I do not follow Indian politics too closely, but the electoral shift underway there fits the pattern seen all over the world: a shift to the right. However, in Asia much of the shift has been structural: the rise of China, the ongoing success of Singapore and Hong Kong, plus the rise of dynastic families in China, South Korea, Japan and elsewhere: see
Princelings are ruling not just China
In India the move appears to be ideological, a right-wing shift within a left-wing system.
The real reason Indian intellectuals are backing Narendra Modi
All of this is new because until very recently, BJP had had a severe deficit of intellectual firepower. Apart from a few former and current editors such as Swapan Dasgupta, Chandan Mitra, and Arun Shourie, a few retired men from the defense services, and some self-appointed historians, the BJP had no one much to show for all the decades it had been in existence under one name or another. That was because until recently, movers and shakers in academia, journalism, literature and films had tended to steer clear of the bad odour that came with the aggressive, religious-identity based politics that the party championed, based on issues such as demolishing mosques that are believed to have been built on top of then-existing temples a few centuries ago by Muslim invaders. In the course of promoting these agendas, the BJP has often found itself at the receiving end of accusations that it stirred up violence and riots. The biggest of them happened in Gujarat in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. Those riots killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. This helped polarize the state along communal lines, and Modi fought the central Election Commission to ensure elections were held as early as possible, before passions that the riots had stirred up cooled down. Modi went on to win the elections handsomely, even though his party had been losing all the by-elections in the period before the riots.
This is where the rubber meets the road with cycle theories of history. The linear interpretation of history says these political shifts are the result of short periods such as the 1910s to 1940s that saw the rise of communism and fascism. The other interpretation is that history is cyclical and the rise of communism and fascism, both democratic movements, was the death rattle of a left-wing impulse that began some 200 to 300 years earlier. (Despite the ending of elections once in power, these regimes, including North Korea today, claim to represent the will of the people. Monarchs didn't need to represent the will of the people, his rule was secured by other means, such as the Mandate of Heaven in China.) The big question today is whether these are more road bumps or a trend change. If these are road bumps, the BJP will appeal to the people. If structural and part of a trend change, the BJP will begin dismantling democratic systems in India.
On that score,
Outside In notes:
There are some obvious reasons for caution (beside dim parochialism). Most centrally, the role of democracy in the BJP wave is strongly analogous to that afflicting the 20th century European far right, and the record of reactionary demotism scores a straight ‘F‘. Democratic pressures suck the right into an ideological black-hole, since the only parts of its agenda that hit the tingle-spot with the masses are its crudest appeals to atavistic sentiment. Cognitive regression is the inevitable price of popularity.
Is BJP leading the country to the right, or following the electorate (riding a mood shift) to the right?
Back to the Quartz piece, the BJP does appear to have fused together an electorally potent policy mix that has worked before:
But all this is beginning to look like distant history. Modi, who has been the chief minister of Gujarat for the last 12 years, has rebranded himself as a go-getting, business-friendly free marketer who has delivered a consistent growth rate of about 10%. And the BJP is now so surfeit with newly imported talent that it is causing heartburn among long-established supporters of the party.
......Shekhar Gupta, editor of the liberal Indian Express—one of numerous newspapers that excoriated Modi during the 2002 riots—wrote in a recent column mockingly titled “Secularism is dead!”: “This anti-Modi battle cry is lazy, illiberal and an affront to Muslims—and Hindus.” But he makes two strong points. One, the BJP-led alliance would get no more than a third of the popular vote at best, and though this may be enough for it to come to power under India’s first-past-the-post voting system, what is clear is that the vast majority of the Hindus, who form more than 80% of the population, have not given up on secularism. Two, even the 30% who might end up voting for Modi would be doing so not because they want to build temples or banish the Muslims to Pakistan, but because they want an alternative to “the weakest, most incompetent, uncommunicative and incoherent full-term government” in India’s history (the Congress).
The rise of China is both a strategic threat and an ideological one. India should be growing faster than China given its smaller economy, but its system has held it back. Whereas the Chinese mandarins could undo socialism with the wave of the hand, India has a lot harder time of reforming itself. It would be a mistake to discount the failure of socialist/democratic systems in producing economic growth. (As for China, communism is being slowly removed from the political system. You can look at the past 30 years and current reform and call it many things, but communist or socialist it is not.)
So the elephant in the room is the question: Can a Modi-led BJP rule the country in a democratic and non-divisive manner, without causing a gradual slide into societal strife? His track record in Gujarat is not reassuring. Though there have been no major riots there since 2002 under his watch, his government has victimised police officers and other critics who spoke up against it; refused to field a single Muslim candidate in state assembly elections though a tenth of the population is Muslim; and inducted into the cabinet a politician who was directly involved in the massacre of 96 people, and was later convicted. He has also sidelined all potential political rivals within his own party. In the words of Ramachandra Guha, well-known historian and author, Modi “is a bully and bigot… Unlike others, I don’t believe he will change, because at 62 you cannot have a personality transformation.”
But an even bigger worry is the RSS, the fountainhead of the Hindu nationalist ideology, which controls the levers of power in BJP and which has put its weight behind Modi to make him prime ministerial candidate. At the heart of the problem lies the RSS definition of who is a Hindu. According to M.S. Golwalkar, one of the founding fathers of RSS, a Hindu is one for whom India is both punya bhoomi and karma bhoomi (holy land, and the land where one lives and works). In the RSS version of nationalism, only those who belong to religions of the land—Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, etc.—can consider India a holy land. For others such as Muslims and Christians, the holy land is elsewhere, in Mecca or Jerusalem, it insists.
Having made this unilateral assertion, Golwalkar argues that all Indians who are not Hindus “must adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture. … In a word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”
India's shift to the right is good news for the economy, if reforms follow. Indian shares are already outperforming the emerging market complex due to buying the rumor, but it will take actual policy changes to make a difference.
Jim Rogers is not optimistic given India's track record:
Has the BJP said or done anything revolutionary, or said anything different? They say we like business people better than Congress, but can they do anything other than making some cosmetic changes? Yes, if they (BJP) win, Goldman Sachs will be happy; they can buy stocks and markets will go up. But a year later everyone will look around and say that nothing has changed. It will still be impossible to do business in India unless you are in bed with politicians and bureaucrats. It will still be impossible for people to buy and sell currencies the way they want to…. I can buy gold nearly anywhere in the world, but not in India because I am foreigner. What kind of garbage is that?
Even if reforms due follow, it bears watching how the new leadership deals with other issues mentioned above, extending to foreign policy with Pakistan and China. As the U.S. recedes from prominence on the world stage, states will jostle to fill the power vacuum. If the BJP's internal cultural policies are also expressed internationally, it does not bode well for regional tensions.
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