Since independence in 1947, despite notable wobbles, India has hewed to the democratic and sccular compact that has kept a huge, highly diverse country from flying apart. That Gandhian compact has been severely tested by a Hindu nationalist movement called the Bharatiya Janata or Indian People’s Party.
Hindu voters in recent years turned this minor party into a major force in state and national clections. Many were drawn to its promises of change, and an ¢end to “appeasement” of “minorities,” meaning the 120 million Indian Muslims, who comprise 14 percent of the population.
Mercifully, not just for India, the same electoral process that sent the Bharatiya Janata Party skyward is now bringing it down. In elections this week, it failed to regain power in four northern states, where a third of India’s population lives, confounding most pundits (a sanskrit word, incidentally, meaning learned man).
It is a hard comedown for the party’s politicians who have been clamoring for quick national elections, sure they were bound to beat the ruling and secularist Congress Party.
The Bharatiya Janata lost out because voters remembered its performance in power. The party proved incompetent, given to erratic lurches to placate a truly fanatic fringe. In Uttar Pradesh, it led a boisterous three-year campaign to replace a mosque with a Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya. Its leaders all but sat on their hands as rioters sacked the mosque last December, setting off a wider rampage that took 3,000 lives, The bloodletting gave New Delhi grounds for dismissing the party’s state governments and imposing direct rule. Meanwhile, Indians learned more about the Bharatiya Janata’s indifference to birth control and literacy programs. Its focus instead has been on rewriting schoolbooks to emphasize Hindu achievements, while giving Hindu myths the aura of history. is forcing policy is scarcely Gandhian; its leaders spoke provocatively about boosting Indian prestige by building nuclear bombs.
The party could regain its lost momentum in future elections, especially if the rickety Congress Party stumbles badly, But for now, in a world with enough martial sectarianism, it is a relief that in a democratic test the Bharatiya Janata Party brought the temple down on itself.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 10, 1993
