India - 2024 Elections
A purple ink casts an indelible mark on the left-hand index finger of voters, and potentially the history books, in this year's general election. The semi-permanent dye is a special, patented formula that leaves a stain for several weeks — and is used to prevent one person from casting multiple votes. The ink was first used in the country's 1962 general election to maintain fairness in the voting process. Boasting the world's largest democracy with a population of roughly 1.4 billion, India expected to hold general elections between April and May this year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), widely considered a Hindu nationalist party, are seeking re-election for a third term. India has become a "competitive authoritarian regime". A third term will effectively undermine the institutions of Indian democracy which will manifest itself in a more muscular foreign policy and destabilise the region overall.
India is a multiparty, federal, parliamentary democracy with a bicameral legislature. The president, elected by an electoral college composed of the state assemblies and parliament, is the head of state, and the prime minister is the head of government. Under the constitution, the country’s 28 states and eight union territories have a high degree of autonomy and have primary responsibility for law and order. Electors chose President Ram Nath Kovind in 2017 to serve a five-year term, and Narendra Modi became prime minister for the second time following the victory of the National Democratic Alliance coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2019 general election. Observers considered the parliamentary elections, which included more than 600 million voters, to be free and fair, although there were reports of isolated instances of violence.
Significant human rights issues included: unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings perpetrated by police; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by some police and prison officials; arbitrary arrest and detention by government authorities; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; political prisoners or detainees in certain states; restrictions on freedom of expression and the press, including violence, threats of violence, or unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists, use of criminal libel laws to prosecute social media speech, censorship, and site blocking; overly restrictive rules on nongovernmental organizations; restrictions on political participation; widespread corruption at all levels in the government; lack of investigation of and accountability for violence against women; tolerance of violations of religious freedom; crimes involving violence and discrimination targeting members of minority groups including women based on religious affiliation or social status ; and forced and compulsory child labor, as well as bonded labor.
Separatist insurgents and terrorists in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast, and Maoist-affected areas committed serious abuses, including killings and torture of armed forces personnel, police, government officials, and civilians, and recruitment and use of child soldiers. The government continued taking steps to restore normalcy in Jammu and Kashmir by gradually lifting some security and communications restrictions. The government released most political activists from detention.
On 19 April 2024 India heads to the polling stations for the first of seven phases of its 18th Parliamentary elections, a process that will stretch until June 4. Around 968 million people –more than the population of the EU, US and Russia combined– are entitled to cast ballots to determine who gets to sit in India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, and who will become India’s next prime minister.
The Lok Sabha, with 543 seats, is the more powerful lower house of Parliament. It passes laws, holds the government accountable by introducing and passing motions of no-confidence, holds the reins of financial control (having sole authority over taxation, borrowing, and spending), and wields more influence in legislative affairs. Whichever party or coalition clinches a majority in the lower house gets to appoint the prime minister. As in the cases of former prime ministers Manmohan Singh or HD Deve Gowda, that appointee can also be a member of the Upper House, the Rajya Sabha. The prime minister then selects cabinet ministers. The term of service in the Lok Sabha is five years, unless mid-term elections are called. To rule, a party or a coalition needs to secure at least 272 seats, though former PM PV Narasimha Rao ruled with a minority government, having won a vote of confidence in Parliament.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is competing against a coalition of more than a dozen opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress, commonly referred-to just as Congress, which once ruled over the nation for more than 50 years.
BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014, winning 282 seats (along with its allies in the form of the National Democratic Alliance, a total of 336 seats were secured). In 2019, BJP won 303 and the NDA took a total of 352 seats. Modi, who first rose to power in 2014 on the promise of economic reform and a Hindu nationalist mandate, is at the center of this years’ contest. If he wins again, Modi will match the record of India’s first prime minister, the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, by staying in office for three consecutive terms. The BJP stated aim is to win 370 seats for itself – this number was the same as the Constitutional article governing Jammu and Kashmir that was struck down on August 5, 2019. Also, 364 seats in the Lok Sabha are required for major/structural Constitutional changes. The BJP has stated that it expects the NDA to win 400 seats. The Opposition predicts less than half of that for the ruling party.
Congress, the oldest party in the country, will contest the 2024 elections from the position of having the lowest number of seats in its electoral history. Congress has so far announced its candidates for only 266 seats, but is expected to field candidates in 330 to 340 constituencies. In 2019, Congress won just 52 seats – it didn’t allow it to qualify for ‘Leader of Opposition,’ for which a party needs to win 10%, or 55 seats.
Modi’s fiercest opponent and Congress’s key campaigner is Rahul Gandhi, the 52-year-old scion of India’s oldest political dynasty; his great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, his grandmother Indira Gandhi, and his father Rajiv Gandhi, were all prime ministers of India. Gandhi himself, however, has never been a minister in a federal or state government. He quit as party chief after the 2019 election failure.
In 2023, 26 opposition parties joined Congress to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Some of the bloc’s other prominent parties include the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which currently rules in the Delhi region and the state of Punjab (its leader Arvind Kejriwal was remanded in judicial custody weeks ahead of polls, on corruption charges). The left-wing Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (M), which leads the ruling Left Democratic Front in the southern Indian state of Kerala; The Trinamool Congress (TMC) which is primarily active in the state of West Bengal; The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), led by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin and particularly influential in that southern state.
While there is no cap on how much parties can spend, candidates are limited to 9.5 million rupees ($114,000) per constituency. Generally, each party looks for candidates that can spend their own money. Some of the big spenders, it’s speculated, may spend a half billion rupees ($6 million) or more on each constituency. In the 2019 election, the authorities seized 33.77 billion rupees ($405 million) around the country that was earmarked for unauthorized spending in elections.
Political funding has become a hot topic ahead of the elections, particularly after February, when the Supreme Court scrapped the scheme for funding political parties – designed using electoral bonds purchased from the government-owned bank, State Bank of India. The scheme was introduced by the BJP government in 2018 to tackle corruption in Indian politics and make it more transparent. However, the country’s top court deemed it unconstitutional and ordered the Election Commission to make public all data provided by the bank.
The data revealed private donors provided about 120 billion rupees ($1.44 billion) to parties through the bond scheme. Half of that, 60 billion rupees ($719 million), went to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Congress party, as well as the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) party, which is influential in the state of West Bengal, were among the next-biggest recipients. They raked in 14 billion rupees ($167 million) and 16 billion rupees ($191 million) in donations, respectively.
The BJP and AAP gained huge momentum in 2022 ahead of the 2024 general election. Except Punjab, in the remaining four states of UP, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, Modi magic has ruined the opposition parties. PM Modi also made a big deal about the Lok Sabha elections to be held in the year 2024. He said, “I will also say today that after the 2019 election results, some political experts had said that the results of 2017 decided the results of 2019. I believe this time also they will say that the results of 2022 have changed the results of 2024. Decided the results.”
While the AAP has seen a swift rise in the 10 years since its inception, there is still no one party that can challenge the BJP's communal polarisation politics combined with its strongman rhetoric and welfarism, says The Hindu editorial today Much more is needed than just smart electioneering or tactical plays to challenge the BJP behemoth. Given the Congress’s miserable performance yet again, it is the AAP now that is seeking to become a national party as well as the BJP’s main opposition party.
Modi has decimated coalition politics at the national level by separating national and state politics. Hindutva is his strength so he campaigns around it. Nationalism is his strength so he campaigns around it. Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party, and the opposition sentiment at large, continue to make the mistake of seeing the Lok Sabha election as the big final that the state elections lead up to.
Rahul Gandhi’s strengths are the legacy of the Congress party, the rights-based laws of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), his popularity in parts of south India, and having a few state governments. Rahul Gandhi's weaknesses are that he is a poor orator, makes too many gaffes, is seen as a serial loser, disappears for days on end and appears inconsistent.
Modi’s weaknesses are unkept promises, the bullet trains in the air, the black money not recovered from abroad, poor economic growth, unemployment, Dalit angst, but none of these will become electorally relevant unless the Congress party campaigns to make the most of them.
Leaders of 17 political parties in India agreed on 23 June 2023 to form a united front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Loose coalitions have been formed in the past, but not since the 1980s have so many different parties banded together on a national level to take on ruling party in government, The Indian Express reported. "There certainly will be some differences among us but we have decided we will work together, work with flexibility," said Rahul Gandhi, a key figure in the Indian National Congress (INC) who was disqualified from parliament in March in a defamation case. The meeting was hosted by the chief minister of the eastern Bihar state, Nitish Kumar, and was held in the state capital of Patna. "Everyone has agreed that we will all work together in the interest of the country," said Kumar of the Janata Dal-United Party.
The compulsions for the opposition parties to present a united challenge to Modi are very, very big because in the last four years they have all faced harassment from federal investigative agencies and the BJP has played politics with all of them to break these parties and harass their leaders. If they don't put up a united challenge to Modi and somehow stop him from coming back, they all know it is going to be the end of the road for them because the BJP will not really allow any of these opposition parties, particularly the Congress, to survive.
Critics of Modi's leadership style have often accused him of exhibiting authoritarian tendencies, particularly when it comes to press freedom, rights of minority communities, and centralization of power. However, it's important to note that these claims are contentious and disputed. Indian democracy, despite its challenges, has robust institutions such as judiciary, election commission, and a vibrant civil society, which can provide checks and balances on the executive power. However, like any democracy, its health and functioning is subject to constant evaluation and scrutiny.
Modi's opponents charge the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi and his spiritual allies with propaganda for Hindu nationalism and right-wing policies; to rewrite India’s history; and divert public attention away from their Hindu supremacist political agenda. The nation has seen a surge in state-sponsored and vigilante attacks on Muslims, Christians, Dalits and other oppressed minorities since Modi has taken office. Not only has Modi legitimised Hindu nationalists to be more emboldened in attacking marginalised populations, but his administration has also weakened independent institutions of Indian democracy, including the judiciary.
More than two dozen Indian opposition parties joined hands to form an alliance called “INDIA” [ “Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance”] to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in parliamentary elections. The decision was announced on 18 July 2023 at the end of a two-day meeting of 26 parties in the southern city of Bengaluru. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the fight against BJP is a fight to “defend the idea of India, defend the voice of the Indian people”. The parties, many of which are regional rivals and have been splintered at the national level, account for less than half the 301 seats that BJP has in the 542-member lower house of parliament.
On April 19, the ‘deep south’ Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with an electorate of 62.3 million, voted for its 39 parliamentary seats (out of a total of 543) in the first phase of general election. What made 2024 stand out were the efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, widely acknowledged as the nation’s most charismatic politician, using every ounce of his appeal to make a breakthrough for his party, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – and its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – in a state that has been immune to their charms. Modi’s high-octane campaign in Tamil Nadu has included an unprecedented eight visits. He has had to weaponize his ideology here because Hindutva politics (denoting Hindu nationalism) has traditionally made no headway against the regional influence of Dravidian ideology. In the 2019 Lok Sabha (lower house) election, it drew a blank in the state despite expanding its majority in the rest of the nation.
Dravidian ideology is predicated on the old theory that lighter-skinned Aryans came and settled among the darker-skinned Dravidians, driving the latter to the Indian peninsula’s south. Hence, the ideology has been against Brahmin hegemony, for social justice, and for strengthening the local language against the imposition of Hindi. The ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) is a proponent of this ideology and stands in staunch opposition to the BJP, a Hindi-proponent from the Hindi heartland. The DMK is currently allied with the Indian National Congress (the Congress Party) in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), collaborating with several regional parties within the state. In the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 and 2019, the BJP allied with the other Dravidian party, the All India Anna DMK (AIADMK). This time, however, the BJP ditched the AIADMK for several smaller regional parties.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi calls parivaarvad, or dynastic politics, “the biggest enemy of democracy”. And yet India, which is pursuing its Lok Sabha (parliamentary lower house) election, is rife with examples of political inheritances. For instance, Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the incumbent Member of Parliament from Kaiserganj, UP, was dropped by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a bid to deflect public anger over public accusations of sexual harassment by Olympic wrestlers; he was replaced with his son.
On 03 May 2024, the opposition Indian National Congress announced that Rahul Gandhi would take part in the election in Raebareli, UP. This seat was represented by his grandfather Feroze Gandhi in 1952 and 1957; his grandmother, former PM Indira Gandhi in 1967, 1971 and 1980; and his mother Sonia Gandhi from 2004 until this year. Rahul’s great-grandfather was India’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru. Another former PM, H. D. Deve Gowda, is fending off critics after several sexual assault cases surfaced involving his grandson Prajwal Revanna, the incumbent MP and candidate in Hassan, Karnataka. He belongs to a party in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and PM Modi has been quick to strongly condemn the young man, who has fled India for Germany.
While “parivaarvad” is a useful dig during election rallies, politicians from across the spectrum tap sons, daughters, wives, brothers, sisters, parents and even sons-in-law and daughters-in-law as candidates with a view to retain or expand their political clout and wealth.
In the western state of Maharashtra, the Baramati constituency is witnessing a high-stakes political battle. The incumbent MP, Supriya Sule, the daughter of the 83-year-old clan patriarch Sharad Pawar, is opposed by Sunetra Pawar, wife of Ajit Pawar, Sule's cousin and Sharad Pawar’s nephew, who was once seen as his political successor. They are fighting because their parent party, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), headed by Sharad Pawar, split 11 months ago, when Ajit, tiring of waiting for his turn and suspicious that his uncle would ultimately ditch him for Supriya, took his faction and joined hands with the BJP to form a new state government.
Baramati is hardly the outlier. Maharashtra sends 48 elected members to the Lok Sabha; candidates in at least 31 of these constituencies belong to political families or have relatives who are former or incumbent MPs, members of a legislative assembly, elected representative to a local body, etc. In a handful of these, as in Baramati, the two main contenders are both dynasts. In the financial capital Mumbai, which has six parliamentary constituencies, members of political families will take the field in five. Most prominent among these is the BJP candidate from Mumbai North: Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, whose father Ved Prakash Goyal was the BJP treasurer for decades.
In Jalgaon, an agrarian district in northern Maharashtra, Karan Patil-Pawar, the grandson of a former Congress leader and nephew of an incumbent state legislator, will take on state legislator Smita Wagh, whose late husband was the district president of the BJP. Campaigning for Patil-Pawar in the town of Amalner, Manoj Patil, a former municipal councilor, said emphatically that local voters do not care if their candidate is from a political family. “On the contrary, people themselves often ask the offspring of senior leaders to take over the mantle—these youngsters, like Karan, can be capable leaders with an instinctive knowledge of how to respond to public needs and get things done,” he said. In any case, Smita Wagh was herself grooming her daughter Bhairavi for a meaty role in district electoral politics, so she could hardly use her opponent Karan’s family privilege against him.
In Baramati’s family drama, the entire Pawar clan, a large family controlling sugar cooperatives, banks, businesses and various industrial investments, has rallied behind the patriarch. Ajit Pawar’s own brother has crossed over and allied with the uncle, to ensure that the veteran’s image is not slighted. Ajit, currently Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister, has had to lament at public meetings that he has been abandoned by the extended family.
Sakshana Salgar, a district-level elected representative, and state president of the Nationalist Yuvati Congress, a political wing for young women initiated by Supriya, said “voters in Baramati viewed the unfolding battle as if it were the mythological battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas,” cousins who wage an 18-day war-to-the-end in an Armageddon-like good versus evil tale called the Mahabharata, written around the 4th Century BCE.
Political families are not unique to India–land-owning families have won elections and controlled resources in the Philippines where at least three recent presidents had parents who were presidents too; in Cambodia, the ruler since 1985 handed over the prime ministership to his son; and in North Korea, rulers have all come from one clan. Political succession within the family helps control the nuts and bolts of the local political economy which works to bring wealth to the political elite and also, simultaneously, helps perpetuate political power for the wealthy. That is why Maharashtra’s big political dynasties are also barons of industry, private education, agricultural cooperatives, etc. Others control large caste groups, eventually also controlling resources.
Ruben Mascarenhas, 35, the working president of the Mumbai unit of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), India’s youngest national political party that has disrupted a traditional landscape of politicians with its breed of educated professionals including many from working class backgrounds, said dynasty politics makes for a very high entry barrier in the mainstream parties. “It’s sad that the political landscape has always been feudal,” he said. “Unlike in the western world, most political parties in India do not offer their cadres the opportunity to rise through the ranks.”
The AAP is a political start-up and the only party to offer such upward mobility based entirely on work and merit, he said. Without a system of primaries, first-generation politicians like him, born to hard-working middle-class parents, without a political pedigree, face an unlevel playing field. “I couldn’t have imagined this, at this age, without pots of money and without being some kind of antisocial element, to be the head of a city unit of any other political party,” he added.
Besides the Pawars, also in the fray in Maharashtra are the Vikhe-Patils and Mohite-Patils of western Maharashtra who are agrarian satraps. The Vikhe-Patils are descendants of Vitthalrao Vikhe Patil, the founder of the cooperative movement in the Indian sugar industry. Based in Ahmednagar, the family has been in politics ever since, and are known for constantly jumping parties. Similarly, Shankarrao Mohite Patil, the patriarch of his clan, started the cooperative movement in drought-prone Solapur district. His son Vijaysinh Mohit-Patil was a deputy CM of Maharashtra, and his nephew Dhairyasheel Mohite-Patil is contesting the current election. His grandson Ranjitsinh Mohit-Patil is waiting in the wings.
Mumbai’s Thackerays comprise the best known political family in India’s financial capital. Patriarch Balasaheb Thackeray, grew the Shiv Sena with a “son-of-the-soil” rhetoric that called for the removal of first south Indians, then north Indians, and then Muslims. His son Uddhav was chief minister of Maharashtra (2019-2022) till his party split. Cousin Raj has floundered after a promising start in the 1990s. Uddhav’s son Aditya is an important member of their Shiv Sena faction.
Pankaja Munde, whose family has represented the ‘other backward castes’ (OBC) in the arid heart of central Maharashtra, is contesting the election from Beed. Her father Gopinath Munde died in a car accident after becoming a minister in Modi’s 2014 government. He was married to the sister of an important member of the BJP brain trust, Pramod Mahajan, who was shot dead in his Mumbai apartment by his brother Pravin in 2006. Two grandsons of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the dalit leader who is called the father of the Indian Constitution, are contesting too — Prakash Ambedkar from Akola and Anandraj Ambedkar from Amravati. The Congress’s candidate in Kolhapur is Chhatrapati Shrimant Shahu Maharaj (Chhatrapati is Marathi for emperor), a direct descendant of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha warrior king.
Younger politicians without political lineage do not shy away from offering kin a foot in the door. The Congress candidate in Chandrapur was Pratibha Dhanorkar, a state legislator who entered politics after her husband was elected to parliament in 2019. After his sudden demise, she was fielded from his seat in the first phase of the 2024 polls. On the fringes of Mumbai, in the Kalyan constituency, state chief minister Eknath Shinde’s son Shrikant Shinde will try to defend his seat, having entered politics on the footsteps of his father, creating a new political family.
Mascarenhas said Indians unfortunately view leaders as “elected maharajahs”, leaving some deep-rooted questions about what this means for a vibrant democracy where the election process is a genuine, bona fide exercise, there is peaceful transition of power, but an inability to stem the erosion of democratic institutions while dynasts continue to serve family interests.
Punjabis were disillusioned with politicians and their inability to act on the long-running crop pricing demand or the drug epidemic. This was a problem for Modi’s BJP on the last day of the Indian election, 01 June 2024, which marked the final round of voting in India’s parliamentary elections, which will determine whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets a third term. Punjab will vote to fill 13 of the 543 seats nationwide. It is India’s breadbasket and the homeland of Sikhs, a reformist religious group who number 30 million worldwide, of which 24 million are in India.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is for the first time in nearly 30 years not contesting the election in Punjab as part of an alliance. Its former National Democratic Alliance (NDA) ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), a century-old regional party with its roots among rural Sikhs, has decided to go it alone. Its decision was linked to rural Punjabi anger against the central government, which resulted in two farmer protests in 2021 and earlier this year.
The farmers had demanded a guaranteed minimum support price for 23 varieties of crop. While the farmers’ unresolved demands are the main issue, there is a second matter bubbling beneath the surface. Punjabis are greatly disillusioned with politicians over their perceived inaction in a drug addiction epidemic that has taken hold, claiming 266 lives between 2020 and 2023. Despite ruling India with a majority since 2014, the BJP has found it a challenge to make inroads into Punjab’s competitive political landscape, where it could only win two seats in the last Lok Sabha election in 2019, and only because it was in alliance with the SAD.
Without the SAD, the BJP is alone in bearing the brunt of the farmers’ deep anger. The farmers’ unions have disrupted the BJP’s campaign by blocking its candidates from entering villages and calling for a boycott. This is likely to hurt the party’s rural outreach, which is critical to its solo campaign. There is a lot of resentment among farmers and this will be displayed when people vote.
The state is governed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which came to power with a thumping majority in 2022. But it also faces a test in this election due to discontent over broken election promises and rising drug addiction.
Despite being members of the national opposition I.N.D.I.A. (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance) bloc, the AAP and the Congress party are rivals in Punjab. The AAP claims to have done a lot in the past two years but not everyone is happy with their performance. “Our government has done a great job in the past two years,” says Malvinder Singh Kang, AAP candidate from the Anandpur Sahib constituency. “We have created 43,000 jobs and, importantly, the jobs were awarded based on merit. We have provided free power to people.” Punjabi chief minister Bhagwant Mann led the AAP’s campaign and is seeking public sympathy following the arrest of AAP supremo and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. The party has accused the Modi government of undermining democracy and the constitution.
Experts say the Congress is in a strong position, capitalizing on anti-incumbency against both the AAP in the state and the BJP in New Delhi. The party supported the farmers’ agitation in 2020 and the ongoing protests at the Punjab-Haryana borders, which form a crucial part of its strategy. “The BJP government has endangered the foundation of our constitution,” Congress leader Vijay Inder Singla says. “The Congress is fighting hard to save democracy and secularism and thus people should vote for it to dethrone the BJP-led central government.”
In Amritsar, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi promised farmers that his party would waive their debt. The Congress has also promised to provide a legal guarantee for minimum support prices (MSP) and aims to build on its 2019 performance, when it won eight seats. “It will not be a one-time thing as the party will study the financial situation of farmers,” Gandhi said, lashing out at the BJP for doing nothing for farmers in the past ten years. “Whenever farmers of this country require debt waiver, the INDIA bloc government will waive it. Not just once, but many times.”
The SAD is striving to regain its political relevance after crushing defeats in the 2017 and 2022 state legislature elections. So it is focusing on its commitment to Sikh principles and a ‘pro-Punjab’ stance. “On getting the people’s mandate, we would introduce a law to ensure that jobs in Punjab would be reserved for Punjabi youth only,” says SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal. This is just one of many pro-Punjab promises.
The BJP’s risk in going alone is also an attempt to expand its electoral footprint beyond Hindu-dominated urban pockets. “For every Indian, Punjab is a crucial state with a history of rich contribution to national development,” Modi said in a recent interview. “Thus, it is not possible for our party to remain silent while the people of the state are unhappy. It is incumbent upon us to work even harder and ensure the people of the state are not unhappy.” The prime minister said the people of Punjab were so disillusioned in 2022 that they gave a mandate to AAP but this has only made things worse. “We are going to the people with our vision and good governance track record. We are going to the people with a single aim- the welfare of Punjab,” Modi said.
Kiranjit Kaur, an Chandigarh-based activist working on farmer suicides, tells RT that there would be multiple issues in the minds of voters on June 1. “The farm crisis is still an ongoing issue and is big,” she says, adding that the second big issue is drugs. “We have seen many governments in the past promising that they will end the menace in months but that has not happened and people are angry. So many young people are dying of drug overdoses,” she says.
“The election mindset in Punjab is different and it’s tough to say what voters are up to,” she says. “This time they will vote wisely and even independent candidates are strong in places. AAP is not so much a favorite. People are angry over what has happened the last five months. This could benefit the Congress.”
Gurshamshair Singh, a Punjab-based journalist and analyst, echoes similar views. He says Punjab elections hold significance as the “Modi magic did not work in the state during the last ten years.” “Punjab’s election is important because it’s a border state, where minority Sikhs are the majority,” Singh says. “It is for the first time a four-cornered contest. There are some independent candidates enjoying support, and they include Sikh separatist leaders.”
He adds that the BJP is facing opposition wherever they campaign. “This is an agrarian state so farmers’ opinions matter,” Singh says. “In cities, there is also a non-Sikh population that supports the BJP. Earlier it was in an alliance with the SAD, but its chances of electoral success seem thin. At least it is getting candidates and fighting on its own. It’s focussing on consolidating its [position] in Punjab.”
Singh says the Congress is the choice of all anti-Modi segments. “The anti-Modi vote would be shared partially between the Congress and independent leaders. The AAP is hoping they will reap electoral dividends on freebies like free electricity.”
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