Dark days for India
Luke Harding looks at how the BJP's election victory in Gujarat will affect India's future as a secular state
The Guardian Monday December 16, 2002
It was, the Hindu newspaper pointed out, a "stupendous victory".
The result of the elections in the Indian state of Gujarat had never really been in doubt. Exit polls after last Thursday's elections all suggested that the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) would hang on to power.
But nobody, not even India's BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had quite expected the scale of the party's landslide yesterday. The BJP romped home with 126 seats in the new 182-seat assembly. The opposition Congress party was virtually wiped out, winning only 51 seats.
The BJP's stunning triumph was clearly down to one man - Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi. Nine months ago Mr Modi presided over the worst religious riots in India's recent history. Hindu mobs enraged by the Muslim burning of 59 Hindu pilgrims on a train in the town of Godhra, went on the rampage - burning, killing and raping more than 2,000 of their Muslim neighbours.
Mr Modi's administration and police force were complicit in the carnage. Mr Modi did not apologise for the riots. Instead he scented a political opportunity. In the run-up to the polls the chief minister campaigned on new, aggressive platform of "Hindutva" - or chauvinist Hindu supremacism.
His main campaign theme centred on Muslim terrorism in neighbouring Islamic Pakistan and in Gujarat itself. Officials hinted that the state's Muslim minority, who account for 9% of the population, should consider leaving India for Pakistan. The strategy was shameful, disturbing, and fascist. But it worked brilliantly. This morning Indian newspapers were busy analysing whether Mr Modi's populist rightwing tactics could be repeated elsewhere - and what the implications were for India's future as a secular state.
The Hindu newspaper dubbed Mr Modi's victory as "disturbing". His tactics had "paid off", it admitted. But it added: "What the BJP has harvested now are the fruits of hate, which it chose to spread assiduously and aggressively in pursuance of its agenda of majoritarian communalism. The poll verdict is not merely unfortunate, but extremely ominous for the country's future as a truly secular and pluralist polity and, therefore, a matter of grave concern for the millions of people who remain committed to the liberal democratic values enshrined in the constitution."
This isn't quite how the BJP sees it. The party's hardline religious allies, who want to scrap India's secular constitution and turn the country into a Hindu state, have called for Moditva Mr Modi's brand of chauvinist politics - to be repeated elsewhere.
Ten Indian states go to the polls next year, followed soon afterwards by a general election in 2004. In the past Mr Vajpayee has been constrained by the fact he leads a 19-party coalition government, largely made up of ostensibly secular parties. But the BJP's coalition allies have usually preferred to stick with the BJP, even if it means sacrificing their principles. The prime minister will now come under intense pressure to pursue a more aggressive, rightwing agenda even if that means further polarising Hindu-Muslim relations in India. BJP party workers, meanwhile, are now talking up Narendra Modi as a future prime minister.
Yesterday's result also comes as a big blow for Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of India's former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. After losing India's last election disastrously in 1999, Mrs Gandhi's party had been enjoying a modest recovery, including victory in elections two months ago in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
But in Gujarat Mrs Gandhi got it wrong. Instead of campaigning on a defiantly anti-communal platform, Congress workers tried to woo voters with "soft Hindutva" a moderate version of the BJP's pro-Hindu politics. It didn't work. Instead the electorate plumped for the real thing.
Whether Modi-style Hindu revivalism can now be repeated across India is a moot point. Buried under blanket coverage of the Gujarat result is another depressing omen for the Congress party- its by-election defeat last week in three previously safe seats in Rajasthan. Observers agree that India's opposition parties now need to get their act together.
"The BJP may not find it as easy to try the same methods in other states," Ramachandra Guha, a writer and political analyst said. "But it is depressing. The man who has presided over a successful pogrom has used it as an electoral strategy."
Mr Guha and other liberal commentators admit Indian political leaders have previously exploited religious riots to reap spectacular dividends most notably Rajiv Gandhi, who won a landslide victory following his mother, Indira Gandhi's, assassination in 1984 at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards. Enraged Congress supporters hunted down and killed several thousands Sikhs. But the Congress party did not mention religion during the ensuing election - it was implicit.
These are dark days for India, it seems. "What has happened in Gujarat is original in the sophistication and completeness of its articulation," Mr Guha said, adding: "the creation of Pakistan at Partition is an open invitation to Hindu fundamentalists. As long as there is Pakistan there will be Hindu fundamentalism."
Email luke.harding at mantraonline.com