The BJP System and the 2020 Bihar State Assembly Election
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[Special Issue: The Future of Democracy in India] The Politics of Obedience: The BJP System and the 2020 Bihar State Assembly Election NAKAMIZO Kazuya I. Emergence of the BJP system In the 2019 general election in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was re-elected with an increased presence of the BJP (from 282 to 303 seats). The BJP, led by Narendra Modi, had received the majority of seats as a single party in Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament) in the 2014 general election for the first time since 1984 (Nakamizo, 2020b). Most scholars of Indian politics tended to be initially reticent about whether the BJP victory in 2014 heralded the emergence of a ‘new party system’. The 2019 result, however, led many to abandon their earlier caution and to generally accept that the BJP has indeed become only the second ‘dominant party’ to emerge in Indian political history, the first being the Indian National Congress (INC). One of the earliest political analysts to point out the emergence of the ‘second dominant party system’ was Palshikar, who made the claim following the NDA’s comprehensive victory in the Uttar Pradesh state assembly election in 2017 (Palshikar, 2017, 2019). After the 2019 general election, Vaishnav and Hintson (2019) analysed the BJP as a system-defining party that represents the emergence of a ‘new fourth party system’ based on the classification of Yogendra Yadav (1999). Chhibber and Verma (2019) also pointed out the rise of the second dominant party system as a ‘BJP-led dominant party system’, emphasizing a new form of ethno-political majoritarianism that is delinked from religious Hindu nationalism. Additionally, Takenaka cautiously suggested the emergence of a ‘BJP system’ based on the observation of Uttar Pradesh politics (Takenaka, 2019). For Jaffrelot and Verniers (2020), however, the BJP’s victory of 2019 marked not merely a change within the party system but also, notably, a change in the political system, particularly in the way that the BJP has impacted the quality of Indian democracy. The author also argued for the emergence of the ‘BJP system’ immediately after the 2019 general election (Nakamizo, 2019) and proposed that the system can be politically characterized as the ‘politics of obedience’ (Nakamizo, 2020b: 86–88). In the ‘politics of obedience’, which contrasts with the ‘politics of consensus’ of the INC (Kothari, 1964), three pillars can be identi- fied: first, economic development; second, the institutionalization of Hindutva (Hinduness);1) and finally, the oppression of religious minorities, especially Muslims, through smaller-scale but pervasive forms of violence. The first pillar, economic development, requires little explanation. Modi’s rise to the prime ministership was largely due to the attraction of his promise of economic development (Nakamizo, 2015). He labelled himself ‘Vikaas Purush’ (Development Man), and his ‘Gujarat model’, which achieved an increased rate of economic development in his home state, Gujarat, had a strong impact on voters’ attitudes. After he became prime minister, India regained eco- nomic growth after the stagflation of the last phase of the INC-led United Progressive Alliance 40 アジア研究 Vol. 67, No. 2, April 2021 (UPA) government, though economic development has been stagnating since the sudden decla- ration of controversial demonetization in November 2016. Regarding the second pillar, the institutionalization of Hindutva, however, the Modi govern- ment has moved with particular alacrity, especially after being re-elected in 2019. In particular, the decision in August 2019 to abolish Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had allowed considerable regional autonomy to the only Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir in India, was made quickly and without sufficient discussion. The abolition of Article 370 reduced the state of Jammu and Kashmir to two union territories and thereby brought it directly under the control of the central government. This was soon followed by the Modi government’s decision in December 2019 to enact the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which excluded Muslim migrants from citizenship rights. The CAA provides citizenship rights to ‘any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who had entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014’ (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2019). According to the eminent political scientist Achin Vanaik, this is the first act since India’s independence that bases citizenship rights exclusively on religion (Vanaik, 2020). Immediately after the passage of this law, the first huge protest movement since the inauguration of the Modi government, the anti-CAA movement, quickly spread across the country. One participant explained the reason for protest by saying, ‘It is not written in the Constitution that one can give certain rights to a person based on his or her religion. Also, who has proper documents these days? Today, it is the Muslims, tomorrow it will be other minorities such as the Sikhs and the Christians.’2) However, the widespread and massively attended anti-CAA protests were forced to be suspended after the Indian government suddenly made the unprecedented decision to institute an All-India Lockdown in March 2020 as a so-called emergency measure against the spread of COVID-19 (Nakamizo, 2020a). The third pillar of the politics of obedience concerns the role of vigilante groups, which tend to receive overt and covert support from government machinery such as the police (Nakamizo, 2021). Under the Modi government, vigilante groups such as Gau Rakshaks (cow protection groups) have been active in attacking and even in some instances killing Muslims by alleging that minorities are involved in the slaughter and smuggling of cattle. While small-scale but fero- cious acts of vigilantism were normalized in the first tenure of the BJP (between 2014 and 2019), in February 2020, medium-scale riots occurred in Delhi. The Delhi riots were instigated by local BJP leaders against the anti-CAA movement to ‘teach a lesson’ (Nakamizo, 2020a). Violence, in other words, is increasingly becoming routinized and has resulted in making Muslims vulnerable and turning them into inferior citizens (Vanaik, 2017: 23–24). In this way, on the one hand, the ‘politics of obedience’ provides rewards for accepting its ideology in the form of economic development, while on the other hand, it metes out punish- ment against those who oppose it in the form of institutional exclusion and violence. What we must ask is how the ‘politics of obedience’ works to sustain the BJP system and secure its place within the Indian political landscape. Sircar analysed the victory of the BJP in the 2019 election and concluded that although the economy was sluggish, it was the ‘politics of vishwas’ (trust/ belief) that ultimately carried the day for the BJP (Sircar, 2020). According to him, ‘the extraor- dinary level of support for Modi and BJP’ was because voters expected a delivery from Modi in the future and were not judging him based on what he had actually delivered over the previous five years (Sircar, 2020: 179). Although Sircar’s analysis is compelling and could explain Modi’s victory of 2019, it tends to emphasize the aspect of reward, or actually the expectation of reward, in describing the BJP system. Instead, I argue that the ‘politics of obedience’ offers a much more multi-dimensional understanding of the BJP and Modi’s political tactics, including the ‘punishment’ side, by linking aspects of presumed economic development, the institutional- ization of Hindutva and the strategic use of violence such as vigilantism. To test how Modi’s The Politics of Obedience 41 appeal could carry through in different contexts, I will examine the effect of the ‘politics of obe- dience’ by analysing the recent Bihar state assembly election of 2020. II. The 2020 Bihar state assembly election The North Indian state of Bihar has been ruled by the NDA since 2005 except for the four years from 2013 to 2017. In the latest state assembly election in October and November 2020 as well as in the pre-election, the NDA secured 125 seats among 243 seats in total, although the power balance within the NDA changed.3) The BJP secured the dominant position in the ruling circle for the first time since independence; however, Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)) lost its seats and fell to the second position (Table 1). The 2020 Bihar election is crucial for the future course of Indian politics in the following three ways. Table 1 Performance of major parties in the 2015 and 2020 Bihar state assembly election Number of Seats Vote Share (%) Party 2015 2020 Gap (2020–2015) 2015 2020 Gap (2020–2015) BJP 53 74 +21 24.4 19.5 –4.9 JD(U) 71 43 –28 16.8 15.4 –1.4 INC 27 19 –8 6.7 9.5 +2.8 RJD 80 75 –5 18.4 23.1 +4.7 (Source) Election Commission of India (Abbreviations) BJP: Bharatiya Janata Party; JD(U): Janata Dal (United); INC: Indian National Congress; RJD: Rashtriya Janata Dal. First, Bihar is infamous for its poverty and low level of development. For example, in 2018, it was the lowest among 28 Indian states and seven union territories in terms of the Human Development Index that was published in 2018.4) In Bihar, Modi’s promise ‘Achhe din aane waale hain’ (Good days are coming) was truly up for trial. Second, the 2020 election was the first major election after the All-India Lockdown under the guise of preventive action against the spread of COVID-19. As the data show, the Modi govern- ment’s All-India Lockdown policy was an utter failure in containing the spread of COVID-19, which led India to have the second-largest cumulative number of confirmed cases since the first week of June 2020 at the time of writing (February 2021).5) Instead of containing COVID-19, the sudden declaration of the All-India Lockdown caused grave damage mostly to the poorer segments of society, typically migrant labourers.