In August, the newly formed government overturned the Constitution’s Article 370 and abolished the disputed Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. The government created two subservient union territories, imposed curfews, cut off communications and detained members of the erstwhile state assembly.
In October, the Party got everything it wanted from a Supreme Court decision about control of land in the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. In 1992, a mob supported by BJP leaders destroyed a mosque said to stand on the birthplace of Lord Ram, a revered Hindu deity. The court decision means that ‘a grand Hindu Ram temple’ can be built on the site.
‘Decisive action’ was a catchcry of the BJP’s torrential communications strategy. During the election campaign, it trumpeted a ‘surgical strike’ in February 2019 by India’s Air Force on terrorists in Pakistan after the killing of more than 40 Indian paramilitary police in a suicide bombing in Kashmir. Many voters lapped up a tale of bold decision-making and retaliation.
The government’s media captains promoted a list of sparkling achievements. The revised Goods and Services Tax was expected to streamline internal trade and revenue collection. A report on a New Education Policy promised a revamp of the entire education system. A scheme to provide poor rural households with bottled gas for cooking freed women from noxious fumes and time-consuming fuel gathering. The government also proclaimed success for its Clean India public sanitation campaign launched in 2014. A national health program held out the hope of affordable medical care for all.
The courts, educational institutions, the banking system and the police increasingly reflected the ‘Hindu values’ of the ruling party and its zealous supporters. A National Register of Citizens promised to identify and root out non-Indians, especially Muslims.
Could a re-elected government, implementing its program, ride higher than this? Perhaps hubris, like love and atmospheric pollution, is in the air.
A ‘bold decision’ resulted in a Citizenship Amendment Act passed by parliament in December. It will grant Indian citizenship to undocumented residents who are Buddhist, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis or Sikhs and who came from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan before 2015. Muslims are excluded.
The Act fulfilled a long-standing BJP promise to find and expel Muslims who slip into India to seek better chances of livelihood.
The Act may prove popular in the BJP heartland, but it ignited Assam, the biggest of seven states in the northeast. In Assam, the fear is not religious migrants but migrants who are not Assamese. The fear is that the Act opens the way for non-Assamese Hindu migrants to settle in the state, take Assamese jobs and swamp Assamese culture.
Economically, annual GDP growth looks like falling as low as 5 per cent — mouth-watering for industrialised countries but not for a country aiming for at least 7 per cent growth and adding more than 14 million people a year to its population.
Many of India’s state-owned banks have massive bad-loan portfolios and the ‘Make in India’ campaign, aimed at creating millions of new jobs, is stalled. Manufacturers pointed to falling sales of automobiles and fast-moving consumer goods while charities and cultural organisations bemoaned difficulties in attracting contributions.
Domestic politics — and fear of Chinese imports — prevented India from joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) that many Indian economists believed offered the chance to generate investment, promote job growth and energise the economy.
To join RCEP, the Indian government wanted concessions on tariffs to protect Indian farmers and manufacturers. Farming families vote, they number in the tens of millions and most find their current circumstances precarious. Their fear is that increased imports of sugar, wheat, spices, milk products and edible oils will worsen their returns. ‘RCEP would be yet another monster,’ a lobbyist wrote, ‘that would eat our farmers’.
Manufacturers pointed to a trade deficit last year of US$104 billion, more than half of which was with China. They argued that RCEP would open the doors even wider to cheap Chinese goods. The government feared tariff cuts would further undermine the Make in India campaign. ‘The paranoia’, one economist summed up, ‘was instrumental in India raising difficult demands and eventually quitting the RCEP’.
Though the once-supreme Congress Party is in disarray — unable to shake off the Gandhi family — it governs five states and non-BJP governments still control more than half the units of the federation. The 29 states use 11 different writing scripts to conduct local business and the Constitution of India recognises 22 official languages. The BJP and RSS project of making their version of ‘Hindu culture’ dominant throughout the land collides with deep regional diversity. India makes the European Union look homogeneous.
Political fortunes in India can fall fast. What’s different now is that neither Indira nor Rajiv Gandhi could call on the millions of believers and workers that the RSS can command. Nor was the zeitgeist flowing, as it does today, in favour of chauvinist movements peddling simple, mythologising appeals through the power of digital technology.
Robin Jeffrey is a Visiting Research Professor with the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
This article is part of an EAF special feature series on 2019 in review and the year ahead.