Campaign for Prime Minister in India Gets Off to Violent Start

Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images

Narendra Modi, the opposition candidate for prime minister of India, accepted a portrait of himself on Tuesday on his birthday.

AHMEDABAD, India â€" India’s most important election in a generation began in earnest this month the same way consequential elections nearly always start here â€" with a proclamation and a deadly riot.

Narendra Modi, center left, with Rajnath Singh, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, on Friday. Mr. Modi, 63, is a divisive candidate for prime minister in India's national elections next spring.

In New Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party announced last week that it had chosen Narendra Modi, one of the most divisive politicians in India’s history, as its candidate for prime minister in next spring’s national elections. Mr. Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, is an unapologetic Hindu chauvinist who has been accused of mass murder.

Mr. Modi has tempered his anti-Muslim tirades and replaced them with a message of development based on a record in Gujarat that even critics acknowledge is impressive. But critics also say he and his Hindu nationalist party have benefited from past violence between Hindus and Muslims, using it to paper over Hindus’ historic differences over caste and get them to vote as a bloc along religious lines.

Not coincidentally, mass rioting broke out last week in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and politically important state, after a legislator from Mr. Modi’s party circulated a fake video of two Hindus being lynched by a Muslim mob. Forty-four people were killed and 42,000 were displaced as villages were sacked.

Riyazat Ali of Bawari said he watched from a hidden room as a Hindu mob stormed his house, hacked his brother to death and fatally shot his 18-year-old niece.

“I saw everything,” said Mr. Ali, who has been living in a refugee camp in Kandhla for the past week with his 11 children. “It was raining bullets inside the house.”

India may be the world’s most populous democracy, but election campaigns here are often fueled by hate and soaked in blood. By choosing Mr. Modi, a fiery orator who once peppered his speeches with anti-Muslim slurs, the Bharatiya Janata Party has raised the prospect that this election could be the deadliest in decades.

Hindus make up roughly 80 percent of India’s population and Muslims 13 percent, a share about equal to that of blacks in the United States. Sushil Kumar Shinde, India’s minister of Home Affairs, said that there had already been 451 cases of sectarian violence this year, surpassing last year’s total of 410. He warned that violence was likely to intensify as elections approached.

Among the country’s vast urban youth, Mr. Modi has rock-star appeal. Half of India’s population is under 25, and most have seen little more from their leaders than the soporific near-whispers of octogenarians like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. By contrast, Mr. Modi is a charismatic preacher of a resurgent India, a vision that millions mired in a sputtering economy find intoxicating. To many Hindus, he is a revelation.

To many Muslims, though, he is an abomination. In 2002, less than a year after he was appointed the state’s chief minister, riots swept Gujarat and killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Mothers were skewered, children set afire and fathers hacked to pieces.

Some witnesses claimed that Mr. Modi encouraged the violence, which he has denied. He has never been charged, but close associates of his were convicted of inciting a riot.

“They want to create a Hindu voting bloc that transcends caste, and they’ll use hate to do it,” said Sumant Banerjee, a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla.

The riots only bolstered Mr. Modi’s political standing. Months later, having consolidated the Hindu vote, he led his party to a resounding victory in state elections. Since then he has dominated Gujarat’s politics, the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, remains deeply segregated and most of India’s Muslims hate him.

Mr. Modi, 63, refused requests over months for an interview (he rarely speaks to Western news organizations). Jay Narayan Vyas, a leader of Mr. Modi’s opposition party, said that Mr. Modi was not to blame for the 2002 riots and that his party did not demonize Muslims.

“The B.J.P. philosophy is justice to all but appeasement to none,” he said.

Mr. Vyas said that as prime minister, Mr. Modi would bring wealth to India and tame its political chaos. He said India needed a strong leader who “doesn’t allow democracy to be a passport to misbehave.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Ahmedabad, and Nida Najar from Muzaffarnagar, India.

A version of this article appears in print on September 18, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Campaign for Prime Minister in India Gets Off to Violent Start.