As the 2024 Lok Sabha election approach, Narendra Modi has remained India’s first choice for Prime Minister.
BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is projected to win 284 seats if the elections were held today. Meanwhile the Congress is projected to win 191 seats.
PM Modi remains India’s favourite to hold the prime ministerial post with 52% of voters in support of his government.
Other contenders emerging from the BJP include Home Minister Amit Shah (26%), Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath (25%) and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari (16%).
Around 14% said that Congress MP Rahul Gandhi could be the next Prime Minister. As the Wayanad MP wraps up the lengthy Bharat Jodo Yatra, 37% opined that the protest march had created buzz, but would not help to will elections.
Around 29% appear to believe that it is a great exercise for mass connect, while 13 dubbed it a ‘rebranding exercise for Rahul Gandhi’.
While the C-voter list suggest that the Congress will continue its stint in the Opposition benches, Gandhi and fellow Congress leader Sachin Pilot have been termed the best leaders to revive the Congress. Gandhi appears to have taken a sharp lead in recent months and polled 26% of votes in his favour.
According to the poll, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is the person best suited to lead the Opposition with 24% of votes. This is followed by West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee at 20% and Rahul Gandhi at 13%.
Heading into its tenth year at the helm, the Modi government’s performance has found favour with 67% of respondents. At an individual level, around 72% of the respondents said that they were satisfied with the PM’s performance.
The number has increased 11% since August last year. Correspondingly, there was also a significant dip in the percentage of people ‘dissatisfied’ with the BJP-led administration.
C-voter data indicated that many believe the NDA government’s biggest achievements were its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic (20%), the revocation of Article 370 (14%) and the building of Ram Mandir (12%).
Somewhat contradictorily, 8% of people also think than its handling of the pandemic was the NDA government’s biggest failure.
According to the survey, 25% believe its biggest failure to be ‘price rise’, while 17% focused on its ‘failure to tackle unemployment’.
The Mood of the Nation poll had 35,909 respondents covering all Lok Sabha segments in India. It also made use of over 1 lakh interviews from C-voter’s regular tracker data.
Who After? Modi
Narendra Modi is in the tenth year in office now as Prime Minister and on his way to seeking a third term in 2024. He will also be turning 74 next year.
So, the question looms for the BJP – sooner if he chooses to live by his own stop-at-75 dictum, later if he doesn’t — who after Modi?
Modi has only recently returned from the US after a tour that must count as a personal high point for him, notwithstanding its low point about his reluctance to face a full-blown press conference and drawing global attention to not having had a single press conference in India during his time as PM, a glaring flaw in the eyes of mature democracies.
PM Modi still keeps a back-breaking schedule people half his age can’t keep up. He jets across the globe a dozen times a year, meeting heads of state and Fortune 500 CEOs, and dazzles the Indian diaspora wherever he goes, with the spotlight always on him.
With equal zest, he criss-crosses the country on whirlwind tours all year, and goes on statue and project unveiling sprees and revels in inauguration of temples choreographed to attain the maximum effect of pious pageantry.
He campaigns for central and state elections with vigour and addresses hundreds of rallies, from morning till night tirelessly, to consolidate the Hindu vote.
When such a driven and charismatic leader as Modi, with a cult following and larger-than-life image, gets on in his years, the question arises — among the public, and in the party and its Parivar.
“Who Will Replace Modi When The Time Comes?”
In parties controlled by dynasties, common in Indian politics, a favoured offspring takes over the reins at an opportune time.
Modi is now the unquestioned leader of the party, towering over all others. He is feared by both his party colleagues and the RSS. And the RSS leadership is cautious in making it known whom it favours as his successor.
Does it prefer one of the two hard-liners and rivals, Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, pre-empting Modi’s choice?
Will it push for Nitin Gadkari, seen as being close to the RSS and as an affable, moderate and acceptable face across the political spectrum, and who would be welcomed by business?
Does the RSS have the courage to ride roughshod over Modi and project its own man? Maybe it will reveal its cards only after the results of the 2024 election.
