22.05.2014
Triumph of the butcher of Gujarat
There is a real danger of a wave of reaction following the general election, warns Jim Moody
From April 7 to May 12, 551 million voters out of an electorate of 814.5 million cast their ballots in nine phases for the five-yearly elections to the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha). It was the highest voter turnout ever in India, both in numbers and in percentage terms (66.4%).1 It was also the largest vote of its kind in the world.
For the first time, an Indian general election was almost solely centred on one individual, the prime ministerial candidate of the extreme rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi. Like all of the BJP’s leadership, Modi cut his political teeth in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu supremacist organisation that was founded in 1925 and inspired by Mussolini’s fascists. Unsurprisingly, RSS members were among the most enthusiastic murderers and rapists of Muslims during the India-Pakistan partition of 1947; a one-time RSS member assassinated MK ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi in 1948. The BJP has gained support in recent decades through its Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist/chauvinist programme; it overlaps ideologically and organisationally with other Hindutva bodies under the Sangh Parivar umbrella, including Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Bajrand Dal is well known for organising street violence, especially against Muslims, using its armed gangs of fascists.
Narendra Modi was chief minister of Gujarat state during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms, which were encouraged by him and his BJP administration; over 2,000 died and many thousands raped, mutilated and tortured; 150,000 were turned out of their homes.2 Because of his role Modi was denied a US visa (no longer the case now, of course). Unrepentant then as now, Modi described relief camps for those displaced as “child breeding centres”.3 These crimes have been brushed aside in almost all the Indian media and he has been lionised as never before.
India’s 180 million Muslims constitute nearly 15% of its population, the largest number within any country after Indonesia and Pakistan; for the BJP they conveniently provide a huge ‘other’ that has been constructed as an enemy within. However, the BJP has been a recipient of much capitalist largesse not because of its anti-Muslim rhetoric, but because of its commitment to anti-working neoliberalism. That is what all the talk about India becoming another China is all about. The most competitive sections of capital want to attack price subsidies and the ‘vested’ interests of small farmers and labour.
Though in recent years economic growth rates have declined, this has been particularly rapid since 2003, leading some to speculate about India becoming the world’s third largest economy by 2035. Not that economic growth has transformed the lives of India’s poor. Average incomes remain abysmally low, housing primitive, power cuts routine and clean drinking water is a literal pipe dream for hundreds of millions. Among the six countries of south Asia, India has fallen to second worst on social indicators (eg, life expectancy, child mortality, girls’ schooling) - below Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Corruption
When it comes to corruption, it is widespread. As professor Ali Nadeem of Aligarh Muslim University says, “… the really disturbing phenomenon is the control the corporate sector has acquired over a whole spectrum of non-left parties, including BJP and Congress, through its money power.”4 Officially, each individual candidate could spend up to seven million rupees (£70,000) on her or his campaign in the largest states. But, as we have seen from the number of larger-than-life Modi posters that have littered the roads of India for the last six months, there were and are no spending limits for the political parties themselves - nor for corporations, for that matter. Across all media, the BJP alone spent 50 billion rupees (£500 million) - not far behind the £600 million Barack Obama spent in the media for his 2012 re-election campaign.
In addition, there is a thriving off-the-books business of buying votes, a fact that only more radical publications carry prominently. As Tahelka reports, “... the Election Commission (EC) has had to step up its expenditure on monitoring the ongoing polls. Starting on March 5, when the moral code of conduct came into force, the EC has seized cash and goods worth 1,110 crore [£110 million] meant to buy votes. That’s more than 50% of the cost incurred by the EC to conduct the election ... Despite their best efforts, it is estimated that the EC has only seized 10% of the total black money in circulation to buy votes.”5
The Indian state’s actual cost of conducting the election is expected to be around £350 million. Officially, political parties will have spent £3 billion during the election, according to the Centre for Media Studies in Delhi.6 But in addition to cash of up to 2,000 rupees per voter in some areas, goods used to buy votes include saris, pressure cookers, cooking vessels, and alcoholic drinks. All the major national parties and regional parties bribe voters. In the ‘expenditure-sensitive’ states, the going rate for a parliamentary seat is £5 million, £1.5 million for a state assembly seat, and £15,000 for head of a local council. Naturally, those elected by such means expect to recoup these expenditures while in office.
Pro-Modi frenzy
As the election campaign proceeded, national media corporations began preparing the way for a BJP government - for example, sacking senior journalists who were not pro-Modi enough. These included Siddhartha Varadharajan and Manu Joseph, editor and managing editor of the Hindu newspaper, and Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Open magazine; Singh Bal was replaced by a friend of BJP leader Arun Jaitley. “In February, popular TV journalist Thiru Veerapandian lost the prime-time show he anchored on Sun TV for 17 years.”7 Social media did not escape either: Raheel Khurshid, Twitter India’s head of news, was also targeted.
And since the election things have actually got worse. In the latest (so-called collectors’ edition) issue of Open8, for example, every article praises Modi; one is even entitled - move over, Ray Winstone! - ‘The Modi hotness quotient: on the sex appeal of the man with the fabled 56-inch chest’. What is less amusing is the magazine’s cover, which features the butcher posturing behind the words, ‘Triumph of the will’, an approving and deliberate bow to the 1934 Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film of that name. One article positively accepts this connection.
Leftwingers and radicals throughout India were disturbed by the prospect of India having its most rightwing government ever. The last BJP administration was somewhat held back by coalition partners. So there was much talk of the danger of “fascism by the ballot box”. For some this meant opting for the lesser evil. Internationally acclaimed film-maker Anand Patwardhan went to Modi’s constituency and was “prepared to support even the Congress candidate if he turned out to be the frontrunner.”9
In the event, the national Modi juggernaut proved unstoppable. But, while the BJP did get 282 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats (52%), it received but 31% of the popular vote (only 21% of the electorate).10 As in the UK, the winner in each of the 543 constituencies is determined on the basis of ‘first past the post’, which deliberately produces skewed results, this time rewarding the BJP with 114 more seats than its vote warranted proportionally. This has been a long-delayed moment of hubris for Congress, which at independence in 1947 insisted on retaining the undemocratic British electoral system in order to engineer its own long-term stay in office.11 One joke doing the rounds on social media in India says, “Forget the tigers - Congress is now an endangered species.”
The butcher of Gujarat will indeed be the next prime minister of India, enjoying enhanced powers thanks to the size of the BJP victory. Not only will the BJP have a majority in the lower house: the Indian National Congress of the Nehru-Gandhi clan could not even retain enough parliamentary seats to sit as the official opposition. Constitutionally that requires 10% of Lok Sabha seats: ie, 54. But Congress now has a mere 44, having suffered the worst defeat in the 129 years of its existence. And one important lesson has hopefully been learned: anti-fascists cannot with any credibility call for a Congress vote to ‘keep out the BJP’: that tactic failed monumentally.
According to Siddharth Varadarajan of the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory in New Delhi, “BJP leaders close to the incoming prime minister have already drawn up a list of measures that could be implemented by administrative fiat. Spared the burden of filling his cabinet with allied parties, Mr Modi will have the freest hand of any prime minister since Rajiv Gandhi.”12 Modi’s government will have no opposition with which it would otherwise constitutionally be obliged to consult over parliamentary committee membership.
Bankrupt of ideas, a thoroughly corrupt Congress had staked its all on the latest offspring of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi. Whether his sister, Priyanka Gandhi, will be considered for the leader’s role by the Congress mandarins, despite corruption allegations against her husband, is now moot. In any event, it would be wrong to write off Congress - after all, 106,938,242 Indians (19.3% of voters) voted for it, which is about two thirds of what the BJP achieved. It has retained enough electoral strength to be able to bounce back as a national party in a few years; in the meantime there are also the states’ legislative assemblies, within which Congress can work, including with some high-vote regionalist parties that have been part of its coalitions at the centre. India’s upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha (Council of States), cannot come under contention for the BJP until next year, when the state and territorial legislatures elect representatives.
There are already signs that Congress is posing left to win back support. But in actual fact, when push comes to shove, were Congress to return to power, its model would more likely be the European one of ever more rightward moves upon each change of government (Cameron’s more rightwing than Thatcher’s; Hollande’s more rightwing than Mitterand’s; etc).
Left in decline
The left is weak and getting weaker, though the ‘official communist’ parties still have a distinct presence. Gone are the heady days after independence when the Communist Party of India received up to 20% of the popular vote. This time, the CPI (Marxist) gained nine Lok Sabha seats on a vote of 17,986,773 (3.2%); the CPI got one seat with 4,327,298 votes (0.8%); and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) got 1,666,380 votes (0.3%).
The CPI(M)’s main election slogan was “Reject Congress, defeat BJP”; it accepts that it did poorly in its main centre, West Bengal, though complaining of “widespread rigging and violence during the last three phases of the elections in the state ... in 32 out of 42 constituencies.”13 The CPI(M) has seen an 11% drop in its vote since the last state assembly elections. Arguably more rightwing, the CPI ran 62 candidates nationally in 23 states and territories; but its website at the time of writing carries nothing on the election results.14 The RSP vote in national elections has declined by a quarter over the last 10 years; in March it broke with the two CPIs over a dispute about which seats to fight and joined Congress’s United Democratic Front instead.
At present the response of the left in India is all over the place, with ‘lesser evil’ arguments contending with ‘official’ communist ‘business as usual’ obstinacy, alongside a panic in some quarters that fascism is about to descend. The dangers, as the economy slumps, of a wave of reaction in the form of BJP-led attacks on the working class are obvious, but depending on a likely more rightwing Congress to do anything other than feather its own nest (while attacking the masses less viciously) is just a dead end.
There is a long tradition of communist organisation in India and an existing milieu for Marxist ideas. But today there is no party worthy of the name ‘communist’: one that holds out the internationalist prospect of working class independence across the sub-continent.
Notes
1. Election Commission of India: http://eci.nic.in/eci/eci.html.
2. S Anandan, ‘Ten years ago ...’ Hindustan Times February 24 2012: http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2012/02/24/ten-years-ago%E2%80%A6.
3. P Mishra, ‘The Gujarat massacre: new India’s blood rite’ The Guardian March 14 2012.
4. Interview with professor Ali Nadeem.
5. G Vishnu, ‘The dirty underbelly of election 2014’ Tehelka May 10: www.tehelka.com/the-dirty-underbelly-of-election-2014.
7. http://gulfnews.com/news/world/india/in-modi-s-india-media-must-be-pliant-1.1314873.
8. Open is the flagship brand of Open Media Network: www.openthemagazine.com.
9. Interview with Anand Patwardhan. Narendra Modi was elected MP for Varanasi (Benares) with 581,022 votes, giving him a majority of more than 370,000 over his nearest challenger, Arvind Kejriwal, of the populist Aam Admi Party.
11. P Anderson, ‘After Nehru’ London Review of Books August 2 2012.
12. ‘The promise, and peril, of the Modi result’, NDTV, May 16: www.ndtv.com/article/opinion/the-promise-and-peril-of-the-modi-result-525627.
13. CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, ‘West Bengal verdict “distorted”’: http://cpim.org/content/west-bengal-verdict-distorted.