In giving a near-majority to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, Indian voters have sent a sharp message: That they reject the communalism of the right, represented by the Hindu-chauvinist BJP, and they repudiate the self-righteous isolationism of the left led by the CPI(M). Indians have chosen the middle path.
Regional parties were expected to play a major role in the formation of the next government. But voting patterns in states where elections were simultaneously held to the local legislature show that voters made a clear distinction between regional and national issues by “cross-voting” in significant numbers. In parts of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, which returned a staggering 33 Congress MPs to the Lok Sabha, several high-profile Congress ministers in the state government were defeated by huge margins.
The setback suffered by the BJP in this election is largely because middle-class India, once the party’s base, has abandoned it. During its time in power (1999-2004), the BJP opened up India’s markets (building on the legacy of Manmohan Singh who was finance minister in the previous government), welcomed foreign investment, strengthened India militarily (although it capitulated to Pakistani terrorists who hijacked an Indian airliner, and was caught unawares as Pakistan’s army infiltrated Indian territory in Kargil in 1999), and, following 9/11, turned India into a staunch ally of the West, inaugurating its arrival as a big power.
All of these successes — which suppressed too many failures — turned the BJP into an idée fixe of the Indian middle class, which after decades of marginalization by the West, began to glory in the sudden adulation showered upon it.
The Indian middle class was once largely dominated by Congress-minded liberals who, despite a stagnant economy, rarely wavered on the question of secularism. But to the expanded middle class, its newfound affluence became linked to the idea of resurgent Hindutva: They saw India as emerging not just from the ashes of British colonial exploitation and the stygian pit of Congress socialism, but also from the “dark ages” of Islamic rule which had emasculated India. This made it possible for them to tolerate the BJP’s Muslim-baiting and even positively acquiesce in it.
Do the electoral verdicts of 2004 and 2009 offer hope that Indians still believe in the Nehruvian ideal of a secular India; that middle-class has resiled irrevocably from the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva ideology? In 2004, Mani Shankar Aiyar, the brilliant humanist Congress MP who was sadly defeated in this election, argued in a book that though Indians are fundamentally secular, the recent triumphs of the saffron brigade had weakened the resolve of secularists, turning them into pale imitations of communalists in a bid to placate the perceived prejudices of the electorate. Aiyar offered “hard secularism”, an unyielding fight against Hindutva, an unrelenting assertion of secularism, as the solution.
The Congress finally argued for “hard secularism” during this election, with Rahul Gandhi bravely taking on the fundamentalists on their own turf in Gujarat and troubled parts of Uttar Pradesh. The Congress should view its victory as a decisive mandate for secularism; and wherever minorities are threatened, it should not hesitate to attack hard, using all constitutional means to undo state governments that support Hindu bigots.
The BJP, as the only real conservative alternative, is essential to Indian political life. If it can come up with sharp economic alternatives and strong national security policies without casting India’s minorities as fifth-columnists, it can turn itself into a robust and honorable opposition party. But the BJP’s troubles lay in its origins — in its fundamental opposition to the idea of India as imagined by Nehru. If it is to avert the ignominy of irrelevance, the BJP must rethink its core ideology.
