How Covid Bungling Can Win You an Election

Narendra Modi benefits from having carefully cultivated the image of a selfless politician.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in Ahmedabad, India, March 11.

Can a politician bungle a nation’s response to Covid and remain widely popular? Yes, going by recent election results in India. Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party won comfortably in four of the five states that voted recently. In Uttar Pradesh,whose 230 million people make it India’s largest and most politically significant state, theBJP government is the first of any party to win re-election in nearly 40 years.

The results place the BJP in position to retain power in national elections in 2024. UttarPradesh’s controversial chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, a hard-line Hindu nationalist known outside India primarily for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, is a strong contender to succeed Mr. Modi as party leader. The elections mark the continued slide to irrelevance ofthe once-dominant Congress Party, which lost in all five states, and the growth of the up start anticorruption Aam Aadmi Party, which wrested the agrarian state of Punjab fromCongress. But most of all the results underscore Mr. Modi’s continued appeal to voters inthe populous Hindi heartland.

A little less than a year ago, the BJP’s prospects appeared less certain. As a devastatingsecond wave of the pandemic swept through India in April and May, some of the grislieststories came from Uttar Pradesh. In her new book, “Humans of Covid: To Hell and Back,”the television journalist Barkha Dutt writes movingly about some of those affected: a pregnant teacher who died after being press-ganged into local election duty by state government officials, siblings who suddenly lost both their parents, 24-year-old twin brothers who died within hours of each other and are buried together in the same church graveyard.

Ms. Dutt lost her 84-year-old father to Covid, possibly because Indian government guidelines made him wait longer for a second vaccine shot than he would have had he lived in a Western country. The portrait of the Indian government that emerges from her finely reported book suggests apathy mixed with staggering incompetence: poor villagers in Haryana unable to buy drinking water thanks to a clumsy lockdown, Mumbai black marketers who jack up the price of a cylinder of oxygen nine times to 45,000 rupees (about$600), millions of Hindu pilgrims invited to take a dip in the holy river Ganges in Uttarakhand even as the pandemic rages.

In Uttar Pradesh, Ms. Dutt encounters government doctors who lack personal protective equipment and officials who artificially keep the Covid death count low by leaving blanks in death certificates. At the pandemic’s peak, the Ganges is regurgitating corpses. A cowherd leads the reporter to scores of bodies hastily buried in shallow river-bank graves. As the book’s title suggests, it’s a vision of hell. The Economist estimates, based on excess deaths, that 5.7 million Indians have died so far from the pandemic, more than 11 times the official death toll of 516,000.

Yet unlike Donald Trump or Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Mr. Modi appears largely unscathed by his handling of the pandemic. In a poll by Morning Consult, Mr. Modi’s current approval rating of 74% makes him the most popular of the 13 world leaders the polling firm tracks. (Joe Biden is at 41%, tied for seventh place with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Australia’s Scott Morrison.)

Mr. Modi benefits from having carefully cultivated the image of a selfless politician: personally pious, unencumbered by family and wholly dedicated to public service. Pro-government TV channels beam this image into people’s homes every day. Many voters are drawn to his Hindu nationalist ideology, which espouses the idea of a strong India where Muslims and Christians know their place. As the ruling party, the BJP has accumulated a war chest that allows it to outspend rivals by orders of magnitude. The party has also worked tirelessly to transcend traditional caste barriers by wooing so-called backward classes and other traditionally deprived Hindu communities while at the same time retaining the support of upper-caste Hindus.

In a Zoom interview, Pradeep Gupta, chairman of the polling firm Axis My India, credits Mr. Modi’s popularity mostly to one thing: “delivery, delivery, delivery.” Over the years, he has unleashed a series of welfare schemes that the poor—the majority of voters in such states as Uttar Pradesh—associate with the prime minister. These include subsidized cooking gas, money to build toilets and houses, and cash transfers to farmers three times a year. During the pandemic, the federal and state governments topped these up with free food grains and cooking oil.

According to Mr. Gupta, women in particular are grateful for this largesse. Axis My India estimates that male voters preferred the BJP and its allies to its nearest rival, the Samaj Wadi Party-led alliance, by 4 points. Among women the BJP lead was 16 points. Voters see Mr. Modi as the “chief wage earner of the family, responsible for their well-being,” says Mr. Gupta.

As for Covid, Mr. Gupta says the prime minister’s popularity dipped during the peak of the pandemic but bounced back. That opposition leaders were largely invisible to the public helped. By contrast, says Mr. Gupta, the BJP’s Mr. Adityanath was on the ground, visiting Covid-affected families in about half of the state’s 75 districts.

“Unless you are available, what are you a leader for?” asks Mr. Gupta. “You have expectations from a pen to write. If it stops writing, you ask where is the dustbin? It’s the same expectation from politicians as well.”