How India Got Here

In the 2019 national election, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled off what many would have thought impossible in an Indian election. The opposition Congress party went as far as referring to the BJP’s thumping victory just five years earlier, in 2014, as a “black swan event” — a highly improbable event that has a negligible chance of happening again. Yet the 2019 electoral results confirmed a sea change in Indian politics, one in which the BJP would serve as a dominant party at the national level (replacing the position the Congress held from India’s independence in 1947 into the 1980s). Overall, the BJP won 303 out of 438 seats that it contested for a “strike rate” of 69 percent, after having won 282 seats in 2014. It was the first time since 1984 that a single party formed the majority in parliament in consecutive elections.

Armed with a sweeping electoral mandate, the BJP has been busy implementing pieces of its Hindu nationalist agenda since returning power. It has been accused of harassing its political opponents, most recently with the jailing of a number of Muslim journalists and public intellectuals critical of the government under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) — which allows the government to, among other things, declare individuals as terrorists and jail them without charge (and this during a period of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic). The government demoted the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, the only state with a Muslim majority, to a “union territory” while curbing protections for local populations in land ownership. And, perhaps most controversially, the BJP amended citizenship rules in India to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from neighboring countries who may have come illegally, while not extending the same protections to Muslims in India.

On top of this, an increasingly poisonous media environment has emerged as a key actor in escalating polarization between Hindus and Muslims in India. When one considers all of these factors, it is not surprising that India’s Muslim community, which, with a population of 180 million, is the third largest Muslim population in the world, increasingly feels threatened, intimidated, and marginalized in its home country.

But it is unreasonable to think that changes in social attitudes in and of themselves, which are by their nature slow, would engender such extraordinary changes in politics. Is it credible to believe that Hindus in India suddenly became significantly more anti-Muslim in India five to six years ago? A more meaningful explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism in politics in the last few years must account for key structural shifts in society, politics, and political incentives, while placing these shifts within the context of increasing right-wing populism and ethnic nationalism across the world. This is how we can begin to understand how India got to where it is today.

In order to grapple with the sudden changes in India, one needs to develop a theory of how democratic politics (or at least the politics of winning elections) can generate the conditions for ethnic majoritarianism. At its core, winning elections is a game of numbers. Given that approximately 80 percent of the Indian population identifies as Hindu according to the last Indian Census in 2011, the electoral formidability of a Hindu nationalist coalition is always an empirical possibility. But in order for this form of politics to foment, people have to believe that majoritarian policy outcomes are feasible and certain institutional hurdles must be weakened or removed — chief among them federalism and minority rights.

This obliges supporters of Hindu nationalism to embrace political centralization in a charismatic leader like Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Electoral Game

On February 23, 2020, Delhi witnessed its worst religious violence in decades. In total, 53 people were killed in northeast Delhi, the vast majority being young Muslim men.  Hundreds more from the Muslim community were displaced. The violence was what Indians call a “communal” riot, which means a conflagration of violence between religious communities (in India, usually Hindus and Muslims).

In the recently concluded Delhi state election, the BJP was trounced by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), with the BJP only winning eight of the 70 seats in Delhi (and the AAP winning the rest). The BJP had secured 56.6 percent of the Delhi electorate in the 2019 national election, but experienced a staggering drop in vote share to 38.5 percent just nine months later in the Delhi state election. The popularity of Delhi’s chief minister, AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal, made the state election tough going for the BJP. As a result, the BJP’s Delhi election campaign focused explicitly on Hindu-Muslim polarization. The lone bright spot for the BJP in the Delhi state election was in northeast Delhi, where it won seven of its eight seats, capitalizing on existing Hindu-Muslim tensions in the area.

The February violence broke out in a heavily Muslim area in the vicinity of these BJP victories. The areas of Chand Bagh and Jaffrabad in Northeast Delhi had been sites for the protests against the aforementioned changes in India’s citizenship law. Just days before the worst of the violence broke out, former minister of legislative assembly (MLA) Kapil Mishra, now a member of the BJP, threatened to take matters into his own hands if the Delhi Police did not clear the protests. That proved to be the spark that was needed to send things down a bloody path in the area.

The recent literature on communal riots in India has followed two streams of thought. One set of explanations, discussed most prominently by Ashutosh Varshney, focuses on the social bonds between local communities in preventing communal violence. For instance, it has been noted by economist Saumitra Jha that in Gujarat, a state that has been quite susceptible to communal riots, port towns that exhibit strong economic complementarities between Hindus and Muslims have seen 25 percent fewer communal incidents. But northeast Delhi, among the poorest regions of the city, has seen recent rivalry between its Hindu and Muslim populations.

A second line of thought has focused on the role of political actors, particularly those associated with the ruling Hindu nationalist ideology, in drumming up communal riots for electoral gain, a line of explanation most prominently pursued by Paul Brass and Steven Wilkinson. The literature explains the electoral benefits for the BJP during periods of Hindu-Muslim polarization. First, to the extent that an area has a significant Muslim population, it is likely to form a core support base for the BJP’s local opponent, be it the Congress party or AAP. In the absence of Hindu-Muslim polarization, the BJP is at a severe electoral disadvantage in these areas. Second, to the extent that Hindu-Muslim violence occurs locally, Hindus will find it difficult to vote the same way as the local Muslim community, yielding electoral advantages for the BJP (especially where Hindus form a majority). This is why the political science literature finds a strong relationship between BJP governance and Hindu-Muslim violence. Indeed, Gareth Nellis and co-authors have shown that the Congress party winning in a seat (usually in lieu of the BJP) is correlated with a 32 percent decrease in the number of casualties due to communal violence and that the BJP is associated with higher rates of Hindu-Muslim violence.

The electoral innovation in the modern era has been to scale up the previously local electoral incentives for Hindu-Muslim polarization to a national level. Communal riots are not new in India, and they existed in great measure even before the social media era. But the fog of rumors, innuendo, and hate that act as kindling in a local communal clash today can spread across India through social and television media in a matter of seconds. Today, a local communal conflict can be made a national issue quickly, and a larger communal narrative can quickly be constructed from a patchwork of local incidents. Consequently, the electoral benefits of Hindu-Muslim polarization are reaped for the BJP at a national level.

The Incentives for Political Centralization

For the first 37 years after India’s independence, the centralized, charismatic authority of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was one of defining features of India’s political system.

At the same time, one must theoretically grapple with why the current rise of the BJP and Prime Minister Modi is different. While political centralization has at times been a characteristic of Indian politics, its current articulation from the perspective of Hindu nationalism is new. India was a fundamentally different place electorally and socially during the reign of Nehru and Gandhi. A modern understanding of the current political centralization must be juxtaposed with the period of weak national leaders, party fragmentation, and coalition governments that immediately preceded it. Indeed, many analysts of Indian politics have viewed the era of BJP dominance since 2014 as a change in the “party system” of India.

India was born with a weak state. As Sandipto Dasgupta has written, the Indian Constitution was tasked with the twin challenges of creating a functional “administrative state apparatus and a mass democracy.” India’s unique form of federalism was born out of necessity, as it had to accommodate “princely states” and those areas under British colonial rule and placate rivalries across language, religion, and caste. With all of these maladies, not to mention crushing poverty, India was the democracy that was never supposed to survive.

But India has long been an outlier in the study of democratic politics, as it is by far the poorest of the longstanding democracies. In a detailed study of Indian federalism, Alfred Stepan, Juan Linz, and Yogendra Yadav have argued that the persistence of India’s democracy is predicated upon a federal structure that respects and allows compromise between linguistic, caste, and religious groups. Most importantly, because these are institutions of compromise, they explicitly militate against the centralization of power in India.

Naturally, this process of fostering agreement between competing interests can generate slow, indecisive outcomes — especially when one considers the variety of caste, religious, and linguistic interests in India. Indeed, until the recent dominance of the BJP, many political analysts believed that a stable majority coalition of support for any political party could only be created by “catch all” politics that negotiated between these different identities (which was seen as a defining characteristic of the Congress Party).

Samuel Huntington (even with his explicitly racist overtones) perceived, after the end of the Cold War, that economic or ideological conflict would eventually give way to “cultural” conflict across the world — that a single, national identity would come into conflict with ideas of multiculturalism. Huntington’s arguments are also applicable to the rise of Hindi-speaking Hindu nationalism in India. In short, frustrations with the project of federalism and multiculturalism generated incentives for a more consolidated majoritarian (in this case, Hindu) identity and greater political centralization.

A quick look at the data confirms these insights. The World Values Survey (WVS) has collected data across the world in five-year waves since the 1980s. The most recent survey was conducted just before the 2014 national election, when the BJP rose to prominence. This data shows an increase in personal religious identification, with 91 percent of respondents characterizing religion as important in their personal life (up from about 80 percent in previous rounds). A question was also asked about the upbringing of children. Respondents were asked, “Here is a list of qualities that children can be encouraged to learn at home. Which, if any, do you consider to be especially important? (choose up to 5).” If “religious faith” was mentioned by the respondent, then he or she was coded as viewing religion to be important as a quality to be encouraged in children. In the most recent wave of the WVS, 83 percent of respondents considered religious faith to be important, a major increase from the 41 percent in the wave before. 

In the West, with consolidated nation-states (typically around a fixed ethnic or religious identity), ethnic conflict is arrayed around the threat of “outsiders” and typically takes the form of aggressive anti-immigration policies. In India, however, the cleavages of religious or ethnic conflict are within its own boundaries. Thus, this cultural conflict has taken the form of defining a Hindu nationalist identity against other regional, linguistic, or religious identities. This obliges those supporting this form of nationalism to centralize power in a leader who can effectively stifle opposition from these competing identities. This is borne out by data as well.

In India, the WVS has asked the following question since the early 1990s: “I'm going to describe various types of political systems and ask what you think about each as a way of governing this country. For each one, would you say it is a very good, fairly good, fairly bad or very bad way of governing this country?” Of particular interest is when the survey respondent is asked about “having a strong leader,” which is straightforwardly connected to interests in political centralization.

I coded a respondent as supporting a type of political rule if they answered that it would be “very good” or “fairly good” to have a particular form of governance. India has consistently shown a desire for a strong leader across waves of the WVS. But the latest wave also showed a significant increase in the support for a strong leader, up to 56 percent when this number hovered around 45 percent in previous iterations of the WVS. Whether it be frustrations with the erstwhile Congress government or corruption scandals or an aspiration for Hindu national identity, the selection of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014 coincided with an electorate that displayed increasingly strong religious sentiments and desires for political centralization.

Scholars of India’s political history will see strong similarities between the position of the BJP today and the Congress of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this period, Indira Gandhi was far and away the most popular national leader, but several breakaway regional factions made state politics far more electorally competitive for the Congress party. One sees a similar pattern today, where the BJP loses a number of state elections despite its electoral dominance in national politics. In the state elections that have followed the 2019 national election, the BJP has lost in Delhi, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra (and also in state elections in Odisha that occurred simultaneously with the national election). Even in the Haryana state election, where the BJP was able to retain power at the state level, its vote share dropped by more than 20 percentage points as compared to its performance in Haryana in the national election.

As Steven Wilkinson has argued, the electoral competition also made elections a far more expensive affair. This led Indira Gandhi to stymie funding for rival political parties by banning corporate donations, not to mention announcing a bevy of government welfare schemes administered by the national government, bypassing the electoral appeal of various state leaders and generating a direct link between Gandhi and the voter. Indeed, the BJP’s controversial electoral bond scheme (which allows for anonymous unlimited political donations, of which the BJP has been the largest beneficiary) and myriad welfare schemes announced by Modi’s government seem to be charting a similar course.

A New Era

The electoral appeal of the BJP, thus, is directly tied to the centralizing tendencies invested in a charismatic leader like Narendra Modi. Nirmala Sitaraman (then defense minister, now finance  minister) summed up the logic in a campaign speech: “I am going to say this in every place that I go to, where BJP candidates are contesting. The people have to vote for Modi, not the candidate. When you choose the ‘lotus’ (BJP’s poll symbol), it is your direct vote to elect Modi.”

There is data supporting this view as well. The National Election Post-Poll Survey (NES) in 2019 found that 32 percent of those who reported voting for the BJP said they wouldn’t have done so if Narendra Modi wasn’t the prime ministerial candidate. A regression analysis by Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma on the same dataset finds that support for Modi is the strongest predictor for supporting the BJP, much more than any stated “ideological” factor. This is further evidence that the rise in Hindu-Muslim polarization is cultivated from institutional and political incentives from above — rather than a movement from below.

But the popularity of a leader is not created in a vacuum. It requires a significant amount of image control. Social media, like Facebook and Twitter as well as peer-to-peer forms of communication like WhatsApp, generated a far more decentralized media environment. It also means that citizens may choose media that aligns more closely with their underlying biases. Thus, an individual with anti-Muslim beliefs can choose only to consume media from sources that explicitly espouse anti-Muslim positions. This is new.

It allows political actors to craft narratives and even promulgate “fake news” among their supporters — a fundamental part of generating the level of Hindu-Muslim polarization that make the BJP electorally formidable. While media dominance is hard to quantify, a single data point is evocative. When one looks at Google searches about politicians over the 2019 election period, a whopping 75 percent of searches were about Narendra Modi, compared to just 12 percent about rival Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party.

As we look forward, the BJP shows little sign of slowing down in implementing its Hindu nationalist agenda. With a thumping electoral win, and a hugely popular prime minister, the Hindu nationalist forces see the opportunity to push their case. And the media has followed suit, actively pinning the rise of coronavirus in India to the Muslim community despite India’s flimsy health data architecture.

Many political analysts believed the BJP was starting to pay the price for poor stewardship of the economy, and that it would have electoral consequences. But all of that is gone now, and the BJP and its Hindu nationalist agenda seem firmly entrenched. The COVID-19 crisis will have a deep negative impact on the economy, and it will serve as the perfect excuse. 

As one academic told me, “This gives the BJP what they needed. They can now hide a murder in a massacre.”