George W. Vajpayee

Thus every liberal worldwide should share the sorrows of liberal America. But in India there is room for cheer. Because in India, unlike in America, a religious right wing socially conservative social agenda has, for many excellent reasons, very little political space. Pity the poor BJP! How it must yearn to be the Republican Party riding confidently to power on the shoulders of terrorism and God, or in our particular case, terrorism and mandir. Narendra Modi has in fact declared how similar his own campaign had been to Bush. But today, while the right wing in America is on the ascendant, the right wing in India is floundering. This time last year George W. Bush and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were embracing at the UN General Assembly, both with their faces turned towards an election in 2004. Months later Bush has swept back to power while Vajpayee is getting ready to ride into the sunset. The comparison must be qualified. Vajpayee’s defeat in 2004 may well have been a psephological accident, simply the fallout of bad alliances in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Bush’s victory may on the other hand have everything to do with the American winner-takes-all system, key southern and mid-west states simply nullifying results elsewhere. Also, electoral and political systems in India and the US are substantially different.

But the fate of the Indian right wing, or the Indian social conservatives, or the BJP, or the Hindutva ideology is an interesting one. While Bush won 51 per cent of the popular vote, the BJP and its particular cultural ethos has never been able to win more than 23 per cent of votes and has been able to rule only through coalition dharma. The majority of Indians, most of whom might well be just as socially conservative as their counterparts in the American mid-west, don’t vote for a politically conservative party like the BJP. Take a poll from Kochi to Jalandhar and you’ll find that most denizens of apartment and mohalla do not believe in inter-religious marriage, nor even in inter-caste marriage, regularly visit mandir, masjid or gurdwara, are deeply suspicious of “English-speaking” people and disapprove strongly of young men running around trying to blow up the Lok Sabha. In short, they are conservative. So why has the BJP failed to harness this unique Indian conservatism centred on religion to its political cause?

Simply because the BJP has failed to become a “normal” modern conservative party rooted in the soil. Instead, the BJP remains hostage to a divided sangh, elements of which (like the VHP) are like the Ku Klux Klan, other elements simply lost in strident rhetoric about “pseudos” and “leftists”. It is in fact a caricature of a right wing rather than a credible right wing. It has no political ancestors of its own and must reach out, as Vajpayee did, for the moral legitimacy of the liberal Nehru. None of its pet issues have yielded durable popular support. After the attack on Parliament in 2002, the BJP hoped to win the elections in Uttar Pradesh barely two months later, on the calculation that fears about terrorism would bring electoral rewards. But surprisingly, the Avadhi farmer showed that he couldn’t care less about terrorism and the BJP finished in third place in UP. The Ram Mandir issue worked in the 1991 elections, giving the BJP its first ever tally of 123 seats, but mandir has now become very boring. Cultural policing such as the attacks on films like Fire or on Valentine’s Day found no resonance in an upwardly mobile aspirant electorate. Vajpayee alone perhaps tried to create a modern right wing by adding “market” to the BJP’s list of causes. Unfortunately the BJP’s espousal of “market” ended up in TV images of Pramod Mahajan huffing and puffing on a treadmill which got everybody including the RSS very angry.

There are naturally sharp limits to any kind of ideological constituency in a country where caste, region and bijli, sadak, pani are the touchstones of politics. Caste is far too empowering a device to ever be surrendered to umbrella categories like Hindutva. Unlike the American Bible-bashers, a poor electorate like ours generally doesn’t vote on ideological issues. In Mumbai in 1995, the Shiv Sena was able to emerge as a protector of Hindus because of the riots and bomb blasts of ’92-93. In Gujarat, Modi’s terrorism crusade delivered an election victory in 2002. But these results were exceptions, and born out of local incidents of violence which were used to create fear and mobilise the “threatened Hindu” voter.

Without violence, in the “normal” course of things, it’s almost impossible to see a Republican-type large socially conservative class which visits the temple, plays the markets and votes BJP ever emerging in

India. Sharp divisions in the political space will always create roadblocks for an ideologically driven conservative party and thankfully India will never see a right wing revolution. God may have taken Bush to power in America. But in India, even God is powerless against a dizzyingly heterogenous janta janardan.