A post-Modi truth: It’s not the economy, stupid!
Written by: Election editor Chirag Chinnappa. Infographics by Sharath Ravishankar. Sharath is a Bangalore-based information designer and illustrator. Check his work out @shirtshanks.
Employment, rather the lack of it, is always a major talking point in every Lok Sabha election. Remember Prime Minister Modi’s promise of creating 10 million jobs every year right before the 2014 elections? These tall employment promises have largely been absent from the ruling party’s campaign this election season. OTOH: The opposition is doing its best to turn rising unemployment into an electoral brahmastra.
But, what about voters? Last week, Lokniti-CSDS released their National Election Study for 2024—the most comprehensive and reliable pre-election survey in India since 1996. A key finding: The greatest number of voters (27%) surveyed say that unemployment is the most important issue this Lok Sabha election—followed by rise in price rise (23%) and development (13%).
But, but, but: Does this mean that unemployment will play a decisive role in determining the outcome of the elections? Maybe not. Let’s look back at elections past—starting with 2014. When BJP won its first term, the unemployment rate was 5.4%—and it was the fourth most important issue for voters (7.5%) in the CSDS survey.
At the end of its first term in 2019, a leaked NSSO employment survey found unemployment at an all-time high of 6.1%. Still, the BJP government continued to promise citizens that jobs were in fact being created, and unemployment was reducing (to almost 3%!) across sectors. But according to the 2019 CSDS pre-poll survey, 19.2% people believed it was the most important election issue, with 60% of the respondents finding it harder to find a job since 2014.
The kicker: The BJP won 303 seats, with a record 37.4% of the vote share that year.
Fast forward to 2024: Once again, unemployment is very important to voters. The number who rate it as the #1 issue has jumped from 19.2% in 2019 to 27% in 2024. And for good reason: The unemployment rate has risen to 6.5% since the last election—according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.
This graphic: maps out two datasets. The first is the percentage of voters who believe unemployment is their biggest election issue. We compared this to the increasing rate of unemployment in the country in the same time period, according to CMIE. 
You can see that since 2020, unemployment numbers have remained extremely high—touching 8.003% in 2023. And yet: the government is well on its way to replicate the 2019 win—and perhaps will even improve its performance.
So…voters don’t care about unemployment?
To answer this question, let’s look at another set of data. In 2014, the voters were most concerned with the rise in prices and corruption–maybe because joblessness was low. But the 2019 data reveals a new trend–unemployment may have become less important–because other issues became more significant.
In 2019, almost 50% of voters credited Modi and the BJP for “increasing India’s image in the world.” Cleaning up corruption was also big for 40% of the respondents–indicating the PR success of demonetisation. In comparison, 43.7% said employment opportunities had decreased–60% said the price of essential commodities have increased.
The trend is even clearer in the 2024 survey—where the “most admired work” of the Modi government is building the Ram Mandir—which got 23% of the votes. Employment generation came a distant second at 8%.
According to Sanjay Kumar from CSDS, economic issues have become far less important to the voter in the post-Modi era. They may be concerned about rising unemployment and lack of jobs, but these carry less weight than ‘feel good’ issues like the Ram Mandir and India’s stature on the world stage. More astonishingly, the ideological allure of the Modi government seems to have reframed the issue of unemployment entirely:
In one small survey of Delhi students, more youth blamed themselves for not finding jobs than the central government. Modi has tried to shift the narrative — become a job giver, not a job seeker — and that may have resulted in a situation where people think they are also responsible for their unemployment.
The big picture: If voters no longer punish the government for the state of the economy—be it employment or inflation—then it bodes ill for an Opposition campaign built around economic pain and/or promise of economic welfare. Rahul Gandhi keeps telling us that unemployment is the biggest issue—followed by inflation—even as the Congress pushes its Right to Apprenticeship Programme. Voters may agree—but not enough to vote against the BJP. Any party or alliance that seeks to topple the government has to offer a lot more than jobs to win an election. For better or worse, that’s new.
A note about employment numbers: We have cited unemployment data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) in our graphic. The government’s data on unemployment has been questioned by many experts as being unreliable. The Ministry of Statistics in its Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) has been showing a decline in the unemployment rate since 2018, and recorded it as 3.2% in 2022-23. Some explanation of this lies in how it defines employment. For example, the government data has considered only those who are unemployed and seeking jobs as part of the calculation, disregarding unemployed citizens who ‘stop seeking employment’ and are unable to find a job.
The survey also counts non-income-generating activities as employment—like women doing household chores. There has also been a rise in self-employment in the last five years, from 52.1% in 2018-19 to 57.3% in 2022–23. This fits the BJP’s narrative of becoming a job giver, not a job seeker—and its fairytale treatment of entrepreneurship.
