The Modi meltdown from March to May

It is halftime in the game of India’s 2024 national elections, with voting for 283 out of the 543 seats completed. But unlike in football, we don’t know the halftime score in this match. India has the technological competence to send rockets to Moon and Mars in one shot but strangely, cannot conduct its national elections in one shot.

As the elections stretch on arduously over two months and seven phases, most people are trapped in this weird situation of watching the election game without knowing the score. The curiosity is killing, and there is a frantic search to find ‘experts’ that may know the score or to look for clues that may give an indication of it. Economists have a term for this phenomenon -- ‘information asymmetry’ -- where a few people have superior information (or at least claim to) that a large majority seeks.

Social media is flooded with pollsters galore, self-proclaimed psephologists and survey ‘experts’ that claim to know the election score through ‘scientific’ survey methods. I know of corporate honchos consulting their favourite astrologers for predictions on the elections. There are supposedly body-language reading experts that can tell you the election score based on how political leaders are walking, smiling, waving and behaving. There are traveling caravans of academics and scholars that have descended from foreign locales to explore Indian hinterlands, mingle with the masses, read the ‘mood of the people’ in local tea shops and impute election outcomes apparently. And there are the usual media commentators dishing out election punditry from their Delhi drawing rooms that invariably begins by how in their decades of covering Indian elections, this election is the most interesting, important and complex!

But perhaps the most significant clue to gleaning the score of the ongoing elections comes from the main protagonist himself – Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If one carefully analyses Modi’s election speeches over the last two months, there is a clear discernible trend and pattern. When the election started, the dominant theme of Modi’s campaign speeches was ‘400 paar’, which meant that the BJP’s goal was to cross 400 seats. It was supposed to convey the impression that the 2024 election was a done deal and Modi was set to return as Prime Minister with an overwhelming majority.

Between March 9 and May 8, Modi delivered 81 election speeches across the country. In the first few weeks, up until the first phase of polling, Modi mentioned ‘400 paar’ between four to eight times in every speech. That is, Modi’s speeches in the initial weeks were focused intensely on an aura of invincibility in this election and a seemingly bold but entirely achievable target of 400 seats.

Slowly but surely, the ‘400 paar’ phrase began to disappear from his speeches. By the week of April 27, Modi stopped mentioning ‘400 paar’ in his speeches. As the chart shows, there was a dramatic decline in the number of mentions of ‘400 paar’ in his speeches. Inexplicably but conspicuously, the bravado went missing. Is this indicative of something about the election score? Surely, Modi is in a position to have the biggest information advantage on the elections and so, should one read more into this change in his tone and content of speeches?

‘400 paar’ was replaced by ‘Muslim’ or ‘minorities’ in Modi’s speeches. Mentions of the word ‘Muslim’ began to rise rapidly just as ‘400 paar’ declined. His speeches became increasingly more about religious minorities and the imagined dangers they pose to Hindu society. He dog-whistled to Hindu voters about their gold and wealth being appropriated and handed over to Muslims, threatened them about losing their reservation quotas, and even went to the extent of insinuating that the Indian cricket team would soon be full of Muslims!

Ironically, in his speech on April 19, Modi attempted to take credit for improving the lives of Muslim women by banning ‘triple talaq’. But since then, nearly every speech of Modi has been disparaging of Muslims and has demonised them consistently. These speeches have seemed like a despicable rant of a nervous and scared man, not an uber-confident, “third term in the bag” Prime Minister. It is extremely unfortunate that a person no less than the Prime Minister of India should stoop so low to slander and scare one set of citizens against another, all for votes. Clearly, something was amiss.

If that was not enough, Modi took the entire nation by shock when he uttered the name ‘Adani’ publicly for the first time in 10 years. In a speech recently, he alleged that the two business tycoons, Adani and Ambani, sent loads of ‘black money in a tempo’ to the Congress party. This was a stunning and strange strategy by Modi. A sitting Prime Minister admits that the two largest business groups in the country have “loads of black money”, which immediately begs the question -- why does he not have them investigated and the money seized immediately? Evidently, this charge and allegation by Modi on Adani, Ambani and the Congress reeks of panic. Again, what explains this steep descent in the tone of Modi’s speeches from the audacity of ‘400 paar’ confidence in March to the frailty of a “Adani tempo load of black money to Congress” whine in May?

When more than 600 million people exercise their vote in a secret manner for over two dozen political parties over two long months, it is a fool’s errand to try to predict the number of seats for each party. Amid all the smart guessing and hullaballoo by supposed experts, the simple truth is that no one knows what the election outcome will be. All we know is that there was a Modi meltdown between March and May. Nobel Prizes have been awarded in economics for studying how societies and markets attempt to bridge large information asymmetry gaps, and India’s national election may be the biggest such experimental study.