The remarkable recovery of Narendra Modi

SIXTEEN MONTHS ago Narendra Modi looked chastened. Having just lost his majority in a national election, the chest-thumping Indian leader was forced to lean on regional parties. His coalition showed little appetite for difficult reform. Some commentators pronounced it “Peak Modi”. Would-be successors began to plot.

Today things look rather different. Mr Modi’s coalition has won a string of state elections and the opposition is in disarray. His government has rediscovered its zeal. Last year it announced a much-needed simplification of India’s goods-and-services taxes and overhauled its Byzantine labour laws. It is deregulating the nuclear industry, promoting a booming electronics sector and striking trade deals. India’s economy is outperforming expectations.

Mr Modi, who at 75 has already been in the highest office for almost 12 years, is now expected to run again in 2029. The prime minister has his eye on Jawaharlal Nehru’s record time in office, which he would surpass in 2031. And he is thinking about his legacy. Still prominent within that is a brash cultural agenda which aims to restore Indian, and specifically Hindu, pride. Yet as India has come under growing pressure from abroad, he has focused more on boosting the country’s economy, and getting it on track to meet his target of developed-country status by 2047.

To see how Mr Modi has bounced back, start with that difficult election result. The seat count of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the lower house fell from 303 to 240 (out of 543); Mr Modi had boasted that it would exceed 400. Yet postmortems that announced a new era of messy coalition politics, the norm for the 25 years before the BJP won an outright majority in 2014, were wide of the mark. The BJP’s vote share had fallen by less than a percentage point, from 37.4% to 36.6%. A buoyant Congress party, its only national rival, had still won only 21.2% of the vote.

Even so, the BJP was quick to identify lessons. As votes were cast, inflation was running at 5% (and the price of onions had risen by an eye-watering 50% in the past year). The government has taken action to improve food supply and distribution.

Party bigwigs did not, however, interpret the 2024 result as an instruction to dial down the Hindu nationalism. At rallies Mr Modi and his colleagues still resort to shrill and divisive rhetoric, often aimed at exploiting chauvinism against India’s Muslims. But the government has refrained from launching many new temperature-raising initiatives. Some had feared more plans to replace mosques with temples, as happened with Mr Modi’s consecration of a temple in Ayodhya in January 2024.

Within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a grassroots Hindu organisation, many want Mr Modi to make good on his promise to introduce a uniform civil code, a long-standing Hindu-nationalist goal that would in effect abolish Muslim family law. So far, Mr Modi has not gone down this path.

Instead, he has focused his movement on the idea of making India strong. He has been helped by a tough external environment. In May, following a gruesome terrorist attack in Kashmir, India fought a four-day air-and-missile conflict with Pakistan. That allowed the prime minister to play the patriotic strongman. Then in August Donald Trump slapped India with an additional 25% tariff (on top of an early 25%) as punishment for its use of Russian oil. Those levies are hurting Indian exporters, from diamond-cutters to garment-makers.

You might think Mr Modi would be blamed for mishandling India’s biggest trading partner. Yet most Indians approve of the way he has stood up to Mr Trump. And he has used pressure from abroad as a pretext for reform. Freeing up labour and reducing the cost of power are urgent, he argues, if Indian manufacturers are to compete. So, too, is reducing trade barriers. At a summit this month India hopes a deal with the EU may at last be sealed.

In all this, Mr Modi’s coalition has proved surprisingly stable. As small regional parties, his partners have largely been happy to offer loyalty in exchange for patronage. They may have curbed the BJP’s instincts in some areas, such as on the uniform civil code. The weakness of the opposition has also made difficult economic reforms easier. Protests over the new labour codes have been muted.

When it comes to elections, the governing coalition has shown a ruthless edge. Weeks before state polls opened in Bihar, in November, 10,000 rupees ($110) was transferred into the bank accounts of around 2.1m female voters under a scheme purporting to support entrepreneurs. While legal, such transactional vote-buying stretches electoral norms and will strain state budgets.

Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, offers a different explanation. He alleges that the government has committed “vote chori”, or voter fraud—and claims that the BJP is engineering elections nationwide. It is true that the government has undermined the independence of India’s electoral commission, and that election-watchers have reported some irregularities. Moreover, Mr Modi does have an authoritarian streak. Note the fourfold increase in criminal investigations into politicians since he took office; an investigation in 2022 found that some 95% were members of opposition parties. Yet Mr Gandhi has not presented evidence of widespread fraud, nor have analysts found a smoking gun.

The accusation risks becoming a crutch for Congress. By any standard Mr Modi remains a genuinely popular leader, approved of by some 70% of Indians. Mr Gandhi has failed to build on the result in 2024 by developing either a compelling critique or an economic and cultural platform of his own. He is “Modi’s best campaigner”, says Rahul Verma of Shiv Nadar University, Chennai.

Mr Modi’s dominance is not guaranteed. States including Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal go to the polls this spring. Those contests will be trickier than the one in Bihar. Although inflation has abated, anger about a lack of jobs has not. Protests have flared over conditions for gig workers. A stronger opposition would help hold the government to account.

But for now Mr Modi is ascendant. The hope must be that the prime minister sees boosting the economy as the best way to secure his legacy. If he does, his third term could do much to improve the lives of Indians by setting the country on a still faster road to growth. ■