John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUSIN AN exercise mind-boggling in its scale, Indians started going to the polls this week in nationwide elections.
To accommodate the sheer number of electors in the planet's largest democracy, the poll will be carried out in four stages over the next three weeks. There are more polling-stations alone in India than there are voters in all of Jamaica. And while many Indian voters are illiterate, and thus will choose their parties on the basis of symbols, the technology used to conduct the election will be on the cutting-edge: electronic voting-machines will tabulate results instantly, making it harder than ever for electoral officials to tamper with results.
By the standards of previous Indian campaigns, this one has been relatively dull. In part, this is because the country's election commission has reined in many of the excesses of the past, which admittedly lent a rich flavour to Indian elections. But in part, the low tenor of the campaign reflects both a rising disinterest in politics, and also a recognition that the election appears to be a foregone conclusion.
With both of India's major national parties - Congress and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) - committed to broadly-similar economic policies of continued liberalisation, there is less at stake in this election than in past ones. The likely outcome will see the continuation of a trend begun a decade ago: the BJP will rise while Congress, in relative terms, declines.
The BJP will not win a majority of seats in the country's parliament, though, and so will maintain its alliances with smaller regional parties to form government. This has forced the party to soften its image and move towards the centre. Founded on the backs of a social movement that rejected Congress's secularism, the BJP has always stressed that India is above all a Hindu nation.
In some states, the BJP is allied to militant groups that have engaged in anti-Muslim riots (Muslims being India's largest religious minority). However, at the centre, the party has been trying to moderate itself, even going so far as enlisting Muslim candidates.
Congress, billing itself as the party which will preserve India's secular, multi-religious heritage, remains unconvinced. Beneath the radar, there is evidence that the BJP is pressing ahead with its goal of restoring the primacy of Hinduism. Particularly in the educational system, the BJP is altering the curriculum and introducing what some consider a dose of Hindu chauvinism.
It is perhaps not surprising that religion should be returning to the politics of a country in which, after all, religion remains important. However, given Hinduism's syncretism and ability to assimilate and tolerate diverse religious trends, even some religious Hindus question the viability of the "Hindutva" (roughly, Hindu pride) strategy. They argue that while Christians and Muslims can become fundamentalists, Hindus cannot.
The roots of the Hindutva movement can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when activists sought to craft an effective response to the evangelic fervour of Christian missionaries. The movement was further reinvigorated in recent decades by the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, imported to India by migrant workers returning from the Persian Gulf.
Therefore, in appearance, as religious influences from outside penetrate India, Hinduism is merely shoring up its defences. Accordingly, if Congress was the party of the modernist twentieth-century, the BJP is the party of the post-modern twenty-first. It is only to be expected that one will rise as the other falls.
A PARTIAL EXPLANATION
This, however, is at best a partial explanation for what is happening. Surveys reveal that support for the BJP is motivated less by religious revivalism than by a widespread perception that the BJP is better than Congress at managing the country's affairs and delivering services to the population. Religion may be paramount to BJP activists. To most of its supporters, though, the increasingly free market in which they operate, and which the BJP promotes, is the more salient fact of life.
Nevertheless, if ordinary voters believe that India should become the land of MTV rather than the land of Ram, for the people who will end up running the country, the latter takes precedence. On the surface, India will remain a secular and liberalising state. Deeper down, though, Hindutva is likely to continue its advance.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI Mona.
