The impact of the Indian elections on Bangladesh

Recent news stated that the Indian government has invited the Awami League to observe the ongoing parliamentary elections in India. No other political party from Bangladesh has received any such request. The parliamentary elections in India which began from April 19, will be held in seven phases ending on June 1. This unparalleled marathon of elections will determine if BJP which holds a majority of 302 seats in 543 strong Lok Sabha of India can retain a similar majority or go even higher.

The opposition to BJP is an alliance called India Block, the most notable of which is Congress that held power in India for the majority of its existence. The question is not whether there will be a change in this election, but how large will be BJP’s strength in the new Lok Sabha, and new changes the party and its current leader Narendra Modi will usher in India in next five years, which will impact its neighbours including Bangladesh.
Narendra Modi has made BJP a formidable party with an ever expanding following that has permeated through all genders and ages. In the last ten years, Modi has appealed to women by emphasizing their role in building home and family, easing their right to vote, while at the same time imbuing the youth with an appeal to mythical India and how Indian civilization actually began with innovations in ancient India. Modi has successfully used Indian economic achievements, and defense prowess to bolster Indian image and parlayed it into a success of his party while denouncing the past governments, particularly Indian Congress, as feckless and weak. While using his political rhetoric to portray a strong India with his party in power, he has also leveraged his own popularity to subdue any opposition either to his party or himself, reports DT.
Abandoning Muslims?
While doing so, Modi has given an upper hand to the most conservative and rightist arm of his party, the Rastriya Sevak Sangha (RSS), of which he himself was a volunteer in his youth. RSS, founded a hundred years ago, is a proponent of Hindutva which advocates a Hindu state in India in place of secularism, and denigrates hundreds of years of non-Hindu rule, mostly Muslim rule, in India. This party provides the ideological basis of BJP, and Narendra Modi embraces this ideology. This is why in his last address in Red Fort observing the Independence Day of India, Modi declared that August 15, 1947, marked not only the end of British rule but also the end of more than seven hundred years of foreign rule of India, terming the periods of Sultanate and Mughal rules in India as foreign domination.
It is no wonder that there is not a single BJP Muslim member in BJP dominated Lok Sabha, not to speak of any Muslim member in Modi’s cabinet. (The only Muslim state minister, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, resigned recently in protest against approval by Lok Sabha the amendment of Indian citizenship act, which prohibits granting citizenship to Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries).
Ironically, in the ongoing elections, BJP has started to woo Muslim voters, particularly in states such as Assam where Muslims comprise 34% of total voters. This is in stark contrast to last elections in the same state, where BJP had declared that they had no need for Muslim votes because they already knew that they would not vote for the party. Why this backtracking? Because it is not only in Assam where the tide is not in favour of the party, in the neighbouring state of West Bengal where 30% of the voters are also Muslim, BJP is fighting to get Muslim votes.
This change in Modi’s election strategy in the Muslim dominated states is striking given his party’s track record in Muslim bashing and ignoring Muslims in his own party committees and banning them from his cabinet. This is all the more striking and it stands in stark contrast to the utterances from his party stalwarts and cabinet members where they revile the Muslims as infiltrators and exclude Muslims from being granted citizenship when they are refugees from the six neighbouring states. Modi himself declared in his campaign speech that if returned to power, he will redistribute wealth to the “infiltrators” (read Muslims).
Narendra Modi and his party know very well that in a democracy (which I hope India still is), subduing nearly 15% of the population by intimidation or targeted exclusion will not work. BJP may not have many minorities, particularly Muslims, in its rank and file. Modi may not have had Muslims in his cabinet or among members of the parliament representing the party. But if in a country which still vows to follow the constitution and gives every person power to vote, the party will have to pay a cost for its willful ignorance of this large mass of population. In this election, BJP may have realized, albeit late, that in order to win, they have to win the Muslim voters also. But will this wooing in a few states be all the party needs? It may win a few votes, but this will not change the anti-Muslim image the party has firmly sketched in the minds of the Muslims of India and elsewhere in the world.
What can Bangladesh take out of this?
Are there lessons to be learned in Bangladesh from the ongoing elections in India? What impact will the elections have on Bangladesh? For one thing, the likelihood of BJP returning to power again is more a reality than a matter of speculation. Narendra Modi or BJP’s continuance in power will not change India’s attitude to Bangladesh given the current conditions in Bangladesh.
Wisely, Bangladesh politicians have refrained from making any awkward remarks regarding these elections, or even on India’s citizenship act. But behind this façade the sad plight of the Muslims of India and their placement as second category citizens do not get unnoticed by the citizens of Bangladesh. They read and watch news, they read the political rhetoric of Indian leaders, and they also read about acts in that country that intimidate the minorities. But they do not react in a manner that either embarrasses the government or threatens domestic peace.
Despite the apparent religious bias of the major party in India and its anti-Muslim stance, the major takeaways from the Indian elections are on several areas. First, the elections are participatory. No party has boycotted the elections on any pretext. The Election Commission has shown its transparency and held on to the election rules, something that Bangladesh can follow. Despite inflammatory rhetoric by some politicians, all parties are following the rule of law. There has been no incident of governmental interference in the polls nor there have been any serious breach of law and order. Everybody is respecting the rule of law, something that has been rare in Bangladesh elections.
India is known as and reputed to be the largest democracy in the world. Holding a parliamentary election for over six weeks for a voting population of nine hundred million is no mean task. But for India to keep its reputation as the largest democracy in the world it is necessary that it engages all communities across religion to participate in it. The ruling party may have among its ideologues who dream of establishing a country dating back to the days of Ramayana. But there are people in India and perhaps within the party itself that to hold on to its image as the largest democracy in the world it has to embrace the democratic ideals of equality of all human beings across ethnicity, religion, and caste. It will be truly the largest democracy in the world if BJP and Narendra Modi were to demonstrate this before the world.
Ziauddin Choudhury has worked in the higher civil service of Bangladesh early in his career, and later for the World Bank in the US.