Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav explores the role of Hinduism, Islam and secularism in Indian politics following their 2024 general election 26/09/2024

After British India’s partition in 1947, the newly–created states of Pakistan and India turned in opposite directions officially. While Pakistan privileged Islam, India resisted pressure to become a Hindu state and was founded as a secular republic. Secularism remained India’s uncontested state ideology until the 1980s, when ascendant Hindu nationalist politics first effectively challenged it. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs, rose to prominence in 1989 on the back of the Ramjanmabhoomi (Ram–birthplace) movement, which aimed to build a temple in the holy city of Ayodhya at the site of the sixteenth–century Babri Mosque, which some Hindus believed was built after destroying a temple marking the Hindu god Ram’s birthplace. In 1992, the movement culminated in BJP–led Hindu nationalist mobs demolishing the mosque, which provoked riots across India.

Following a decade out of power in 2004–14, after running its first stable government in 1999–2001, the BJP won an absolute majority in 2014. Modi, its Prime Ministerial candidate, promised to repeat across India his purported development record as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. But, as astute political analysts had warned, Modi also brought with him the Hindu nationalist agenda he had realised in Gujarat to the national level. These analysts unsuccessfully raised alarms about the Modi regime gnawing at India’s secular democracy in its first term (2014–19). After Modi’s 2019 return to power with an even larger majority, his second term (2019–24) saw the BJP unabashedly ramp up its ideological project of ‘Hindutva’. This Hindu nationalist ideology defines India as a Hindu land and India’s nationhood in exclusively Hindu terms at the exclusion or subordination of India’s religious minorities, particularly its substantial Muslim population. Between 2019 and 2024, India’s secular constitution faced unprecedented threats, symbolised starkly by the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), linking Indian citizenship to religion for the first time, and Prime Minister Modi linking state and religion and inaugurating a grand Ram Temple at Ayodhya in January 2024. 

Yet, by early 2024, reports suggested that neither anti–Muslim Hindutva nor propaganda about Modi’s achievements were answering public dissatisfaction­ – even anger – over failed promises of development and job–creation. To thwart electoral defeat by consolidating a Hindu ‘vote bank’ (an Indianism for an electoral base) across regions and castes, Modi resorted to divisive religious rhetoric that he previously mostly found prudent to leave to others in his party. Throughout the election campaign, Modi relentlessly equated the opposition ‘INDIA’ alliance ­– consisting of Congress and its allies ­– with Muslims, and the BJP with Hindus. Going by BJP rhetoric, one would think the election was a battle between Hindu and Muslim political forces (despite opposition parties having Muslims as only a tiny proportion of its candidates). Modi charged that the Congress’s election manifesto reflected the thought of the Muslim League – the party that, in the 1940s, demanded and founded the separate Muslim homeland of Pakistan.[1] Soon, he declared that, ‘echoing Mughal mentality’ (a reference to India’s medieval Persianate rulers who he reductively believes oppressed Hindus), the Opposition had deliberately cooked mutton on camera to mock Hindus and secure ‘their vote bank’, a reference to Muslims.[2] This evoked the Hindu nationalist trope of treacherous secular parties hurting India’s Hindu majority to appease its Muslim minority. At rallies, Modi accused the Congress–led opposition of banning celebrations of the Hindu festival marking Ram’s birth in various states,[3] and tolerating Hindus being lynched for listening to Hindu devotional music. Hindus, he fear–mongered, would find it difficult to practice Hinduism fearlessly under Congress rule,[4] and the Congress would put the ‘Babri lock’ on Ayodhya’s Ram Temple.[5]

Another ceaseless refrain in Modi’s campaign rhetoric was that the Congress believed Muslims had the first right to India’s wealth and resources[6] and was plotting to re–distribute them among ‘those who have more children’ and ‘infiltrators’, dog–whistle references to Muslims.[7] The Congress would ‘snatch’ affirmative action quotas (known as ‘reservations’) constitutionally granted to marginalised castes to give to their ‘special vote bank’, i.e., Muslims.[8] It would also seize Hindu private wealth to redistribute to Muslims.[9] Modi warned, ‘they will noteven spare your mangalsutras (sacred wedding necklaces of Hindu women)’.[10] This conjured images of the Congress snatching Hindu women’s chastity to give to Muslims. Predictably misinterpreting a speech by a Muslim opposition leader asking Muslims to undertake a nonviolent democratic ‘jihad (struggle) of votes’ against Modi,[11] the PM associated the Opposition with the notion of violent Muslim jihad against infidel Hindus, and asked voters to choose between the BJP’s godly Ram–rule and the Opposition’s ‘vote jihad’.[12] The (toothless) Election Commission’s Code of Conduct prohibits parties from aggravating differences or creating hatred or tension between religious communities. Indian law criminalises acts ‘promoting enmity’ between religious groups and words and acts ‘outraging’ the religious feelings of any group. Used to muzzle democratic dissent, these laws apparently do not apply to the Prime Minister and the BJP.

Unfazed by moral guidelines or the law, the BJP’s social media handles supplemented the PM’s rhetoric. One official video showed a line of Pepe the Frogs, a white supremacist symbol but here a reference to Muslims, two thousand years from now. The first frog bows before the idol at the Ayodhya Temple in contrite devotion, sparking a flashback where the Modi–led BJP spearheads a historic righteous battle on behalf of ‘billions of Hindus’ suffering since medieval Mughal rule, with this anguish depicted through painted images of temple destruction; the molestation of women; and the apparently depraved homosexuality that the Mughals supposedly promoted.[13] The BJP leads this pseudo–historical battle via the Ramjamnabhoomi movement and the Babri mosque’s destruction, a cause for which several Hindutva activists were ‘martyred’. This millennium–long struggle culminates in Modi inaugurating the Ayodhya Temple in January 2024. Shortly before polling day, the BJP’s X handle appealed for votes on religious lines, insisting that each vote for the BJP would bless Lord Ram’s idol in the Ayodhya Temple.[14] Another official video visually echoed the PM’s rhetoric about the Congress’s designs to redistribute wealth and ‘reservations’ to Muslims and its covert commitment to Pakistan.[15]

Mid–campaign, as other BJP leaders fear–mongered about the Opposition’s designs to introduce sharia across India and cover Hindu women in burqas[16], Modi, addressing ‘moderate’ voters, suddenly denied making the Ram Temple an election issue, or indulging in ‘Hindu–Muslim’ politics, declaring that ‘the day I do Hindu–Muslim, I will be unworthy of public office’.[17] But the very next three days saw him charge the Congress with plans to allocate 15% of the budget to Muslims, distribute the money of Hindus among ‘vote jihadis’, and bulldoze the Ram Temple.[18] He dog–whistled, ‘the Opposition should learn from [UP Chief Minister] Yogi Adityanath where to use bulldozers and where not to’. Adityanath has used bulldozers to destroy Muslim homes.[19] 

Meanwhile, other BJP leaders continuously depicted the Opposition as ‘anti–Hindu’ and soft on Muslims – often equated with ‘those who kill cows’ (considered holy by many Hindus), terrorists and criminals.[20] In contrast, having ‘brought’ Ram to Ayodhya, the BJP would build temples for Sita, Krishna and Shiva. It had bulldozed ‘rioters’, and ‘cleared streets of those who perform namaz. It would teach cow–killers a lesson, and close madrasas ‘where Mullahs are made’. India, it was said, was divided into Ram’s devotees and his enemies, and only a Ram devotee like Modi could rule Delhi’s ‘throne’. Whereas Modi would complete the Hindu rule inaugurated by the seventeenth–century warrior Shivaji (and interrupted by colonialism and Congress’s secularism), the soul of the seventeenth–century Muslim emperor Aurangzeb had possessed the Opposition. The people must not let Aurangzeb or his descendants (read: Muslims) become powerful again.

As elections drew to a close, Modi shifted from divisive rhetoric to a different register of religious politics, now projecting himself as divine. He declared he is ‘not biologically born’ but sent by God to do His work.[21] He also announced that, by voting for him, his supporters would continue accumulating religious merit from the blessings of his welfare schemes’ beneficiaries.[22] Such ‘piety’, however, was quickly punctured by proclivities to use religion to polarise and conquer; two days later, Modi proclaimed that the Opposition was doing ‘mujra’ for its (Muslim) vote bank.[23] The reference, intended as pejorative, is to a dance form historically performed by Muslim courtesans for a male, often Muslim, audience. Voting ended with the PM sitting in a 45–hour ‘meditation’, carefully captured on multiple cameras, at a memorial of a nineteenth–century Hindu monk. These publicised images of Modi, as a Hindu driven by selfless spiritual service rather than worldly power, were his final appeal to the Hindu ‘vote bank’ he sought to rally to catapult back to power and entrench his political project of Hindutva supremacy.

The BJP lost its majority in the Parliament, making it reliant on allies for the first time in ten years. It lost several constituencies where the Prime Minister made his most polarising speeches. Modi won from the holy city of Varanasi but with a substantially reduced margin. In Ayodhya, the site symbolising the BJP’s political rise and its Hindu nationalist project, the BJP lost, with scores of Hindus voting against it. Religious rhetoric surreally presenting the election as an apocalyptic battle between Hindus and Muslims failed to distract voters from multiple economic failures: under–investment in human capital, high unemployment, price rise, and widening economic inequalities. Yet, while space for the opposition has opened, the BJP remains the single largest party, leads the governing alliance, and maintains a 36.6 % vote share. Indian laws prohibiting the promotion of religious enmity, used to muzzle dissent, were, predictably, not invoked against the Prime Minister or other BJP leaders. Efforts to actualise the Hindu nationalist project remain alive. But so will – for now – secular–pluralist, democratic Indian resistances to them.

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