A Moderate Victory

Whe

n India's Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first took office eight years ago, some Indians wondered if it marked the end of their country as a tolerant, secular, democratic nation. After all, the BJP had come to power on the back of a violent and emotive campaign to destroy the Babri mosque at the sacred Hindu site of Ayodhya, so bringing religion into the very heart of politics. Moreover, the BJP was allied to many extreme Hindu-fundamentalist groups. Indeed, it was founded as the political associate of a neofascist paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Today, as the BJP heads toward what it is convinced will be its third term in government, the doomsayers' more apocalyptic predictions have proved unfounded. India has not become a Hindu state and is still the world's largest democracy. Its press is still remarkably free and its judiciary by and large as independent and outspoken as ever. Peace has broken out with China, and even seems possible with nuclear archrival Pakistan. Moreover, India's economy is booming. Its growth rate has passed 7%, the stock market is on a roll and foreign-exchange reserves exceed $100 billion.

Nevertheless, like the Likud in Israel, the BJP embraces a wide spectrum of right-wing opinion, ranging from mildly conservative free marketeers to raving ultra-nationalists and religious radicals. For now, the moderates—led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Finance Minister Jaswant Singh—are firmly in the driving seat, and the clear popularity of their policies has strengthened their hand. But far more extreme figures are waiting for their moment.

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To this day, many senior BJP figures, including the Prime Minister, have RSS backgrounds and hold posts in both organizations. The RSS and the BJP still believe that India is in essence a Hindu nation and that the minorities may live in India only if they acknowledge this. After all, the RSS was founded in imitation of European fascist movements, and its early ideologue, Madhav Golwalkar, drew direct inspiration from the Holocaust. "To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of its Semitic races—the Jews," he once wrote. "National pride at its highest has been manifested here ... The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must entertain no idea but glorification of the Hindu race and culture, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges."

Two years ago, India had a taste of what can happen if the hard-liners in the BJP seize power from the moderates. In the western state of Gujarat, Hindus embarked on a rampage that left about 2,000 Muslims dead. The police stood by while local BJP activists armed with swords, tridents and electoral lists raped Muslim women; beheaded, burned and disemboweled Muslim men, and torched Muslim-owned businesses. Tens of thousands were forced to flee. No one has yet been brought to book for the mayhem, and the Gujarat courts have proved incapable of convicting the rapists, looters or murderers.

Alongside such violence, there have been other more subtle—though no less worrying—developments. Serious criticism of the government is now strongly discouraged: Te-helka.com, an online investigative-media outlet that managed to film several officials taking bribes, was shut down, and a systematic campaign of harassment let loose against its employees and investors. Individual Hindus have employed strong-arm tactics against Christian missionaries and burned down churches. And school history textbooks have been rewritten to depict India's medieval history as a long saga of unending Muslim barbarism. As Neeladri Bhattacharya, professor of modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, noted in an article published last year, so inaccurate are the new textbooks that they represent nothing less than "declarations of war against academic history itself ... When history is fabricated to constitute a politics of hatred and violence, then we need to sit up and protest. If we do not, then the long night of Gujarat will never end."

It's certainly true that the BJP has proved much more moderate than its more severe critics could have imagined. But the zealots, racists and ultra-nationalists are still there, waiting in the wings, and as long as that is the case, there is still cause for caution and concern about India's future.