India’s Electoral Politics Reignites Religious Hatreds

Niha Masih A woman, with her children, at a refugee settlement at Loi village in the district of Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, on Monday.

Sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims has killed more than 38 and displaced over 10,000 people in the past week in Muzaffarnagar district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The state government led by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav of Samajwadi Party failed to respond swiftly to the violence and restore order. Indian army had to be deployed to control the violence and impose a curfew.

According to the press and official reports, riots in Muzaffarnagar started after two Hindus killed a Muslim man for stalking their female relative. The Muslims retaliated by killing two Hindu men. Rival state legislators made hate speeches at charged public gatherings of the two communities, where members of the audience brandished weapons.

A legislator of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) is on the run from the police after circulating a fake video of a Muslim mob lynching two men. Uttar Pradesh police officials said that the video had not been shot in India, and have filed charges against leaders of several political parties for inciting Hindu and Muslim mobs.

According to Sushil Kumar Shinde, India’s minister of Home Affairs, there have already been 451 cases of sectarian violence in 2013, surpassing 410 such incidents reported in 2012.

Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press A policeman holding arms recovered during a search-to-search operation in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh on Monday.

Mr. Shinde told the Indian press that religious violence is likely to intensify before the 2014 national elections. Uttar Pradesh, which elects 80 lawmakers to the lower house of the Indian Parliament, will be a key state in the formation of the new government. “The situation is certainly worrying because there are political players in Uttar Pradesh, who have an incentive in polarizing votes using religion,” said Ramachandra Guha, historian and author of “India After Gandhi”, a history of modern India.

Mr. Guha pointed out that about half of India’s current population is too young to remember the gruesome, nation-wide violence of the 1990s and how opportunistic politicians cracked open religious fissures in the past. India’s median age is 26.

After the 2002 riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat, India has seen comparatively lesser sectarian strife in the past decade. It was also the country’s most prosperous period, which saw increased economic growth.

There are very superficial similarities between the political and economic conditions of India in the early nineties and the country today. The economy is braving a downturn; millions of literate young Indians are struggling to enter the workforce; the current federal government, led by the Congress party, is seen as corrupt and ineffective. The middle class resents the government for its economic redistribution measures aimed at the poor. And religious accommodation is showing clear signs of strain.

The situation in the early 1990s was far more serious. In December 1992, a weak Congress party government did nothing as extremist Hindu mobs led by several B.J.P. leaders, demolished the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. After the mosque was destroyed, riots and arson followed in Mumbai and more than 900 people were killed, most of them Muslims. In March 1993, Muslim extremists set off a series of bombs in Mumbai, then Bombay, which killed more than 250.

Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press A woman, injured in the communal clashes, being brought for treatment at a hospital in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh on Monday.

In a 1993 essay titled “Modern Hate”, Chicago University Political Science professors Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, wrote about the mobs that demolished the Babri mosque. “They are the educated unemployed, not the poor and illiterate,” they wrote. “Frustrated by the lack of good jobs and opportunities, they are victims of modernization, seeking to victimize others - like ‘pampered’ Muslims.”

According to the Rudolphs, the riots in the 1990s had less to do with ancient religious revisionism, and more with contemporary economic faultlines: the resentment of entrenched upper caste Hindus against the ruling parties that “pampered” Muslims and lower caste Hindus, with affirmative action like reservations in government jobs. “The Hindu backlash to minority protectionism asks, whose country is this anyway?”

The B.J.P. converted that resentment into a consolidated Hindu vote bank. On the other side, the Samajwadi Party sought to grab the votes of the state’s Muslims by positioning themselves as the community’s savior.

About two decades later, there is a slight sense of dejavu. Mr. Yadav, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, relies heavily on Muslim votes. After his failure to stop the violence, Mr. Yadav tried to stem the potential loss of Muslim votes by showing up at an event with Haj pilgrims in Lucknow in a skullcap.

Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, who is the B.J.P.’s defacto prime ministerial candidate, has turned his gaze on Uttar Pradesh. Mr. Modi can become India’s Prime Minister in 2014, if the B.J.P. performs exceedingly well in the state.

Mr. Modi has appointed his confidante, Amit Shah, as his party’s election manager in Uttar Pradesh. Mr. Shah, a former minister in Mr. Modi’s Gujarat government, is currently out on bail for allegedly masterminding the extra-judicial killings of suspected Islamic militants. Critics say that Mr. Shah’s appointment to Uttar Pradesh exposes the B.J.P’s strategy of dividing the electorate along religious lines. “Modi is a ruthless and cynical man,” said Mr. Guha. “He is projecting himself as a development oriented politician in other states, but is using Amit Shah to polarize Uttar Pradesh.”

Will this calculus of passion improve the electoral prospects of the B.J.P.?  

“People are not drawn toward religion today like they were in the 1990s,” said Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist and author of “Mistaken Modernity”. “There will only be limited gains, if any, for the B.J.P. or regional parties [like the Samajwadi Party],” he said.

Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press Army soldiers patrolling through the streets of Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh, on Monday following clashes between Hindus and Muslims.

Mr. Gupta also pointed out that the economy today is very different from the 1990s, when it took years of internationally aided restructuring before an economic turnaround. Unlike the early nineties, several sectors of the Indian economy are showing signs of recovery.

The past week was a good one for investors after a long time: a new central bank governor brought some optimism, the bulls rallied the Mumbai stock exchange, and the currency strengthened against the dollar.

If the outlook improves over the coming months, business and middle-class anger against the Congress government may subside and the B.J.P’s Uttar Pradesh gambit may be seen as a cynical ploy to divide the country.

But the B.J.P’s planners are extrapolating from past successes: “Muslims’ rabid opposition to the B.J.P. has indeed proved to be beneficial to it electorally,” wrote wrote G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, party strategist, in the ideological mouthpiece, The Organiser.

Religion remains one of the surest ways of mass political mobilization in India, according to the political psychologist, Ashis Nandy. “Caste factors attract much smaller numbers of people,” he said. “India’s neo middle-class is still too naïve to be mobilized purely around economic issues.”

British India’s independence and partition into India and Pakistan was accompanied by genocidal violence, which killed millions of Hindus and Muslims. The 1950s were a quiet decade in independent India, but the 1960s and 1970s witnessed riot after riot throughout the country. The eighties were scarred by the massacre of several thousand Sikhs in Delhi by mobs led by politicians and workers of the Congress party. The Hindu nationalist movement to build a Ram temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya dominated the late 1980s and the early 90s.

“The early nineties was only the climax of tensions that were simmering for decades,” said Mr. Nandy. “The riots we see today are not merely a throwback to the nineties. This is how Indian politics has been for much of its history.”

Sambuddha is a Fulbright scholar, media entrepreneur and freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter @some_buddha