Curing what ails India's Hindu
hardliners By K Gajendra Singh
In India's first electoral battle
since general elections took place last April /May,
the ruling Congress party-led Democratic Front further
rolled back Hindutva forces in Maharashtra, the second-largest
state in western India, with a population of 100
million. Along with the National Congress Party (NCP),
the Democratic Front won 140 out of 288 seats in the
state legislature, while the Hindu nationalist combine of
the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena won 119
seats (from 128 in 1999). The NCP, which did better this
time than in 1999, won 71 seats compared with the 69 won by the
Congress. The Congress and allies won 40% of the overall
vote, compared with 32% for the BJP and allies.
The results reaffirm the revival of the
Congress under Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow
of assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of
former premier Indira Gandhi. Manmohan Singh was given
the prime-ministerial post when Sonia Gandhi, "listening to her
inner voice", renounced the top job in May, but she
continues to lead the Congress party.
Sonia
Gandhi had campaigned vigorously in Maharashtra before
the elections. Now that Congress has emerged on top,
there will likely be more stability in New Delhi and the
Congress can pursue its own policies. Its allies -
especially the communists - who support the Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance from the outside have been
a source of frequent hurdles for the government. The
Congress should also find a "less strident and more
responsible" BJP on the opposition benches in
parliament, and will now be able to make hard decisions,
a luxury previously not afforded to the coalition
government.
In Maharashtra, the BJP and
the parochial Shiv Sena enjoy strong support in the
state capital Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. But
the incumbent government was widely criticized for
poor governance and corruption, including a fake-stamp scam
valued at hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly
involving many senior leaders. Generally, governments
lose elections in part because anti-incumbency feelings
run high at the time of election, and this was the case
in May.
This sudden loss
of power five months ago came as a difficult shock
for the ruling coalition, the National Democratic Alliance
(NDA), led by prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the
BJP. The NDA was sure it would win on the basis
of its "India Shining" campaign, but the electorate
instead gave the Congress 146 seats (compared with 112 in 1999), a
total of 217 seats with its allies, in the 543-member
lower house of parliament. An overconfident BJP came
out of the elections with 138 seats (compared with 182 seats
in 1999), a total of 189 with its allies. The Congress,
with outside support from the left, easily formed the
new government. A confident and somewhat arrogant NDA
had gone to the polls out of touch with the country's
grassroots problems, such as poverty, as the government's
economic successes benefited only the rich and middle
classes.
Apart from enormously strengthening Sonia Gandhi, the Maharashtra
election results bring the NDA's five-year rule in Delhi to
an end. Gandhi has delivered a state that has not voted
back any ruling government for the past 10 years. Her
stature as the unquestioned leader of the party has gone
up. In spite of increasing consumerism, India is
a poor country where politicians are seen as
rapacious rulers. With traditional regard for austerity
and renunciation, Gandhi's decision to decline the top job in
May made a deep impression on voters.The electorate, both
at the national and the state levels, has also rejected
the opposition's obsession with Gandhi's Italian
origins, as she has learned Hindi and was taught how to
be a traditional Indian daughter-in-law. According to
Indian tradition, once a bride is accepted, she becomes
a part of the family.
It seems that the lesson
of voter rejection is finally seeping through. Senior
BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, one of the front runners to
succeed the aging leadership, while accepting the
results, said, "The game is over for us." She also
clarified that Hindutva and Veer Savarkar, the first
exponent of Hindutva philosophy, were not electoral
issues for the BJP campaign. These movements advocate
Hindu nationalism.
The
issue instead was development. "The campaign was, if
you want development, vote for a government headed by the same
party at the center. This has clicked."
Swaraj also grudgingly admitted that credit should go to Sonia Gandhi,
as she is the president of the Congress party and
it is winning. After the defeat in May, which
stunned the BJP leadership, Swaraj was among the
most vociferous voices against foreign-born Gandhi becoming the
prime minister, and in that eventuality she had vowed to
shave her head (as widows do in India).
Mumbai is
the country's financial and film capital and accounts
for 12% of country's gross domestic product, and pays
two-thirds of India's corporate taxes and more than
one-third of its personal income taxes. The
anti-incumbency factor was eroded in the recent state
elections, as people in Mumbai are still haunted by
memories of the five-year "misrule" of the BJP-Sena,
with its policy of petty corruption and extortion by
local Shiv Sena workers. Shiv Sena also lambastes
non-Maharashtrians in Mumbai , who form 20% of the
electorate. Its founding leader, Bal Thackeray, is now
ailing and has lost his roar and shine. His parochial
agenda no longer gels in Mumbai. And last, the
Thackeray family feud between his son and nephew
concerning their political legacy has made things even
worse.
The time for aging Vajpayee and Lal Kishen
Advani, former home minister and BJP No 2, has
passed, as the latter even indicated in a recent British Broadcasting
Corp interview. Neither he nor Vajpayee would probably
head any future BJP government at the center. They are,
even by Indian standards, too old and too tired. The
younger leaders, such as party president M Venkaiah Naidu, Pramod
Mahajan, Arun Jaitly, Rajnath Singh, Uma Bharti and
Sushma Swaraj, after the defeat in Maharashtra, are now
embroiled in a power struggle for succession to the
first-rung leadership.
In resolving the
BJP's internal power rivalries, Vajpayee seems to have
lost the acumen, political prestige and even the
physical energy to carry the party forward. Advani, who had
dreamed of stepping up to the throne, took time to
internalize the election defeat, which left him in a
state of disbelief and denial. The reversion to the
policies of Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu
Parishad, the BJP's ideological and sister
organizations, on the theory that the April/May
electoral rout was caused by the party's deviation from
Hindutva, ie Hindu fundamentalism, shows how out of
touch the BJP leadership was. But many leaders repeated it
like a mantra for salvation. Advani and Vajpayee also
placed little constraint on the churlish behavior of the
younger party leadership and their increasing recourse
to abusive and low-level discourse, which only alienated
the electorate further.
In going back to
its Hindutva roots, the BJP has contracted into a
parochial, special-interest party, or a pressure group, ie
traders, middlemen and refugees from Pakistan with a chip
on their shoulders against minorities, especially
Muslims. This tendency, if not checked, will badly affect the
BJP in the upcoming assembly elections in Bihar,
Jahrkhand and Haryana. The BJP has already lost much of its
ground support in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and has
suffered from a massive electoral erosion in 25 of India's 28
states.
Most Hindus are generally secular and
tolerant in their political outlook. It may be recalled
that in 1993, elections were held in four states where
BJP governments were dismissed, including Uttar Pradesh,
where the Ayodhya Mosque was demolished, leading to
serious communal riots in which Muslims suffered the
most. With the exception of Rajasthan, where the
Congress allotted too many seats on the basis of
nepotism, the BJP was defeated in three other states.
Most Hindus feel that a place of worship should not be
demolished to build another. In India, Muslims have
shown their electoral muscle by voting for anyone who
can beat the BJP. The cosmetic TV photo ops of some
disgruntled and tired Muslim leaders joining the BJP
just before the April/ May elections did not fool the
Muslim masses.
However, even the Congress
has been forced to use its soft Hindutva card to
retain Hindu voters, who form more than 80% of the population. Both
Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi pandered to religious
sentiment. It was during Rajiv Gandhi's time that the
gates of the Babri Mosque were opened and the Silyanas
(foundation stone) was laid for the Ayodhya Hindu temple
in place of the mosque. It was under a Congress prime
minister, P V Narsingh Rao, that the mosque was allowed
to be demolished. The sophistry of the BJP's commitment
not to let the mosque be harmed in Uttar Pradesh, where
it was in power, did not wash. It permanently alienated
the Muslim voter from the Congress, leading to its steep
decline and the rise of the BJP and regional secular
parties, with Muslims going over to the latter.
A page out of Turkey's book Many young
BJP leaders are well educated and intelligent. However,
they could stand to learn from Turkey's ruling Justice
and Development Party (AKP), which emerged out of the
ashes of several banned Islamic parties.
Now is not the time to begin shaving heads in protest
or count the medicinal and religious efficacy of cow
urine. The topic of building the temple at Ayodhya has
long been milked for votes, which has only divided the
nation and pitted Muslims squarely against the BJP. A
similar situation took place in Turkey, where the AKP
leadership in its earlier incarnations demanded that St
Sophia Church in Istanbul be converted back into a mosque.
It had been converted into a mosque when the
Ottomans conquered Constantinople, but Kemal Ataturk, founder
of the Turkish Republic and first president, turned it
into a museum. Turkey's Islamic leadership soft-pedaled the
issue in 1996-97 and now doesn't speak about it.
Turkey's AKP, which has Islamic roots,
stunned everyone by getting two-thirds of the seats in
parliament and 35% of the votes cast in November 2002
elections. Parties must cross a 10% threshold to enter
parliament.
In the secular republic of Turkey
established by Ataturk in 1923, political parties based
on religion are banned. So to attract religious and
conservative voters, Islamic parties instead resort to
religious symbolism and choose names with nuanced
meanings. Even the secular parties do so. The first
Islamic party established in 1969 by Najamettin Erbakan
was called the National Order Party, which hints at
Islamic order. When it was closed in 1971 after a
military intervention, Erbakan named the next party the
National Salvation Party (remember the Islamic Salvation
Front in Algeria, which, if it were allowed to contest
the second round of voting, would have won a thumping
majority in Algeria. It had proclaimed that it would do
away with elections and usher in Sharia law - the code
of law based on the Koran).
When
the National Salvation Party was banned after the
1980 military takeover, Erbakan named his next attempt
the Welfare Party. It received nearly 21% of the votes and
won the largest number of deputies in the 1995
elections. When the shotgun coalition government of two right-of-center
secular parties collapsed within three months, in June
1996, prime minister Erbakan joined up with Tansu
Ciller's secular Right Path Party (DYP), the first-ever
Islamist-led government in the republic's history. But
the Pashas (armed forces) made Erbakan resign the next
year, accusing him of promoting Islam. When the Welfare
Party closed, Erbakan established the Virtue Party. It
was also closed and Erbakan was debarred from politics
in 2001.
Then, younger and more moderate leaders
such as Recep Tayyep Erdogan, now prime minister, and
Abdullah Gul, foreign minister, seeing the futility of
establishing religion-based parties, broke away from
Erbakan and established the AKP. They repeatedly
proclaimed that it was not a religious but a
conservative party. They said they did not even meet
with Erbakan. In 1995, Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul
on the Welfare Party ticket and Gul became minister
of state in charge of foreign affairs in the Erbakan-led
government. The AKP's victory was helped by religiously
educated cadre in the bureaucracy, planted
during the 1970s, when Erbakan was deputy premier twice
and premier during 1996-97. The AKP's efforts to place
their men in key places has met with resistance from the
secular establishment. Their attempts to lift the ban on
veils in public places have also failed.
In 1994, when Gul was spokesman for foreign affairs for
the Welfare Party, he said, "Turkey should not join
the European Union, we have said this from the
beginning. Look at a European city, and then look at Istanbul.
It's not a Christian city." A few years ago, Erdogan
recited a poem that included the verses, "Minarets are
our bayonets, domes are our helmets, mosques are
our barracks, and believers are our soldiers." For this
he was jailed and subsequently debarred from contesting
the November elections. But Gul and Erdogan have
jettisoned the aggressive Islamic baggage and have come a long
way since then. The European Union might demur at the
entry of Turkey, with its 99% Muslim population, but it
has accepted the AKP as a moderate, conservative and
constructive political party.
Most political
parties treat municipalities as milch cows and milk them
shamelessly. The AKP, though, has built on Erdogan's
excellent track record as mayor of Istanbul and of
others elsewhere, apart from Erbakan's clean government
in 1996-97. Most of the recent governments in Turkey,
mostly coalitions, were riddled with corruption. In
India, the BJP was honest while running municipalities,
but during its six year tenure in Delhi, was involved in
many scams. Its earlier reputation stands tarnished.
Unlike the general impression of Islamic
parties, the AKP leadership and ministers are highly
educated, many with a background in economics and
management. Its backers are of the upwardly mobile
conservative trading and industrial classes from central
Anatolian towns such as Kayseri, Konya and beyond, who
want their slice of the economic pie. The AKP also has
the backing of the poorer sections of Istanbul, Ankara
and other big cities. Erdogan in Istanbul and Welfare
mayors in Ankara and elsewhere provided cheap bread and
medical facilities to poor areas. These people had
earlier been looked after by communist and leftist
parties and have now come over to the AKP. After coming
into power, by transparency in governance and caring for
the poorer people, the AKP has been be able to
consolidate its vote. It did very well in June municipal
elections and recent polls suggest that it might get 50%
of the vote in coming elections.
In
India, checks on rabid fundamentalism are exercised by
the judiciary, the media and the electorate, who do
not approve of blatantly religious parties, except in
Gujarat. The heads of the Supreme Court of India have tried
to set right the abominable record of the
Narendra Modi government in Gujarat. Most unfortunately,
even the state judiciary joined hands with the ruling BJP
and the establishment in acquitting Hindus accused
of carrying out the pogrom against Muslims after the burning
of 50 Hindus in a railway compartment in Godhra in
2002. The Supreme Court has called for a review of all
cases and transferred major cases for retrial to next
door Maharashtra. But the darkness prevails in Gujarat,
where the BJP under Modi has done well in recent
by-elections, thus hindering attempts by his detractors
in the party to remove him from the post of chief
minister.
When the BJP suffered its
"shock" defeat in May, the mourning was short-lived.
When Vajpayee suggested that Modi's post-Godhra
"excesses" were responsible for the rout, there were
protests. First the RSS and then party president M Venkaiah
Naidu and others silenced such views for moderation. They
did not want to alienate the Hindutva vote bank
in Maharashtra. Yet the Maharashtrains have rejected them.
Conclusion It is
unfortunate that democracy in India has been largely reduced
to the holding of elections by the ruling
political elite across the board, who have introduced
many distortions into Indian politics. While in many
areas the government's progress and growth are remarkable,
there are still many reasons for deep anxiety. M
N Venkatachaliah, one of the greatest judges ever to
head its Supreme Court and also former head of the
National Human Rights Commission, recently wrote that the
"the experience of 50 years has shown that great social
and economic changes can be negotiated through
the institutions of liberal democracy", but there are
many disturbing problems that tend to obliterate all the
gains.
"These are the pervasive
criminalization of politics, politicization of criminals, the
deep distortion of the electoral process and
pervasive bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency beyond
all acceptable limits. Equally disturbing is the slower
pace of social economic change. India ranks 123 on the
Human Development Index. At the core lies the pervasive
political and electoral corruption which is corroding
the values of liberal democracy. Unfortunately,
initiative for reform rests in the hands of just those
who are the best beneficiaries of the conditions that
badly need reform. The deep divisions in the social
structure help the clever politician to set one group
against another and confound the real issue. If
electoral processes are not reformed the future of the
country is surely doomed."
K Gajendra
Singh served as
Indian ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from
1992-96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to
Jordan (during the 1990-91 Gulf War), Romania and
Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for
Indo-Turkic Studies and editorial adviser of global
geopolitics website Eurasia Research Center, USA. E-mail
Gajendrak@hotmail.com.
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2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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