How Enduring Is Modi’s Spell?
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
As the Indian elections approached their final phase, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to visit Kedarnath temple devoted to Lord Shiva and located some 12,000 feet in the high Himalayas. He spent 17 hours, swaddled in saffron robes, meditating and offering prayers in a holy cave, according to the venerable Indian newspaper, The Hindu. He was careful, however, to ensure that his journey of spiritual rejuvenation, spotlighting his piety and devotion to Hinduism, was well covered and publicized by the Indian press.
He is now showcased as a devout Hindu ascetic, in the mold of Mahatma Gandhi, except that he does not subscribe to Gandhi’s sublime core values -- non-violence, pluralism and religious tolerance.
The pilgrimage, apparently, was well rewarded. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), crushed the opposition parties, capturing 303 seats out of 553 of the lower Parliament House (the Lok Sabha) in an election in which more than 600 million participated. The BJP exceeded its own record of 282 seats won in 2014 that was the largest in history. The main opposition party, The Indian National Congress (INC), the party identified with the titans of the freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, won a miserly 53 seats in the current parliament. This number is too small for INC leader, Mr Rahul Gandhi, to qualify to be the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha. More humiliating, he lost his seat in the district of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, which he had held since 2004 and which his family had been representing for decades. He did win a seat in Wayanad, Kerala.
The spectacular success of BJP in the recent election is a subject of much analysis and study internationally. The conventional wisdom is that ultimately the economic success trumps all other factors in winning elections. In the case of India at least, this axiom has been invalidated. India’s economy during Modi’s stewardship has declined significantly. According to available data quoted in Washington Post and first reported by Business Standard, an Indian financial newspaper, the nationwide unemployment rate had gone up to 6.2 % in 2018, the highest in 45 years. Among the young, it has climbed to 18.7%. The situation is so dismal that college graduates are applying for menial jobs. The economic growth (GDP) has fallen to an annual rate of 6.6%, the lowest in five quarters. Many promises for improvement of economic conditions made before the 2014 election have remained unfulfilled.
When it comes to winning the contest of public opinion, Narendra Modi, however, is a highly skilled, charismatic politician, a brilliant strategist and a fiery speaker. Sensing the smell of victory, he refocused his campaign from the economy to Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), cleverly making Pakistan and Indian Muslims its primary issue. The Indian Muslim community was reduced to a state that its political support became a liability to be shunned. The opposition Congress Party that prides in being secular and inclusive was accused of having treasonous sympathy for Pakistan.
Unfortunately, extremists in Pakistani provided Modi some valuable support just weeks before the elections. On 14 February 2019, the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit, Jaish-e-Mohammed, claimed responsibility[ for orchestrating the suicide attack in Pulwama District in Kashmir on a convoy of Indian security forces, killing at least 40 of them. India retaliated on February. 26, claiming to have destroyed the terrorist bases in Balakot in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pakistan strongly denied all the Indian claims. Whatever the truth may be, the purported attack catapulted Modi into a hero, guarantor of the national security, the chowkidar, as he would call himself in election rallies. The president of Congress, Rahul Gandhi, proved no match for Modi. He lacks the zeal, the eloquence and motivations to match those of Modi’s. He found himself into the leadership position because of his status as the scion of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty. His position has now become tenuous.
The election results highlighted the isolation and marginalization of the Indian Muslims minority, comprising nearly 14 percent of the population. In fact, in some Indian provinces their population is even higher. In West Bengal, they number 27%, while in Uttar Pradesh and Behar they are nearly 20 percent of the population. However, their number in the new parliament will be 27, slightly higher than in the last, 23; none of them nominated by the BJP. In 2014 also, BJP did not have a single elected Muslim member in parliament. Senior journalist Kaushik Deka, in an article in India Today, argues that based on their population, their number in the Lok Sabha should be 76.
The success of BJP is a manifestation of a phenomenon of populism sweeping the political landscape worldwide. In a recent book, How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, examines the rise of fascism and illiberal democracies around the globe and outlines some of the conditions that facilitate firebrands to divide their own nation by creating an environment of religious and ethnic polarization, us versus them. The drift of Indian democracy towards religious exclusiveness has alarmed some Indian intellectuals worldwide. The renowned Indian economist and Nobel Laureate at Harvard University, Professor Amartya Sen, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times commented: “What is clear enough is that during the past five years of BJP rule, India has become much more divided along religious lines, making more sharply precarious the lives of minorities, particularly Muslims.” Not so long ago, India was touted as a model developing county, secular, multicultural and inclusive. Now, it seems to have chosen a different paradigm.
The remarkable success of Modi’s BJP has important lessons for Pakistan, which played such an unwitting and disproportionate role in its recent victory. Unfortunately, Indian Muslims are still paying for the creation of Pakistan, even though their vast majority was not even born at the time of partition or had any part in the Pakistan movement. After 72 years, it should be clear that the festering problem of Kashmir cannot be solved by force, or by terrorist actions orchestrated by extremist organizations based in Pakistan. They only result in the loss of innocent lives, making life even more difficult for Kashmiris and causing a fierce backlash against Muslims in India. The Kashmir problem can only be solved by peaceful negotiations among the three stakeholders-- Kashmir, India and Pakistan.
How long can the BJP Government elected by inciting communal and religious divisions maintain majority support? After a while, the weapons of hatred lose their effectiveness and ordinary people start worrying about real problems, such as unemployment, supporting their families and day-to-day survival. Then they start questioning the Government for its failings, realizing that demonization of minorities or the incitement of religious passions cannot solve problems of unemployment, poverty or economic deprivation.
(The author is a former Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, and a health science administrator, US National Institutes of Health)
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