Who’s Afraid of the Hindu Vote?

BABA TO GAYO,” was the war cry most heard on social media in the run-up to the February-March 2022 elections in five states, including the politically crucial Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the government had been run by Yogi Adityanath for the last five years.

Adityanath was seeking to make history by repeating the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in a state that had never seen an incumbent government voted back to power. When exit polls predicted a big win for BJP in four of the five states, including UP, a rash of counter-exit polls crowded social media. Most of the so-called liberal voices had turned the elections into a trial for 2024. The refrain being, if the opposition could not oust Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP in 2019, they had to rework their strategy and aim at wresting power in states first in the run-up to 2024.

That was just one part of the story. The Modi-Yogi-baiting media was put into action and vast column space was devoted to the crowds that Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav and his new allies, including Jayant Chaudhary of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and dissenting voices like Swami Prasad Maurya from within BJP, were attracting. Generous airtime was devoted to issues such as unemployment, restlessness among youth, stray cattle, the farmers’ protest and the Lakhimpur Kheri incident, high inflation, fuel prices, and much more. Not to be left behind, echo chambers went on an overdrive: caution was urged in guarding strong rooms where EVMs were stored to prevent attempts by BJP to replace or tamper with them in key constituencies. But by then the noise had gone down to the point of whimpering acceptance that BJP would return to power in most states and the only face saver would be the number of seats it would lose in key states.

After March 10, though, most of these voices fell conspicuously silent, with some even doing a disappearing act from social media. The strategy of capturing states, especially UP (and later on, Gujarat), the fulcrum of Modi’s power, had fallen through. BJP’s resounding win demolished the most dog-eared calculations of baiters based on caste, communalisation and polarisation on the basis of religion. The premise that widespread disaffection over ‘real issues’ would trump BJP was disproved decisively.

Following the election, one commentator acknowledged that it was difficult to beat Narendra Modi and that his rivals would have to work hard at fashioning a new strategy. That crucial project to quash Modi-Amit Shah-Yogi Adityanath electorally, according to him, would be “[B]est of all, have a regional, ethnic and linguistic fortress so strong that Hindus vote primarily as Tamils, Malayalis or Telugus.” The project should succeed at any cost, including, ominously, turning India into separate silos based on regional, ethnic and linguistic identities. This, he suggested, was the only strategy by which the critical mass of Hindu votes could be denied to BJP. This strategy is a cynical one borrowed from the colonial era divide et impera copybook of the British.

The ‘break up’ India chorus, precursor to the ‘tukde, tukde’ exhortations of today, is not new in left-liberal thinking. While Gandhi viewed nationalism through the prism of unity, various political parties tended to view it through the lens of caste, class and community. The Left’s own dalliance with this went as far back as 1942, with a resolution passed by the Communist Party of India (CPI) in favour of creating Pakistan, based on Gangadhar Adhikari’s proposals. Batting for the creation of Pakistan, Adhikari maintained that India was never a single, united entity and that the idea of one nation, one people, and one language was alien to the subcontinent’s history. He argued that Pakistan should be created as a front against British colonialism and that Muslims should be given the right to form autonomous states or even secede, if they so desired, wherever they formed an overwhelming majority of the population in contiguous territory that was their homeland.

In independent India, too, efforts were made at various times to fuel linguistic, ethnic and regional identities. This, despite the awe-inspiring freedom movement that resulted in the birth of a new nation after integrating over 500 princely states. These efforts atrophied over time and India would witness secessionist movements in Punjab and Assam, the Dravidian movement and quasi-separatist politics in Tamil Nadu. Some efforts left an indelible imprint on the nation. In 1952, it was the fast until death by one of Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘apostles’, Potti Sriramulu, to ensure the creation of a separate state of Telugu-speaking people from the erstwhile Madras Presidency that forced Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s hands into creating Andhra Pradesh as a separate state. This set the stage for the use of language to draw the boundaries of individual states. Ironically, this (linguistic demarcation of provincial boundaries) was endorsed by Congress itself in its annual sessions in 1920, 1927, 1928 and 1937, prior to Independence. This opened the floodgates for other similar demands and led subsequently to the linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956.

DESPITE THE BEST efforts of Modi baiters—since 2014 and even as long ago as 2002 when he was the chief minister of Gujarat—to weaken him by raising various regional, communal, ethnic and economic issues, India, dominated by the youth, has steadfastly refused to allow the narrative to be stolen and refashioned. The last four electoral innings—in 2014 and 2019 at the Centre and in 2017 and 2022 in UP—have proved conclusively that Modi and his BJP have the political heft to swat away outdated narratives and tired tropes built on caste, community and other calculations. Prominent among these is the ability to construct an appealing framework of welfarism that allows no first right to any community as was done in the past. The foundation for this exercise was set and pursued doggedly in Modi’s first term. It was expanded and reinforced to include more and more sections of society over time.

It is in his second term, though, that the exercise has come to fruition, as did the exercise, in the first term of the Modi government, to single-mindedly neutralise the potency of the Muslim veto in electoral politics. This inclusive welfarism and secularisation of welfare programmes and projects served to successfully blunt the sharp edges of criticism over communal polarisation as a key tool of BJP’s electoral politics and holding on to power.

BJP did not just win; it bettered its record. The party upped its vote share from 39.67 per cent in 2017 to 41.6 per cent in 2022 and became the first government since 1985 to win two consecutive terms in UP. Thus far used to flogging the anti-incumbency horse in UP, Modi baiters have had to, perhaps for the first time, credit a pro-incumbency wave for the victory. 2014 and 2017 were not fluke elections. Voters in UP had carefully chosen to bring BJP and the Modi-Yogi duo back to power.

The only state where BJP did not win was Punjab where a relatively new entrant, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), won 42 per cent of the vote, conclusively proving that voters in the state wanted to not only throw out the incumbent Congress (Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi lost both seats he contested) but also grind to dust the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), an erstwhile BJP ally whose politics was based solely on regional, linguistic and religious identities. Now, at the national level, a congested opposition space with no clear anti-BJP line-up is witnessing Telangana’s K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) and West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee (the two had been making the loudest claims in the run-up to the state polls that national politics would change radically after March 10) withdrawing quietly to their respective states.

Something curious and sinister happens every time BJP approaches a major election. Be it the General Election (as in 2019) or a clutch of important state Assembly elections (UP 2022), two emotions are widely expressed almost as a reflex by commentators and intellectuals alike. The first—this is comeuppance time for BJP. This position is usually based on disbelief: How can a party last so long at the helm of power in what was, until the other day, a fractured polity?

In UP, for example, the size of SP leader Akhilesh Yadav’s rallies was considered a metric for BJP’s doom. Despite past experience proving that the size of attendance at public meetings is not always proportionate to overwhelming ballot box gains. Once that prediction fails, the second argument takes over, also based on emotions rather than reasoning: a strong urge to see BJP’s destruction. Things were no different in the days after March 10. The suggestion that the opposition ‘break’ the ‘Hindu vote’ and make people in different states vote along their regional and linguistic identities was part of this ‘demolish BJP’ instinct. The idea has been expressed at different times as a regional strategy and a ‘federal strategy’.

This time, however, these post-disaster post-mortems were particularly vehement. The proposal was that if the opposition managed to take away a sliver of the ‘Hindu vote’, say anywhere between 10 and 15 per cent, BJP’s prospects could be dented. The example offered was that of West Bengal where the “67:33 ratio”—the ratio of the two main religious communities—prevented BJP from winning in the state. The idea was simple: the Trinamool Congress (TMC) ensured that a sliver of the ‘67’ vote—women in particular—was cast on the basis of gender identity and that was enough to badly dent BJP’s prospects. If this is an acceptable aspect of electoral strategy, it has to be noted that exploiting people’s identities for electoral gains is at odds with the concept of a national identity—their Indianness so to speak. This is an old and dangerous idea that has been around since even before India became independent, but that it was rejected resoundingly in recent years does not matter. However, it seems to be the only idea left now in the armoury of Modi’s most trenchant and desperate critics, making it that much more dangerous.

IN 1946, MAHATMA GANDHI paid one of his last visits to south India before he was assassinated a couple of years later. In January, he was in Madras for a function to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Dakshin Hindi Sabha. The event provided a foretaste of the language conflicts that emerged a few years later. At the gathering of the Sabha, Gandhi started saying his prayer in Hindi. This was being simultaneously translated into Tamil by the organisers. One member of the audience—from the Telugu-speaking region of the Madras Presidency—stood up and asked for a Telugu translation of what Gandhi was saying. That was not all. Tamil delegates protested at any use of Telugu words and the latter disrupted the proceedings at the use of any Tamil words. Flabbergasted, Gandhi walked out. One agitated Telugu speaker walked right behind him until Gandhi had to rebuke him. (The episode is recounted in Selig S Harrison’s India: The Most Dangerous Decades, 1960.)

Two months later, almost to the date of Gandhi’s visit to Madras, the Cabinet Mission landed in India. The Mission was in India “to help her attain her freedom as speedily and fully as possible.” If the Mission paid lip service to the unity of India, it administered a number of ‘poison pills’ that continue to have toxic political effects right up to the present day.

Indian leaders of that time ensured that some of the most dangerous ideas outlined by the Mission lived on. These are a matter of historical record but worth mentioning: the ‘grouping’ of British Indian provinces outside the control of the Centre; the lapse of paramountcy over Indian states, theoretically making them independent; and the freedom of provinces to review their position within the Constitution, repeatedly at an interval of every 10 years.

These two events—Gandhi’s Madras visit and the Cabinet Mission—were unlinked but that they occurred in such a tight span of time spelt out the dangers that India confronted even before it had become a viable country.

The dangers were almost immediately evident. Such was the demand for “linguistic states” that less than a year after Independence, on June 17, 1948, the Constituent Assembly itself created a commission to inquire whether the Andhra region and Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra could be organised as separate states. The commission—led by, SK Dar, a retired judge of the Allahabad High Court—deferred a decision on Andhra and recommended that another commission be appointed to look at the issue of linguistic states in general.

In no time, a furious reaction broke out. In Andhra, the Dar Commission was described as the “no linguistic provinces commission”. Egged on by the communists, who had been at the receiving end of the law and order machinery in the Telangana region, the language issue continued to rock that part of the Madras state for years on end. The Centre, caught up with problems in the wake of Partition, Constitution-making and a host of other pressing issues, could not take a call without considering all aspects of this sensitive issue. In the end, a 58-day fast by Potti Sriramulu leading to his death on December 15, 1952, forced the government’s hand. Andhra Pradesh was conferred statehood within a year.

Matters did not stop there and, as had been suspected by careful observers, the move opened the floodgates for similar demands in western and peninsular India. These demands were met ultimately after the States Reorganisation Commission made its recommendations in 1955. It was not the first time that India had a close shave with centrifugal forces. The political ideas motivating ‘separateness’ never really left India alone for a long time.

One way to look at ‘Balkanisation’ is to understand the inability of two political communities to come to terms on foundational issues or to coexist peacefully. Partition of India was an example of this kind of separation.

But there is another motivation, one driven by pure short-term political goals that seek to legitimise Balkanisation. What is being witnessed in India today, especially the idea of making Indians vote along their regional, linguistic and other identities, falls in this category. The story of India from the Cabinet Mission Plan (1946) to the present day is one of moving from the first kind of Balkanisation to the second kind. Given the quiet and secretive manner in which it has been justified and accepted in intellectual quarters, it nearly succeeded.

The best examples of this kind of dangerous politics come from two states at the extremities of India: Punjab and Assam. Both witnessed inflamed politics that turned into insurgencies almost at the same time in 1979.

Punjab witnessed competitive religious politics between SAD and Congress in the 1970s. Each party, whether in power or in opposition, tried to outbid the other in wooing the ‘Sikh vote’. The result was ever-increasing polarisation of politics in the state. This reached a point where neither party could back down or even try to do so.

After their defeat in the Assembly elections, the parties veered further to the right and toyed with a ‘soft separatism’ of sorts when it passed the Anandpur Sahib Resolution in October 1973. While some of the demands outlined in this separatist charter appear innocuous today, at that time they represented an extreme of the kind that had been rarely seen in Indian politics. If one were to use contemporary language, the Akalis sought to turn Punjab into a “regional, ethnic and linguistic fortress”. In this, they had competition from Congress. The then chief minister, Giani Zail Singh, indulged in Sikh religious politics of his own. Some six months before the Anandpur Sahib Resolution was passed, he inaugurated the Guru Gobind Singh Marg, a highway linking the dozens of shrines associated with the last Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh.

This competition ultimately turned into a disaster when a relatively unknown cleric, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, carried out a violent political coup of sorts. In April 1978, violent clashes took place in Amritsar between extremists and Nirankaris, a heterodox religious sect. From the next year, there was no looking back. It took more than a decade to bring Punjab under control. Thousands died at the hands of terrorists and in the security operations that became necessary. If one looks at the events of that time dispassionately, it was all due to politics based on making people vote along ethnic and religious lines in a sensitive border state.

IN ASSAM, THE gestation period for the turn to insurgency was much longer, spanning more than a quarter of a century. But as in Punjab, it was the politics of ‘making people vote differently’ by letting the problem of illegal migration fester for a very long period that ignited the insurgency. Unlike Punjab, Congress was solely responsible for what transpired in Assam.

It was not as if the party’s brass in Delhi were not aware of the powder keg in Assam. The first two chief ministers of the state—Gopinath Bordoloi (1946-50) and Bishnuram Medhi (1950-57)—knew about the huge influx of illegal migrants from East Pakistan. But because the changing demography suited the party’s political prospects in the state (as well as to garner seats in Parliament), the two were checkmated. Bordoloi died before he could implement his plan to fix the issue; Medhi was dispatched as the governor of Madras state in 1958.

Twenty years later, the problem deepened to such an extent that Assam rose in agitation after a sudden and inexplicable increase in the number of voters on the rolls in Mangaldoi parliamentary constituency. Along with the emergence of a regional party—the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP)—a militant outfit, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) rose, this time against India itself.

Much like Punjab, it took more than a decade to control the situation in Assam. Through a series of army operations and ULFA’s own indiscriminate violence, separatist sentiment waned. After a series of bomb blasts in Guwahati and other cities of the state, Assam’s civil society and people in general became disenchanted with separatism. ULFA persists till today, especially in the easternmost districts, even if its violence has by and large been ended.

It took more than 60 years for a pushback of sorts at the mass level. Today, Indians of all persuasion are acutely sensitive to any abuse of politics that can harm the unity and integrity of the country. That has not stopped the quest for political gains by dividing people, but the returns are increasingly diminishing. One clear sign of this change is the immediate reaction to any ‘counter-narrative’ that seeks to justify or legitimise infractions that have a bearing on India’s unity.

The latest example of this change is the reaction and counter-reaction to the Vivek Agnihotri film, The Kashmir Files. Until recently, this was a taboo subject. There was a quiet nexus between filmmakers, politicians and intellectuals as to what subjects were acceptable when it came to problems like Kashmir. Until now, any exploration of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits/Hindus in 1989-90 was considered unacceptable as it damaged India’s secular fabric. It does not take much imagination to understand who gained from this position. That period, roughly from 1995 to 2014, was one wherein the Indian establishment tried very hard to turn terrorists into ‘responsible interlocutors’. An entire industry of activists, academics and journalists sprang up to make India compromise on its territorial integrity by loosening control over Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Matters went so far that it was considered normal on the part of public intellectuals to speak in the same breath of the forced migrations of Pandits from the Kashmir Valley and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, as if the two were politically equivalent. That sort of moral equivalence is now unacceptable.

The pushback against the conspiracy of silence on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits/Hindus from the Valley due to the violence, threats and bullying by separatist militants with Pakistani connections was practically non-existent when it happened in 1991, after the extraordinary kidnapping of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter Rubaiyya. Most liberal intellectuals failed to come through for the community in their worst hour of loss. Some admitted only recently that they chose not to highlight the issue at the time since that would mean fuelling the already simmering Hindu sentiment over Ayodhya and the Ram temple movement launched by BJP and the Sangh Parivar, raising tensions countrywide. Otherwise outspoken A-list actors from Bollywood, such as Aamir Khan (he was earlier widely criticised for saying that his wife Kiran was worried enough over the lynching of Muslims in India to consider leaving the country), who sported sealed lips on the Kashmir issue for years have only now acknowledged the trauma that Pandits/Hindus in the Valley went through in the 1990s as a consequence of the actions of terrorists.

The film has also changed the very way the cultural space is being manipulated. People like popular comedian Kapil Sharma have become the arbiters of public taste. His show, usually the first port of call for Bollywood celebrities before their films hit the theatres, refused to host the makers of The Kashmir Files to showcase the film. But popular support has ensured that the film is the biggest grosser in recent times. Enough, in fact, for the Karni Sena (it shot to prominence after it threatened to chop off Deepika Padukone’s nose for acting in a period film) to demand that director Vivek Agnihotri and his team donate at least half their earnings to the welfare of Kashmiri Pandits.

The runaway success of the first-ever movie on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits comes at a time when OTT platforms are used to create new and convenient political and ideological narratives. In most of these productions, the Hindu is shown as the villain, characters from the minority community are shown as victimised by society, and murderers in serials chant Shiva stotram, and so on. The success of The Kashmir Files has set the precedent for an aggressive pushback against these biased narratives.

Since the 1950s, much has changed in India. The integrative institutions of the country, migration of people from their ‘home states’ across the length and breadth of India for work, have deepened the feeling of oneness. Even then, the urge to gain from divisive politics packaged as ‘federalism’, ‘local sentiment’ and linguistic identities remains strong. Now, more than ever, this sentiment will be used to ensure a ‘level playing field’ in 2024. But chances are this is unlikely to pay the dividends it once did.

BJPNarendra ModipoliticsPunjabUP Elections 2022Yogi Adityanath