The audacity of hope

Mr Modi should press on with economic reforms

With resounding election victories in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Narendra Modi is now the monarch of all he surveys in North India. Never before has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured the kind of numbers in UP that it has this time under Mr Modi’s leadership. Coming as they did — smack in the middle of Mr Modi’s five-year term as prime minister — the February-March elections to five states can easily be viewed as a mid-term referendum on the PM’s rule. The result underscores the fact that Mr Modi is today the tallest political leader in the country, and, by extension, the BJP the sole political pole. The Congress did manage to win Punjab and became the single-largest party in Goa and Manipur, yet these victories pale in comparison to what Mr Modi and Amit Shah, his cup bearer, managed to achieve in UP.

The BJP won a total of 312 seats, after improving its tally by a whopping 265 seats over the last state election in 2012. The 57 seats won (out of 70) in Uttarakhand completed the sweep. Just as the growing popularity of the BJP across India is evident so is the decline of the Congress. There are several reasons why the UP victory is the centrepiece of these electoral results. For one, they represent an even better performance over the overwhelming victory that Mr Modi achieved in the 2014 general election, in which the BJP won more than 70 Lok Sabha seats. This is an astonishing achievement indeed, specially in a state that is possibly the toughest state to crack since it is dominated by several caste-based regional parties. However, by all accounts, it appears that Mr Modi has been able to convince people cutting across various disparate, and often antagonistic, groups by focusing on the hopes and aspirations of the poor to have a better, more prosperous future.

The victory will help turn the Rajya Sabha arithmetic in the BJP’s favour, though not immediately. Besides, winning UP was necessary for Mr Modi and his party as they look ahead to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. With a contribution of 73 seats, the state played a big role in the party’s 2014 victory. From the perspective of economic policy making in the country, the results of the polls place an enormous responsibility on a stronger Mr Modi, who can now easily look favourably at his chances of a re-election in 2019. There will be an increased expectation from him to deliver on economic well-being in terms of income, employment, health and education. There will also be the hope that Mr Modi and his party will utilise this newly acquired political capital to undertake hard policy changes in areas such as liberalisation of the foreign investment framework with a focus on local manufacturing, a thorough clean-up at debt-laden banks, etc. The massive vindication of the demonetisation decision is expected to encourage the government to renew the war on black money and continue with measures to widen the ambit of the formal economy and shrink the informal economy. The overriding consideration, of course, will be that Mr Modi will aspire to be the prime minister of all Indians and not just of his own party and of one religious community.