The Adani scandal takes the shine off Modi’s electoral success
For India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, it should have been the perfect prelude to the winter session of parliament. Two days before its reopening on November 25th, results showed that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies had won a landslide victory in a state election in Maharashtra. The state is not just India’s richest and its second most populous. The stakes this year were especially high as the poll was seen as an indicator of whether the BJP could consolidate a political rebound after the surprising loss of its parliamentary majority in a general election in June.
But victory for the BJP and its partners in Maharashtra, with more than 80% of 288 local assembly seats, is now almost certain to be eclipsed by the scandal that erupted shortly after voting ended on November 20th. That was when American prosecutors filed an indictment accusing Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest men, along with seven others, over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250m in bribes to Indian officials. Mr Adani, who has denied any wrongdoing, comes from the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat and has been a close ally of his since Mr Modi was chief minister there from 2001 to to 2014.
The indictment does not implicate Mr Modi directly. It does, however, provide fresh political momentum to India’s opposition alliance, despite the Maharashtra result and the BJP’s unexpected victory in another state poll, in Haryana, in October. The opposition’s leader, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, has long alleged impropriety in the Modi-Adani nexus and is now demanding a parliamentary investigation and the tycoon’s arrest. “It is a vindication of what we have been saying,” Mr Gandhi told reporters on November 21st. “The prime minister is protecting Mr Adani.”
The opposition alliance was also buoyed by its victory in another election, in the eastern state of Jharkhand, the results of which were announced on November 23rd. Although that state is much smaller and poorer than Maharashtra, the result there was seen as a show of defiance against Mr Modi’s alleged use of investigative agencies to target political opponents. In January, one of those agencies arrested Hemant Soren, an opposition-party leader who stepped down as Jharkhand’s chief minister shortly before his arrest on corruption charges.
Mr Soren, who denies the charges, was released on bail in June and resumed his post as chief minister in July. He is now expected to be sworn in again in the coming days after his Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party and its allies, including Congress, won 56 out of 81 seats in the local assembly. Mr Gandhi’s sister, Priyanka, is also set to make her debut in the national parliament after winning a by-election in the southern state of Kerala on November 13th. She stood as the Congress candidate there after her brother, who had held the seat since 2019, gave it up to take another that he won in northern India.
In Maharashtra, meanwhile, Mr Modi was not the one primarily gaining credit for the victory of the BJP and its local allies. That was attributed instead to last-minute welfare handouts by the local government and to a big voter outreach campaign by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist group from which the BJP emerged. Headquartered in Nagpur, in eastern Maharashtra, the group’s leadership has been unusually critical of Mr Modi of late (albeit obliquely), intensifying a quiet contest among his potential successors.
As the result became clear, Mr Modi thanked the people of Maharashtra, especially the young and women voters, for their support. “Development wins! Good governance wins! United we will soar even higher!” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). BJP leaders will no doubt be pleased that their electoral machine appears to be back on track. But as the Adani scandal unfolds and rivals jockey for position, Mr Modi’s own political prospects look increasingly problematic. ■
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