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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004Our Life and TimesIndia: Voters repudiate religious Rightby Kevin A. Barry In an upset that confounded pollsters and pundits the world over, India’s voters dealt a decisive defeat in April-May elections to the Hindu chauvinist Bharata Janata Party (BJP), in power since 1999. The BJP had campaigned on the slogan “India shining.” This alluded to the country’s strong economic growth, with the Gross Domestic Product having increased at a rate of 8% in 2003, nearly as fast as in China. The BJP also stressed the recent peace negotiations with Pakistan. This new emphasis on peace and prosperity was supposed to soften the BJP’s traditional image as a party based on religious hatred, especially toward Muslims. Only 14% of the population, India’s Muslims are regularly accused by the BJP of oppressing the Hindu majority. The BJP was heavily involved in the 2002 riots that killed over 700 Muslims in Gujarat. The new, softened BJP image was supposed to foster a more decisive victory than in 1999. Instead, the left-of-center Congress Party slate won the most parliamentary seats (40%), as against the BJP’s 33%. With the two (reformist) communist parties recording their best showings ever, a coalition government based in the Congress, the communists, and a few other parties is the likely outcome. How could this have happened? The BJP’s most solid base of support lies within the middle classes, around 200 million people, less than 20% of the total population, which is now over a billion. Along with the upper classes, this group has benefited the most from the recent embrace of globalized capitalism. It is from within this narrow group that most of the oft-cited two million mobile phones are sold each month, or that two million people work in the vaunted computer sector. It is here that the slogan “India shining” had some resonance. This same slogan had little impact on the urban and rural poor, when it did not annoy or even outrage them. The poor are far more numerous than the middle class, as seen in the fact that 300 million Indians are forced to live on less than a dollar a day. It is within this group that one finds most of the 50% of Indian women who are still illiterate. It is within this group that one finds most of the 200 million people who lack access to clean water. It is in this group that one finds most of the Dalits (untouchables), the 20% of the population that lives under an apartheid-like system in rural areas. In retrospect, two events of the last several months seemed to foreshadow the BJP’s resounding defeat. One, noticed by the world, was the vast turnout of urban and rural activists, including many from Dalit and women’s groups, at the World Social Forum in Mumbai (Bombay) in January. WSF organizers were overwhelmed when 60,000 local people attended their workshops, more than at any previous WSF. They added a focus on class, caste, and gender oppression WITHIN Indian society to the WSF’s sometimes rather abstract anti-globalization politics. At the same time, these indigenous revolutionary forces acquired a new sense of confidence from the fact that activists from the world over heard them out and recognized their grievances. A second event, virtually unnoticed by the world, was the February strike, in which 50 million government workers walked off their jobs in the face of government repression. This type of yearning for a new world will hardly be fulfilled by the Congress Party, which has already promised not to change the BJP’s overall economic policies. Nor will the legacy of the BJP disappear. In its years in power, it has deeply impacted the educational system with its propaganda. It continues to organize and train the paramilitary Association of Nationalist Volunteers (RSS), its openly neo-fascist youth wing. Nonetheless, the politics of hatred, of religious chauvinism, and of the narrowest cultural nationalism has been weakened, creating space in which liberatory forces that oppose the rule of capital can more easily assert themselves. |
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