Why did Modi panic after the first round of voting?

It is challenging for any politician to win the trust of one billion eligible voters. Narendra Modi has been dominant in the Lok Sabha elections since 2014. However, it appears his supporters overestimated his political charisma. There is no doubt that Modi will become Prime Minister again, even if the BJP somehow manages to win around 200 seats. As it is now in the public domain, the BJP has around three billion dollars in party funds. And that amount is big enough to manage smaller parties.

Let’s assume that people did not vote for the BJP as expected during the first round of elections. Why are people not voting for Modi? What went wrong with Modi’s appeal? The answer to the preceding questions lies in the failure of the Modi government on various fronts during the last ten years. The reasons are well known but less discussed in the national media.

First, the Agniveer scheme was a bad idea. Modi has yet to learn how many youngsters try to soldier recruitment rallies of the armed forces. However only two out of a hundred succeed eventually in getting the job. Most youngsters in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and other northern states prepare for soldier recruitment rallies till they turn 21, particularly in rural areas, for years. It keeps them occupied. Modi's government alienated its greatest support base by introducing the Agniveer scheme. 

The BJP introduced a one-rank, one-pension scheme, which was a wrong financial decision and unsustainable. The fallout of the populist decision was a stressed exchequer. Hence, the government proposed recruiting soldiers on a contract basis for four years so that the pension bill remained in control. The scheme was called Agniveer. It was a good, prudent financial decision to manage costs, but it also reflected the political overconfidence of the BJP to manage the political fallout. 

Relying too much on propaganda about infrastructure projects without changing much on the ground. The railway is a good example. Multiple delays marred the Bullet train project, though not entirely BJP’s fault, but govt tried to convince voters by making videos about it as if it had connected all states of India. A handful of Vande Bharat trains were launched, but the BJP again indulged in hyperbole and propaganda and mostly made untrue claims about train speed.  

It launched a media blitz as if all ugly, filthy, and overcrowded trains had been replaced with Vande Bharat. In fact, in this day and age, Vande Bharat technology, which was touted as a great feat, was, at best, a low-level tech, that has been achieved by developed countries like Japan perhaps 60 years ago, if not earlier. While most passengers continued to travel like cattle on the Indian railways, Modi's advertising campaigns painted a different picture of train travel. The lived reality of the people clashed with govt’s exaggerated claims. A similar thing happened in the 2004 India Shining campaign, while the BJP claimed India was shining and that people were struggling for basic amenities.

The only thing that is common in the whole of India that connects the youth from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh is unemployment. Our youth are struggling for jobs. The BJP stopped the recruitment in government departments. It was an undeclared ban on the recruitment. The railways did not launch a large recruitment drive as it did in the past, and the nationalized bank did not recruit in large numbers. There are no quality jobs available for our educated youth. Work is available to the laborers in large construction projects. However, their minimum wage did not rise in the last decade.

The BJP resorted to backhand tactics to claim that many new jobs had been created. The mainstream media did not even report that the government is forcing small businesses, even large sweet shop owners, to open EPF accounts for their employees so that the government could claim that many new jobs have been created. Except for a few large projects, FDI in the manufacturing sector was limited. In fact, the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP declined under Modi’s tenure. 

[Mukesh Devrari]