Will the opposition unite to blunt Modi’s advantage over terrorism in Kashmir?

Over the next few weeks the dates for India’s national election will be announced. Several leaders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have publicly stated that the popular reaction against the killing of over 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir, in a terrorist bomb blast in February, will help Modi get re-elected.

The BJP is using the attack, and the subsequent clash between Indian and Pakistan armed forces, to organize rallies against Pakistan all across India from villages to big cities. The terrorist killings in Kashmir, supported by some groups in Muslim-dominated Pakistan, has hence gifted the BJP an easy way to pursue its key political strategy of trying to gain Hindu votes by claiming to protect Hindus from attacks by Muslims and Pakistan.

But for the strategy to work the relevant issue is whether a divided opposition will ensure that Modi wins again with a minority of the votes. In the last national election in 2014, Modi's party got just 31% of the votes, the lowest percentage secured by a winning party. Yet his BJP won over half the seats in parliament because two or more candidates from parties, which were opposed to the BJP, split the majority of the votes which were cast against the BJP.

For decades, since India’s first national elections in 1951, earlier incarnations of Modi's party did poorly in the national elections. In 1984, for instance, it won only two out of the 542 seats in parliament. The BJP got just 8% of the votes that year, roughly the same share it (then called Jan Sangh) got in the 1971 national elections. This was because the party was supported mainly by the business castes, who are a numerical minority.

Since the 1980’s, BJP leaders have aggressively sought wider support among Hindus by launching campaigns to turn Hindus against Muslims. Modi and other leaders of his party are current or former members of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization.) The sangh is a secretive, militant group whose core belief is that India is a “Hindu Rashtra,” or Hindu nation.

The first national win for Modi’s party came in 1996, following a bloody nationwide march to replace a mosque with a Hindu temple. The mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, built in the 16th-century, was destroyed by a mob led by Hindu militants in 1992. 

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the states with the first and second largest population, account for a quarter of the seats in India's parliament. Voters in these Hindi speaking states hence play a major role in determining which party wins the national elections. In both states, the caste and religious demographics favor parties opposing Modi. Traditionally the farmer and low-caste Hindus have opposed Modi's party for representing the interests of the upper castes.

Recently some of them have also been opposing Modi for hurting their dairy farming and leather business. State governments run by Modi’s party, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have hurt the water buffalo beef business by shutting some abattoirs claiming they were selling cow meat. Since Modi came to power, over 42 Muslims and low-caste Hindus have been lynched for allegedly killing cows by mobs led by Hindu extremists. Various reports point out that there was no evidence that those who were lynched had killed cows, an animal sacred to the Hindus.

Modi’s campaign to protect cows, to try to win Hindu votes, is hurting businesses run by Hindus as well as beef exports, which brings in major foreign currency revenue for India. In U.P. and Bihar, Yadavs are Hindus who farm buffalos. They sell the animals to Muslims who run the beef abattoirs. The Muslims sell the buffalo skins to low-caste Hindus, who own tanneries and make leather goods.

The economic links between the Yadavs, low-castes and Muslims make them natural political allies. Also, their numbers give them enough votes to easily defeat Modi’s party in both the crucial states. In Uttar Pradesh, low-caste Hindus are about 21% of the state’s population, half of them working in the leather and meat business; Yadavs are 9% and Muslims 19%. In the neighboring state of Bihar, Yadavs are 11% of the population, low-caste Hindus 16% and Muslims 17%.

In 2018, an alliance of Muslims and low-caste, Yadavs and Jats, defeated Modi’s party in elections to three national parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh and one in Bihar. One of the seats was vacated by the Hindu warrior-priest and BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, after Modi appointed him head of the Uttar Pradesh government. Yogi had won the seat in the previous four elections. Another contest in the state was won by a Muslim woman, a candidate of the party representing the Jats.

Ajit Singh, the leader of the Jat party, earlier worked for 17 years as a software engineer at IBM in the U.S. A graduate of IIT Kharagpur, he has an M.S. from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Akhilesh Yadav, the leader of the Yadav party in U.P., has a Master’s in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia. The fathers of both Singh and Yadav were the founding leaders of their respective caste-based parties.

Also in 2018, Modi’s party was defeated by the Congress Party in the state legislative elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

Winning a majority of seats in India’s parliament often requires, in addition, support from caste, religious and linguistic parties in the non-Hindi speaking states.

The leaders of the opposition parties say they will form a grand alliance and defeat Modi’s party in the upcoming national election. Yet in Uttar Pradesh, the leaders of the Yadav and low-caste parties have announced they will contest all the national parliamentary seats in the state, excluding the Congress Party from their alliance. If they do not reach an agreement over sharing seats with the Congress Party and the Congress Party fields its own candidates, the three way contest will likely enable Modi’s party to win a majority of the parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh, and perhaps also in the national parliament. 

------------

This opinion article is adapted from Ignatius Chithelen’s “Passage from India to America: Billionaire Engineers, Extremist Politics & Advantage to Canada & China.” He is manager of Banyan Tree Capital and adviser to Silley Circuits, a business network, both based in New York.