Congress decimated, AAP emerges as a challenger but 2024 will go the BJP way
BJP has swept the most populous state in India that is often seen as a bellwether for the General elections
The local boy who accompanies me around Varanasi is ecstatic. Our Yogi will be the Prime Minister of the country in 2024, he tells me. Look at the love he has accorded to Ram Lalla! It’s how he refers to Lord Ram, and to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath, who has just been returned to power in India’s largest state, with a landslide victory.
Critics have frequently labelled Adityanath as a militant monk, an ambitious right-wing nationalist who wears the saffron robes of a renunciant. Adityanath is often recorded making brazen Islamophobic remarks at his rallies. His speeches are met with wild applause from crowds, and face no censure from his seniors in the Bhartiya Janata Party, who are themselves complicit in demonizing India’s Muslims.
So is the press. In a recent interview to the popular news channel Aaj Tak, Adityanath referred to Muslims as ‘kathmullas,’ a historically offensive slur for men of the community, referring to the practice of male circumcision. Neither did the anchor interviewing him express her objections, nor did the chief minister of India’s most populous state express any regret for using the slur.
For the last five months, I have been talking to my journalist colleagues about a sweep by the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, a repeat of its performance in the 2019 general elections. I assumed this would occur even though neither Modi nor Adityanath had delivered on any of their election promises, and were indeed responsible for waves of mismanagement and suffering over the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the worst effects of which were felt in Uttar Pradesh.
Many well-meaning friends among these journalists claimed that I live in a delusion. The “Modi wave,”––that is, the narrative of Modi’s sweeping popularity––is just something that has enamored the mainstream media, they say. To all of them, I have said the same thing repeatedly: the power of hate, polarization, the othering of Muslims is the strongest weapon for any political party in India right now. A huge section of the Indian population is basking in this newfound sense of sadism.
Such is the the arrogance of the ruling party, and its single-minded focus on appeasing voters hooked to this narrative of newfound Hindu empowerment, that the BJP did not give a single ticket to a Muslim candidate in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
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The Other
Adityanath’s tenure as chief minister has been a time of unparalleled trauma, even despair, in the state. It witnessed massive death and distress over the pandemic, a devastation that was livestreamed on Indian and international channels. Over 2020 and in 2021, the families of patients I met during the second wave in hospitals in towns such as Kanpur and Azamgarh begged for hospital beds, and oxygen. Crematoria overflowed with funeral pyres and dead bodies were photographed floating in the Ganga.
And even before the terrible second wave of the summer of 2021, hundreds of thousands of hungry and exhausted migrant labourers walked back home to Uttar Pradesh from India’s big cities after unplanned lockdowns, in scenes reminiscent of the Partition of 1947. Almost everywhere in the state, these returning workers were met with indifference, and, in some cases, cruelty.
But all this trauma dissipated in the face of the fear of the other: the Muslim, who is lying in wait to take over the state’s resources and cement an imagined religious supremacy over this vast and innocent majority of peaceable Hindus.
The news publication The Quint recently published a report documenting hate crimes against Muslims in UP in recent years. The report finds 418 instances that can be described as hate crimes against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh since 2015. In 2017, when Adityanath came to power, the number of documented hate crimes rose five times over 2016.
In an election rally in Uttar Pradesh last month, India’s home minister Amit Shah declared: “Before Modi’s rule, any Alia, Malia, Jamalia could enter India!” The crowds swayed in ecstasy, listening––the phrase ‘Alia, Malia, Jamalia’ is a casual insult meant to refer to Muslims. (It’s been used to similar effect by Narendra Modi in his own speeches, in the past.)
This wasn’t simply Islamophobia fueling voter enthusiasm. It was potent and outright hate, sold as a magic potion to heal the scars of Uttar Pradesh’s many unemployed, poor, and homeless.
Over the winter of 2019 and 2020, just before the pandemic created havoc in India, Adityanath’s regime jailed hundreds of students and Muslims for protesting against the Citizenship Act. Around the peak of the citizenship protests in November 2019, just under twenty people lost their lives in Uttar Pradesh alone. More than five thousand, a majority of them Muslim, were taken into custody. Of these, dozens were charged under the National Security Act––serious allegations that helped frame peaceful dissent as something akin to terrorism and treason. It allowed the BJP to hold protestors in jail with little to no recourse to legal remedy, and set the stage for deadly violence against Muslims.
The Opposition
A voter named Manhar Yadav from Lalganj in Uttar Pradesh told me that he was disillusioned with the alternatives. Politicians like Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, who was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh before Adityanath, were nowhere to be seen over the worst waves of distress in the state. He emerged in public sight less than a year before elections.
Meanwhile, Manhar Yadav says, his sister got a job as a school teacher on the basis of merit and did not have to give a competitive exam. “Akhilesh,” he quipped, “can build more madrassas”--schools of Islamic learning. The Samajwadi Party is led by Hindus on a platform of lower-caste empowerment and state welfarism. Yet it has long been labelled a “pro-Muslim” party because it is the choice of a significant chunk of Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim voters.
It is an ironic label, given how totally the Samajwadi Party shied away from taking a stand over years of attacks on Muslims. Over the last few weeks, as the BJP created a national campaign to intimidate Muslim women by banning or attacking the hijab in the southern state of Karnataka, the polarization created frenetic headlines and loud debate. Yet the Samajwadi Party, the BJP’s chief opposition in Uttar Pradesh, did not find it worthwhile to make any stand against this harassment.
While Akhilesh Yadav remained silent on these attacks, Narendra Modi’s BJP milked the polarization to its advantage. In late February, while polling was underway, a trial court in Modi’s native Gujarat handed down a judgement sentencing thirty eight Muslims to death for an alleged terror from over a decade earlier. Commentators made noises about the suspiciously convenient timing. But Modi’s party left no room for misunderstanding. The Gujarat wing of the BJP tweeted a violent caricature featuring Muslim men hanging by the noose, labelled with the motto of the state of India, ‘satyameva jayate,’ or “truth will prevail.”
Modi himself missed no chance to bring up the death sentence in his campaign speeches. Justice meted out to suspected Muslim terrorists took the place of the idea of “development,” something for which every major Western media outlet innocently lauded him some years ago.
Today’s election result has completely decimated two other political forces in Uttar Pradesh, the Indian National Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party, respectively important stakeholders for Muslim and Dalit voters. The Bahujan Samaj party was more or less absent through the campaign, the Congress was not viewed as a force to reckon with. The chief challenger, Akhilesh Yadav, was not only underprepared: he was completely unsuccessful at galvanizing multiple disaffected communities to stitch together any sort of cohesive alliance.
The Future
Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh is not the only state that the BJP under Narendra Modi has marked its victory. The BJP has also won the states of Uttarakhand and Manipur. It is a contender to win the coastal state of Goa where several parties jumped into the fray against the BJP’s deeply unpopular incumbent government. Here again, a lack of unity amongst opposition leaders, an absence of a pre-poll alliance and the split in the non-BJP votes is likely to deliver Goa back to the BJP on a platter.
The only state that has resisted the BJP’s juggernaut is Punjab, where Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, which has so far been restricted to its home base of Delhi. Kejriwal’s politics have been opportunistic, particularly on the matter of religious polarisation. The party offered its support to the revoking of Article 370 which ended Muslim-majority Kashmir’s special status. It turned a blind eye to the atrocities in the Delhi carnage of 2020 in which dozens of Muslims were butchered, and Muslim student activists who protested against the unconstitutional Citizenship Act were jailed. Over seven years in power as the chief minister of Delhi, Kejriwal has reinvented himself as a devout Hindu, trading freely on religious piety and occasionally fuelling anti-Muslim bigotry, in order to present himself as an alternative to Modi.
Voters in Punjab had welcomed the Indian National Congress to power five years earlier, but have since been disgruntled with the arrogance of former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh and the party’s confused, often self-sabotaging stances. Their opposition, the BJP-aligned Shiromani Akali Dal, has been mired in allegations of unbridled corruption, and have not been able to shake charges of grave mismanagement in their years in power. Unsurprisingly, the state found Kejriwal to be the best alternative. His party offered its well-regarded public health and education policy in New Delhi as a moral alternative to the corrupt chieftains that have ruled the state for decades.
This brings us to the narrative quickly building up following today’s results. Can Kejriwal be seen as a pan-India leader who could be a contender against a popular strongman like Narendra Modi ?
The Aam Aadmi Party is set to contest the Himachal and Gujarat assembly elections due end of this year. I have been a Gujarat watcher for years and can reliably conclude that he, along with other regional parties, might make a dent in the electorate. But winning Gujarat will be next to impossible. Nonetheless, with victory in Punjab and continuing popularity in New Delhi, Kejriwal can now look at expanding the reach of his party, in all likelihood at the cost of dividing and further decimating the chances of national parties like the Congress.
Where, then, does this leave the battle for 2024 ?
This may not be a palatable opinion to some readers, but the sheer ineptitude of the leading opposition, with no cohesive alliance in sight fewer than twenty four months before the general elections, means that the BJP is in pole position. I will go a step further and predict that 2024 is a foregone conclusion. The virulent anti-Muslim campaign unleashed in Uttar Pradesh, a bellwether for national elections, clearly indicates that the narrative will only get more violent and more dangerous to religious minorities.
The Indian opposition has been almost uniformly silent over the BJP creating a situation that has caused India’s 225 million Muslims to live in fear of genocide. This has emboldened Modi, his leadership, and his core voters. If Modi does see a threat in 2024 to his political ambition, it may well be from within the party: the new Hindu icon, the face of the Uttar Pradesh victory, the monk who can successfully deliver election results as Modi himself has done: Yogi Adityanath.
Adityanath, like Modi, has captured the imagination of the national media. A ‘Yogi v/s Modi’ narrative might not be playing out in our mainstream media. But it is certaintly playing out in the rank and file of the BJP already. A battle between Adityanath and Modi-Shah might not be a battle of equal footing for now. But it is a possibly interesting development in the run up to the 2024 General elections. Unfortunately, whoever achieves the decisive victory in this incipient battle, the ultimate sacrifice will be paid by the Indian minorities. India’s democracy has much to fear.
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This is well written and articulated. The truth is clear and God bless and protect, the minorities of India.....