Between 1984 and 2014, no single political party could win enough seats to form a national government on its own. There were simply too many, it seemed, and new ones kept emerging. In 2014, 464 political parties competed in the national elections—up from 215 in 2004—with most representing narrow regional, religious, or ideological constituencies. The system gave meaning to the famous catchphrase: “Indians don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.” [...]
The BJP’s 2019 campaign had to be different—after all, Modi was no longer the candidate representing change. Unemployment had hit a 45-year high under the BJP, and economic growth began to slow down. And so instead of Modi the reformer, Indians got to see Modi the performer this election season: He branded himself a chowkidar, or security guard, to emphasize his ability to keep India, and especially Hindus, safe. Across hundreds of campaign speeches, he carefully shifted the focus of his message to national security and identity politics. And it worked. The question now is what lesson the BJP will derive from its latest victory, and how those insights will guide it in the years to come. [...]
Meanwhile, as press freedom declines in India—Reporters Without Borders ranks India 140th out of 180 countries, and Modi declined to hold a single press conference in his first five years as prime minister—the media will struggle to challenge government reports of military action. For example, New Delhi has claimed that in a Feb. 27 aerial dogfight with Pakistan, it shot down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet. As Foreign Policy reported at the time, a U.S. count of F-16s sold to Pakistan found no missing jets, calling into question New Delhi’s account of what happened. But an increasingly jingoistic mainstream Indian media didn’t follow up. Future Indian governments now have a template for appearing strong in public—irrespective of what they actually do. [...]
And the lines in that fight were drawn clearly in 2019. The BJP’s party president Amit Shah—the chief architect of Modi’s reelection campaign—referred to Muslim immigrants living in India illegally as “termites” on the campaign trail last September, and he repeated the phrase this year. In the eastern state of Assam, the BJP has created a National Register of Citizens, a database that excludes 4 million people in that state, most of them Muslims. Shah has promised that the BJP would implement a similar database across the whole country, ostensibly to force a mass purge of Muslims deemed to have immigrated illegally from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
No comments:
Post a Comment