Foreign policy almost never figures in Indian election campaigns—unless it has to do with Pakistan. So it’s no surprise that the face-off between India and Pakistan over a terror attack on February 14 in Indian-administered Kashmir, which happened days before the schedule for the Indian general election was announced, is casting a long shadow on the campaign. The general election, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a second term, will be held in multiple phases over April and May.
The Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government should have been on the defensive after the attack on an Indian convoy by the Pakistan-based terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), killed 40 troops. However, it quickly turned a serious security breach—one that testified to the failures of the current Indian government in Kashmir—into a public relations coup. Due to the muscular image of the Modi government and the attack’s proximity to the election, it was widely expected that India would hit back. It did so on February 26, when Indian fighter jets bombed a JeM training camp in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunwa province. This was the first time that Indian fighter aircraft had crossed into Pakistani territory since the 1971 war, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.
Soon after the air strike, two versions of the event began circulating. One was the Indian version, articulated by the Indian Foreign Secretary, that the strike had killed a “large number of militants.” The other was Pakistan’s, which admitted that Indian planes had intruded into Pakistani airspace, but upon pursuit had dropped their “payloads in haste” and escaped. In the next few days, the conflict escalated to the point where Pakistan shot down an Indian fighter jet and captured the pilot. A Pakistani F-16 might have also crashed in the dogfight. Pakistan’s much-publicized release of the Indian pilot on March 1 helped cool down tempers and seemed to have averted any immediate further action from India.
It did not, however, take long for the air strike to dominate both Indian media coverage and the BJP’s electoral pitch. The conflict seemed to be have been fought with greater intensity in TV studios and on social media sites than on the India-Pakistan border. Objectivity flew out the window and most news channels engaged in patriotic one-upmanship, with one news anchor donning military fatigues and holding a toy gun. Social media was rife with disinformation and fake images. Fact-checking, too, became a casualty, as the ultra-nationalists and moderates each debunked the other’s claims. Satellite images, many of them doctored, of the strike’s site and the damage done bolstered rival claims.
The BJP and Modi, too, were quick to foreground the air strike in their election campaign. Within hours of the air strike, Modi said that India would no longer be “helpless” in the face of terror. In subsequent speeches, Modi has reiterated that his government won’t shirk from entering the home of terrorists and killing them. Some of his party colleagues have been candid about the effect of the strike. One of them, a former chief minister of an Indian province, B.S. Yeddyurappa, predicted that the strike would help the BJP win at least two dozen seats in his home state of Karnataka. Disputes over the impact of the air strike and the number of casualties, too, have become intensely politicized. While the Indian armed forces were wary of coming up with a number, the BJP President and Modi’s confidante, Amit Shah, proudly proclaimed that 250 terrorists had been killed in Balakot. The BJP also put up posters across India with Modi holding a gun and surrounded by militaristic images.
By contrast, after initial reluctance, the opposition parties have begun questioning the credibility and impact of the air strike, demanding to know the extent of the damage caused and the number of terrorists killed. The Congress Party also criticized the Modi government, despite all its courting of China, for failing to enlist Chinese support at the UN for designating JeM chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. However, these attacks on the government’s official narrative have done little to move the needle on public opinion. The BJP has continued to exploit the attack to shore up its nationalist credentials.
Before the terrorist attack in Kashmir, the BJP’s standing was looking shaky in the face of electoral defeats in late 2018 in three north Indian states. Voters had punished the BJP on several issues, including anaemic job creation, farmer distress, a poorly designed Goods and Services Tax, and the aftershocks of Modi’s most disruptive move—a dramatic demonetization of high-value currency in November 2016. The question now is whether the air strike will swing the vote in favor of the BJP.
A survey done immediately after the air strike showed that the approval ratings for Modi, which were 32 percent at the beginning of 2018, had jumped to 62 percent. At the same time, national security, which was chosen by only 4 percent of the respondents as a key issue in early 2019, climbed to 26 percent and ranked even higher than unemployment. The gap in popularity between Modi and his closest challenger, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, had also widened considerably following the air strike. Two recent opinion polls have forecast that the BJP will win fewer parliamentary seats than it did in 2014, but the fall won’t be as steep as was widely expected. While opinion polls can be notoriously inaccurate in India, they usually capture the general trend, which seems to indicate a post-air strike bump for the BJP.
If, however, we look at the impact of past India-Pakistan conflicts on elections, the evidence is mixed. The 1965 India-Pakistan war did not have a discernible impact on the 1967 general election, which saw the Congress, without Nehru’s presence for the first time, returning to power. The 1971 war took place after Indira Gandhi had convincingly won the election the same year. The 1999 Kargil war, which saw India score a decisive victory over Pakistan, arguably had an impact on the general elections that were held soon after the war ended. The Kargil war was fought under a shaky coalition government, headed by the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Prime Minister, that had been in power for only a year. A Vajpayee-led coalition was re-elected in 1999 with exactly the same number of seats it had won in 1998, but with an increase in vote share in the seats that it contested. Significantly, the BJP did better in states where it was in a direct contest with the Congress than in states where its main opponent was a regional party—suggesting that the BJP is stronger when focusing on national issues.
If we compare 1999 with 2009 and 2016, the evidence becomes even less conclusive. The 2009 general elections were held soon after the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, widely known as India’s 9/11. In these elections, the Congress-led coalition, which did not take any military action against Pakistan, returned to power with a greater majority than it had five years earlier. The more recent so-called Indian surgical strikes in September 2016, carried out across the Line of Control with Pakistan in response to a terror attack on an army camp, did bring electoral dividends in the critical state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). However, it is unclear whether demonetization, which also happened around the same time, had the greater impact on the UP elections.
During the current 2019 election campaign, the BJP is likely to keep talking up national security and the air strike against Pakistan and duck issues where the Modi government has been less successful, such as mitigating unemployment and farmer distress. How the opposition parties respond to this changed narrative is crucial. Given past history, three things can be said with some certainty. One, the air strike could matter more in states where the BJP is in a direct contest against the Congress. Two, the issue will possibly find more takers in urban India and middle-class homes, who are far more concerned with national security and deeply polarized than rural India. Three, the election campaign is likely to focus less on the substance of the India-Pakistan relationship than it is on scoring political points.
Looking beyond the election campaign, the Balakot air strike signaled the willingness of the Indian government to hit targets inside Pakistan in retaliation against terror attacks. This air strike has thus established a new threshold for India’s response to terror attacks, without changing the fundamental nature of the India-Pakistan relationship. While it has raised the cost of Pakistani meddling in Kashmir, the root causes of the conflict remain very much in place. Unless Pakistan acts against terrorist organizations operating out of its territory, terror attacks on Indian soil will likely continue. From now on, however, Indian governments will find it difficult to exercise restraint when faced with such attacks—leaving the door dangerously open to escalation.
