Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has formally filed papers to seek re-election in his constituency in the holy city of Varanasi, where he was mobbed by political supporters as he entered his bid for a third term.
Modi bathed in the Ganges on Tuesday and offered prayers before filing his nomination papers. In 2014, the year he became prime minister, “I said mother Ganges has called me . . . now I feel she has adopted me”, he said in a video posted on social media platform X.
The seven-phase election, which is staged over six weeks because of India’s size and logistical challenges, is now more than halfway through. The fourth phase of polling was held on Monday.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party is projected as the strong favourite to win, and analysts have described the vote as a referendum on his decade in office, including his brand of vigorous Hindu nationalism, foreign policy record and management of the world’s fifth-largest economy.
But the opposition, led by the Indian National Congress and comprising liberal, leftwing and regional parties, has claimed that voters are more disaffected than opinion polls suggest, pointing to lower election turnout to argue that the BJP is underperforming. The opposition is predicting a rerun of the 2004 contest, when a Congress-led coalition defeated the incumbent BJP government.
Turnout in the first three phases of voting was just over 66 per cent, about 3 percentage points lower than in India’s last polls in 2019.
Ajay Rai, the opposition’s candidate in Varanasi who has unsuccessfully challenged Modi twice in the past, insisted in an interview that the solidarity of the bloc — which has united this year under the acronym INDIA — had strengthened his chances.
“My win is certain because all those angry” about unemployment and other issues “are all coming to us”, Rai told the Financial Times.
Analysts said it was premature to predict the poll’s outcome, and official polls are banned by the election commission during the lengthy voting process, which wraps up on June 1. Results will be announced on June 4.
“It would be a fool’s errand to try to guess what will happen with the results,” said Neelanjan Sircar, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Definitely we’ve seen a change in rhetoric from the prime minister, but what numbers they [the BJP] are actually seeing internally we don’t know.”
Modi, India’s most powerful leader since Indira Gandhi, has leaned on polarising language on the campaign trail, attacking India’s Muslim minority and accusing Congress of favouring them over majority Hindus during its decades in power.
At a rally last week, the 73-year-old prime minister said voters faced a choice between “vote jihad” and “Ram rajya”, or the reign of the Hindu god Ram. In January, Modi kicked off his campaign by presiding over the consecration of a temple devoted to Ram in Ayodhya, which was built on the site of a destroyed Mughal-era mosque.
Last week, Modi also claimed — without evidence — that Congress had accepted “black money” from billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, reversing opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s long-standing accusations that Modi himself was too close to India’s politically connected tycoons.
Modi has set a target of increasing the BJP and its allies’ parliamentary seat share to a supermajority of 400 in the 543-seat lower house, a big jump from the 303 seats the party won in 2019.
Congress has focused its campaigning on lower-caste Indians, who account for more than half of the population, as opposition alliance politicians have accused Modi of undermining India’s secular values and the challenged BJP over the country’s persistently high joblessness.
Modi in exchange has alleged that the opposition plans to dilute long-standing “reservations” for lower-caste Hindus in government jobs and military recruitment to benefit Muslims.
Read the full article here
