At the best of times, Indian parliamentary elections are chaotic and transactional affairs. Disguised under a thin veneer of ideology, political parties mobilize sub-group identities to capture the resources of an ever-expanding state in an environment of general scarcity. Political ideologies converge once elections conclude, and state resources are then used to perpetuate networks of patronage to retain power in subsequent elections. Amidst the parade of politicians of modern India, only a few have ever sought to conduct themselves otherwise; fewer still have achieved it. Ideology is the first casualty of India’s politics.

2019 is different. Beneath the viciousness and the cacophony about personalities and dynasties, an ideological battle is being fought on three existentially important issues confronting modern India: cultural identity, national security and the economy. On all three issues, substantive clarity and differentiation have now emerged between the positions of the BJP and the Congress. Rarely has the messaging of the two contenders been more sharply defined, or the choice between the two more stark.

In 2014, BJP’s leadership seemed unsure about the degree to which they could – or should – embrace their historical platform of Article 370, 35A, Ram Janmbhoomi etc. The issue of UPA’s decade of corrupt reign remained front and centre. In 2019, this has changed. While they were never unsure about the righteousness of their cause even during decades on the margins, deep confidence has now emerged in BJP’s leadership team of Modi-Shah-Jaitley about the achievability of their purpose.

The BJP and the RSS are no longer insecure about being perceived as interlopers in New Delhi. Indeed, they are the ‘establishment’. Now, Modi speaks calmly and surefootedly about BJP’s core platform. He is setting the agenda, confronting the Congress and all regional parties, and demanding that all political parties clarify their positions rather than lurk in ambiguity.

This is a fundamental change in approach that has happened for two reasons. First, if the true wages of power is confidence, the BJP’s dominance of India’s political landscape over the last five years has allowed it to earn it in abundance. This has given the BJP leadership the courage to execute upon the lessons of the second observation, the directional reality of which has been best recognized by Arun Jaitley, modern India’s foremost political strategist: At the point of convergence of India’s evolving political-economy and shifting demographics lies a young, aspirational middle class which will soon become a billion in size, and this electorate will possess right-of-centre positions which are in-sync with that of the BJP on the three core issues of national identity, national security and a liberal market economy.

As such, the key question of 2019 (and for the next several decades) will be as follows: Who will best address the hopes and fears of a billion-strong aspirational middle-class with subaltern origins from India’s countryside. This is an electorate that will have no memory of seminal Indian dates such as 1947 or 1975, or even of 1984 or 2001. They will have little affinity with Nehru’s vision of an anglicized soft-state governed by early-20th century European romanticism. And, they will oppose the hagiography surrounding the then urban Indian elite who negotiated their way into post-1947 power behind closed doors. Most of all, they will resent the petty-dynasties who populate the Congress leadership and have governed India contemptuously ever since.

This new electorate will demand economic security, historical dignity and national pride. And as their levels of affluence rise, exposure to the world and technology will allow them to make the journey up Maslow’s pyramid of needs with great speed.

In that journey, their needs will evolve: They’ll start with clamouring for economic freedom and a market-based economy as the only organizing principle that can deliver them jobs and wealth. They will insist on reclaiming India’s historical role as one of the key centres of civilization for the world, and for it to have the capacity to project force globally to protect its national interests. And, they will demand that India’s cultural definition of itself be restored to an unsaid (and potentially indescribable) Vedic historicism thousands of years in the making, and which is the core constituent of the making of every Indian’s worldview irrespective of their religion.

The sociological evidence for such shift in political sentiment is best seen next door in China, and which is, ironically, the only other civilization-as-nation managing similar issues: the rise of a young, proud, and nationalist middle-class in China. Just as the new Chinese middle-class has not followed the expected trajectory of demanding greater social freedoms along with their rising incomes, the new Indian subaltern middle-class will not seek to define modernity along the lines of Western individualism but alongside historical and uninterrupted Indian traditions of social organization. (Thin anecdotal evidence is already arising, for example in the way the new Indian middle-class is more likely to seek marriage as per the very Indian practice of ‘arranged marriages’ where families lead such search, rather than the expected individualism that is the norm in the West.)

They will be, in short, an electorate tailormade to receive the RSS’ and BJP’ messaging. For almost a century, the RSS (and then the BJP) have been consistent about articulating a message of cultural reformation and right-of-centre economic policy. It is to their good fortune that their message will achieve deliverance at the hands of this new India.

The BJP is playing the long game. While the Congress is yet to come up with a coherent issue for 2019, Modi’s three-issue platform is setting the BJP up for a golden period of electoral dominance that could last for decades to come.

What are the three core issues of 2019, and of the new electorate?

Cultural reformation and national identity:

The BJP has made ‘culture’ and ‘national identity’ as core issues of the 2019 campaign. This is a vast and complicated subject, including severely contested anthropological issues of nationhood, religion and citizenship. This ideological position informs the positions not only of Article 370, 35A, the Citizenship Bill, Ram Janmbhoomi … but also, core foundational issues that involve the very definition of what it means to be Indian: Hindutva.

Barring the echo-chambers of the academy and the media, the general mood of the new electorate has already begun to shift and to support BJP’s view of the world. This will only accelerate along with the increase in the size of the new electorate, forcing even all political parties to adjust themselves to adjust to the BJP’s point of view. The clearest evidence is the manner in which the Congress leadership has felt compelled to make overt displays of their religiosity, something that was inconceivable for previous generations of the party’s leadership. While the Congress’ actions could be mere election tactics, this could not have happened if they did not themselves sense a major shift in the sensibilities of the nation.

In many ways then, the resolution of India’s culture and identity issues can only happen in the coming decades when both, the new electorate has become large enough in order to allow politicians to adjust themselves accordingly, and, a new political vocabulary has been created and accepted. In 2019, it is not possible to carry forward meaningful debates on any contested national issues using the tired vocabulary of the past. Over the last few decades, the attempts to explain complex thoughts in one-word summaries (say, Hindutva) has been unsuccessful for the BJP. Instead, its use unleashes a torrent of pre-configured constructs on each side, immediately ending prospects of advancing the discussion rationally.

It is the creation of this new vocabulary that will be a challenge (and an opportunity) for the BJP in the coming years. An entirely new language that can calmly explain the relationship between India’s Vedic birth and an inclusive present for all Indians in the 21st century, and which can be explained to a new electorate unburdened by history or by the coded language of contemporary India.

In doing so, the BJP may have a chance to finally heal both, the open wound of India’s partition, and the subconscious anger of a people for the centuries of assault on their Vedic civilization’s living fabric. It is self-evident that this reconciliation cannot be achieved with the violence that some fringe elements of the BJP have displayed in the last five years, but graciously and confidently so that the course of the nation can be set differently. Just like it can only be the BJP who can organize peace with Pakistan, it can only be the BJP which can reorder the debate around culture and identity for the next century.

For more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, India’s tremendous agricultural surpluses allowed it to create a complex Vedic civilization with a daring understanding of life and consciousness. For a thousand years after, India was the civilizing force for many parts of the world. India peacefully gave its commerce, mythology, tenets of law and administrative organization, religion, language etc. to the Indianized states of Asia and beyond. (George Coedes has published a remarkable work of scholarship on this subject.)

The BJP would do well to tap into India’s overall economic growth and rising cultural confidence to reclaim and redefine the ‘idea of India’ for the next century by addressing the following three issues plainly and calmly.

National security and India’s engagement with the world:

As a matter of some irony, a hundred years from now, historians will remember Modi’s greatest legacy to be the creation of a new foreign policy doctrine for India rather than the culture wars which gave him his initial rise. Alone amongst the Prime Ministers who have preceded him, Modi has shown the capability to play the bold, long game.

While keeping one eye on the neighbourhood, he has sought to reengage with the world in a markedly different manner than previous governments. Modi has shown both, a willingness to create a calibrated response to Chinese actions when prompted, and – equally importantly – the ability to scale down tensions when needed. He has sought to deepen the relationship with new allies as a first step towards enhancing strategic options but realized that old relationships are important. He has shown the willingness to take the battle to the other’s backyard, and yet, not present India as easy to provoke. (In this, the new electorate will pose a challenge: newly-affluent sub-population groups are always hyper-nationalist and easy to inflame, and the BJP needs to be able to rein-in its fringes.)

All of this is coalescing into a nascent, yet undeclared ‘Modi Doctrine,’ and which will focus in-time not on Pakistan, but on India’s two most important foreign policy relationships: the US and China. As India joins them in the club of the three largest global economies, India must engage deeply with both to articulate each’s expectations of the other, and to participate more fully in the reordering of the global order.

India’s relationship with each is unique, and yet, the three are tied together via an evolving US-led Indo-Pacific strategy whose scope and manifestation is yet to fully unfold. India would do well to avoid the incessant posturing and hesitation of its past and move forward to protects its interests wherever such allegiances may lie.

But between the two, it is the relationship with China that will soon become the fulcrum of Indian foreign interest. For a thousand years predating the Islamic invasions of India, China and India fought quietly and fiercely for dominance of Asia with competing ideas of philosophy, civilization, law, administration and religion. In the annals of history, the length of such rivalry probably exceeds that of any other two nations. Indeed, the pre-medieval ‘great game’ was the fight between the equally powerful and rich civilizations of India and China for influence in Asia, the evidence of which now lies scattered across South East Asia in its ruins, its culture and its religious sub-structure.

India’s foreign policy apparatus is hopelessly ill-equipped as of now, with insufficient diplomats and an equally insufficient ambition. Over the next five years, Modi must build the scaffolding within which a $10 trillion economy (and in time, a $20 trillion economy) can protect its foreign policy interests for the next hundred years. Its endgame: friends should admire it; adversaries should respect it and enemies should fear it.

The BJP has rightly made national security the central subject of the 2019 elections: The state’s primary duty is to exercise its monopoly on the use of force to provide law-and-order at home and security at the border. To make up for decades of neglect during which India has lost the respect of its neighbours and made few new allies, Modi must document his foreign policy doctrine, and propose, without reservation or delay, that India seeks global partners who represent common values, common long-term interests, and a framework within which India can operate as an equal partner to protect common interests.

The end of the administrative state:

Modern India continues to suffer from a socialist worldview first laid by Jawaharlal Nehru, and on which Indira Gandhi built a ruthless and expansive ‘administrative state’. This ‘administrative state’ has functioned as an invisible state-within-a-state, and is comprised of an enabling framework of sprawling state-owned companies and state-led institutions; year-after-year, it does a bewilderingly efficient job of destroying national wealth.

This is the nerve centre of India’s problems: Unless the BJP dismantles this superstructure, all else is bound to fail. Without economic strength, grand national ambition is mere posturing.

Modi threatened to demolish the administrative state in his run up to 2014. But the last five years have left scope for a much deeper resolve for 2019-2024. Case in point: In 1951, the number of government-owned public sector units was five. By 1984, Indira Gandhi had made that 220. Surprisingly, even the BJP increased the number from 290 in 2014 to about 340 in 2018. (Numbers sourced from Prannoy Roy’s well-researched recent book, “The Verdict.”)

Modi risks falling into the trap common to all earnest leaders: the belief that they’re different because they’re personally honest, and that with sincere effort, they can manage the economy. That’s wrong. The modern economy is unimaginably complex. It cannot be comprehensively understood, let alone be effectively managed, and certainly never by the very state-institutions and bureaucracy that have been at the centre of its despair. Modi’s increasing attempts to do so reflect his gradual embrace of the administrative state as the tool through which he seeks to deliver the promised reforms, ignoring the reality that both forces are actively opposed to each other.

At stake is not only the reform process but the moral arc of India and the long-suffering soul of the average Indian, corrupted through decades of bending to the whims of the administrative state. Modi and Jaitley understand, a few other Indian politicians, that economics is not about mere budgets or numbers; it is a moral philosophy, requiring of each citizen a framework around which they make individual choices.

As such, reform must begin where the decline began: The government ownership of banks and enterprises. Everything else is mere tinkering. Modi-Jaitley must establish a target so bold that its execution can launch a multi-decadal period of double-digit GDP growth which will end, once-and-for-all, not only the curse of poverty, but also, India’s second-tier status amongst great nations.

When faced with forces one doesn’t understand, it is expedient to revert to a known vocabulary of Indian politics: Secularism, polarization, Hindutva, nationalism etc. This is understandable; language allows us to make sense of the known world, and to share such comprehension using a shared platform of understanding.

But language is also a weapon. In the hands of the Indian politician, language is used to ambush those who think differently. For the new India that will emerge with this new electorate, the BJP may need a different set of words altogether so as to create, without arrogance or anger, what George Kennan wrote of as the “placid give and take …, in particular: The tempering of all enmity and all intimacy, the balancing function of personal self-respect, the free play of opposing interests.”

Through long years of internal perseverance (and some demographic manna), BJP now finds itself in an enviable situation: An ability to shape the nation for the next century as it had long promised it would. If now it were to fail to act decisively, it would only have itself to blame.

(The author can be reached at annatjain@gmail.com)