In January, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the opening of the Ram Mandir, a grand Hindu temple on the site where a mosque once stood, most political observers concluded that this religious moment would define the election.
Modi’s personal ratings were already higher than any of his opponents. Given his cult of personality, targeted welfare schemes, effective messaging on India’s enhanced place in the world and an entirely obsequious broadcast media, he seemed to have won the election before it started. His party, the BJP, is also India’s richest. The temple gave his campaign an added emotional, populist message.
“It’s Hindu Resurgence” writer Neerja Chowdhury said to me at the time, “and Modi is a phenomenon that liberals have not fully understood.” At the time I agreed with her.
But now the country’s voters — across regions, religions, castes and class — are saying they care less about religious matters than they do about everyday issues of governance.
For nearly two months I have been traveling thousands of miles by road, from the southernmost tip of the Indian mainland in Kanyakumari to Kashmir in the north, interviewing hundreds of voters from diverse regions, religions and communities. Modi remains the dominant political force, but I have found healthy pockets of strong pushback against aggressive religious rhetoric that has often characterized his party’s politics.
“Yeh dharam ki rajneeti bekar hai” — “Politics based on religion is worthless,” said a farmer impatiently as we sat under the shade of a giant banyan tree surrounded by wheat, maize and pearl millet fields. “What we want is 24/7 electricity, enough water for irrigation and opportunities for our children.”
This was a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and hence most electorally significant state.
Next to us children scampered under a scorching sun. One wanted to be a doctor, the other a soldier in the army.
“Don’t talk to us about Hindus and Muslims, they are both good people,” he said. “Talk to us about how our lives can be better.”
As India’s election — the world’s largest — enters its final phase, the Ram Mandir is turning out not to be a salient electoral issue. Everywhere I traveled, the temple was raised by me — it never came up in conversation otherwise. Even in Ayodhya, the pilgrim town where the temple was built, people link it to the elections mostly in the context of increased economic opportunities. Ardent admirers of Modi say it isn’t why they’re voting for him.
In city after city, I asked BJP voters to list what they liked best about the prime minister. They mentioned infrastructure expansion, India’s growing importance in the world, Modi’s 24/7 workaholic image, his forceful persona — and the absence of a compelling alternative. And when I asked what they would like to see him change, invariably I heard two answers — a greater focus on jobs and a toning down of the religious rhetoric.
After a dip in voter turnout in the first two phases of the election (voting has been taking place since mid-April), Modi’s speeches became more aggressively Hindu nationalist. In one, he suggested that the opposing Congress party would take people’s wealth and redistribute it among Muslims. He used words such as “infiltrators” and “those who have more children.”
He seemed to be falling back on formulaic Hindu-Muslim divisiveness in an effort to mobilize Hindu voters.
But in my conversations, Modi’s fans said they’re not comfortable with this kind of religious stridency. In Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, one BJP voter told me he wished the prime minister would “dial down saffron politics.”
A couple of weeks later, Modi distanced himself from his own remarks and denied that he had been speaking about Muslims at all. He went further. “I am not fit to be in public life, if I do Hindu-Muslim.”
Unlike the previous two elections that catapulted Modi to victory — 2014 was a vote against a Congress government mired in corruption, and 2019 was a national security election held in the aftermath of a terrorist attack and India’s retaliation inside Pakistan — no single national issue is steering the vote this time.
By flagging issues of local importance — agrarian distress, water scarcity, unemployment — voters have opened up space to demand accountability from the Modi government.
“Modi will definitely be prime minister again,” argues Prashant Kishor, one of India’s best known political strategists who has in the past worked closely with Modi. “But his currency has been devalued, he is a brand in decline.”
In any case, India’s voters appear to be swinging the pendulum away from the Hindu-Muslim divide and back to ordinary political concerns.