Daily Times

In the Indian elections of 2019, the Hindutva chauvinist BJP led by Narendra Modi swept to a landslide majority. The so-called NDA (BJP’s coalition with its allied parties) won the world’s most expensive election in a country that has the highest concentration of poverty on the planet. India’s corporate bosses opened up their coffers, pouring billions into the campaign for the BJP’s gigantic electoral machine, even more so than in 2014. Millions of dollars were doled out to the Infotech firms that monopolised the social media. Most of the electronic and newspaper corporations owned by ardent supporters of the Modi sarkar, went on a round-the-clock campaign to bolster the BJP. Votes were bought wholesale of various castes, races, religious minorities and even urban shantytowns and villages. Advertisement companies, organised ruffian gangs, mafias and lumpen elements, mostly unemployed, made fortunes enforcing votes for the rich and mighty, represented by the BJP.

This election result has transformed one aspect of Indian politics: that the BJP appears to have become the traditional party of the Indian bourgeoisie, just as Congress was in the first few decades after the partition-induced independence. Tycoons and stock exchange manipulators were jubilant as results poured in, with the share index rocketing. The BJP’s manifesto pledged abolishing labour protection laws and ordaining extravagant incentives for the capitalists to boost their profits and guaranteed protection to elite’s plunder. The massive investment in infrastructure, including 100 new airports and 50 metro systems were also promised to corporate capital.

However in his last five-year stint Modi failed to carry out any of its major electoral promises. Modi had pledged to create 20 million jobs annually. However at the end of his first term in office the rate of unemployment is the highest in 45 years.

The India of a rich culture and great civilisation has been defeated and instead Hindutva’s Bharat seems to have replaced Hindustan. But the mighty Indian proletariat has still to give its verdict

Modi’s image as a moderniser propped-up by tycoons is a myth fostered by hired intellectuals and media anchors. While aromatising Modi, they posed oblivious to the reality that how filthy India had become under his rule, with sprawling suburbs and shanty towns that stink and have become garbage dumps making India’s outlook even more horrid. Modi had vowed to purify the Ganges, Hinduvta’s holy river, but five years later it remains a stinking and depleted waterway, with unquantifiable litres of sewage and industrial effluents making it one of the most polluted rivers. An environmental disaster is ravaging rural and urban India at a frightening speed.

Corruption seems to be a secondary issue in today’s India, where without it the lives of ordinary Indians would be an even greater hardship. Modi and the BJP are drenched in a quagmire of massive corruption scandals. Molestation and rape of women and infants had become a norm in Delhi, which international women’s liberation activists pronounced the “rape capital of the world”. Now the BJP has banned women from entering the Sabarimala temple in the Kerala for their physical ‘flaw’ of menstruation.

Modi’s Hindu supremacist character was exposed when in 2002, under his watch as chief minister of Gujarat, a pogrom of Muslims took place and more than 2000 were mutilated and slaughtered. But as prime minister he has also proved to be incompetent, narcissistic and intrinsically vicious. Large sections of scholars and academics ran the campaign of Modi’s deification. This in itself exposes the cultural and intellectual decay of India’s contemporary intelligentsia.

The Indian state’s former veneer of secularism has been to a large extent wiped away under five years of the Modi Sarkar, and these election results will further entrench Hindutva chauvinism in the structures of the state and society. Modi in his victory speech vehemently ridiculed the ideology of secularism. But taking a closer look, this election has dealt a blow against the bourgeois national ideology instituted by the British-grafted founding politicians of the Indian bourgeois republic. Pragya Singh Thakur, the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate who won the electoral contest in Bhopal, had praised Nathuram Godse, assassin of Mahatma Gandhi’s in 1948 as a patriot. Godse has always had a place in the Hindutva pantheon, and he had been praised in the past also by several BJP stalwarts. Pragya Thakur’s remark was supported by the union minister Anant Kumar Hedge and the BJP MP Nalin Kumar Kateel. Modi’s retractions and explanations for such statements have been deceptive and hypocritical.

The Hindutva ideologues fully justify Gandhi’s assassination and it’s not just the fringe groups in the Sangh Parivar no longer advocate the deification of Godse. Millions of Indians voted into power those who celebrated Ghandi’s assassin. Pragya Thakur and BJP’s victory in India’s elections speak volumes about the demolition process of the state’s ideological foundations. In a country where Mohandas Gandhi, revered as ‘Bapu’ symbolised the Indian state and his picture printed on India’s currency bills for more than seventy years, was desecrated to such ignominy, lays bare the degenerative process of this bourgeois state. Its the dismal failure of the Indian ruling classes who forefathers, propped up by the Raj had vowed to build a modern secular, industrialised, democratic and sovereign India. Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” has proved to be a failure. The India of a rich culture and great civilisation has been defeated and instead Hindutva’s Bharat seems to have replaced Hindustan. But the mighty Indian proletariat has still to give its verdict.

There has been a massive hue and cry by the liberal secularists about the fascist ideology being imposed on India. In a recent article in the Guardian, Kapil Komireddi wrote: “Worse, democratic institutions have been repurposed to abet Modi’s project to remake India into a Hindu nation… And five years on, we have more than a glimpse of the ‘New India’ he has spawned. It is a reflection of its progenitor: culturally arid, intellectually vacant, emotionally bruised, vain, bitter, boastful, permanently aggrieved and implacably malevolent; a make-believe land full of fudge and fakery, where bigotry against religious minorities is among the therapeutic options available to members of a self-pitying majority frustrated by the prime minister’s failure to upgrade their economic standard of living. In the world’s largest secular democracy, Muslims have been lynched by mobs since Modi came into office for such offences as eating beef, dating Hindus and refusing to vacate their seats for Hindu commuters on crowded trains…Sectarian prejudice has always existed in India. The room for giving it homicidal expression has expanded exponentially under Modi. The Muslims they butchered were not victims of unpremeditated paroxysms of rage but exhibits in an organised campaign to entrench Hindu supremacy. The deification of Modi is the consequence of a crude awakening of many Hindus to their past: a haphazard response to the traumas bequeathed by history, especially the partition of India to accommodate the demands of Muslim nationalism.”

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign