Modi’s landslide and the Lessons for Sri Lanka - EDITORIAL

With World geopolitical alliances and strategies changing beyond recognition, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has swept to a landslide victory in the general elections with his “Bharatiya Janata Party” (BJP) and its allies securing more that 350 of the 543 seats in India’s parliament or Lok Sabha.   

Mr Modi, who sought re-election from Varanasi, struck gold, garnering over 63% of total votes polled. His rival the Congress Party’s Ajay Rai had polled 53,385 votes, about two hundred thousand votes less than Mr. Modi. Most political analysts said the general election eventually turned out to be more like a Presidential election or a referendum on the charismatic Mr. Modi and the world will be closely watching to see which way he takes India in this new geopolitical and digital era.   

According to “The Hindu” newspaper, Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi, who lost in his traditional sitting constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, scored a record victory in his second seat of Wayanad in Kerala.   

The Guardian Newspaper said that as India’s Congress Party was badly defeated and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, was also convincingly beaten in his own parliamentary seat – a north Indian constituency that had sent three of his family members to parliament in the past half-century.The loss of the family bastion seat of Amethi underscored the dwindling relevance of south Asia’s most famous political dynasty in Narendra Modi’s “new India”, alongside the decline of the pluralistic vision of India that has been synonymous with the Nehru-Gandhi family for the past seven decades.   

Mr. Gandhi, 48, told a news conference in New Delhi “The public is the master and the master has made the decision,”.   

Congress was trounced by Modi’s party in 2014 and reduced to its worst ever showing of 44 seats. It improved on that result on Thursday, but loss of Amethi and the BJP’s penetration of the country’s east, north-east and south confirmed that Mr. Gandhi’s party has been superseded as India’s only national political force.   

The loss will revive questions about whether Gandhi and his family should relinquish control of Congress to fresh faces, exactly a century since his great-great-grandfather Motilal Nehru, took the helm of the party that led India’s freedom movement. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s great-grandfather, fiercely opposed Hindu nationalism and sought to establish India as a secular country, a vision the modern party continues to uphold.   

Under Mr Modi, the staunchest Hindu nationalist ever to occupy the office, that tradition has been recast as a long national nightmare, blaming it even for the breakup of the subcontinent, according to the Guardian.   

“It is in your character that the division of India happened,” Mr. Modi told Mr. Gandhi in parliament in February.   

Though dynasties continue to be common in Indian media, business and politics, Mr. Modi has successfully drawn the contrast between his biography as the son of a poor tea seller with Mr. Gandhi’s more gilded upbringing.   

Whatever the consequences in India, with its’ population of about 1,300 million – the world’s second largest, next to China -- Sri Lanka needs to closely monitor the role India will play in world politics. This is especially important in the aftermath of the April 21 bomb attack by IS related terror groups which dragged Sri Lanka into international terrorism.  

According to the Sunday Times’ Political Editor, India is known to be deeply concerned about Sri Lanka’s growing ties with China and the United States. In 2007, the then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa signed an agreement with the US, and this 10 page deal has now turned into a 80 page agreement. Concerned over this, the increasingly powerful China virtually persuaded Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena to attend a conference in Beijing. But reports say the real purpose was a personal meeting with China’s powerful President Xi Jin Ping where the Chinese leaders reportedly expressed concern over Sri Lanka’s growing ties with the US. As a result, President Sirisena signed a defence agreement with China.

With India being drawn more towards the US, Sri Lanka will need to get its international affairs experts to closely study the complex situation and ensure we don’t get dragged into a big power conflict.