Modi’s Election Strategy Is Well Tested
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
Following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, European powers held a conference at Vienna in 1814, known as the Congress of Vienna, to chart a new map of Europe. The gathering itself was more an occasion for celebration and merrymaking than a serious deliberative endeavor that went on for about a year. However, the Congress eventually succeeded in drawing new boundaries of states, a strategy that kept peace in Europe for nearly a century. However, in the twentieth century, Europe experienced two devastating wars of annihilation as narrow nationalism reasserted itself. The memory of the destruction prompted the creation of the European Union, another attempt to establish a unified Europe, free of authoritative populism.
Nearly six decades later, the world is experiencing a return towards nativism, and right-wing populism. Unscrupulous politicians in many countries incite hatred, ethnic and religious divisions as a political weapon against sections of their own nation to mobilize their supporters. In Europe, we have seen the emergence of right-wing politicians, like Marine Le Pen in France, Victor Orban in Hungary: in Brazil the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro and in Israel the reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The case of Israel is especially noteworthy. Netanyahu won an unprecedented fifth term in the Israeli elections, even though the specter of a legal case for corruption remains hanging over his head. The country, however, is prosperous and has evolved into a regional super power, capable of overpowering any combination of Arab countries. In contrast, Palestinians are in a helpless, bedraggled state, having no support from Arab countries. As if all of this was not enough for winning the election, Netanyahu hyped the danger from Iran, and proposed further humiliation for the Palestinians. If elected, he promised to annex the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, eliminating any possibility of a Palestinian State. Israel has about 20% Arab minority, Muslims and Christians, but their participation in the country’s politics is marginal.
In the United States, the election of Donald Trump was greatly helped by his incitation of ethnic and racial divisions and his exaggeration of the threat of terrorists coming into the country from the Middle East, Mexico and central America. As a candidate, he advocated a total ban on the entry of Muslims and after the election banned entry of citizens from five Muslim-majority countries: Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It is most likely that he will employ the similar winning methods in his reelection campaign in 2020.
Finally, India, the world’s most populous democracy has already embarked on its mammoth election exercise, with potentially 900 million voters using their right to choose their representatives. The election for 545 parliamentary seats started on April 11, 2019 and will conclude on May 19, 2019. The result will be announced on May 23.
In the last elections in 2014, Mr Narender Modi (68 years old) and his Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) won a huge majority, garnering 282 seats in the Parliament. The BJP had championed the ideology of Hindutva (Hinduness), appealing mostly to Hindu atavistic emotions, but also promised to bring economic prosperity and employment opportunities.
BJP’s strategy, grounded in a divisive agenda and aimed mostly against Muslims, succeeded remarkably. In a recent book, Majoritarian State, How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India, Angana Chatterjee (ed.) wrote: “While the share of Muslims in Indian population rose from 11.1 to 14.2%, their representation in the Lok Sabha dropped from 9 to 3.7%.” Only 22 Muslims members were elected in 2014 elections, none of them on the BJP ticket. Also, in the most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), where Muslims represent 18 percent of the population, not a single Muslim won a seat in the Lok Sabha.”
Modi’s promises about economic prosperity and employment opportunities had raised the hopes of millions who voted for BJP. However, the unemployment rate in 2018 went up to 6.1%, the highest in the last 45 years. According to figures cited by the New York Times, “The Modi government has, however, not created as many jobs as it promised in the last election. There are an estimated 23 million unemployed people in the country, of them more than a third hold graduate or higher degrees. Almost one in six highly educated Indians is unemployed.”
At a time when the political debate was pivoting on domestic problems and the BJP was losing some support among the electorate, they received an unexpected boost. A suicide attacker killed 40 Indian paramilitary officers in Pulwama district in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The responsibility for the massacre was accepted by the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant, terrorist organization. The incident brought India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations, to the brink of a catastrophic war. It also enabled the BJP and Modi to change the dynamics of the election, shifting the discourse from domestic issues to targeting Pakistan, indirectly Muslims, always winning subjects.
Even before the latest incident in Kashmir, Modi’s policies had fractured the country along religious and ethnic lines---Hindus and Muslims, upper and lower cast Indians. The official efforts have been made in UP and elsewhere to alter history books taught in schools, removing or distorting narratives of Muslim rulers, while cities and towns with Muslim names with historic significance have been renamed to those that have no Islamic connotations. The efforts to delegitimize Muslims as Indians and marginalize them is ironic. They have lived in India and been essential part of the nation’s fabric for a millennium and are genetically indistinguishable from Hindus.
Modi is a charismatic and shrewd politician and the BJP has cleverly decided to capitalize on his popularity in the 2019 elections. His main rival is Rahul Gandhi, the 48-years old, urbane, Cambridge-educated grandson of India’s iconic leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is relatively inexperienced in the rough and tumble of Indian politics. Should Modi and his BJP, with their retrograde agenda, prevail in the coming elections, as seems likely, India in time will be transformed into a country very different from what its founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and many stalwarts of the freedom movement had envisioned it to be - a secular, tolerant and pluralistic society.
Espousal of these sublime values in the fifties and sixties was what made India a leader of, and a model for, the newly-independent Third World countries. Their repudiation now will be a betrayal of all the noble values with which India, and indeed the Hindu faith, have been associated since ancient times.
(The author is a former Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, and a health science administrator, US National Institutes of Health)
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
