Implications of India’s elections

Pakistan bashing, Hindutva posturing, and brazen Islamophobia became primary planks of BJP’s re-election campaign

The Modi-led BJP has won the Indian elections by a larger majority than expected. The largest democratic experiment in the world has produced a disappointing result where majoritarian tendencies have clearly prevailed over any pretense of inclusivity.

Focusing on the enemy within, and the enemy without, unfortunately remains a time-tested strategy for opportunistic politicians to solicit support and to deflect blame from their own failures. Examples of politicians of different shades fueling xenophobia, and evoking fear of hostility by neighbouring states, are not hard to find across much of the contemporary world, including South Asia.

Pakistani politicians do still sporadically evoke the India card to deflect criticism from their own performance or to discredit opponents. Consider, for instance, how Nawaz Sharif was simultaneously taunted in the lead-up to the last elections for his ‘friendship’ with Modi (recall for instance the oft-repeated PTI slogan “Modi Ka Jo Yaar Hai, Ghaddar Hai, Ghaddar Hai”), and for ratcheting tensions with India whenever he found himself in trouble.

Overall, however, evoking the fear of India is no longer an election winning strategy in Pakistan. The PPP, the PML-N, and now even the PTI, have expressed the desire for better ties with India. Based on the rationale that it is easier for hardliners to make concessions for peace, our current Prime Minster had even expressed the hope that a new Modi-led government may make it easier for Pakistan to improve ties with India.

On the other side, however, Pakistan was being turned into a hot-button election issue, the implications of which will be hard to undo. In 2014, when Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, he used the plank of development, promising to modernise India’s moribund economy and take everyone along with him on the path to progress. Given his RSS background, and his role in the Gujarat massacre, the subtext of Modi’s campaign, even then, was ultranationalist. However, after five years of rule, and an array of failed economic promises later, Modi changed his tactics. Pakistan bashing, hyper-nationalistic Hindutva posturing, and brazen Islamophobia became the primary planks of the BJP’s re-election campaign.

The assertive posturing around the Pulwama incident may have worked in propelling the Modi-led BJP to regain power, but it had brought the countries to a very dangerous brink. Whether India will respond in a similarly aggressive manner if there is another terrorist incident on its soil, which it blames on Pakistan, remains to be seen. However, Pakistan hatred still does run quite high in India, which also has very negative implications for Indian Muslims.

The electioneering behaviour of many prominent BJP candidates has been described by an Indian journalist as having “crossed over into the domain of sanctioned communalism”. Hate-speech against Muslims by Modi-endorsed hardline candidates such as Yogi Adityanath and Pragya Singh Thakur even compelled the Election Commission to censure them, prompted by orders of the Supreme Court. Even Amit Shah, the President of the BJP, and Maneka Gandhi have made xenophobic and problematic remarks.

Amidst the euphoria of his re-win, Modi has promised to work towards an ‘inclusive India’. However, the strong mandate that the BJP under his leadership has received is not based on principles of inclusion but rather divisiveness, and the promise of further consolidating majoritarian rule. The BJP’s winning electoral campaign included pledges of an intensified push to declare India a Hindu nation, to crack down further on dissenters, to tighten the noose around Indian Muslims, and to end the special status to Jammu and Kashmir.

It will prove difficult for the majoritarian Indian state to conveniently walk back on these electoral promises, despite the threat of a backlash within India. The pursuit of more myopic policies by the Indian state will in turn continue to undermine chances of overcoming tensions with its nuclearised neighbour, which too has its share of similar problems.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 31^st, 2019.

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