter how you look at it, what do these results tell us about how voters feel about Modi and the BJP at this point.
Well, by and large, I would submit that Nearanther Modi is still personally popular. You know, it's nothing to sneeze at to win three consecutive elections, right, That's not something that a party has done under the same leader since Naeru after independence. Okay, so this is still an achievement, but it's certainly a personal setback because he had put his own political credibility on the line and has come
up short, really for the first time. Despite the kind of glossy headline numbers, the Indian economy has not been firing on all cylinders. There has been some degree of disenchantment with individual BJP leaders that Nearanthomody has empowered at
the state and local levels. There is a feeling that perhaps there was a certain amount of hubris or arrogance that had accumulated over the past ten years, which led this government to believe they could sort of do whatever they wanted without any checks and balances.
Right, And of course, the context in a lot of elections is that the incumbent and the ruling party gets re elected if people are feeling good about the economy and their futures, right, and certainly I mean with this election, we know that unemployment, for example, has been a big issue, particularly among younger people in the country. Was that something that really drove voting at the polls and the results that we're seeing perhaps.
I mean, we're going to have to wait for more systematic survey data to validate that, but I think anecdotally, if you look at a lot of the ground reporting in places where the BJP has suffered losses and take out through Fordesh for example, you know a lot of journalists who were traveling, you know, off the beaten path did since this feeling of you know, we've supported you for ten years, you being mothy, but the fruits of
growth have not yet completely reached us. We appreciate that this government and this Prime Minister have invested in an expansion of the welfare net, so we now have greater access to things like bank accounts, to gas connections, to modern flush toilets, but that does not equal livelihoods. It doesn't equal good paying jobs.
Right.
It doesn't mean that if I invest in my son or daughter's education they're going to be able to find gainful employment when they go out and join the labor force, right, So I think that that disenchantment has resulted in some of these seat tallies coming down for the BJP, which is why they end up in this situation of really needing friends to form this new government.
And some of those issues were things that the BJP's opposition party talked about, I mean, running against Mody and the BGP this election cycle. Was this alliance of opposition groups in the country. How did they campaign against Mody and the BJP. What was their argument for why voters should choose them.
The number one issue the India Alliance brought up was inequality, right that we fundamentally have a two speed society and system where the current politically economy of India has worked for the haves and it hasn't worked at all for the have knots. So the rich have gotten richer and the poort have either stagnated or suffered or decline right in terms of their living standards. And they tied this issue cleverly in hindsight, to the issue of caste, which
is an emotionally charged issue. It's a you know, connected to a set of a pattern of deep seated, kind of rigid inequalities going back, you know, centuries in India to say that, you know, people who have been historically disadvantaged have not benefited from economic growth in the same way that the privileged casts have. I think that they were able to get some resonance on the ground with people who felt like, fundamentally this system is unfair and I'm at the receiving end.
The other thing that defines Mody and the BJP has really been their Hindu first nationalist agenda, is that are we seeing now that maybe that's not enough to mobilize new voters, that that's resonating the way that they thought it would.
Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think though, that this vote is somehow a massive rebuke of that politics, right. I think that the ideological kind of midpoint, right, if you think about the median voter has probably moved in a more Hindu first way over the past ten years. So I don't know that there's outrage over pro Hindu
policies as such. It's just that pro Hindu policies, at the end of the day, don't put food on the table, right, And It's notable that one of the biggest promises that this party made going into these elections was the guarantee delivery of free rations for eight hundred million Indians. Now, if the economy is firing on all cylinders, why would you need to make that promise? Right, So that shows that at the end of the day, you know, the political laws of gravity can only be defied for so long.
Right there, there is something to that. It's the economy stupid tagline that we often bring about in elections, right, it's not totally irrelevant.
Looking ahead, what does mody do? Now? What do you think comes next, especially in the next one hundred days.
Well, let's not even get to the first hundred days. Let's get to the next you know, one hundred hours, because they have to solidify their coalition, right, because you can bet that the Opposition Alliance is making every phone call they can to the BJP's friends saying, look, if you leave them and join us, we'll give you a really sweet deal, right, dangling cabinet post and perhaps even
prime ministerships. And so that's not a done deal yet, right, assuming though, that they're able to negotiate that, you know, I expect they are going to have to come together with their allies and put forward some kind of common minimum program, right, which is a common understanding of These are going to be our governing priorities. These are the highlights of our legislative agenda. You know, this is not something they have to do before because they could decide
on their own. They didn't have to negotiate with anyone. Theyd'dt have to consult with anyone.
Modi of course at this point, you know, still reeling, i'm sure from from these election results. What does he need to do? You know, assuming that he can put together coalition government, what does he really need to focus on in the immediate.
I think you know their top number one, number two, number three objectives really has to be jobs. You know, this is a country that is what There's a lot
of dynamism, there's a lot of aspiration. There are geopolitical wins that are moving in India's favor if it could take advantage of this unique window of opportunity right, and so that means getting your policies right such that you can actually create a robust domestic manufacturing sector right, and that involves getting your trade policy right, getting your tariff policy right, getting your factor market policy right, getting all of these things which have been a little bit muddled,
frankly over the past ten years.
Right.
And so I think if I we're advising this government, I would say, you know, that is rarely where you need to focus your attention. And if you can get that eight to nine percent growth sustained over a period of time, all of these other questions you have about social policy and welfare policy, and foreign policy and so on and so forth, they will fall into place.
You mentioned foreign policy. What are the global implications of these election results?
You think, well, I think you know, given geopolitical factors and what I mean specifically, there are you know, growing concerns about China's role in the world, the ongoing kind of reemergence of a global Russia, the decline of kind of American hegemony. I think India, no matter the shape or form of its government, still has a lot of room to maneuver, right, and so it is going to continue to be a valued and sought after partner by a multiplicity of countries east and West, and that's not
going to change. But I do think it at the same time comes probably as a bit of a breadth of fresh air for a lot of foreign leaders who were very concerned about democratic backsliding, concerned about things like, you know, India's alleged involvement in the target assassination of democratic citizens on democratic soil abroad, and so I think this could act as a check on some of those excesses, and so I don't think these results will be entirely
unwelcome in the corridors of power outside of India.
By the way, if you want to learn more about India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and how he became so popular and polarizing, we have a two part series out. You can find The Rise of Moti on the Big Take Asia podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to The Big Take Asia podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm wanh. This episode was produced by Young Young Naomi, Jessica Beck and Adriana Tapia, who was mixed by Blake
Maples and fact checked by Adriana. It was also edited by Caitlin Kenny and Daniel ten Kate, Naomi Shaven and Kim Gettelson are our senior producers. Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor. And Nicole beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please follow and review The Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. See you next time,