Lessons from India’s elections

According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, a crime is committed against a dalit by a non-dalit every 16 minutes; everyday, more than four “Untouchable” women are raped by “Touchables”; every week, 13 dalits are murdered and six dalits are kidnapped.

In 2012 alone, the year of the Delhi gangrape and murder, 1,574 dalit women were raped (the rule of thumb is that only 10 per cent of rapes or other crimes against dalits are ever reported).

In 1919, in what came to be known as the Red Summer in the US, 76 Black Americans, men and women, were lynched. In India, in 2012, 651 dalits were murdered. That’s just the rape and butchery. Not the stripping and parading naked, the forced s... eating (literally), the seizing of land, the social boycotts, the restriction of access to drinking water.

When our eyes were turned on the inordinately long election campaign in India, writer Arundhati Roy was engaging with dalit intellectuals and ordinary “Untouchables” in their hub in Yawatamal in Maharashtra.

She was sharing with them notes, such as her observations cited above, on how the Indian system, led by Hindutva, has successfully broken down the solidarity of the common people, and pitted them against each other in a way that the colonial maxim of “divide et impera” would pale in comparison.

That’s why I believe the most curious thing about Indian elections is that you can count the numerous lessons that can be drawn from any one of the contests even before they are held. There was nothing in the elections for the dalits, nor the Christians, the tribespeople or the other lower-caste Hindus.

The system has divided them nicely. As a result, the Muslim thinks he is the most targeted, the dalit sees himself as the worst hit by an unequal system. Narendra Modi has got them to lacerate each other, in Gujarat, in Muzaffarnagar, wherever Hindutva has spread its roots.

In other words, the lessons from an average election tend to be mostly unrelated to what the much discussed and widely appreciated process of Indian democracy purports to be. That’s how we get angry voters mocking politicians of being opportunists, leaches. But they vote nevertheless, may be for an Alice-like moment of relief, who knows, and to be able to observe again and again how the more we change the more we remain the same.

Take the two major issues that occupied the discourse for well over a month of a bitter election campaign: communalism and development. Who could have sown communalism better than the British? And who could have sponsored India’s “development” at such a massive scale that even Marx could not help being impressed.

Colonialism “developed” India for its own narrow reasons, not necessarily to improve the natives’ lot. It sowed communal friction in exactly the way that Mr Modi uses it, to push an economic agenda by stealth.

After all Mr Modi, like his fellow heirs of colonialism, has been tasked by the big financiers to press the accelerator on a so-called “development” model before another freedom movement takes root to challenge it. And it may have begun to strike roots in the form of a nationwide anti-communal, anti-corporate initiative not in a doctrinaire way a Communist-led Left Front would have preferred, but in its own erratic yet purposeful, possibly Indian way.

There were gasps of outrage and fear in the secular corner when Mr Modi and his cohorts unleashed communal vitriol during the campaign. But Hindu and Muslim communalism, including their motifs and slogans, are older than India’s Independence.

The Charter Act of 1833 categorically established that “no native of India, nor any natural born subject of His Majesty should be disabled from holding any place, office or employment by reason of his religion, place of birth, descent or colour”. Under Mr Modi this rudimentary legal cover, honed by B.R. Ambedkar into India’s statutes, chiefly by including gender as deserving of equality in law, would stand degraded by the exigencies of Hindutva.

This is the foremost lesson everyone ought to have learnt from the rise of Hindu communalism and its Muslim cousin way before 1947. Far from atoning for the massacre of 2002, Mr Modi looks unwilling to dump the 1938 Hindutva principles enunciated by M.S. Golwalkar, which threaten to cancel even the momentary lapse when colonial endeavour nudged civility into India’s social intercourse. As we heard during the elections, from one of Golwakar’s students, anyone criticising Mr Modi (thereby Hindutva) would be sent to Pakistan.

The reality may not be quite so Muslim-specific, however, although the elections might have seemed to be heavily focused on the community.

As Ms Roy put it in Yawatmal, not only the Muslims, the Christians, Adivasis, Sikhs and dalits are at risk. They “live in a Savarna Hindu State that is permanently at war with its minorities and its Avarnas. But then India is a nation of minorities, so how does this very elite minority (brahmins and banias make up less than 6 per cent of the population) maintain its privileges and its power?

“Like any colonial power by pitting people against each other. By sending Nagas to fight in Kashmir, Kashmiris to Chhattisgarh, Tamils to Assam. By pitting OBCs against dalits, dalits against Muslims. Adivasis against each other.” There was nothing about any of this in the elections and that is clearly the most important lesson they offer not for the first time, of course.