New era seen for India after Modi's victory

NEW DELHI, Friday

India’s triumphant Hindu nationalists declared “the start of a new era” in the world’s biggest democracy on Friday, after hardline leader Narendra Modi propelled them to a stunning win on a platform of revitalizing the sickly economy.

Preliminary results at the end of the marathon six-week election showed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by prime ministerial candidate Modi on track for the first parliamentary majority by a single party in 30 years.

Most of the poverty-wracked country’s 1.2 billion people — more than half of whom are under 25 — have never witnessed such dominance having grown up in an era of fractious coalition politics.

Modi, the 63-year-old son of a tea seller tainted by anti-Muslim riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, wrote on Twitter that “India has won. Good days are coming.”

The stunning results exceeded all forecasts. Firecrackers exploded at BJP offices around the country and sweets were handed out in celebrations that began only a few hours after the first figures filtered out.

HUMILIATION FOR GANDHI DYNASTY

The triumph redraws India’s political map, elevating the BJP to a pan-national power, handing Modi a huge mandate for change and heaping humiliation on the ruling Gandhi political dynasty.

The immediate change Modi will need to deliver is an improvement in the economy, growing at its slowest rate in a decade, but his past as a religious hardliner means he is viewed with suspicion by India’s 150 million Muslims.

“This is the beginning of change, a people’s revolution and the start of a new era,” senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar told AFP at party headquarters in New Delhi.

Preliminary figures from the Election Commission showed the BJP winning more than the 272 seats required for a majority on its own in the 543-seat parliament, with victories by its allies taking it easily in excess of 330.

The Congress Party, the national secular force that has run India for all but 13 years since independence, was set to crash to its worst ever result after a decade in power.

“Modi promised the moon and stars to the people. People bought that dream,” senior Congress leader and spokesman Rajeev Shukla told reporters as preliminary results showed the party winning only 45 seats.

STOCK MARKETS SURGE

Outgoing PM Manmohan Singh, who said in January that Modi would be “disastrous for the country” after “presiding over the massacre of innocents,” called to congratulate him, his office said.

Stock markets, which have risen five per cent in the past week, surged more than six percent in the morning but were trading flat in the early afternoon.

Investors and the wider public have rediscovered heady — many say unrealistic — optimism about the world’s second-most populous nation after years of frustration about weak leadership, rising food prices and corruption.

“There’s a very tough task ahead that will take time to resolve, the economic problems are quite acute. There’s no magic wand,” D.K. Joshi, chief economist of credit rating agency Crisil, told AFP.

India is in the grip of stagflation — growth has slumped to 4.9 percent from nine percent two years ago and consumer inflation is at a wage-eroding 8.6 per cent.

The disastrous showing for Congress is a humiliating blow to the scion of the Gandhi dynasty, 43-year-old Rahul, whose first performance as chief national campaigner will lead to acrimonious fallout.

CORPORTATE CHEERLEADERS

The country’s most illustrious political family has provided three prime ministers and Rahul will need to emulate his grandmother Indira’s art of reinvention to become the fourth.

A group of Congress supporters shouted slogans in support of his more popular sister Priyanka outside party headquarters Friday.

“I can say today’s vote is against corruption, inflation, poor governance and dynastic rule of the Congress party,” L.K. Advani, one of the founding fathers of the BJP, told reporters.

Modi has reinvented himself from a controversial regional leader accused of turning a blind eye to religious riots in 2002 to an aspiring prime minister intent on helping India fulfil its potential.

His promises to revive the economy have won him corporate cheerleaders, while his rags-to-riches story and reputation as a clean and efficient administrator satisfy many Indians’ desire for strong leadership.

Attacks from his opponents — one called him a “devil” and the “Butcher of Gujarat” — as well as warnings from secular-minded critics and religious minorities have failed to dent his rise.

AWKWARD PROSEPCT FOR WEST

While Singh, 81, was hailed by US President Barack Obama as a “wise and decent man,” Modi presents an awkward prospect for Washington and other Western powers.

The bachelor, elected three times as chief minister in his home state, was boycotted by the US and European powers over the 2002 Gujarat riots that left around 1,000 dead.

He denies that he turned a blind eye to the bloodshed and investigators have never found evidence of wrongdoing.

“He has to succeed on the economy and that’s the thing on which he will be judged,” said Christophe Jaffrelot, an academic on India from Sciences Po university in Paris and King’s College London.

“But what if he fails to re-launch the economy? The Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) plank is the plan B,” he told AFP.

The BJP manifesto includes a pledge to build a temple to honour the Hindu god Ram at the site of a former mosque in northern India, a religious flashpoint that sparked deadly rioting in 1992.