Citizenship law protests and economic slowdown haven’t dented Narendra Modi’s popularity

In the last few months, the Bharatiya Janata Party has not had much reason to celebrate. It suffered defeats in some key Assembly elections and faces an image crisis internationally, largely because of the economic slump and brutal clashes during the citizenship law protests.

But amidst all this comes some reassuring news: the Mood of the Nation Survey 2020, conducted by the India Today Group and Karvy Insights, indicates significant public support for Narendra Modi.

On plain sight though, the results offer very little in the form of good news for the BJP. According to the survey data, if elections were held today, the BJP is predicted to win 271 seats. While this is just one short of an absolute majority, it is a drop from the 303 seats won during its 2019 Lok Sabha performance. With its allies in the National Democratic Alliance, it would go on to lose a further 50 seats, but secure enough to seal a comfortable majority in Parliament.

But despite the drop in seat and vote share, I think the results are still pretty upbeat for the BJP, primarily because they have to be interpreted with a few qualifiers.

First, the survey was conducted between December 21 and 31, 2019, which coincided with the most citizenship law protests. Second, the results come at a time when the Indian economy is staring at stagflation. Unemployment is at a 45-year high, inflation at a five-year high, and growth rates are sinking to new lows. The survey results themselves testify to this: 60 percent of the respondents said they’ve personally felt the pinch of the slowing economy.

So, what else do we learn from this survey?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Modi remains the most popular leader in the country, with his approval rating at 68 percent — up from 54 percent a year ago. This is consistent with the results from other surveys, including one by ET Magazine which set the figure at 64 percent last September.

Fifty-three percent of those surveyed said Modi is the right person to lead the country while 34 percent believed Modi to be the best prime minister in India’s history (remember this 30-35 percent ballpark, as we will come back to it later), up from 19 percent just one year ago.

The Congress should be very disappointed by the results. Despite the 50 seats lost by the NDA (and 32 lost by the BJP), the Congress could only increase its seat share from 52 to 60, while the United Progressive Alliance increased its tally from 92 to 108. So the vast majority of the seats lost by the NDA could not be regained by the Congress or the UPA, implying that state parties outside the alliance must have captured a significant part of them.

This is also in line with the recent Lok Sabha and Assembly election results where the BJP faced the stiffest competition in states where its Opposition was the state parties, not the Congress.

The results, however, do offer something promising for the Opposition. There were some issues where the government received a thumbs down. For instance, 43 percent of the respondents believe the citizenship law is an attempt to divert attention from more serious problems like unemployment. Similarly, 52 percent believe minorities will feel insecure due to such policies, and 53 percent feel the feeling of insecurity is justified.

Even if the 53 percent is a subset of the 52 percent who think minorities will feel insecure, it still forms a sizeable 25 percent who feel that the insecurity is justified.

Now this is the part which I think is most telling. Remember the 30-35 percent ballpark? Here it is again: 32 percent believe the citizenship law was a good idea, 32 percent believe these are not policies to divert attention, and 32 percent believe minorities have no reason to feel insecure. Including the 34 percent who think Modi is the best prime minister in Indian history and the 38 percent that voted for him in 2019 (and the 31 percent who voted in 2014), this group constitutes the core Modi voter base.

This is a voter base so strong that, despite the numerous red flags in the state of the economy, they have chosen to support him unconditionally.

We have to remember that in India’s first-past-the-post voting system, it often takes less than 30 percent of the vote share to form a government. In fact, the last time a party with more than 25 percent of the vote share couldn’t form a government was Congress in 1999. In the current system, a party that gets anywhere between 25-30 percent of the votes, and then strikes up a few strategic alliances, can “game the system”. As long as the BJP can keep its 30-35 percent loyal and hardcore base, its electoral success is more or less confirmed — with the exception of the unlikely event that all other parties unite against the BJP.

Many will find the results hard to accept. How can a government under which the economy is falling off a cliff, a government whose policies have received so much criticism, still garner such public support?

The answer perhaps lies in the polls itself. Maybe the subject of the economy that takes up most of the screen time on national media is of little importance to the BJP’s core base. Maybe issues such as the criminalisation of triple talaq, the scrapping of Article 370, and the citizenship law protests have, in fact, emboldened this core base even more.

Or maybe they think despite these problems, Modi is still the man to fix it.

Whatever the reason, this is something the Opposition should take into cognisance. In elections that have turned into a presidential-style election, the Opposition has failed to put up a candidate on par with Modi, personality-wise. The person often hailed as an alternative, Rahul Gandhi, according to the same poll was judged by only 13 percent of respondents as the right person to lead the country.

This also points to the leadership crisis in the Congress. Of the people the respondents thought would be able to save the Congress, the first three are from the Gandhi family, while Manmohan Singh and Sachin Pilot come at a distant fourth and fifth, respectively.

Opposition parties can go on and on about how BJP’s policies are an assault on the spirit of the Constitution and the secular fabric of the nation. But until they can sway at least some of Modi’s key voter base, their fate is likely to remain unchanged. If anything, the survey has further reaffirmed that Narendra Modi’s popularity among Indians remains as high as ever.