'Worst of All Worlds' as Neoliberal BJP Wins India Elections in Landslide

[adipocere]

'Worst of All Worlds' as Neoliberal BJP Wins India Elections in Landslide


Critics say victory of Hindu nationalist party and asendancy of Narendra Modi put nation on perilous course

- Jon Queally, staff writer
The BJP's Narendra Modi will be India's next Prime Minister which critics say puts India on a perilous path of neoliberal economics and nationalist politics. (Photo: Hindustan Times)In national elections in India, the rightwing Hindu nationalist party, called the Bharatiya Janata Party (or BJP), has won a landslide victory for the country's parliament and their leader, businessman Narendra Modi from Gujurat, is now set to become the nation's next Prime Minister.
According to Reuters:

With more than six times the seats of its closest rival, Modi's is the most decisive mandate for any leader since the 1984 assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi propelled her son to office. Since 1989, India has been governed by coalitions.
The BJP was winning in 278 seats of the 543-seat parliament, counting trends showed. An alliance led by the party was ahead in 337 seats, TV channel NDTV said.

Though many are framing the BJP's victory as the result of widespread disgust with the current government, led by the Congress Party, and a win for those calling for an end to systematic corruption in the world's most populous democratic state—critics of the neoliberal BJP say its ascendency puts India on a perilous path.
For progressive-minded Indians, says Vijay Prashad, a historian and professor at American University of Beirut, the BJP victory "is the worst of all worlds."
In statements ahead of the elections, activist and author Arundhati Roy said that India's election were not about serving the interests of the nation's poor and disenfranchised, but about "which corporation would come to power."
Referring directly to the now victorious Modi, Roy stated, "This time, [the elections were] corporate war and he is a corporate candidate." She indicated that all the major parties continue to ignore the pervasive poverty, including mass malnutrition which plague vast sections of the country. Despite India having the third-fastest growing economy in the world, Roy said, its democracy is being steadily destroyed by "unequally distributed wealth" and a political elite that pays only lip service to the nation's farmers, marginalized youth, and underclass.
To de-mystify Modi's victory and put his party in context, Prashad explains:

"BJP never ran against the roots of inequality or deprivation, but only what it deemed to be its symptom – corruption. This was a clever strategy. It both rode the anti-Congress wave, which had been produced by anger at the inequalities in the country, and it mollified the corporate community, which would not have been interested in any criticism of the policies of neoliberalism."The BJP’s record in governance is not any different from that of the Congress – with inequality and corruption being the order of the day in its bastion of Gujarat, for instance. To take one indicator as illustrative, in Gujarat the mal-nutrition rate is so low that it is worse than the average level of malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa (where the rates of mal-nutrition remain very disturbing). Gujarat’s ‘development model’ also favored the privileged businessmen of the ruling party, the BJP, and its chief minister, Narendra Modi. Family firms such as the Adani group earned substantial gifts from the BJP government, which enhanced their profits, and helped Gujarat increase its own profile as “open for business.”
Modi was able to dodge questions of the “Gujarat Model.” He was quickly anointed by the BJP as its Prime Ministerial candidate and hastily favored by the media with far more coverage than any other politician. Modi ran as the development candidate with a carefully calibrated argument – he suggested that it was not neo-liberalism that created inequality, but its symptom, namely corruption, which the BJP tied to the mast of the Congress. In other words, the BJP never ran against the roots of inequality or deprivation, but only what it deemed to be its symptom – corruption. This was a clever strategy. It both rode the anti-Congress wave, which had been produced by anger at the inequalities in the country, and it mollified the corporate community, which would not have been interested in any criticism of the policies of neoliberalism.

Writing in the Guardian on Friday, Indian author and writer Pankaj Mishra argues that with Modi at the helm, India is facing "its most sinister period since independence." Providing context for both Modi's rise within the BJP and the rightwing fanaticism of the party now set to control India, Mishra writes:

Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or "Hinduness". In 1948, a former member of the RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowed that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of thousands of displaced Muslims as "child-breeding centres".
"Modi is never less convincing than when he presents himself as a humble tea-vendor, the son-of-the-soil challenger to the Congress's haughty dynasts. His record as chief minister is predominantly distinguished by the transfer – through privatisation or outright gifts – of national resources to the country's biggest corporations. His closest allies – India's biggest businessmen – have accordingly enlisted their mainstream media outlets into the cult of Modi as decisive administrator; dissenting journalists have been removed or silenced.".
Such rhetoric has helped Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat. A senior American diplomat described him, in cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, as an "insular, distrustful person" who "reigns by fear and intimidation"; his neo-Hindu devotees on Facebook and Twitter continue to render the air mephitic with hate and malice, populating the paranoid world of both have-nots and haves with fresh enemies – "terrorists", "jihadis", "Pakistani agents", "pseudo-secularists", "sickulars", "socialists" and "commies". Modi's own electoral strategy as prime ministerial candidate, however, has been more polished, despite his appeals, both dog-whistled and overt, to Hindu solidarity against menacing aliens and outsiders, such as the Italian-born leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, Bangladeshi "infiltrators" and those who eat the holy cow.
Modi exhorts his largely young supporters – more than two-thirds of India's population is under the age of 35 – to join a revolution that will destroy the corrupt old political order and uproot its moral and ideological foundations while buttressing the essential framework, the market economy, of a glorious New India. In an apparently ungovernable country, where many revere the author of Mein Kampf for his tremendous will to power and organisation, he has shrewdly deployed the idioms of management, national security and civilisational glory.
Boasting of his 56-inch chest, Modi has replaced Mahatma Gandhi, the icon of non-violence, with Vivekananda, the 19th-century Hindu revivalist who was obsessed with making Indians a "manly" nation. Vivekananda's garlanded statue or portrait is as ubiquitous in Modi's public appearances as his dandyish pastel waistcoats. But Modi is never less convincing than when he presents himself as a humble tea-vendor, the son-of-the-soil challenger to the Congress's haughty dynasts. His record as chief minister is predominantly distinguished by the transfer – through privatisation or outright gifts – of national resources to the country's biggest corporations. His closest allies – India's biggest businessmen – have accordingly enlisted their mainstream media outlets into the cult of Modi as decisive administrator; dissenting journalists have been removed or silenced.

[L.A.P.]

it's a fucking outrage, wish nothing but the worst for this quasi-fascist scumbag. I'm disgusted with the "liberal" well-off Indian emigrants such as certain family members showing support for this man. Got in a very heated argument over this today. The Hindu extreme-right are the biggest threat to the Indian proletariat right now.

[Marshal of the People]

Lets just hope the Indian voters run away from him and the BJP at the next election.

[La Guaneña]

To what point does the PCI (Maoist) strategy of boycotting elections facilitate/harden this?

[Ocean Seal]

Not much. India doesn't have a Presidential system. He wasn't elected: his party was. The districts where the Maoists are, don't vote for this type of party.

[La Guaneña]

Not much. India doesn't have a Presidential system. He wasn't elected: his party was. The districts where the Maoists are, don't vote for this type of party.

Who did they vote for, if they did vote at all?

[Ocean Seal]

It looks like mostly third front guys won in their territories and some social democrats from the map. However, a few territories were won by nationalists. That being said, this should not be a concern for communists as bourgeois masters are bourgeois masters.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The BJP will have an easier time forcing through neo-liberal "reforms" than Congress did under Singh, but Congress has become a deeply neo-liberal party itself having long moved past Nehru's "third world socialism" model of social democracy. It's the extent to which the party will resort to Hindu nationalist politics which is the most troubling. While the BJP likes to play the role of the traditional rightwing religious conservative party, its alliances with groups like the RSS and Shiv Sena show that it is willing to work with far more insidious, violent groups with authoritarian, racist, anti-religious minority and anti-migrant attitudes.

I guess the question is the extent to which the party is more concerned with facilitating trade and economic growth for its business backers, or riling up the Hindu majority with invented "threats" to the "Hindu nation" from the secular left, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, non-orthodox Hindus and so on. The BJP may well take a more strongly militaristic line on the Maoist insurgency, Christian missionaries, Kashmiri groups and other forces accused of undermining their national project. That said, too much blood on the streets might undermine their ability to market India as a safe place for foreigners to invest, but the BJP has allowed its far-right allies to commit bloody violence in the past, and Modi's experience in Gujarat may have taught him that ultimately businesses are happy to invest in a place even where bloody communitarian riots have occurred if they can still make money off it.

Modi is full of shit, and we can hope that the Indian people figure that out, it's just a question of how long he will be able to do what other religious conservative political leaders have done elsewhere in the world like the AKP in Turkey and use their control over media, religious and political institutions to minimize public awareness of the corruption, authoritarianism and sectarianism of their political program.

[Red Commissar]

There was a thread earlier about the election, though about a specific issue. How many other parties opportunistically jumped onto the BJP's coattails for seats?

I also wonder too though if the BJP would go the way of the DP in Japan or the PAN in Mexico, both of which were able to unseat long-standing parties in their countries only for their fortunes to reverse later. Granted, the BJP's victory is much larger than I recall happening in those other examples, Congress's collapse was pretty large and BJP has a strong presence to make more drastic changes. Lot of the BJP's tactics seemed to've come from a combination of cynically exploiting discontent over Congress's rule in India but focusing on corruption solely being the cause of them, while throwing in a lot of the nutty ass right-wing nationalist shit and the machismo, like that bizarre comment about a manly chest size(?). The old left parties didn't seem to do all that well either it appears, their decline continues.

[SensibleLuxemburgist]

Any semblance of socialism in India that was set forth by Jawaharlal Nehru during his presidency of India from 1947 to 1964 has been swept away at this point. It is really tough for socialists in India to combat the underlying ultra-conservative composition of Indian society, considering its ultra-religious cultural background with Hinduism and Buddhism. In addition, the dismantling of the ever-present caste system despite the work of Gandhi and Nehru, would be difficult to achieve.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Congress have drifted considerably from even the most soft left ideals that they were founded with (if my admittedly meager knowledge of Nehru and Gandhi serves) but having said that, this is a very troubling result.

[ckaihatsu]

The election of Narendra Modi and the dangerous rise of India's far-right

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews...ndra-modi.html