* india’s General election: Preliminary intimidation
In a blatant attempt to influence the general elections in April, a top Indian opposition politician was remanded in custody last Friday following his overnight arrest in a case supporters say is aimed at sidelining challengers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi before next month’s election (AFP/Agence France Presse, March 22).
Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of the capital territory Delhi and a key leader in an opposition alliance formed to compete against Modi and his ruling Bhratiya Janata Party (BJP) in the polls, was detained in connection with a long-running corruption probe.
He is among several leaders of the bloc under criminal investigation and one of his colleagues described his arrest as a “political conspiracy” orchestrated by the ruling BJP. Kejriwal was brought before a New Delhi court on Friday which ruled he should stay remanded in the custody of the Enforcement Directorate, India’s main financial crimes investigation agency, until at least March 28.
“My life is dedicated to the country, whether I am inside or outside,” Kejriwal told reporters while being led into the courtroom before the hearing began.
Shadan Farasat, a member of Kejriwal’s legal team, told AFP that colleagues were considering their next course of action after the ruling.
His Aam Aadmi Party (AAP/ Common Man Party), maintains that Kejriwal has not resigned his office as chief minister despite his arrest.
“We made it clear from the beginning that if needed, Arvind Kejriwal will run the government from jail,” Delhi education minister Atishi Marlena Singh told reporters on Thursday.
Hundreds of supporters from Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) took to the streets Friday to condemn the leader’s arrest, with police breaking up one crowd of protesters who attempted to block a busy traffic intersection.
Several demonstrators were detained, including Singh and Health Minister Saurabh Bhardwaj.
Rallies in support of Kejriwal were held in numerous other big cities around India.
Kejriwal’s government was accused of corruption when it implemented a policy to liberalise the sale of liquor in 2021 and give up a lucrative government stake in the sector. The policy was withdrawn the following year, but the resulting probe into the alleged corrupt allocation of licences has since seen the jailing of two top Kejriwal allies.
Kejriwal, 55, has been chief minister for nearly a decade and first came to office as a staunch anti-corruption crusader.
He had resisted multiple summons from the Enforcement Directorate to be interrogated as part of the probe.
Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin, a fellow member of the opposition bloc, said Kejriwal’s arrest “smacks of a desperate witch-hunt.”
“Not a single BJP leader faces scrutiny or arrest, laying bare their abuse of power and the decay of democracy,” he said. In a sarcastic and self-delusionary note, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, a minister in Modi’s government, said the opposition’s reaction to Kejriwal’s arrest had been “extremely mystifying” . “Arvind Kejriwal should understand…that the law and the consequences of violating the law don’t stop just because you are a political leader,” he told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.
Modi’s political opponents and international rights groups have long sounded the alarm on India’s shrinking democratic space.
U.S. think-tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.
Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent member of the opposition Congress party and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty that dominated Indian politics for decades, was convicted of criminal libel last year after a complaint by a member of Modi’s party.
His two-year prison sentence saw his disqualified from parliament for a time until the verdict was suspended by a higher court, but raised further concerns over democratic norms in the world’s most populous country.
Kejriwal and Gandhi are both members of the big tent opposition front – I.N.D.I.A. (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance) -- composed of more than two dozen parties that is jointly contesting India’s national election, which is running from April to June this year.
[The rival association National Democratic Alliance (NDA) comprises right-leaning political parties led by the BJP]. A delegation from the bloc met with India’s election commission on Friday to condemn what they said were deliberate efforts to undermine the oppostion’s campaign.
“It is a larger issue of impairing, undermining and sabotaging the basic structure of the Indian constitution,” Congress politician Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters after the meeting.
But even without the criminal investigations targeting its most prominent leaders few political pundits – both domestic and international – expect the bloc to make inroads against Modi, who remains immensely popular a decade after first taking ‘
partly due to the resonance of his assertive Hindu-nationalist politics with members of the country’s overwhelming majority Hindu religion.
2024 Elections: Social Relations or Ideologies?
Many India-specialists complain that much of Indian politics revolves around social relations rather than ideologies. However, according to one, this time around, from the ‘Hindi belt’ to the south, for the BJP and the opposition, it may be different (TOI/Times of India: Anastasia Piliavsky).
Piliavsky contends that this year’s elections will not be a battle of political parties. These will be a battle of political principles.
At the same time, the 18 Lok
th Sabha (the House of the People) will hold few surprises.
With the BJP facing no national opposition to speak of, one can safely predict that the NDA will retain, and most likely expand, its parliamentary supermajority.
Comparative Analysis
The alliance (NDA) is expected to occupy between 358 and 398 In which case, it will have a 66-73 % percent majority, up from the current 65 % percent.
These are conservative estimates.
With the gains made by BJP in last year’s assembly elections, when it wrested Rajasthan and Chhatisgarh away from Congress, the one possible surprise may be the margin of victory.
The interest of these elections will lie less in who wins and more in the political logics that will be seen in action.
A struggle will unfold between the politics of relations and the politics of ideology.
Modi ‘image’ becomes a civilizational platform
- A lot of Indian politics revolves around social relations rather than ideologies; - Patronage is rife; - Political messaging targets particular groups: castes, super-castes, classes, ‘vote banks’ – not general principles. · Parties resemble guru cults instead of platform-bound collectives.
Elections are popularity contests, in which people vote for colourful personalities, not universal ideals or national policies.
The BJP is no doubt the world’s biggest personality cult focused on ‘Modi magic’.
While working his magic, Modi has also labored hard to construct a mega ideology, a civilizational platform with messages for both India and the world.
‘Bharat brand’ growing A future-facing, space-bound India, which is also in touch with its ancient roots, is now a big brand, at least inside India. · India’s streets buzz with patriotic pride in its globally visible achievements – from the moon landing to South Asia’s first G – 20 summit and the economy snatching the colonial/ imperial power Britain’s fifth world place.
There is also the world’s largest new meditation centre in Varanasi.
Is ‘Hindutva’ slowly scaling down?
In a survey conducted recently across Indian cities, remarkably only 51 % percent supported the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, while an astounding 49 % percent thought it an electoral ruse.
For the first time last year, the TOI correspondent Piliavsky heard working-class Hindus in northern India describe Ayodhya temple as a distraction from what they want and what India needs.
Ideology: Advantage BJP in UP As BJP sweeps away regional parties across the north of the country, Piliavsky, who is a social anthropologist, postulates that the politics of ideology will become increasingly important. · UP, which sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, used to be a fiercely competitive multiparty state, with three or four parties playing political leapfrog for decades.
No party won a leading reelection to the state assembly for decades until the BJP did in 2022. In that politically fragmented setting, one could win with 3035 % percent of the votes using the politics of relations to target particular ethnic groups, like Yadavs or Dalits. · Now that the BSP and Congress have virtually vanished from UP (Congress gained 2.5 % percent of the votes in 2022) and only two parties remain in play – BJP and SP – victory will require up to 50% percent of the votes. No social group comprises half of the electorate and parties will need ideology.
Something similar is happening across many states in the Hindi belt, where ideology will prove decisive.
Ideology: Advantage Congress in the South
It is precisely ideology – cogent narratives of regional identity shading into sub-nationalisms that have staved off BJP in the south, so far.
In last year’s assembly elections, Congress mobilized regional ideology in Karnataka to take the state back from the BJP, as it did to hold on to Telengana.
· In the North, while the “INDIA” alliance members are speaking quietly among themselves, releasing no clear public messages, BJP is projecting Bharat’s new ideology from the megaphones.
On its own, the BJP actually holds a slim 55 % percent majority in Parliament. To retain this, it will need to sweep the Hindi belt. Piliavsky predicts that it will. This politics of ideology, with a coherent political platform, national ideals and global principles may appear more mature and ‘modern’ than India’s deleterious old personalism, paternalism, and the caste-ism of vote banks.
But it is precisely such politics, focused as it is on local relations, affairs and groups that has been the bulwark of India’s fragile, relative peace.
A turn to totalizing, doctrinaire ideology threatens this enormously.
Indo-Bhutanese Relations: Prime Example of India’s ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’ Modi began both his terms of office with a visit to the remaining Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and also closed his second term with another visit there.
He probably considers this his propitious omen. Against a turbulent global landscape, India’s relationship with Bhutan remains a constant in India’s foreign policy.
Indian policy makers tout this relationship as the ideal of its “Neighbourhood First Policy" under the motto: ‘sabka sath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’ ( ‘with everyone together, development for all, everyone’s trust). They even claim that India and Bhutan lead by example (Pankaj Saran: Times of India, March 20).
The fact is that India inherited its historical role in the border Himalayan kingdoms from the British Raj. It considered them ‘protectorate states’ and ‘buffer zones’, and, in fact, within their own national security zones. Bhutan opted for close proximity to India, hoping to keep China at bay. This has been only partly successful. Bhutan (and India) claim that China has occupied Bhutanese territory and even constructed new villages there. Bhutan has been rewarded by India contributing to its 12 Five Year Plans and even to continually connect and integrate its economy with India. Only time will tell whether this policy of accepting India’s full embrace was strategically wise.