Hindu right takes power
* India The far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is to lead India's new government. Raghu Krishnan and B. Skanthakumar outline the causes and consequences.
The BJP is associated with the politics of Hindutva, the political mobilisation of the Hindu majority on a communal and anti-Muslim platform. Most of the Indian left characterises the BJP as a fascist
Prior to the elections, the BJP cemented a shaky alliance with a heterodox group of smaller parties, in the expectation that it would not be able to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha (Lower
The BJP itself captured 25% of votes cast and, with its allies and independents, has 264 of 545 seats, leaving it just short of a majority.
The party has a three point agenda
"reclamation" of disputed religious sites where mosques now stand in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura and the building of mandirs (Hindu temples) in their place. Second, the abrogation of Article 370 in the Constitution, which gives a special status to Jammu and Kashmir - India's only Muslim-majorıty state. Finally, the BJP wants a Uniform Civil Code for all Indians, regardless of religious affiliation. At present each community observes its own personal laws in the areas of matrimony, divorce, maintenance and succession.?
However, in this campaign the BJP had to downplay its traditional preoccupations in exchange for electoral alliances with regional parties which do not share its Hindutva agenda and in a transparent bid for greater respectability among the influential non-Hindutva sections of the middle and upper classes.
The refrain from the BJP was the dual slogan of "stability and good government". It was well received across the country by a population fed up with the instability associated with coalition governments at the Centre and the financial scandals that are associated with all parties excepting the BJP and the Left. Not-so-United Front
The incumbent United Front, an alliance of the bourgeois centrist Janata Dal (JD), regional parties and the Left Front, survived in office for nineteen months, implementing the economic programme of its Congress (I) predecessor. Its parliamentary strength was halved from 180 to 98 seats and splits in the JD, the core of the alliance, have reduced it to a rump and in-
The United Front had been floated as a 22 International Viewpoint #299 centre-left alliance of "secular and demoparties to keep out of government both the corrupt Congress (I) and the communal BJP after the 1996 election. Its largest constituent is now the Communist Party of India (M) with 32 seats, while the other Left Front partners have 16 seats between them, mainly in West Bengal and
When it became clear that the BJP would be the only beneficiary of an unnecessary and unpopular election, the CPI (M) leadership, tremendous pressure to formally join the United Front government but instead "supported from outside, dropped clear hints that it would rather support Congress than let the BJP into office. This represented a change in the previous CPI (M) policy of equal treatment for the BJP and Congress.
At the same time, Jyoti Basu, Communist Chief Minister of West Bengal, was touting himself as the future Prime Minister of a United Front coalition government. He had narrowly missed that opportunity in 1996 when the CPI (M) Politburo rejected by a single vote his nomination for that post. Basu himself has described that decision as a "historic blunder" twenty unbroken years at the helm of a state government, he clearly yearns to end his political career as the country's prime Congress in crisis
The Congress will be pleased that it has lost only one seat in the new parliament though its share of the vote remains on a downward trend falling to 25.4%. This is a much better than expected result for a party whose factions are openly hostile to each other and which has split into smaller parties on several occasions in the 1990s. Prior to the election campaign, pundits were predicting its imminent demise as there was a steady flow of defections from all levels of the party, primarily in the direction of the BJP.
This haemorrhaging was stopped and party morale improved when Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, entered the electoral fray as the Congress Party's star campaigner. While she drew huge crowds of the curious, her impact seems to have been greater on Congress itself than on the Indian people. She also became the object of the most intense and tedious debates in a lack-lustre election campaign - on whether a 'foreigner' should be allowed to become Prime Minister in the event of a Congress victory.
Meanwhile. CPI (M) General Secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet, appealed to Congress supporters not to desert their party and welcomed Sonia Gandhi's involvement to salvage its sinking fortunes, in an attempt to reduce the steady erosion of the traditional Congress electorate into the BJP fold and to prevent the Hindutva party from winning an outright victory.
The desperation of the Congress to cash in on what remains of the inherited lustre of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty led it to withdraw support for the minority United Front government unless it threw out one of its key partners the DMK (which currently also heads the government in the southern state of Tamil Nadu). The UF refused and Congress, whose previous threats had forced the UF to change prime ministers, was backed into a corner with no face-saving exit but to
This was a foolish and clumsy attempt to confirm its fealty to the Gandhi family, when the report of the Jain Commission (to investigate the security lapses that allowed Rajiv Gandhi to be killed in 1991) blamed the DMK for sheltering and supporting his assassins, the Sri Lankan Tamil LTTE. Considering that it was the policy of both Central and Tamil Nadu state governments to shelter, train. arm and finance the LTTE and other militant groups, this was an easy evasion of broader issues involving India's entanglement in Sri Lanka. BJP's unstable alliances
The BJP's most important regional ally is the main opposition party in Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK, with its coterie of smaller parties. In return for its support at the centre to the BJP, the ALADM leader and former film star J. Jayalalitha demanded and received the Law and Justice cabinet portfolio for her partyman. This demand is not unrelated to the 48 separate charges of corruption pending against her from her time as Tamil Nadu chief minister.
Jayalalitha had became notorious for her egotistical and regal manner of government, symbolised by the buildingsized cardboard cut-outs of her that towered over her subjects as she lavishly spent their money on her cronies. She has also demanded that the BJP invoke Article 356 of the Indian Constitution, to dismiss the incumbent DMK led government.
There are several ironies to this episode. One of the key historic grievances of regional governments, particularly in south India, has been the manipulation of this Constitutional provision to interfere with opposition-led state governments. Moreover the BJP stood on an anti-corrup-
1 and stability platform and is deeply promised by its present association h Jayalalitha, a fickle partner who may sert the alliance when it has outlived its usefulness to her, bringing down the government with her departure. Hindutva Lite
In general, it remains to be seen whether the BJP's alliances with and concessions to various regional formations are part of a short-term tactical adaptation of the party's traditionally centralist, hard nationalist BJP-take-all strategy. Or if, rather, we are seeing the emergence of a longer-term ruling alliance in which a "Hindutva Lite" BJP-led government at the centre consistently wins the support of non-Hindutva regional forces in exchange for accelerated deregulation and decentralisation of the economy and ruling
As it stands, in recent years the gap between rich and poor regions has grown considerably. Mumbai (Bombay) and the surrounding area, Ahmadabad (central Gujarat) and "India's Silicon Valley" in Bangalore (the capital of the southern state of Karnataka), for example, have all been booming over the last decade and attracted a large share of domestic and foreign private investment. Regional elites here and elsewhere in the country have been in a scramble to cash in on the deregulationglobalisation bonanza, pulling the traditionally highly centralised country in every of the domestic economy and, second, by modernisation of the agricultural and small scale sector.*
The ideologues of neo-liberalism and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will exert pressure on the new government to dispense with the populist schemes that it must retain in however diluted a form to ensure its return at the next election. It will be particularly difficult tor the BJP to swallow this policy turn and win acceptance for it, given that the new government may not last a full term.
The pro-business magazine India Today was categorical on what the BJP's economic priorities ought to be. In addition to whole- scale privatisation beginning with public utilities like water, it also recommended, "getting rid of the fertiliser subsidy; [to] reduce and re-orient food subsidies, [and] open up the insurance sector [to foreign companies]." s
A spate of 200 suicides among cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh - who took their own lives rather than face the con-sequences of bankruptcy from rising fertiliser prices and disappointing harvests - are grim portents of the impact on the poor of
The legacy of economic liberalisation bequeathed by Congress in the 1980s to its successors is an enormous external debt which quadrupled from under US$20 billion in 1980 to $82 billion ten years later, and a gross imbalance in the nature of foreign investment flows. According to the Reserve Bank of India, short-term portfolio investment outstrips productive Investment by a ratio of three to one."
This affair with speculative capital, its obvious seductions aside, is a fragile relationship, as East and South-East Asian economies found out to their continuing cost last year. *
"The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar". Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai) January 30 1993, pp. 163 - 167; Aijaz Ahmad, "On the Ruins of Ayodhya" in Lineages of the Present (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996). For an alternative view see Achin Vanaik, "Situating Threat of Hindu Nationalism: Problems with the Fascist Paradigm", Economic and Political Weekly,
1729 - 1748. This is reprinted as chapter five in Vanaik's important new book, The Furies of Indian Communalism (London: Verso, 1997). 2 While a Uniform Civil Code would be a step forward for gender justice, it is necessary to separate the BJP's agenda from the slogan. The BJP is not noted for its profeminist politics and is using this issue as another stick to beat the Muslim community with, as their laws are less favourable to Muslim women than the Hindu Code is to Hindu women. In view of the communally-charged context of this demand, the precise strategy to achieve legal equality for all women irrespective of religious affiliation has been a source of debate in the Indian feminist movement. See A. R. Desai (ed.) Women's Liberation and Politics of Religious Personal Laws in India, (Bombay, C. G. Shah Memorial Trust Publication, 1990). 3 Kunal Chattopadhyay and R. Prajapati, "Elections intensify India's instability", International Viewpoint 4 "Liberalise, modernise and then globalise, says BJP", The Asian Age (Delhi), 10 March 1998, p. 1. 5 "An Agenda for Change", India Today (New Delhi), 6 Cited in C. T. Kurien, Economic Reforms and The People, (Delhi: Madhyam Books, 1996), p. 25.
which way.
In any event, in the arena of economic policy there may be a change of emphasis The resistable rise of the BJP but there will be no change of direction. On the campaign trail the slogan of swadeshi (nationalism) with its clear implication of favouring Indian over foreign B. Skanthakumar and Raghu Krishnan capital was the main distinguishing feature between the BJP and the other parties However, the BJP is unlikely to alter the general thrust of the neo-liberal policies which ended the Nehruvian centraliseddirigiste model. Capitalists not threatened
The fraction of the Indian capitalist class which supports the BJP favours greater deregulation of the internal economy through the scrapping of the "license-permit-quota empire" of state controls where it can gain entry into those sectors and opposes transnational investment in those sectors where a foreign presence could pose a competitive threat. The BJP has long been in favour of "liberalisation" (of the domestic economy) while opposing "globalisation" (the opening up of the country to the world market).
However, the new Finance Minister has insisted that transnationals have nothing to fear from the BJP. Senior party leader Murli Manohar Joshi claimed after the election that his party was not against globalisation. Rather, he said, it supported greater Indian integration into the world market, provided it was on more equal terms and preceded, first, by liberalisation
Given the size and diversity of India, it is remarkable that the Congress Party should have been able to remain solidly entrenched as the natural party of government in India (in conditions of universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy) for as long as it did: from Independence in 1947 until the late 1970s, and off and on through the 1980s and 1990s.
Equally remarkable has been the meteoric rise in the fortunes of the Hindu right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from its humble beginnings in the late 1970s until now.
The rise of the BJP is a significant break with the Congress tradition associated with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Though in general Congress has left a rather contradictory legacy. Sadly, the progressive part of this legacy - emerging from the mass, multi-class and national anti-colonial movement that it led from the 1920s through the heyday of Third Worldism and non-alignment in the 1950s and 60s - has largely disappeared from mainstream political life.
The BJP has taken the worst surviving parts of the Congress legacy and radicalised them within the framework of an aggressive Hindu communalism, rooting itself in the aspirations of the increasingly self-confident, aggressive and "modern" Hindu intermediate and upper castes.'
The BJP was founded in 1980 from a fragment in the non-Congress government that held office between 1977 and 1980. In 1984 it had only two seats in the Lok Sabha and was regarded as a fringe party and a political appendage of the rabidly Hindu communalist militia-type organısation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and latterly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).? Yet by 1991 it was the main parliamentary opposition party.
A distinguishing feature of the BJP is its combination of parliamentary politics with extra-parliamentary mobilisation.
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* India This is also a source of tension within that party and between it and its non-electoral allies like the RSS and VHP who lately feel that it is soft-pedalling its ideological positions for political pragmatism.
Its political campaigns are suffused with Hindu iconography, references to religious mythology and the invocation of a mythical glorious past which ended with the Muslim "invasions" and the consolidation of their rule over India.?
However it is false to describe the BJP as "Hindu fundamentalist" or "Hindu revivalist" as some commentators do, as if it were some throwback to an obscurantist past. Its project of a Hindu rashtra (nation) in which Hindu is equated with India is a "radically modern" "the nation, in India as much as in Italy, is a thing without a past... It can only look for subterfuges of antiquity... As a proposal for modern living, on a scale quite unprecedented... in a society still knowing only one legitimising criterion -tradition - it must seek to find past dısguises for these wholly modern proposals." 4 A narrow social base
The social base of the BJP had historically been quite narrow. Its core support was overwhelmingly North Indian, particularly from the Hindi-speaking states. They comprise rural upper caste Hindus who had shifted from Congress antagonisocial ecologica teminist anti-militarist democratic
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24 International Viewpoint #299
NATIONAL AGENDA GOVERMANCE FOR BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee is expected to become Prime Minister in a communalist-led government. sed by the changes in the agrarian economy which undermined their dominance; and the urban petty bourgeoisie who resented the privileged relations of patronage and protection between Congress and the big industrial houses, impeding their
Recognising the electoral imperative of broadening its constituency to the lower castes, dalits ("untouchables") and adivasis ("tribals") who comprise the majority of Indians, the BJP began to portray itself as the party of and for all Hindus, irrespective of caste origin.
The discriminatory treatment of lower castes, their impoverished existence and the social taboos which remain rife were rejected as recent corruptions of Hinduism. In its place a homogenised Hindu identity was articulated, albeit in the image of the patriarchal upper caste Hindu and his rituals and life-style.
Winning acceptance for such an homogenised identity is no simple task. The divisions of caste, class, language and region and the loyalties that these engender - often cutting across religious differences - are an ever present obstacle to the consolidation of a national "Hindu"
Indeed, one of the positive legacies of the Congress golden era (until the early 1970s) is the real upward social mobility and heightened political consciousness of significant layers of the country's lower and intermediate castes, and tribal peoples. Similarly, regional languages have often
In 1989 and 1990, there was a tide of resentment from the upper castes spilling over into violence and self-immolation when the newly elected centre-left government announced it would implement the Mandal Commission's recomendations, and reserve 40,000 jobs in national and state government and public sector institutions for "other backward castes"
The BJP was the only mainstream party to openly oppose this policy of affirmative action. Not suprisingly, it made further inroads among the Hindu upper castes. However, in order to deflect attention from its upper caste bias, It sought to close Hindu ranks under its leadership through an aggressive campaign against the perceived favouritism of the State towards the Muslim minority. The Muslim "Other"
The BJP has sought to forge unity among Hindus by demonising the Muslim "Other". It followed its anti-Mandal campaign with a nation-wide effort in late 1990 to collect bricks for the building of a Hindu temple at Ayodhya, birthplace of the mythical god-king Ram, in the place of a 16th century mosque. The campaign brought down the centre-left government of V. P. Singh - which probably represented the last chance for the semblance of a left-leaning, secular outcome to the collapse of Congress rule.
The Muslim community in India accounts for 12% of the population (115 million people). It is disproportionately made up of urban.poor, owners and workers in small and medium-sized craft enterprises, and landless labourers. This often places Muslim in direct class conflict and competition with certain intermediate and upper layers of the Hindu
In the face of Hindutva anti-Muslim hatred, captivated by the enrichment of Indian Muslim migrant workers in the Gulf, haunted by the lost grandeur of the Mughal period in pre-colonial times -elsewhere in the Islamic world - Indian Muslims have seen a symmetrical rise of communalist tendencies within their ranks.
What are the immediate dangers of a BJP government? First, tensions are sure to increase with neighbouring Pakistan as the BJP flexes India's diplomatic muscles over such sensitive questions as Kashmir and India's nuclear weapons capacity. On the nuclear question, the BJP merely occupies the right-wing of an overall national consensus around Indian refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. It would be very wrong to underestimate the dangers of renewed tension between India and Pakistan, following a period of relative détente ushered in by the
United Front government from 1996
Second, the formation of a sturdy BJP government will be seen as a major victory by the mobilised, violently communalist sections of the Hindutva family;
and as a defeat by the minority communities and anti-communalist sectors.
Expect more violence
Due to the complicated and contradictory nature of the alliances the BJP has made to form the new government, its ability to introduce extreme and controversial parts of its programme will clearly be