Party Trained

There are two major parties in India – the Indian National Congress (“Congress”) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (“BJP”) – which have just duked it out in the longest set of elections in recent Indian history. With an estimated 1.27 billion people, around 17.5% of the world’s population and heavily skewed to younger constituents, India will eventually surpass China as the most populous nation on earth. As the largest democracy in the world, India’s middle class is larger than the entire U.S. population. Thus, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that seismic political shifts in India have deep significance for us all. Indian voters, craving a new direction for their country, have just handed Congress a crushing defeat, giving a seemingly unstoppable mandate to the BJP. But what does it all mean?

Let’s start with an understanding of who these parties are and what they stand for. Formed in 1885, long before independence from Britain, Congress is the old incumbent. “Afterindependence in 1947, it became the nation's dominant political party; in the 15 general elections since independence, the Congress has won an outright majority on six occasions, and has led the ruling coalition a further four times, heading the central government for a total of 49 years. It has been led by the Nehru-Gandhi family for the most part, with major challenges for party leadership emerging only since 2010.” Wikipedia. Congress has also advocated a non-aligned foreign policy.

While the modern incarnation of the Congress Party is distinctly liberal – founded on Ghandi’s underlying principle of Sarvodaya (uplifting all sections of the society) and "socialistic pattern of society" – the party has more recently lurched into advocating a more “free market” approach that seems to have accelerated a popular impression of political and economic elites raping the system, hands out or in each other’s pockets. The notion of powerful families, dominating Congress generation after generation, has also irked a young population looking for change.

Educated young Indians want jobs and opportunities in an impaired economy, and the disenfranchised masses want to be included in India’s future. Enter BJP, a merger of political factions in 1980, itself having been the party in power from 1998 to 2004. It otherwise has been the dominant opposition party since its inception. But to many, BJP is a right wing alternative focused heavily on the large Hindu majority, often at the expense of Muslims and other religious minorities, a hot button for Muslim strongholds in the unstable northern states that border Muslim Pakistan.

“The BJP designates its official ideology and central philosophy to be ‘integral humanism’, based upon a 1965 book by Deendayal Upadhyaya. Labelled as right-wing and ‘Hindu nationalist’, the party advocates social conservatism, self-reliance as outlined by the Swadeshi movement, and a foreign policy centered on nationalist principles. Key issues for the BJP include the abrogation of the special constitutional status to [the predominantly Muslim states of] Jammu and Kashmir (Article 370), building a Ram temple in Ayodhya [Hindu, Hindu, Hindu!] and the implementation of a uniform civil code for all Indians.” Wikipedia.

The charismatic BJP leader (and next PM) – Narendra Modi (above) – has been both controversial and mysterious. Depicting himself as a committed bachelor, governmental records show a old marriage (never terminated) to a now-retired school-teacher, a status Modi has never denied. He has been a controversial figure, particularly resulting from his actions in 2002 during his tenure as Chief Minister (like a governor) of Gujarrat State after a series of incidents stemming from an attack of a train filled with Hindu pilgrims allegedly by a band of Muslim extremists. In the anti-Muslim riots that followed, with Modi issuing “shoot to kill” orders to stem the violent tide, thousands were killed or injured. While a government inquiry cleared Modi of any wrongdoing, some members of his cabinet were not so lucky. And the stigma of those events still inspires mistrust and fears of his “dictatorial” style among liberals and minorities (especially Muslims) alike.

BJP won. “Addressing a euphoric crowd [May 16^th] afternoon, Narendra Modi rallied the public to join him in taking on challenges of a vast scale. He has floated the idea of building ‘a hundred new cities,’ of extending a high-speed rail network across the subcontinent and undertaking the herculean task of cleaning the Ganges River… He has been inspired by China’s model of high-growth, top-down development. But the country he will govern is India: messy, diffuse and democratic…

“For months, Mr. Modi’s advisers had focused on crossing such a threshold, which they regarded as a signal that the country was behind an agenda of radical change… The nature of that change has never been clear, though. Voters are seeking immediate economic opportunities. The party has proposed pro-business legislation like the easing of labor and land-acquisition laws. Mr. Modi is drawn to large-scale building and infrastructure projects, which he pursues with a single-minded — critics say dictatorial — style.” New York Times, May 16^th. But like it or not, Modi is the new India, at least until the next elections.

Are his pledges mere words, meaningless in a country where most political decisions are local and where Chief Ministers frequently ignore the dictates from the central government in Delhi? Or is this a real change? Are the liberal and minorities justified in their fears of Modi’s potential to disrupt their lives? Is this a turning point, a moment where India’s growth engine can spark to a new beginning, or simply the introduction of a new power elite with another cadre of officials with their hands in the wrong places?

I’m Peter Dekom, and what happens in faraway India, by simple virtue of its size, will impact our daily lives here in the U.S., an ocean and continent away.