June 4 proves Narendra Modi is no Tony Blair. Not Yet...

What absolute political victory actually looks like

Before the results of the latest Lok Sabha elections, I was comparing Narendra Modi in my head to former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. In their long (and for a long time, overlapping) careers, they have many displayed many similarities. Both displayed a rare and enviable combination of being deviously good at retail politics, while also being competent administrators. Most politicians are either good campaigners or good administrators, and only a small handful can do both with equal competence. In this era where human agency is sought to be replaced with systems and processes, where any sort of executive action is seen with suspicion, where corporate lobbying, NGOs (both those funded by the government and those funded by private individuals), and "international institutions" push and pull levers behind formal power, and where judicial oversight and expansion is limitless and all-encompassing, this is the rare figure who can successfully wield the power granted to him or her by the mandate of the Demos. He is a nothing short of a political unicorn. He is the Carlylian "Great Man" somehow cutting his way through the hydra of systems and processes. But after the results of June 4, I have increasingly come to think that this comparison is not fair to Blair, even though Modi, like Blair, is back as Prime Minister of his nation for a historic third consecutive term.

I say this for a simple reason, and by asking a simple question: In today's political system - which can be lucidly described as technocratic institutional governance that receives an indirect mandate through the stamp of electoral politics - what does "winning" look like? Is it enough to just win an election? Once you take your oath of office, are you simply going to be allowed to waltz into the official room of power and enact the promises that got you elected? Is the permanent institutional machinery simply going to fall into line in reverence for the Peoples' Mandate? What about the next election? Will these things magically happen if you somehow manage to repeat your feat?

The answer, quite obviously, is no. And the reasons should be obvious to everyone. True "victory" in such systems is not just winning one election and to then planning for the next one. True "victory" means being able to navigate the labyrinthian maze of the permanent institutions and unofficial and unelected power structures who affect the direction of the country, to be able to enforce your will on these structures (through hook or crook), and to bring about the change you have sought to make and has been rewarded by the People by voting you into office.

This is one metric in which Tony Blair defeats Narendra Modi by a large margin. And how Blair does so is something that deserves to be studied. To me, the answer is simple. Blair has shaped nearly four decades of U.K. politics through the creation of permanent institutions that continue to shape politics long after he has given up formal power. The success of Blair in this metric is such that even though his Party has been technically out of power for fourteen years now, Blair's total restructuring of the U.K.'s capillaries of power means that every Tory government for the last decade and a half has been, and has had to be, a slightly modified variation of Blair. If Margaret Thatcher's biggest achievement was New Labour, then Blair's extraordinary achievement can be seen in the hilarious image of the 2010 U.K. General Elections - David Cameron (Conservatives), Gordon Brown (Labour) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats). Three minor variations on the flavor known as Tony Blair. If electoral successes and being able to appoint a winning successor is one victory condition of modern technocratic electoral politics, then surely reducing your opponents into mimicry and admiration is the far superior and desirable condition of victory.

Cameron won this battle of Blair clones in 2010, and after a decade-and-a-half of Cameronite rule, it's hard to see his "One Nation Conservatism" as anything but a Blairite transformation of Britain's oldest political party. Cameron, and every Tory PM since him, have locked-in Blair's gains, continued his policies through the 2010s and early 2020s, and are now about to hand over power (and these very same institutions that Blair created) to Blair's hand-picked successor Sir Keir Starmer. New Labour 2.0 is going to be a smooth transition from the comically disastrous Tories, and as New Labour under Blair created Britain's new permanent political structure, they will be much more comfortable captains of this ship. For fourteen years, it's like a ship that was built by a mouse and crewed by mice was being captained by a cat. It was an unnatural and uncomfortable settlement, but the crew of mice dug-in and reached a mutually-beneficial agreement with the cat captain. The cat captain got to nominally captain the ship, but had to govern for all intents and purposes like a mouse. Now, after fourteen years of this bizarre arrangement, a true-blue mouse is in the running to captain the ship again, and the New Labour 2.0 government and the permanent British system will fit with each other like a hand going into a tailor-made glove.

Below are a just a few examples of the permanent institutions Blair and New Labour created in the late 90s and 2000s. Keep in mind that creating new institutions means you get to staff them, thus creating a permanent institutional patronage system that is paid for and funded by the government, i.e. including the money of your political enemies. You make your policies and vision of the country and power as the "neutral" point that has to be accepted by all sides, the null-hypothesis of a nation's politics. It is the absolute victory condition of modern oligarchical institutional politics.

1. The British Supreme Court. Ending the judicial functions of House of Lords.

2. Devolution of democracy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

3. Ofcom

4. Giving the Bank of England independence to set interest rates.

5. Significant acceleration to university attendance. Permanently changing the educational and cultural makeup of the country. (Just coincidently, also creating a permanent and solid bloc of Blair loyalists in positions of power).

6. And, of course, most importantly, immigration. There's too much to compile on this issue so I'd recommend reading this article.

To sum up, Blair achieved permanent victory in British politics by changing the very structures of governance. He created institutions out of thin air and staffed them with his people. He domesticated his own opponents to the point that their victory condition was to be "more Blair than Tony Blair". Even if his enemies won an election after him, it didn't really matter what they wanted to do because the ground had been shifted from under their feet. Blair is the ultimate example of the outstanding and sovereign influence of individual action over the inevitable tides of materialist forces of history. He is, somehow, Carlyle's Great Man, as well as the Über-Technocrat, as is brilliantly laid-out in this homage to Blair from a figure of the British online Right. U.K. politics has revolved around Blair, and has been shaped by him for at least 25-years now, and with an incoming Starmer term, it will be for at least 30 years.

Narendra Modi has done basically none of the above. He hasn't created any new institutions, hasn't staffed them with his people and funded them through public funds. In fact under the BJP, public funds still pay for permanent institutions set up by Shuddho and the INC. Looked at this way, the BJP has for ten years patronized their enemies through government funds, which points to a childish misunderstanding of the basic reality of Friend-Enemy politics. In contrast, if they had somehow come to power in 2024 by winning 10-15 more seats, India's Opposition Parties, representing the Shuddho consensus, would've acted swiftly to ban organizations like the RSS and passed "hate speech" laws within a matter of days. This is because they understand Friend-Enemy Politics, and know how and why Power is to be exercised. Unlike Blair, Modi's opposition has not bent to his will. In fact, when Modi exits stage, Indian politics threatens to turn the clock back straight to 2014. This it the difference between Modi and Blair.

I'm sure that as the results poured-in on June 4, 2024, the above thoughts must have passed through the mind of Narendra Modi. After all, you can accuse him of being a lot of things, but you cannot accuse of him of being a slouch or of not being committed to enacting the change he wants to enact on Indian society. In a significant way, Modi is the first Prime Minister and mass leader in Indian politics to make a hard break from the Shuddho Consensus and Equilibrium that was the null-hypothesis of Indian politics since Partition, and arguably even before that. Unlike Blair, Modi has failed to create a new consensus, that replaces and old and receives the bending of the knee by the rent seekers of the old consensus. It's hard to not link this with the complete failure of Modi to create any new institutions despite having ten years of near-uninterrupted power.

As he wades into the dodgy-waters of a coalition government for the next five years, Narendra Modi must be wondering what his legacy is going to be. Will it be the dawn of a three-decade reich like Blair created in the U.K.? Or will it be looked-back at by Shuddho historians (as the only correct answer to the statement "History will not look back at X kindly" is "It depends on who writes the history") as a bizarre aberration from the pre-destined course of Indian politics as was assumed till 2014? Time will tell, but if he was looking for inspiration, Modi could do worse than studying the career of Tony Blair.