Modi’s Faux Nationalism & Communal Politics Won’t Break Democracy

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(Photo: Liju Joseph/The Quint)

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived for the first time in New Delhi as a lawmaker, he knelt down at the footsteps of the Parliament, a historic show of respect for an institution created by human reason, not a temple.

He was seen as a reformer. When Modi picked up a broom to clean India, we saw him emerging as a global leader. He was a leader with a promise to take India forward.

The Modi Magic

Like a magician’s wand, the broom Modi picked up soon transformed into a cess on our restaurant bills. His ideal of Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas (together with all, development for all) was abandoned to the benefit of cow vigilantes, who mauled the nation’s rule of law. His successive budgets failed to seed bold reforms. Big-ticket issues – police and school reforms, divestment of banks and Air India, the MNREGA he had once lampooned with eloquence – are still crying for reform.

GST and demonetisation are not blueprints for development, though GST can be seen as a systemic reform.

Karl Marx said that man makes history but he does so in given circumstances. Donald Trump won riding the wave of anti-Obama politics. Barack Obama rose to power by pursuing anti-Bush politics. Modi won on an anti-Manmohan Singh wave or a Congress-mukt Bharat plank. However, Modi’s victory in 2014 was not driven just by domestic anti-incumbency votes. It is rooted in the journey of global intellectual history.

More than 8 million people died in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) during which the ‘great powers’ of the day were dragged into a series of religious conflicts between the Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe. When the war ended in the Westphalian peace agreement signed in 1648, religion stood discredited. Secularism rose and has continued to prevail in the intellectual thinking of Europeans.

Liberalism Takes a Backseat

More than 16 million people died in the First World War (1914-1918). About 45-60 million people were killed in the Second World War (1939-1945). These wars were fought by nation-states. When the Second World War ended, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ lost legitimacy in the eyes of Europe’s people and leaders, paving the way for the birth of a more hopeful European Union. Liberalism emerged triumphant. Religion and nationalism were casualties. Counter-religion and counter-nationalism took roots.

Over the second half of the 20th century, these movements of ideas created a global void. The current generation of leaders – Donald Trump in the United States, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India – have quickly filled this void.

They have relied on nationalism and religion to win. They have succeeded because the global system of states, anchored to the United Nations since 1945, no longer addresses regional issues.

It’s now the turn of liberalism to take a backseat, as illiberal leaders in parts of the world set the political agenda.

‘Prejudice’ as a Political Tool

Modi maintains a loud silence on extremist leaders in BJP. Vinay Katiyar can remain in the BJP despite telling Muslims to go to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Giriraj Singh can stay a minister in the Modi government despite telling every Indian, not just Muslims, to go to Pakistan for criticising the prime minister. Jaswant Yadav, a BJP leader in Rajasthan, escapes censure for uttering prejudice: “If Hindu, vote for me; if Muslim, vote for Congress”.

For the Modi-led BJP, prejudice is a wheel of political profit. It has always been so.

Modi pursues a carefully considered strategy the first element of which seeks to consolidate Hindus by carefully marginalising Muslims. From 2001 to 2014 when he was chief minister, Modi ensured that no Muslim was given a ticket by BJP for the Parliament or the Gujarat Legislative Assembly. It is a strategy aimed at the systematic exclusion of Muslims from India’s mainstream – eliminating Muslims from the country’s political life. Exclusion is the intellectual pot in which discrimination, hate and xenophobia bubble.

After Modi became prime minister, BJP pursued the same policy outside Gujarat. In the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2017, and Karnataka assembly elections 2018, no Muslim candidate was given a ticket.

The right-wing Hindus say that BJP should not field Muslims because they cannot win. True.

But the question is also: Why should a Muslim vote BJP? BJP rules in 21 states, but none of its MLAs or MPs is a Muslim. While pluralism may have been the cornerstone of Indian civilisation, it is no longer the basis of the brand of Hinduism propagated by BJP, RSS and other Hindutva groups.

Communal Politics & Crony Capitalism

The second element in Modi’s strategy is to use Muslims as achaar (pickles) to go with political khichdi. Modi doesn’t speak for the LGBTQ+ community either and maintained a studied silence when the Supreme Court decriminalised gay sex, reading down Section 377. But the same Modi is vocal in raising hot-button Muslim issues like triple talaq, Halala and polygamy because these mobilise Hindu voters.

Like secular governments had a few Muslims as ministers to look good, Modi loves achaar (pickle): have a few Muslims as ministers; visit Shia leaders.

The strategy is: exclude the bulk of Sunni Muslims whose votes he doesn’t need. “I do not want your votes,” Hitler had told the Socialists, according to Madeleine Albright’s book, Fascism – A Warning.

The third element in Modi’s strategy is to ensure that Hindus do not get divided along caste lines. To do so, the BJP governments in Maharashtra and the Centre strive to turn inter-caste conflicts into Naxal issues. The Bhima-Koregaon controversy illustrates how an inter-caste issue has been turned against intellectuals who sympathise with Naxals. Senior journalist Tavleen Singh has pointed out that Modi maintained silence when Muslims were killed by cow vigilantes, but spoke against them when the victims were Dalits. Silence is murder. Silence is also communal.

Modi and his supporters describe themselves as nationalists. Even if we take the criterion of nationalism, it doesn’t appear that Modi’s politics is for India’s national interest.

For example, his government introduced a law in the 2018 Budget that exempted legal scrutiny of foreign funds received by political parties since 1976.

At a time when Indians are forced to offer PAN and Aadhaar numbers for any money they spend, what kind of a nationalist would exempt political parties from legal scrutiny? By now, we know that the government facilitated, perhaps through the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – the escape of fraudsters Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and others.

The Tectonic Plates of History Will Shift Again

But let’s be frank. The CBI did not become a ‘caged parrot’ – as famously described by the Supreme Court – under Modi. Neither did the Republic of India turn into an illiberal democracy suddenly after Modi became the prime minister in 2014.

At best, Modi is a product of the wave of ideas across the world in which community-based politics – a distorted version of which was also practised by the ruling parties in India in the name of secularism, by the democrats in the US in the name of liberalism – and by the Labour Party in the UK in the name of multiculturalism – has ascended into the mass global intellectual history of the now.

Madeleine Albright, the refugee-turned former US Secretary of State, gives perhaps the best definition of the democratic downturn seen across the world. She observes: “An illiberal democracy is centered on the supposed needs of the community rather than the inalienable rights of the individual. It is democratic because it respects the will of the majority; illiberal because it disregards the concerns of minorities.”

In history, Modi’s emergence signifies merely a bend in the road. The Republic of India will take a course correction at the next elections when voters – the intellectuals of the new era – assert themselves.

(Tufail Ahmad is a former BBC journalist and now Senior Fellow at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington DC. He tweets at @tufailelif. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)