Abki Baar Trump Sarkar

The year 2024 has been like no other for electoral democracies across the world. More than 60 countries have held elections in this mother of all election years and the results have been pretty stunning. In May this year, India’s voters pulled off a surprise: an election that was meant to be a 400-plus seat ‘done deal’ for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saw the BJP lose a parliamentary majority and form a coalition government.
In July, it was the turn of the British voters to send Rishi Sunak packing with an overwhelming mandate for Labour: the UK result was more anticipated, but the scale of Keir Starmer’s victory wasn’t. And now, the United States has seen Donald Trump create a slice of history: the first US President in over 120 years to win presidential elections after being defeated previously as an incumbent. An election that most pollsters predicted would be a dead heat has turned out to be pretty one-sided.
Is there a pattern that has emerged from these verdicts in major democracies? Firstly, it is apparent that incumbents across the world have been put on notice in almost every election. A mix of voter anger and fatigue has meant that those in power have found it difficult to retain it. One major reason for Kamala Harris’s defeat was that the Vice-President was far too closely identified with the outgoing President: Joe Biden’s weaknesses as a President were an overwhelming baggage that weighed heavily on her. She couldn’t speak with conviction about promising a ‘new order’ when she was an intrinsic part of the old.
Prime Minister Modi has been an exception to the anti-incumbency principle, but he, too, lost as many as 63 Lok Sabha seats and saw his dominant position being challenged for the first time in a decade. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a single ruling party leader in a truly democratic election returning to power with a bigger majority than previously. Even our neighbourhood has seen stunning upsets: witness how Sri Lanka voted in its first Communist president. Pakistan has been an exception with Shehbaz Sharif returning to power, but it was hardly a free and fair election with the country’s most popular leader, Imran Khan, being jailed and denied the right to fight the polls.
Secondly, a key driving factor in fuelling the anti-incumbency sentiment has been the economy. Across the world, governments have struggled to deal with post-Covid distress. Even the relatively buoyant US economic numbers this year can’t take away from the reality of scarce new jobs, falling incomes and rising costs of living in that country. Not surprisingly, working class groups and those living on the margins have been amongst Trump’s strongest supporters and the economy was the number one concern of most voters. It was no different in India during the Lok Sabha polls: the reason why so many Dalit groups, for example, were swayed by the ‘Samvidhan Khatre Mein Hai (Constitution in danger)’ argument was because of a fear that loss of reservation benefits would mean further diminishing job opportunities. Agrarian distress and uncertain employment options were two key factors in ending the BJP’s ‘400-paar’ dream.
Thirdly, there is the cultural identity dimension to voter preferences that is often lost in the media focus on democracy and diversity. In the United States, for example, Harris supporters stressed the need to build a more inclusive ‘new’ America that supported and respected people of all faiths and race. This ‘diversity’ argument was turned on its head by Trump’s shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric, at times coarse and venomous in demonising those of different colour and ethnicity. It was no different from the routine dog-whistle targeting of minorities during the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign when voters were warned that ‘infiltrators’ would snatch away their mangalsutras and even take away buffaloes. Now, Yogi Adityanath has also ratcheted up the communal temperature further with his ‘Batenge toh Katenge (will be slaughtered if divided)’ slogan.
In a more civilised world, a Trump or a Modi-Yogi’s incendiary remarks might have led to widespread condemnation. But in the 2024 election whirl, these openly divisive statements are seen as rousing the core voters against a perceived ‘enemy within’. In the US, Harris’s passionate appeal for inclusivity was targeted as left-liberal political correctness that was hurting the interests of ‘white’ Americans; in India, those who hark back to Nehru’s ‘unity in diversity’ credo are dismissed as ‘pseudo-secularists’, or worse still, as ‘anti-national’, ‘urban Naxals’. If it is the Lutyens elite that are singled out as the ‘enemy’ in India, in America it is the Washington ‘establishment’ that has been the hate figure.
In a sense, as political strongmen, Trump and Modi have discovered a similar success formula. If Modi has spun the dream of a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047, Trump too has promised to ‘Make America Great’ again. Populist sloganeering that appeals to a muscular nationalist instinct has been at the core of the Trump-Modi messaging. Creating the fear of the ‘outsider’, be it Puerto Rican or Haitian immigrants in the US or Rohingya or Bangladeshi ‘ghuspetiya’ (infiltrators) in this country is part of a conscious strategy to consolidate a distinctive identity: Trumpian Americanism in the US and the BJP’s Hindutva in India are built on unbridled cultural assertion couched as a nationalist backlash to liberal condescension.
If these strategies have succeeded to varying degrees, it is because the opposition in both the US and India have fallen into the trap of challenging the personality traits of their larger-than-life ideological rivals instead of offering a distinct policy prescription of their own. Like the opposition’s reflexive Modi-bashing, the Democratic campaign too got caught in constantly attacking Trump’s character flaws instead of articulating a more cohesive future vision of their own. In the process, Trump was able to play victim and position himself as the ‘outsider’ much like Modi has been able to contrast himself as a ‘chaiwala ka beta’ ‘kaamdar’ pitted against his ‘naamdar’ opponents.
In their career graphs, Trump and Modi are both political survivors who have marched to their own beat. If Modi has been able to frequently defy his critics, Trump too has scripted an unlikely comeback despite a serious felony conviction, misogynistic behaviour and the virtual insurrection of 2020 when he steadfastly refused to accept the election verdict. Five years ago, Modi seemed to prematurely declare Trump the presidential race winner with his catchy ‘Abki Baar Trump Sarkar’ slogan. In 2024, that poll pitch has now come to acquire a new dimension: there is still space in global politics for demagogues.
(Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author. His new book is 2024: The Election That Surprised India)