Hindu nationalism, economic liberalism, hi-tech populism – The candidate from Gujarat
by CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT
Narendra Modi is attempting to become prime minister of India in this year’s election. But what has worked in his home state of Gujarat may appeal much less across the whole country.
The BJP’s leadership has put the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, forward as its candidate for prime minister of India in this year’s general election. Modi rose out of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; National Volunteer Organisation), which believes that since Hindus are the “sons of the soil” in India and 80% of India’s population is Hindu, Hindu culture embodies Indian identity. The RSS was set up in 1925 in reaction to the pan-Islamic mobilisation defending the Caliphate (which became part of the wider independence movement); it has clashed violently with other religious groups, particularly Muslims, on many occasions, including the 1947 Partition. Today it feels that Muslims (14%) and Christians (2%) may practise in private, but in public should lend allegiance to the dominant culture.
While the RSS is traditionally associated with the higher castes, Modi is from a low-caste family from Gujarat. As a child, he ran a tea stall with his father and gradually rose through the ranks of the RSS, starting as a volunteer, then becoming a pracharak (full-time cadre), which meant renouncing having a profession or a family. Pracharaks are at the disposal of the RSS, which can send them far afield to extend its network, or to affiliate organisations such as its student union, its workers’ union or its political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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India: Modi of the middle class
by CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT
The negative reasons why the middle class “votes for Modi” are most obvious. There is a total rejection of the UPA regime, because of corruption and dynastic politics. There is also a fatigue with the government’s style of leadership and distrust vis-à-vis its policies. In spite of the fact that the middle class has benefited from Manmohanomics more than any other social group, it resents his inability to make growth sustainable (growth has declined in all emerging countries, including China, but that’s no reason for not blaming the government) and to counter the erosion of the rupee, which makes life so much more complicated abroad.
The “positive” reasons are more interesting. First, a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. One of his biographers, Nirendra Dev, points out that he “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner” (Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth, 2012).
This image relies on a whole set of beliefs: he is less a politician than a manager (an assumption harking back to his past career as an organisation man, a pracharak) and he is for the liberalisation of the economy (didn’t he claim that he would transform Gujarat into “the SEZ of India” as early as 2007?). This last quality has affinities with the middle class’s trust in the private sector to modernise the economy. The upper layer of this class already lives in new towns where education, health, security, water, electricity etc are privatised.
If the middle class wants a super-CEO at the helm of India, it is also because it does not valorise parliamentary democracy as much as before, compared to a more managerial decision-making process. In 2008, the CSDS survey on the State of Democracy in South Asia showed that in India, 51 per cent of the respondents from the “elite” “strongly agreed” and 29 per cent “agreed” with the proposition: “All major decisions about the country should be taken by experts rather than politicians”. Among interviewees from the “mass”, 29 per cent “strongly agreed” and 22 per cent “agreed”, probably because they were not prepared to undermine one of their main assets: numbers.
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)