A Saffron Wave in India’s Northeast

India’s ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which for years was a party primarily concentrated in the country’s north and west, has now come to dominate most of the states of India’s northeast, either alone or in alliance with other parties. The BJP won state legislative assembly elections, held on February 18 in Tripura, and on February 27, in alliance with others parties, in Nagaland and Meghalaya. The party, which also controls the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, and Manipur, now rules most of the Indian northeast.

The Indian northeast may not initially seem like a likely place for the triumph of the BJP, which now has a strong presence all over India except in the extreme south. The northeast, unlike the rest of India, is predominantly Christian and has a low population, consisting mostly of tribal hill peoples who were converted in the 19th century during the British Raj. The main exception to this is Assam, a mostly Hindu state along the Brahmaputra River valley. Many of the inhabitants of the northeast are ethnically and linguistically closer to the people of Southeast Asia than to the rest of India, and as such have often felt isolated both physically and culturally from the rest of India. The region has been racked by separatist movements for decades; one particularly long movement has been ongoing in Nagaland since the 1950s.

Yet, the BJP has managed to transcend its Hindu nationalist roots to do well throughout the northeast. As The Economist has argued, this was accomplished by the BJP’s emphasis on two themes. First, it has promoted economic development, as it has throughout the rest of India. Economic development is a theme that resonates particularly well in the northeast because of its isolation relative to the rest of the country; it is only connected with the rest of India, and ports on the Bay of Bengal, via the narrow Siliguri Corridor, or Bangladesh. Infrastructure in the heavily forested region, which was mostly ruled by the previously dominant center-left Congress Party or various leftist, Marxist, or regional outfits, is in bad shape or nonexistent. The northeast is rich in natural resources and would be more prosperous if those resources were tapped and the region better integrated with the rest of India and Bangladesh. Meghalaya, for example, is a potential source of hydropower that can electrify much of the region. Yet, much of that potential remains untapped.

The other theme that has contributed to the BJP’s success in the region is the result of a tweaking of its Hindu nationalist preferences to encompass a broader goal of protecting the local inhabitants of the northeast, Christian and Hindu, from outsiders – mostly Bengali Muslims, some of whom are unlawful migrants from Bangladesh. Many local groups fear that Muslim population growth in Bangladesh and spillover into India threatens to swamp them demographically. In 2012, there were major riots between the Bodo tribal group and Bengali Muslims in the state of Assam. Later that year, various Naga groups threatened to evict Muslim Bengalis that they claimed were settling on their lands.

The BJP has skillfully built up its power in the region on the basis of economic development and protecting tribal groups, de-emphasizing some of its talking points from the rest of India, such as banning beef, which is popularly consumed in the northeast. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has visited the region several times, more frequently than previous prime ministers, including his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, who was technically elected to parliament from Assam. Modi’s cabinet includes a prominent politician from Arunachal Pradesh, Kiren Rijiju, the current union minister of state for home affairs of India. By visiting small states that few national politicians have deigned to pay much attention to, Modi has made many northeasterners feel part of the mainstream Indian discourse.

Different circumstances, of course, led to the BJP’s rise in the three recent state elections. In Meghalaya, where technically the Congress Party won the most seats, 21 (out of 60), the BJP successfully maneuvered in creating an alliance with all the other parties, led by the local National People’s Party (NPP), which won 19 seats. This was more of a maneuver than a victory; nonetheless, the BJP has shown itself adept at such alliances with local parties in order to deny its political opponents the opportunity to form governments. Similar tactics were used in Bihar and Goa, among other states, where the BJP or its allies did not have a clear majority in the legislative assemblies. In Nagaland, an ally of the BJP, the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) won a clearer victory in alliance with the BJP, which together received the majority of seats, but again this result demonstrated the ability and success of the BJP in forming alliances.

The BJP’s big win in the region, however, was in Tripura. Tripura, which like the Indian state of West Bengal is dominated by ethnic Hindu Bengalis (who have come to outnumber the native Borok people), was long a bastion of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had held power in the state since 1993. While initially popular, the party eventually resorted to strong-arm tactics in order to retain power, terrorizing the local population, with the local Congress Party not being able to do much about it. While in Tripura’s last election in 2013, Congress won 36.53 percent of the vote and 10 seats (out of 60), it failed to win any seats this time. On the other hand, the BJP’s vote share increased from 2 percent to 40 percent. This represents a major seismic shift. It was no surprise then that the hate of many in Tripura toward the Communist Party (Marxist) was manifested in the dramatic toppling of a status of Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin in the southern Tripuran town of Sabroom, where people celebrated the fall of the Communists for three days. In the past, many who had worked against the Communists, including on behalf of the Congress Party, were savagely beaten up and harassed.

Does this victory mean that the BJP will continue to grow in power nationally? It remains to be seen if the BJP can gain votes among those groups it has the most difficult time with: members of the lower castes and the Muslim minority. While it has made some inroads among some castes, much of the BJP’s recent gains have been driven by grabbing up voters who used to be the base of the Congress Party: individuals more likely to be cosmopolitan, middle class, and motivated by ties beyond their village and caste. The main difference is that the BJP has replaced the secular nationalism of the Congress, which grew up around the legends of India’s independence heroes, with a Hindu nationalism that draws more from India’s ancient past. With the national decline of the Congress Party, most people who did not want to vote for the Communists in the state simply switched to the BJP. As the Indian political commentator Barkha Dutt pointed out in The Washington Post, “the center-right has displaced the center-left as India’s dominant political narrative.”

The Congress Party is becoming increasingly moribund and irrelevant as an opposition party. Its support for some regional and local parties often seems to hurt rather than help. The BJP’s main problem is if popular regional or caste-based parties band together to fight it; in many places, these parties combined can get a majority of the vote. Thus, the party can ill afford to rest on its laurels. In recent by-elections for the national lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha), the BJP lost several prominent seats from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, seats it won in the 2014 national elections. Its parliamentary majority has decreased from 282 to 274 seats since 2014 due to losses in by-elections.

The BJP has two ways to combat this: take their pick of a few opposition parties and offer them alliances, a strategy that it is generally good at, or win straight majorities in districts, which would require the party to work harder to expand its appeal. India’s 2019 nationwide elections are approaching, and while there is a danger of the BJP losing seats, it will almost certainly still be the largest party at the national level and form the next government, as the opposition parties are too many and too fragmented to effectively form a front to keep the BJP out of power.

Most importantly, the party’s saving grace is the popularity of its prime minister; few Indians want anyone else as prime minister other than Narendra Modi, whose appeal can catapult his party to another win. Modi is wildly popular, much more so that any other alternative leader; he has an approval rating of more than 90 percent, according to a recent Pew survey. Even among the members of the Congress Party, he has a favorability rating of 65 percent. Whatever the BJP’s future, it’s clear that Modi himself continues to be a force of nature in Indian politics.