Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics

Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics

Polarization and the Growing Crisis of the Congress Party (2009–
19)

ZOYA HASAN
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For Mushir
 Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Democratic Reorganization Eludes the Congress Party
2. Collapse of the United Progressive Alliance
3. The Gujarat Model and the Turn to the Right
4. Secular Politics on the Back Foot
5. Hindu Nationalism to the Fore
6. Opposition Interrupted
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgements

A sea-change has taken place in Indian and global politics in the decade
since my book Congress After Indira: Policy, Power, Political Change
(1984–2009) was published. That book focussed on the comeback of the
Congress party after the unexpected victory in the 2004 elections. It was a
story of political recovery. But it is now clear that the political revival was
transitory. The two staggering defeats in 2014 and 2019 have brought the
dire state of the Congress party to the front and Centre of public debate.
This book seeks to understand the reasons for these enormous changes by
looking, first, at the underlying conditions that led to the steep decline of
the Congress and, second, the challenges—both external and internal—
confronting the Congress and, while doing so, estimating its impact on
Indian politics.
The central question is what accounts for these changes in this critical
decade of 2009–2019: a decade defined by tremendous political changes in
India, which are reflected in the dramatic decline of the Congress party. The
book focusses on ideological and organizational issues, which, I argue, are
critical for understanding the crisis facing the party. Exploring ideological
shifts in this period that shaped the decline of the Congress party makes a
compelling case for the significance of the Congress story in understanding
the larger political transformation underway in India. Congress’s crisis is
not just the crisis of a party; it represents the vanishing of a certain
conception of politics in the midst of the ideological consolidation of the
Right in India. The argument is focussed on the Congress party, but
comparatively speaking, it has relevance for the experience of centrist and
centre-left parties in other countries, which too suffered a decline in the
context of an upsurge of populist nationalism and right-wing politics in the
past few years.
 During the writing of this book I have benefited immensely from the
support of several individuals, friends, and institutions. I want to thank the
faculty and staff of the Council for Social Development (CSD, New Delhi)
for their support for this and other academic endeavours during my
association with the CSD for the past few years. I am most grateful to
Seema Chishti, Christophe Jaffrelot, Gyanesh Kudaisya, and Mujibur
Rehman for reading the manuscript and giving valuable comments, and
above all, I am indebted to Amrita Basu for her meticulous reading of the
manuscript and detailed and perceptive comments and suggestions for
revisions and sharpening my analysis.
I have learnt a great deal about Indian politics and the Congress party
from numerous discussions with wonderful friends and colleagues, as many
of us watch the waning of the Congress party. Fortunately, these discussions
have been plentiful as the Congress is always ready with a crisis or two to
talk about. These splendid interlocutors include Amir Ali, Rajeev Bhargava,
Bharati Bhargav, Anuradha Mitra Chenoy, Mannika Chopra, Suranjan Das,
Peter Ronald deSouza, Jayati Ghosh, Ajay Gudavarathy, S. Irfan Habib,
Farida Abdullah Khan, Harish Khare, Jawid Laiq, Fawzia Mujeeb, Geetha
Nambeesan, Seema Mustafa, Saeed Naqvi, Anand Sahay, Asha Sarangi,
Tanika Sarkar, Eswaran Sridharan, Pamela Philipose, Prabhat Patnaik,
Rajen Prasad, Ritu Menon, Imrana Qadeer, Achin Vanaik, (late) Hari
Vasudevan, and Vidhu Verma. I’m also obliged to many journalists,
activists, and politicians who have shared their thoughts and understanding
about the Congress with me.
For helping me with research for this book, I want to thank Divyakshi
Jain, Avishek Jha, Rupak Kumar, and Anantveer Sinha for their
commendable research assistance. I’m most grateful to my long-standing
editor Adil Tyabji for his excellent editing of the manuscript. I would also
like to thank various members of my family, especially my nieces and
nephews, for their warmth and support at all times.
Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my husband Mushirul
Hasan with infinite affection and gratitude for his companionship for
several decades and for much more, for his exceptional courage, generosity,
and good humour, and for our shared academic interest in the history of the
Congress party and Indian nationalism. Mushir’s absence is acutely felt, but
his intellectual creativity, social commitment, and luminous sparkle will
always shine and inspire me.
 Introduction

Indian and global politics have undergone a seismic transformation over the
past decade. This has been most apparent in the spectacular decline of the
Indian National Congress. Devastatingly defeated twice, in 2014 and 2019,
it ceased to be the fulcrum of the Indian political system. In 2013, Rahul
Gandhi had said that if India was a computer, then the Congress was its
default programme.1 The statement was widely criticized for betraying the
Congress’s feudal mindset. He wasn’t, however, entirely off the mark
because, until 2013, the party had lost national power only thrice: in 1977,
1989, and 1996. On two of those occasions, it maintained a very healthy
vote share of 34.5 per cent in 1977 and 39.5 per cent in 1989 and 1996. A
non-Congress government completed its first full term only in 2004, a full
57 years after Independence. The party staged a comeback when a
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) defeated the Bhartiya
Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and formed
the government in 2004 (although it won just seven seats more than the
BJP) and did so again in 2009. The party increased its seat share from 145
in 2004 to 206 in 2009, with its vote share that had dipped to 26.3 per cent
(2004) increasing to 28.55 (2009). Since 2009, it has been a steep downhill
curve for the Congress.
The political history of India is intimately intertwined with the history of
the Congress, a party synonymous with modern India. It played a crucial
role in shaping and establishing a democratic system and ‘providing the
core of institutions and processes of power through which the Indian polity
had begun its career in 1947’, said Rajni Kothari.2 However, the Congress,
which led India to freedom from colonial rule and the party of Mahatma
Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, is a pale shadow of its former self. It
performed dismally in the last two general elections and in most assembly
elections since 2014.
 The formation of the first full-fledged right-wing government in 2014
with an absolute majority marks a critical turning point in India’s modern
political history.3 In what was an event of great significance, the BJP
replaced the Congress party at the Centre of the political system. The
political footprint of the Congress has shrunk dramatically in a matter of
years. Even as the Congress declined, the BJP and its mentor, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), grew in strength.4 The growth of the BJP–RSS
combine began in the late 1980s when Hindutva—a form of religious
nationalism that views Hinduness or Hindu culture as the core of
nationhood—emerged as an important influence in Indian public life.5 The
BJP promoted Hindu nationalism, as opposed to the Nehruvian concept of
secular nationalism, which had thus far found general acceptance. It self-
consciously propagated an ideology that was at odds with composite
nationalism deeply embedded in the life of the Republic. The demolition of
the Babri Masjid by karsewaks (religious volunteers) owing their allegiance
to the Sangh Parivar in 1992 was the most overt demonstration of this line
of thought.6
The Congress crumbled in state after state, with the BJP replacing it as
the alternative, especially in north, central, and western India. In the five
states which account for the highest number of seats in the 543 member Lok
Sabha—Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu
—the Congress won only 12 of the 248 seats in 2014 from these five states.
The party does not have a single MLA in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Tripura,
Sikkim, and Nagaland.7
The Congress party witnessed a complete rout in several other states
until it succeeded in forming a government in Punjab and Puducherry in
2017, in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh in 2018, a post-
election coalition government in Karnataka (which lasted just over a year),
and Maharashtra and a pre-poll coalition government in Jharkhand in 2019.
It is almost extinct in Uttar Pradesh and virtually non-existent in Bihar; it
has ceded ground in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Odisha
to either the BJP or to regional parties. The party’s social alliances have
completely collapsed in major states of north India, and in consequence it
has never succeeded in regaining power in Lucknow or Patna. Its strength
declined significantly in the industrial and commercial powerhouses of
Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu. It had, of course, lost out to regional
parties much earlier in Tamil Nadu, an erstwhile stronghold. The last time it
was in power on its own there was in 1967. It has found it extremely
difficult to stage a comeback in these states.
This brief outline of electoral trends underlines the Congress party’s
downslide over the past decade,8 but the crisis has a longer history.9 It
began with the setbacks suffered in 1967, when the party lost elections in
several states, and this was followed by a split in the party in 1969. While
the split saw the emergence of a decisive leader in Indira Gandhi, it had far-
reaching implications for the Congress, which was gradually transformed
from a loose coalition of ideologically diverse groups into a highly
centralized party completely dominated by its leader. These shifts led to an
institutional crisis that the party has been facing since then. It has not been
able to reorganize itself in the intervening years.
The crisis of the Congress also stemmed from transformational changes
underway in the polity, economy, and society. The party was both shaping
and being shaped by these transformations. Change stemmed from a shift
from a state-regulated economy to a market-based model of economic
growth. It was also influenced by wide-ranging reservation and affirmative
action policies, which threw up substantial numbers of lower-caste elites
who formed the nucleus of a highly vocal political leadership which began
weighing in on the opposition ranged against the Congress. As a
consequence, political power moved downwards from the old established
elites to new groups who sought a politics of parity and representation.
These castes drifted towards regional parties, greatly weakening the
Congress, while the upper castes began gravitating to the BJP. The
Congress hold over the Dalit and Muslim vote fell significantly in several
states, most noticeably in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.10 These two groups had
constituted the very foundation of Congress power, and once they began
shifting their loyalties elsewhere, the party’s political dominance was truly
shaken. The middle classes, the greatest beneficiaries of economic
liberalization in 1991, were nonetheless dissatisfied and favourably
considered its rival, the BJP. These lost spaces were difficult to recover, and
after 2014 it became an even more uphill task.
 The Congress began flirting with communal politics to shore up its
dwindling support but eventually became the principal victim of this
misjudged course. Its greatest failure was in the way it approached Hindu
assertiveness being spearheaded by the BJP–RSS combine. The decisive
moment came in 1989 after the implementation of the Mandal
Commission’s recommendation of 27 per cent reservations in public
employment for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).11 This drastically
changed the balance of power between upper and backward castes in favour
of the latter prompting widespread disturbances and violence in several
parts of India. It was opposed to reservations for OBCs, and even after the
party returned to power in 1980; it did not include OBCs in its electoral
coalition, which continued to be a combine of upper castes, minorities,
Dalits, and Adivasis, with both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi refusing to
implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations. Rajiv Gandhi had
criticized the V. P. Singh government for thinking only ‘around caste’ and
‘vested interests in particular castes’.12 When, however, the UPA-1
government came to power in 2004, it introduced 27 per cent reservations
for OBCs in publicly funded educational institutions of higher learning.
This decision was a crucial element in the new strategy of counterbalancing
backward castes’ long-standing distrust of the party, which was generally
viewed as being elitist. This, however, did not help the Congress to gain
their support; indeed, many among them gravitated towards the BJP.13
The BJP–RSS combine was incensed that reservations for OBCs would
exacerbate divisions in Hindu society. The upper castes were hugely upset
but these reservations could no longer be wished away. Mandal politics had
fired up the OBCs as the fulfilment of a long-standing demand for greater
representation in government. Mandal emerged as the greatest hindrance to
the quest for Hindu unity, which typically based itself on an external enemy
outside the majority community against whom all Hindus could unite. Caste
divisions would upset that modus operandi, with this crucial event upending
their political plans. The dream of a unified Hindu identity was likely to get
sidelined by exposing caste divisions and contradictions. In response,
Hindutva was propagated to unify a divided Hindu society. The Ram temple
movement was positioned as an antidote to Mandal to promote Hindu unity
and dominance. The villains of the piece would inevitably be Muslims. The
idea was to bring together Hindus under the banner of Hindutva while
painting Muslims as the ‘other’. Thus, the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign
was launched in 1989, with L. K. Advani leading it with his rathyatra
(chariot pilgrimage) through large parts of India in a demonstration of
Hindu unity, culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya
in December 1992. Around 2,000 people died in the violence following the
demolition; even the Gujarat violence in 2002 was set off by an incident
involving the death of Hindu pilgrims returning to Gujarat from Ayodhya.
Following this, vilification of Muslims became routine and served as a
foundation for the formation of a sizeable Hindu communal majority in the
northern, central, and western parts of India.
Conditions were conducive for the emergence of the BJP as a rival
power Centre; indeed, within a few years of the Ram Janmabhoomi
movement it formed the government at the Centre in 1998, albeit in a
coalition, ending decades of political isolation. This marked the emergence
of a right-wing alternative at the Centre and regional parties backed by the
OBCs in the states, later also moved towards the BJP. Following this
development, the Congress wasn’t easily able to position itself at the
Centre. It attempted to remain broadly centrist but the centre-ground was
squeezed and pressed from both sides by identity politics of different kinds.
Historically, the Congress was built as a centrist catch-all party, but to
remain a catch-all party became very difficult in the 1990s when two
powerful cleavages based on caste (after Mandal) and religion (related to
Ayodhya) were building up, gaining momentum and popular acceptability.
This resulted in a major confrontation between the upper and backward
castes, displacing the Congress from its position of dominance in Uttar
Pradesh. This had a cascading effect too on the party’s political fortunes in
other states. The party never recovered from this transformation of India’s
politics, which challenged the pluralist foundation of the political system by
shifting the discourse towards identity politics. This political shift, in part a
consequence of the backward castes decisively backing non-Congress
formations and upper castes backing the BJP, reshaped politics across a
large swathe of India. The Gujarat violence was another turning point in
this chain of events that compelled the Congress to confront communal
politics, which it had until then strenuously attempted to avoid. It did not,
however, fully confront the implications of this turn of events by not
actively pursuing the pending criminal investigations into the Gujarat
violence when the UPA came to power. It thereby helped the BJP and
Narendra Modi, its prime ministerial candidate, from taking any
responsibility for the mass violence under his watch.14
Significant shifts during this period can also be traced to the neoliberal
restructuring of the economy begun by the Congress government in 1991.
While it accelerated economic growth, it also deepened class, regional, and
rural-urban divisions. In the wake of the economic transformation wrought
by liberalization, social inequalities compounded economic inequality with
an incredible concentration of wealth in few hands. Old sectors died and
new ones arose with incredible rapidity. The crucial question was whether
inequality could be lessened without impeding economic growth essential
to sustain social spending.
This question was addressed through redistributive public welfare
policies aimed at greater inclusiveness and what can be called an Indian
version of ‘social democracy’. This was a time when the Congress entered
into power-sharing arrangements with several regional and state-based
parties that eventually took shape as the UPA, which ruled from 2004 to
2014.15 Backed by the Left parties, the Congress-led alliance steered the
ideological course of the UPA in a progressive direction. Although
neoliberal policies were never abandoned, the UPA government promoted a
raft of groundbreaking rights-based welfare policies—the Mahatma Gandhi
Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Right to Education
(RTE) Act, the Mid-day Meal Scheme, and National Food Security Act
(NFSA)—which proved to be effective in tackling economic deprivation.
The harsh effects of neoliberalism were neutralized to some degree,
although there was no decisive change in the economic policy paradigm.
The rights-based welfare programmes were an important achievement.
These were not just welfare programmes; rather they were part of an effort
to merge social and economic rights (the material payouts) with elements of
political and civil rights guarantees of participation and accountability
found within the Acts and the Right to Information (RTI) Act. But the idea
of social democracy, such as it was, hadn’t emerged through regular
political processes but outside them. This agenda had been outsourced to
civil society organizations, most notably the National Advisory Council
(NAC), which comprised a mix of civil society activists and ex-bureaucrats,
headed by Sonia Gandhi, but hardly included any other politician from her
party which was not involved in the initiation and mobilization for these
landmark moves. In the event, all hope for a participatory welfare society to
catalyze changes in the political landscape was probably overblown and
they didn’t take place.
Nonetheless, the Congress appeared to have regained political support, at
least temporarily, with its UPA governments, keeping the middle class
happy through growth and also, through MGNREGA, delivering for the
poor. These initiatives paid political dividends in the 2009 elections, with
the Congress seat share rising from 146 to 206. Notwithstanding these
impressive returns, the political support evaporated quite rapidly. Congress
was outmanoeuvred in 2011, just two years after its return to power. The
dramatic turn of events began with the anti-corruption movement
spearheaded by India Against Corruption (IAC), backed by the RSS and
24/7 television coverage. This triggered an upsurge of public anger against
the UPA government and the Congress, which was unable to shake off the
corruption charges, a point the BJP exploited to the hilt to attack the
government, which eventually culminated in its devastating defeat in 2014.
The party was overwhelmed by the combined opposition of the corporate
sector, middle class, and major media outlets, which led the charge against
the Congress and redistributive policies championed by it.
The 2014 election shifted the Centre of gravity to the Right. The year
2019 ratified the trajectory India had embarked upon that year which saw
the decimation of the Congress and of liberal progressive forces. The 2019
elections produced a further shift, with the pivot of politics moving more
decisively to the Right. Exceeding its tally of 282 out of 543 Lok Sabha
seats, the BJP now crossed the 300 mark while its vote share jumped from
31 per cent to 38. Its victory was so complete that it captured all or most of
the seats in some states and reduced the Congress to a mere 54, for the
second time insufficient to win the leader of the opposition post in the Lok
Sabha.
The catastrophic defeat of the Congress in two successive elections has
prompted major debates about the Congress and the UPA and whether the
errors of the latter led to the Congress downfall. The public debate was
prompted by the BJP’s strong disapproval of the UPA, which gained greater
traction after its defeat. Political pundits were quick to follow suit with the
claim that the UPA had collapsed because the Congress was elitist and was
out of touch with the aspirations of the ‘new India’ and had focused
excessively on entitlement and welfare and not empowerment and jobs.
Corporate media took the lead in projecting UPA’s social policies as
bottlenecks to economic growth and presented the Gujarat model as the
panacea. This played an important part in shaping the public discourse,
which burgeoned rapidly through social media platforms.
The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies on the
dramatic growth of the BJP and the political changes shaped by this.16
Tracking this shift in power dynamics has been the focus of academic
research and analysis for the past few years. The consequence has been a
neglect of attention to changes taking place on the other side of the political
spectrum: notably other political parties. This book directs attention to the
other side—the Congress party in the context of the rise of the Right in
Indian politics and its impact on the future of the once-dominant party.
The Congress party is particularly important when it comes to exploring
the challenges facing non-BJP parties caught in the potentially destabilizing
politics of polarization and communal mobilization. While it is difficult to
find something new to say about the party, whose past history and current
failings have been thoroughly debated and scrutinized, it seemed useful to
put the Congress alongside the BJP amid the rise of the Right and ask some
questions regarding this interface and the role of polarization in changing
the structure of Indian politics and in hastening its crisis. Political scientists
tend to explain the decline and fall of parties in terms of institutional factors
that are internally specific to the party concerned. The interface between
parties and the role of internal and external factors in their development is
frequently ignored. This analysis emphasizes both sets of factors and, above
all, the role of context and ideology and organization in the making and
unmaking of parties. The crisis of the Congress is discussed in the context
of transformations provoked by the expansion of majoritarianism in India.
Whether in power or in opposition, the 136-year-old Congress remains a
significant political party. It is no longer the default party of power but the
one which propelled the freedom struggle, established the structures and
institutions of democracy, initiated the economic liberalization of 1991, and
established the rights-based social security architecture of the UPA years.
However, the Congress party’s record in government and opposition should
not be idealized. In significant ways, its failings and manipulation of the
politics of religion set the stage for the rise of Hindu nationalism and for its
own crisis and decline. But even in its depleted state, it has historical,
social, and intellectual capital of which few other parties can boast. That’s
why the BJP attacks it relentlessly, well aware that only the Congress party
is capable of challenging it nationally.
This book builds on my earlier work, Congress After Indira: Policy,
Power, Political Change (1984–2009).17 That book focused on the
comeback of the Congress, particularly the period after the unexpected
victory in the 2004 elections, which brought the party back to power on the
national stage. It chronicled changes in the new political landscape, raising
hopes of a revival. It was a story of political recovery. The party leadership
had shifted the debate from identity politics to secular and distributive
politics, which created substantive difficulties for the return of the NDA in
2004. In hindsight, the victories in 2004 and 2009 provided a temporary
reprieve. It worked because Sonia Gandhi was able to hold the Congress
together and forge a political alliance that held for a decade. It is now clear
that the political revival was a mere postponement of a future long-term
decline. The party had wasted the opportunities provided by the back-to-
back electoral victories of its coalition to rebuild and restructure its own
organization. These issues are addressed through an examination of key
political developments from 2009 to 2019 in order to understand how and
why one of the world’s oldest political formations lost its place in the public
imagination within a few years of its return to power. Discussed are the
major issues that have been at the Centre of public debates: the collapse of
the UPA, the Gujarat model of politics and development, secularism,
nationalism, and majoritarianism, which have contributed to this
denouement.
Broadly speaking, the principal concern of this foray into the
contemporary history of the Congress is essentially to reflect on the decline
of the Congress and its impact on Indian politics at the national level. In
significant respects, the Congress experience resembles the experience of
centrist parties in other democracies in the wake of an upsurge of populist
nationalism and right-wing parties.18 Several centrist parties have been
affected by the sharpened political polarization created by social and
religious divisions sweeping across the world. Analysis of the critical
decade of 2009–19 in India affords insights into these processes of
transformation on the back of political polarization that grounded the
Congress party, so to speak.

Notes
1. ‘Rahul Gandhi Says if India Is a Computer, Then Congress is Its Default Program’, The Times
of India, 24 Aug.2013.
2. Rajni Kothari, ‘The Idea of Congress’s, The Indian Express, 18 Apr. 2009.
3. Pratul Sharma, ‘The Indian Right Arrives in Official Policy Prime’, Sunday Standard, 7 Dec.
2014.
4. Hindu Right, refers to organizations and parties that subscribe to the ideology of Hindutva or
Hindu primacy, are socially conservative and in favour of a strong quasi-authoritarian state. It
would include organizations such as the RSS, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), and Bajrang
Dal, among others. It has dozens of affiliates representing women, youth, and students, all
loosely linked under an RSS umbrella of Hindu nationalist organizations. It also runs
thousands of schools across India under the Sangh Parivar’s affiliate Vidya Bharati. Its
affiliates hold shakhas, the morning marching-and-meditation sessions, in dozens of other
countries, including the United States.
5. For the BJP’s self-description of its ideology, see http://www.bjp.org/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=369:hindutva-the-great-
nationalistideology&Itemid=501. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
6. Sangh Parivar is an umbrella term that refers to a whole host of political, cultural, and social
organizations affiliated to the RSS.
7. Kaushik Deka, ‘What’s Wrong with the Congress’s, India Today, 3 Aug. 2020.
8. For more recent writings on the Congress party, see Adnan Farooqui and E. Sridharan, ‘Can
Umbrella Parties Survive? The Decline of the Indian National Congress’, Journal of
Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 54, no. 3, ; Suhas Palshikar, ‘Congress in the
Times of the Post-Congress Era’, Economic and Political Weekly, 50, no. 19, 9 May 2015;
Praveen Rai and Sanjay Kumar, ‘Decline of Congress in India Politics’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 52, no. 12, 25 Mar. 2017; Express Web Desk, ‘Mapped: Congress’s Decline
Through the Years’, The Indian Express, 21 May 2016.
9. Roshan Kishore, ‘Is the Decline of the Congress Seasonal, as Veerappa Moily Claims?’, Live
Mint, 22 Mar. 2017, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/yJ5cGKzuQq8268lu2zc1vK/Is-the-
decline-of-the-Congress-seasonal-as-Veerappa-Moily-c.html. Accessed 17 Nov. 2021.
10. On the changing social base of the Congress, see Anthony Heath and Yogendra Yadav, ‘The
United Colours of the Congress: Social Profile of Congress Voters, 1996 and 1998’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 34, no. 34/35, 8 Aug.1999.
11. Reservations of 27 per cent for the OBCs in government employment were put into practice
at the national level in the 1990s after Prime Minister V. P. Singh decided to accept the
recommendations of the Mandal Commission and after the recommendations were modified
 by the Supreme Court. Fifteen years later, in April 2006, the UPA government introduced
reservations for the OBCs in elite institutions of higher and professional education. See Zoya
Hasan, ‘The Die Is Cast(e): The Debate on Backward Caste/Class Quota’, inAnthony Heat
and Roger Jeffery (eds.), Diversity and Change in Modern India: Economic, Social and
Political Approaches, Oxford Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 2010.
12. Rajiv Gandhi’s speech on the Mandal Commission in the Lok Sabha, published in The Indian
Express, 9 Jun. 2006.
13. Kancha Iliah Sheperd, ‘Shudras and Democratic India’, in Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and
Karthik Raja Karuppusamy (eds.), The Shudras: Vision for a New Path, New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 2021.
14. R.B. Sreekumar was with the Gujarat Intelligence Bureau in April–September 2002. Terming
the conduct of the Congress leadership in the aftermath of the riots as ‘quite vacillatingly
obnoxious’, Sreekumar writes, ‘Soulless secularism and over-sensitivity to Hindu sentiments
presumably prompted Congress leaders to block the plans of Congress president Sonia
Gandhi to visit Zakia Jafri … during her Gujarat visit after the riots, for expressing
condolence.’ Report on Sreekumar’s book titled Gujarat Behind the Curtain, Manas
Publication, (2015) published in Leena Misra, ‘Congress Didn’t Let Sonia Meet Zakia Jafri
After Riots: 2002 “Whistleblower” ’, The Indian Express, 28 Dec. 2015.
15. The Tenth Indira Gandhi conference organized by the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust in 2010,
presided by Sonia Gandhi, addressed the challenges and the prospects of creating an
alternative Indian social democracy. See the two volumes which were an outcome of this
discussion. Sunil Khilnani and Manmohan Malhoutra (eds.), An Indian Social Democracy:
Integrating Markets, Democracy and Social Justice, Two Volumes, New Delhi: Academic
Foundation, 2013.
16. Achin Vanaik, Hindutva Rising: Secular Claims, Communal Realities, New Delhi: Tulika
Books, 2017; Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.),
Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India, London: Hurst & Co, 2019;
Meghnad Desai, Making Sense of Modi’s India, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015; Ashutosh
Varshney, ‘The Emergence of Right-Wing Populism in India’, in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Re-
Forming India: The Nation Today, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2019; Saba Naqvi, Shades of
Saffron: From Vajpayee To Modi, New Delhi: Westland Publications, 2018.
17. Zoya Hasan, Congress After Indira: Policy, Power, Political Change (1984–2009), New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.
18. John Feffer, ‘Nationalism Is Global: The Left Is on the Defensive’, The Nation, 6 Nov. 2019.
Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.
 1
Democratic Reorganization Eludes the Congress
Party

Political parties, providing the linkage between institutions and

constituencies within the polity and bringing to the fore issues affecting the
interests of social groups and the public at large, are indispensable in a
democracy. Well-functioning parties perform these functions by
representing the public, aggregating their views, demands, and interests,
providing political choices to voters, mobilizing them to participate in the
democratic process, and holding governments accountable. None of this
would be possible without an effective party organization. That is why it is
important to begin this account of the Congress during this critical decade
(2009–19) with a discussion of the party organization.1 Following an initial
discussion of the nature of party organization, I highlight the Congress
party’s institutional problems, principally the challenges facing it
organizationally, especially in relation to setting up a democratic structure.
The Congress is a mass party, but one without cadres that recruits
anyone willing to join it.2 As a ruling party, it occupied the middle ground
as a centrist organization, although occasionally tilting to the Left. The
party’s ideology was essentially based on the principles of constitutionalism
and social revolution, embodied in the Constitution. Socialism inclusive of
democracy, secularism, equality, and social justice were the party’s articles
of faith.3
Post-Independence, the Congress party, under the leadership of
Jawaharlal Nehru, was the anchor of the political system. Until 1989, it
formed all governments, with the exception of a brief interlude in 1977 to
1980 when it lost power to the Janata party following the imposition of the
unpopular Emergency (authoritarian rule) from 1975 to 1977. The party
won a sizeable majority of seats, although not always the popular vote at
the national level, and the same was true in most states.
The key to the Congress’s success lay partly in its ability to represent
and aggregate the regional, ethnic, caste, and class interests, which made up
India’s extraordinarily diverse electorate. The electoral strength of the
Congress in the early years of the new republic was thus ascribed to the
party’s institutional strength. This enabled district leaders to distribute
patronage and incorporate social groups at both the local and state levels.
The organization provided space for groups and factions within the party to
compete for influence and therefore ‘an intricate structure of conflict,
mediation, bargaining, and consensus was developed within the framework
of the Congress’.4 The party performed the critical function of conflict
mediation both within and beyond its organization.
The Congress party has been dominated by the Nehru–Gandhi family,
which dominated India’s public life over the past century. They have held
the reins of the party ever since the freedom struggle under the leadership of
Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru cast a spell over the twentieth century. The top
echelon of leadership has remained within the family, first with Nehru
himself, and later with Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and
Rahul Gandhi in turn heading the Congress. Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira, and
Rajiv Gandhi, who occupied the office of prime minister for two-thirds of
the post-Independence era, loomed large over Indian politics and the
Congress. Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and that of her son Rajiv a
few years later, diminished the overwhelming influence the family exerted
in electoral politics and this brought to end the era of Congress dominance.
The declining power of the Congress party has not, however, reduced their
hold over the party. Their leadership has not been challenged despite their
decreasing ability to deliver votes for the party because, in the words of
Digvijaya Singh, ‘the Nehru–Gandhi family which has an unparalleled
history of sacrifice for the nation before and after the Independence is a
binding factor for Congress workers throughout India. No one in the
Congress would like to even think of Congress without them’.5 However,
Congress leaders who have left the party or are disgruntled with it squarely
blame the Gandhis for the terrible condition of the organization.
 Organizational structure
Formally, the organization developed by Mahatma Gandhi’s reorganization
of the Congress through the years 1918 to 1920 has been retained at least in
name.6
Prior to Independence, the Congress organization extended down to the
village level. Each district had a committee reporting to a provincial
committee. The latter reported to the All India Congress Committee
(AICC), a body of about 350 people. The Congress Working Committee
(CWC) was responsible for political policy and other policy decisions. The
party membership was open to all who paid nominal dues and were not
members of any other political party. The limited criteria for membership
opened the party to the masses as primary and active members. While it
provided the party a mass base, this rule lent itself to misuse by the
enrolment of bogus members, which has been a bane of the party.
Post-independence, the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) became the
Centre of power in each state. The district units of the Congress
corresponded to the administrative boundaries of districts. Each PCC had a
Working Committee of 10–15 key members, with the state president as
leader of the state unit. The PCC was responsible for directing political
campaigns at local and state levels and assisting the campaigns for
parliamentary constituencies. The AICC was formed of delegates sent from
PCCs around India. The delegates elected various Congress committees,
including the CWC, which comprised senior party leaders and office-
bearers, and took all important executive and political decisions. The CWC
and the president remained at the top of the national party structure, which
ran the party at the national level on a day-to-day basis and took all key
decisions.7 Control of the presidency was critical for the control of the
CWC, Congress Parliamentary Board (CPB), and Central Election
Committee (CEC). During the early years, the CWC was not only a
convenience but also significant as the principal arena where there was
constructive dialogue between the national and state party leaders
concerning all manner of issues.8 The fact that there was a strong presence
of state leaders in these bodies enhanced the influence of the Congress in
the states. Party competition could sometimes be significant, but the most
important struggles and debates occurred within the Congress, among
leaders with a social base in particular states or constituencies. It was a
grand coalition of major social and political groupings.
It is clear from this brief account that Congress was a party with a
formidable organization that ran an effective political machine, mobilizing
wide political support through its strong state units and dedicated workers.
In most parts of India, given its robust organization, the party’s influence
quite effectively penetrated downward, at least to the sub-district level and
sometimes further down to the taluka. It was held together by the popularity
of its leaders and a host of powerful state leaders who enjoyed considerable
support, and there was space for intra-party democracy which allowed for
accommodation of different groups and interests.9

Institutional erosion
All of this changed with the arrival of Indira Gandhi at the Centre stage of
national politics and the split of the Congress party in 1969. The split was
the consequence of a bitter battle between Indira Gandhi and the Syndicate
or the old guard, led by party president, S. Nijalingappa, who was expelled
by her. Indira Gandhi accused the old guard of being reactionaries and
opposed to progressive policies such as the nationalization of banks and
abolition of the princes’ privy purses.10 The break was complete when
Indira Gandhi, after proposing N. Sanjeeva Reddy’s name for the post of
president, asked Congressmen to ‘vote according to their conscience’. V. V.
Giri, the rebel Congress candidate supported by her, won. She later led her
faction of the party known as the New Congress Party or Congress-R (R
stood for Requisition) to an overwhelming victory in the 1971
parliamentary elections. The Congress-R won 352 seats, roughly a two-
third majority in the Lok Sabha. The split had transformed the Congress,
clearly establishing the supremacy of the parliamentary wing over the
organizational and the political executive over the party. Prior to the split,
the party organization had enjoyed some independence from the executive.
Once Indira Gandhi had established political supremacy, she did not
countenance any leader with an independent power base in any state as
he/she might pose a potential challenge to the central leadership, appointing
office-bearers personally selected by her. She established total control over
the CWC, CPB, and the CEC. Chief ministers were nominated by her as the
party in the states usually requested her to nominate the chief minister. The
centralization of power in party and government remained the defining
feature of Congress dominance, dispensing with all processes of intra-party
democracy connecting the Centre to lower levels in the system.11
It soon became clear that the move towards centralization had cost the
party heavily in terms of popular credibility and broke its political
monopoly by the late 1970s. The party lost power in the 1977 general
elections held after the Emergency had been lifted and began the process of
the party’s long decline. Its political influence began to be seriously
challenged once the party machinery began breaking down in the states.
The centralizing drives coupled with a penchant for tight control and
political manipulation were largely responsible for organizational erosion.

Centralization
The workings of the party organization underwent a major change in this
period. Until the split in 1969, the Congress held regular elections, but no
elections were held after the party split. The party has never recovered from
the atrophy that set in then and has continued to operate with a top–down
structure ever since. Decision-making became the preserve of the high
command headed by the party president.12 In consequence, loyalty was
privileged over the political support base of the leader. The sole criterion of
loyalty for any Congress worker was to the people who had nominated
them. ‘There’s no loyalty to party or ideology’.13 The high command
syndrome that decided party matters earlier at the national level and in
relation to state matters was extended to local levels with no connection
with party functionaries there.
At various points since the mid-1980s, Congress leaders have signalled
their awareness of organizational erosion. Rajiv Gandhi’s address at the
party’s centenary celebrations in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1985 famously
declared it to be a party of power-brokers, but he did very little to change
that. Elections that had been promised early in his tenure were never
conducted during his term as party president.14 During his time, the
Congress leadership became even more personalized, managerial, and Delhi
centric. The massive mandate given to the Congress in memory of his
mother was squandered and misunderstood as a personal mandate for him.
Although he was acutely aware that the party organization required a
thorough overhaul he made no serious effort to change or revitalize it, and
therefore the centralization of the party continued. Like his mother, he
depended on the institutions of the state and not the party to mobilize
people.
During his tenure, the party functioned as a centralized unit, although
every now and again the high command recognized that only a strong
organization anchored in public support could enable the party to grow. The
party, however, did not move away from its dependence on a single leader,
the Congress remaining a leader-driven party, completely dependent on
Rajiv Gandhi. He did not trust Congress leaders, even those who had been
known to have been close to his mother. He went on to change the decision-
making structure in the party by bringing in professionals and friends as
advisors. He replaced her coterie with his own set of friends who had little
exposure to political realities. They had no mass base, yet they were given
important positions in the party. Some of them, like Arun Nehru, gave
disastrous advice, for example, on unlocking the gates of Babri Masjid in
Ayodhya or overturning the Supreme Court judgment in the Shah Bano
case.15

State leaders sidelined

This period witnessed an accelerated decline in the importance of state
leaders in the party. As the process of decision-making was centralized with
the core committee in Delhi deciding everything, the party was unable to
draw strength from the lower levels of the organization or politics. State
leaders, keen to establish a distinctive political identity, were often sidelined
with little regard for the long-term consequences of this.16 Most of the
crucial states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra,
Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh had chief
ministers for short spells because they fell out of favour with the central
leadership. Indeed, very few Congress chief ministers were able to
complete a full five-year term. Even the electoral debacles of 1989 and
1990 did not alter this pattern of control.
This trend was completely at variance with the emergence of states as
the principal theatre of political activity. With the decentralization of
politics and the shift in the Centre of political gravity from the Centre to the
states, people began to look upon their chief ministers as the major power
Centre and the principal reason to vote for one party or another.17 The
implications for Congress’s politics of a refusal to factor in these
developments were obvious. No individual leader in any region was able to
construct a durable alliance of social support for the party as the basis for
electoral mobilization.
The most dramatic consequence of this began to be felt in the rapid
erosion of the Congress as the centrepiece of the political system. However,
even as the party was losing ground, looking up to the high command for
the smallest decisions and neglect of leaders with popular support remained
the norm.18 This absence of democracy at the bottom, together with the
nomination of chief ministers and members of the CWC, PCCs, and DCCs,
resulted, for the most part, in a weak, ineffectual, and strife-torn
organization. In order to change this, the leaders who were not active in
mass politics needed to be replaced by leaders with a mass base. This
required a wholesale change in the organizational culture of the party
symbolized by the high command, which took all decisions.19

Party elections put off

The attrition of the Congress system in the 1990s indicates that the
fundamental malaise was the organizational corrosion of the party and that
therefore emphasis should’ve been given to revamping it. However, the
party never seriously undertook reform. Election to the CWC was held in
1992 during Narasimha Rao’s tenure as prime minister after a gap of 20
years. The process of elections proved messy, with an embarrassing number
of irregularities, squabbles, and indeed violent clashes between factions
across states.20 Elections were held but the process came to an abrupt halt
when Rao decided to nominate members who had actually been elected to
reinforce his primacy in the party.21 He pulled out Sharad Pawar and Arjun
Singh from the elected group and nominated them. His defence was that
‘the party leaders in the states have got used to old habits and that they have
forgotten the process of election, compelling him to nominate PCC and
CWC leaders’.22 Elections were held in 1997 but again were deeply
compromised to prevent Rajesh Pilot from being elected to the CWC.23
Many senior leaders were not in favour of internal elections, believing that
this would create more divisions and factionalism than already existed and
lead to a lopsided result.
Sonia Gandhi, when she assumed charge as the party president in 1998,
held out the hope of reorganizing the party on democratic lines, declaring
that her goal was to revive the party organization and that her priority
would be reinforcing the role of the ordinary worker in the party
organization. According to her, ‘such a development can alone provide an
organizational structure representative of the party, responsible to the party,
and therefore, responsive to the party’. She said that the Congress needed
nothing less than complete revitalization and a return to a time when the
party was instinctively the first choice of the electorate. She repeatedly
called for efforts to strengthen the organization, particularly in those states
which had been annexed by political rivals.24 However, apart from a
brainstorming session in Panchmarhi, very little was done to restructure the
organization, although she had promised to broad-base the party and revive
intra-party democracy in her acceptance speech in April 1998 when she was
unanimously elected as the Congress president. The leadership fell back on
the old top–down method of recasting the CWC and AICC through
nominations. Barely a month after Sonia Gandhi was appointed president
she was given full freedom to nominate the elected quota of the CWC and
was continually authorized by the PCC chiefs to select CWC members and
other party functionaries. Elections were postponed on one pretext or
another, earning the Congress a show-cause notice from the Election
Commission seeking to know why the party should not be derecognized for
its failure to hold organizational elections. Elections for the post of
president were finally held in October 2000 when Sonia Gandhi
resoundingly defeated Jitendra Prasada.

No reorganization
Sonia Gandhi was re-elected president of the Congress in May 2004 when
the party returned to power as the head of the United Progressive Alliance
(UPA). The Congress that assumed power was different both
organizationally and ideologically. Politically, it wrested a position of
dominance by dislodging the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA. The
mandate for the party, to quote Rajni Kothari, was more ‘exciting than the
assumption of power by the Indian National Congress after
Independence’.25 For him, the distinctive thing about the renewed mandate
was that ‘the Congress was a party rather than a governing structure that has
been assigned the role of providing a new institutional structure’.26 He
expected the focus on the party would contribute to its renewal as an
organization.27 Disappointment was, however, in store for those who
expected change. This was particularly so because, for the first time after 30
years, there was a division of power and authority between the prime
minister and the Congress president, and between the government and the
party, a new socio-political configuration. Sonia Gandhi had an opportunity
to reorganize the party, especially because the party president was not the
prime minister. The party was, however, unable to take advantage of it
because the focal point of Sonia Gandhi’s leadership was not, and has not
been, on party building or reform but on managing a fractious coalition.28
There was therefore no change in the party’s functioning. But she had
certainly restored the party to Centre stage without holding any
governmental position. She took the lead in providing the ideological
foundations for a welfare-oriented government policy which directly
benefited the people.29 She remained party president for 20 years until
December 2017.
As noted above, Sonia Gandhi was unable to shake up the party even
though she enjoyed unparalleled dominance in the party. This raised serious
doubts about the regeneration and efficacy of the party, leading, as in the
past, to greater reliance on government and welfare programmes to win
support than on reforming the party to mobilize the electorate. The response
of the Congress to most fundamental issues has been generally
‘governmental rather than political. This failure to distinguish between
modes of governmental action and possible responses of a party apparatus
is obvious.’30 The lack of organizational heft was a severe limitation,
hampering the party’s ability to reap the political dividends which could
have accrued to it from the unprecedented welfare spending by the central
government. Organizational degeneration hampered the party’s capacity to
engage with mass politics.
As the Congress began losing ground in several states, it became clear
that the organization was dysfunctional. As a corrective, Sonia Gandhi set
up several committees to recommend ways of reorganizing and
strengthening the organization.31 The first was a task force headed by P. A.
Sangma, and the second, headed by A. K. Antony, was entrusted with
looking into the reasons for the Congress’s poor performance in the 1998
elections. The report was submitted but none of the recommendations were
ever implemented. ‘We deliberated on it for nine hours. Yet, when the time
for reorganization came in 2000, all the PCC chiefs were retained and the
AICC posts were filled up by senior leaders.’32
Sonia Gandhi set up a third committee, known as ‘The Group to Look
into Future Challenges’, headed by Veerappa Moily, to examine the same
issues: party reorganization and intra-party reforms.33 ‘This group too
proposed internal reforms but went a step further and recommended that
Congress build cadres on the lines of organizations like the BJP and the
Left parties. The party had to find out some way of touching every
household right from the day of election notification till the end of the
campaign’, Moily said.34 Cadres must reach out to people rather than the
party banking on its candidates’ abilities and resources to mobilize support
to achieve victory, the committee suggested. According to a news report,
this proposal was prompted by the Election Commission’s greater
stringency in relation to limits to election expenditure and the ban of posters
and graffiti that led the committee to propose this drastic and clearly
unrealistic change of the Congress into a cadre-based party.35 However, the
suggestion that campaigns needed to be more party oriented than just
candidate oriented was an important one. ‘Now our campaigns are mainly
candidate-oriented. We want to make them party-oriented. That’s why the
need for committed workers or cadres who can do door-to-door
campaigning instead of organizing meetings for the candidate or big party
leaders’, said a member of the Future Challenges Group.36 According to
Mani Shankar Aiyar, ‘these changes were also recommended in the Uma
Shankar Dikshit recommendations to revamp and democratize the party
which was endorsed by Rajiv Gandhi and steered by him through the CWC
and AICC in July 1990’.37 There was, however, no discussion or follow-up
on these committee reports. All the reports were shelved for fear of stirring
up the pot and upsetting the status quo and the established hierarchies in the
party. No progress could be achieved because the top leadership just did not
have the political will to restructure the organization.

No-changers
There was no change in the party structure with no-changers having their
way. The party was not serious about decentralization of decision-making,
although Sonia Gandhi was disinclined to exercise absolutist control.38 Her
approach was consultative and she allowed discussion to proceed on most
subjects so that members could have their say. ‘She listens to criticism’ and
gives ‘space to various disagreements, questions and concerns’, commented
Aruna Roy on the basis of her experience of working with her as a member
of the NAC.39 However, unlike Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, who had created
new leadership structures, Sonia Gandhi relied on the existing leadership to
work the party hierarchy even after 2004 when she had fully established her
pre-eminence. She was clear from the outset that she would work with
senior leaders who had backed her during the 20 years she held the reins of
the party. Many of these leaders lacked a political base. The absence of
linkage between those who were given political responsibilities and the
rough and tumble of state politics was glaring. This gulf was aggravated by
the tendency to marginalize leaders who had at least some links with
ground-level politics for fear of disturbing local power structures. It was
difficult to change this structure because ‘Sonia Gandhi herself relied
heavily on the old order in the party’.
It is a pervasive fear of those around the Congress president that elections might lead to
undesirable consequences such as instability that stands in the way of party rejuvenation. All
those in the coteries might find themselves booted out because they are all nominated and few
of them have any mass support. Moreover, they are keen to retain their influence irrespective of
whether they face the electorate or win elections or not.

Arjun Singh had remarked in an interview.40

 After gaining prominence, Rahul Gandhi was keen to democratize the
party but he too made little headway. He questioned the lack of inner-party
democracy and deplored the culture of entitlement. His appointment as the
vice president of the party at the AICC meeting in Jaipur in January 2013
held out the hope that it would bring about the much-needed change in
organizational matters, as this was one of the major reasons he had
advanced for not accepting a cabinet berth in the two UPA governments. He
emphasized that the Congress needed to reinvent itself with a new
methodology of public outreach. He encouraged lateral entry into the party
as early as 2004 but did not pursue it in the long run. He made no bones
about the need to remove deadwood and democratize the party structure by
opening up the organization to young leaders from the ranks of the Youth
Congress and the National Students Union of India (NSUI). The hope was
that the democratization experiment of the NSUI would be followed up by
the parent party. That has not, however, happened even though he
recognized that the only way of resolving the organizational crisis was
decentralization of decision-making and devolution of power and policy-
making from the hands of a few to the many.41 There was however no
course correction because he ran into a wall of opposition each time he
attempted to tinker with the old order of the party. His experiments were
unable to effect the changes that he had so often spoken about42 and indeed
may have proved counterproductive. At the end of the day, nothing tangible
was effected at the ground level to strengthen the party organization.
In 2015, the Congress leadership outlined a blueprint to revamp the party
by progressively devolving power and increasing the accountability of
leaders at all levels.43 A note prepared by Rahul Gandhi with suggestions
culled from a series of discussions with around 450 leaders on ways and
means of reviving the party was circulated.44 It was released before the
CWC meeting in January 2015 and highlighted strategies such as
distribution of power, party-government interface, institutionalization of
Congress committees as deliberative platforms, accountability, and mass
contact as the way to the party’s revival in the states. This radical blueprint
for party restructuring went nowhere because Sonia Gandhi and the
veterans believed that changing the structure of party organization at a time
when it was out of power would only hasten its demise. Most leaders were
wary of Rahul Gandhi’s radical plans and this put the blueprint in cold
storage.45 After the defeat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2017,
Rahul Gandhi reiterated the need for change: ‘We need to make structural
and organizational changes—that’s a fact.’46 But his hand was greatly
weakened by the defeat and the party let matters drift and the status quo
continued.
Rahul Gandhi was appointed party president in December 2017. Soon
after his appointment, he once again made it clear that he was keen on
reorganizing the party, starting with the democratization of the CWC. CWC
is one of the oldest decision-making bodies in any party. According to the
Congress constitution, 12 of the 25 members of the CWC are supposed to
be elected, but in reality there have been no elections to the CWC. Over the
past 45 years, elections to the CWC have been held only twice. All CWC
members are nominated rather than elected. Of the 25 members in 2019, 19
are permanent invitees and there are 10 special invitees. Rahul Gandhi was
keen to change this, with at least half its members being elected to this key
decision-making body. However, as with all earlier proposals this too was
put on ice. His desire to hold elections for 12 of the 25 CWC members
faced resistance and the system of nomination to the CWC continued. Of
the 18 CWC members who contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, only
four won their seats, including Rahul Gandhi, who won from Wayanad but
lost in the traditional Gandhi-family stronghold of Amethi.47 The other
CWC members who won are Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli), Gaurav Gogoi
(Kaliabor), and A. Chellakumar (Krishnagiri).48

Organizational stagnation
Rahul Gandhi has made several attempts to usher in change but has met
with grief because of the inter-generational clash within the party and old-
timers refusing to make way for younger leaders, and also because, under
him, the party has faced major electoral losses. But even when the party has
performed well as in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh state
assembly elections in 2018 he has not had his way in promoting younger
leaders to leadership positions. The process of lobbying during the selection
of chief ministers in these three states became so intense that eventually the
party decided to appoint senior leaders as chief ministers in all the three
states, in the face of much heartburn among the young leaders close to
Rahul Gandhi. While Kamal Nath was appointed chief minister of Madhya
Pradesh and Ashok Gehlot chief minister of Rajasthan, these appointments
left the two young leaders, Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh and
Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, extremely unhappy and discontented. Both began
plotting their own strategies to strengthen their influence at the expense of
the party, which eventually led to Scindia’s exit from the party and the
eventual downfall of the Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh in
March 2020. As regards Pilot, he raised a banner of revolt against the
Gehlot administration along with a band of his supporters over complaints
of their neglect and deliberate sidelining in the Rajasthan government but
was persuaded to remain in the party.
The top–down model run by backroom specialists with a disinclination
to engage with the risks of mass politics holds sway at the cost of party
building. The party functions as a bureaucratic organization and its
approach to politics is essentially managerial and technocratic.49 This
process has killed innovation, and discussion and debate have ceased to
exist. There is, besides, perfunctory discussion on most issues. When the
Congress was in power, discussions took place only in the Cabinet and by
Groups of Ministers (GoMs).
Decisions were taken by the Core Group formed by Sonia Gandhi in
2004 to help the UPA government, which became the effective decision-
making body. All crucial decisions were taken by this group which replaced
important party institutions which in any case never met.50 The CPB, for
instance, didn’t meet at all after the formation of the Core Group. ‘Meetings
of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) have been reduced to [the]
customary address by the Congress president and obituary references. The
past practise of discussion has been discontinued. That is required now that
the party is in Opposition.’51 CWC meetings are episodic and reactive
rather than those of a deliberative body setting a national agenda and taking
policy initiatives. Consensus was evolved even before an issue was decided
in the CWC, although members were permitted to speak and air their views.
Decisions were taken ‘by managing consensus and consensus was managed
through backroom discussions’.52 In short, as a former Congress leader
said, ‘the party structure exists on paper. Nominated small coteries play
musical chairs, they become ministers or chief ministers when Congress is
in power, and when the party is in opposition, they are office-bearers of the
party’.53 In these circumstances, ‘the Congress knows what it has to do. It
also knows why, for more than three decades this has not been done’.54
‘And the inner circle of the Congress knows that it is none other than the
inner circle that is blocking organizational reforms’, observed a Congress
leader.
The contrast between the Congress and the BJP organizations is stark,
not in terms of internal democracy and decision-making structure, which is
centralized in both cases, but especially in terms of electoral management.
The Congress party’s ramshackle organization is no match for the RSS,
which provides ground support in election engineering, propaganda,
mobilization, and booth management. The Congress is not a cadre-based
party which puts it at a great disadvantage in comparison with the
organizational strength of the BJP–RSS combination. The BJP has, at its
disposal, a well-oiled political machine led by the RSS and its affiliated
organizations. During the 2019 election, the BJP had workers in the
position of panna pramukh (page in-charge) who were responsible for
mobilizing voters listed on a single page of the published voter list (which
contains approximately 30 voters, although in practice they may have
handled up to 60). This is the greatest strength of the BJP and the Congress
has nothing remotely similar dedicated to election management. In six
states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and
Tamil Nadu, which account for over 250 Lok Sabha seats—the party has no
credible organizational structure. At one time, it had a strong organization,
although it was a loosely organized party with no cadres. Most leaders
agree that the organization is not what it should be and needs to be
revamped, and yet nothing has been done to change this. The party is bereft
of a dedicated cadre of grassroots workers in the states or districts even as
the BJP–RSS continued its steady expansion. It has no ground game
because it lacks cadres and workers at the booth level, which is essential for
winning elections.
‘The AICC does not meet regularly, CWC meets sporadically and PCCs
and the Block level units exist virtually on paper’, lamented a former
Congress leader. One political advisor said that ‘hardly any CWC members
has ever been to a village or spent a night there’.55 Most CWC members are
Delhi based with little or no relevance in their own regions, and yet they
continue to exercise power to decide the future course of action within the
party even though they have no mass base and are entirely dependent on the
patronage of the party president. A majority of them have either never
contested a Lok Sabha or Assembly election or did so decades ago when the
politics, discourse, and tools of fighting elections were very different. Their
influence has, however, grown in direct proportion to the weakening of
party units across India.56 Therefore, ‘the only thing the CWC has ensured
is status quo so that they remain relevant to the power-mongers within the
set-up’, remarked Pradyot Manikya Bikram Debbarma, former president of
the Tripura PCC.57
It is thus amply clear that the idea of internal democracy has not
travelled very far.58 Organizationally, centralized command and control and
loyalty have replaced ideology. Nothing much has been done to rebuild the
organization from the time Rahul Gandhi was appointed vice president in
2013 until May 2019, when he resigned as president. Although he had been
president since December 2017, his writ did not run as forcefully in the
party as his mother’s did, and leaders loyal to the two Gandhis frequently
do not see eye to eye with one another, leading to speculation that there are
two power centres in the Congress. Centralized functioning has impeded the
party’s ability to regain support leading to a gradual shrivelling and
withering away of the party structure, with a high command which is
disconnected not only from its workers but also from its own leaders.
Barring a few states, notably Kerala, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Assam, the Congress has no strong
organization in any of the other states.
It is true that it is not easy for a loosely organized mass-based party to
build a strong organization, but at least the Congress can begin with a
genuine pan-Indian membership drive. Most PCC members are ‘resourceful
middlemen with close links to businessmen’ who can easily mobilize bogus
members.59 The PCCs could be asked to submit reports on organizational
and political issues in the states ‘but even this minimum work hasn’t been
done’.60 The party organization is weak, factional, and chaotic in most
states. District units remain headless because the party was unable to even
fill important posts in the states.

Political consequences
The Congress party is never short on declarations of intent, and such
declarations come far more frequently than actual change. Indeed, the
changes that are required have been spelt out in a series of reports
commissioned by the high command mentioned above. But these
recommendations have not been acted upon. The party would not have
come to such a pass had it implemented these recommendations and the
repeated promises of party leaders to revitalize the party.
The overall organizational decay and leadership crisis has had major
political consequences for the party over the past decade. ‘Organizational
atrophy and ideological obfuscation can be fixed by a leadership with a
clear vision. That is the elephant in the room’, observed one leader.61
Several prominent leaders have left the party and joined the BJP.
Defections, splits, and the ensuing electoral decline is not a new
phenomenon in the party’s long history, but the defections after the last two
defeats in 2014 and 2019 have weakened the party more than ever before.
Some of these defections were a consequence of the leadership’s slow and
sometimes confusing movement on key organizational matters. The party
has not only suffered from defections in key states but also lost
governments due to the inaction of its leaders and office-bearers. The party
has not encouraged state leaders who could have been entrusted with the
task of rebuilding the party. Its crisis has coincided with the rise of regional
parties, most of whom are breakaways from the Congress: the Trinamool
Congress in West Bengal, the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra,
and Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh, to name a few.
The Congress has paid a heavy price for its failure to give space and leeway
to mass leaders at the state level leading many, such as Mamata Banerjee,
Himanta Biswa Sarma, and Jaganmohan Reddy, to leave.
Andhra Pradesh and Assam are prime examples of this phenomenon. In
2009, Andhra Pradesh gave the Congress 33 Lok Sabha seats, the party’s
largest contingent from any state in India, thereby strengthening the UPA
position at the Centre. There was, however, a serious crisis in the Congress
soon after the sudden death of Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy in a
helicopter crash on 2 September 2009 when he was just settling down to
serve a second consecutive stint as chief minister. He had almost single-
handedly achieved the challenging feat of defeating the Telugu Desam Party
(TDP) in two consecutive elections and outwitted the Telangana Rashtra
Samithi (TRS) chief K. Chandrashekar Rao by speaking in favour of
Telangana before the elections and subsequently reversing his position.
The Congress crisis deepened at the same time as it had spurned
Jaganmohan Reddy, who was keen to replace his father as chief minister
after his death.62 Not only was he denied the post but he was arrested by the
Central Bureau of Investigation on charges of embezzlement and jailed for
16 months. K. Rosaiah, with no mass base, was appointed as the new chief
minister and was later replaced by Kiran Kumar Reddy in a bid to retain
him in the party. The refusal to appoint Jaganmohan as chief minister
resulted in a division of the party because Jaganmohan was backed by most
in the Andhra Congress. Thereupon, he left the party and formed the YSR
Congress Party (YSRCP). The crisis was aggravated further on the issue of
Telangana and spiralled out of control after the bifurcation of the state.63
Far from reaching out to disgruntled leaders, important decisions such as
the bifurcation of the state were taken by the central leadership without
fully considering its implications for the future of the party in the state.
Ironically the mishandling of the state’s bifurcation spelt the end of the
Congress in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as neither state was
satisfied with the hastily created new state of Telangana. This was the end
of the Congress in Andhra Pradesh, where it had been a formidable force
since Independence, and after 2014 it was unable to regain lost ground in
both states. The Telangana fiasco underscored the pitfalls of the command
and control approach, which proved to be disastrous for the party.
The same was the case in Assam, which the Congress lost again due to
the inability of the central leadership to accommodate the ambitions of state
leaders. As in Andhra Pradesh, the sidelining of a powerful leader like
Himanta Biswa Sarma resulted in his defection to the BJP.64 This provided
the BJP with an opportunity to make inroads not just into Assam but the
entire north-east. In 2015, Sarma left the Congress, where he had played the
role of deputy to former chief minister Tarun Gogoi for nearly 14 years
since 2001. Cracks between the two leaders had, however, begun appearing
soon after the Congress’s victory in the 2011 Assembly elections, which
was largely organized and coordinated by Sarma. He had expected to be
rewarded with the chief-ministerial post for steering the Congress to
victory, but Gogoi was chosen again by the party high command. According
to Sarma, his decision to leave the party was further sparked by Rahul
Gandhi’s cavalier approach to his demands. Shortly after walking out of the
party in 2015, Sarma entrenched himself as the key strategist of the BJP in
the north-east, successfully pushing the Congress out of power in the
region. His electoral expertise led to the BJP forming governments in
Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura.65 Before
Sarma’s entry into the BJP, the party had very small electoral presence in
the region.66 In 2018, the BJP formed part of the government in six of the
seven north-eastern states. The Congress performed poorly in the
subsequent general elections, winning just 3 out of the 14 seats in the state
in the 2019 general elections. The Congress, which traditionally had strong
state leaders, cannot afford to lose them to other parties. Indeed, even in the
post-2014 period, it remained relevant as a political force on the strength of
its state leaders. The centralization of political authority by an exaggerated
deference to party bosses has robbed the party of leaders in the states who
were denied their due.
The Congress failed to initiate organizational changes, which would
have helped it in elections. The organizational neglect has been blamed on
the leadership’s indecisiveness and inability to do what it takes to
reorganize the party. However, as noted above, party reform was attempted
by Rahul Gandhi, but notwithstanding his primacy in the party, he has been
unsuccessful in democratizing the party. He has faced stiff resistance every
time he has made an attempt to break the grip of the old guard and
patronage networks in the states. This has prevented the party from
evolving as an effective organization in the states. Its inability to motivate
the cadres for the long haul has greatly hampered it as a party that fully
awakens only when elections are upon it. Restructuring and democratizing
the organization is imperative because the party requires leaders backed by
the masses and not office-bearers in Delhi with little connection with
ground realities.

Notes
1. My book Congress after Indira: Policy, Power, Political Change (1984–2009), New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2012 provides a detailed account of the party organization and the
pitfalls of dynastic leadership in Chapter 4, some of which is recounted here.
2. On the Congress party, see the official website of the Congress, which includes a brief history
of the party. https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjErZbJiKf0Ah
UWxDgGHZtVCtkQFnoECAsQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.inc.in%
=AOvVaw2PMqpViLT3zTMV22EyhH5q. Accessed 20 Nov. 2021.
3. A note circulated in 2015 on party revamp suggested the redraft of socio-economic policies.
It said the party must take up all progressive issues including ‘but not limited to secularism or
welfare for the poor’. ‘We have to redraft our socio-economic policies keeping their
aspirations in view.’ ‘Congress Outlines Blueprint for Party Revamp Post-electoral Debacle’,
The Economic Times, 10 Jan. 2015.
4. Rajni Kothari, ‘The Congress System in India’, Asian Survey, 4, no. 12, Dec. 1964, pp. 1161–
73.
5. Ibid.
6. For a description and discussion of this, see Gopal Krishna, ‘The Development of the Indian
National Congress as a Mass Organization, 1918–1923’, Journal of Asian Studies, 25, no. 3,
May 1966, pp. 413–30.
7. Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968,
189.
8. Ibid.
9. Zoya Hasan (ed.), Parties and Party Politics in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2002; Rajni Kothari, Politics in India, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970; Kochanek, The
Congress Party of India; Myron Weiner, Party Building in a New Nation: Indian National
Congress, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967; Richard Sisson and Ramashray Roy
(eds.), Diversity and Dominance in Indian Politics: Changing Bases of Congress Support,
New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990.
10. For details on this period of Congress history and the 1969 split, see Ch. 10 in Francine R.
Frankel, India’s Political Economy: 1947–2004, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005,
2nd ed.; Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., ‘The Congress in India—Crisis and Split’, Asian Survey,
10, no. 3, Mar. 1970, pp. 256–62.
11. James Manor, ‘Organizational Renewal’, Seminar, no. 526, 13 Mar. 2009.
12. The Electoral College for the election of the party president comprises 7946 PCC delegates.
13. Interview with Kishore Deo, 8 Jul. 2020. V. Kishore Chandra Deo was a member of the
Congress Party and part of its highest decision-making body, the Congress Working
Committee. He has been a five-time Lok Sabha MP and a one-term Rajya Sabha MP, and
Union Minister of Tribal Affairs and Panchayati Raj in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA - 2
government from 2011 to 2014. He joined the Telugu Desam Party in 2019.
14. Sukumar Murlidharan, ‘A Difficult Legacy’, Frontline, 15, no. 2, 24 Jan.–6 Feb. 1998.
15. On this, see Ch. 1, ‘Ayodhya and the Politics of Religion’, in Hasan, Congress after Indira,
pp. 10–45.
16. Murlidharan, ‘A Difficult Legacy’.
17. Shekhar Gupta, ‘Yes, Chief Minister’, The Indian Express, 3 Sep. 2005.
18. Jyotirmaya Sharma, ‘Spluttering on All Cylinders’, DNA (Mumbai), 18 May 2006.
19. Harish Khare, ‘Sonia Gandhi’s Decade as Congress Mascot’, The Hindu, 12 Mar. 2008.
20. James Manor, ‘Organisational Renewal’, Seminar, no. 526, 13 Mar. 2009.
21. Interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar, New Delhi, 26 Sep. 2010. Mani Shankar Aiyar was a
career diplomat until he joined the Indian National Congress in 1989. He has been a three-
time Lok Sabha MP (1991, 1999, and 2004) and a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. He
served in multiple positions in the first UPA government as Union Minister of Petroleum and
Natural Gas (2004–6), Panchayati Raj (2004–9), Youth Affairs and Sports (2006–8), and
Development of North Eastern Region (2008–9).
22. Manor, ‘Organisational Renewal’.
23. Ibid.
24. See Chapter 4 for details of Congress organization in Hasan, Congress after Indira.
25. Rajni Kothari, ‘The Idea of Congress’, The Indian Express, 18 Apr. 2009.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. For a discussion on the state of party organization during UPA-1, see Ch. 4 in Zoya Hasan,
Congress after Indira.
29. Khare, ‘Sonia Gandhi’s Decade as Congress Mascot’.
30. Tridip Suhrud, ‘Is Congress a Political Party’, The Indian Express, 11 Mar. 2008.
31. This account draws on my book, Hasan, Congress after Indira, Chapter 4.
32. Lakshmi Iyer, ‘Tiring of Sonia Gandhi’, India Today, 6 Mar. 2000.
33. The panel chaired by Veerappa Moily included Rahul Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh, Sachin Pilot,
Digvijay Singh, Jagdish Tytler, Salman Khurshid, and Anand Sharma.
34. D. K. Singh, ‘EC Tight Leash Prompted Cong to Go Cadre Way’, The Indian Express, 4 Jun.
2008.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Mani Shankar Aiyar, ‘It’s Good to Lose’, The Indian Express, 10 Dec. 2013.
38. Interview with a senior journalist, New Delhi, 5 Jul. 2020.
39. Aruna Roy, ‘Sonia Gandhi, a Friend of the Poor’, National Herald, 9 Dec. 2018 .
40. Interview with Arjun Singh, 20 Nov. 2009. Arjun Singh was a veteran Congress leader who
served as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh between 1980 and 1985. He was the HRD
minister in the first UPA government.
41. Bharat Bhushan, ‘Modi Shouldn’t Be Attacked: Why Congress Has Knives Out for Rahul’,
Quint, 10 Jul. 2020, https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/pm-narendra-modi-rahul-
gandhi-priyanka-gandhi-congress-old-guard. Accessed 11 Jul. 2020.
42. Editorial, ‘Beyond the Wall: On the Gandhis Looking for Scapegoats’, The Hindu, 15 Jun.
2019.
43. ‘Congress Outlines Blueprint for Party Revamp Post Electoral Debacle’, The Economic
Times, 10 Jan. 2015.
44. Ibid.
45. Kaushik Deka, ‘Can the Congress Heal Itself? Cover Story’, India Today, 19 Jul. 2019.
46. C. G. Manoj, ‘Congress Is Screaming for Change but Is Rahul Gandhi Listening? If Not, Why
Not?’ The Indian Express, 16 Mar. 2017.
47. ‘Election Results 2019: Rahul Gandhi Wins from Wayanad, but Loses from His Traditional
Amethi’, NDTV, 23 May 2019, https://www.ndtv.com/people/lok-sabha-election-results-
2019-rahul-gandhi-wins-from-wayanad-but-loses-from-his-traditional-amethi-2042173.
Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
48. C. G. Manoj, ‘CWC Strike Rate 4/18, Many Last Fought Elections Decades Ago’, The Indian
Express, 28 May 2019.
49. Interview with Mohan Gopal, 28 Feb. 2020. Mohan Gopal is a lawyer and has been the head
of the National Judicial Academy of the Supreme Court of India (NJA) from 2006 to 2011,
former Vice-Chancellor of National Law School of India, Bangalore, and Director of the
Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS).
50. Interview with Kishore Deo, 8 Jul. 2020.
51. Ibid.
52. Interview with Mohan Gopal, 28 Feb. 2020.
53. Interview with Kishore Deo, 8 Jul. 2020.
54. Interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar, 10 Jul. 2020.
55. Interview with a senior political analyst, 16 Mar. 2020.
56. This was the comment of a political analyst who has worked closely in election strategizing
with the Congress party. Interview, 17 Mar. 2020.
57. Pradyot Manikya Bikram Debbarma, ‘Ambition Isn’t a Bad Word. Lack of Hunger Has
Reduced Congress to Its Present Position’, The Indian Express, 16 Jul. 2020.
58. ‘Rahul Gandhi’s Big Plan to Revamp Cong Faces Resistance from Party Veterans’, Deccan
Chronicle, 8 Mar. 2018.
59. Interview with Kishore Deo, 8 Jul. 2020.
60. Interview with Kumar Ketkar, 12 Mar. 2020. Kumar Ketkar has been a senior journalist who
has served as the editor-in-chief of the Dainik Divya Marathi. He has worked with other print
platforms such as the Loksatta and Maharashtra Times, among others. He is currently a
Rajya Sabha member of the Indian National Congress.
61. Sanjay Jha, The Great Unravelling: India After 2014, New Delhi: Westland Publications,
2020.
62. D. P. Satish, ‘Sonia’s Insult, Reddys’ Revenge, Curse of Andhra: Jagan’s Rise Is Filmier Than
Fiction’, News 18, 24 May 2019, https://www.news18.com/news/politics/sonias-insult-
reddys-revenge-curse-of-andhra-jagans-rise-is-filmier-than-fiction-2158419.html. Accessed
20 Aug. 2020.
63. For details, see Jairam Ramesh, ‘How the Congress Lost Andhra Pradesh’, India Today, 9
Jun. 2016.
64. Sandeep Phukan, ‘Himanta Biswa Sarma, Congress’s Big Loss, Delivers Another State to
BJP’, NDTV Opinion, 15 Mar. 2017, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/with-manipur-bjps-
north-east-strategist-himanta-biswa-sarma-delivers-again-1669460. Accessed 26 Aug. 2020.
65. Nilima Pathak, ‘I Joined BJP to Take Revenge on Congress’, India Gulf News, 25 Mar. 2018,
https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/i-joined-bjp-to-take-revenge-on-congress-1.2193969.
Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
66. Abantika Ghosh, ‘Assam Congress Leaders Think over What Could Have Been—With
Himanta’, The Indian Express, 21 May 2016.
 2
Collapse of the United Progressive Alliance

The Congress party astonished everyone by defeating the BJP-led National

Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2004 parliamentary elections and
returning to power at the head of a coalition, the United Progressive
Alliance (UPA), with Manmohan Singh becoming India’s first Sikh prime
minister. It led the UPA to victory again in 2009 with a larger share of seats
(206), affording the Congress an opportunity to play a more decisive role in
governance with Manmohan Singh as prime minister for a second time.
The Congress-led UPA government, which had come into being in 2004
following Sonia Gandhi’s refusal to accept the post of prime minister,
functioned well under UPA-1 (2004–9) but faced numerous challenges and
still greater ones under UPA-2 (2009–14). Manmohan Singh’s second term
in office was more turbulent than could have been imagined when the
coalition was re-elected in May 2009.1 There was a pervasive feeling that it
lacked direction and cohesion, and the Centre did not hold. Manmohan
Singh had barely settled into his second term when a slew of mega-scams
hit the government, and by 2011, it was wholly on the defensive.
It is important to understand how and why a government that had been
sufficiently popular during its first term to be re-elected in 2009 with a
larger number of seats could so rapidly fall from grace. The questions are
what went gone wrong, why did the Congress and UPA collapse, and finally
why could the party’s progressive politics not be sustained .
There are sharply differing opinions about what went wrong. According
to its critics on the Right, the UPA government squandered resources on
populist schemes such as MGNREGA and the National Food Security Act
(NFSA); it reversed liberalization and starved growth-enabling sectors such
as infrastructure.2 According to its critics on the Left, the UPA government
succumbed to corporate influence and became a promoter of crony
capitalism rather than inclusive growth and therefore lost the support of the
people.3‘It is a unique misfortune for any party to be charged with both
crony capitalism and unbridled welfarism,’ remarked Maitreesh Ghatak et
al. in their assessment of UPA-2.4
Starting from a peak in 2009, UPA-2 ended with serious corruption
charges, loss of credibility, a leadership vacuum, and policy paralysis. The
UPA’s political crisis was not caused by policy paralysis alone; it was
triggered by the concerted effort of powerful right-wing groups that wanted
to see an end to Congress rule, which was seen to be leaning to the Left, at
least in rhetoric if not substance. The animosity of these groups was also
probably provoked by opposition to Sonia Gandhi and the high-profile
welfare schemes and rights-based legislative agenda that she had espoused.
That is not to say that the leadership and organizational gap did not play a
role; it obviously did, as also did unchecked corruption, indecisiveness, and
policy paralysis.

United Progressive Alliance 1 and 2

The formation of UPA represented a new development in Indian politics.
Although there were several coalition governments from the beginning of
the 1990s, none of them had remained in power for a full five-year term,
except that headed by the Congress from 1991 to1996 and the NDA’s from
1999 to 2004. Besides, none of the coalitions were re-elected for a second
consecutive term because of the ideological and programmatic divergences
of their members. Both during its first term in office (2004–9) and its
second term, the UPA was made up of a group of primarily secular political
groupings and inclusive policies were being promoted by the Congress as
the majority force in the coalition.
Although the Congress party had fewer than 150 seats, the Congress-
Left alliance in UPA-1 gave Sonia Gandhi internal leverage within the
government and a hegemonic position in her party. The UPA government
functioned effectively from 2004 to 2009. When it returned to office in
2009, it had already introduced the most progressive rights-based
legislations in Indian history and had at the same time succeeded in
clocking a respectable 7.4 per cent GDP growth rate that year, establishing
India as the second-fastest-growing economy in the world.5 The UPA
government took advantage of the high economic growth and the revenue it
generated (four times higher than in 1990) to pilot several welfare
measures, which enshrined a new set of legally enforceable rights to
address some of the pressing needs of the people. These included
programmes such as the Right to Information Act (RTI), MGREGA, Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Right to Education, National Rural Health Mission
(NRHM), and the Forest Rights Act. These were not abstract rights but
extended to the everyday survival of marginal groups. Although the
programmes’ purpose was to compensate the poor for the deprivations they
suffer under neoliberal policies, they signified an emphasis on the role of
the state as an instrument for redistribution and social change and indicative
of a commitment to charting a progressive ideological course. This,
however, also provoked a backlash. Moreover, the Congress itself was
deeply divided on the strategy of growth-cum-welfare, a combination on
which there was no consensus. For example, the Right to Food, an
extremely important promise, was caught in this crossfire and legislated as
late as September 2013, leaving little time for implementation.
Two positions were in plain sight. One was a broadly social democratic
position that shared misgivings relating to neoliberal economics, advocated
an inclusive approach, and favoured a larger role for the state and social
welfare. On the other side, there were many senior leaders in the party and
government who favoured the neoliberal model with its emphasis on high
growth, fiscal consolidation, and economic reforms. The success of UPA-1
had rested on a balance between Manmohan Singh’s pro-market agenda and
Sonia Gandhi’s social welfare agenda.6 This balance had, however, frayed
and was missing in UPA-2. The core difference was related to the pace of
economic reforms as a means of reviving economic growth and the extent
of public investment necessary for social welfare and inclusive growth.
The Left’s insistence on a National Common Minimum Programme
(NCMP) lent a progressive thrust to the UPA-1 coalition and provided it
with the credibility to project itself as a pro-people government. The Left
parties had, however, withdrawn support in 2008 over the nuclear deal
imbroglio resulting in a political void at the heart of the coalition.7 This part
of the story—the role of the Left (and the NCMP) in pressurizing UPA-1
towards more progressive positions on a range of questions and its
withdrawal of support is well known.8 At the same time, it is also the case
that there was a very strong perception in the Congress that the Atal Bihari
Vajpayee–led BJP government had lost power in 2004 because it had lost
touch with the rural poor and therefore the Congress had to make a
demonstrable start from the outset to burnish its credentials as a party with a
difference. It may also be that this emphasis was given a further boost
because Sonia Gandhi did not become prime minister and therefore found it
convenient to identify herself strongly with the National Advisory Council
(NAC) and its activities. Declining the post of prime minister
notwithstanding fervent entreaties from her colleagues, and even allies like
Sharad Pawar who had resigned from the party to form the Nationalist
Congress Party (NCP) to oppose her claims to prime-ministership enhanced
her political status. ‘Her renunciation brought about a transformation in the
perception about the Gandhis and the party they controlled, which is to say,
her renunciation showed that they were not after power,’ observed Kumar
Ketkar.9 While there was no outside pressure on the Congress, there were
hardly any advocates within the Congress for a radical social agenda. The
support of the Left had gone a long way in ‘mitigating the effects of the
neoliberal policies’, observed Mohan Gopal.10
Winning the 2009 election despite the departure of the Left Front and
growth rates still high, the Congress assumed that all was well with the
coalition and that it was well positioned to assert its primacy. The mandate
was over-read as an endorsement of the Congress’s ability to override the
pulls and pressures of coalition rule. Differences and divergences in the
coalition’s second term came to the fore with no mechanism to sort them
out. Differences had existed even under UPA-1, but then there had been an
NCMP that provided an agreed roadmap and a coordination committee that
zealously guarded against any deviation. The NCMP established a
minimum framework of cooperation in the coalition despite the differences
among its members. After 2009, there was no NCMP and no coordination
committee to harmonize relations among the allies. It was, therefore, for all
practical purposes, a Congress government but all its problems were not
due to the Congress: they ran deeper and were often precipitated by its
allies.
 Dual power centres
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a Rajya Sabha MP with no political
base of his own.11 He had never won a direct election and owed his
appointment entirely to Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president. She had
chosen him as prime minister for a second time, which aggrieved at least
some Congress leaders who felt they had stronger claims given their long
association with the party. In any event, real power vested with her as the
party chief and she took crucial political decisions as chairperson of the
UPA. She was the undisputed leader and the final arbiter on cabinet
positions and for resolving any differences that arose between the Congress
and its allies.12 This unique arrangement, however, proved to be a bone of
contention and a target of widespread criticism throughout the two terms of
the government. It was used by its critics to discredit the Congress for
creating dual centres of power and weakening the institution of prime
minister. The BJP routinely described Manmohan Singh as the weakest
Prime Minister India ever had.
The book by the former media adviser to the prime minister, Sanjaya
Baru (2004–8), The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking
of Manmohan Singh, did little to help him shore up his position much as he
may have wished to do so; it indeed served to do the opposite, reinforcing
the perception of his powerlessness. Providing an insider account, the book
details the weakening of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) by Sonia
Gandhi.13 His account caused a political storm because it claimed that there
was only one power Centre in the government and that was Sonia Gandhi.14
Manmohan Singh, however, himself disagreed with the claims and
contentions in the book, maintaining that history would be kinder to him
than the current assessments.15 Mark Tully rightly and tersely remarked in
this context, ‘But that is if that history is told.’16
Rahul Gandhi weakened the prime minister’s authority further in 2013
by publicly denouncing the controversial ordinance brought to negate a
Supreme Court verdict on convicted lawmakers. The ordinance aimed at
saving convicted legislators from disqualification. He described it as
‘complete nonsense’;17 that it should be ‘torn up and thrown away in the
dustbin’.18 Publicly rubbishing the ordinance, which was later withdrawn
by the cabinet, demeaned the prime minister’s office but Manmohan Singh
didn’t resign.19 He was asked in an interview towards the end of his second
term whether he had ever felt like resigning at any point over the past 9–10
years. His emphatic response was: ‘I have never felt like resigning at any
time; I have enjoyed doing my work. I have tried to do my work with all
honesty, with all sense of integrity, without regard, or fear or favour.’20 In
spite of this controversial episode, Rahul Gandhi described the relationship
between the Gandhi family and the prime minister as a ‘harmonious one
characterized by mutual respect. There have been differences but little
conflict.’21
Manmohan Singh deferred to Sonia Gandhi on most political and policy
issues, and for him, the duality of power was not a problem:
For me, it has been a remarkable achievement that I have been able to complete 10 years of my
prime ministership without any hiccups in the relationship between the Congress party and the
Prime Minister, or for that matter, the government. For me, Mrs Gandhi’s support has been an
enormous help in dealing with very complex issues. The fact that she was there to back me up
facilitated my task as Prime Minister in more than one way.22

He also noted:
There were, of course, times when they [Sonia and Rahul] differed from what the government
had done. The government reconsidered those issues, and I don’t think this is wrong, or a
disadvantage, to make corrections if the party leadership feels that such corrections were
required in the national interest.23

Also for Pranab Mukherjee, the second most important person in the
government who had expected to be nominated at least as deputy prime
minister, if not prime minister, ‘the duality of power in the Congress and the
UPA was not a hindrance’.24 He too claimed Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan
Singh ‘had a perfect understanding.’25

Coalition troubles
Apart from the problem of dual centres of power, political problems were
compounded by the dynamics of coalition politics. The Congress lacked the
necessary numbers to effectively set the legislative agenda even within the
coalition. Stitched together in 2004 by Sonia Gandhi to defeat the BJP
government, the coalition began unravelling in the early days of its second
term. Several crises within months of taking over revealed the internal
contradictions of the coalition, which was struggling to guarantee its own
survival. Every now and again allies would threaten to withdraw support
over policy disagreements. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) left the coalition in 2012 and 2013,
respectively, and by 2014 virtually no coalition remained.
Politically and ideologically, the coalition was broadly centrist and Left
of Centre, although ideological unity was not its strong point. Some parties
in the coalition, such as the DMK, had previously been a part of the NDA
coalition when it was in power, indicating that their alliance with the
Congress was based less on common ideology and more on striking a
bargain to remain in power. Pranab Mukherjee shouldered the responsibility
of keeping the alliance partners on board.26 He was so important to the
coalition that at one time he chaired 97 Groups of Ministers (GoMs) to
decide on important policy and governance issues. That’s why Sonia
Gandhi turned down the proposal in 2007 to nominate him for the president
of India ostensibly because she felt he was indispensable to the functioning
of the coalition.27 Although his ambition to become prime minister was
thwarted because she trusted Manmohan Singh more than him, the
influence he wielded both within party and government was huge and much
greater than any position he held. Mukherjee notes in his interview to India
Today that UPA-1 was more cohesive than UPA-2 and was therefore able to
deliver more on the ground.28 Notwithstanding its stronger position, the
Congress was reluctant to take decisions on important issues in its second
term. As he says, ‘Somehow or the other, in UPA-2 we appeared to have
lost steam.’29 The crucial reason was coalition compulsions. To quote him,
‘The coalition compulsion was such that each of the political parties had to support us, and
without support, you couldn’t run the government. If they insisted that such a person had to be
taken as minister, then we had to yield. We tried to counsel them and resolve it. But we never
thought that the fallout would be so bad.’ 30

Meanwhile, the government-party dynamic changed because of the

increase in the Congress’s seat share, such as it had not witnessed in the
previous 18 years. According to Mukherjee, hubris set in after the Congress
won 200 seats and the party was unwilling to be accommodative or listen to
the views of its coalition partners. The inflated political assessment of this
seat increase by party leaders contributed to its undoing. He concluded31:
One reason for the Congress downfall was that it thought that the 200 seats it won were equal
to 280 seats. So, the flexibility of mind and flexibility to accept others’ views were restricted.
Secondly, in terms of the coalition, Mamata Banerjee departed in 2012. It was very difficult to
handle her, no doubt, but at the same time, we had to handle her because she had 19 Lok Sabha
members, a big partner. I had fought with her, we had an open confrontation in the cabinet, she
used to get very angry with me but nonetheless, I could keep her in the coalition. I was elected
President in July and she left the coalition in October.

A senior editor summed up the situation:

‘It is clear that the policy of ministerial latitude and total absence of prime ministerial oversight
have combined to produce deleterious consequences, including unacceptable ethical
aberrations. Allies have been allowed to run their ministries as autonomous kingdoms. This
arrangement was bound to generate a dysfunctional order, which has culminated in
Mamatagate.’ 32

The UPA, in this turmoil, lost the momentum it had gained after its re-
election with the disarray in the BJP camp, which only further enhanced the
initial gains. This momentum, however, didn’t last long.

The rift within

Political differences within the UPA seriously damaged it during its second
term in office. The Congress’s own lack of cohesion and ideology
exacerbated the problem, the party appearing torn between differing
strategies on key policy issues. There was barely an issue on which ‘senior
ministers of the government, allies of the UPA, and top leaders of the
Congress did not speak in divergent and sharply discordant voices’
commented an editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly.33
From the Telangana fiasco to the uncertainty over the Women’s
Reservation Bill (WRB), Operation Green Hunt against the Maoists, to the
manner in which forest and agricultural lands were taken away from tribals
and poor villagers, to the environment, to corruption, to promulgation of
policies on food, frequently the sharpest opposition to government policy
had been from within the coalition and even from within the government.
The rift seemed to have begun with the WRB. Sonia Gandhi first goaded
and then directed a reluctant government to ensure its passage in the Rajya
Sabha, in spite of obvious political risks.
The overriding concerns were that opposition to the women’s quota
would affect the smooth passage of the government’s financial business in
parliament. Sonia Gandhi refused to put it on the backburner setting aside
threats from its allies.34 The party’s strong stand at a core group meeting
paved the way for the passage of the WRB in the Rajya Sabha in March
2010,35 but it did not, however, push this legislation in the Lok Sabha. Most
male politicians opposed women’s quota because they feared that the WRB,
if it became the law of the land, would shake the ground beneath their feet.
‘No one wants to relinquish power very easily,’ or as a political
commentator puts it ‘sign their death warrant’.36
The reconstitution of the NAC in 2011 was a further source of
uneasiness within government circles and outside them. It rang alarm bells,
although, in its second avatar, the NAC was not as effective as it was during
the first term. It had played a crucial role in the process of policymaking
under UPA-1, guiding the government on distributional issues, and was
responsible for the formulation of MGNREGA, the RTI, Lokpal, Grievance
Redressal Bill, and the Whistle Blower Protection Bill. The decision to
revive the NAC in 2010 came against the backdrop of disquiet over a drift
in the implementation of social welfare schemes and a demand for political
oversight of these programmes, as also the need to take charge of shaping
legislation aimed at guaranteeing food security and public health schemes.
It was, however, difficult to revive the NAC under UPA-2 given the
diminished political support for the centre-Left position in the coalition
after 2009, without which the body lacked heft. Therefore, most of its
recommendations went unheeded and were unacceptable to the
government.37 As early as 2011, the NAC and PMO were at loggerheads
over the issue of wages under NREGA. The NAC suggested higher wages
because the minimum wage under NREGA was lower than the statutory
minimum. Sonia Gandhi wrote to the prime minister to consider granting
the statutory minimum wage to NREGA workers. Additional Solicitor
General Indira Jaising argued that the payment of wages below the
minimum wage would amount to forced labour but Manmohan Singh
disagreed. His view was that the wage rate fixed by the government could
be indexed to inflation but not to the Minimum Wages Act of 1948.38
The NAC drafted three bills on Food Security, Land Acquisition, and the
Prevention of Communal Violence. The government disagreed with all
three.39 Frustrated by the lack of progress, Jean Dreze resigned from the
NAC, noting in an article he wrote at the time of his resignation:
The NAC-1 was instrumental in ushering constructive legislations and policies that would, in
all likelihood, never have seen the light of day through normal government channels … The
second version of the NAC, however, has been convened in very different circumstances and
does not seem to have the ear of the government.40

Despite these differences, the media and the corporate sector didn’t spare
the NAC because they feared its mere existence would nudge the
government towards social welfare policies. They expected the government
to put these aside and focus in all earnest on economic reforms. They were
therefore keen to stop the NAC in its tracks and were eminently successful
in achieving this.

Running out of steam

The economy clocked an average growth of 8.4 per cent until the financial
crisis in 2008–9 but the growth rate ran out of steam after the global
economic slowdown. The financial crisis was a pivotal moment in UPA and
Congress politics. It had its effects on India’s economy, and therefore on
major policy decisions. It also led to a cutback in funds available for
welfare programmes, which, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, were
necessary for the dual strategy to work. A financial crisis and declining
private investment induced rapid economic deceleration.41 Manmohan
Singh blamed the domestic economic slowdown on the global economic
situation, but that was no consolation to India’s middle classes, who
squarely blamed the Congress–UPA government for their problems. The
financial crisis brought their disgruntlement with the government to the
fore. For them, it raised serious questions over the UPA government’s
managerial capabilities and the UPA’s model of development. They were
extremely critical of the UPA because ‘they did not see it as their own
government … but one that works essentially for the poor’, as one
columnist put it.42 They were joined by the corporate sector that was in any
case upset by the ‘policy paralysis’. Both these powerful classes were
clamouring to get the Indian state and the Congress out of the way.43
Their disenchantment aside, the fruits of India’s growth largely accrued
to these very classes who were extremely critical of UPA/Congress
combine: they were the top 10 per cent who had inordinately benefited from
the growth of national income over the past three decades (capturing 66 per
cent of that growth). Income inequality in India is among the highest in the
world.44 This is confirmed by French economists Lucas Chancel and
Thomas Piketty. Using a range of sources, including tax returns, they have
argued that income inequality in India today is higher than at any time since
1922 when the income tax was first introduced.45 According to them, India
has recorded the highest increase in the share of the top one per cent in
national income over the past three decades, from 6.2 per cent in 1982–83
to 21.7 per cent in 2013–14. ‘This rising inequality contrasts with the 30
years following Independence when income inequality was widely reduced
and the incomes of the bottom 50 per cent grew at a faster rate than the
national average.’ India was shining for its top one per cent (and for another
top 10 per cent) and this ‘one per cent are not sharing anything with
anyone.’46 India has the fifth largest concentration of dollar billionaires in
the world (after the United States, Russia, China, and Germany). Much of
this wealth was derived from land, real estate, construction, mines, and the
like.47
There was an attempt by the Congress–UPA government to address these
disparities through redistributive measures. Sonia Gandhi concentrated
attention on people on the margins who felt neglected. The fruits of
liberalization had not reached them. But there was a deep divide over
whether the gains from growth ought to be ploughed back to achieve social
security for everyone or to continue to rely on the trickle-down effects of
growth, and what specific strategy should be adopted to ensure welfare
provisioning. The upper and middle classes were not enthused by UPA’s
welfare policies, convinced that the government was using ‘their’ taxes to
pursue a social agenda. The most vehement opposition came from the
corporate and financial elite and the media they controlled. All these groups
claimed that they were not opposed to welfare measures per se but to
corruption in government welfare programmes, when in reality, the
opposition was actually to the very idea of welfare, perceived as a handout
to the poor.
The politics of food security epitomized the problems of striking a
balance between growth and equity. Food security was the Congress party’s
promise, underscored in the manifesto itself, to ensure a minimum quantity
of affordable food to all deprived Indian households if the Congress was
voted back to power in 2009. It was a vital instrument for showcasing the
government’s political philosophy of social justice. However, in comparison
to other social legislations, the NFSA was caught in the crossfire between
the government and the Congress leadership. It took longer to reach fruition
because there were differences regarding the exclusion criteria, financial
outlays, and the authority of the states, and as a consequence of the
prolonged consultation process with a large number of stakeholders.48 The
NAC recommended universal coverage of 25 kg of rice, wheat, or cereals
per household while the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and
the parliamentary committee decided that 67 per cent of the population
would be provided with 5 kg of rice, wheat, or cereals per person per month
at subsidized prices.
The food security provision in the NFSA was a far cry from what
activists were fighting for: universal coverage of 25 kg per household.
Ultimately the legislation ‘was a compromise between what Sonia Gandhi
wanted and what the Manmohan Singh government was willing to
deliver.’49 But even in its reduced form, NFSA was a far-reaching law
which in principle makes the states responsible for food security by
providing citizens with a legal entitlement to food and enabling them to
demand their legally guaranteed rights to food. This leap from welfare to
legally enforceable rights was made possible by the political backing of the
top leadership of the party. It eventually happened because Sonia Gandhi
threw her weight behind it and, but for her intervention, it wouldn’t have
materialized. Most of the senior leaders were more concerned about
finances for the programme rather than how a radical breakthrough could be
affected through it. NFSA took over four years to fructify and came too
late. However, by the time it was passed in September 2013, it was too late
for the government to roll it out.
Sonia Gandhi, as head of the NAC, played a seminal role in the social
agenda of the Congress–UPA government. The participation of social
activists in the NAC created an interface between government and civil
society, which enabled this agenda to be carried forward. It was a unique
space for the promotion of progressive social policies, but the change they
brought in, albeit commendable, had left the Congress party out. It appeared
as if the NAC rather than the Congress was setting the social agenda for the
UPA government. The Congress as an institution was not involved in this
process, and therefore this collaborative exercise in preparing draft
legislation and social sector policy with civil society organizations didn’t
necessarily promote participatory governance. Ideally, these policies should
have originated from the Congress and its apex bodies in consultation with
social activists working with marginalized communities. Instead,
policymaking was outsourced to the NAC, bypassing the party. Therefore
these progressive policies were neither owned nor internalized by the
Congress, nor was it quite a part of their political narrative. The NAC was
in no position to mobilize support for these policies while the party—the
key instrument of mobilization—was disconnected from these
interventions. In the final analysis, it left the Congress looking ineffective
and not entirely in control of the government it headed or of policymaking,
lending credence to the complaint that non-party and non-government
people were determining policies on behalf of the government.

On the back foot

The social agenda was overtaken by the outbreak of corruption scandals
that paralyzed the government. While the UPA government had initiated
several progressive policies, such as the NFSA discussed above, these were
completely overshadowed by corruption scandals. The eruption of one scam
after another belied the expectation that economic liberalization and
deregulation would lessen corruption and rent-seeking.50 In reality, it
became evident that corruption and crony capitalism had increased
corruption which was a spin-off of neoliberalism. The Commonwealth
Games, the 2G, and Coalgate scandals were the most serious controversies
that blackened the image of both the government and the corporate world.
Corporate lobbies were hounding the government with their incessant
demands, ranging from cheap credit to captive power.51 Elites used their
influence and connections to gain tax exemptions, sweetheart deals, land
concessions, forest resources, or spectrum controlled by the government.52
Opening up mining, drilling, large construction projects, and
telecommunications to private corporations had encouraged a rush to grab
the contracts in return for pay-offs to politicians. Land acquisition became a
major problem because the economy was growing rapidly and there was
pressure to convert large stretches of agricultural land to high-value use:
industrial, residential, and infrastructural. No safeguards were put in place
to regulate this rush of economic activity.53 Based on telephone calls made
to top government officials, companies took loans from public sector banks,
overleveraged, and found themselves deep in debt.54 Some of these
corporate houses were able to get their loans restructured to postpone
payment of interest and principal repayment, especially after the global
economic slowdown deepened post-2012.
The 2G spectrum scandal was the bell-weather case that rocked the UPA.
This was the allocation of mobile telecom spectrum for second-generation
(2G) services on a first-come-first-served basis, which became the subject
of a raging controversy. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of
India, Vinod Rai, claimed an under-collection of revenues of 1.73 lakh
crores. The CAG report was leaked to the media, generating a perfect
storm.55 The media went to town, suggesting that Rs 1.76 lakh crores had
actually been pocketed by someone, leading to the allegation that this was
one of the greatest scams the world had seen. The estimates were of how
much money the government could have raised from an auction but the
public at large believed that a ‘presumptive loss’ was an actual loss and the
repeated use of the word ‘scam’ suggested that someone had stolen the
money. Kapil Sibal tried to explain that it was a zero loss for the exchequer
as the government’s principal ‘concern was not revenue but teledensity,
network, mobile penetration, and the like.’56 His zero loss explanation was
ridiculed and he never repeated it.
 On 23 March 2012, The Times of India broke the story of irregularities in
the allocation of coal mining concessions to private firms between 1993 and
2011. Again, the report provided by the CAG to the newspaper said the coal
blocks’ allocations had led to unjustified benefits to the private sector.57
Appearing on the heels of a series of corruption scandals, the coal scandal
triggered a storm of criticism across India and completely paralyzed the
government. By sacking some of its own ministers over improprieties
committed by them, the Congress attempted to retrieve lost ground but that
did not make it appear moral and high-minded. Rather, it contributed to the
public perception that the Congress government was a den of crooks and
shysters. Although the Supreme Court refuted the basic premise of the
sensational audit reports on telecom and coal on two separate occasions,
these scandals had put the government completely on the defensive,
especially because Manmohan Singh held the coal portfolio at the time the
controversy erupted. The damage had been done: Rs 1.73 lakh crores
became a pictogram of the gigantic scale of corruption under the Congress.
An editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly correctly concluded
that:
Irrespective of the veracity of such conspiracies, it is now possible to identify one clear political
consequence of this case. It became the template on which corruption by the Congress could be
converted into ‘common sense’, and all the other alleged scams and corruptions could be added
up without much scrutiny. It was this ‘common sense’ that bestowed credibility to the India
Against Corruption ‘movement’ and led to a situation where corruption came to be seen as the
single reason for all that ailed the nation, thus making anti-corruption the talisman for all
problems, too.58

The editorial went on to note a ‘direct link between the claims of 1.73
lakh crore loss in the 2G scam and the election of Modi’.59
Significantly, there was no effective rebuttal from the Congress and the
matter was only made worse when senior leaders refused to speak to the
media or the public. Both Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi believed that
the best response was to insist that they had played no significant role in the
decisions taken by the respective ministries and officials. In retrospect, it is
obvious that they underestimated the public anger aroused by corruption
which underpinned the growth story of those years. The prime minister’s
unwillingness to speak in defence of his government made the UPA
government appear corrupt. Instead of finding a way of combating the
attack, Manmohan Singh retreated into a shell. The barrage of scams turned
the prime minister’s image of integrity into an object of mockery. Some of
this was self-inflicted and some of this was the creation of the CAG. In any
case it allowed the BJP to make him the target of attack. This inflicted
incalculable damage to his government and party.60
The government was attacked relentlessly on numerous issues, but what
mattered most were the accusations of crony capitalism. The central story
was the huge favours conferred to big business by politicians. Most of the
problems arose from the politics–business nexus and the scams it
engendered.61 Business tycoons were particularly cut up when the law
began catching up with them. This nexus came under great strain after the
Vodafone controversy and a series of high-profile tax disputes, including
shutting the door on the contentious and damaging issue of retrospective
taxation. British telecom giant Vodafone’s acquisition of Hutch Essar in
2007 ducked Indian taxation laws.62 The Income Tax Act was amended in
2012 with retrospective effect making offshore deals in India taxable. This
amendment was intended to bypass a Supreme Court verdict that ruled that
Vodafone’s transaction was not taxable in India. This annoyed Vodafone
and business groups in general and gave rise to an impression that even
with Manmohan Singh at the helm the UPA government was not business
friendly. The capitalist class was in any case uncomfortable with the UPA
because ‘they never trusted the Congress’.63 The Vodafone case sealed that
belief.
The slowing down of economic reforms had also upset the corporate
sector because they had believed that with the Left parties out of the way
the Congress–UPA would speed ahead with economic reforms.64 This did
not, however, happen on expected lines. The Right to Fair Compensation
and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act
2013 (also known as Land Acquisition Act, 2013) was widely blamed for
stalled projects and policy paralysis. An RTI inquiry, however, revealed that
the UPA’s Land Acquisition Act was not the principal reason why projects
were being stalled.65 Only 34 projects were stuck for lack of environmental
clearances.66 After the anti-corruption campaign, ministers and bureaucrats
were reluctant to take decisions lest they be caught in some form of media
expose or face police investigations or jail.67
Countering charges of policy paralysis, the Congress–UPA government
announced policy changes and reform initiatives to introduce foreign direct
investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail in November 2011. The proposal met
with protests in parliament, leading the government to backtrack. Even a
year later, there was no consensus in the cabinet on FDI and yet a decision
was taken to go ahead. In October 2012, the cabinet cleared FDI in multi-
brand retail and the limit on foreign investment in the insurance sector was
raised from 26 to 49 per cent. The cabinet’s nod was designed to spur
sentiments and rally the stock market. This agenda did not, however, really
take off. Trying to please both sides, which didn’t quite work, the
Congress’s dilemma was apparent in December 2013 when Rahul Gandhi
sought to placate big businesses and dispel the swelling criticism of
industrialists by highlighting the strong connection between the Congress
and Indian industry. He told the gathering at the Federation of Indian
Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) that members of industry are
‘stakeholders of the Congress Party’ and that he had removed an obstacle to
growth by changing the minister (Jayanthi Natarajan) who had in the
perception of businessmen delayed environmental clearances.68 However, a
year later he said: ‘Let me make it very clear … I don’t do politics for
industrialists. I do politics for the poor and will continue to fight for their
rights.’69
But even in UPA-1 there were numerous signs that the pro-business
elements in the Congress (and its allies) were engaged in activities
calculated to make the government extremely unpopular. The Special
Economic Zones (SEZs) Act in particular, which was introduced with
almost no debate and implemented with great opacity, led to ceaseless
charges of corruption, incompetence, and favouritism, among other ills.70
The business elite lost confidence in the UPA–Congress as 2014 drew near,
and some of this had to do with the Congress trying to recover its image as
a friend of farmers and the rural poor (which had been seriously dented by
land seizures for SEZs and other projects, as well as the usual
pricing/subsidy and other complaints) by enacting the Right to Fair
Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act, etc. Some of the
distributive zeal was therefore still alive, but in a weakened form and in
forms that alienated other constituencies. Indian business was not thrilled
with the persistence of this agenda.

Anti-corruption and the power of protest

The BJP, desperate to regain power after two Lok Sabha defeats, was on the
lookout for an issue to corner the UPA government and corruption perfectly
fit the bill. Several top-level leaders were found guilty and some of them
had to resign owing to corruption charges levelled against them, which,
rather than quietening them, added grist to the BJP mill. It was around this
time that civil society groups decided to launch a major campaign against
corruption. A multitude of websites and groups had sprung up to bolster the
anti-corruption campaign. The big one was India Against Corruption (IAC),
which led the anti-corruption protest, which proved to be one of the biggest
agitations in decades.71
The IAC choreographed the anti-corruption campaign against the UPA
government.72 Established in 2010, it held two rallies in Delhi, which did
not initially attract much public attention or participation until Arvind
Kejriwal, who was spearheading it, decided to rope in Anna Hazare, a 74-
year-old self-styled Gandhian who had established himself as a crusader
against corruption in Maharashtra after having forced some corrupt
ministers to resign. Once Hazare was on board, the IAC campaign took off
and began dominating media headlines. No one had heard of it until March
2011 but by mid-April it had captured the front pages and prime time slots
and remained in the headlines for the entire year. Multiple media platforms
helped the campaign to garner support, which Time magazine listed among
the top ten news stories of 2011. It was the interface between different
media platforms, ranging from print and television to the Internet, that
created space for new forms of mass mobilization against corruption.73 Its
success lay in co-opting the television and mobile companies, event
managers, media personalities, and PR professionals to its cause.
Television’s role was the most crucial in providing the campaign with 24/7
coverage and often went far beyond that in actually campaigning for the
cause. It shaped the anti-government narrative and elevated its leaders to
the status of national heroes. This created a strong connect between the
protests and the growing sense of anger towards the Congress. It
encouraged large numbers of middle-class people—information technology
professionals, college students, doctors, and lawyers—to come out on the
streets in support of the protest.
The Congress leadership was caught off-guard by Hazare’s decision to
go on an indefinite fast in April 2011 to demand strong anti-corruption law,
bringing the government to its knees.74 He called it off after wresting a
major concession from the government: a Joint Drafting Committee (JDC)
comprising Hazare’s nominees and ministers to draft an anti-corruption bill.
He was also able to include in the committee several of his companions
from Team Anna as they were popularly known. Government termed this an
‘extra layer of consultation’ and a new experience, thus, according to
unelected activists, a legitimacy equivalent to that of elected
representatives.75 This allowed them to claim the mantle of being the ‘sole
spokesmen’ of civil society, giving a great fillip to the campaign against the
UPA government. In retrospect, this was a miscalculation that actually
bolstered IAC’s claim to be speaking not just for civil society but for the
nation as a whole.
Baba Ramdev too jumped into the fray, himself deciding to go on a fast,
which so worried the government that it took the unprecedented step of
sending three senior ministers, which included Pranab Mukherjee, to
receive the yoga entrepreneur at the airport in a bid to persuade him not to
go ahead with the protest. The talks, however, failed and Ramdev decided
to go ahead with his protest at Ramlila Maidan from 4 June. He began his
fast, but by midnight the security forces swooped down on the maidan. Six
years later, Mukherjee admitted that the airport visit was a ‘misjudgement’
on his part and he ‘should not have done it’.76 This error was compounded
by the midnight crackdown when Ramdev did not break the fast at the
agreed time. It was clear that the government didn’t have a cohesive plan on
how to deal with him. The midnight arrest was a clear case of government
overreach for which the Supreme Court reprimanded the UPA government
and Delhi Police. This fiasco contributed to turning the tide of public
opinion against the Congress.
 Meanwhile, Hazare decided to go on fast again on 16 August 2011. This
time, in an ill-advised move, the Delhi Police arrested him just as he was
preparing to leave for Gandhi Samadhi at Rajghat to press for a strong
Lokpal.77 His arrest on 20 August 2011 was the last straw on the camel’s
back, prefiguring the fall of the Congress.78 In the end, government
negotiators defused the crisis and persuaded Hazare to break his fast before
things spun totally out of control.79 The standoff ended only when the
government convened a special debate in the Lok Sabha on the proposed
Jan Lokpal Bill.80
At its peak, few agitations have captured the public imagination quite as
the IAC did. It took Delhi by storm and garnered wide swathes of public
support because corruption arouses widespread anger in India. It was not,
however, a spontaneous campaign but one conceived and backed by
activists affiliated with or sympathetic to the RSS.81 Officially they denied
participation even while eager to take credit for the storm that shook New
Delhi in the summer of 2011. The campaign couldn’t have succeeded
without their active support. Even at the height of the agitation it was
apparent that it wasn’t just disgust at corruption and the appointment of a
Lokpal that animated the campaign; it was essentially an RSS-sponsored
campaign to dislodge the Congress government. Prashant Bhushan, a
leading light of this campaign, acknowledged this much later when he
admitted that the anti-corruption campaign was propped up by the BJP–
RSS to discredit and remove the Congress from power and easing the path
for a BJP takeover.82 This agitation faded once the assortment of ‘right-
wing groups who were providing “boots on the ground” ’ gradually and
quietly withdrew their helping hand. The Congress defeats in a string of
assembly elections in 2012–13 was very much a consequence of this; even
though the government had brought the Lokpal bill to parliament, which
was passed in 2013.83 However, the passing of the Lokpal legislation did
not prevent the defeat of the Congress in the general elections held a year
later. No Lokpal was appointed until 2017, not even in Delhi, whose Chief
Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, was a leading force behind the campaign.
Clearly, the removal of the Congress from power at the Centre was the main
goal and the rest, including the appointment of a Lokpal, was less
important.84
 End of the road
The anti-corruption protests took a huge toll on the credibility of the UPA
and the Congress party. This agitation was a catalyst in the decline and fall
of the UPA. It served to create a national common sense that Congress was
a metaphor for corruption. It crystallized public opinion against the
government and paved the way for a strongman alternative to a floundering
Congress-led coalition. A senior minister acknowledged that the UPA had
failed to deal with the anti-corruption campaign against it notwithstanding a
major victory in 2009.85 This campaign played a much larger role in
weakening the Congress than its actual size and scope would indicate. The
Lokpal Bill, the Food Security Act, and laws for women’s safety, all
progressive measures, were unable to undo the damage inflicted by this
campaign. Thereafter there was a free fall. While in 2011 the fallout of the
anti-corruption campaign was difficult to gauge, it was clear even then that
the government had alienated important social constituencies. It
fundamentally generated a political mood that promoted the BJP’s anti-
Congress crusade. It opened the gates for the right-wing to enter the gates
and take over political institutions.
Two governments, the Congress government in Delhi led by Sheila Dixit
and the UPA government, lost power essentially to this campaign. It
prepared the pitch for the BJP to be catapulted to power in 2014 and the
IAC transitioned into a political party (Aam Aadmi Party [AAP]), which
launched its political career on the shoulders of anti-corruption politics and
this indirectly helped the right-wing forces come to power. Barely a year
after its formation, the AAP, which had appropriated the Congress’s aam
aadmi platform made a dramatic debut in the Delhi legislative elections in
December 2013, crushing the Congress in the capital. The Congress,
fighting with its back to the wall, lost the battle on the corruption issue
although it had introduced the RTI, the Whistle Blowers Bill, Citizen’s
Right to Grievance Bill, and the Judicial Accountability and Standards bill,
among other transparency and accountability — measures to curb
corruption. But in the end, this could not stem the tide against the Congress;
in the end, the big winner was the BJP. It reaped the bumper anti-Congress
harvest which the IAC campaign had unleashed. The Congress lost out
because of its mishandling of the anti-corruption agitation and
ineffectiveness in combating corruption allegations that had a shattering
impact on its electoral fortunes. The BJP clearly sensed the decline in the
government’s ability to resolve issues and swiftly moved into the political
vacuum.86 Their calculation was simple: UPA is melting, Congress is
sinking, and here is a great opportunity to corner it, and they succeeded
remarkably well in putting the Congress on the mat. They disrupted
parliament on a daily basis to force the prime minister to resign. The tactic
was to disrupt and disallow debate and, at the same time, insist on a debate
as a condition for the passage of important legislation such as the NFSA.
The disruption of parliament for months over 2G eventually became the
government’s Achilles heel. Sonia Gandhi blamed the BJP’s ‘obstructionist’
tactics for the problems in getting crucial legislation, such as the Land
Acquisition and Food Security Bills, passed in parliament.87 Both Sushma
Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, the leaders of the opposition in the Lok Sabha and
Rajya Sabha, justified disruption as a legitimate means of parliamentary
functioning through which a government is made accountable and therefore
in itself a very important function.88
The UPA government ran out of steam just when India’s constitutional
democracy began addressing inequality and policies for marginalized
groups and their access to constitutional guarantees. Sonia Gandhi went
ahead with a social agenda, bringing together elements in her party and the
government with the political support of the Left parties and civil society
groups. ‘The steps taken by the UPA in ten years were radical for any
conservative society. There was a backlash against the Congress which was
seen to be anti-right.’89
Although the effort was modest it was attacked both by the capitalist
class and the media, who were inclined to support the BJP because it was
more pro-business. The drift within the Congress party and its government
encouraged the corporate world and media to openly pitch for Modi, who,
on the strength of their support, claimed the inevitability of being voted to
power. The public debate on the merits of government’s social agenda was
overtaken by the 2G, Coalgate, and Commonwealth Games controversies,
which took a front seat.90 The BJP’s mantra of ‘less government, more
governance’ was supposed to be the blueprint to promote economic growth.
Corporate media chose to represent social welfare measures as bottlenecks
to economic growth, presenting Gujarat as a haven for business and growth.
The reality, however, of the claims of the Gujarat model was extremely
questionable, its popularity a sign of things to come: the prevailing socio-
political paradigm was pushed aside to make way for a right-wing takeover.

Notes
1. For details on this aspect, see Zoya Hasan, Congress After Indira: Policy, Power, Political
Change (1984–2009), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, see Chapter 4, pp. 97–122.
2. The varied criticisms of the UPA are discussed in Maitreesh Ghatak,Parikshit Ghosh, and
Ashok Kotwal, ‘Growth in the Time of UPA: Myths and Reality’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 49, no. 16, 19 Apr. 2014.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Sumit Ganguly, ‘The UPA 2: Looking Back, Looking Forward’, Heinrich Boell Foundation,
29 Jan. 2014, https://in.boell.org/en/2014/01/29/UPA 2-looking-back-looking-forward.
Accessed 7 Mar. 2020.
6. Yamini Aiyar and Michael Walton, ‘Rights, Accountability and Citizenship: Examining
India’s Emerging Welfare State’, Oct. 2014, Accountability Initiative, Engaging
Accountability: Working Paper Series. https://www.cprindia.org/research/papers/rights-
accountability-and-citizenship-examining-indias-emerging-welfare-state. Accessed 9 Nov.
2019.
7. Congress-Left differences on the Indo-US nuclear deal discussed in Hasan, Congress After
Indira. See Chapter 8.
8. For a discussion of this, see Hasan, Chapters 5 and 6 in Congress After Indira.
9. Interview with Kumar Ketkar, 12 Mar. 2020.
10. Interview with Mohan Gopal, 28 Feb. 2020.
11. For an assessment of Manmohan Singh, see Peter Ronald deSouza, ‘Five-Point Nobody?’,
Outlook, 19 May 2014; Harish Khare, ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There?’, Outlook, 19 May
2014; Vinod K. Jose, ‘Falling Man: Manmohan Singh at the Centre of the Storm’, The
Caravan, Oct. 2011, https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/falling-man/4. Accessed 26 Jul.
2020.
12. See Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Backstage: The Story Behind India’s Growth Years, New Delhi:
Rupa Publications, 2020, pp. 233–34.
13. Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan
Singh, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2014.
14. R. Jagannathan, ‘PM’s Surrender to Sonia: Baru Proves What We Already Knew’, Firstpost,
14 Apr. 2014, https://www.firstpost.com/politics/pms-surrender-to-sonia-baru-proves-what-
we-already-knew-1477069.html. Accessed 18 Nov. 2021.
15. Manini Chatterjee, ‘Manmohan Sting: Baton in the Air, PM Batters Modi’, The Telegraph, 4
Jan. 2014.
16. Mark Tully, Personal communication, 30 Oct. 2019. Mark Tully was the Chief of Bureau for
the BBC in New Delhi for over two decades. He is an acclaimed author who has written
extensively on India.
17. ‘Rahul Gandhi Trashes Ordinance, Shames Government’, The Times of India, 28 Sep. 2013.
18. Ibid.
19. Ahluwalia, Backstage, pp. 342–4.
20. ‘Transcript of the Q&A Portion of the Prime Minister’s Press Conference on January 4,
2014’, The Hindu, 4 Jan. 2014.
21. ‘BJP’s Politics Is One of Hubris and Anger’, Rahul Gandhi Interview to Varghese George,
The Hindu, 24 Apr. 2014.
22. ‘Dual Centres of Power Worked Well: PM’, Business Standard, 3 Jan. 2014.
23. Ibid.
24. Pranab Mukherjee Interview to Raj Chengappa, India Today, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 36.
25. Ibid.
26. Raj Chengappa, ‘The Insiders Story’, India Today, 23 Oct. 2017.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Harish Khare, ‘An Opportunity, Not a Crisis’, The Hindu, 20 Sep. 2012.
33. Editorial, ‘Congress Today’, Economic and Political Weekly, 45, no. 40, 2 Oct. 2010.
34. Swaraj Thapa, ‘Now or Never, Says Sonia; and Party Falls in Line’, The Indian Express, 10
Mar. 2010.
35. Zoya Hasan, Agitation to Legislation: Negotiating Equity and Justice in India, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 138.
36. Neena Vyas, ‘Government Develops Cold Feet’, The Hindu, 9 Mar. 2010.
37. Akshat Kaushal, ‘Power Centre or Toothless Body?’, Business Standard, 20 Jan. 2013.
38. T. J. Rajalakshmi, ‘Wages of Tokenism’, Frontline, 11 Feb. 2011.
39. Kaushal, ‘Power Centre or Toothless Body?’.
40. Ibid. Jean Dreze cited in Akshat Kaushal.
41. Sanjay Ruparelia, ‘Modi’s Saffron Democracy’, Dissent Magazine, Spring 2019.
42. Mihir Sharma, ‘Farewell, a Golden Age’, Business Standard, 11 May 2014.
43. Harish Khare, ‘2014: The Great Middle Bulge Is Back to Business’, Hardnews, 5 Dec. 2013,
p.17.
44. Editorial, ‘Monstrous Indian Income Inequality’, Economic and Political Weekly, 52, no. 40,
7 Oct. 2017.
45. Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, ‘Indian Income Inequality, 1922–2015: From British Raj
to Billionaire Raj?’, WID. World Working Paper Series N° 2017/11, World Inequality
Database, World Inequality Lab, 2017. wid.
world/dev/document/chancelpiketty2017widworld Accessed 17 Nov. 2021.
46. Ibid.
47. The numbers and wealth of billionaires have risen dramatically for a relatively poor country,
with many feeling marginalized from the growth that has occurred. SeeAditi Gandhi and
Michael Walton, ‘Where Do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 47, no. 40, 6 Oct. 2012.
48. Interviews conducted for Congress After Indira and Agitation to Legislation highlight the
problems facing Congress in undertaking these legislations.
49. Editorial, ‘Food for Politics’, The Hindu, 6 Jul. 2013.
50. Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, ‘Drowning in Scams’, Frontline, 31 May 2013.
51. Mritunjoy Mohanty, ‘The Growth Model Has Come Undone’, The Hindu, 11 Jul. 2012.
52. Ibid.
53. Maitreesh Ghatak et al., quoted in Mayank Mishra, ‘UPA’s Decade Wasn’t All That Dark’,
Business Standard, 15 Apr. 2014.
54. Credit Suisse India put out the names of the top ten business groups which owed about Rs 7.5
lakh crore to the banks. Piyush Pandey, ‘The Biggest Ever Fire Sale of Indian Corporate
Assets Has Begun to Tide over Bad Loans Crisis’, The Hindu, 8 May 2016.
55. Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar, ‘Ex-CAG Vinod Rai’s Appointment as Bank Board Head Raises
Debate on Propriety’, Wire.in, 29 Feb. 2016, https://thewire.in/banking/ex-cag-vinod-rais-
appointment-as-bank-board-head-raises-debate-on-propriety.
56. Nistula Hebbar and Sandeep Phukan, ‘We lost the perception battle in 2014: Salman
Khurshid’, The Hindu, 30 May 2018.
57. Sanjay Datta, ‘CAG: Govt Lost Rs 10.7 Lakh Crore by Not Auctioning Coal Blocks’, The
Times of India, 23 Mar. 2012.
58. Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly, L2, no. 57, 30 Dec. 2017. p. 7.
59. Ibid.
60. ‘Credibility Crisis’, Frontline, 13–26 Aug. 2011.
61. M. K. Venu, ‘Saving Crony Capitalists from Raghuram Rajan’, Wire.in, 20 Jun. 2016.
https://thewire.in/politics/saving-crony-capitalists-from-raghuram-rajan. Accessed 23 Jan.
2018.
62. India’s tax dispute with Vodafone Plc revolves around its purchase of Hutch Essar in 2007 for
$11 billion. ‘Warned UPA of Retrospective Tax Law Change against Vodafone: Montek
Singh Ahluwalia’, Livemint, 13 Feb. 2020, https://www.livemint.com/politics/policy/warned-
upa-of-retrospective-tax-law-change-against-vodafone-montek-singh-ahluwalia-
11581594666167.html. Accessed 20 Mar. 2020.
63. Interview with Kumar Ketkar, 12 Mar. 2020.
64. Banker Deepak Parekh,Wipro’s Azim Premji,Mahindra & Mahindra’s Keshub Mahindra, and
Thermax’s Anu Aga wrote a letter to the prime minister on the government’s lack of policy
reforms and that large projects were stuck. Sunil Jain, ‘UPA versus India Inc’, The Financial
Express, 31 Dec. 2011.
65. The Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill, which was supposed to
replace the archaic Land Acquisition Act, 1894, states that ‘a humane, informed, consultative
and transparent process for land acquisition for industrialization, development of essential
infrastructural facilities and urbanization with the least disturbance to the owners of the land
and other affected families and provide just and fair compensation to the affected families
whose lands have been acquired,’ T. J. Rajalakshmi, ‘A Law and Its Losers’, Frontline, 29,
no. 26, 29 Dec.–11 Jan. 2013.
66. Of the total projects that were on a standstill, land acquisition problems affected only 8 per
cent. Of the 804 projects stalled, 97 were in that situation due to unfavourable market
conditions, 95 because they had not received clearances (unrelated to environmental issues),
94 due to lack of promoter interest, and 84 for lack of funds and 34 due to environmental
clearances. For details, see ‘What Policy Paralysis? Projects Got Stuck during UPA due to
Poor Market, Not Land Bill’, Firstpost, 28 Apr. 2015,
https://www.firstpost.com/business/policy-paralysis-projects-got-stuck-upa-due-poor-market-
not-land-bill-
2217104.html#:~:text=The%20party%20attacked%20the%20Congress,Modi%20becomes%2
0the%20prime%20minister. Accessed 20 Nov. 2021.
67. James Manor discussed policy paralysis under UPA in an interview with Prashant K. Jha,
‘Rahul Gandhi Erratic and Intermittent; Congress Organisation Chaotic: Manor’, The
Hindustan Times, 24 Feb. 2015.
68. ‘Rahul Gandhi Pushes for Middle Path in Development’, Sakal Times, 21 Dec. 2014.
69. Jatin Anand, ‘Rahul Gandhi Breaks Silence on Jayanthi’s Charges’, The Hindu, 5 Feb. 2015.
70. On this see Rob Jenkins,Loraine Kennedy, and Partha Mukhopadhyay, Special Economic
Zones in India: Interrogating the Nexus of Land, Development and Urbanization, Sage
Publications, New Delhi, 2015.
71. Maya Chadda, ‘India in 2011: The State Encounters the People’, Asian Survey, 52, no. 1
Jan./Feb. 2012, pp. 114–29.
72. For details on the anti-corruption campaign and the Lokpal issue, see Hasan, Agitation to
Legislation. See Chapter 2, pp. 74–122.
73. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Am I Still Anna When Nobody Is Watching’, The Hindu, 7 Sep. 2011.
74. See Partha Chatterjee, ‘Against Corruption = Against Politics’, Kafila, 28 Aug. 2011,
https://kafila.online/2011/08/28/against-corruption-against-politics-partha-chatterjee/.
Accessed 20 Nov. 2021; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Our Corruption, Our Selves’, Kafila, 30 Aug.
2011, https://kafila.online/2011/08/30/our-corruption-our-selves-arjun-appadurai. Accessed
20 Nov. 2021.
75. The government nominees included Union Ministers Pranab Mukherjee (chairman), P.
Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, M. Veerappa Moily (convener), and Salman Khurshid. Apart
from Anna Hazare himself, his nominees included former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan (co-
chairman), lawyer and civil rights activist Prashant Bhushan, Karnataka Lokayukta Justice
Santosh Hegde, right to information campaigner Arvind Kejriwal, V. Venkatesan, and
Purnima S. Tripathi. ‘Hazare Effect’, Frontline, 6 May 2011.
76. C. G.Manoj, ‘Meeting Baba Ramdev: I Should Not Have Done It, Admits Pranab
Mukherjee’, The Indian Express, 25 Oct. 2017.
77. For details of his arrest, Rahul Tripathi, ‘The Story Behind Anna Arrest’, The Indian Express,
24 Aug. 2011.
78. Interview with Kumar Ketkar, 12 Mar. 2020.
79. Purnima S. Tripathi, ‘Coming Adrift’, Frontline, 28, no. 22, 22 Oct.–22 Nov. 2011.
80. The Lokpal Act (2013) provided for setting up a Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayukta at the
level of the states. It stated that the body would comprise: (a) a chairperson, who is or has
been a Chief Justice of India (CJI) or is or has been a judge of the Supreme Court or an
eminent person who fulfils the eligibility specified; and (b) members, not exceeding eight,
out of whom 50 per cent were to be judicial members. The selection of the chairperson and
the members of Lokpal shall be through a selection committee comprising the prime minister,
speaker of Lok Sabha, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the CJI or a sitting Supreme
Court judge nominated by the CJI, and an eminent jurist to be nominated by the president of
India on the basis of recommendations of the first four members of the selection committee.
81. A seminar on black money organized in April 2011 by the Vivekananda India Foundation
(think tank affiliated to the RSS) set the ball rolling. Ajit Doval, National Security Advisor to
the NDA government and the RSS, played a key role in the anti-corruption campaign and in
the turn of events leading to the fall of the Congress. See Praveen Donthi, ‘How Ties with the
Think Tanks Vivekananda International Foundation and India Foundation Enhance Ajit
Doval’s Influence’, The Caravan, 5 Nov. 2017,
https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/vivekananda-international-india-foundation-ajit-doval-
influence. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
82. ‘Prashant Bhushan Says India Against Corruption Movement “Propped up by BJP-RSS” ’,
Scroll.in, 15 Sep. 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/society/the-independence-of-the-
judiciary-has-collapsed-prashant-bhushan/article33193377.ece. Accessed 14 Feb. 2021.
83. Amrita Johri,Anjali Bhardwaj, and Shekhar Singh, ‘Lokpal Act 2014’, Economic and
Political Weekly, XLIX, no. 5, 1 Feb. 2014.
84. For details, see Hasan, Agitation to Legislation, pp. 112–4.
85. Sandeep Phukan, ‘Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot Were the “princelings” of Congress,
says Manish Tiwari’, The Hindu, 3 Aug. 2020.
86. Mani Shankar Aiyar, ‘The Four Year Toll’, The Indian Express, 6 Jun. 2018.
87. Sanjay Jha, The Great Unravelling: India After 2014, New Delhi: Westland Publications,
2020. p. 198.
88. Anita Katyal, ‘ “Disrupting Parliament Is Important”: BJP’s Words from Opposition Days
Come Back to Haunt It’, Scroll.in, 24 Dec. 2014, https://scroll.in/article/696910/disrupting-
parliament-is-important-bjps-words-from-opposition-days-come-back-to-haunt-it. Accessed
2 Apr. 2021.
89. Interview with Anand Sahay (Asian Age), New Delhi, 29 June 2020. Sahay is a senior
journalist, columnist, and editor based out of New Delhi. He writes regularly for different
print and digital media platforms.
90. See Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems
of India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 101–6.
 3
The Gujarat Model and the Turn to the Right

The 2014 general elections brought about a major turnaround in Indian

politics. For the first time since Independence, India elected a right-wing
party with an absolute majority in parliament. The BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) captured all or most of the seats in some states
and reduced the Congress tally to a mere 44 of the 543 seats in the Lok
Sabha, a shocking come-down for the party whose history is integral to
India’s foundational narrative. The Congress polled 19.3 per cent of the
votes, declining from 28.6 per cent in the 2009 election.1
The steep fall of the Congress and the dramatic victory of the BJP
signalled a change in the discursive and ideological space of Indian politics.
This election marked the end of an epoch dominated by the Congress and
its secular politics. The BJP defined the election as an election for change,
and the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, as the harbinger of change,
an answer to the problems of weak leadership that had bedevilled the
Congress. The party was unable to match his leadership claims. The BJP’s
well-crafted, resource-rich and aggressive campaign was bankrolled by
corporate India. No election prior to this one had witnessed such a vast
expenditure of money.2 This election also saw an extraordinary rise in
media power, with politics playing out in TV studios and the social media.
More than anything else, the RSS played the most decisive role in the
massive mobilization of voters urging and motivating them to come out and
vote against the Congress, which it was determined to remove from power.
The Gujarat model of growth and development was presented as an
alternative to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government which
was attacked for ruining the economy. This appealed to a large section of
people who felt that the UPA government had stagnated after the 2G scam
unravelled and other controversies followed in its wake. The BJP claimed
the economy would grow again under Modi by replicating the Gujarat
model of development. For several years prior to the election, Modi had
extolled the virtues of this model and projected it as a perfect formula for
growth that could be replicated in the rest of India. The substantive policy
interventions of the UPA government were overshadowed by the powerful
propaganda and exaggerated claims about the Gujarat model, which Modi
claimed had outperformed India under his leadership. The Gujarat model
launched his bid for prime ministership and encouraged voters to believe
that it could transform India’s economic fortunes.
This chapter examines the Gujarat model and the right-wing shift in
national politics brought about by it, and the resultant defeat of the
Congress. It then discusses the Congress response, notably the diffuse and
undirected structure of its campaign, among a concatenation of reasons that
contributed to its massive defeat in 2014. The Gujarat model was the
biggest talking point of the election campaign. The starring role of that
model of growth and Modi’s economic management of his home state in the
2014 victory of the BJP is apparent but the fact is that it was deeply
problematic in economic, social, and political terms. The hype surrounding
it was so overwhelming that the Congress was barely able to present its own
policy programmes and achievements, let alone point to its limitations. The
BJP’s strident propaganda around the Gujarat model won the support of
economic elites and the middle classes. It endeared the BJP, under Modi’s
leadership, to corporate tycoons and the media, which therefore made it
more appealing to large sections of the electorate.

The flawed Gujarat model

The Gujarat model was the pivot of BJP’s campaign in the election. Modi
began his campaign soon after he won the state assembly election for the
third time in December 2012 on the strength of his achievements in Gujarat
in terms of economic growth.3 Growth and development soon became
buzzwords as if no growth or development whatsoever had taken place in
India or in other states prior to this. The Congress leadership, for its part,
tried to fence him into the 2002 riots but he brilliantly reworked the script
by moving the focus to economic growth. Modi’s transformation from a
regional politician to a decisive leader with a clear development agenda was
nothing short of extraordinary.
The Gujarat model was never very precisely defined, although Modi had
been extolling it since 2005. The reinvention had begun in 2005 when the
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF) ranked Gujarat as the highest-ranking state
in India for ‘Economic Freedom’.4 The Gujarat government was quick to
take advantage of this praise from the Congress-dominated think tank by
taking out full-page advertisements in the national newspapers advertising
the ‘honour’. The second event was the translocation of the Tata Motors
factory for the production of the Nano model from Singur in West Bengal to
Sanand in Gujarat in 2008 consequent to controversies over land acquisition
for the project in the Communist-ruled state.5 The Nano project was given
sops of Rs. 30,000 crores to move its car plant to Gujarat in addition to
provision of land at throwaway prices, free electricity, and tax breaks. In
one stroke, Modi established his reputation as a pro-business chief minister
who had enticed a top industry leader, spurned by politicians in West
Bengal, to his state. At the time, Ratan Tata famously said: ‘You’re stupid if
you’re not in Gujarat.’6 Modi’s hard selling began from there. Soon the
captains of industry were queuing up in Ahmedabad to issue certificates of
economic excellence to him. Gujarat was widely praised by business elites
as a single-window clearance state that facilitated investment and growth.7
The Vibrant Gujarat Summit, launched in 2003, was the third part of this
story. From early 2013, the ‘Gujarat group’ of businessmen had been
mobilizing support to counter the unfavourable opinion of him and to
support his economic plans. The ‘Resurgent Gujarat’ theme was intended to
present Gujarat as a booming industrial hub. India’s top business leaders
attended these summits and were generally effusive in their praise for Modi.
Organized every two years, these flagship summits showcased Gujarat’s
economic development to attract private investment, laid out a red carpet
for domestic and foreign investors offering attractive incentives leading to
hyped-up investment commitments. Although these were mostly proposals
for future commitments, extravagant promises of investment were made by
industry leaders and foreign investors.8 They did not necessarily result in
actual investment or in generating the projected employment. Between
2003 and 2011, Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were signed by the
Gujarat government and industrialists, pledging an investment of 40 lakh
crores in the state. In reality, however, only 8 per cent of the promised
investment, amounting to 3 lakh crores, was actually invested in the state.
At the summits held in 2013, 2015, and 2017, another 86 lakh crores was
pledged. No one knows how much has actually been realized. These
summits did, however, provide a perfect platform for Modi to redefine his
image as the ‘development man’ India awaited. They received huge media
coverage and consolidated his image as a pro-business leader.
It is well known that Gujarat has been a well-performing state in terms
of GDP growth, among the top three states in the growth of per capita
income over the past three decades.9 It is also equally well known that
Gujarat’s economic achievements are not recent, many predating the BJP
government there. But everything is claimed to have happened since 2001,
just as all development took place in India after 2014 when Modi took over
from his predecessors.10 The average GDP growth rate in Gujarat was
above the national average but in line with the growth rates of comparable
large states such as Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.11 Both Maharashtra and
Tamil Nadu had fared better than Gujarat in the overall growth trajectory,
but the latter was hailed as the great success story. Moreover, although the
truth was not hidden, people still believed that Gujarat had done better and
that other states would do well to emulate it.
Notwithstanding the state’s success in relation to economic growth,
industry, and infrastructure, its poor record in social development is also
well documented.12 The benefits of growth have been concentrated within a
small percentage of the state’s population, the urban rich, the middle class,
and the upper castes, while the rural and urban poor and the lower castes
had been increasingly marginalized.13 The state’s high growth was
associated with stagnant or even declining material standards for a
significant proportion of the people.14 The condition of its poor remained
unchanged.15 Its high growth was not reflected in improvements in
employment, wages, health, or education. It fared poorly in terms of its
infant mortality rate, sex ratio, and child sex ratio. Evidently Gujarat’s pivot
towards large industries had come at a high price in terms of human
development. The strategy to attract industries by providing public
resources to industrialists left meagre resources for education, healthcare,
and the poor. Notwithstanding high levels of private investment and the
establishment of a large number of companies, employment generation was
low. Indeed, the ‘pro-corporate’ strategy worsened the human development
indices in the state.16 Christophe Jaffrelot described the Gujarat model as
one of jobless growth or ‘growth with minimal development’.17 It was
effectively a capital-intensive model of industrial investment with very little
employment generation and low levels of social expenditure in relation to
other states.18
What stood out in the Gujarat model was the belief that rapid economic
growth will only result from a spurt in private investment. The state
government therefore promoted Special Economic Zones (SEZs), easier
land acquisitions, and stricter labour laws as critical aspects of the model.
BJP sold the idea that attracting investment to a state amounts to
development. In consequence, Gujarat became a very popular destination
for Indian business.19 Big business jumped on the Modi bandwagon,
believing in his carefully crafted image of an economic reformer and claims
that India would once again reach 8 per cent economic growth under his
leadership.

Corporate sector and media adulation

The Gujarat model fits very well with the corporate sector’s view that the
primary role of the state is to promote business. Gujarat’s growth had been
achieved through privatization and handing over sectors such as ports,
roads, rail, and power to corporate capital. It also extended to making land
easily available for private enterprise and commercial development. Not
surprisingly, Modi emerged as the favourite prime ministerial candidate of
the business elite. His claims were reinforced by corporate adulation for
Modi during the Vibrant Gujarat summits. Surveys conducted prior to the
elections found that 75 per cent of the top corporate leaders wanted him to
be the next prime minister. For his part, he repeatedly stressed the need to
promote ease of doing business and providing greater concessions to
business groups. This was just what the corporate sector wanted to hear.
Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, said he was proud of his
Gujarat roots and that ‘in Narendra Bhai, we have a leader with a grand
vision’.20 ‘Today people are talking about the China model of development
in Gujarat. But the day is not far when people will talk about the Gujarat
model of growth in China,’ proclaimed Anand Mahindra, chairman of the
Mahindra Group, at the 2013 Vibrant Gujarat summit.21 Even some top
business leaders who were critical of the Gujarat government following the
2002 violence were seduced by his ‘pro-capitalist’ economic agenda and
began lavishing praise on him.
Major corporate sector leaders supported his candidacy even before he
was officially nominated as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. This
development significantly tilted the scales in his favour within and outside
his own party. This was the first time that the big corporate leaders were
openly one-sided in their support for a prime ministerial candidate and the
political party he represented, neatly foregrounding the issue of growth and
linking that to Modi’s decisiveness, which to them appeared as the only way
to lift the economy. It is significant that, even as the support of corporate
capital was propelling Modi to the top, what it also signified was his
readiness to accommodate the demands of capital to expand in any way it
wanted under his leadership. This can be judged from the staggering
subsidies offered to various business groups in addition to Tata for its Nano
plant. The CAG report for 2012–13 noted that the Gujarat government had
provided ‘undue benefits’ of over Rs 750 crores to Reliance Industries Ltd.
(RIL), Essar Steel, and Adani Power Ltd. (APL), causing grave loss to the
state exchequer.
It is not surprising that the BJP has complete monopoly over corporate
funding. The party received massive amounts in corporate donations and
easily outspent its rivals. Record funds flowed to the BJP, which, according
to one independent estimate, ended up spending over Rs 5,000 crores on
just advertising, only a little less than the $986 million that US President
Barack Obama spent on his 2012 presidential campaign in a country where
the per capita income is 30 times higher than that in India. That is why the
Economic and Political Weekly called the BJP’s victory ‘the biggest
corporate heist in history’.22
In addition, to the corporate sector, BJP garnered the support of the
urban middle classes, who saw Modi as a leader capable of facilitating
economic growth. His focus on economic growth struck a chord with the
middle classes, the lower middle classes, and less well-off youth.23 If,
however, there’s one sector that powered his rise to the national stage, it is
the media. It played a significant role in his projection in the election.
Reporting on the election almost entirely focussed on him, rarely on the
opposition. He had assumed a larger than life dimension, dwarfing all other
elements of the political discourse and public agenda. Media was
effectively used to create a wave in his favour24; media outlets (television,
newspapers, and the Internet) were all backing him. The wall to wall
coverage spread over six months was staggering and unprecedented by any
standard.25 Television news channels had little time for anyone other than
Modi, who was seen as the only hope against the UPA. This was further
enhanced by the massive deployment of modern communication technology
and an unprecedented techno-led mobilization. This included social media
trolls, fake videos, WhatsApp groups, and the like, with Modi himself
addressing 437 rallies across India.
For weeks, any speech by Modi in any remote district ran live on several
channels. Modi dominated over a third of prime time news telecasts on five
major channels.26 From 1 to 11 May, Modi’s screen time crossed the 50 per
cent mark, six times that which Rahul Gandhi received.27 The paid news
phenomenon acquired a new dimension altogether, with entire media
houses under pressure to act as the wind in the sails of the Modi wave.
Media became the BJP’s principal campaign platform.
The Congress, on the other hand, had no media strategy, no answer to the
media blitzkrieg, especially television. It underestimated the import of
BJP’s media clout and ‘news channels as the main battle tank for the Modi
assault on the UPA regime’, just not taking communication seriously.
Congress was slow to wake up to the reality that communication had
undergone a revolutionary change with profound effects on politics. It was
only after the party’s defeat that Sonia Gandhi singled out the
communications strategy as one of its major failures, saying that ‘the
message of party was lost in the din and dust raised by an aggressive and
polarizing campaign by our opponents, which was backed by unlimited
resources and a hostile media.’28 While corruption was highlighted, all that
the government had achieved was never broadcast because the party was
unable to communicate it effectively, observed an editor.29 The laid-back
response of Congress spokespersons to their bellicose BJP counterparts
amplified the perception that the Congress was no match for them. The BJP
and its social media networks would circulate all manner of misinformation
with no refutation from the Congress, making it appear to be a party that
had abandoned all hope.
The Indian media did not raise questions about the Gujarat model either.
Indeed, it was the foreign media that questioned Modi’s record rather than
their gullible Indian counterparts. The media’s eagerness to prop up the
Gujarat model was an important reason why it became a major talking point
in the run-up to the elections. Media showcased its success in delivering
both growth and development, and even improving its social indicators,
thus vindicating the claims made on its behalf.
In spite of the tardy progress made by the state in improving human and
social development, people believed that Gujarat had done better than other
states, with facts not mattering in this debate. The electorate outside Gujarat
fell for the tall claims, hoping that Modi would generate economic
transformation and productive employment across India using the magic he
had woven to produce high growth in Gujarat, thus buying into the myth of
the Gujarat model.30 Many voters therefore entered the polling booths
under the impression that Gujarat resembled developed countries like Japan
or Germany and that letting Modi take charge of India provided a prospect
for India in its entirety to follow suit. The uncritical acceptance of the
quintessentially pro-business model signalled a rightward shift in the
ideological ground of Indian politics.31 Not surprisingly, any criticism of
the model fell on deaf ears, with his supporters dismissing such scepticism
as habitual anti-BJP rhetoric, while the political opponents of the BJP were
neither able to convince people about the inherent weaknesses in BJP’s
economic ideas nor sell the growth experiences of other state governments
that had performed as well as Gujarat or outperformed it.

Gujarat model of politics

Politically, the Gujarat model means centralized governance, concentration
of power in the supreme leader, and decimation of opposition. The
distinctive political feature of the Gujarat model was the branding of Modi
as a tough and decisive leader who would cut through inefficient state
apparatus to usher in development. Modi was nonetheless still viewed as a
polarizing politician who was unable or disinclined to control mass violence
in February 2002 ignited by the massacre of Hindu pilgrims returning from
Ayodhya on the Sabarmati Express.32 He had been accused of complicity in
the mass violence or, at the very least, looking the other way. Although
judicial inquiry had cleared him of any legal responsibility for the violence,
he wasn’t able to wipe off the stain.33 The economic propaganda for the
Gujarat model proved extremely useful here, helping to divert attention
from his communal record. Also, the reluctance of the Congress to talk
about the Gujarat violence gave him a free pass. Even when it was in power
at the Centre in 2004, the party was hesitant to take action on the Gujarat
violence and fix responsibility for it. This allowed him to evade
responsibility and accountability for the violence under his watch; he
indeed played the victim card to the hilt to claim that the accusations were a
conspiracy to malign his character. At the same time, the BJP mounted a
counter-offensive on the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres in the aftermath of Indira
Gandhi’s assassination, diverting attention even further from the 2002
violence. In this competitive blame game, the Gujarat violence became less
important than that unleashed in 1984 and it was the Congress that needed
to defend itself rather than Modi, a victim.
Focus on the Gujarat model created an impression that Modi had gone
beyond the communal agenda. It helped him refashion his image by
projecting, in the words of Arvind Rajagopal, a ‘developmentalist’ stance,
‘redefined as both aspirational and nationalist’.34 Frequently used
expressions such as development, governance, and decisiveness succeeded
in deflecting attention from mass violence and the involvement of Hindu
extremism. It also overshadowed other negatives, such as centralization of
power and authoritarian tendencies, which are essential features of the
Gujarat model.35 This led to a widespread belief that in the trade-off
between Hindutva and development, BJP had opted for the latter.36 This
appealed to the middle classes who were disenchanted with the slowdown
in growth and the succession of crises that had engulfed the UPA
government. When economic growth began faltering, it presented the BJP
with a perfect opportunity to showcase the Gujarat model as the best option
for growth.
Undoubtedly, one part of the Gujarat model was connected with
privileging a business-friendly administration over investment in the social
sectors but another equally important part of it was pushing Muslims to the
margins. Social and political polarization and ‘the systematic reduction of
religious minorities to second class citizenship was a crucial part of this
model’.37 Muslims were not only excluded from the social and economic
systems but also expelled from their homes and neighbourhoods into
ghettos on the margins of the city. Pamphlets were distributed in
Ahmedabad calling upon people to neither do business with Muslim shops
nor work for or employ them and to avoid all social contact with them. It
was ‘a manual for demoting Muslims to the status of second rate citizens’.38
Jan Breman points out in this context that Gujarat was the original
laboratory of Hindutva and the RSS and a testing ground for the RSS’s
political agenda.
The Gujarat model had shown ‘scant regard for democratic principles of
inclusivity’.39 The BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate in the 2014
Lok Sabha election, although they constituted the largest minority in the
state and one-tenth of its population. Muslims were pushed out of the
system, first by making them electorally irrelevant and then invisible in the
public sphere through their electoral inconsequentiality. This resonated with
the Hindu base of the party, which believed that the Congress pandered to
minority communities for electoral advantage and that the BJP was
rectifying this overkill.40‘Modi did not reach out to Muslims even once
during his campaign to assuage any misgivings they may have had about
him as a prime minister.’41
For several months, the BJP’s campaign speeches sounded as if
governance and development were the overarching themes of Modi’s
political agenda. His speeches were replete with references to development
and no overt references to Hindu nationalism. However, the carefully
cultivated image of the ‘development man’ could not act as a catalyst for
victory throughout India without polarization and hate speech. The
communal campaign in Uttar Pradesh and Modi, having decided to contest
elections from Varanasi, exposed their doublespeak. The campaign was by
no means restricted to economic growth, inflation, corruption, and the
greatness of the Gujarat model of development. Rather, it was a classic
combination of both development and division. Modi spoke about
development but allowed other leaders and the Sangh Parivar to raise the
communal heat, with the RSS taking the lead in this while running the BJP
campaign in that state.42
Amit Shah (former Home Minister of Gujarat) took charge of the Uttar
Pradesh campaign. With this it took a decisive turn towards Hindutva which
became the central plank in the election. Following that, the Sangh
intensified its ‘save cow’ campaign and ‘love jihad’ propaganda. While
Modi proclaimed that he was interested only in economic development,
Shah was telling Hindus in western Uttar Pradesh that this election was an
opportunity to seek ‘revenge’ for the ‘insult’ inflicted during the communal
violence in Muzaffarnagar and ‘that they must not vote for parties who had
given compensation to those who killed Jats’.43 Shah’s vitriolic expression
was a reminder that polarization and violence was the focal point of the
election campaign, which was central to the BJP’s game plan.44 Shah
picked RSS men as poll coordinators in the state. Pointing later to the
growing presence of the RSS in the political sphere, Seshadri Chari, former
editor of the Organiser, said that Hindus have always been a majority in
India but the manifestation of majoritarianism has been reflected in the
cultural and social field.45 ‘Now it is reflected in the politics of the country.
A large number of foot soldiers in the BJP—RSS do believe that the
political Hindu has arrived,’ he observed.46 One right-wing Hindu leader
who had a front-row seat at Modi’s swearing-in as prime minister remarked
that now the ‘tables had turned’.47 The polls were a ‘setback to Muslim
politics’ used by ‘foreign and divisive forces to destroy our identity’, he
said.48
The larger strategy of polarizing the electorate through majoritarian
symbolism was writ large in BJP’s campaign speeches. An article by Ashish
Tripathi in the Times of India provides a timeline of the campaign.49 It
shows that Modi might not have deployed the Hindutva vocabulary, but
through his gestures, expressions, and symbols at his rallies he had kept
intact his image as the mascot of the Hindu Right. At a rally in Ghaziabad
(Uttar Pradesh), he accused the Congress government of promoting cow
slaughter and meat export, adding that the number of slaughterhouses was
increasing, as were incidents of cattle being stolen from villages. He added
that when India was waiting for another green revolution, the Congress was
planning a ‘pink revolution’ (meat export). While there was no overt
display of Hindutva here, the undercurrent cannot be missed with the same
political message being conveyed in a subterranean guise. The media,
however, dutifully highlighted the development dimension and underplayed
Hindutva, notes Irfan Ahmed.50 Modi’s decision to contest from Varanasi
further underlined the significance of Hindutva and the eagerness of both
the BJP and RSS to signal its centrality to their strategy in this crucial state.
During the last leg of his campaign, Modi slipped in Lord Ram’s name and
spoke with the Hindu God, a temple providing the backdrop of the stage
signalling the Hindutva underpinning of his campaign.
At the same time, the BJP pinned the blame for governance and
development bottlenecks on the corruption scandals which rocked the UPA
government (discussed in the previous chapter). The poll campaign was
centred on scams, weak governance, remote control from the 10 Janpath,
and ‘Maun Mohan Singh’. Modi categorized the ten years of UPA rule as a
‘wasted decade’.51 His party issued a booklet condemning the UPA’s term
in power as a ‘Dark Decade in Governance’.52 It projected the Congress
government as one that blocked reform and restricted business and growth
arising from Sonia Gandhi’s preference for welfare schemes and
entitlements. Modi’s image as a pro-business leader talking up the success
of the Gujarat model provided a clear alternative to the Congress model.53
The two approaches and the arguments backing them became the
intellectual counterpart of the BJP versus Congress electoral battle. Modi
stood for rapid growth, while the Congress was all about social welfare. His
supporters argued that redistribution could not occur without rapid growth.
They advocated a free rein for markets which would generate a surplus and
in turn trickle down to the masses. Modi went a step further, spelling out a
vision for the promotion of prosperity rather than combating poverty.
Spurring economic growth and facilitating ease of business to improve
opportunities became his principal message as opposed to promises of
greater public spending on social welfare measures. There was very little
support for the welfare model in his speeches, with critics hammering the
point that growth would falter if too much were spent on welfare. This
narrative gained such traction that the UPA’s record, which was not as bad
as the BJP had painted, was completely ignored.

Leadership Contest
Congress completely lost out in this election because it had no clear
strategy and no clear leader to head the campaign. Modi stressed his strong
leadership credentials in contrast to the feckless and weak Manmohan
Singh.54 His campaign based itself on his Vikas Purush image, which would
get the government moving and unshackle the paralysis of the UPA years.
This appealed to many people who felt that the UPA government had
stagnated since 2010 when the 2G scam burst onto the national scene,
followed, among other things, by an unbridled anti-corruption campaign. It
is well known that right-wing populists do not just feed on socio-economic
discontent but on a perception of ineffective governance, their great appeal
being a claim that they will replace it with a government that is effective
through its autocratic power. That was exactly the situation here.
Rahul Gandhi was reluctant to assume a leadership position, let alone
identify himself as a prime ministerial candidate for his party. In 2009, the
Congress had sought votes in the name of Manmohan Singh. In 2014,
Rahul Gandhi’s name was on the hoardings that dotted the landscape but
the party fought shy of calling him the prime ministerial candidate. There
were doubts about his ability and willingness to provide hands-on
leadership to the party. He was ‘the leader who won’t lead’, as one TV
anchor put it, in sharp contrast to Modi, who was over-eager to lead and
dominate.55 As The Hindu editorial put it after the Congress scored a zero
in the 2015 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, ‘He does not have what it
takes: he has neither demonstrated the ability to sustain an idea or the hard
work demanded of a full-time politician in a leadership role.’56 He was
reluctant to take up even a ministerial position, which was a mistake. He
denied himself vital experience, which would have helped him to compete
with more experienced leaders. He made the mistake of believing that
‘political mobilization and outreach can happen independently of your
record in government’.57 The lack of any prior government role was held
against him. It was a great disadvantage in a contest with Modi, who was
seen as an experienced, decisive, and hardworking leader. He was chief
minister of Gujarat for 12 years, general secretary of the BJP for many
years, and an active member of the RSS from a very young age. He had
loads of administrative experience to back his political claims.
The BJP’s entire messaging was organized around the idea of a strong
leader who would cut through the labyrinthine system and bring change.
The Modi-centric character of the BJP’s campaign found expression in a
full-page newspaper ad showing Modi telling Indian citizens: Your vote for
the BJP candidate is a vote for me. The personalization of the act of voting
in 2014 enhanced an already existing tendency to presidentialise a
parliamentary system where members of parliament have begun to matter
less and less, noted Jaffrelot58 parliamentary elections.
Modi is a consummate demagogue. His political rhetoric laced with
scorn and mockery is difficult to match for anyone and Rahul Gandhi is
certainly no match for it. The latter’s communication and speech-making
skills fall short, and yet, facing an extremely negative campaign, Rahul
Gandhi still took on Modi in the 2014 and 2019 elections. The entire BJP
machinery attempted to challenge him, ridiculing and undercutting him,
launched daily attacks on his leadership style, and questioned his
capabilities and even his nationality. For close to a decade he has been at
the Centre of a concerted propaganda barrage that distorts everything he
says or does. Since a disastrous interview given to Arnab Goswami of the
Times Now TV channel in 2014, Rahul Gandhi has been the target of trolls
on social media and of television anchors that spare no effort in destroying
his political brand.59 He speaks up for the marginalized and the poor and
those left out of India’s economic growth trajectory. He has also reminded
people that they need not hate or base their identity on the exclusion of
other communities. Far from appreciating his concern for the marginalized,
Rahul Gandhi was scoffed at and lampooned by the BJP–RSS machinery
and the media during the election. In that sense, he was not only pitched
against a political party but a much mightier political force forged by the
collaboration of the corporate sector, the media, and the BJP–RSS.
Modi has upended the political order by projecting his plebian
beginnings to crafting a compelling story of an outsider taking on the
political establishment comprising elites. His social background was a
perfect antidote to Rahul Gandhi’s elite background. Modi was presented as
a chaiwala, although his closest allies were big businessmen who powered
his campaign and enlisted their media outlets, especially electronic media,
to promote him. As noted above, the corporate sector was the first to
support his ascent to respectability and power. The personal success story of
Modi was an unquestionably more compelling narrative than that of Rahul
Gandhi, who has apparently had success hand-delivered to him.
Rahul Gandhi too attacked the Indian power structure and positioned
himself against Modi’s plebeian imaging of himself. In his speech after he
was appointed vice-president of the Congress in 2013 in Jaipur, he said:
It does not matter how much wisdom you have, if you have no position, you mean nothing.
This is the tragedy of India. Why is our youth angry? Why are they out on the streets? They are
angry because they are alienated. They watch from the sidelines as the powerful drive around in
their lalbattis (red beacon cars). All our public systems — administration, justice, education,
politics — are designed to keep people with knowledge out. They are all closed systems. They
are designed to promote mediocrity and mediocrity dominates discussions while the voice of
insight and thought are crushed.60

This, however, gained little traction. When Modi said something similar on
the campaign trail, it had many takers because of his own social background
and because his attack was personalized and directed against the Gandhis,
whereas Rahul Gandhi was general and non-figurative.
Modi termed all the attacks against the BJP as attacks directed at him
personally. In this way he blunted the Congress attack while at the same
time continually aiming personal and dynastic barbs at Rahul Gandhi even
though there are several dynasts in the BJP. Modi was aware that in
damaging the Gandhi name he was damaging the Congress because the
party’s history is so closely intertwined with theirs. He projected the
Gandhis as elitist, corrupt, and immoral and took them to task for
everything that had gone wrong in India. Rahul Gandhi was dismissed as a
symbol of the entitled elite and a child of privilege, who was seen as living
off his famous lineage and illustrious pedigree. Congress was described as a
party that did not work for the people but for its first family. He repeatedly
said that it is only the Nehru–Gandhi family that matters whether they are in
power or in the opposition. Responding to the dynasty charge, Rahul
Gandhi said in an interview in 2019:
Members of my family have been in politics, but their experience is not my experience. My
experience has been of tremendous battles and violence. I’ve seen my father and grandmother
getting killed, I have seen elections being won and lost. How can you encapsulate my entire
experience in one word? Understand me and judge me for what I am and what I do.61

Sonia Gandhi wasn’t spared either even though she had refused the post
of prime minister, fearing her foreign origin would generate a backlash but
remained the Congress president and chairperson of the UPA. This roiled
Hindu supremacists who were livid with the idea that a woman of foreign
origin should be directing the course of government. This situation was
somewhat similar to that in the United States, where the election of a black
president inflamed white supremacists who voted in droves for Donald
Trump in the American presidential elections in 2016. The Congress party
wholly underestimated the propaganda against its leadership, and Sonia
Gandhi in particular. Apart from her foreign origins, she was targeted for
being responsible for minority appeasement and the appointment of
members from the minority community to important government positions
while at the same constructing a counter-narrative of Hindu victimhood on
the basis of imaginary grievances.

Lacklustre campaign
The Congress party went into the elections giving the impression that defeat
was a foregone conclusion, almost as if they had surrendered the field even
before the battle had begun. There was a perception that it lacked the will to
fight and had lost the desire to counter corruption charges and, above all,
the will to defend its record, seriously hurting the party. Public
dissatisfaction with the UPA government was extremely high and the
Congress was blamed for it. The party ran a lacklustre, diffused campaign
which proved no match for the BJP’s tightly controlled nationwide one
against Congress misrule and ineptitude and the alternative it offered as an
agent of change. The Congress campaign was directionless and disjointed,
forever playing catch-up rather than defining the political narrative. The
BJP ran a meticulously structured campaign where every location was
intricately mapped and every intervention multiplied through an elaborate
outreach programme. By contrast, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta argued later in
the context of Congress defeats in a string of assembly elections after 2014,
‘The Congress is being defeated by defeatism.’62
The Congress undersold its achievements and gains even when faced
with the opprobrium being heaped upon it. Despite economic slowdown
and inflation, there has been an enormous expansion of well-being over the
last decade. People were far better off than they had been at the turn of the
millennium. According to Planning Commission estimates, about 140
million people were lifted out of poverty from 2004 to 2012, with the
poverty ratio declining by at least 15 percentage points. The gap between
the rich and poor had shrunk appreciably, with 40 per cent of the population
experiencing upward mobility, and some 15 per cent of the total population,
or 40 per cent of the poor, moved above the poverty line. Arvind
Subramaniam, the chief economic advisor to the NDA government, said
that the rate of poverty reduction achieved during the five-year period from
2005–6 to 2011–12 was the fastest in India’s recorded history.63 Some
redistribution of wealth to the poor had indeed occurred under the UPA and
growth had been fairly inclusive as the Congress had intended. It was
astonishing that these important achievements were not widely broadcast
and discussed. This was hardly ever mentioned by the prime minister or
even the party president even when the party was under ceaseless attack and
therefore failed to become a part of public discourse.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning
Commission, defends the prime minister’s reluctance to do so, arguing that
‘Manmohan Singh never bragged about his achievements. He genuinely
believed it was best to let the results speak for themselves.’64 He, however,
acknowledges that as neither he nor his party projected these achievements;
‘they never formed part of the political discourse’ even though it was
‘important to establish that the UPA strategy was working in a way that
earlier strategies had not’.65 This lack of confidence cost the party dearly in
terms of a lack of recognition of its greatest achievement, reduction of
poverty, and its success in establishing social peace. Once matters are taken
for granted, they are soon forgotten.
 It was not poverty reduction alone that was absent in the campaign. The
Congress took no credit for an array of progressive social legislations
enacted during its two tenures, many of which were extremely significant
and had yielded very positive results. No one took political ownership of or
projected these policies and the accumulated silences greatly damaged the
Congress. ‘But nobody in the government defended it, and nobody out of
the government admired it,’ summed up a columnist.66 Parties are not re-
elected for things voters are unaware you have done nor for legislation
whose effect the voters cannot yet feel. Meanwhile, the BJP mobilized the
classes and groups annoyed with the Congress, whereas those who had
benefited during their tenure were not activated to protect their gains by the
Congress. While Modi, to quote an article in the Wall Street Journal,
‘tapped into the frustrations of a generation of Indians who climbed out of
poverty in the past decade, but who have been prevented from joining the
middle classes by slowing growth and a lack of employment’.67 The
problem was that the Congress focussed too much on policies and not
sufficiently on politics, and, going into election, it needed to do both. It
wasn’t able to use radical ideas and policies to change the national
discourse and was handicapped by the lack of political leadership and
organization which could send party loyalists to villages to ensure that
programmes were effectively implemented and to ensure that the party
received credit for them. Needless to say, the only issue people were talking
about was corruption rather than the positives of ten years of UPA rule.

Right side up
The Congress suffered an ‘electoral disaster rather than a defeat’ in 2014,
observed Suhas Palshikar.68‘The politics of dynasty, entitlement and
inheritance has been rejected in favour of the politics of initiative and
accomplishment based on hard work,’ claimed a BJP minister.69 This defeat
brought the party down to 44 seats in the Lok Sabha. In state after state it
was unable to halt the BJP’s electoral juggernaut.70 This was the worst
defeat suffered by the Congress in its history, and much worse than those of
1977, 1989, and 1999, failing to open its account in 13 states. Following
this, the party headed into a protracted downward spiral, losing power in
several states. A swathe of saffron swept across from Gujarat and
Maharashtra in the west to the Hindi-speaking heartland to Jharkhand,
Assam, and the northeast. State-level data shows that the BJP’s gains had
largely come at the expense of the Congress. It drew a near blank in most
key states across the Hindi heartland and did not win a single seat in Delhi,
Gujarat, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tamil
Nadu, and Uttarakhand. It made no dent in the crucial states of Uttar
Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, which, together, account for nearly
160 Lok Sabha seats. The state of Andhra Pradesh did not elect a single
Congress MP or MLA, a terrible blow for a party which in May 2009 had
won 156 of the 294 Assembly seats and 33 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the
combined state, and these had served as the party’s principal contingent in
the UPA. It made no headway in the newly created state of Telangana
despite its decision to create it. The Congress, on the other hand, retained
significant support in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and Karnataka.
The most striking feature of this election was the BJP’s successful
consolidation of the Hindu vote, religion serving as the deciding factor in
vote preference, most notably in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and
Gujarat, key states for the BJP.71 During the long campaign in Uttar
Pradesh, the BJP actively courted the Hindu vote, systematically stoking
Hindu sentiments and anxieties there.

The Gujarat model turns full circle

In 2014, the BJP’s vote share had climbed from 18 to 31 per cent,
apparently because of the Gujarat model and Modi’s energy and enterprise,
which capitalized on anger against and disenchantment with the ruling
party. It is equally true, as noted earlier in this chapter, that the Congress ran
a poor campaign: from the advertising campaigns to confusion over
candidate selection to the botched-up Rahul Gandhi interview.72 The party
leadership failed to anticipate the political challenge and completely
underestimated it. There is no denying that the Gujarat model was an
important reason for the BJP’s dramatic victory. However, it was all but
forgotten after 2014 when the Patidar agitation launched by Hardik Patel in
Gujarat in 2015 exposed its limitations and uncovered dissatisfactions with
this model. It reached its limits in the 2017 assembly elections, which the
BJP came close to losing. The final nail in the coffin was the slogan ‘Vikas
pagal ho gaya hai’. One witty message posted on Twitter summed up the
new take on the model, ‘In a conversation, on seeing the railway tracks
submerged in water, a person asks why Vikas is not visible? The response is
that as Vikas is sitting in the bullet train, he is invisible.’ All this greatly
upset the BJP. The party president, Amit Shah, asked the youth of Gujarat
not to fall prey to the propaganda being mounted by the Congress on social
media.
Even Modi stopped mentioning the Gujarat model after becoming prime
minister.73 It had been hyped up for political purposes in the run-up to the
2014 election, but seven years on, it became clear that the Gujarat model’s
projection had itself been a scam. The model had been exposed for what it
really was: lopsided development and a textbook case of what development
should not be. In the end, we are left with the Gujarat model of politics,
which embodies concentration of power, disregard of human rights and
political marginalization of minorities. Gujarat has not had a single Muslim
MP over the past 30 years and barely an MLA. The same is true in all the
states where the BJP has won power. Besides, the model signalled
centralization of power and curbs on dissent. The fact that Section 144
needed to be imposed each time the Vibrant Gujarat Summit was organized
testifies to the authoritarian nature of the model, which hinges on
suppressing dissent.74 The BJP repeatedly invoked Gujarati pride and
Hindu pride to counter any opposition to it. Criticism was brushed under the
carpet, although it was clear that this model was exclusionary and did not
achieve positive development outcomes for the majority of its people, and
silencing dissent was an essential ingredient for its political success.

Notes
1. There is a considerable body of work on the 2014 elections. See, for example, Irfan Ahmad
and Pralay Kanungo (eds.), The Algebra of Welfare-Warfare: A Long View of India’s 2014
Elections, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019; Mujibur Rehman (ed.), The Rise of
Saffron Power: Reflections on Indian Politics, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2018, especially
Introduction, pp. 1–43; Suhas Palshikar, Party Competition in Indian States: Electoral
Politics in Post-Congress Polity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014; Achin Vanaik,
 ‘India’s Landmark Election’, Socialist Register, 51, 2014; Rahul Verma and Sanjay Kumar,
‘The Implications of the 2014 Elections: Is BJP the New Congress?’, in Ashutosh Kumar and
Yatindra Singh Sisodia (eds.), How India Votes: A State-by-State Look, New Delhi: Orient
Black Swan, 2019; Rekha Saxena, ‘The Indian National Congress: Coping with Challenges
of Deepening Democracy, Federalism and Neoliberal Capitalism’, in How India Votes: A
State-by-State Look, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2019; Shreyas Sardesai and Pranav
Gupta, ‘The Religious Faultline in the 2014 Election’, in How India Votes: A State-by-State
Look, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2019. There are also interesting journalistic accounts:
Harish Khare, How Modi Won It: Notes from the 2014 Election, New Delhi: Hachette India,
2014; Rajdeep Sardesai, The Election That Changed India, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2014;
Prashant Jha, How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine, New Delhi:
Juggernaut, 2017.
2. Analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch
(NEW) found that BJP cornered about 69 per cent of total donations made to parties in 2013–
14. The party gained the most even though it was not in power at the Centre. Kumar Vikram,
‘BJP Coffers Bulged with Corporate Cash in Financial Year 14’, Mail Today, 25 Feb. 2015.
3. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Modi-Centric BJP 2014 Election Campaign: New Techniques, and Old
Tactics’, Contemporary South Asia, 23, no 2, 2015, pp. 151–66.
4. Mohan Guruswamy, ‘Myth of the Gujarat Model Miracle’, Observer Research Foundation,
13 Feb. 2013, https://www.orfonline.org/research/myth-of-the-gujarat-model-miracle/.
Accessed 16 Jun. 2016.
5. A. K. Bhattacharya, ‘Singur to Sanand’, Business Standard, 20 Jan. 2013.
6. ‘It’s Stupid If You Are Not in Gujarat: Ratan Tata’, Business Standard, 5 Feb. 2013.
7. This single-window, all powerful Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) meant that even anti-
corruption watchdogs were made subservient to the political executive. The conflict between
the chief minister and the Gujarat governor over the appointment of a state Lokayukta is a
classic example of how the Modi government in Gandhinagar was unwilling to cede space to
even a constitutional authority when it came to major appointments.
8. On investment promises, see Hemant Kumar Shah, ‘Why PM Modi No Longer Speaks of
“Gujarat Model”: Jobless in Gujarat Expose His Exaggerated Claims’, National Herald, 19
Apr. 2019.
9. Atul Sood, ‘Development Outcomes and Politics in Gujarat’, Kafila, 7 Dec. 2017,
https://kafila.online/2017/12/07/development-outcomes-and-politics-in-gujarat-atul-sood/.
Accessed 13 Jun. 2020.
10. Jean Dreze, ‘Gujarat Muddle’, The Hindu, 26 May 2014.
11. Rohini Hensman, ‘The Gujarat Model of Development: What Would It Do to the Indian
Economy?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49, no. 11, 15 Mar. 2014.
12. See, for example, Jayati Ghosh, ‘Gujarat Model’s Failure Explains Why the Economy Is
Significant Factor in the Coming Elections’, Wire.in, 27 Nov. 2017,
https://thewire.in/economy/gujarat-models-failure-explains-economy-significant-factor-
coming-elections. Accessed 29 Nov. 2017; Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Gujarat Economic Trajectory’,
People’s Democracy, 29 Dec. 2013. Accessed 30 Nov. 2017; Paronjoy Guha-Thakurta,
‘Gujarat Model of Development: More Hype Than Substance’, Rediff.com, 2 Apr. 2015,
https://www.rediff.com/business/column/gujarat-model-of-development-more-hype-than-
substance/20150402.htm. Accessed 12 Jun. 2016; Maitreesh Ghatak, ‘Gujarat Model: The
Gleam of State’s High Growth Numbers Hides Dark Reality of Poverty, Inequality’, Scroll.in,
25 Oct. 2017, https://scroll.in/article/855027/gujarat-model-the-gleam-of-states-high-growth-
numbers-hides-dark-reality-of-poverty-inequality. Accessed 30 Nov. 2018.
13. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Modi of the Middle Class’, The Indian Express, 24 May 2014.
14. Jayati Ghosh, ‘Gujarat Model’s Failure Explains Why the Economy Is Significant Factor in
the Coming Elections’.
15. Maitreesh Ghatak and Sanchari Roy, ‘Why So Many Economists Are Disillusioned with the
“Gujarat Model” ’, Wire.in, 29 Nov. 2017, https://thewire.in/economy/narendra-modi-gujarat-
model-economists.Accessed 30 Nov. 2017.
16. Patnaik, ‘Gujarat Economic Trajectory’.
17. ‘Gujarat Model Is Growth with Minimal Development: Political Scientist Christophe
Jaffrelot’, The Financial Express, 25 Nov. 2017.
18. Ghatak and Roy, ‘Why So Many Economists Are Disillusioned with the “Gujarat Model” ’.
19. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Gujarat Model?’ The Indian Express, 20 Nov. 2017.
20. ‘India Inc. promises Modi Much Investment, as Always, at Vibrant Gujarat Meet’, NDTV, 11
Jan. 2013, https://www.ndtv.com/business/india-inc-promises-modi-much-investment-as-
always-at-vibrant-gujarat-meet-316012. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
21. Ibid.
22. Editorial, ‘Anger, Aspiration, Apprehension’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49, no. 21, 24
May 2014.
23. Sanjay Kumar, ‘Interpreting the Electoral Verdict of 2014 Lok Sabha Elections in India: A
Significant Shift in the Nature of Electoral Politics’, Panjab University Research Journal
(Arts), XLIV, no. 1, Jan.–Jun. 2017, pp. 25–54.
24. Sevanti Ninan, ‘The Media Moving to the Right’, in Making Sense of Modi’s India, New
Delhi: Harper Collins, 2016, pp. 177–89 .
25. Sandeep Bhushan, ‘How the Television News Industry Scripted the Indian Elections’, The
Caravan, 14 May 2014, https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/television-scripted. Accessed 21
Nov. 2021.
26. Study by Centre for Media Studies analyzed the coverage of five major news channels:
AajTak, ABP News, Zee News (Hindi), NDTV24x7, and CNN IBN (English) in the 8 p.m. to
10 p.m. prime-time band from 1 Mar. to 30 Apr. ‘Modi and BJP Hogged Prime Time TV,
Finds CMS Media Analysis’, The Hindu, 8 May 2014.
27. Ibid.
28. Maitreesh Ghatak, Parikshit Ghosh, and Ashok Kotwal, ‘Growth in the Time of the UPA’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 49, no. 16, 19 Apr. 2014.
29. Interview with Alok Mehta, 6 Jun. 2020. Alok Mehta is the former chief editor of Outlook
Hindi. As a journalist and television broadcaster, he has worked with several other platforms
such as Nav Bharat Times, Nai Duniya, Dainik Bhaskar, and Governance Now, among
others.
30. Paronjoy Guha-Thakurta, ‘Gujarat Model of Development: More Hype Than Substance’,
Rediff.com, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.rediff.com/business/column/gujarat-model-of-
development-more-hype-than-substance/20150402.htm. Accessed 12 Jun. 2016.
31. Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, ‘The BJP’s 2014 Modi Wave: An Ideological
Consolidation of the Right’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLIX, no 39, 27 Sep. 2014, p.
50.
32. See Amrita Basu, Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015. Chapter 5 on Gujarat, pp. 162–202; Martha Nussbaum, The Clash
Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007, Chapter 1 Genocide in Gujarat, pp. 17–51.
33. For an account of how the Gujarat riots occurred and its aftermath, see Ashis Khetan,
Undercover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva, New Delhi: Context, 2021.
34. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Reinvention of Hindutva’, The Hindu, 4 Mar. 2015.
35. Ibid.
36. Radhika Desai, ‘A Latter-Day Fascism’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49, no. 35, 30 Aug.
2014.
37. Harsh Mander, ‘15 Years After Godhra Riots: The Politics of Hate Still Divides Us’, The
Hindustan Times, 27 Feb. 2017.
38. Ibid.
39. Dibyesh Anand, ‘Indian Fantasies About Gujarat and Narendra Modi’, The Guardian, 28
Dec. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/india-fantasy-gujarat-
modi-hindus. Accessed 20 Nov. 2021.
40. Shoaib Daniyal, ‘It’s Becoming Increasingly Dangerous in Uttar Pradesh to Even Look
Muslim’, Scroll.in, 27 Nov. 2017, https://scroll.in/article/859333/opinion-its-becoming-
increasingly-dangerous-in-uttar-pradesh-to-even-look-muslim. Accessed 30 Nov. 2017.
41. Editorial, ‘Anger, Aspiration, Apprehension’.
42. Radhika Desai, ‘The Question of Fascism’, in Making Sense of Modi’s India, New Delhi:
Harper Collins, 2016 .
43. Irfan Ahmad, ‘Democracy as Permanent Advertising: Indian Media and Elections’, Kafila, 8
May 2014, https://kafila.online/2014/05/08/democracy-as-permanent-advertising-indian-
media-and-elections-irfan-ahmad/. Accessed 17 Jun. 2016.
44. On the role of violence in elections, see Steven I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral
Competition and Communal Riots in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004
and Basu, Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India; Amrita Basu and Srirupa Roy (eds.),
Violence and Democracy in India, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007.
45. Varghese K. George, ‘A Pull Away from the Periphery’, The Hindu, 21 Aug. 2014.
46. Seshadri Chari quoted in Saba Naqvi, ‘Numerocracy’, Outlook, 25 Aug. 2014.
47. Quoted in Prashant Jha, ‘BJP Win Blow to Muslim Politics: Singhal’, The Hindustan Times,
17 Jul. 2014.
48. Ibid.
49. Ashish Tripathi, ‘Modi’s UP Campaign: Development or Deception?’, The Times of India, 6
Feb. 2014.
50. Irfan Ahmad, ‘Democracy as Permanent Advertising: Indian Media and Elections’, .
51. ‘Dark Decade in Governance: BJP’s Chargesheet on Congress-Led UPA’,
https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwitp_mOvKf0
AhWdxjgGHYvJDPoQFnoECAoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttp%2Fcdn.narendramodi.in%2Fwp-
content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F04%2FBJPBooklet-ExecutiveSummary.pdf&usg=.
Accessed 20 Nov. 2021.
52. Economic Times Bureau, ‘UPA Presided over a Wasted Decade: BJP’, The Economic Times,
19 Jan. 2014 .
53. Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, ‘The BJP’s 2014 Modi Wave: An Ideological
Consolidation of the Right’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49, no 39, Sep. 2014, p. 27.
54. On Modi’s leadership, see Nilanjan Mukhopadjyaya, Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times,
New Delhi: Westland Publications, 2013.
55. NDTV Anchor Barkha Dutt quoted in Sadanand Dhume, ‘The Last Gandhi’, First Post, 19
Aug. 2014.
56. Editorial, ‘Congress Zero’, The Hindu, 12 Feb. 2015.
57. Ibid.
58. Jaffrelot, ‘Modi-Centric BJP 2014 Election Campaign: New Techniques, and Old Tactics’,
Contemporary South Asia, 23, no 2, 2015, pp. 151–166.
59. Arnab Goswami, ‘Frankly Speaking with Rahul Gandhi’, Times Now, 29 Jan. 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psen10db1k0. Accessed 7 Mar.2020.
60. D. K. Singh, ‘Rahul Seeks Sweat, Party Has Tears’, The Indian Express, 21 Jan. 2013.
61. ‘From Naamdar to Kaamdar: Rahul Gandhi the Challenger’, Rahul Gandhi interview to Raj
Chengappa and Kaushik Deka, India Today, 13 May 2019.
62. Pratap Bhanu Mehta quoted in Rajdeep Sardesai, ‘Rahul Gandhi Has to Lead His Troops’,
The Hindustan Times, 31 Oct. 2014.
63. Puja Mehra, ‘Rate of Poverty Reduction Fastest Under UPA II’, The Hindu, 26 May 2015 .
64. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Backstage: The Story Behind India’s Growth Years, New Delhi:
Rupa Publications, 2020.
65. Ibid.
66. Mihir Sharma, ‘Farewell, a Golden Age’, Business Standard, 11 May 2014.
67. Niharika Mandhana, ‘Narendra Modi’s Election Win Heralds New Era in India’, The Wall
Street Journal, 17 May 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-counting-begins-in-indias-
national-election-1400210643. Accessed 20 Jun. 2020.
68. Suhas Palshikar, ‘The Defeat of the Congress’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLIX, no. 39,
27 Sep. 2014, p. 57.
69. Jason Burke, ‘Narendra Modi’s Landslide Victory Shatters Congress’s Grip on India’, The
Guardian, 16 May 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/16/narendra-modi-
victory-congress-india-election. Accessed 25 Jun. 2019.
70. Liz Mathew and C. G. Manoj, ‘The Shrinking of Indian National Congress’, The Indian
Express, 26 Jun. 2018.
71. Sanjay Kumar, ‘Interpreting the Electoral Verdict of 2014 Lok Sabha Elections in India: A
Significant Shift in the Nature of Electoral Politics’, Panjab University Research Journal
(Arts), XLIV, no. 1, Jan.–June 2017.
72. Sardesai, ‘Rahul Gandhi Has to Lead His Troops’.
73. Hemant Kumar Shah, ‘Why PM Modi No Longer Speaks of “Gujarat Model”: Jobless in
Gujarat Expose His Exaggerated Claims’. National Herald, 19 Apr. 2019.
74. Atul Sood, ‘Development Outcomes and Politics in Gujarat’, Kafila, 7 Dec. 2017.
 4
Secular Politics on the Back Foot

Apart from the six years of the BJP-led coalition government in Delhi
(1998–2004), India was not governed by a political party or a coalition of
parties that made explicit appeals to religion. This changed after the BJP
won an absolute majority in 2014 and an even bigger one in 2019.
Religious politics has been an important element in Indian public life much
before the BJP came to power at the Centre. It has assumed greater salience
during BJP rule but that party alone is not responsible for the increasing
politicization of religion. Most parties are guilty of using religious issues
for narrow political gains. Parties seeking to stake out a position as pro-
Hindu or simultaneously pro-Hindu and pro-minorities, have given a fillip
to communal politics.
The focus of this chapter is on the Congress and its often ill-advised
actions that weakened both the party and the secular state, which it
proclaimed to uphold and, in an important sense, helped to establish. This
should be read in conjunction with Chapter 3 on the rise of the Gujarat
model, which helps to connect the Congress decline with the rise of the BJP
and the consequent decline in secular politics. The argument advanced here
is that the crisis of the Congress cannot be understood without placing it in
the context of the rise of the Hindu Right and its propaganda against
secularism not just to discredit the Congress but the entire liberal spectrum.1
The BJP–RSS and its sundry ideological affiliates hold a critical view of
pluralism and secularism. They envision India as a majoritarian nation-state
rather than a pluralist multicultural one. The tensions inherent in these
competing visions have come to the fore in recent years. The ruling party
has relentlessly attacked and denigrated secularism. Indeed, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi was quick to point out how ‘no party dared to wear the
mask of secularism and mislead the people’ soon after winning a second
term in 2019.2 He stressed how people had used the tag of secularism to
engage in evil acts. ‘It was used like Gangajal to wash all your sins,’ Modi
said, adding how it stood demolished after 2014.3
Both these narratives underline the difficulty faced by the Congress in
reversing its decline without ideological clarity on the question of secular
politics. The BJP’s decisive victories in 2014 and 2019 have intensified
these difficulties and the critique of secular politics, but, as Rajmohan
Gandhi argues, these ‘do not translate so readily into a defeat of secular
ideology’.4

The backstory
Secularism is a central idiom of political life in India.5 It can mean many
different things, but what is clear from the debates in both the Constituent
Assembly and parliament, in various situations and iterations, is that one of
its key features is an endeavour to separate religion from politics. The basic
constituents of this separation, however, are not exactly the same as, for
example, in Europe or the United States. Secularism was adapted to suit
Indian conditions in order to combine the demands of statecraft while
incorporating the religious ideals of Gandhi and the modernist outlook of
Jawaharlal Nehru. On 18 April 1949, Nehru elaborated the rationale of the
secular state, arguing:
I am convinced that the measure of India’s progress will be the measure of our giving full effect
to what has been called a secular state. That, of course, does not mean a people lacking in
morals or religion. It means that while religion is completely free, the state, including in its
wide fold various religions and cultures, gives protection and opportunities to all and thus
brings about an atmosphere of tolerance and cooperation.6

Secularism was the legitimating ideology of the Congress in the struggle for
Independence, repudiating any religious identity. This position derived from
the commitments made during the freedom struggle that all religions would
enjoy equality and parity in Independent India.7
The party in the immediate decades after Independence worked to
establish a secular state in India. For Nehru secularism was necessary to
hold India’s disparate communities together under a single roof. Indeed,
Nehru often pronounced that India’s composite culture was one of its
greatest strengths. It was a specific response to India’s astonishing pluralism
and the need to accommodate minorities in the aftermath of Partition in
1947.8 The Nehruvian consensus on secularism emphasized democracy,
religious neutrality (or equal standing for all citizens, regardless of
religion), and social justice.9 It was a central feature of the Indian project of
modernity, democracy, and development.10
Notwithstanding its many weaknesses, this strategy worked for many
decades. But as the unabated Congress hegemony waned, the party began
compromising with the tenets of secularism. It found the idea of making
quick electoral gains by compromising with secular principles and
institutions too tempting to resist. Congress leaders were sometimes eager
to curry favour with religious leaders to use them to marshal political
support in elections.11 Its political supremacy began declining after it
started flirting with religious politics from the early 1980s. Before this
period, the political influence of religion was limited and communal parties
won few seats. The clear separation between politics and religion necessary
to maintain the secularist polity in India eventually blurred. The politics of
expediency damaged the general perception of secularism, and above all it
damaged the Congress.

Political pandering
Even before Hindutva forces began attacking Indian secularism, the
Congress had started undermining it by pandering to one religious
community after another on divisive issues. One of the cardinal errors the
party made in the 1980s was to get directly involved in the controversy over
the role of the state in regulating the personal law of religious minorities,
especially at a time when Hindutva politics was beginning to raise its
head.12 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, concerned about losing Muslim
support, decided to enact the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on
Divorce) Act (MWA) of 1986. This was done to revoke the landmark
Supreme Court judgment, which granted a maintenance allowance to Shah
Bano, a 73-year-old Muslim divorcee, to be paid by her husband under the
Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). This controversy sparked off a huge
political uproar, demanding exclusion of Muslim women from the purview
of the CrPC, to which otherwise all citizens have recourse. The government
took the decision to nullify the court’s verdict and enact the MWA,
declaring that Muslim women would not have recourse to the provisions of
the CrPC in regard to maintenance in the event of divorce. Rajiv Gandhi
had clearly succumbed to the pressure from the clergy and Muslim leaders
in his own party to pass this statute.
This legislation became a bone of contention between Muslim
conservatives and critics of the government. This surrender of Muslim
women’s rights was part of a larger ideological shake-up in this period
resulting in a closer entanglement of politics and religion. The conciliatory
response to Muslim misgivings against the Supreme Court verdict tipped
the balance in favour of opposition parties who had campaigned against it.
The excessive regard for Muslim sensibilities in areas of personal law
provoked an indignant reaction that India would be overrun by a rapidly
rising Muslim population propagated by multiple wives. There was strong
opposition from the middle classes, from Hindus more generally, and from
the women’s movement, which regarded the MWA as a concession to
Muslim fundamentalism and a break from secularism. This was a blessing
for the BJP, which was on the same page as the middle classes who agreed
that India’s Muslims were being pampered by the Congress. Ever since its
passage, it has been used by the BJP to draw attention to the compromises
the Congress was willing to make to endear itself to the minorities.
Exploiting the mistakes of the Congress, the Hindu nationalists accused it
of playing vote bank politics.
The BJP had long mocked secularism, which it regards as a Western
construct unsuited to India. Importantly, it sought to demonstrate that the
Congress was not genuinely secular. To the BJP, and many others outside its
circles, the Shah Bano episode was a touchstone of this politics. The
passage of the MWA gave them a significant opportunity to build on this
critique to condemn the double standards of the state’s constitutional law
and jurisprudence.
The Congress was shaken by the vehement opposition to this decision
among Hindus who completely and fervidly opposed its government’s
position with regard to Muslim personal laws. Having done this, it felt
compelled to mollify Hindu militants demanding concessions on the
disputed Mandir-Masjid site at Ayodhya. In 1989, with a view to winning
the Hindu votes, the government allowed the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP) to perform the shilanyas at the site13 that Hindu nationalists had long
proclaimed to be the exact birthplace of Lord Ram or ‘RamJanmbhoomi’.
Hindu activists had claimed that the mosque at the site and its use by
Muslims were sacrilegious.14
The RSS and Sangh affiliates demanded that the temple that once
purportedly stood above Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya should be rebuilt in
place of Babri Masjid. During this period, the BJP and its affiliates
launched a nationwide campaign to construct a Ram temple in Ayodhya,
which gathered momentum after the Mandal decision to give 27 per cent
reservations to OBCs in government employment. The unresolved dispute
in Ayodhya seemed to offer an opportunity to Hindu nationalists to garner
public support. This movement must be understood in the context of the
attempt by the RSS to mobilize the Hindu community around the powerful
symbol of Lord Ram. That historic moment was primarily the outcome of a
series of events in the late 1980s and early 1990s that created a climate
conducive to the growth of communal politics.
Together, these two decisions—the revocation of the Shah Bano verdict
and the reopening of the gates to the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya—were part
of a ‘grand’ strategy to arrest the Congress’s declining hold over Hindu and
Muslim votes. Post-shilanyas, its leaders were keen to harness the political
advantages provided by the Ayodhya controversy, even if that meant
brushing aside secular principles and the prime minister’s assurances to the
Muslim community that the Babri Masjid was safe.
The Congress was playing the Ayodhya card in the fond hope that Hindu
votes would go to it. That was not, however, quite how it transpired. The
BJP–RSS campaign convinced Hindus that the shilanyas had been the
result of their efforts to compel the government to concede to their demand.
This inflicted serious damage on the party’s Hindu base in Uttar Pradesh
and equally inflamed contrary Muslim sentiments. It was only much later
that the party realized that it was alienating Muslims and also losing the
support of Hindus. The principal consequence of this process was the
acceleration of communal polarization contributing to a groundswell of
support for the BJP and a point of no recovery for the Congress, which had
completely lost the plot.15 The leadership admitted that permitting the
shilanyas had been an error, but by then it was too late to retrieve lost
ground.
Allowing the opening of the gates was seen by the right-wing as an
opportunity to demolish the mosque. Soon, the situation spiralled out of
control and the Babri Masjid, in a public spectacle on 6 December 1992,
was demolished. This time the Congress had played right into the hands of
the BJP–RSS. In the past, it dealt with these tangled issues by deferring or
fudging them. By facilitating access to the disputed site and by doing
nothing to stop it when it was clear the BJP–RSS were mobilizing to pull it
down, both Rajiv Gandhi and P. V. Narasimha Rao, respectively, laid the
groundwork for the destruction of the mosque. The effect of both these
decisions, calculated to please both Hindus and Muslims, had the effect of
boosting communal politics. The attempt to provide concessions to a
particular community and then offsetting it by granting concessions to
another left both dissatisfied and a feeling they had lost something. This
was a dangerous approach that provoked a backlash from both sides of the
Hindu–Muslim divide.
The Ayodhya issue forced the Congress to cede more space to the Hindu
Right. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in brazen disregard of the stay
order of the Supreme Court was the defining moment in this process.16 The
political rupture opened up the prospect of changing both the ideological
discourse and institutional politics in favour of a majoritarian idea of India,
contrary to the hitherto established concept of a non-parochial India. The
demolition was a clear reflection of the Sangh Parivar’s anti-secular agenda,
which remains its core position till today.17 This was an important step
towards turning India into a Hindu Rashtra and, more importantly, the
‘obliteration’ of Muslims from the public sphere. The Hindu Right took the
lead in shaping this narrative which would be decisive three decades later.
Far from helping the Congress, these developments brought its political rule
to an end and led to a steady decline of secular politics. This discourse
foregrounded the hurt sentiments of the majority community, exemplified
by the very existence of the Babri Masjid at the birthplace of Lord Ram,
which demanded rectification.18 It opened up the political space for the
advance of Hindu nationalism facilitated by the cluster of organizations
affiliated with the RSS. These organizations mobilized support in in favour
of the majoritarian agenda and the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a
critical part of this process. This enhanced BJP’s influence, which offered
newer opportunities to carry forward this political project after it had
replaced the Congress as the central point of reference in the Indian polity.
It advanced the idea that Hindus had not received their due because of
the alleged partiality of the state towards religious minorities when there
was no evidence to support this. This approach blames Muslims and labels
them as the adversary for all Hindus regardless of their internal differences,
beliefs, and practices.19 That is to say, it seeks to unite Hindus not by what
they share but by what they oppose, which is the common opposition to the
‘enemy’ within. Muslims and Christians do not fit into this scheme because,
according to the RSS, although India is their place of birth and place of
work, it is not their land of origin and their holy land. Since its inception in
1925, the RSS has never deviated from this fundamental ideological
premise.

Debunking the secular

Congress’s political strategy enabled Hindu nationalists to claim that the
party was indulging in pseudo-secularism or minority appeasement through
these actions, especially the volte-face on the Shah Bano verdict. This
opened the door for Hindu nationalism to gain greater political salience.
The Congress was accused of pampering Muslims principally through its
recognition of Muslim personal law. Critics directed their energies on what
they perceived to be an unequal exercise of power of the state, providing for
reform of the institutions and practices of Hinduism while not deploying
this power in relation to Indian Islam. Essentially, state neutrality was
bypassed when the government allowed Muslims to follow their own
personal laws while pushing through reform of Hindu personal law though
the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill. True secularism strictly entails equal
treatment of all religious communities. The reversal of the Shah Bano
verdict was the tipping point in this process and it was repeatedly cited as
the most blatant example of Muslim appeasement and also to claim that
Hindus were being discriminated against.20 In the BJP–RSS’s way of
thinking, leaving Muslim law untouched implies unequal and asymmetrical
treatment. This asymmetry has formed the basis of the charge that the
Congress practice of secularism implies Muslim appeasement which had
been used to build minority vote banks.21
After the Shah Bano controversy, Hindu organizations stepped up their
advocacy of a uniform civil code. The BJP government initiated a
nationwide public consultation on the issue of the uniform civil code in
2016. The Law Commission was mandated to deliberate on this issue, but
its report stated that a uniform civil code was neither desirable nor feasible
at this stage. The former chairman of the Law Commission suggested that
the government should begin working on reforms of family laws across
communities and that the best practices available should be extended to all
communities.
In the meantime, a new legislation, the Muslim Women (Protection of
Rights on Marriage) Act 2019 (MWA) was passed to outlaw the practice of
instant divorce and make it a punishable offence liable to a three-year term
of imprisonment. The law is controversial because it criminalizes the
practice of instant talaq rather than simply confirming that a divorce
pronounced in this way is invalid. The Act has introduced penal legislation
specific to a class of persons based on religious identity even though
abandoning or deserting wives and dependants is not unique to the Muslim
community. It does nothing to improve the status of Muslim women who
suffer from numerous other disabilities and has no procedural safeguards
and is therefore easily liable to misuse.22
Apart from being allowed to retain their personal laws, which actually
hurts Muslims, there is little evidence of being pampered. Muslims have no
job reservations, quotas, or other forms of preferential treatment. Their
representation in the central and state government, armed forces, judiciary,
police, and civil services, is extremely low. Early in the tenure of his
government, Manmohan Singh appointed the Sachar Committee to
investigate barriers that hold back Muslims from full equality. The Sachar
Committee Report (SCR) submitted in 2006 highlighted their under-
representation in all categories of jobs in central and state governments and
public sector undertakings.23 This Report documented that Muslim
communities lagged behind in every aspect of socio-economic
development, thus exposing the big ‘appeasement’ lie. It showed their over-
representation in the informal sector and their under-representation in the
formal sector among different socio-religious categories: fewer than 8 per
cent of urban Muslims formed part of the formal sector while the national
average was 21 per cent.24 Only 7.05 per cent of the Muslim population
was employed in the public sector as against a national average of 18.3 per
cent and, on the other hand, 68 per cent forming part of the informal sector
as against the national average of 52 per cent.
A recent study by Arvind Subramanian and Rohit Lamba shows that in
terms of the average number of years of education, upper castes and other
groups are remaining much longer in school than Muslims. By 2015, while
the upper castes were approaching the Organization of Economic Co-
Operation and Development (OECD) average of 11 years, the rise was least
for Muslims at less than 8 years. The research shows that even Scheduled
Caste communities remained in school longer. While inter-generational
mobility rose for Scheduled Castes, it fell for Muslims.25
The SCR had recommended affirmative action for Muslims, but no
action was taken, although Manmohan Singh had stated in 2006 that
Muslims must have the first claim over national resources. But this was
ruled out as there was huge opposition to any form of preferential treatment
or affirmative action for the community, naturally leaving Muslims unhappy
because it was obvious that politics and prejudice had overruled social
outcomes. It was especially problematic after the OBCs had been provided
reservations in higher education by the UPA government in 2006.26 ‘In the
fragile post-Mandal equilibrium, the reservation politics had transitioned
from a discourse of social justice to a discourse of majoritarian politics,’
notes Vinay Sitapati.27 Reservations were now an assertion of political
power for jobs and opportunities and Muslims lacked the power to extract
these concessions.
For its part, the UPA government’s response was to do what was
absolutely necessary to bolster its support among Muslims at a time when
the ruling party’s had seen an erosion in its social base among various
groups. It was keen to signal its intent that the interests of Muslims were
important but it was unwilling to press ahead with the necessary policy
changes fearing BJP’s appeasement slur and, in the process, blunting its
own objectives. This cautious response was influenced by the politics of
polarization which questioned Muslim claims to special measures and
benefits given to others but not to them.
The Congress could not get across the point that affirmative action didn’t
necessarily mean reservations and that minority schemes would not lead to
discrimination against the majority community and, moreover, resources
were not being channelled to the entire Muslim community. It made no
attempt to put things in perspective to convince people that these schemes
would not hurt the majority community. In consequence, the concerns that
have troubled policymakers in relation to the concept of minorities and the
scope of state intervention for their welfare persisted and continued to loom
large.
On the other hand, some of the public policies had begun to produce a
significant change. This was noticeable both in policy principles and the
criterion for recognition of beneficiary groups. Two types of schemes were
devised by the UPA government in the wake of the SCR recommendations.
One was the area development programme directed at improving
infrastructure and creating assets in districts with minority concentration.
The other major intervention was in the sphere of education, that is, the
provision of a Merit-cum-Means Scholarship scheme. However, some of
these minority schemes encountered considerable opposition within and
outside the UPA government on the ground that minority-specific schemes
contravene the constitutional provisions which prohibit discrimination on
the grounds of religion. This was often cited as the reason why the
government was unable to introduce affirmative action programmes for
minorities.
Four petitions in the Bombay, Gujarat, and Delhi High Courts questioned
the Merit-cum-Means Scholarship scheme for students of minority
communities introduced by the UPA government on the ground that it
discriminated against students belonging to the majority community on the
basis of religion and was therefore unconstitutional.28 It is, however, worth
noting that minority scholarship schemes passed the constitutional test. The
Bombay High Court judgment (2010) affirmed that these schemes were not
constitutionally invalid and had no adverse impact on students of the
majority community. This view was also supported by the decision of the
Gujarat High Court in Vijay Harischandra Patel v. the Union of India
(2009). It held that funds used to minimize inequalities among minority
communities by adopting various social and welfare activities would in no
way violate the constitutional principles of equality or affect any of the
fundamental rights guaranteed to members of other communities. Both
courts relied on Articles 14, 15, and 16 to suggest that the Constitution
provided for affirmative action for the socially and economically backward
classes among minorities. Clearly, what emerges is that if a group of
persons are socially and educationally backward, they are entitled to
affirmative action, in particular under Article 15 (4). It was important to
target the disadvantaged among minorities and not the entire population of
the minority communities concerned.
The Bombay High Court further stated that the expenditure incurred by
the central government on scholarship schemes was Rs. 675 crores, which
was 1.4 per cent of the central government’s expenditure of Rs. 48,671
crores in 2010–11. As only a minuscule of the total tax revenue or
education cess was utilized for providing some facilities to any religious
denomination, especially the underprivileged and disadvantaged among
them, the students of the majority community were not discriminated
against. The findings given in the SCR, particularly the facts, figures, and
reasons for the social and educational backwardness of the Muslim
community in India, ‘fully justify the impugned affirmative action taken by
the Government of India’.
This indicates that there was scope for government intervention in
relation to minorities. The concept of disadvantaged minority for the
purpose of government intervention, so far limited to caste groups, was in
‘public interest and fully in keeping with the egalitarian spirit of the
Constitution’. Even so, the UPA government continued to take recourse to
the view that the Constitution does not permit discrimination on the grounds
of religion to justify its failure to reduce the development deficit of
minorities.
In the event, ‘government persisted with “symbolic” implementation
appearing to pursue policies while recognizing that it would be difficult if
not impossible to implement.’29 The overall approach was ‘characterized by
ambivalence, non-decisions and twin-tracking’, as one scholar concludes.30
Muslims were disappointed that even after belated recognition of their
backwardness so little was done to alleviate it. Barring the scholarship
schemes mentioned above, no major step was taken by the UPA
government to ensure the implementation of any substantive policy after the
SCR. This actually increased resentment among political and social
activists alike.31
Even so, BJP continued to Manmohan Singh’s address to the Annual
Conference of State Minorities Commissions of December 2006, in which
he had stressed the need for ‘fair and legitimate share for minorities in
Central, State and private jobs’, to discredit the Congress as the party of
Muslims for giving an unfair share of the national resources to the
Muslims.32 Rajnath Singh took a direct crack at the Congress when he
stated:
‘I want to ask Sonia Gandhi as to which government’s Prime Minister had said that Muslims
have the first right on the resources of the country. It was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It
is Congress which has tried to divide the country. It is Congress which is communal.’33

The charges stuck even though no substantial policy actions were taken by
the government. Any policy initiative benefiting Muslims provoked
resentment and intensified the perception that this was minority
appeasement and that secularism was not about equal treatment but was, in
reality, a policy of preferential treatment of Muslims. The formation of the
SCR was the foundation of this renewed critique.34

Dwindling representation
While Muslims loomed large in public debates it is no secret that they
continued to remain on the sidelines of public institutions, indeed largely
absent. This was confirmed by the Amitabh Kundu Committee appointed to
evaluate the implementation of SCR recommendations, which concluded
that serious bottlenecks stymied implementation and any substantive
improvement.35 Muslim representation in parliament is abysmal.36 For the
first time in 2014, the ruling party did not have a single Muslim MP in the
Lok Sabha. The BJP had one Muslim MP in 2019 out of 303.37 Its decision
of not fielding Muslim candidates aims to free the BJP from mobilizing the
Muslim vote that it accuses other parties of wooing for electoral gain at the
expense of the Hindu majority. This strategy has been so successful that all
parties are busy chasing the Hindu vote and giving fewer tickets to
Muslims. This is evident in the Congress party’s ticket distribution strategy.
It has fielded very few Muslim candidates in elections, especially where the
party faces off against the BJP in two-party states. In the 2014 election, the
party contested 464 seats but fielded just 31 Muslim candidates38; in the
2019 election, 32 of the party’s 423 candidates were Muslim. Congress
courtship of Muslim voters has not translated into tickets for Muslim
candidates. The Congress seems to have made a strategic decision to
nominate fewer Muslims on the assumption that Muslims have no choice
but to vote for it if they want to defeat the BJP, and also because BJP’s
under-representation of Muslims is far more significant. Each time the BJP
establishes its dominance in a new state, the number of Muslim MLAs
immediately drops.39 The Congress feared being attacked as anti-Hindu if it
gave tickets to Muslim candidates.
The dwindling representation of Muslims in elected assemblies matters
because it is important to have ‘your people’ represent your interests in
elected bodies because if not, ‘there will be less people in defence of the
minorities’.40 The huge increase in the number of legislators belonging to
the BJP has had an unfavourable effect on development outcomes and on
the prospects of employment for the Muslim community in the public and
private sector and can also affect their safety and security.41

Disagreement over tackling mass violence

Apart from the issue of representation in public institutions, the problem of
targeted violence is a matter of concern. India has a long history of
communal violence and a poor record when it comes to the prevention and
punishment of the perpetrators of such violence.42 Numerous commissions
of enquiry and fact-finding reports confirm recurring abdication of state
responsibility, bias, and even complicity of local administrations, law
enforcement, and criminal justice machinery.43 In order to combat such
violence, the UPA government had promised to table the Communal
Violence Bill (CVB). However, the CVB never really got off the ground. It
languished in parliament for nine years before it was withdrawn, although it
was one of the poll promises the Congress had made in both 2004 and 2009.
The 2005 Bill was widely criticized by opposition parties and state
governments because they felt it undercut the federal structure by
encroaching upon the right of state governments to maintain law and order.
The first version of the CVB defined the victim of communal violence as
essentially a person belonging to a ‘religious or linguistic minority’. The
BJP vehemently opposed it on ground that it is anti-Hindu and biased
against the majority community. They claimed that the CVB assumed that
communal trouble is always fomented by the majority community and that
the former will never be victims. A revised draft named the Prevention of
Communal Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill (2013) took
on board the criticism of the first version of the Bill.44 The word minority
was dropped, the definition of a group affected by communal violence was
made community neutral, and the prevention and control of communal
violence essentially was left to the states, with the Centre only playing a
coordinating role. Even this didn’t pass muster.
The revised Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to
Justice and Repatriation) Bill (2011) was hotly discussed in the National
Integration Council (NIC). It faced criticism from both sides of the political
divide. The BJP again criticized it for being skewed in favour of the
minorities and being unfair to the majority community. Others, including
the Trinamool Congress (TMC), Janata Dal (United), and the All India
Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), termed it as ‘anti-federal’.
The BJP’s principal opposition was the same as before. According to them,
the CVB addresses violence caused by a majority community against
minority and not vice versa. Apart from four members of the minority
community, no one else spoke up in support of the CVB in the National
Integration Council (NIC) meeting. No one from the government or from
the Congress defended the bill, which raised questions about the
government’s intentions. No one from the Congress even presented the
rationale for a legislation to prevent targeted violence.
The CVB was revived in January 2014 but again went into cold storage
because this time, in addition to all the other issues, the Congress was
accused of seeking to pass it a few months prior to the elections to
strengthen its base among the minorities. The government abandoned the
CVB. There was no effort to negotiate support through discussion to
address the various concerns expressed by non-BJP parties and social
activists. According to a National Advisory Council (NAC) member, it fell
through because of an exaggerated fear of Hindu backlash and alienation of
the majority community. Congress leaders themselves feared the
repercussions of this legislation. Turning reality on its head, a false
interpretation went around that it was anti-Hindu or that it only protected
minorities.45 No attempt was made to counter this propaganda. This bill, if
passed, could have put the brakes on the institutional bias prevalent in the
criminal justice system. But the bill did not, however, go through, and
therefore the institutional bias against the minorities in law enforcement,
which was recognized for the first time, was not addressed. An NAC
member observed, this law will only be passed when there’s willingness:
To accept this bill, we have to first accept that those who manage these systems of the state can
and do discriminate in how they use their powers. The past sixty-three years are replete with
instances of discriminatory exercise of state power when the group under attack is non-
dominant.46

The truth is that the Home Ministry rejected the CVB, fearing a Hindu
backlash.
Following 2014, the major episodes of mass violence had given way to
vigilante violence against individuals. Most of these were not spontaneous
acts of violence; systematic planning usually lay behind them. According to
a fact-finding report, Lynching Without End, 86 per cent of those killed in
lynching incidents in 2017 were Muslims.47 This was not conventional
Hindu–Muslim violence but targeted violence, which, given its frequency,
could no longer be regarded as episodic but a continuum, with Muslims
being lynched on issues ranging from allegations of eating beef or even just
transporting cattle for slaughter to love jihad to petty theft. Most of these
incidents were perpetrated by vigilante militias and were the direct result of
the communal atmosphere that the Hindu Right created, leaving little scope
for redressal or recourse to justice against persons who committed these
hate crimes.48 The Alwar-Dadri-Latehar incidents are three of several
disturbing events of a similar nature witnessed in the past few years in
which the government showed an unwillingness to respond adequately and
in time.49 Cow vigilantism has prevailed more in BJP-ruled states,
especially Uttar Pradesh.50 But it has also spread beyond them. The
Congress did not take the lead in mobilizing opposition against it. The
muted stand on mob lynchings dismayed many of its own leaders, who
believed that the party had allowed itself to be browbeaten by the BJP.
A delegation of opposition parties led by the Congress, which met
President Pranab Mukherjee on 12 April 2017, raised issues of mob
lynching of citizens, vigilantism, and moral policing, among others. These
meetings seemed, however, no more than a mere formality as there was no
follow-up with mobilization on the ground. The opposition would be more
convincing when the Congress takes on the BJP through concrete actions
and mobilization but it didn’t do so against cow vigilantism, perhaps
because of the constant fear that BJP would accuse the party of minority
appeasement.51

Majority and minority appeasement

Hindu nationalists accused the Congress of playing vote bank politics, but,
at the same time, the right-wing played the same card with Hindu voters
turning the majority community into a vote bank. From the 1990s onwards,
religion became an important political instrument for mobilizing religious
majorities and turning the majority community into a vote bank. It
challenged the older ideal of political parties attracting votes across
different communities to consolidate a legitimate political majority,52 the
notion of majority itself beginning to acquire a stronger political force. This
approach derives from the belief that India is a Hindu nation and that
everyone must recognize the Hindu nature of India’s culture and assimilate
into it. Anything short of such majoritarian exhibition of dominance will
make the majority feel as though they are victims of less powerful minority
groups. Hindus dominate all public institutions, education, politics, and
economy in independent India and are economically and culturally
powerful. These obvious facts notwithstanding, the narrative of majority
victimhood has taken hold of a much larger section of Hindus than ever
before. This idea has caught the imagination of the people and given rise to
the feeling that Muslims have been put in their place by this regime,
whereas the Congress government showed an unnecessary indulgence
towards them. In this view, Congress provided Muslims an undeserved
position of privilege, the silent majority supposedly suffering in
consequence. It is reinforced by concerns over terrorism, conversions, and
the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants. This has therefore led to the further
exacerbation of prejudices against minorities which perpetuates their
exclusion in India’s polity, economy, and society.
After coming to power, the BJP claimed that it had ended the Congress
practice of minority appeasement and that therefore the majority
community would reclaim its rightful place and its cultural norms would
prevail in the public domain, as indeed they do. For decades, the BJP
claimed that the Congress had betrayed Hindus in favour of Muslims which
was never the case. In reality, as we have noted, the Congress had a much
more complex relationship with Muslims and secularism. Its support for
minorities was largely symbolic, limited to placating their identity concerns.
It was less supportive in actual policies to substantially benefit the
minorities. Thus, even after appointing SCR, the Congress party did not
develop a coherent policy, let alone a secular vision of social justice, to
accommodate them in public institutions. In many ways, the Congress’s
approach is illustrative of the confused way the party responded to the
politicization of the minority question since the 1990s.
After its defeat in 2014, Congress was acutely worried about its pro-
minority stance, which was said to be turning away the majority community
from the party. A party internal introspection report stated that one of the
primary reasons for the defeat was that the majority of Hindus perceived the
Congress as a party focussed on appeasing Muslims. The charge of being
pro-Muslim gained momentum in the run-up to the 2014 election ‘putting
the Congress on the defensive’.53 Top leaders publicly admitted that this
propaganda about ‘the Congress as a Muslim party had hurt the party in the
election’.54 Therefore the party consciously sought to make amends. Sonia
Gandhi alluded to the dilemma and the need for course correction when she
observed that the BJP had managed to ‘convince’ people that the Congress
was a ‘Muslim party’. She said at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai in
April 201855:
 The BJP has managed to, I don’t say brainwash because that is a rude word, but it has managed
to convince people, to persuade people that the Congress party is a Muslim party. In my party,
the great majority is Hindu. Yes, there are Muslims too. So I fail to understand this branding us
as a Muslim party.56

She also said that the Congress had been ‘pushed into a corner’ and so it
felt the need to draw attention to, rather than play down, Rahul Gandhi’s
frequent temple visits before the Gujarat assembly elections in December
2017.57 His visits to temples were an attempt to shed this particular
perception. His temple visits had sparked a debate on whether the Congress
was resorting to ‘soft Hindutva’ and was in the process of abandoning
secularism. Asked if his temple visits were aimed at not letting the BJP
monopolize the Hindutva movement, she said, ‘There is a bit of that
because we have been pushed into a corner. Perhaps rather than going to a
temple quietly, may be a little more public focus on that.’58 ‘The BJP
branded us as [a] Muslim party. It’s a conscious decision to shed that tag
thrust on us by our rivals.’59
Sonia Gandhi was echoing the growing concern that the Congress had
paid a heavy price for being painted as a ‘Muslim party’.60 Several senior
leaders, including general secretaries, had conveyed this sentiment to the
party before the elections. Digvijaya Singh said that although the Congress
‘does not flaunt religious preferences’, the BJP succeeded in ‘pinning down
the Congress as a Muslim party’.61 A general secretary had written to A. K.
Antony expressing the apprehension that the BJP would project the
Congress as a pro-Muslim party and try and exploit this politically.62
The A. K. Antony report, investigating the reasons for the 2014 defeat,
had apparently concluded that the Congress was perceived as pro-Muslim,
which hurt the party, and that it had to impress on the Hindu voter that it
was not anti-Hindu.63 The report was not, however, made public and so its
findings and recommendations are not known. He expressed misgivings
about the party’s version of secularism, which, according to him, was seen
to tilt towards minorities and had eroded the electorate’s faith in the party’s
commitment to secularism. This he stated at a function in
Thiruvananthapuram where he said:
 People have lost faith in the secular credentials of the party. They have a feeling that the
Congress bats for a few communities especially minorities. The people are really worried
whether Congress can ensure social justice. The people are concerned whether the Congress is
ensuring social equality in society. There appears to be doubts in the minds of some people that
while professing and practicing secularism, the party has some slants that all sections of people
do not receive equal justice. This has to be removed.64

These remarks were made in the context of the need for the Congress to halt
the BJP’s march in his home state of Kerala.65 They, however, revived the
national debate on minority bias because Anthony was heading a committee
to look into the causes of the party’s defeat, and it was seen as one of the
major reasons for the defeat.66 The BJP had also picked on a remark
allegedly made by Rahul Gandhi in a closed-door meeting with Muslim
intellectuals on 12 July 2018 to ratchet up the attack on the Congress as a
‘Muslim party’ and to attack the meeting as ‘part of some sinister
conspiracy to divide India … What precisely is the BJP’s argument? Are
minority rights entirely off the agenda in democratic India today? Does the
mere presence of people with Muslim names portend communal
polarization?’ asked social activist Farah Naqvi, one of the participants at
the meeting.67 Rahul Gandhi never made the remark but facts don’t come in
the way of post-truth and propaganda. The party leaders challenged the
veracity of the BJP’s version of what transpired at the meeting and accused
it of peddling ‘untruth, half-truth, and lies’.68 Labelling the Congress as
pro-Muslim to attack it has coarsened the public debate. Even then, some in
the party felt that ‘the Congress is also mealy-mouthed in handling the
minority appeasement charge’.69

Imitating Saffron
The electoral success of the BJP in the Hindi heartland states triggered
unease in Congress circles that this misconception has to be corrected.
Some party leaders sought to do this by publicly demonstrating their Hindu
credentials typically associated with the BJP and thus indulging in what
some observers have called soft Hindutva.70
The first step in this process was Rahul Gandhi’s trek to the Kedarnath
temple in the summer of 2015, followed by temple-hopping since the 2017
Gujarat assembly elections. The elections campaigns in Gujarat, Madhya
Pradesh, and Rajasthan were dominated by visits to temples. During these
campaigns, Rahul Gandhi presented himself as a Shivbhakt, displayed his
janeu (sacred thread), and let his entourage discuss his Brahmin background
and his gotra (lineage) in response to BJP leaders who repeatedly brought
up the Italian heritage of his mother. Rahul Gandhi justified his temple run
by drawing a distinction between the BJP’s Hindutva, which he
characterized as hatred, insecurity, and anger and the Congress’s belief in
Hinduism as a liberal, progressive concept that teaches love and respect for
others. ‘We are committed to secularism. But secularism does not mean
being irreligious or anti-religion,’ he said.71 ‘We all worship our gods but
don’t use it for politics. The BJP created a misconception that secular
parties are anti-Hindu. This deception suits their power game. Unlike them,
we respect all religions.’72 This was an important distinction but the very
fact that he felt compelled to highlight the party’s Hindu identity was part of
the attempt to contain the backlash by shedding its pro-Muslim image.
But things went beyond this. The party manifesto in Madhya Pradesh
promised to build gaushalas (cow shelters), develop commercial production
of gaumutra (cow urine) and cow dung, promote the Ram Van Gaman Path
(the path that Lord Rama took during his exile from Ayodhya), pass laws to
conserve sacred rivers, and promote Sanskrit. The BJP accused the
Congress government of discontinuing the mass recitation of ‘Vande
Mataram’ at the secretariat on the first day of every month, a practice the
BJP introduced in 2005. The Congress chief minister responded by
announcing a bigger ‘Vande Mataram’ event.73 The manifesto in 2013 had
devoted a whole section to the minority community.74 However, the
Congress drubbings in 2014 and 2019 proved that voters were not
impressed with a duplicate copy of the original poster boys of publicized
Hinduness, the BJP.75
The shrinking political space of the Congress prompted the need to do
things that would please the majority community. So, its attempts swung
from minority to majority accommodation, which did not help the party to
wean away Hindu voters from the BJP, nor prevent minority votes from
going to regional parties. Notably, such strategies backfired disastrously,
resulting in further political marginalization as it failed to pick up electoral
dividends from this competitive wooing of the Hindu vote.
As Mani Shankar Aiyar puts it:
While this overwhelming principle of governance was projected as ‘secularism’ by the
Congress, electoral compulsions of attracting the Hindu vote or at least not alienating it have
resulted, since the second coming of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s time, in drifting away
from Nehruvian ‘secular fundamentalism’ … Try as it might, this masking of its fundamental
secular principles by the Congress party at election time (which has now become ‘all the time’)
has not paid any electoral dividends because the extreme end of the politico-religious spectrum
has been irrevocably captured by the Sangh Parivar.76

The real danger lies in seeking to thwart the BJP by becoming pale
imitations of the original.
Competing with BJP on its turf resulted in scepticism from the target
audience and ‘its dismissal as a pretender’.77 ‘The Janeudhari politics
makes the Congress appear like Saffron lite,’ said Sanjay Jha.78 In the
event, the Congress did not frontally confront Hindutva; rather, it ‘adjusted’
to Hindutva. This adjustment strategy hasn’t rocked the BJP boat but
instead that of the Congress, which has slipped between two streams.
Recent research in relation to this trend has consistently shown that when
mainstream parties move to the Right in an attempt to co-opt the issues of
the radical Right, it does not hurt populist Right parties—instead buoys
them.79 Also, ‘it shows that it does not stop the electoral bleeding of social
democratic parties either.’80

Ideological dilemmas
Well until the early 1990s, India’s secular model seemed to work reasonably
well. Religion and religious polarization was not exploited for political
gain. Hindu nationalism has since then gained traction to the point that most
political parties believe that it is the only legitimate strategy of electoral
success. The attitude of the Congress lends itself to such an interpretation as
the party has sought to downplay its secularist roots and embrace pro-Hindu
sentiments. The spate of electoral reverses appears to have compelled it to
take this stance as it does not wish to risk popular support by being seen as
a champion of secularism.
 The ideological dilemma within the Congress was well illustrated by the
controversy over the entry of women into the Lord Ayyappa temple in
Sabarimala. In September 2018, the Supreme Court decided to lift the ban
on women of all ages entering the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. There was
a visible divide in the Congress over this issue. The central leadership
supported the verdict, but state leaders opposed it. In fact, Rahul Gandhi
openly contradicted his state party’s stance in the name of equality.81 But
realizing the adverse impact of his stand on the Hindu vote base of the
party, he diluted his position, saying that he was not ‘able to give an open
and shut position on this [question]’ as he could ‘see validity in the
argument that tradition needs to be protected … and that women should
have equal rights’.82
Arguably this kind of flip-flop has strengthened majoritarianism, which,
however, has a long history and a momentum that is independent of the
failings of secularism and the Congress. Importantly, the assiduous work of
the Sangh Parivar for the last 90 years and in recent years the nationwide
campaigns for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the
propaganda about Hindu hurt have facilitated the shift from a secular
discourse to a majoritarian one. Additionally, the political success of the
BJP has been ‘aided by the skills of Modi, by a flow of massive funds to the
BJP, and by the Sangh’s mounting influence, if not control, of TV channels,
social media, and institutions of the state’.83
The Congress party has a fundamentally different approach from the BJP
on secularism and the majority–minority relationship.84 This difference is
diluted by Congress leaders themselves, who have had no compunctions in
migrating to the BJP.85 Digvijaya Singh noted in this context that:
Those who came to Congress for power and authority when they suddenly find themselves out
of power leave Congress to seek power elsewhere. Those who came to Congress attracted to its
ideology shall stay on and fight the forces of right-wing communal forces in India.86

A similar observation was made by another senior leader who said that
those who have left the party ‘never had any ideological convictions or
emotions attached to the party. For them, it was but a vehicle to catapult
them into organizational or governmental positions.’87 Of the 303 BJP MPs
in the current Lok Sabha, at least 31 are former Congress members.
Between 2015 and 2020, nearly 150 elected Congress MLAs have switched
over to the BJP.
From the oft-quoted principle of secularism, as envisaged by Nehru and
Indira Gandhi, the Congress has moved to acknowledging and catering to
the growing Hindu sentiment across India. Basically, the party was
attempting to deny the BJP the monopoly over Hindu sentiment, which has
helped the latter to make electoral gains at the expense of the Congress. The
party was put on the defensive by first calling it ‘sickular’ and then
labelling it a ‘Muslim party’, which made the Congress even shakier about
its core ideology.88 The deeper purpose behind this was Hindu
consolidation and remaking of the state on Hindutva lines. The BJP’s
campaign has focussed on consolidating a political majority based on a
majoritarian identity to unite Hindus beyond other factors of identity,
especially caste. However,
Even in these very bad days for traditional Congress secularism, at least 60 per cent of Hindu
voters (country-wide) remain outside the ambit of the BJP’s Hindutva and at least another 10
per cent of the drift is tepid and opportunistic. The Congress can attract it by providing a
credible alternative at the hustings.89

Secularism and pluralism are the greatest strengths of Indian democracy.

Indian secularism was and is essential to sustain democratic governance in
the face of striking ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Congress’s
compromises with regard to religious politics need to be noted, but with all
the inconsistencies and compromises, there is recognition on its part that
secularism is essential for democracy. This stands out as the most crucial
distinction between the Congress and the BJP’s political discourse and it
was this platform of secularism that kept communal polarization at bay for
several decades. Whether secularism can remain India’s defining ideology
will depend in part on the BJP’s future electoral success but, above all, on
the strategies the Congress adopts to counter divisive politics engendered
by this regime.

Notes
1. For the early debates on secularism, see essays in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its
Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
 2. J. P. Yadav, ‘After Victory, Modi Is Magnanimous with a Secular Swipe’, The Telegraph, 24
May 2019.
3. Ibid.
4. Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘Indian Secularism Still Has a Future if Followers Stop Blame Game with
RSS: Rajmohan Gandhi’, The Print, 15 Jul. 2020, https://theprint.in/opinion/indian-
secularism-still-has-a-future-if-followers-stop-blame-game-with-rss-rajmohan-
gandhi/460265/. Accessed 15 Jul. 2020.
5. On secularism, see essays in Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds.), Comparative
Secularism in a Global Age, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
6. Jawaharlal Nehru cited in Sumantra Bose, Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey
and the Future of Secularism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 34.
7. Ibid., p. 38.
8. The Partition of British India in 1947, which created the two independent states of India and
Pakistan, was followed by one of the greatest migrations in history. An estimated 12 to 15
million people were forcibly transferred between the two countries. The religious fury and
violence that it unleashed caused the deaths of some 2 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.
At least 75,000 women were raped. The trauma incurred in the process has been profound
and has had a lasting impact on the politics and relations between the two states.
9. See, for instance, Gyan Prakash, ‘Secular Nationalism, Hindutva and the Minority’, in
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds.), The Crisis of Secularism
in India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007, 177–88.
10. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds.), The Crisis of Secularism
in India, p. 15.
11. SeeRajeev Bhargava, ‘Liberal, Secular Democracy and Explanations of Hindu Nationalism’,
Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 40, no. 3, Nov. 2002.
12. The backstory section is based on excerpts from ‘Ayodhya and Politics of Religion’, in Zoya
Hasan Congress After Indira: Policy, Power and Political Change (1984–2009) published in
Scroll.in, ‘Ayodhya: How Rajiv Gandhi’s Plan to Use the Ram Temple for the Congress Party
Came Undone’, Scroll.in, 21 Oct. 2019, https://scroll.in/article/941140/ayodhya-how-rajiv-
gandhis-plan-to-use-the-ram-temple-for-the-congress-party-came-undone. Accessed 4 Apr.
2020.
13. Liz Mathew, ‘Explained: Milestones in the Ayodhya Ram Temple Journey’, The Indian
Express, 6 Aug. 2020.
14. For an account of the history of the Ayodhya dispute, see Valay Singh, Ayodhya: City of
Faith, City of Discord, New Delhi: Aleph Book Co., 2019. The author points to the collective
failure of the judiciary, parliament, and political parties to resolve the issue.
15. On aspects of communalism, see essays in Mujibur Rehman (ed.), Communalism in
Postcolonial India: Changing Contours, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2016.
16. An insider’s account of why P. V. Narasimha Rao, as prime minister, did not act to prevent or
stop the demolition of the Babri Masjid. See P. V. Narasimha Rao, Ayodhya: 6 December
1992, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006.
17. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Fate of Secularism in India Today: The BJP in Power’, 4 Apr.
2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/fate-of-secularism-in-india-pub-78689.
Accessed 6 Apr. 2021.
18. For an analysis of the history and politics of communalism during this period, see essays in
David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of
Democracy in India, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; AchinVanaik, The
Furies of Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularisation, London: Verso, 1997.
19. Bhargava, ‘Liberal, Secular Democracy and Explanations of Hindu Nationalism’.
20. See Zoya Hasan, ‘Minority Identity, State Policy and the Political Process’, in Zoya Hasan
(ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1998.
21. See Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Secularism, Multiculturalism, and the Very Concept of Law’, in Akeel
Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity and Enchantment, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2014.
22. Justin Jones, ‘India’s Triple Talaq Law Has Divided Even Those Who Oppose the Practice’,
Conversations, 16 Sep. 2019, https://qz.com/india/1709560/will-criminalising-triple-talaq-
help-indias-muslim-women/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2020.
23. The prime minister constituted a ‘High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic and
Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India’, charged with investigating the socio-
economic status of Muslims in 2005. Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim
Community of India, Prime Minister’s High Level Committee, Cabinet Secretariat, GoI, Nov.
2006. The Committee chaired by Rajinder Sachar, former chief justice of the Delhi High
Court, submitted its report to the Prime Minister in November 2006.
24. Prime Minister’s High Level Committee, 2006, p. 96.
25. Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian, ‘Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The
Distinctive Indian Model’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34, no. 1, winter 2020, pp. 3–
30.
26. ‘Reservation Bill Passed in Lok Sabha’, Rediff.com, 14 Dec. 2006,
https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/dec/14quota1.htm.Accessed 17 Nov. 2021.
27. Vinay Sitapati, ‘Reservations’, in Sujit Chowdhary, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta
(eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2016 .
28. Sanjiv Gajanan Punalekar vs Union of India on 6 Jun. 2011, PIL 84 of 2008,
https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1952085/?type=print. Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
29. Heewon Kim, The Struggle for Equality: India’s Muslims and Rethinking the UPA
Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 123–241.
30. Ibid., p. 123.
31. ‘Muslim Activists Unhappy with Non-Implementation of Sachar Committee
Recommendations’, The Hindu Business Line, 29 Jan. 2014.
32. ‘Muslims Must Have First Claim over Resources’, The Times of India, 9 Dec. 2006.
33. ‘Rajnath Singh Hits Back at Congress, Says It Divides on Religious Lines’, The Indian
Express, 21 Jan. 2014.
34. For a detailed discussion on the Sachar committee report, see Zoya Hasan and Mushirul
Hasan, ‘Assessing UPA Government’s Response to Muslim Deprivation’, in Zoya Hasan and
Mushirul Hasan (eds.), India Social Development Report 2012: Minorities at the Margins,
Council for Social Development, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
35. Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee, Chairman Amitabh Kundu, Ministry of Minority Affairs,
GoI, New Delhi, 2014. The Kundu Committee was set up in August 2013 to look at the
socio-economic and educational status of Muslims after the Sachar report. The Kundu panel
was mandated to evaluate the process of implementation of the Report’s recommendations
and the prime minister’s 15-Point Programme to assess the outcome of the programmes
implemented by the Ministry of Minority Affairs (MoMA), to look into the mismanagement
of funds released for multi-sectoral development programme (MSDP) in Minority
Concentration Districts (MCDs) to revive the proposal and to recommend corrective
measures.
36. Nissim Munnathukaren, ‘The Fast Disappearing Muslim in the Indian Republic’, The Indian
Express, 22 Jan. 2018.
37. Katherine Adeney, ‘A Move to Majoritarian Nationalism? Challenges of Representation in
South Asia’, Representation, 51, no. 1, 7–21, DOI: Published Online 7 Apr. 2015.
https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwio9rGT_aH0A
hWYH7cAHRqDDq4QFnoECAUQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.tandfonline.com%2Fd
oi%2Fabs%2F10.1080%2F00344893.2015.1026213&usg=AOvVaw1EohWxEQ_62JJqGB3k
JiMz Accessed 18 Nov. 2021.
38. Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Vernier, ‘The Dwindling Minority’, The Indian Express, Jul.
30, 2018.
39. Ibid.
40. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Losing by Religion: Muslim Exclusion in Modi’s de facto Hindu
Rashtra’. Caravan Magazine, 1 Mar. 2019, https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjDpa7w_6H0
AhUZfX0KHetiBzkQFnoECAIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fcaravanmagazine.in%2Fpersp
ective%2Fmuslim-exclusion-modi-de-facto-hindu-
rashtra&usg=AOvVaw1apLKKLCb8u3FOY0jyiDNo Accessed 18 Nov. 2021.
41. Sonia Bhalotra, Clots-Figueras, Irma Cassan Guilhem, and Lakshmi Iyer, ‘Religion,
Politician Identity and Development Outcomes: Evidence from India,’ Journal of Economic
Behavior & Organization, 104, 2014, pp. 4–17 .
42. Farah Naqvi, ‘Kiska saath, kiska vikas’, Seminar, 665, Jan. 2015.
43. Ibid.
44. The NAC drafted a Communal Violence Bill. The Bill is intended to prevent acts of violence
or incitement to violence directed at people by virtue of their membership to any ‘group’. An
existing Bill, entitled the ‘Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of
Victims) Bill, 2005’, was pending in the Rajya Sabha. The Bill makes illegal acts that result
in injury to persons or property if such acts are directed against persons on the basis of their
affiliation to any group and if such an act destroys the secular fabric of the nation. It makes
public servants punishable for failing to discharge their stated duties in an unbiased manner.
In addition, public servants have duties such as the duty to provide protection to victims of
communal violence and also have to take steps to prevent the outbreak of communal
violence.
45. ‘Table Communal Violence Bill Early’, The Hindu, 19 Nov. 2011.
46. Farah Naqvi, ‘When Equal Protection Matters Most’, The Indian Express, 21 Jul. 2011.
47. Lynching Without End: Report of Fact Finding into Religiously Motivated Vigilante Violence
in India, New Delhi: Citizens Against Hate, Sep. 2017, Accessed 18 Nov. 2021,
http://www.misaal.ngo/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FINAL-report-Lynching-without-
End.pdf. Citizens Against Hate is a collective of individuals and groups committed to a
secular, democratic, caring India. It seeks to provide practical help to victims of hate crime,
and to counter, through research, outreach, advocacy, and litigation, hate in all its forms.
Constituents that took part in the fact finding study were: Aman Biradari Trust, New Delhi,
Anjuman Islamiya, Ranchi, Quill Foundation, New Delhi, Misaal, New Delhi, Yuva Ekta
Jagruk Manch, Nuh, Haryana, Afkar India Foundation, Shamli, Uttar Pradesh.
48. David Barstow and Suhasini Raj, ‘Indian Muslim, Accused of Stealing a Cow, Is Beaten to
Death by a Hindu Mob’, The New York Times, 4 Nov. 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/world/asia/hindu-mob-kills-another-indian-muslim-
accused-of-harming-cows.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
49. Three major incidents of cow vigilantism include: (1) Mohammad Akhlaq, father of an Indian
Air Force employee, was murdered in 2015. (2) Two Muslim cattle traders, including a
minor, were found strung and hanged in Latehar in Jharkhand. (3) A young man died in
police custody in the same state for allegedly WhatsApping cow-related texts. For details, see
Seema Chishti, ‘The Cow Test’, The Indian Express, 8 Apr. 2017.
50. Uttar Pradesh administration leads in applying the draconian National Security Act
indiscriminately to put people behind bars, and 94 out of 120 such orders have been quashed
in recent years by the Allahabad High Court, which has criticized the administration. Cow
slaughter is Category Number One when it comes to invoking NSA: it accounts for 41 cases,
more than a third of the total that reached the High Court. All the accused are from the
minority community and were detained by the District Magistrate based on FIRs alleging
cow slaughter. See report ‘94 Out of 120 Orders Quashed: Allahabad High Court Calls Out
Abuse of NSA in Uttar Pradesh’, The Indian Express, 6 Apr. 2021.
51. Ajaz Ashraf, ‘Uttar Pradesh Meat Politics: Why Have the “Sickular Parties” Failed to Show
Support for Muslims?’, Scroll.in, 14 Apr. 2017, https://scroll.in/article/834267/uttar-pradesh-
meat-politics-why-have-the-sickular-parties-failed-to-show-support-for-muslims. Accessed
14 Apr. 2017.
52. On this, see Achin Vanaik, Hindutva Rising: Secular Claims, Communal Realities, New
Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017; Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘A De Facto Ethnic Democracy? The
Obliteration and Targeting of the Other: Hindu Vigilantes and the Making of an Ethno-State’,
in Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Majoritarian
State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India, London: Hurst & Co., 2019.
53. Interview with Sanjay Jha from The Telegraph), 14 Jul. 2020. Sanjay Jha is a senior journalist
who has covered the Congress party for over a decade.
54. Editorial, ‘The Dividing Line’, The Indian Express, 17 Jul. 2018.
55. ‘BJP Managed to Convince People We Are a Muslim Party: Sonia Gandhi’, The Indian
Express, 10 Mar. 2018.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Kaushik Deka, ‘The Myth of a Monolith: The Muslim Vote’, India Today, 13 May 2019, p.
54.
60. Ibid.
61. ‘BJP Succeeded in Pinning the Congress as a Muslim Party’, says Digvijaya Singh, ‘Off the
Cuff with Digvijaya Singh’, The Print, https://theprint.in/off-the-cuff/digvijaya-singh/54438/.
Accessed 20 Nov. 2021.
62. Smita Gupta, ‘Antony’s Remark on Minorities Revives Debate in Congress’, The Hindu, 29
Jun. 2014.
63. Sanjay Jha, The Great Unravelling: India After 2014, New Delhi: Westland Publications,
2020, p. 180.
64. ‘Antony Attacks Congress’s Minority Appeasement’, The Times of India, 28 Jun. 2014.
65. Gupta, ‘Antony’s Remark on Minorities Revives Debate in Congress’.
66. C. L. Manoj, ‘Congress Revisiting Religion & Votes, Signals AK Antony’, The Economic
Times, 30 Jun. 2014.
67. Farah Naqvi, ‘India’s Muslims Are Not the Enemy, Madam Raksha Mantri’, Wire.in, 15 Jul.
2018, https://thewire.in/communalism/indias-muslims-are-not-the-enemy-madam-raksha-
mantri. Accessed 17 Jun. 2020.
68. Editorial, ‘The Dividing Line’, The Indian Express, 17 Jul. 2017.
69. Interview with Congress leader, Sanjay Jha, 6 Aug. 2020.
70. Jaffrelot, ‘The Fate of Secularism in India’.
71. Rahul Gandhi quoted in Sanjay Jha, ‘Unstated Message of Rahul Pilgrimage’, The Telegraph,
4 Sep. 2018.
72. Ibid.
73. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Beyond Optics, Congress Has Begun Flirting with Some of BJP’s
Favourite Campaign Themes’, The Indian Express, 13 Mar. 2019.
74. Ibid.
75. T. K. Arun, ‘View: Soft Hindutva Approach Can Prove Disastrous for Congress’, The
Economic Times, 28 Nov. 2018.
76. Interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar, 10 Jul. 2020.
77. Interview with Sanjay Jha (The Telegraph), 14 Jul. 2020.
78. Interview with Congress leader Sanjay Jha, 6 Aug. 2020.
79. Cas Mudde, ‘Why Copying the Populist Right Isn’t Going to Save the Left’, The Guardian,
14 May 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/14/why-copying-the-populist-
right-isnt-going-to-save-the-left. Accessed 4 Apr. 2020.
80. Ibid.
81. ‘Sabarimala: Rahul Gandhi Contradicts Congress Stand, Favours Women Entry’, Week, 30
Oct. 2018.
82. ‘Can’t Take Open-and-Shut Stand on Sabarimala, Let People of Kerala Decide: Rahul
Gandhi’, Livemint, 14 Jan. 2019,
https://www.livemint.com/Politics/3ue8jzaPtDgqC0JsttHP6J/Cant-take-openandshut-stand-
on-Sabarimala-let-people-of.html. Accessed 6 Apr. 2021.
83. Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘Indian Secularism Still Has a Future if Followers Stop Blame Game with
RSS: Rajmohan Gandhi’.
84. Interview with Anand Sahay, New Delhi, 29 Jun. 2020. Anand K. Sahay is a senior journalist,
columnist, and editor based out of New Delhi. He was formerly with The Times of India and
The Asian Age. He writes regularly for various print and digital media platforms.
85. Jyotiraditya Scindia, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Kalita, Himanta Biswa Sarma, Shankasinh
Vaghela, S. M. Krishna, Jaganmohan Reddy, Jayanti Natarajan, Ajay Kumar, and Pradyot
Manikya Bikram Debbarma are among the leaders who have left the Congress.
86. Interview with Digvijaya Singh, 2 Aug. 2020.
87. Sandeep Phukan, ‘Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot Were the “Princelings” of Congress,
Says Manish Tiwari’, The Hindu, 3 Aug. 2020.
88. Interview with Sanjay Kapoor, 5 Jul. 2020. Sanjay Kapoor is the editor of Hardnews
Magazine, partner of Le Monde Diplomatique in South Asia.
89. Interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar, 10 Jul. 2020.
 5
Hindu Nationalism to the Fore

Hindu nationalism posed the most formidable challenge to the Congress

party and the pluralist idea of India it espoused and promoted. Hindu
nationalism, which emphasizes the Hinduness of India, seeks to privilege
the identity and aspirations of Hindus as the numerical majority and reduce
the significance of pluralism and secularism, which for them represents an
appeasement of minorities.1 The BJP’s triumph in 2019 was driven by this
form of nationalism based on the primacy of the Hindu majority. This is
contrary to secular nationalism, which defines the nation as comprising
those who inhabit Indian territory and recognizes equal rights for all people
regardless of caste or religion for a common cause.2
The BJP’s concept of nationalism, which went unchallenged prior to the
elections, was reinforced by the 2019 election campaign, which centred on
nationalism and national security. The BJP, rather than seeking votes for
what they had accomplished over the past five years, which was very little,
chose nationalism and national security as the core issue to promote its
election effort. This campaign played an important part in shifting the
ideological ground of Indian nationalism towards Hindu nationalism.3
Hindu nationalism is the central concept that has shaped India’s right
turn. Its political success is in consonance with developments across the
world, which has seen the Far-Right move from the margins to the Centre
of power.4 Right-wing governments are in power in Russia, Turkey, Brazil,
the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sri Lanka. All
make widespread use of nationalist political appeals to construct religion-
or race-based majorities, and all characterize their opponents as anti-
national. Most of them have elected autocrats who have come to power
through the ballot box by making nationalist appeals to ‘the people’ and
railing against the ‘elite’ even as their politics is fundamentally anti-
democratic and seek to exclude or marginalize the minorities in their
countries.
For the most part right-wing regimes share common attributes but it is
important to note that the BJP is no ordinary right-wing party or even akin
to the new far-right politicians and parties in central and Eastern Europe. It
is a right-wing front of the extreme Right represented by the RSS. The
objective of the RSS is not merely to win elections and form governments
but to transform Indian society in all domains of culture, religion, and
civilization, a project it has assiduously pursued for close to a century.
This chapter discusses how and why Hindu nationalism gained the upper
hand in 2019 and the effect it had on the Congress which failed to counter
support in favour of Hindu nationalism. Both the BJP and Congress
attacked one another over issues of national security. Matters came to a
head over the purchase of French-made Rafale fighter jets and ‘surgical
strikes’ against Pakistan-based terrorist camps following the Pulwama
terrorist attack in Kashmir in February 2019, which led to the death of 40
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. The Pulwama attack,
followed by the retaliatory Balakot airstrikes, brought into the forefront the
discourse of nationalism and national security propounded by the BJP,
which played a major role in winning them a second term in office with a
larger majority. Modi, throughout the election campaign, accused the
Congress of supporting Pakistan and by so doing compromising India’s
security, while the opposition denounced the BJP for exploiting the issue
for political gain. Partha Chatterjee notes, in relation to the election
campaign:
It is important to emphasize that the 2019 story was created by successfully tying together two
separate political projects: one, the immediate representation of Narendra Modi as the
unquestioned populist leader who could be trusted to defend the nation’s security, and two, the
long-term project of a nationalism defined by the Hindu majority. The two projects could be
brought together because of the opportunity provided by the country-wide elections to
Parliament.5

A tale of two nationalisms

For nearly a century, an ideological conflict over the idea of India has
simmered, pitting an inclusive vision of a pluralistic nation against that of
the RSS, which holds that Hindus should have primacy in Indian society.
The post-Independence concept of India as a nation was based on a civic
rather than ethnic identity, and indeed much of its social progress was
closely tied to its preservation of diversity and cultural heterogeneity. India
proposed to set itself apart from Pakistan, which effectively committed
itself to being a state for Muslims by adopting secularism and pluralism as
its governing philosophy. The idea of India, usually attributed to the
country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is that of a nation
belonging to all Indians and not to any single group. He believed in
inclusive nationalism and scrupulously avoided defining the nation in terms
of the majority community. Throughout his political life, Nehru, like
Gandhi, took the sectarian forces head-on. In his very first campaign speech
in 1951, he alerted voters against those spreading the communal virus in the
name of Hindu or Sikh culture, as the Muslim League had earlier done in
the name of Islam.
Inclusive nationalism was distinct in three significant ways. First, there
was no enemy within the bounds of what was defined as India,
encompassing everyone within a certain territory. Second, it wasn’t
imperialist, as it didn’t seek to annex or acquire control over other
territories. Third, it did not place the nation above the people. National
development was the promotion of the welfare of all the people.6 Thanks to
the legacy of the freedom struggle and the long dominance of the Congress,
inclusive nationalism came to define India’s post-1947 national identity.7
Nehru fiercely opposed Hindu nationalism and sought to establish India as a
secular country.
While India was founded on a vision of inclusive nationalism designed
to hold the subcontinent’s disparate communities together, a strand of
Hindu nationalism has long envisaged a majoritarian polity that would
dispense with pluralism. Its origins go back to the early days of British
colonialism, which saw the emergence, not just of Hindu nationalism, but
the construction of Hinduism as it is known today. The penchant for making
India Hindu has been an undercurrent since its emergence in the early
decades of the twentieth century, although it did not then have the power or
the heft to pose a serious challenge to the accepted idea of India. The
votaries of this idea played no significant role in either the freedom struggle
or in creating the secular Constitution of Independent India. In fact, they
were almost completely absent from the Constituent Assembly. Although
this concept occupied a marginal place in India’s political spectrum for
most of the twentieth century, it emerged at the forefront of Indian politics
in the early decades of the twenty-first century and has gradually and
systematically entrenched itself into various spheres of society and polity
and succeeded in dramatically reshaping it. This powerful undercurrent has
had access to an array of deeply entrenched civil society organizations that
have been undertaking the ideological groundwork for building a Hindu
state since 1925. While they differ in tactics and strategy, they are all
grounded in the philosophy of Hindutva and support the assimilation of new
versions of Hindu culture and traditions into state policies and institutions,
and generally oppose the secular agenda.8 These organizations are the direct
descendants of the political tradition that had sought to anchor Indian
nationalism in Hindu ethnoreligious identity.9 The RSS has a huge cadre
and daily around 70,000 shakhas (literally, branches or basic units) hold
meetings across India. Sustained ideological, organizational, and
mobilization work by the RSS, the fountainhead of the Hindu Right, helped
it to penetrate and control state power. The ideological growth of Hindu
nationalism has been accompanied by its obverse, the hugely weakened
state of secular nationalism in contemporary India and the growth of the
politics of religion.
The secular strand of Indian nationalism began losing as soon as the
Congress began losing ground following the rise of Hindu nationalism in
the late 1980s. The alternative idea of Hindu India gained prominence with
the growing acceptability of the Jana Sangh after it joined mainstream
parties to oppose the Emergency in 1975, and more so after the BJP’s rise to
prominence since the late 1980s. The electoral success of the BJP brought
the alternative conception of nationalism to the fore, one based not on
secular principles but rather on the premise that Indian culture is
coterminous with the syndicated homogenized version of Hindu culture. It
chose to target secularism and the post-Partition idea of India. It promoted
the idea of a Hindu nation as a corollary to the two nations that came into
being after Partition. The Hindu nationalist idea of India is reminiscent of
European notions of nationalism embodied in the paradigm of ‘one nation,
one culture, one language’, which emerged in the wake of the Peace of
Westphalia.

Nationalism and anti-nationalism

Once the BJP came to power, Hindu nationalism began to displace inclusive
secular nationalism associated with the freedom struggle. The defining
feature of this nationalism is the idea that India is essentially a Hindu
nation. Nationhood is defined more by what it excludes than what it
includes. Its prime ideologues were V. D. Savarkar, leader of the Hindu
Mahasabha, and M. S. Golwalkar, the second chief of the RSS, who in
different ways offered the theory of Hindu primacy and depicted Muslims
as enemies of the Indian nation. Savarkar defined Hindus as only those
whose holy land (punyabhumi) and fatherland (pitribhumi) were in India
and only such citizens were central to Hindu nationalism. For the RSS,
traditionally, the internal threats were Muslims, Christians, and the
Communists. Congress was subsequently added to the list, although the
party now tops the list of anti-nationals.10 By this reckoning, the notion of
India being constructed of multiple overlapping identities must be replaced
with that of a singular identity. The principal danger of this nationalism is
the quest for an enemy within India and the conflation of the religious
identity of the majority community with nationalism. Nehru was prescient
in projecting this into the future when, in 1958, he declared that the
‘communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism
of the minority’, because, as he added, it ‘wears the garb of nationalism’.11
His assessment has been confirmed in India, Turkey, and elsewhere. Rather
than promoting unity, the Hindu nationalism of the RSS variant ends up
promoting disunity by emphasizing and politicizing differences and threats
to the nation from within. It constructs internal enemies and seeks to
dominate them by demonizing these identities in the process of creating a
Hindu order. In this case, the enemy is not just the Pakistani within the
borders, and there is a continuum from the external to the internal enemy.12
Thus, the BJP launched a nationwide campaign to create the perception
of enemies lurking within the borders of India through the dubious category
of the anti-national while arrogating to itself a monopoly of the national.13
This campaign began with the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
controversy in February 2016. A standoff at JNU took place after some
students organized a meeting to discuss recent instances of capital
punishment, which led to the arrest of student activists on charges of
sedition. This issue became serious with the arrest by the Delhi police in
February 2016, on charges of sedition, of the president of the JNU Student
Union (JNUSU) Kanhaiya Kumar, along with two other students, Umar
Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya. The provocation for the police action and
the sedition charge was the alleged shouting of ‘anti-India’ slogans at a
public meeting on 9 February. The Students Union categorically denied any
involvement with the controversial event, the identity of those chanting
slogans is still unknown, and yet, on 11 February, the JNUSU president was
picked up by the police for anti-national behaviour and for violating the
sedition laws, which are punishable with life imprisonment. This was a
political decision taken at the highest levels of government, except that the
home minister’s and the Delhi police’s decision was apparently based on a
tweet from a parody handle in Hafiz Saeed’s name and a doctored video
supplied by television channels. The entire controversy fitted well with the
overall politics of hyper-nationalism promoted by the BJP–RSS.
JNU has been in the crosshairs of the Right for a long time because it
represents much of what the Hindu nationalists abhor and resent about
India: a fortress of liberal, leftist, and secular ideas and action. That JNU
academics had been extremely critical of Hindu nationalism for decades
lent urgency and affirmation to their opposition to JNU.14 ‘The university
has been like a stone in the boot of the BJP, hobbling the party with every
step.’15 It seems as though it regards the JNU as a principal intellectual
opposition to its political agenda.
This controversy was used as a springboard for a campaign to redefine
nationalism as a form of hyper-nationalism that labelled critics of the
nationalist project as anti-national. The right-wing began using the phrase
‘tukde tukde’ gang to label dissidents as groups of people seeking to divide
India after the JNU controversy.16 It was part of a larger design by right-
wing forces to capture universities and impose a singular political discourse
of nationalism. The same pattern was visible in the unrest at the Film and
Television Institute of India at Hyderabad Central University, which led to
the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula, the controversy over the Ambedkar-
Periyar Study Circle in IIT Madras, the furore over a film screening in IIT
Delhi, and the protests at Jadavpur University in Kolkata.17 The key issue in
all these cases was the use of the nationalist discourse to put all critics of
the government on the defensive.

Crisis of Indian nationalism

The Congress party failed to question this new form of nationalism, leaving
the field wide open not just for an attack on the Congress but on Indian
nationalism as we once knew it. As the party fumbled on the issue, the BJP
succeeded in inscribing Hindutva nationalism in the popular discourse. As
early as 2014, Shashi Tharoor had warned his party
not [to] allow the BJP to monopolize the nationalist narrative. As the party with the most
experience in safeguarding India’s national interests, the Congress must proudly articulate its
own nationalism and remain vigilant on security and foreign policy issues that could be
mishandled by the BJP government. Though our tradition is that political differences stop at the
water’s edge and that foreign policy is India’s, not any one parties, we must not allow the BJP
to use its governmental position to be identified as the sole protector of Indian national pride,
which we may define very differently.18

The party allowed the BJP–RSS to run away with the nationalist
narrative because it was on the defensive once the BJP assumed the mantle
of nationalism. It did not defend its record on national security and
therefore allowed the BJP to arrogate to itself the claim to be the latter’s
sole arbiter and guardian. The BJP was convinced that it alone represented
nationalism. The party presented itself as the principal guardian of
nationalism and national security.
The Congress contested the nationalist label the Sangh Parivar has
ascribed to itself but failed to build a counter-narrative highlighting its
conception of nationalism or its contribution to national security. The party
was in power when Pakistan was split into two in 1971 and over 90,000
Pakistani soldiers surrendered in what was an unprecedented military action
when Bangladesh was formed. It faced down Khalistani separatism in
Punjab, which posed a serious threat to the unity of India in the late 1970s
and early 1980s. In the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the
government was instrumental in isolating Pakistan internationally as a
sponsor of terrorism through responsible diplomatic efforts and even
initiated covert measures such as surgical strikes.19 The party, however,
failed to capitalize on its historic achievements to punch holes in BJP’s
claims to be the sole guardian of national interest.
There was no debate in the Congress on nationalism, let alone Hindu
nationalism. No concerted effort was made to question its claims. No
discussions were organized on nationalism to generate a country-wide
debate on its hijacking by the BJP. Even the absence of the RSS from the
freedom struggle was not seized upon to corner the BJP. Given the
Congress’s long history of nationalist credentials, it was an issue that the
party had taken for granted for years and therefore perhaps did not see the
need to reiterate its claims over nationalism as a political battle. This
confidence was misplaced because nationalism had already emerged as the
principal political battleground of contesting ideologies. The party should
have joined the debate by spelling out how inclusive nationalism was
different from religious nationalism but effectively allowed itself to be left
out of the debate. The two nationalisms are indeed poles apart but the Right
has been largely successful in fusing Indian nationalism with Hindutva
while stridently emphasizing uniformity of identity and belief. With no
serious challenge to their redefinition of nationalism, inclusive nationalism
was replaced by the narrow definition of the Sangh Parivar, reminiscent of
European hyper-nationalism, which reached its apogee during the inter-war
years.20
The BJP’s 2019 election manifesto entitled ‘Sankalpit Bharat–Sashakt
Bharat (Determined India—Empowered India)’, declared ‘nationalism’ to
be the party’s ‘inspiration’. Soon after the manifesto was launched at the
BJP headquarters, finance minister Arun Jaitley said the document had been
prepared with a ‘nationalist’ and not a ‘tukde-tukde or Ivy League’ vision.21
Through such insinuations and campaigns, the government cultivated an
image of a staunchly dedicated nationalistic regime. This form of hyper-
nationalism was also evident in government directives. For instance, the
Vice-Chancellors of 42 Central universities were asked to fly the national
flag on their buildings, although most of the central universities already
have the tricolour flying from their administrative buildings.22 Ministers
and some retired military men called for tanks to be installed on campuses
that would display the portraits of all the 21 Param Vir Chakra (recipients of
India’s highest gallantry award) winners. This variety of hyper-nationalism
was promoted by social media and anchors on their television chat shows,
with repeated focus on the dangers posed by terrorism from Pakistan and of
illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh.23

Hindu nationalism occupies Centre stage

Given the centrality of nationalism in BJP’s strategy, it is no surprise that it
occupied Centre stage in the 2019 election, although the campaign had not
begun on that note. During the five years of BJP rule, the economy
floundered, with slow growth, joblessness, farm distress, and slump in
industrial production. There were repeated instances of breach of national
security in the armed forces bases and societal violence was at a high, with
recurrent cases of mob lynching of the minorities. Private investment,
exports, and rural demand had all been consistently falling. Farmers had
marched into cities to convey the extent of their distress, and many believed
it would prove an electoral problem for the BJP. Many people were hit hard
by the disastrous demonetization decision announced in November 2016,
which had been designed to flush out undeclared wealth but ended up
seriously damaging the economy, especially the informal sector and
resulting in huge job losses as people returned to villages where they had no
sources of livelihood. The faulty rollout of the Goods and Services Tax
(GST) in July 2017 hurt small- and medium-sized businesses. Both
decisions diminished the government’s popularity and would negatively
impact its prospects in the 2019 general election. The strategy was to skirt
attention away from economic performance and job losses because
feedback indicated that these issues had been gaining traction with the
public. Instead, there was a concerted attempt to highlight the prime
minister’s strong man image as the only leader who can take on Pakistan’s
terror establishment.
The BJP began forefronting a combative strategy because there was a
growing feeling that the ruling dispensation was unlikely to repeat the
performance of 2014. In his 2014 campaign, Modi railed against the corrupt
Congress system in which there was dynastic rule by a single family,
excessive government interference in the economy, and the poor, the
minorities, and Dalits were held in perpetual political bondage through
doles. He promised wholesale reform of taxation and labour laws to make
Indian industry globally competitive. There was almost no mention of
Hindutva or the Ayodhya temple or the uniform civil code. Even when
other BJP leaders or candidates brought up the subject of Hindutva, Modi
carefully kept aloof from it. Development and corruption were two major
poll issues when Modi projected himself as the harbinger of change. Both
these issues had lost their appeal as non-Hindutva supporters who backed
the BJP on the promise of development were disenchanted as development
hadn’t taken off. The BJP revamped its strategy with greater prominence
given to nationalism and high-pitched communal rhetoric in the months
prior to the election. The 2019 elections saw more extravagant use of this
idiom. At the same time, it is important to remember that polarization has
always been an indispensable part of its campaign strategy and is embedded
in its ideology. For the BJP, creating a Hindu–Muslim divide is at the heart
of its quest for a Hindu consolidation. This stemmed from the belief that a
politics of polarization paid dividends.
The BJP challenged the Congress’s ‘idea of India’ on issues ranging
from sedition to Jammu and Kashmir to judicial interference in matters of
faith. For the BJP, the Congress’s espousal of the idea of India as a
multicultural nation was a watery concept that diluted India’s Hindu
identity. Thus, a hard line against agitators in Kashmir, rights activists, and
left-wing students on university campuses was necessary as a thrust in its
attempt to redefine nationalism. The old debate on pseudo-secularism was
revived by the decision to pass legislation in parliament to make ‘triple
talaq’ or instant divorce a criminal offence. An amendment to the
citizenship law was proposed to offer Indian citizenship to non-Muslim
victims of religious persecution in neighbouring Muslim majority countries.
A campaign was launched to complete the National Register of Citizens
(NRC) in Assam in order to identify illegal foreigners without valid
documents. Addressing a rally in Sawai Madhopur in Rajasthan, Amit Shah
said that ‘crores of illegal infiltrators’ have entered the country like
‘termites’ and should be ‘uprooted’.24 With the use of the term ‘termite’,
Shah set the pace for the demonization of Muslims and immigrants. He
vowed to create a NRC that would ‘remove every single infiltrator from the
country’ unless they happen to be Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist. This threat
becomes clearer when viewed together with the proposed Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill. Coupled with ongoing campaigns against eating beef
and love jihad, and propaganda about Muslims illegally entering India from
Bangladesh and altering the demographic balance of the country, the party
fuelled anti-Muslim sentiments aimed at moving attention away from
growing grievances of people. It especially deployed the Hindu nationalist
tropes in north, central, and western India, where it believed such appeals
would resonate.

Balakot and after

The Congress began the election campaign with a focus on economic
distress but this lost traction in the face of the nationalist ambush. The party
had already gained momentum with a good performance in the Gujarat
elections of 2017 and wresting three heartland states—Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh—from the BJP in 2018. It had hoped that
problems of unemployment and farm distress would unseat the ruling party.
However, the surge of nationalism following the Pulwama attack helped the
BJP evade its dodgy economic record by diverting attention to a one-point
agenda of national security and the subsequent Balakot airstrikes.
Till the afternoon of 14 February, the Rafale deal,25 45-year-high
unemployment rate, and farm distress were the talking points appearing to
dominate the election narrative and the opposition looked all set to pose a
tough challenge to the BJP. Around 3.15 that afternoon, Jaish-e-
Mohammad, the Pakistan-based terror group, targeted a convoy of the
CRPF, killing 40 jawans on the Jammu–Srinagar highway. Twelve days
later, on 26 February, Indian fighter jets reportedly bombed a Pakistani
militant camp across the Line of Control (LoC) in Balakot to avenge the
terrorist attack, which the government said killed ‘a very large number’ of
militants.26 The target was a terror training Centre in the Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. An aerial dogfight followed the next
day, that is, 27 February, when Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman
shot down a Pakistan Air Force F-16 fighter jet. His aircraft too was shot
down and he parachuted down on Pakistan territory. Backchannel
diplomacy helped by American mediation ensured that the pilot was
released from Pakistan as a goodwill gesture.
The satellite imagery acquired by Planet Labs, Inc., and accessed by the
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)27 calls into question the claims
made by the Ministry of External Affairs of ‘a very large number’ of
militants being killed in the strike on the morning of 27 February.28
Similarly, the publicly available imagery acquired by European Space
Imaging the day after the strike suggests that buildings at the camp were not
visibly damaged or destroyed.29 Although most of these accounts say the
strikes missed their target, nonetheless, it was cited in the Indian media and
strategic commentary as an example of the BJP’s and Prime Minister
Modi’s strong and decisive approach to national security.30 These claims
formed the basis of the entire 2019 campaign centred on national security.31
Led by no less than the prime minister himself, the BJP’s campaign was
built largely around the Pulwama attack and the government’s tough
response to it. Once national security became a central theme in the
elections, everything else took a backseat.32 The first step was to ensure that
the government, and not the opposition, controlled the narrative around
national security. This was systematically done, beginning with homage at
the funerals of the CRPF personnel who died in this dastardly attack.
Rajdeep Sardesai writes,
When the bodies of the forty slain CRPF jawans reached Palam air force area in a special
Indian Air Force plane, the next evening the prime minister was there to pay homage. Prime
Minister walked slowly around each of the 40 coffins draped in the tricolour. He also directed
all his ministers and BJP MPs to attend the funerals of the jawans who had belonged to their
respective states. Funeral processions were organized through the towns and villages of the
martyrs.33

The Congress, fearing the BJP’s propensity to project any form of

questioning of security forces as an unpatriotic act, was guarded in raising
the issue of intelligence failure leading to the terror strike.34 No questions
were asked except to emphasize the admission of the Jammu and Kashmir
governor, Satyapal Malik, that there was an intelligence failure.35 The BJP
was, however, quick to put a lid on this too by invoking the spirit of the
martyrdom of the CRPF jawans to drown out any criticism.36 Any attempt
to seek details about the surgical strikes was lambasted as treasonous and
anti-national.37 Those questioning Balakot and seeking proof that an F-16
was actually downed were denounced as anti-national. Anyone doubting the
surgical strikes was accused of sympathizing with Pakistan and hence anti-
nationals. ‘After the surgical strikes, gloom prevailed in Pakistan, and in
Rahul baba and Kejriwal’s offices. They were worried about their vote
bank,’ said Amit Shah at an election rally.38
From there on, hyper-nationalism was the ruling party’s chosen weapon
to corner the Congress, which was routinely described as anti-national and
its opposition as fundamentally illegitimate.39 Balakot flattened the
Congress party’s campaign, its leaders not quite recognizing that the ground
had slipped beneath their feet. The BJP succeeded in suppressing every
uncomfortable issue by hyping up Pulwama and the airstrike on Balakot.
From mid-February, there were reports suggesting strong support for the
BJP in the wake of the Pulwama attack. Even after this perceptible shift,
there was no attempt at modifying it, the top leadership of the Congress
persisted with the Rafale fighter jet campaign and Rahul Gandhi led the
attack on Modi with his pet slogan ‘Chowkidar chorhai’.
National security issues should not be specific to any party but the BJP
has tried to acquire exclusive rights to this brand equity. It, like most right-
wing parties, has an advantage over its rivals on this plank as it projects
itself as the only party according priority to national security. It has come to
own the national security space because it is seen to be the toughest party
on three important national security threats in popular imagination:
Pakistan, Islamic extremism, and Maoism.40 In a 2014 Lokniti survey, 31
per cent of people named the BJP the most trusted party on national
security, with just 19 per cent choosing the Congress.41 This lead appeared
to have only widened in 2019, according to surveys.42 Indeed, BJP’s actions
post-Pulwama created the narrative of a ‘Modi way’ of securing India,
distinct from the Congress way.43 To borrow the words of Mukul Kesavan,
written in the context of the prime minister’s speech in Leh (Ladakh) in the
aftermath of military confrontation with China in June 2020, the surgical
strikes sealed his reputation ‘as the grandmaster of the military riposte’.44
Even in 2014, the BJP had attacked the Congress for not adopting a tougher
stance towards Pakistan and for its inability to fashion a coherent national
policy to deal with periodic Maoist violence, which has wracked several
states. Because of the BJP’s astute media management, people are prone to
trust it with national security more than others. This plank was completely
appropriated after Balakot, as no party or government, the BJP claimed, had
the guts to take on the enemy in the way their leader had.

Material politics goes backstage

The Congress campaign collapsed as the national security paradigm
overshadowed all else. The real gains of the Congress would have come
from disappointment in the government’s economic performance but this
record was shrewdly sidestepped by diverting it to a three-point campaign
of nationalism (national security, Pakistan and terrorism), Hinduism
(Hindus everywhere, minorities nowhere), and anti-corruption (blasting
Congress corruption, ignoring their own).45 The BJP ran its entire campaign
on teaching Pakistan a lesson and many voters lapped it up.
Pakistan, Muslims, and terrorism are the principal tropes of BJP’s
nationalist politics. The BJP has ‘mastered the art of linking the threat of
terrorism, Muslims, and Pakistan and has deployed this trope to win
elections.’46 When it comes to making these links, BJP leaders are not
bound by facts because for them everything is fair in war and elections.47
After Pulwama, the terrorism-Pakistan-Muslim threat was emphasized even
more vigorously to target the Congress for playing into the hands of the
enemy. It was built on stoking fears and insecurities and highlighting
security threats from internal and external enemies.48 Modi accused the
Congress of hatching the ‘Hindu terror’ conspiracy to defame India’s
religious heritage.49 He said at an election meeting in Khandwa, Madhya
Pradesh: ‘No matter how many ‘janeu [sacred thread] they will show, the
Congress and its mahamilavat [highly adulterated] allies will never escape
from the sin of putting a blot of terrorism on the saffron colour of Hindu
religion.’50 On 1 April, in Wardha, voters were exhorted to defeat the
Congress because the party had hurt Hindus by coining the term Hindu
terror. ‘The Congress tried to stain crores of the country’s people using the
term “Hindu terror”. Tell me, weren’t you deeply hurt when you heard the
term “Hindu terror”?’51 He claimed that the Congress party’s electoral
manifesto speaks the same language as Pakistan. The provocation for this
was a statement in its manifesto that it wanted to do away with the sedition
laws. Modi said, ‘Pakistan too wants this. It wants a free hand for those who
want to work against India.’52 Suggestions in the Congress manifesto such
as diluting the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and dispensing with the
sedition laws were seized upon by the BJP as evidence of the role which
‘Congress and left-liberals can play in weakening the security forces and
allowing the so-called “tukde tukde” gang to flourish’.53 Home Minister
Rajnath Singh had not only pooh-poohed the idea of doing away with the
sedition laws but pledged to strengthen them even further, making them
even more stringent than the British thought necessary.
The prime minister delivered a speech with photographs of the CRPF
men who had been killed in the Pulwama attack forming the backdrop. This
was justified by saying that he had taken a great risk in sanctioning the
surgical strike within Pakistan, which was quite the opposite of the
Congress, which did not initiate any military action even after the Mumbai
terrorist attack in 2008.54 Modi repeatedly referred to this and exhorted the
young to vote for the security of India. His speeches ended with the
exhortation: ‘Remember, a vote for the kamal [lotus, the BJP symbol] is a
vote for Narendra Modi.’
Amit Shah stated categorically that ‘the 2019 Lok Sabha elections are
being fought on the issue of national security. The way PM had ensured
national security, people have been waiting for this for the past 70 years.’55
The election was turned into a referendum on Modi as the strong man
defending the nation against its enemies. What mattered was trust in his
leadership. The identification of the leader with the people and the leader’s
opponents with the people’s enemies was complete. Most Indians seemed to
trust him over other leaders when it came to delivering national security. It
speaks of the attributes that Modi often projects about himself:
decisiveness, muscularity, and nationalism.
This suited the BJP because a personality cult had been assiduously built
up over five years. The origins of this project can be traced to Gujarat.56 At
the national level, the presidential-style campaign was launched with great
fanfare in Varanasi with the chanting of ‘Har Har Modi’, acquiring greater
weight in the 2019 election.57 The entire exercise was aided by a
formidable party organization: millions of members recruited through
‘missed calls’; effective polling booth committees active well before
elections; foot soldiers of the RSS delegated from every shakha (branch) in
a state to interact with sensitive constituencies; campaign squads
persistently visiting voters’ homes with leaflets and arguments; and a
command structure that relayed instructions down the hierarchy with swift
and unchallengeable authority.
Once the general elections were framed essentially as a question of the
people choosing their prime minister, the opposition was stranded in a
hopeless position. Promises of jobs and welfare were sidelined as national
security became the dominant theme of the campaign. This helped to
mobilize the core constituency, which was wavering because of the
government’s palpable economic failures.58 The message that the
government had hit back against Pakistan changed the narrative; indeed, it
changed the outcome of the election.59 This was not the first time Indian
armed forces have struck at targets across the border. They have done so on
numerous occasions since 1950, but previous governments have not
publicized this, as in the way the BJP government did. This is done ‘only if
you want to become a hero in the eyes of the people and win elections on
the strength of military actions’, commented former National Security
Adviser (NSA) Shiv Shankar Menon.60 Thus, the phrase ‘surgical strike’,
hitherto used largely in military circles in Israel and the United States,
became a household term in every Indian language thanks to its repeated
use in describing how the government was dealing with the Pakistani threat.
The poor too were suddenly more concerned about national security than
employment, appreciating that Modi had restored asmita [pride].61 People
with no obvious interest in foreign policy—small farmers, petty
shopkeepers, labourers, and boatmen—were all of a sudden talking about
national security and how India had won the respect of the outside world.
‘It is all right if there’s little development, but Modi is keeping the nation
secure and keeping India’s head high,’ said a voter in Allahabad.62 The
political impact was clearly greatest in areas where the voters were more
ideologically aligned to the BJP. Public anger against the economic
slowdown took a backseat as the hyper-nationalism agenda took Centre
stage. The Rafale deal, GST, and other issues did not resonate on the ground
anymore. The Congress continued to emphasize a pro-poor, pro-farmer
pitch, but it had few takers. It tried to change the narrative by focussing on
an income guarantee proposal for the poor which too had no takers.

No takers for NYAY

On 25 March, Rahul Gandhi announced Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), a
minimum-income guarantee scheme that would be the Congress’s flagship
electoral promise.63 The promise of minimum income support of Rs 72,000
per annum to the poorest 20 per cent of families was a significant
assurance. NYAY, which means justice, was to be the pivot of the election
campaign. The slogan ‘Ab Hoga Nyay’, now there will be justice, became
the focus of its publicity campaign for the elections. All the party’s other
pre-poll promises, manifesto, social media strategy, hoardings, and posters
centred on this broad theme.64
Rahul Gandhi relied heavily on the potential appeal of this programme,
claiming it would trigger economic activity at the grassroots apart from
addressing the concerns about poverty. NYAY could have been a game-
changer but Balakot changed that. Also, the announcement came too late
and therefore couldn’t gather momentum and didn’t reach the people.
Voters were unaware of it even in states where the Congress was in power
such as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The party’s proclaimed game-
changer failed to percolate down to the last mile. There were hardly any
NYAY signboards in central Uttar Pradesh, for example, where a minimum
income guarantee was certainly necessary, and lack of communication
strategy and planning around NYAY meant that it didn’t kindle the popular
imagination.65 Not only was its belated announcement and poor messaging
responsible for its lack of success, but Pulwama and Balakot completely put
paid to its gaining traction with the people. The BJP forcefully countered
the scheme with its own programme of direct benefit transfers to crores of
the poor.66 Under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM Kisan)
scheme, income support of Rs 6000 per year was provided to all farmer
families across India in three equal instalments of Rs. 2000 each every four
months.67 NYAY was a promise while PM Kisan had already delivered Rs.
2000 each into the bank accounts of farmers just prior to the elections. As
the proverb goes, ‘A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.’ Cash delivery
and the government’s welfare delivery schemes were a second turning point
in the election. From gas cylinders to toilets, rural housing to PM Kisan, the
BJP government delivered benefits, but more importantly, made it known
that it had done so.68

‘Chowkidar chor hai’ backfires

Congress was clearly uneasy with the changed scenario after Balakot. Yet, it
persisted with the Rafael fighter jet campaign. For this it relied heavily on
feedback by Data Analytics and Operation Shakti, a flagship mass contact
programme with a technological interface with ground-level workers.69
Serious questions had been raised about the reliability of this data on which
the Congress president relied heavily.70 State unit presidents and chief
ministers were sending regular feedback on the ground realities in their
states and they felt that the party could be wiped out in the Hindi heartland
if it didn’t modify its campaign strategy. But the top leadership failed to
heed the ground situation so relayed71 and, despite these misgivings the
Rafale deal continued to be the mainspring of the party campaign based on
data inputs provided by Data Analytics.
While the national security narrative derailed the Congress campaign it
helped Modi frame himself as a ‘Chowkidar, or watchman, who would
protect India’. This narrative was used maximally to project the prime
minister as the strong leader who had entered Pakistan to defeat the enemy.
The ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ campaign was effectively countered by ‘Main
bhi chowkidar’. As the campaign progressed, Rahul Gandhi trained his
guns on the Rafale deal, his speeches and public addresses focussing
pointedly on this issue even though it was commonly believed that no
corruption charge could stick to Modi. Every speech Rahul Gandhi gave
would begin and conclude with the Rafale issue and people were asked to
repeat the slogan ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ after him; this was raised in every
election rally. It was first raised in the Rajasthan assembly election in 2018
to launch an attack on the Rafale deal and made the headlines in major
newspapers. This convinced the leadership that it was working well, and
thereafter it became a regular slogan at all the rallies. The assembly win in
three heartland states reinforced the belief that the slogan had indeed
worked well with the voters and the party continued with it in the Lok
Sabha polls. It, however, did not create the expected impact in the 2019
elections; it didn’t excite people and thus didn’t translate into votes. Indeed,
calling Modi a thief backfired because people didn’t see him as one. The
BJP received a further boost when Rahul Gandhi was hauled up by the
Supreme Court for his remarks, of which even the apex court disapproved.
Modi did not take kindly to the slogan.72 Just weeks ahead of the
elections, he changed his personal Twitter username to ‘Chowkidar Modi’ a
day after launching the #MainBhiChowkidar campaign on 17 March 2019.
It was a calculated response to Rahul Gandhi’s jibe, using the slander and
vilification to play victim. ‘Your chowkidar is standing firm and serving the
nation. But I am not alone. Everyone who is fighting corruption, dirt, and
social evils is a chowkidar. Everyone working hard for the progress of India
is a chowkidar. Today, every Indian is saying: #MainBhiChowkidar,’
tweeted Modi.73
This campaign was designed by the social media team at the PMO and
executed by the Gurugram-based Association of Billion Minds (ABM).74
The ABM was the organization behind the Facebook pages of the BJP. An
investigation by The Huffington Post revealed that this firm was created
exclusively to support the BJP. The ABM conceives, designs, executes, and
provides memes for many of the party’s campaigns, including ‘Main bhi
Chowkidar’, ‘Nation with NaMo’, and ‘Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat’, and
makes them viral across a network of Facebook pages with millions of
followers. The campaign speeches, rallies, and public events in the physical
world were quickly turned into digital content for online platforms. This
campaign was a great success; indeed, the personal attacks generated a
sympathy wave that the Congress’s top leadership did not recognize. Rahul
Gandhi persisted in repeating the slogan ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ to dent
Modi’s image as a scrupulous and honest leader rather than remake his
message but it didn’t excite anyone apart, perhaps from the committed
voters attending his rallies.
 The Congress leadership was convinced that there was corruption in the
deal and the award of the offset contract to Anil Ambani’s Reliance
Company with no previous experience in defence production. The party had
raised ‘many “pertinent” questions on process, procedure, and pricing,
however, the smoking gun with regard to pecuniary malfeasance could not
be decisively clinched in public consciousness’. Consequently, the
campaign against the Rafale deal fell flat even though the procurement was
not above board, as revealed by a series of investigative reports published in
the Hindu but the BJP stonewalled them.75 Focussing on corruption served
only to remind people of the corruption scandals under the previous
Congress governments.76 Rafale lost momentum as national security
became the primary driver of the public mood stoked by the BJP–RSS,
who, apart from presenting themselves as the guardians of the nation,
painted the opposition, and the Congress in particular, as Pakistan friendly
and anti national.

Stunning defeat
The Congress party suffered a huge defeat in 2019. The BJP cemented its
hold on power, even as the Congress was unable to even make inroads in
states it had been expected to win. The BJP crossed the 300 mark while its
vote share jumped from 31 to 38 per cent in 2019. Among the 421 seats the
party contested, it won just 52. It came second in 196 and third or below in
173 constituencies. However, even in the 196 seats in which it came second,
the Congress lost by huge margins in a large number of them. It drew a
blank in 18 states and Union Territories; nine former chief ministers lost in
the election. The Congress was completely routed in the Hindi-speaking
states, where the BJP won nearly every seat. The party’s dismal
performance in Uttar Pradesh stands out, with its vote share dipping from
7.53 to 6.31 per cent. It lost Maharashtra, did poorly in Karnataka and West
Bengal. It was invisible in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Most of its seats
came from just three states: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab.77
This dismal performance raised questions about Rahul Gandhi’s
leadership and many blamed him for his party’s miserable performance. He
wasn’t, however, a complete pushover and the BJP’s relentless attack on
him was testimony to this till the post-Pulwama-Balakot events altered the
political narrative. Throughout the campaign, the BJP leaders relentlessly
attacked Rahul Gandhi and the Congress and indeed reserved their
munitions for the Congress, not bothering much about the rest of the
opposition. Rahul Gandhi fought a fierce battle against the BJP despite the
restricted opportunities the surcharged political climate allowed. He did
raise real issues while the prime minister concentrated entirely on terrorism,
the threat from Pakistan, and India’s vulnerability. Nonetheless, the party
lost badly because a combination of Hindu nationalism, populism, and the
Balakot airstrikes proved unbeatable. After the Balakot airstrikes the
Congress never found its footing again and was outgunned by the BJP’s
deep pockets and disciplined party machine.
The party was too far behind in organization, money, and momentum to
catch up. The BJP’s nationalist discourse was given credibility by key
players in the electronic media and also some in the print media. The media
sees itself as the conscience-keeper of the state, waging a battle against
‘enemies’ of the nation, principally those who disagree with the
government. It has become complicit in the manufacture of the nationalist
narrative and in signalling to supporters and dissidents alike who are
national and who are anti-national.78
During primetime, the prime minister received three times more airtime
than the Congress president. Hindi media is particularly enamoured of
Modi.79 His 64 rallies received most of the attention from Hindi channels
across India, while Rahul Gandhi’s 65 rallies within the same time period
were largely ignored. TV channels presented Modi not merely as the
frontrunner but as the only choice,80 as they had done in 2014. Pakistan was
used as a punching bag for the BJP to retain power, electronic media
reinforcing this campaign.
While there are many reasons for the Congress’s defeat, we must not
overlook the asymmetry in resources, most importantly the mind-boggling
money power of the BJP. Money was a major factor as this election which
was the most expensive ever.81 The BJP broke all records for election
spending,82 was by far the richest party in the fray,83 and outspent the
Congress and all the other political parties combined.84 The Centre for
Media Studies estimated that about Rs. 60,000 crores was spent in the 2019
elections, of which the BJP accounted for at least 45–55 per cent spending,
while the Congress spent only about 15–20 per cent of this amount.85
Before the campaign had even started, the BJP had spent more money on
ads than the previous government had done in ten years.86 It benefited from
the bulk of electoral bonds purchased during the two months preceding the
results.87 These funds helped the BJP to craft a campaign that no other
competitor could match, and when it came to electioneering, they were able
to rent all the available helicopters and private jets in India, leaving the
opposition stranded.
The BJP spent over Rs. 20 crores, which was six times as much as its
principal rival, the Congress, on Internet and social media-based
advertising.88 The BJP’s IT cell head, Amit Malaviya, had declared in
March that, ‘The upcoming elections will be fought on the mobile phone …
In a way, you could say they would be WhatsApp elections.’ He later said,
‘This is India’s first truly social media-driven election, fought on WhatsApp
with much greater intensity than in a TV studio.’89 The BJP is the master of
this technique, running an estimated half a million WhatsApp groups across
the country,90 making full use of WhatsApp and other social media
technologies to spread fake news. The IT cell was actively relaying
misinformation in the elections.91 According to a BBC report, online
accounts that favour the BJP are more prone to disseminating fake news in
comparison to those who oppose them; in fact, the prime minister’s NaMo
app has itself been a major source of misinformation.92
The BJP’s campaign was turbo-charged by Hindu nationalism and it won
the second five-year term on the strength of this platform despite the
ravaged economy, record joblessness, and widespread rural distress. In
2014, the BJP concentrated on economic issues, which gave rise to the hope
that it would bring economic growth and rid India of corruption. There was,
however, no reason to hope the same in 2019 as virtually nothing that was
promised was delivered. In such a situation, majoritarianism helped by
shifting the public discourse from the economic crisis to national security
and threats to the nation from internal and external enemies saved the day.
The Congress has never been able to take on the BJP and the Sangh Parivar
when they have used the national security mantra to keep it on the backfoot.
 The BJP won the elections with a larger majority indicating that shift in
public discourse is what mattered. The defeat of the Congress makes it clear
that nationalism and perception of threats to national security motivated
voters more than policy choices. Economic discontent was swept aside as
large numbers of people from the majority united behind the BJP. In the
past, the focus was on what Arjun Appadurai described as the power of
small numbers, which top BJP leaders saw as an attempt to split the Hindu
vote. The BJP first implemented its strategy of Hindu unity in the 2017
Uttar Pradesh assembly elections by uniting lower castes while painting
Muslims as the ‘other’.93 Any counter-discourse was seen as pro-Muslim
and anti-national.94 Many people were happy that the ‘topiwala, darhiwala’
(Muslims) were shown their place.95 Some of them criticized the BJP but,
at the same time, said, ‘Modi is the only one who can show Muslims their
place, reduce them to the status of second class citizens.’96
The BJP’s ideologyoffered a sense of belonging to the nation while
masking conflicting interests. It popularized the idea that it is the nation,
albeit a Hindu nation, that matters. The 2019 verdict in this sense is a
triumph of the idea of a Hindu nation in the garb of national security. This
strategy succeeded in securing an unprecedented electoral endorsement as a
significant percentage (38 per cent) of the electorate thinks it can best
protect the nation. This was an election neither about past performance nor
about future promise but one to achieve ideological dominance through the
terrain of nationalism. The success of this platform highlights the structural
shift in Indian politics reflected in the emergence of a de facto majoritarian
democracy. There were now fewer barriers to the project of establishing a
Hindu state that might emanate from the fragmentation of power in Indian
society.

Notes
1. Dibyesh Anand, ‘Modi’s Election Win Is a Victory for Far-Right Hindu Nationalism—India’s
Secular Democracy Is Under Threat’, Independent (UK), 24 May 2019,
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/india-general-election-narendra-modi-bjp-hindu-
nationalism-a8926831.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
2. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Hindu Nationalism and Democracy’, in Francine R. Frankel et al.
(eds.), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2000, pp. 353–78.
 3. Milan Vaishnav, ‘Religious Nationalism and India’s Future: The BJP in Power’, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 4 Apr. 2019,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/religious-nationalism-and-india-s-future-pub-
78703. Accessed 20 Oct. 2019.
4. Walden Bello, ‘Understanding the Global Rise of the Extreme Right’, Counterpunch, 8 Oct.
2018, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/08/understanding-the-global-rise-of-the-
extreme-right/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.
5. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Populism Plus’, India Forum, 7 Jun. 2019,
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/populism-plus. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.
6. Prabhat Patnaik, ‘How the Nationalism of India’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Differs from
Hindutva and Why It Matters Today’, The Telegraph, 12 Jun. 2019.
7. Peter Friedlander, ‘Hinduism and Politics’, inJeffrey Haynes (ed.), Routledge Handbook of
Religion and Politics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
8. Sumit Ganguly, ‘India’s Prime Minister Modi Pursues Politics of Hindu Nationalism—What
Does That Mean?’, Conversation, 27 May 2019, https://theconversation.com/indias-prime-
minister-modi-pursues-politics-of-hindu-nationalism-what-does-that-mean-117794. Accessed
1 May 2020.
9. Lauren Frayer and Furkan Latif Khan, ‘The Powerful Group Shaping the Rise of Hindu
Nationalism in India’, npr, 3 May 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/706808616/the-
powerful-group-shaping-the-rise-of-hindu-nationalism-in-india. Accessed 4 Apr. 2020.
10. The Nehru-Gandhi family, which has been multi-religious since the time Indira Gandhi
married the Parsi political leader Feroze Gandhi, and the Italian origins of Sonia Gandhi,
have made them an easy target to bolster the project of internal exclusion. See Vikas Pathak,
‘Why Did the Congress Lose Its Grip Over Nationalism’, Asiaville, 17 Mar. 2019,
https://www.asiavillenews.com/article/why-did-the-congress-lose-its-grip-over-nationalism-
3128. Accessed 6 Jul. 2020.
11. Prasenjit Chowdhury, ‘Communalism of the Majority’, Deccan Herald, 20 Jan. 2020.
12. Pathak, ‘Why Did the Congress Lose Its Grip Over Nationalism’.
13. Shruti Kapila, ‘Once Again, Sedition Is at the Heart of Defining the Nation’, Wire.in, 28 Feb.
2016, https://thewire.in/politics/once-again-sedition-is-at-the-heart-of-defining-the-nation.
Accessed 21 Mar. 2020.
14. For the series of lectures on nationalism organized by the Jawaharlal Nehru University
Teachers Association (JNUTA), see Rohit Azad, Janaki Nair, Mohinder Singh, and Mallarika
Sinha Roy (eds.), What the Nation Really Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures,
New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2016.
15. Samanth Subramanian, ‘How Hindu Supremacists Are Tearing India Apart’, The Guardian,
20 Feb. 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-
nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks. Accessed 15 Jun. 2020.
16. The Home Ministry’s reply to a query by RTI activist Saket Gokhale stated: ‘We don’t have
information about “tukde-tukde gang” ’, Scroll Staff, ‘Home Ministry Says in Reply to RTI
Query’, Scroll in, 20 Jan. 2020, https://scroll.in/latest/950531/we-dont-have-information-
about-tukde-tukde-gang-home-ministry-says-in-reply-to-rti-query. Accessed 30 Jun. 2020.
17. ‘Campus Trouble: 10 Times Colleges Turned into War Zones’, The Hindustan Times, 7 Apr.
2016.
18. Shashi Tharoor, ‘Eight Ways to Rescue the Congress’, India Today, 23 May 2014.
19. ‘UPA Govt Did Multiple Surgical Strikes, Never Used Them to Seek Votes: Manmohan
Singh’, India Today, 2 May 2019.
20. For a discussion on Indian nationalism, see Shashi Tharoor, The Battle of Belonging: On
Nationalism, Patriotism and What It Means to Be Indian, New Delhi: Aleph Book Co., 2020.
21. See Monobina Gupta, ‘Poll Vault’, Wire.in, 9 Apr. 2019.
22. Anuradha Raman, ‘National Flag to Fly at All Central Universities’, The Hindu, 18 Feb.
2016.
23. Amy Kazim, ‘How Hindu Nationalism Went Mainstream in Modi’s India’, Financial Times, 8
May 2019.
24. ‘Bangladeshi Migrants Are Like Termites: Amit Shah’, The Hindu, 22 Sep. 2018.
25. The Rafale deal controversy in India pertained to the purchase of 36 multirole fighter aircraft.
The NDA’s decision to enter an $8.7 billion government-to-government deal with France to
buy 36 Rafale warplanes made by Dassault was announced in April 2015, with an agreement
signed a little over a year later. This replaced the previous UPA regime’s decision to buy 126
Rafale aircraft, 108 of which were to be made in India by the state-owned Hindustan
Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL). The Congress alleged loss to the public exchequer because of the
high price of the fighter jets.
26. ‘India Launches Air Strike in Pakistan; Islamabad Denies Militant Camp Hit’, Reuters, 26
Feb. 2019, https://in.reuters.com/article/india-kashmir-pakistan/india-launches-air-strike-
inside-pakistan-islamabad-denies-militant-camp-hit-idinkcn1qf07g. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
27. Marcus Hellyer,Nathan Ruser, and Aakriti Bachhawat, ‘India’s Strike on Balakot: A Very
Precise Miss?’, ASPI, Strategist, 27 Mar. 2019, https://scroll.in/article/923534/indian-voters-
cared-most-about-jobs-healthcare-drinking-water-then-pulwama-attack-happened. Accessed
7 Jan. 2020.
28. Nathan Ruser, ‘Did Balakot Airstrikes Hit Their Target? Satellite Imagery Raises Doubts’,
Wire.in, 1 Mar. 2019, https://thewire.in/security/balakot-airstrikes-india-pakistan-satellite-
images. Accessed 7 Aug. 2020.
29. Hellyer, Ruser, and Bachhawat, ‘India’s Strike on Balakot: A Very Precise Miss?’.
30. Martin Howell and Salahuddin, ‘Inside the Pakistani Madrasa Where India Said It Killed
Hundreds of “Terrorists” ’, Reuters, 11 Apr. 2019, https://in.reuters.com/article/india-
kashmir-pakistan-madrasa/inside-the-pakistani-madrasa-where-india-said-it-killed-hundreds-
of-terrorists-idINKCN1RN0XH. Accessed 7 Aug. 2020.
31. Nathan Ruser, ‘Were India’s Airstrikes in Pakistan a Strategy for Public Approval?’, ASPI,
Strategist, 1 Mar. 2019, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/were-indias-airstrikes-in-pakistan-
a-strategy-for-public-approval/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020.
32. Kunwar Singh, ‘Indian Voters Cared Most About Jobs, Healthcare, Drinking Water. Then,
Pulwama Happened’, Scroll.in, 16 May 2019, https://scroll.in/article/923534/indian-voters-
cared-most-about-jobs-healthcare-drinking-water-then-pulwama-attack-happened. Accessed
10 Feb. 2020.
33. Ibid. Rajdeep Sardesai, How Pulwama Made Modi’s Balakot Response His 1971 Moment’,
Business Standard, 30 Nov. 2019.
34. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the opposition had no such hesitation in questioning
Jawaharlal Nehru after the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. Criticism of Nehru’s handling
was not interpreted as disparaging the Indian army.
35. Ritu Sareen, ‘Pulwama Attack: Intelligence Failure … We Are at Fault Also, Admits
Governor’, The Indian Express, 15 Feb. 2019.
36. ‘Centre Counters J&K Governor on Pulwama Attack, Denies Intel Failure’, The Indian
Express, 26 Jun. 2019.
37. The government hasn’t so far explained how such a huge quantity of explosives made its way
to one of the most protected roads in the country—the Jammu–Srinagar highway—and how
 the car carrying them could penetrate a security convoy of the CRPF. Failure to fix
accountability for the lapse that killed 40 CRPF jawans hasn’t been done yet. Rahul Gandhi’s
question about who ‘benefited the most’ from the Pulwama attack was a direct reference to
what many see as brazen exploitation of the sacrifice of soldiers for political gain by the BJP.
38. ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Amit Shah Invokes National Security’, The Hindustan Times, 5
May 2019.
39. Barkha Dutt, ‘In 2014, Modi Ran on Aspiration. In 2019, He Is Running on Fear’,
Washington Post, 16 Apr. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/15/modi-
ran-aspiration-he-is-running-fear/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020.
40. Bruce Stokes, ‘How Indians See the World’, Pew Research Center, 17 Sep. 2015,
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/09/17/3-how-indians-see-the-world/. Accessed 10
Jul. 2020.
41. ‘NES-Post Poll 2014-Findings’, Lokniti CSDS, 2014, https://www.lokniti.org/media/PDF-
upload/1536130357_23397100_download_report.pdf. Accessed 10 Jul. 2020.
42. ‘BJP Scores Big on National Security, Congress Pushes Back on Economic Welfare (IANS-
CVoter 2019 Survey)’, Business Standard, 1 Apr. 2019.
43. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyaya, ‘Tale of “Two Modis”: What the “Politician” & PM Achieved in
Leh’, Quint, 4 Jul. 2020. https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjj9Nf2tKL0A
hUFxjgGHZXeAw8QFnoECAsQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.alignindia.in%2Ftale-of-
two-modis-what-the-politician-pm-achieved-in-
leh%2F&usg=AOvVaw0oKavwisRHwl5NSQi2OUuX. Accessed 5 Jul. 2020.
44. Mukul Kesavan, ‘What Modi Signalled with Excursion to Nimu’, NDTV Opinion, 6 Jul.
2020, https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/what-modi-signalled-with-excursion-to-nimu-by-
mukul-kesavan-2257752. Accessed 7 Jul. 2020.
45. Shekhar Gupta, ‘Not Growth & Jobs But Nationalism, Hindutva, Corruption Will Drive
Modi’s Push to 2019’, The Print, 30 Dec. 2017, https://theprint.in/national-interest/modis-
politics-to-2019/25694/. Accessed 16 Aug. 2020.
46. Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘Modi’s Campaign of Fear and Prejudice’, The New York Times, 17 Apr.
2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/modi-india-election.html. Accessed 16
Jun. 2020.
47. Manoj Joshi, ‘In His Attempt to Win Elections, Narendra Modi Does Not Seem Bound by
Propriety—or Even Dignity’, Scroll.in, 12 Dec. 2017.
48. Dutt, ‘In 2014, Modi Ran on Aspiration. In 2019, He Is Running on Fear’.
49. ‘Congress Hatched “Hindu Terror” Conspiracy to Defame Religious Heritage: PM Modi’,
The Economic Times, 12 May 2019.
50. Ibid.
51. ‘BJP Pivots Campaign to Attacking Congress for “Linking Hindus to Terrorism” ’, Wire.in, 2
Apr. 2019, https://thewire.in/communalism/bjp-pivots-campaign-to-attacking-congress-for-
linking-hindus-to-terrorism. 16 Aug. 2020.
52. ‘Modi Blames Congress for Creation of Pakistan, Slams “Chowkidar Chor” Jibe’, Hindu
Business Line, 9 Apr. 2019.
53. Amulya Ganguli, ‘Verdict 2019: Triumph of BJP’s Hindu Nationalist Card’, News Click, 27
May 2019, https://www.newsclick.in/verdict-2019-triumph-BJP-hindu-nationalist-card.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2020.
54. Dutt, ‘In 2014, Modi Ran on Aspiration. In 2019, He Is Running on Fear’.
55. ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Amit Shah Invokes National Security’, The Hindustan Times, 5
May 2019.
56. Pralay Kanungo, ‘The Rise of the NaMo Cult and What Lies Ahead for “New India” ’,
Wire.in, 26 May 2019, https://thewire.in/politics/narendra-modi-cult-bjp-election-victory.
Accessed, 20 Jul. 2019.
57. Ibid.
58. Interview with Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, 5 July 2020. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a senior
journalist and writer. He has authored several books such as The Demolition: India at the
Crossroads (1994), Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times (2013), and Sikhs: The Untold
Agony of 1984 (2015).
59. Interview with Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, 5 Jul. 2020.
60. Shiv Shankar Menon quoted in Kashif Kakvi, ‘Armed Forces Action Never Publicised as
Being Done by Modi Govt: Former NSA’, Newsclick, 13 Jan. 2020,
https://www.newsclick.in/armed-forces-action-never-publicised-being-done-modi-govt-
former-nsa. Accessed 4 July 2020.
61. Field Notes from a visit to Lucknow, Allahabad, Banaras, Rae Bareli, and Amethi in April–
May 2019.
62. Ibid.
63. ‘ “We Will Wipe Out Poverty”: Rahul Gandhi Announces Minimum Income Guarantee
Scheme’, Scroll.in, 25 Mar. 2019, https://scroll.in/latest/917806/it-will-bring-justice-to-the-
poor-rahul-gandhi-announces-minimum-income-guarantee-scheme. Accessed 5 Apr. 2020.
64. Tushar Dhara, ‘Anonymous Note Circulated Within Congress Highlights Failures of Its
Election Ad Campaign’, The Caravan, 3 Jul. 2019,
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/anonymous-note-circulated-within-congress-highlights-
failures-election-ad-campa. Accessed 5 Apr. 2020.
65. Apparently, in 2014, there were NREGA billboards in Breach Candy, Mumbai, an affluent
locality, but there were none that we spotted during our field visit in the midst of the 2019
election campaign. Sanjay Jha, The Great Unravelling: India After 2014, New Delhi:
Westland Publications, 2020, p. 198.
66. Interview with Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, New Delhi, 5 Jul. 2020.
67. ‘Govt to Transfer Rs 2,000 Under PM-KISAN Scheme to 8.69 Farmers in April 1st Week’,
The Economic Times, 26 Mar. 2020.
68. Interview with Zafar Agha, New Delhi, 7 Jul. 2020. Zafar Agha is the editor-in-chief of the
National Herald. He is a veteran journalist and political commentator who earlier served as
editor-in-chief of Quami Awaz.
69. Shakti was among the first policy initiatives of Rahul Gandhi as party president. It was
supposed to ‘help the party evolve a much better ground game at the booth level’ through
Project Shakti, a database of booth-level Congress workers/sympathizers by their voter card
numbers.
70. Roshan Kishore and Sunetra Choudhury, ‘Over Dependence on Data May Have Derailed
Congress’s 2019 Campaign’, The Hindustan Times, 20 Jun. 2019.
71. Betwa Sharma, ‘How Project “Shakti” Misled Rahul And Deepened Congress’s Lok Sabha
Rout’, Huffpost, 30 May 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/bogus-app-rahul-gandhi-
congresss-lok-sabha-rout_in_5cee2e83e4b0793c23476816. Accessed 30 Mar. 2020.
72. Since his days as Gujarat chief minister, whenever the Congress made personal attacks
against him, Modi turned around the slogans to his advantage. In the 2007 Gujarat assembly
elections, the BJP had turned around the ‘Maut Ka Saudagar’ comment by Sonia Gandhi to
polarize the electorate. In 2014, Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar made the controversial
remark that Modi cannot become prime minister, but he can come to the Congress conclave
and sell tea, a dig at his humble background. In response, his team launched the ‘Chai Pe
 Charcha’ campaign that put Congress on the backfoot. See Rakesh Mohan Chaturvedi and
Kumar Anshuman, ‘Chowkidar Beats Chor Hai: Modi Uses Insults to His Advantage’, The
Economic Times, 24 May 2019.
73. ‘Rajdeep Sardesai Explains How Marketing Professionals Run Narendra Modi’s and BJP’s
Social Media’. An excerpt from his book on the 2019 elections published in Scroll.in. ‘2019:
How Modi Won India’, Scroll.in, 25 Dec. 2019, https://scroll.in/article/947789/rajdeep-
sardesai-explains-how-marketing-professionals-run-narendra-modis-and-bjps-social-media.
Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
74. Ibid.
75. The Hindu published a series of investigative reports on Rafale procurement by N. Ram.
These reports reveal the great increase in the price of the Rafale transaction was because the
deal bypassed mandated procedures. The French side took advantage of parallel parleys by
the PMO, which weakened the Indian negotiating team’s position. ‘Modi’s Decision to Buy
36 Rafales Shot the Price of Each Jet up by 41%’, The Hindu, 18 Jan. 2019; ‘Rafale: Modi
Govt. Gave Unprecedented Waivers in Offset Agreements’, The Hindu, 9 Apr. 2019; ‘No
Bank Guarantees Meant a More Expensive New Rafale Deal’, The Hindu, 6 Mar. 2019;
‘Government Waived Anti-Corruption Clauses in Rafale Deal’, The Hindu, 11 Feb. 2019;
‘Rafale Deal Not on “Better Terms” Than UPA-Era Offer’, The Hindu, 13 Feb. 2019.
76. Katherine Adeney, ‘India Election: How Narendra Modi Won with an Even Bigger Majority’,
Conversation, 24 May 2019, https://theasiadialogue.com/2019/05/24/india-election-how-
narendra-modi-won-with-an-even-bigger-majority/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020.
77. Aditya Menon and Abhidek Deb, ‘How Congress Lost 2019 Elections: 4 Charts Give the Full
Picture’, Quint, 25 May 2019, https://www.thequint.com/elections/how-congress-lost-2019-
elections-narendra-modi-bjp-rahul-gandhi. Accessed 3 Dec. 2019.
78. ‘Television News in India Is Missing the Wisdom That Comes with Age’, Wire.in, 4 Aug.
2018, https://thewire.in/media/television-news-in-india-is-missing-the-wisdom-that-comes-
with-age. Accessed 25 Aug. 2018.
79. On the role of Hindi media in elections, see Tabrez Neyazi, Political Communication and
Mobilisation: The Hindi Media in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
80. Several persons interviewed said the media propaganda is that ‘BJP May Not Be Good, But
Modi Is Good’. Interviews in Allahabad, 14–15 Apr. 2019.
81. Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav, Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018. Also see, Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money
and Muscle in Indian Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
82. Bibhudatta Pradhan and Shivani Kumaresan, ‘Indian Elections Become World’s Most
Expensive: This Is How Much They Cost’, Bloomberg, 3 Jun. 2019,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-03/india-s-bitterly-fought-poll-becomes-
the-world-s-most-expensive. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020. ‘BJP Flush With Poll Cash, No
Questions Asked in These Elections’, The Telegraph, 2 May 2019.
83. Two ABM-managed pages are the top two biggest spenders on Facebook, a fact disclosed
once the social network rolled out its advertiser transparency campaign in Feb. 2019.
Samarth Bansal,Gopal Sathe,Rachna Khaira, and Aman Sethi, ‘How Modi, Shah Turned a
Women’s NGO Into a Secret Election Propaganda Machine’, Huffington Post, 4 Apr. 2019,
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/how-modi-shah-turned-a-women-s-Rights-ngo-into-a-
secret-election-propaganda-machine_in_5ca5962ce4b05acba4dc1819?
ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4&utm_campaign=share_email. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020.
84. Alexandra Ulmer and Aftab Ahmed, ‘Modi’s War Chest Leaves India Election Rivals in the
Dust’, Reuters, 1 May 2019, https://in.reuters.com/article/india-election-spending-bjp-
 congress/modis-war-chest-leaves-india-election-rivals-in-the-dust-idINKCN1S7390.
Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.
85. Over 20 years, involving six elections to Lok Sabha between 1998 and 2019, election
expenditure rose by around six times from Rs. 9,000 crores to around Rs. 55,000 crores. The
BJP spent about 20 per cent in 1998 against about 45 per cent in 2019 out of total poll
expenditure estimated at Rs. 9,000 crores to Rs. 55,000 crores. In 2009, the Congress party’s
share was 40 per cent of total expenditure in 2009, against 15–20 per cent in 2019. Centre for
Media Studies, Poll Expenditure: The 2019 Elections: A CMS Report,
http://cmsindia.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Poll-Expenditure-the-2019-elections-cms-
report.pdf. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.
86. Sonia Faleiro, ‘Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation’, New York Review
of Books, 3 Aug. 2019, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/29/absent-opposition-modi-
makes-india-his-hindu-nation/?printpage=true. 3/9 Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.
87. ‘What Are Electoral Bonds’, India Today, 12 Apr. 2019.
88. Anumeha Chaturvedi, ‘BJP Top Spender on Political Ads on Digital Platforms’, The
Economic Times, 16 May 2019.
89. ‘Rajdeep Sardesai Explains How Marketing Professionals Run Narendra Modi’s and BJP’s
Social Media’.
90. Alt News, which monitors social media feeds, found that ‘he [Amit Malaviya] repeatedly uses
misinformation in an attempt to discredit individuals, communities, opposition parties,
leaders and social movements.’ Since he is the official head of the BJP’s online propaganda
machine, the misinformation promoted by Malaviya has a dangerous ripple effect. His false
claims are echoed by party members and supporters of the BJP, giving rise to large-scale
misinformation campaigns. Pooja Chaudhuri, ‘Amit Malaviya’s Fake News Fountain: 16
Pieces of Misinformation Spread by the BJP IT Cell Chief’, Scroll.in, 10 Feb. 2020,
https://scroll.in/article/952731/amit-malviyas-fake-news-fountain-16-pieces-of-
misinformation-spread-by-the-bjp-it-cell-chief. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.
91. With some 625 million Internet users in India and upwards of 80 per cent of Internet use on
mobile phones, there could be 625 million pairs of eyes looking at social media during the
2019 election, nearly eight times more than in 2014. Over a third of India’s population, and
perhaps over 40 per cent of its voters, use social media though there are no reliable studies on
how frequently they use it for political news and views. Shashi Tharoor, ‘Modi, the BJP and
Social Media: India’s WhatsApp Elections’, Qantara, 6 Jun. 2019,
https://en.qantara.de/content/modi-the-bjp-and-social-media-india%CA%B9s-whatsapp-
elections. Accessed 16 Aug. 2020.
92. Aria Thaker, ‘There’s No Stopping Fake News in India When the Prime Minister’s Own App
Spreads It’, Quartz India, 28 Jan. 2019, https://qz.com/india/1534754/modis-namo-app-
spreads-pro-bjp-fake-news-before-indian-elections/. Accessed 19 Jul. 2020.
93. A popular BJP slogan in the 2019 election in Uttar Pradesh was: ‘Yadav, Chamar Chodo,
Sabko Jodo’.
94. Interview during a field visit to Banaras, 15 Apr. 2019.
95. Interview with a master weaver in Banaras, 15 Apr. 2019.
96. Interviews during a field visit to Allahabad, 15 Apr. 2019.
 6
Opposition Interrupted

The landslide victory of the BJP in 2019 reinforced the right-wing

trajectory India had embarked upon with the election of the BJP
government at the Centre in 2014.1 The second victory makes it clear that
the move to the Right was not a temporary swing of the pendulum, with the
election breaking the back of the Congress and other secular opposition
parties. The BJP’s top leadership interpreted the verdict as a signal for a
complete change in direction and a mandate to establish a Hindu state.
There are two principal consequences of this shift: the acceleration of
authoritarian control and communalism, which seeks to divide the Indian
nation along religious lines. The coming together of both these elements has
paved the way for the institution of an authoritarian-communal regime.
This chapter discusses these shifts reinforced by growing polarization
and curbs on dissent against the background of institutional takeover, media
control, and growing concentration of economic power, all of which have
redefined the political narrative. This has profound consequences for the
Congress and opposition politics, which is the principal concern of this
chapter.

Majoritarianism and polarization

Majoritarianism, the central concept driving this project, sought to
reconfigure the Indian nation-state as one that is the exclusive preserve of
the Hindu majority.2 It consolidated Hindu unity through authoritarian
means and objectifying the other, defined in terms of religion and
nationality, thus reminding people of a threat from an enemy within. These
processes have led to the creation of a Hindu vote bank promoted by the
RSS-BJP political machine, with which no opposition party can compete in
terms of reach and penetration. Hindu nationalism has been used both to
promote the Hindutva constituency and to scuttle opposition politics.
Political polarization, between the BJP and the Congress, and between
Hindus and Muslims, is an important feature of contemporary Indian
politics. These differences are not new, but they’ve been taken to a new
level, although India has a multitude of parties rather than a two-party
system and complex and variegated social structures. The divisions between
parties have become much deeper: a deeper communal divide, a deeper
cultural divide, and a deeper class divide. Polarization has deepened
because many of these identities reinforce one another. A 2017 survey by
the Pew Research Center confirmed the growing gap between supporters of
the BJP and the Congress when it came to their views of Prime Minister
Modi whose politics divides people into friends and enemies.3
Communal politics in India has always been intimately intertwined with
its politics in general. Although this has been true for close to a century,
Hindutva politics served both to advance the process and intensify the
demonization of minorities. Hindu–Muslim polarization is central to the
BJP’s election strategy, which aims at consolidating the support of Hindus.4
Modi chose to speak about the shame and rage of over ‘a thousand years of
slavery’ under Muslim rule in his very first speech as prime minister in
2014, drawing attention to the notion of Hindu victimhood and fears of
being under siege. This has served to polarize the electorate by creating a
permissive climate that enabled a politics of majoritarianism to continue
unabated.
This has been used to promote mobilization from below, tied to the
larger goal of creating a Hindu state. It has come about through greater
transformational changes, which contradict the probability that caste and
regional identities provide natural breaks on any national agendas.
Backward caste politics had indeed hindered the march of Hindutva in the
1990s, with Mandal upstaging religious politics, which had been catapulted
to Centre stage by the Ayodhya movement. However, the belief that caste
could continually contain Hindutva is misplaced. The RSS has been
working behind the scenes to overcome caste-based polarization in the
Hindi heartland states, and this has led to a weakening of backward caste
assertion and aided their acceptance and accommodation within the BJP.
The creation of a Hindu vote bank consisting of non-Yadav OBCs and the
non-Jatav Dalits in some of these states is an indication of its success.
This outreach was immensely helped by Modi who is from a backward
caste and has highlighted the narrative that he has been victimized by
Delhi’s English-speaking establishment, a feeling shared by OBCs and
Dalits too. Some of these groups are attracted to this anti-elite discourse
which says that this old cultural elite has been ruling the country and
Hindutva is the movement to liberate the masses from its domination. But
there is a new backward caste Hindi-speaking regional elite that has been
well entrenched in the states for several decades and has had access to both
education and resources.5 The new elite is unabashedly pro-Hindu and not
particularly concerned about preserving social unity. However, the old elite
looms large in the consciousness of the new elite even though it lacks any
real power. This set the stage for a subaltern crossover to the BJP.
Turning the politics of social justice on its head, the Hindu Right has
crafted a broad-based identity to undercut Mandal, which appeared to have
outlived its utility for a critical mass of the socially marginalized,6 bringing
the OBCs and Dalits into the BJP fold.7 They began to see Hindutva as a
more capacious identity which aligns them to a larger narrative than caste
politics which was losing relevance. This was partly because the condition
of lower castes had not been improved sufficiently by successive regimes
and the benefits of reservation had been cornered by the upper segments of
these castes, which alienated sub-groups within the wider category that
crossed over to the BJP. This blunted caste politics, which encouraged a
counter-mobilization of groups unwilling to support regional parties which
had hitherto been the vehicle of their promotion.8 Hindutva politics has
gained momentum at the expense of caste politics and directly contributed
to a more communal approach to politics by uniting the pan-Hindu coalition
that the BJP depends on for its majority. This development has weakened
the possibility that caste identities could serve as a counterweight to Hindu
majoritarianism.

Communal-authoritarianism
Three events which occurred within months of BJP’s massive victory in
2019—(1) the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A (which grants Jammu
and Kashmir special autonomous status) and downgrading the state to a
Union Territory, (2) the settlement of the Ayodhya dispute in favour of the
Hindu party, and (3) the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the
proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC)—exemplify the convergence
of communalism and majoritarianism to establish a communal-authoritarian
regime.9
Reading down Articles 370 and 35A and the abolition of the state are
central to this form of politics.10 Describing political arguments as the
‘people’s mandate’ or the ‘will of the people’, an entire state was caused to
disappear from the map under a presidential order unconstrained by
constitutional practice and disregarding the state’s legislative apparatus on 5
August 2019. That unconstitutionality is further exacerbated by the fact that
this declaration was made with the concurrence of the governor at a time
when the state was under the president’s rule. Anticipating outrage and
protest, the entire population was placed under curfew, high-speed Internet
taken down, and virtually every mainstream politician in the Kashmir valley
was placed under house arrest or jailed, including former BJP allies, and the
state was downgraded to the status of a Union Territory controlled by the
Centre from New Delhi.
Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought four wars since the
Partition in 1947, has been the battleground for conflicting ideologies.11 For
India after Independence, the state became a symbol of secularism in its
post-colonial nation-building project.12 For Hindu nationalism, Kashmir is
not a symbol of secularism but a geographical expression of land that had to
be conquered, homogenized, and Hindu nationalism emblazoned upon it.
This agenda couldn’t have found a better place than Kashmir as a starting
point. ‘For them, Kashmir was a symbol waiting to be rebranded, the
perfect geography from where to announce the rise to dominance of India’s
new aggressive nationalism and unabashed majoritarianism,’ notes Haseeb
Drabu, former finance minister of the then state.13 Even in this instance, the
focus was on India’s only Muslim-majority state, thereby firmly coupling
nationalism with Hindutva.14
 The Congress Working Committee (CWC) deplored the ‘unilateral,
brazen, completely undemocratic manner’ in which Article 370 of the
Constitution was abrogated and the State of Jammu and Kashmir
dismembered by misinterpreting the provisions of the Constitution, which
calls into question the very idea of India being a Union of States. ‘Every
principle of constitutional law, states’ rights, parliamentary procedure and
democratic governance was violated,’ said the CWC resolution.
The second critical issue was the Supreme Court’s unanimous verdict in
the historic Ayodhya case on 9 November 2019.15 The five-judge bench
legally buried the prolonged and tangled dispute, which began as a minor
litigation and expanded into a major political issue that deepened
polarization and transformed the course of Indian politics. The apex court’s
verdict pronounced that the disputed land in Ayodhya would go to a
government-monitored trust to build a temple, and Muslims would receive a
separate five-acre plot of land in the city to build a mosque. The bench
recorded its revulsion at the desecration of the mosque in 1949 when Hindu
idols were planted surreptitiously under its central dome and the planned
destruction of the entire structure on 6 December 1992, describing it as an
‘egregious violation of the law’. However, handing over the entire disputed
site where the mosque once stood to the Hindu party amounted to
legitimizing the very demolition it unequivocally condemned. The Supreme
Court thus ensured that a temple would be built on the land where the
mosque once stood, which by the court’s own admission was illegally
demolished. The greater significance of the judgment lies in the tacit
endorsement of majoritarian politics by the highest court.16 The Hindu
editorial correctly noted in this context that, ‘After nearly three decades of
unrelenting pursuit of communal polarization, the majoritarian, revanchist
forces in the country have fatigued their secular adversaries into passive
acquiescence.’17 Allowing faith and belief to determine a modern legal
claim undermines the ground on which the Indian republic was built.
Assigning to the central government the task of setting up a Hindu religious
trust to build a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid implies that it
was the government’s duty to cater to Hindu religious interests.
The ruling, just six months after the landslide election triumph, was a
huge victory for the BJP government, which had made the construction of
the Ram temple at Ayodhya a focal point of its agenda to transform India
into a Hindu nation. The construction of the temple would not have been
possible without the indulgence of the Supreme Court.18
The Congress signalled its acceptance of the verdict, with the CWC
welcoming the verdict in the Ayodhya case and asserting its support for the
Ram temple construction. ‘After 26 years, the Supreme Court has done
exactly the same thing that the Congress party had sought to do through an
Act of Parliament (the Ayodhya Act, 1993), vis-a-vis construction of the
Ram temple, a mosque and a museum,’ the Congress chief spokesman
claimed.19 The party said in its communiqué, ‘The name of Lord Ram can
never be used to divide people. Those who will dare to do so, they don’t
understand the values and traditions established by Lord Ram.’20 Given its
past positions on this issue, this was hardly surprising.
The third important issue is the CAA 2019. The amended law seeks to
fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim minorities from India’s three
neighbouring countries—Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—on the
grounds of religious persecution. It offers quick protection and citizenship
by creating an exemption from the ‘illegal migrants’ category for Hindus,
Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from these three countries
but discriminates against refugees and immigrants who happen to be
Muslim. This is in complete violation of the right to equality and equal
protection before the law enshrined in Article 24 of the Constitution. The
Act is illogical as it singles out one particular religion for exclusionary
treatment.21 Clearly, the idea is not simply to help persecuted minorities but
to demonize and isolate one group. The CAA, in addition to making the
naturalization of Muslim migrants from the neighbouring countries
difficult, would, at an ideological level, establish the notion of India as a
Hindu Homeland to which the RSS is doctrinally committed.
This exercise was correctly seen by many as an intensification of
communal polarization that feeds into the larger construct of targeting
Muslims for political ends. Tens of thousands of people in cities across
India joined in protests to oppose the CAA and the projected
implementation of the NRC.22 Far from responding to concerns regarding
the CAA, the protests were met with strong-arm tactics by the
establishment in most places. These protests were significant because they
came at a time when the very idea of dissent had been delegitimized and
criminalized on a regular basis over the past seven years. Consequently,
protestors were continuously under threat from mob vigilantes and state
agencies who tried to stop them.
The CWC demanded that the CAA be withdrawn and the NPR process
be stopped forthwith, accusing the BJP government of using its brute
majority to impose a ‘divisive and discriminatory’ agenda.23 Congress chief
ministers rejected the amended citizenship law and said they would not
implement the NRC. The CAA, along with the NRC, gives rise to a legal
regime that is not consistent with the tenets of the Constitution.24 It violates
the basic structure of the Constitution and the principle of secularism
embedded within the constitutional framework. At stake is the conflict
between the secular spirit of the Constitution and the sectarian narrative
propagated by the ruling dispensation.
The BJP singled out the Congress for criticism on all these issues to
demonstrate that the latter was on the side of Muslims rather than on that of
the nation. The political strategy is to pin down the Congress to these
issues, and to fiercely attack all other critics of their policy, and declare
them to be anti-national.

Curbing dissent
Sharpening political divisiveness has been accompanied by vigorous curbs
on dissent. The government is seriously averse to criticism, NGOs, and
protests;25 targeting and stifling the opposition is its avowed objective.
While every previous government is guilty of similar abuses, the nature and
scale of curbs are qualitatively and quantitatively different, as evidenced by
the present dispensation’s dismal record when it comes to the use of central
agencies to rein in dissenting voices in political battles against the
opposition and curtailment of freedom of expression. The consequence is
India’s plummeting record on democratic indices over the past few years.26
The fundamental right to freedom of expression has been restricted
through many means. Hate speech is rife; peaceful dissent is criminalized;
and freedom of expression and association faces new constraints. Previous
governments too sometimes crossed the line on dissent but this government
has gone much further than they had ever ventured. The BJP government
has used a heavy-handed approach to put critics and dissenters in their
place, which is often in jail. It has used overwhelming resources, power,
and skills to silence its critics who are accused of being anti-national and
wrapping itself in the national flag. Any criticism of the state is labelled
anti-national, thus blurring the distinction between government and state
and confusing dissent with disloyalty. Branding dissent as an anti-national
activity is a crucial component of the political agenda driving this regime.
This encroachment on the space for dissent has resulted either in self-
censorship or arrests that have generated an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and
mistrust.
Activists have been held in preventive detention to stop them from
organizing protests, students have been assaulted in university libraries and
within campuses, and civil society organizations, countering hate and
discrimination, have been hounded rather than protected by the law
enforcement agencies. The passage of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act (UAPA), 2019, although intended to fight terror, has been used against
those who have raised their voice against the government, including Right
to Information (RTI) activists, public intellectuals, thinkers, journalists, and
ordinary citizens.27 These laws permit the state to designate someone as a
terrorist without trial and with no prospects of bail. It has been liberally
used to arrest prominent intellectuals and advocates of civil liberties such as
those accused in the Bhima Koregaon case.28 The government’s wide-
ranging actions clearly suggest that it sees democratic rights as an obstacle
to political consolidation.
Salman Rushdie sums up the situation in India today. He writes on the
completion of 40 years of his landmark book, Midnight’s Children, that,
‘right now, in India, it’s midnight again.’29
India today, to someone of my mind, has entered an even darker phase than the Emergency
years. The horrifying escalation of assaults on women, the increasingly authoritarian character
of the state, the unjustifiable arrests of people who dare to stand against that authoritarianism,
the religious fanaticism, the rewriting of history to fit the narrative of those who want to
transform India into a Hindu-nationalist, majoritarian state, and the popularity of the regime in
spite of it all, or, worse, perhaps because of it all – these things encourage a kind of despair.

Erosion of institutions
The political ecosystem has been vitiated by calculated erosion of the
neutrality of public institutions, which are intended to serve as checks and
balances on the exercise of executive power.30 There has been a complete
takeover of public institutions. The BJP–RSS has been entrenched at every
level of government over the past few years.31 The party has used its
electoral majority to capture institutions ‘to consolidate its authoritarian and
ideological control over institutions’, argues Prabhat Patnaik.32 Institutions
have been hollowed out, accompanied by a centralization of power, abuse
of authority, a growing personality cult, and a clear negation of personal
freedoms.33 There is growing evidence, as Pranab Bardhan notes, of
Concentration of power in one person, intimidation of critics and dissenters, weakening of
institutions of checks and balances, and misuse of police, bureaucracy, tax, and investigative
agencies against political opponents, are all gross violations of the Constitution which can put
the world’s largest democracy to shame.34

The BJP had accused Sonia Gandhi of running the UPA government by
remote control and thereby undermining political institutions. It was
assumed that once elected to power it would restore the authority and
sanctity of public institutions. Events have, however, moved in the opposite
direction, with increased government interference in institutions resulting in
institutional denigration.35 Decision-making is concentrated in the hands of
the prime minister, demonstrating his total command and control over the
Indian state and its instruments. ‘No other prime minister has enjoyed such
complete ascendancy in every power and constitutional equation,’ which
led Harish Khare to describe this phenomenon as ‘prime-ministerial
autocracy’.36
Although state institutions have always had to negotiate with political
rulers, and there have been periods in India’s past when matters came to a
flashpoint, such as during the Emergency (1975–77), never before or since
have constitutional institutions had to function for purely political ends to
such a degree, especially at a time when there has been no formal
declaration of Emergency. The chosen method to muzzle institutions is to
fill such posts with loyal bureaucrats and thereby turn autonomous statutory
bodies into virtual government departments. The checks and balances of
constitutional government have been weakened as major public institutions
have become deeply partisan. The autonomy of the Election Commission of
India (ECI), the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Central Vigilance
Commission, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), media, universities, the
Right to Information, Parliament, and its committees have all been seriously
undermined.
The ECI has enjoyed a global reputation for democratic integrity and
operational excellence in conducting the world’s biggest elections. It has
historically benefited from a robust constitutional mandate, granting it wide
powers and significant independence from the executive.37 T. N. Seshan
turned the ECI into one of the best in the world, but in recent years many of
its decisions have been biased and often favoured the incumbent party.38 Its
reputation for integrity has been undermined by allegations of subservience
to the BJP government and accused of modifying election dates and
schedules to favour it.39 The ECI has turned a blind eye to senior BJP
leaders, including the prime minister flouting rules. Prime Minister Modi
was accused of invoking the Indian Army and the Balakot airstrikes for
election propaganda, thereby violating the model code of conduct, but the
ECI took no action40 He was cleared on the technicality that he did not seek
votes for either his party or himself while doing so.41 The ECI permitted
NaMo TV, a propaganda channel dedicated to Modi, to continue to screen
coverage of the prime minister well up to polling day, although its contents
were breaking rules that prohibit political advertising during the election.42
Subscribers didn’t have to pay for the 24-hour channel, which appeared in
the menu options just prior to the elections, and then, as mysteriously,
vanished once polling was over.
The opposition parties, most notably the Congress, have expressed
concerns regarding the ECI’s favouritism in relation to the BJP, raising
doubts about the Commission’s institutional integrity. The party accused the
ECI of bias and abdication of constitutional responsibility in ensuring a
level-playing field in the 2019 elections. Voicing its fears that the ECI
might have been captured by the BJP government, the party observed,
The sanctity of the electoral process and the institutional integrity of the Election Commission
of India is in jeopardy. There must be a thorough credible enquiry into the issues raised by
[Ashok] Lavasa and restoration of the commission’s independent status as the watchdog of
[the] world’s largest democracy.43
 The Supreme Court appeared to be infallible but its impartial functioning
has been compromised too. Of all the institutions, the Supreme Court has
grown considerably in power and stature during the past two decades,
becoming one of the most powerful courts in the world. Judges are least at
risk from a domineering executive but have chosen to be more pliant in the
face of an authoritarian government. ‘It is precisely in such circumstances
that the judiciary is called into play, as a check on executive excess and
despotism,’ argues Sanjay Hegde, senior advocate in the Supreme Court.44
Four Supreme Court judges took the unprecedented step of holding a
press conference to voice their protest against arbitrary allocation of cases
to benches by the Chief Justice of India, questioning the independence of
the court, which they warned could be manipulated in the appointment of
judges.45 That, however, did not change things. Justice Ranjan Gogoi, when
he became chief justice, presided over some crucial cases which were of
great import to the government: The Rafale scam, the Ayodhya land title
dispute, abrogation of Article 370, NRC in Assam, and electoral bonds. His
nomination to the Rajya Sabha four months after his retirement cast serious
doubts on the independence of the judiciary.46 Prashant Bhushan remarks47:
Over the past six years, we have seen a striking decline in the role of the Supreme Court as
being the guardian of the Constitution and rights of people. Also, during the terms of these last
four CJIs, there has been an abdication by the Supreme Court of its constitutional duty to
protect basic constitutional values, fundamental rights of citizens, and the rule of law.

The apex court and the government appeared to be on a single

wavelength.48 The Supreme Court has often given an imprimatur of
approval to government actions rather than confronting it, even when these
violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution.49 Prior to 2014, the apex
court did not, in several cases, hesitate to take positions that went counter to
the government, especially the cancellation of the 2G licences and coal
scam cases. This appears to have vanished post-2014 when it came to
dealing with cases that could adversely affect the political interests of the
ruling party.50 In most other matters, the court has chosen to either defer
cases challenging government actions or to acquiesce with the executive’s
wisdom and logic. Habeas corpus pleas, the CAA, abrogation of Article
370, and petitions challenging electoral bonds were postponed to suit the
government. This reluctance to question the government on consequential
issues has seriously affected its moral authority. Commenting on the role of
the Supreme Court in maintaining checks and balances, former judge
Madan Lokur asked presciently: ‘Has the last bastion fallen?’51

Corporate power and election financing

There is a massive growth of corporate power that has gained a position of
unparalleled significance, displacing the legitimacy previously enjoyed by
the developmental state. The enormous lobbying power of corporations to
bend the rules in their favour has increased the concentration of power and
money in the hands of a few. A new Oxfam report indicates that 1 per cent
of India’s population controls 73 per cent of its wealth, resulting in a
substantial increase in socio-economic inequalities, with the wealth of the
wealthiest section growing exponentially while a majority of Indians
suffering destitution and hunger.52 Far more noticeable has been the
concentration of wealth in the hands of a few industrialists with interests in
sectors such as coal, oil, telecom, medicine, pharmaceuticals, education,
and the retail sectors.53 India has among the most unequal distribution of
wealth; in 2019 only Putin’s Russia and Bolsonaro’s Brazil had a higher
share of wealth than India owned by the top 1 per cent of the population.
There are apprehensions about the impact of economic concentration on
political financing in India. The concentration of wealth in a few corporate
hands has upended the traditional model of funding for political parties.54 A
vital aspect of the new political structure is a merging of corporate and
political power, which has given the ruling party a monopoly over resources
and weakened the political finance environment of the opposition. No party
has been so closely and openly supported by the corporates as the BJP. In
the words of a senior leader and former minister in the UPA government:
‘This is a government of the corporates and by and for them.’55 The BJP
was the darling of the corporate sector and received very significant
donations over the years. The government doled out tax concessions to
them and in return received huge funding. Although the sources of political
funding are opaque, all indicators suggest that the BJP’s wealth is
preponderantly greater than its rivals.56 Most of this money came from
electoral bonds, discussed below.
Elections are an expensive business in India and parties lean heavily on
business houses for election expenditure. Unlike elections in most other
democracies, Indian elections are entirely privately funded, which makes
illicit election finance pervasive.57 As elections became more competitive
and progressively more costly, financial support and funds assumed a new
importance. Parties and candidates need large sums for advertising, polling,
consulting, travel, vehicles and fuel, and printing campaign for voters in the
constituencies.58
The BJP’s expenditure on its election campaigns is something India has
never earlier witnessed and such a discrepancy in expenditure by different
political parties is unprecedented. According to annual audit reports filed
with the EC the 2014 election was India’s most expensive election,
surpassed only by the 2019 general election. Since then, the BJP has
become the richest party, monopolizing political finance often through
untraceable means such as electoral bonds. The Congress was short on
funds in comparison to the BJP, with its funding crisis worsening once it
began losing state elections as the ruling parties in states provide funds for
national parties.59 Every state the party loses reduces its financial clout. It
has already been pushed out of power by the BJP in Karnataka, Madhya
Pradesh, and Puducherry, leaving Congress governments only in Punjab and
a one-third share of power in Maharashtra to generate funds for the party.
Several Congress leaders admitted to a ‘severe funds crunch’ during the
2014 elections. The crisis, blamed on corporate houses moving away from
the Congress, continued through subsequent elections. The party’s financial
troubles began when it had become clear that it was unlikely to return to
power. Corporate houses and other donors who would normally line up to
support the party had a change of heart and did not think it wise to invest in
a losing side. Instead, they flocked to its rival, which was perceived as the
clear winner. Importantly, corporate donors were also wary of the Congress
because they believed the UPA government had blocked economic reforms
and restricted business growth during its tenure, while the BJP was a pro-
business party of reform.
 The BJP has constructed a powerful financial machine through corporate
donations. Between financial years 2012–13 and 2017–18, the BJP received
corporate donations of Rs. 1621.40 crores, constituting 83.49 per cent of the
total corporate donations, over six years. According to the Association of
Democratic Reforms (ADR), the BJP received 16 times more funding
through corporate donations than the Congress from 2016 to 2018.60 The
ADR report shows that BJP received Rs 915.59 crore during this period
while the Congress received a modest Rs 55.36 crore. Most of this money
for the BJP came in the form of electoral bonds.
In 2016, the BJP government introduced electoral bonds, which allow
businesses and individuals to anonymously donate to political parties,
‘legalizing crony capitalism’, as a former chief election commissioner put
it.61 Under this scheme, anyone can buy electoral bonds in the form of
bearer bonds from specified branches of the State Bank of India and donate
them anonymously to a political party of their choice, encashable within 14
days,62 with no restrictions on the quantum of corporate donations. These
bonds are non-transparent as the donor’s identity is known only to the bank
and government. Data from the fiscal year 2017–18 shows that the BJP has
a near-monopoly of bond receipts, i.e. Rs 210 crore out of a total of Rs 222
crore, which amounts to an overwhelming 95 per cent of all electoral
bonds,63 with the Congress receiving fewer than 10 per cent of the total.
Big business and campaign finance donors funding the ruling party have
been amply rewarded.
Congress raised objections to the bond scheme in a representation to the
EC.64 Its manifesto promised to scrap the opaque electoral bond scheme,
which had clearly been designed to favour the BJP.65 Electoral bonds have
hurt opposition parties because the corporate sector has shunned them,
gravitating towards the ruling party.66

Media controls
One institution that might be expected to hold the government accountable
is the media but, through a variety of means, this medium has been reduced
to a collaborative platform or amplifier for the BJP. The BJP’s greatest
advantage is that it has had consistently good press.67 The leading lights of
the Indian media have given close attention to the problems of the
opposition and the Congress but have no questions whatsoever for the
government. The media has asked very tough questions, but only to the
opposition with Rahul Gandhi being singled out for special attention,
relentlessly held to account, especially by television channels, as if he were
the prime minister with an absolute majority and therefore accountable to
the people. Political opponents are mercilessly pilloried while the
government gets away unscathed.68 This is unusual because in most
democracies the media serves to keep a critical eye on the government, but
in India, it has been the opposition that has been under scrutiny.
Corporate control of the media is a major reason for this but that alone
cannot explain its shrill pro-government tone. Earlier it was the same
corporate sector that controlled the media and freely lambasted the UPA
government, but now it more or less uncritically accepts the government’s
view and has readily aligned with the ideological impulses of the state.69
The government swears by the freedom of the press, yet there is increasing
evidence that the long arm of the government is finding ways of compelling
media houses and journalists which/who question or expose its
wrongdoings to toe the line. The new trend is the use of media not to
communicate news but to propagate the ruling ideology.70 By encouraging
friendly corporations to take control of the media and by way of some arm-
twisting and selective allocation of government advertisement, the ruling
dispensation has succeeded in ensuring that the media is completely in sync
with the dominant narrative.71 What is also apparent, although less
recognizably, is the denial of access to information to people holding public
office as a form of limiting the freedom of press.72 This government refuses
to accept that the role of the media is to ask questions and expose
shortcomings of policy and its implementation.73 As the Economic and
Political Weekly noted:
rarely has there been such tight control of information from the central government to the point
that bureaucrats are afraid to speak or mingle openly with journalists. People in power publicly
endorse what is deemed to be the Prime Minister’s view. There is no open debate within the
government and independent voices within it are afraid to speak. This leaves little or no space
for independent journalists to investigate issues of importance. When they do, they are accused
of being allied with an opposition party.74
 This, however, also happens because the media is willing to abdicate its
responsibility of revealing the truth.
Indian political trends no longer are what the Congress thought they
were. They are now driven by right-wing television networks, WhatsApp
groups, and gigantic campaign extravaganzas staged at the cost of billions
of corporate rupees, much of it secret and untraceable. Although traditional
media continues to be an important source of information, digital platforms
are an even more potent tool with which to woo voters.75 As many as 230
million Indians use WhatsApp, making India its biggest market.76 Many
political groups use the platform to circulate undiluted propaganda.77 The
BJP’s 400+ Cyber Army, a WhatsApp group, is quite frank about its
political objectives: ‘This Group is a Nationalists Group with Hindu
Warriors Working to Save Nation from Break India forces led politically by
Congress, Communist and religiously by Islam and Christianity [sic].’78
The depth of the BJP’s social media control was evident from Amit Shah’s
remark that the group had the power to make any message go viral, whether
real or fake.79 In short, as a Congress activist put it, ‘Social media is the jet
fuel that took their message from shakhas to lakhs of people.’80

Gutting the opposition

It is clear from the above account that politics in India is not a level playing
field. Public institutions that should be impartial have been used in service
of the ruling party. Media and regulatory capture was part of the
institutional takeover during 2014–19, and this has become sharper since
2019.81 The BJP has moulded the political terrain to its advantage. In the
event, opposition parties face formidable challenges in building up
resistance against the government. But democracy is unthinkable without an
opposition, however, targeting and stifling the opposition is an avowed
objective of the government. This was apparent from the rhetoric of
‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ (Congress-free India). This is not limited to
defeating rival parties but to virtually annihilate them. One of Modi’s first
statements after taking over as the chairman of the BJP’s Election
Committee in 2013 was the proclamation that ridding India of the Congress
would be ‘the solution to all problems facing the country’.82 The ‘Congress
party is a burden on this nation,’ he declared. This mission has, however,
not been limited to getting rid of the Congress alone. It extends essentially
to an opposition-free nation ruled by one party. Indeed, at its Bhubaneswar
national executive on 15 April 2017, the top BJP leadership discussed the
contours of a ‘vipaksh/virodh mukt Bharat’, i.e. an India without an
opposition and opponents.83 In effect, this was an attempt to do away with
political plurality and pave the way for a one-party, one-leader system that
would undercut the foundations of democracy.
The government’s prosecution powers have been continually misused for
partisan ends. The double-barrelled weapons are engineering defections to
the BJP and misuse of the investigative agencies for political advantage,
slapping corruption, and money laundering–related investigations by the
investigative agencies into acts of omissions and commission by opposition
leaders. Investigation by the central agencies, especially the law-
enforcement agencies, has been used to pursue all manner of cases against
political leaders, or those who are in the opposition, to tame them.84 The
Hindu editorial was unambiguous when it said:
The present regime’s record is quite dismal when it comes to the obvious use of central
agencies such as the CBI, ED, IT and even the NIA, to rein in dissenting voices. It is
unfortunate that specialized agencies are allowing themselves to be used as force multipliers in
political battles against sections of the opposition.85

This comment came in the context of raids on media outlets, but it speaks
volumes of executive overreach to muzzle the voices of the opposition.
Income tax raids and summons intensify especially when an election is
around the corner or whenever an opposition government is in crisis.
Income tax raids occur, apparently coincidentally, largely in opposition
ruled states.
The list of opposition leaders who have been investigated by central
agencies is long and is not restricted to the Congress party and its leaders
alone. In recent years it extends across political parties but only those
opposed to the BJP. ‘But when it comes to BJP, which itself is the richest
political party in the world, there is no accountability or questioning,’ said a
Congress spokesperson.86 Most opposition leaders have been cowed into
remaining silent under the threat of punitive action by the investigation
agencies.87 This is not, however, a battle against corruption because the
investigations and raids are restricted to opposition leaders even as the
government dragged its feet for five years in appointing a Lokpal.88
The opposition has been trumped in state after state through active
encouragement of defections and purchasing MLAs.89 There has been no
hesitation in welcoming MLAs from the Congress, even those who were
earlier trenchant critics of the BJP. Opposition legislators have in sizeable
numbers switched over from various parties, especially the Congress, to
join the BJP, and this has immeasurably helped the party gain a majority by
default in states where it had lost the elections. The BJP has lost several
state elections in Goa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh
but succeeded in forming governments by luring Congress MLAs to its
side. Each time a Congress-led government fell, there were reports of large
sums of money changing hands to make this possible. The loss of so many
state governments further erodes the Congress party’s financial power and
the opportunity to generate funds.
Public scrutiny of government actions has been crippled by the dilution
of RTI. The UPA government was instrumental in passing the RTI Act in
2005, which helped in exposing government corruption as it was no longer
possible for state authorities to conceal information on the way they made
decisions or spent taxpayers’ money.90 This government has systematically
diluted the RTI in different ways, most importantly, by refusing to comply
with RTI demand for information.91 Stonewalling information sought under
the RTI began soon after 2014. The RBI refused information on a range of
queries about demonetization, from who had been consulted92 to the
reasons for the move,93 and the cost incurred in scrapping the banned notes.
The Indian Air Force refused to release crucial information relating to the
pricing of the 36 Rafale aircraft purchased by India from France.94 Besides
denying information, in July 2019, parliament passed amendments
providing the government with powers to fix salaries, tenures, and other
terms and conditions of employment of information commissioners.95 Sonia
Gandhi accused the government of launching the ‘final assault’ in the
decimation of the historic RTI Act, diluting the powers of the information
commissioners through amendments to the legislation, and enforcing their
‘majoritarian agenda without being held accountable to people’.96 The
Congress opposed these amendments in parliament and activists feared it
‘would reduce autonomous information commissions to the status of “caged
parrots” ’.97 ‘The effect would be to erode the independence of the
information commissions at the national level and in India’s states.’98
The Congress has provided a semblance of opposition to the BJP but
nowhere approaching the scale necessary, advancing its case both in the
Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha but without any tangible impact given the
government’s overwhelming majority.99 The government, for example,
refused to reach out to the opposition parties even on crucial legislations
such as the Land Acquisition Bill. This was, however, one instance in
which the opposition, led by the Congress, prevailed. Singled out by the
corporate sector as the principal obstacle in the path of development, three
ordinances amended the Land Acquisition Act passed in 2013 by the UPA
government. These were projected as pro-reform measures designed to
make it easier for the state to acquire land for infrastructure and industry.100
The opposition was, however, able to compel the government to revert to
the situation prevalent before the BJP came to power, in effect admitting
that the Land Acquisition Ordinance was an error.
Congress politics outside parliament was largely non-existent. The huge
vote swing the Congress needs to increase its vote and seat share requires a
transformation on the ground, which can be brought about only through
mass mobilization or mass contact programmes, public campaigns, and
political movements, which the party hasn’t conducted for several years. It
simply doesn’t organize protests any longer, which further weakens the
party by disengaging from mass politics. There was no mass mobilization to
galvanize the opposition and no resistance even when it was evident that the
BJP government was dismantling the achievements of successive Congress
governments built up over half a century of democratic legislation and
institution-building.
Opposition was frequently expressed through press conferences, and
even these were organized only in Delhi. Press conferences obviously
cannot be a substitute for public action. The other major tool is social
media. Until recently, the Congress faced criticism that it had no presence
in the social media, which was saturated by the BJP. This has changed, with
the Congress making a conscious effort to become active on social media
platforms. This, however, appears to have gone to another extreme, with
Twitter becoming a substitute for real political action. The Congress cannot
fight its battles on Twitter and social media alone.101 Political struggle has
to be waged on the streets on the with ground mass mobilization.
Despite constraints, there has been unprecedented opposition and
protests on the streets from students, farmers, workers, women, Dalits, and
Muslims against a range of highhanded decisions taken by the government,
and the systematic use of pressure tactics to suppress dissent and dilute the
autonomy of institutions. Several modes of resistance have gathered
momentum, particularly outside traditional party politics, in response to
increasing polarization and the accelerating decline of democratic
institutions in recent years. Resistance efforts have been organized around a
variety of causes; grassroots organizations have been joined by larger civil
society bodies and formal political opposition groups. Much of this
opposition has come from non-party groups rather than political parties,
which haven’t taken to the streets in opposition to the government, but have
amplified the political message, although off the protest stage.
Nonetheless, Congress still remains the party best placed to lead the
opposition against the saffron onslaught because it still has a national
presence. Regional parties cannot be a substitute for a national opposition.
Even in its debilitated state it offers a challenge to Hindutva on an all-India
plane: in ideas, policy, governance, and political experience. The party still
commands roughly 20 per cent of the national vote and is in power in a few
states. It has a base of committed followers nationwide. Without the
Congress, the opposition is reduced to a collection of regional parties with
competing agendas and often amenable to alliances with the BJP. However,
given its shrunken base, the Congress is not in a position to function as the
opposition in several states. It just doesn’t have the electoral bandwidth to
take on the BJP singlehandedly and can compensate for its weakness only
by banding together with other opposition parties. The Congress has to
learn ‘the politics of “give a lot, take a little”, and so as to eventually prevail
in the alliance-coalition framework by virtue of being the only national
party in the opposition.’102 Without alliances or seat adjustments ‘there is
no way in which the Congress and the non-BJP opposition can offer an
effective challenge, particularly in the Hindi heartland.’103 However, as a
senior leader acknowledged, the Congress would prefer to have a joint front
against the BJP but it was difficult to forge a viable opposition front with
other parties because of all forms of unethical pressures exerted on them to
prevent this.104

Notes
1. The Economist’s cover story on the BJP’s dramatic victory entitled ‘Intolerant India: How
Modi Is Endangering the World’s Biggest Democracy’, summed up the shift. The cover
depicts a lotus, the BJP’s election symbol, sitting on a barbed-wire fence. ‘Veneer Off on
World Stage’, The Telegraph, 25 Jan. 2020.
2. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘A Hundred Days on Modi 2.0: Its Purpose Is the Show of Power,
Nationalist Fervour, Social Control’, The Indian Express, 9 Sep. 2019.
3. Bruce Stokes,Dorothy Manevich, and Hanyu Chwe, ‘Three Years in, Modi Remains Very
Popular’, Pew Research Center, 15 Nov. 2017,
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/11/15/india-modi-remains-very-popular-three-
years-in/. Accessed 4 Jun. 2020. Niha Masih and Joanne Slater, ‘U.S.-Style Polarization Has
Arrived in India. Modi Is at the Heart of the Divide’, The Washington Post, 21 May 2019.
Accessed 4 Jun. 2020.
4. See Ziya Us Salam, Of Saffron Flags and Skullcaps: Hindutva, Muslim Identity and the Idea
of India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2018.
5. Sugata Srinivasraju, ‘The Trap of the Lutyens’ Liberal’, The Wire, 8 Jun. 2019,
https://thewire.in › rights › india-liberalism-lutyens-regional. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.
6. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Rise of Hindutva Has Enabled a Counter-Revolution Against Mandal’s
Gains’, The Indian Express, 10 Feb. 2021.
7. Ibid. The percentage of OBCs who supported the party jumped from 22 per cent in 2009 to 34
per cent in 2014, and 44 per cent in 2019.
8. Avishek Jha, ‘BJP’s 2019 Victory: How Caste-Based Politics Has Been Redefined and
Reinvented’, LSE Blogs,.https://blogs.lse.ac.uk › southasia › 2019/06/26 › bjps-2019-victory-
how-caste-based-…June 26, 2019. Accessed 5 Sep. 2019.
9. On the BJP under Narendra Modi, see Kapil Komireddy, Malevolent Republic: A Short
History of the New India, London: Hurst & Co., 2019.
10. Happymon Jacob, ‘A Year on, Article 370 and Kashmir Mythmaking’, The Hindu, 4 Aug.
2020.
11. For a historical account of the Kashmir dispute, which brings the story to the present, see
Radha Kumar, Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir, New Delhi: Aleph Books,
2018.
12. Jeffrey Gettleman,Kai Schultz,Hari Kumar, and Suhasini Raj, ‘Modi’s Kashmir Move Places
India’s Secular Status in Doubt’, The Irish Times, 7 Aug. 2019,
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/modi-s-kashmir-move-places-india-s-
secular-status-in-doubt-1.3979452. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.
13. Haseeb Drabu, ‘Modi’s Majoritarian March to Kashmir’, The New York Times, 8 Aug. 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opinion/modis-majoritarian-march-to-kashmir.html.
Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.
14. Gowhar Geelani argues: ‘The BJP’s ideological and civilisational motives can be well
understood from the kind of symbolism and importance the saffron party is attaching to
August 5 as a day of “Hindu conquest”; August 5, the day Kashmir was put under the
guillotine last year, is the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be attending the
“bhoomipujan” of the temple site in Ayodhya.’ Gowhar Geelani, ‘Concertina in Our Souls’,
The Telegraph, 2 Aug. 2020.
15. ‘Complete Text of Ayodhya Verdict’, The Hindu, 9 Nov. 2019.
16. Editorial, ‘Peace and Justice: On Ayodhya Verdict’, The Hindu, 11 Nov. 2019.
17. Ibid.
18. Sanjay Hegde and Pranjal Kishore, ‘The Ayodhya Verdict Can Shake the Very Foundations of
India’, Quartz India, 8 Feb. 2018, https://qz.com/india/1199361/babri-masjid-ayodhya-
dispute-the-supreme-court-verdict-can-shake-the-very-foundations-of-india/. Accessed 15
Aug. 2019.
19. Randeep Surjewala, the Congress party spokesman, quoted in Puneet Nicholas Yadav, ‘Of
Ideologies and Compromises: Post Ayodhya Verdict, Congress Romp with Shiv Sena Not
Surprising’, Outlook, 20 Nov. 2019.
20. Ibid.
21. Ramchandra Guha, ‘Why the CAA Is Illogical, Immoral and Ill-Timed, Writes Ramachandra
Guha’, The Hindustan Times, 12 Jan. 2020.
22. The tense political environment eventually led to communal violence in the national capital,
Delhi, in February 2020. Over 50 men, women, and children were killed, most of them
Muslim. Beyond the killings, Muslim properties were destroyed to cripple them
economically. Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, ‘Ground Report: In Riot City, Hindutva Mobs
Rage with Impunity as Police Watch in Silence’, Wire.in, 25 Feb. 2020,
https://thewire.in/communalism/delhi-riots-jai-shri-ram-hindutva-bjp. Accessed 10 Mar.
2020. Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, ‘Ground Report: How the Riots Unfolded in Delhi’s
Chand Bagh’, Wire.in, 28 Feb. 2020, https://thewire.in/communalism/delhi-riots-chand-bagh-
arson-mazaar. Accessed 10 Mar. 2020.
23. ‘Congress Working Committee Demands Withdrawal of CAA, Stopping of NPR Process’,
Business Line, 11 Jan. 2020.
24. Gautam Bhatia, ‘Challenge Against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act’, Live Law
www.livelaw.in. Accessed 10 Mar. 2020; Bharat Bhushan, ‘Citizens, Infiltrators, and Others:
The Nature of Protests Against the Citizenship Amendment Act’, South Atlantic Quarterly,
Jan. 2021. http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-
pdf/120/1/201/835969/1200201.pdf Accessed 10 Mar 2020.; Jhalak M. Kakkar, India’s New
Citizenship Law and its Anti-Secular Implications. www.lawfareblog.com › indias-new-citi…
Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.
25. NGOs receiving foreign funding through the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA)
have been pursued and chased out of the country. Greenpeace and Amnesty International
offices were closed down.
26. ‘India Slips Two Positions to 53rd Spot in EIU’s Democracy Index’, The Hindustan Times, 4
Feb. 2021.
27. Abhinav Sekhri, ‘How the UAPA Is Perverting the Idea of Justice’, Article-14.com, 16 Jul.
2020, https://www.article-14.com/post/how-the-uapa-is-perverting-india-s-justice-system.
Accessed 18 Jul. 2020.
28. In June 2018, the Pune police launched raids at the homes and offices of lawyers and activists
across Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, and Ranchi in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence
investigation. The police arrested nine rights activists and lawyers in an all-India level
 investigation into what it termed ‘urban Naxalism’. The arrests were justified in the context
of the violence that took place in the wake of a celebratory gathering in Maharashtra in
January 2018 to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Koregaon. Bhima Koregaon is a
village in Pune district where Dalit soldiers of the British army, mostly Mahars, roundly
defeated the troops of the local ruler, Peshwa Bajirao II, a Brahmin, in 1818. On 1 January
2019, Mahars gathered to commemorate this event, which they do every year. On the eve of
the event, an Elgar Parishad in Pune, whose organizers included two retired judges, saw
speakers contesting Hindutva and criticizing the BJP government. The police allege that this
was the provocation for violence at Bhima Koregaon: participants of the event were attacked
by upper-caste Hindu nationalists. They retaliated, leading to the death of one person. See
Sukanya Shantha, ‘Bhima Koregaon: Amid Demands for Fresh Probe, a Hard Look at the
Case’s Discrepancies’, Wire. in, 21 Dec. 2019, https://thewire.in/rights/discrepancies-bhima-
koregaon-investigation-sharad-pawar-demands-fresh-probe. Accessed 1 Jul. 2020.
29. Salman Rushdie, ‘Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children at 40: “India Is No Longer the
Country of This Novel” ’, The Guardian, 3 Apr. 2021, https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjU9_en9KT0
AhWXyDgGHTTBDb4QFnoECAcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2
Fbooks%2F2021%2Fapr%2F03%2Fsalman-rushdie-on-midnights-children-at-40-india-is-no-
longer-the-country-of-this-novel&usg=. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.
30. For an Assessment of NDA rule, see essays in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Re-Forming India:
The Nation Today, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2019.
31. Ibid.
32. Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Democracy: All for One’, The Telegraph, 3 Jan. 2020.
33. In the widely cited report of the Economist Intelligence Unit on the State of Democracy in the
World for 2018, India’s rank has declined sharply since 2014, from 27 to 42 in 2018,
registering the second largest fall in ranking after Indonesia, which fell by 20 ranks to 68.
34. Pranab Bardhan, ‘India Has Gone from False Hopes in 2014 to False Pride in 2019’, The
Indian Express, 15 Jun. 2019.
35. Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, ‘From CBI to RBI, An Incomplete List of Institutions That
Narendra Modi Has Undermined or Threatened’, Scroll.in, 31 Oct. 2018,
https://scroll.in/article/900097/from-cbi-to-rbi-an-incomplete-list-of-institutions-that-
narendra-modi-has-undermined-or-threatened. Accessed 3 Jun. 2020.
36. Harish Khare, ‘Let Us Gratefully Count the Leadership Dividend Offered by Narendra Modi’,
Wire.in, 31 May 2020, https://thewire.in/politics/leadership-dividend-narendra-modi.
Accessed 31 May 2020.
37. Anjali Modi, ‘Opinion: By Giving Modi a Free Pass, Election Commission Has Abandoned
Any Attempt to Appear Neutral’, Scroll.in, 3 Mar. 2019,
https://scroll.in/article/922121/opinion-why-is-the-election-commission-giving-narendra-
modi-special-treatment. Accessed 9 May 2020.
38. Siddharth Bhatia, ‘The Reputation of the Election Commission Has Been Severely
Tarnished’, Wire. In, 20 May 2019, https://thewire.in/government/elections-2019-election-
commission. Accessed 3 Jun. 2020.
39. See Seema Chishti, ‘The Biased Referee: Why the Election Commissionʼs Neutrality Is in
Doubt’, The Caravan, 31 Mar. 2021, https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi0o__G9aT0A
hVM4jgGHXW8Df4QFnoECAIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fcaravanmagazine.in%2Fpoliti
cs%2Fwhy-election-commission-neutrality-doubt&usg=AOvVaw2WfeI-
0wU4X9aG64c4M1ZY. Accessed 8 Apr. 2021.
40. Bhatia, ‘The Reputation of the Election Commission Has Been Severely Tarnished’.
41. Modi, ‘Opinion: By Giving Modi a Free Pass, Election Commission Has Abandoned Any
Attempt to Appear Neutral’.
42. Aishwarya Paliwal, ‘NaMo on, NaMo TV Gone: Channel Disappears from All Platforms as
Lok Sabha Election Ends’, India Today, 20 May 2019.
43. Sanjay Jha, ‘Election Commission Might Have Been Captured by Modi Government, Says
Congress’, The Telegraph, 19 May 2019.
44. Sanjay Hegde, ‘How the Higher Judiciary Let Down the Citizenry’, The Telegraph, 20 Oct.
2019.
45. ‘Supreme Court Crisis: All Not Okay, Democracy at Stake, Say Four Senior-Most Judges’,
Business Line, 18 Jan. 2018.
46. For over six years, Gogoi presided over multiple benches to ensure the creation of the NRC,
the establishment of Foreigners Tribunals, and urging governments to identify and deport
illegal immigrants. His judgments on controversial cases, from Rafale to Ayodhya and
several others, went in favour of the government.
47. Prashant Bhushan, ‘In Reply to Contempt Case, Bhushan Offers Detailed Critique of SC’,
Quint, 3 Aug. 2020. https://www.thequint.com/news/law/details-of-prashant-bhushan-
affidavit-reply-to-contempt-case-supreme-court-freedom-of-speech-cji-controversies.
Accessed 7 Aug. 2020.
48. Justice A. P. Shah points out that threats from within have also damaged the judiciary’s
independence. He notes that ‘There is a tendency to view threats to judicial independence as
emerging from the executive, and occasionally from the legislature. But when persons within
the judiciary become pliable, it is a different story altogether.’ A. P. Shah, ‘Court Adrift and
Chinks in the Judiciary’s Armour’, The Hindu, 7 Sep. 2020.
49. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘A Different Court’, The Indian Express, 7 Sep. 2020.
50. Manu Sebastian, ‘How Has the Supreme Court Fared’, The Telegraph, 20 Oct. 2019.
51. ‘It Redefines Independence & Integrity of the Judiciary: Justice (Retired) Lokur Over Gogoi’s
Nomination to RS’, National Herald, 17 Mar. 2020.
52. Indian billionaires increased their wealth by 35% during the lockdown to ₹3 trillion, ranking
India after United States, China, Germany, Russia, and France. Out of these, the rise in
fortunes for the top 100 billionaires since the lockdown in March is enough to give every one
of the 138 million poorest Indian people a cheque for ₹94,045 each, according to Oxfam’s
‘Inequality Virus Report’. The report points out, ‘In fact, the increase in wealth of the top 11
billionaires of India during the pandemic could sustain the MNREGA scheme for 10 years or
the health ministry for 10 years,’ according to Oxfam’s calculations. Jagriti Chandra, ‘Indian
Billionaires Increased Their Wealth by 35% during the Lockdown, Says Oxfam Report’, The
Hindu, 25 Jan. 2021.
53. On the back of the Facebook investment in Jio, over 40 per cent FDI inflows were captured
by Ambani’s Reliance Group. Six airports, including some profitable ones, controlled by the
Airports Authority of India (AAI), were won by a group headed by Gautam Adani in 2019.
54. Harish Damodaran, ‘Real Power Is with Centre, Which Holds the Purse-Strings in These
Fiscally-Challenging Times’, The Indian Express, 20 Dec. 2020.
55. Interview with Kishore Deo, 8 Jul. 2020.
56. ‘In 2019, Is BJP Riding a Modi Wave or a Money Wave?’, Wire.in, 8 May 2019,
https://thewire.in/politics/bjp-modi-political-funding-money. Accessed 10 Mar. 2020.
57. M. V. Rajeev Gowda and E. Sridharan, ‘Reforming India’s Party Finance and Election
Expenditure Laws’, Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, 11, no. 2, Jun. 2012,
p. 239.
58. V. Venkatesan, ‘Chequered Relations,’ Frontline, 16, no. 16, 31 Jul.–13 Aug. 1999.
59. Bibhudatta Pradhan, Archana Chaudhary, and Abhijit Roy Chowdhury, ‘Empty Coffers
Hinder India Congress Party’s Plans to Topple Modi’, Bloomberg Quint, 23 May 2018,
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/empty-coffers-hinder-india-congress-
party-s-plans-to-topple-modi. Accessed 19 Jul. 2020.
60. ‘Corporate Donations: Report Shows BJP Received 16 Times More Than Congress’, 10 Jul.
2019, https://adrindia.org/content/corporate-donations-report-shows-bjp-got-16-times-more-
congress. Accessed 19 Jul. 2020.
61. Adil Rashid, ‘Electoral Bonds Have Legalised Crony Capitalism: Ex-Chief Election
Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi’, Outlook, 7 Apr. 2019.
62. Electoral bonds were introduced through amendments in the Reserve Bank of India Act,
Companies Act, Income Tax Act, Representation of Peoples Act, and Foreign Contributions
Regulations Act.
63. ‘The Election Fix: Despite Note Ban, Cash Is All Over India’s Elections—but Can Votes Be
Bought?’, Scroll.in, 7 Apr. 2019, https://scroll.in/article/919108/the-election-fix-despite-note-
ban-cash-is-all-over-indias-elections-but-can-votes-be-bought. Accessed 9 Jan. 2020.
64. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, ‘Part 2: Electoral Bonds—the Tool BJP Used to Route Illicit and
Foreign Funding’, The Times of India, 9 Jul. 2019.
65. On 26 March 2021, the Supreme Court refused to stay the release of fresh electoral bonds
ahead of assembly polls in four states and a Union territory.
66. Bibhudatta Pradhan,Archana Chaudhary, and Abhijit Roy Chowdhury, ‘Congress Facing
Financial Crisis Ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha Elections’, Business Standard, 25 Sep. 2018.
67. Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘The State and/of the Media in Modi’s India’, in Alf Gunvald Nilsen,
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Anand Vaidya (eds.), Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories,
Contestations, London: Pluto Press, 2019, pp. 58–71.
68. Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta, ‘Mass Media and the Modi “Wave” ’, Himal South Asian, 30 Jun.
2014. https://www.himalmag.com/media-modi-elections/. Accessed 6 May 2020.
69. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘The Age of Cretinism’, Open Magazine, 10 Aug. 2018,
www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/the-age-of-cretinism. Accessed 24 Aug. 2018.
70. India has dropped two places on a global press freedom index to be ranked 140th out of 180
countries in the annual reporters without borders. ‘India Drops Down on World Press
Freedom Index’, The Economic Times, 18 Apr. 2019.
71. Kalpana Sharma, ‘ABP Resignations: This Isn’t the Emergency—So Why Are Many Media
Houses Falling in Line?’, Scroll.in, 25 Aug. 2018, https://scroll.in/tag/ABP. Accessed 24
Aug. 2018.
72. Editorial, ‘Creeping Unfreedoms’, Economic and Political Weekly, 53, no. 4, 27 Jan. 2018.
73. Raksha Kumar, India’s Media Can’t Speak Truth to Power’, Foreign Policy.com
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/indias-media-cant-speak-truth-to-power-modi-bjp-
journalism/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
74. Editorial, ‘Creeping Unfreedoms’, op cit.
75. Snigdha Poonam and Samarth Bansal, ‘Misinformation Is Endangering India’s Election’, The
Atlantic, 1 Apr. 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/india-
misinformation-election-fake-news/586123/information. Accessed 7 Jun. 2020.
76. Vidhi Choudhary, ‘Ahead of LS Polls, WhatsApp Tells Political Parties Not to Spam Users’,
The Hindustan Times, 7 Feb. 2019.
77. Two ABM-managed pages are the top two biggest spenders on Facebook, this being disclosed
once the social network rolled out its advertiser transparency campaign in February 2019.
Samarth Bansal,Gopal Sathe,Rachna Khaira, and Aman Sethi, ‘How Modi, Shah Turned a
 Women’s NGO Into a Secret Election Propaganda Machine’, Huffington Post, 4 Apr. 2019,
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/how-modi-shah-turned-a-women-s-rights-ngo-into-a-
secret-election-propaganda-machine_in_5ca5962ce4b05acba4dc1819?
ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4&utm_campaign=share_email. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020.
78. Ibid.
79. ‘Real or Fake, We Can Make Any Message Go Viral: Amit Shah to BJP Social Media
Volunteers’, Wire.in, 26 Sep. 2018, https://thewire.in/politics/amit-shah-bjp-fake-social-
media-messages. Accessed 7 Jun. 2020.
80. Swati Chaturvedi, I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army, New
Delhi: Juggernaut, 2016.
81. Sanjay Jha, The Great Unravelling: India After 2014, New Delhi: Westland Publications,
2020, p. 103.
82. Archis Mohan, ‘Vipaksh Mukt Bharat: How Modi, Shah Want to Herald the Golden Age of
BJP’, Business Standard, 2 Aug. 2017.
83. Ibid.
84. Several opposition leaders have come under the scanner of the central investigation agencies.
The former home and finance minister P. Chidambaram, Congress leader D.K. Shivakumar,
NCP leader, and Ajit Pawar, among many others, have been investigated. Ajoy Ashirwad
Mahaprashasta, ‘Why Opposition’s Claim of Central Agencies Being Misused Rings True’,
Wire.in, 5 Sep. 2019, https://thewire.in/politics/chidamabaram-shivakumar-arrest-central-
agencies. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020.
85. Editorial, ‘Media as Target’, The Hindu, 11 Feb. 2021.
86. ‘Modi Govt’s Single Point Agenda Is Vendetta, Says Congress’, National Herald, 12 Oct.
2019.
87. K. S. Dakshina Murthy, ‘India’s Political Opposition Wakes Up to New Reality Under Modi
& Co’, TRT World, 24 Aug. 2019, https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/india-s-political-
opposition-wakes-up-to-new-reality-under-modi-co-29256. Accessed 1 Jul. 2020.
88. On this, see A. K. Bhattacharya and Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta, ‘Many Claims, Few Results:
Modi’s Campaign Against Corruption’, in Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.), Re-Forming India,New
Delhi: Penguin Books, 2019.
89. As of July 2020, Assam: 10 MLAs, Uttarakhand: 9, Arunachal: 43, Manipur: 4, Gujarat: 16,
Goa: 10, Karnataka: 17, and Madhya Pradesh: 22 MLAs have defected and joined the BJP to
help it form the state government.
90. Betwa Sharma, ‘5 Scams the RTI Act Helped Bust in Its First 10 Years’, HuffPost, 12 Oct.
2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/10/12/5-most-critical-scams-exp_n_8263302.html.
Accessed 9 Jun. 2020.
91. Vidya Venkat, ‘With 26,000 Queries Pending, India’s Right to Information Law Is as Good as
Defunct’, Quartz, 7 Jan. 2019. https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjporGSr6b0A
hX8zDgGHZpGC5cQFnoECAIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fqz.com%2Findia%2F1516380
%2Fhow-indias-modi-government-is-killing-the-rti-
law%2F&usg=AOvVaw1vnCcr4XVu6EyE6tnyJ62f. Accessed 29 Jun. 2020.
92. ‘Were Jaitley, CEA Consulted on Demonetisation? RBI Refuses to Answer RTI Query’, The
Hindu, 1 Jan. 2017.
93. ‘RBI Refuses to Give Reasons Behind Demonetisation’, The Hindu, 29 Dec. 2016.
94. Venkat, ‘With 26,000 Queries Pending, India’s Right to Information Law Is as Good as
Defunct’.
 95. Scroll Staff, ‘Amendments to RTI Act Passed in Rajya Sabha, Opposition Alleges
Intimidation by Government’, Scroll.in, 25 Jul. 2019,
https://scroll.in/latest/931800/amendments-to-rti-act-passed-in-rajya-sabha-opposition-
alleges-intimidation-by-government. Accessed 7 Aug. 2020.
96. ‘ “Final Assault!” Sonia Gandhi Tears Into Modi Government Over “Dilution” of RTI Act’,
The Financial Express, 31 Oct. 2019.
97. Anjali Bhardwaj and Amita Johri, ‘To defend Modi Govt’s RTI Act Changes, BJP Released a
“Factsheet”. It Doesn’t Have Much Facts’, The Print, 24 Jul. 2019,
https://theprint.in/opinion/to-defend-modi-govts-rti-act-changes-bjp-released-a-factsheet-it-
doesnt-have-much-facts/267161/. Accessed 30 Jun. 2020.
98. Vidya Venkat, ‘The Steady Dilution of the RTI Act Is One of the Legacies of the Modi
Government’s Term’, Scroll.in, 8 Jan. 2019, https://scroll.in/article/908524/the-steady-
dilution-of-the-rti-act-is-one-of-the-legacies-of-the-modi-governments-term. Accessed 29
Jun. 2020.
99. Editorial, ‘Parliament Deadlocked’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1, no. 31, 1 Aug. 2015.
100. Niharika Mandhana, ‘India Land-Acquisition Measures Gain, but Face Hurdle in Upper
House of Parliament’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 Mar. 2015,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-land-acquisition-measures-gain-but-face-hurdle-in-upper-
house-of-parliament-1426006694. Accessed 7 Jul. 2020.
101. Interview with Vinod Sharma 23 Jul. 2020. Vinod Sharma has been the political editor of the
Hindustan Times. He was also appointed member of the National Commission for Minorities
in 2010.
102. Interview with Mani Shankar Aiyar, 10 Jul. 2020.
103. Interview with Javed Ansari (formerly India Today), 12 Jul. 2020. Javed Ansari has been a
senior journalist and political analyst, reporting on Indian politics and elections for the past
30 years. He has worked with several electronic and print media platforms and was
associated with the India Today Group for over two decades.
104. Interview with Javed Ansari (formerly India Today), 12 Jul. 2020. Javed Ansari has been a
senior journalist and political analyst
 Conclusion

The Congress party is no stranger to crises but those it has faced over the
past decade are unprecedented and probably the worst in the course of its
long history. They have come at a pace and scale that perhaps few in the
party could have foreseen. Two of the worst defeats in its history have
raised questions and concerns for its very survival. These crises have been
building up for years and yet no leader has faced them head on and sought
to address the challenges confronting the party. This lack of a sense of
urgency is conspicuous in the post-election conduct of its central leadership,
which has failed to draw up a roadmap for revival. There has been no
attempt to analyze or a committee appointed to investigate the causes of the
2019 debacle, essential in the wake of such a major debacle. That apart, the
top leadership has not taken a hard look at why the party has lost traction
with the people. After its loss in 2014, the Congress set up a committee
chaired by former defence minister A. K. Antony but did nothing with the
report it submitted. After its loss in 2019, the party did not systematically
analyze the reasons for its colossal defeat. No one in a position of authority
within the Congress has offered a comprehensive explanation of the party’s
devastating defeat that year.
The Congress has faced three major challenges in a political conjuncture
defined by ‘the great moving Right show’, to borrow a phrase from cultural
theorist Stuart Hall, and the polarization engendered by it. It must agree on
or elect a leader capable of keeping the party united, reconstruct its
organizational structure across the states, and, finally, project and propagate
a clear alternative ideological narrative to the BJP.
Historically, as a party of consensus, the Congress had always come to
power on a centrist platform, reflecting its varied social base, including,
most notably, its support from the lower sections of Indian society.
Centrism and consensual politics, which explained its early success, do not
seem to work in a deeply divided polity. A party that once famously
claimed to represent everyone seems to have lost the support of most
groups in India’s deeply polarized polity. The party is confronting a
dilemma because of the fracture of its electoral coalition owing to the
breakdown of the traditional forms of identity. This occurred when
cleavages based on caste (post-Mandal) and religion (related to Ayodhya)
were exacerbated. The party no longer enjoys Dalit support, competing for
their vote with regional parties and the BJP; it has lost the support of upper
castes who prefer to vote for the BJP; it has no OBC support except in some
states such as Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, thanks to state leaders; and the
Muslim vote has drifted to regional parties or whoever can offer an
alternative to the BJP. The Congress garnered 12 crore votes (BJP got 22
crores) and 20 per cent of the vote share in the 2019 parliamentary elections
and, therefore, cannot be underestimated, but its social base has shrunk and
it lacks a core vote in key states.
The crisis of the Congress party is not unique. It is not the only centrist
party to be knocked off its pedestal. The support for such parties has
dwindled if not collapsed in many countries as they have faced difficulties
in grappling with right-wing populism and nationalism. In India, the decline
of the centre-left parties is a conspicuous feature of the contemporary
political landscape. Thus, parties like the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) and Communist Party of India, and several state-based parties
such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Samajwadi Party (SP), and Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP) have seen their support markedly shrink.
The shrinking support of these parties is closely linked to the move of
the Centre of gravity to the Right in the wake of the national community
being redrawn on the basis of religious identity and communal polarization.
Caste does matter but religion and the politics surrounding it matters as
much, if not more, especially in north and north-western India—regions in
which the BJP has a strong presence. The crucial divide over the past
decade has been Hindu–Muslim polarization, with a much greater gap
developing between the majority and minority communities than between
caste groupings. This underlines the significance of communal mobilization
on the basis of a pan-Hindu identity marking a real shift, with large
numbers of voters viewing themselves through the prism of their
overarching religious identity rather than caste and region. These
ideological divisions have shaped the polarization of Indian politics more
than ever before.
 The fundamental difference between the 2014 elections that brought
Narendra Modi to power and the 2019 elections makes this amply clear. In
the 2014 elections BJP’s victory was made possible by his slogan of ‘vikas’
or development. He didn’t spell out development and how it would be
achieved; nonetheless, he made the point that development had suffered
because of the Manmohan Singh government’s leadership deficit and policy
paralysis. Development received short shrift between 2014 and 2019. The
aspirations of the middle classes and lower middle classes were not
addressed but that didn’t seem to matter. The BJP’s manifesto promise of
two crore jobs had not materialized but that didn’t seem to matter either.
The frying pakoras solution for joblessness had been the subject of ridicule
and countless jokes but this was forgotten in 2019. Even when the
government had actually done nothing much on the job front, it still got
voted because Modi was seen as the only person capable of doing
something.
The success of the BJP derives from its ability to redirect public
discourse. The discourse it has tried to displace had occupied Centre stage
of post-Independence politics in India and revolved around people’s
material life and the here moved from material concerns to issues that
divide people through a systematic inculcation of a politics of hate and the
weaponization of religion. The BJP leaders were able to mould large
sections of the majority community to think that they are victims, that they
have been deprived of their rightful place in the Hindu nation. To achieve
their rightful place, they must embrace Hindu identity.
Two back-to-back defeats raised questions about the ability of the
Congress, and the Nehru-Gandhis in particular, to win elections. This
emboldened their critics to demand that the family relinquish control of the
party to fresh faces, exactly a century after Rahul Gandhi’s great-great-
grandfather, Motilal Nehru, assumed presidency of the party in 1919.
Rahul’s own defeat in Amethi in 2019 underscored the dwindling relevance
of India’s most famous political dynasty, alongside the decline of the
pluralistic vision of India, which has been synonymous with them. This has,
however, not diluted their relevance to the Congress. The predicament for
the Congress is, however, that the latter are unable to provide the strong
leadership that the party requires at this juncture. The Congress as a party is
caught in a political bind: the prospects of the party falling apart without the
Gandhis at the helm as the latter are an important glue holding together a
loosely organized party, and on the other, the bleak chances to prosper with
a Gandhi at the helm as it has made the party an easy target for its
detractors.
Shocked by the electoral debacle, Rahul Gandhi resigned as party
president in May 2019, taking responsibility for his party’s disastrous
showing in the 2019 elections. His resignation plunged the Congress into an
even deeper crisis as the party was unable to agree to a non-Gandhi as his
successor. This is partly because the challenge isn’t just about his
ineffectual leadership or a poorly executed electoral strategy but something
more profound. Essentially, the old form of accommodative politics, which,
for long, held together a social coalition and fractious nation, is not capable
of galvanizing the imagination of ‘new India’. The Gujarat model of
politics, marked by an exclusive focus on individual leadership as the driver
of election campaigns, a strong sense of Hindu pride, a shift in popular
attention to aggressive nationalist appeals regardless of reality or facts, and
a complete rejection of the entire democratic past and superimposition of
perception over performance, appears to hold voters in thrall. Changes
unleashed by liberalization, globalization, and the information
communication revolution initiated by the Congress have undercut its
political ethos and ideological architecture to a greater degree than that of
its principal rival.
Following Rahul Gandhi’s resignation the party witnessed discontent and
disintegration in several states, most notably in Karnataka, Madhya
Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Several prominent leaders had resigned from the
party and joined the BJP. Defections are not new in the party’s long history
but the problem has clearly been aggravated by the inability to resolve the
organizational and leadership issues. It remained leaderless for months and
did not have a full-time president for nearly two years. The uncertainty of
finding a replacement for Rahul Gandhi cost the party dearly with no
serious attempt to halt its downward slide.
It is clear that (for now) Rahul Gandhi, notwithstanding his humane,
compassionate, and progressive politics, doesn’t evoke the faith and trust of
India’s electorate, especially when pitted against BJP’s ‘Hindutva plus
neoliberal economics (development)’ pitch in increasingly presidential-style
elections. Therefore his return to the top leadership position would not have
helped the party’s electoral prospects; nonetheless, the decision on
leadership should not have been postponed ad infinitum. Rahul Gandhi’s
backseat driving, even after resigning as party boss, was a major hindrance
in the reorganization of the party. With his unwillingness to lead the party
from the front, several leaders expressed their disquiet with the way power
was being exercised with no clear lines of individual responsibility and
accountability.
At the organizational level, there has been a complete collapse of the
Congress system established in the early years of post-Independent India.
The organizational weakening was principally due to centralization and a
concentration of power in the hands of top leaders. Basically, Congress
lacks a modern political machine to fight elections. It has neither the will
nor the wherewithal nor the resources to fight a good fight in India’s highly
competitive and hugely expensive elections. Poll debacles highlighted the
contrast between the Congress and the BJP organization, the latter having
succeeded in expanding and building its organization in states where a few
years ago it had no presence, while the Congress was organizationally very
poorly equipped to provide a counter.
The party’s loose structure, with no organizational presence on the
ground to speak of, was thus incapable of taking on what is clearly the most
formidable organizational machinery that India has ever seen.
Consequently, there were very few local leaders and workers to conduct
ground-level campaigns, a far cry from what it once was: a well-oiled
machine with grassroots contact right down to the district level. Essential
organizational changes, such as appointment of state presidents, have
remained pending for very long and no discernible efforts have been made
to change this. These delays have seriously damaged the organization. This
issue was brought front and Centre by 23 senior leaders (in August 2020)
who pointed out that ‘uncertainty’ over the leadership and the ‘drift’ in the
organization had demoralized workers and weakened the party.
The Congress desperately needs a democratic renewal, with
democratization at the front and Centre. However, fundamental issues
concerning renewal and restoration of internal democracy have been
repeatedly set aside and weighed down by the debate on leadership and an
obsessive focus on the Gandhis because of the widely held belief that it is
the leadership vacuum in the Congress that BJP rushed in to fill. The party
hasn’t held elections for 23 years, though it must be admitted that the BJP
too has not held competitive elections with two or more contestants for the
post of president or other party posts. Regardless of the situation in other
parties, the Congress must hold party elections but not with a single
candidate for a post, as has often been the case in the past. It is important
for the Congress to hold competitive elections for the post of president, and
positions in the CWC, AICC, and PCC. A genuinely competitive electoral
process can throw up new leaders. It could give a boost to the party by
changing the perception that it is a family business. In the absence of inner-
party democracy, power brokers, and rootless leaders hold sway and deny
members the right to decide who is best equipped to lead them at different
levels of the polity.
Given Modi’s popularity, which has so completely captured
contemporary Indian politics, the BJP has monopolized national politics but
has faced strong headwinds in several states. The party has not won any
state election on its own since 2017, when the Congress mounted a stiff
challenge to the BJP’s electoral supremacy in the Gujarat assembly
elections. Modi campaigned vigorously in the Karnataka, Haryana, and
Maharashtra elections, but this notwithstanding, his party did not fare well
and failed to win outright in any of these states. It lost power in Jharkhand
and in Maharashtra to a post-poll alliance led by its former ally, the Shiv
Sena, and regained power in Haryana by forging a post-poll alliance.
The Congress party’s respectable performance in several states since
2017 indicates that strong state leaders can hold out against the BJP. Punjab
(2017), Chhattisgarh (2019), Rajasthan (2019), Madhya Pradesh (2019),
and Haryana (2019) are examples of the party performing well with strong
state leadership which can take on the BJP. The party won in these states
because it had a strong state leadership. It can revive its national fortunes on
the back of state leaders who have a mass base and enjoy political
credibility in the states. The erosion of the party base and persistence of the
practice of nomination to key posts within the party are important issues
that have not been addressed.
One important failure of the Congress has been its reluctance to tell its
own story, especially the story of the ten years of the UPA. The UPA did not
publicize its achievements or highlight its distinctive approach, and that was
one reason why the Congress did not play to its strengths, allowing itself to
be outsmarted in 2G and spectrum distribution controversies. The BJP has
correctly calculated that so long as they sustain the argument that the UPA
was a period of elitism, corruption, policy paralysis, and economic
stagnation, it can prevent the Congress from emerging as a credible
alternative. What aids and abets these half-truths is the passivity of the
Congress in defending its record even as the NDA government successfully
obfuscates data on its own underperformance.
The Congress, as indeed the entire opposition, faced an unequal playing
field but, this notwithstanding, Rahul Gandhi has consistently spoken up
against the government’s several failures, in particular, its mismanagement
of the economy and national security. It is another matter that the systematic
dismantling of his political equity by the BJP–RSS and its troll armies has
prevented him from emerging as the pivot of the opposition. In the event,
the Congress has been restricted and hasn’t been able to offer a robust
counter to the BJP. Congress crisis is beyond personality and leadership
issues. The greatest challenge facing it is to define its ideological message
and communicate it loudly and clearly to the electorate as an underpinning
for political mobilization. It is therefore necessary for it to decide what it
stands for and communicate it effectively and repeatedly. Political
ambiguity makes no sense amidst the growing influence of the Hindu Right.
The key issue is disagreement about an appropriate response to Hindu
nationalism. The party has swung between making ideological
compromises with majoritarian nationalism and plotting a frontal battle
against it. It has often adopted a majoritarian undertone on certain
controversial issues. Political ambiguity arises from the fact that most of its
leaders don’t see the growing expression of Hinduism in the public sphere
as a form of Hindutva politics. Both as a strategy and as an actuality, the
mixing of religiosity and politics doesn’t guarantee electoral dividends.
Moreover, the conflict in India is not about the growing prominence of
Hinduism in our public life (which most political parties readily accept) but
about the BJP’s idea of nationalism, which is utterly majoritarian and
exclusivist, pitted against the inclusive nationalism championed by the
Congress during the freedom struggle. Indian politics has never been more
polarized than it is today; never before has the gulf been so wide. Hence,
today, the battle is more fundamental; it is about the very idea of India—the
idea of a diverse, pluralistic nation committed to liberal values. By
remaining silent on the way in which nationalism has been redefined, the
Congress has ceded the nationalist space to the BJP, which poses as the pre-
eminent torch-bearer of nationalism today even though it made no
contribution to the freedom struggle, the crucible which defined Indian
nationalism, from which it either absented itself or collaborated with the
British. For several decades after Independence its leaders rejected the
composite nationalism and plurality which Gandhi and the Congress
espoused. Yet, its conception of Indian nationhood, which it has fought for,
has prevailed, over the past decade and more, against the Congress’ ‘Idea of
India’.
The Congress party needs to provide India with an alternative unifying
vision to the divisive policies adopted by the BJP government. For this, it
must unequivocally reaffirm its philosophy of secularism, nationalism, and
social justice and underline India’s innumerable achievements in past
decades, which evolved from an adherence to these commitments. The
party could do so by building an ideological opposition through mass
contact campaigns and a battle for constitutional rights. The party should
take the lead in forging an alliance of all the progressive forces that have
stood up to safeguard the constitutional idea of India over the past few
years. This requires building organizations and/or linkages with democratic
processes on the ground to mobilize public opinion against majoritarianism.
This is possible only if the Congress, along with other Opposition parties,
hammers out an agenda around which different sections of the people can
coalesce and develop programmes to fight authoritarian tendencies and
polarization in society.
Defending a pluralist view of politics and governance is one aspect of
the political strategy; the other is grounding its politics in the idiom of
social justice, which both sidesteps identity politics and resonates with an
aggrieved population, particularly the rural population alienated by BJP’s
policies (demonetization, the Land Acquisition Bill, farm laws) and thereby
placing the party in the mainstream of Indian politics. The rural
employment guarantee scheme was a perfect example of this political pitch.
In 2014, the Congress party was gifted an opportunity to formulate an
alternative position when Prime Minister Modi staked considerable political
capital on passing the Land Acquisition Bill, which appeared to place the
interests of corporations over landowning peasants. Intervening in a debate
on the contentious bill, widely regarded as anti-farmer, Rahul Gandhi
described the government as ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’, a jibe which eventually
forced the prime minister to abandon this controversial piece of legislation.
Rural grievances and the farmers’ cause offered a rare opportunity for
ideological repositioning and a possible basis for common political action
and cooperation across the board on structural remedies for the agrarian
crisis. Unlike the Rafale issue, which dealt with corruption in the purchase
of French fighter aircraft which didn’t touch most people, the farmers’ issue
presents a powerful political canvas to build an anti-capitalist narrative
linking it to economic issues, joblessness, and development. This can steer
the political discourse to the material problems of life, thereby giving the
Congress party a more capacious agenda and one that pitches a wider
political tent in opposition to the right-wing BJP.
There is a larger ideological point to this story that relates to the
implications of declining Congress influence for India’s democratic politics
and the substance of democracy itself. The shrinking political space of the
Congress is disconcerting not only for the party but also deleterious for
democracy itself and for the various diversities of India—religious,
linguistic, region based—being flattened by the exclusivist idea of the
nation. Whether or not this will happen will depend on the political process.
A pushback against this requires political struggles and sustained and united
opposition in elections and between elections. Although nothing much has
been done to revive the Congress in the past few years, it is still a party with
pan-India support and it seems to counter the BJP ideologically and has
mobilized a semblance of opposition to the BJP and, therefore, has to be at
the front and Centre of opposition to it. Even in its shrunken state, the party
has political footprints all over the country. It is difficult to imagine a liberal
consolidation without it. For all its faults, the pluralist character of the
Congress represents a non-parochial idea of India, which is politically
worth preserving because India needs a credible and modern voice of
liberalism to retain its equilibrium.
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 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

Advani, L. K., 4–5

affirmative action programmes for minorities, 99–101
Ahluwalia, Montek Singh, 81
Aiyar, Mani Shankar, 22–23
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), 104
All India Congress Committee (AICC), 15
Alwar-Dadri-Latehar incidents, 105
anti-corruption movement, 6–7, 54–57
anti-Sikh massacres, 1984, 72–73
Antony, A. K., 22, 108, 181
Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 134–35
Articles 370 and 35A, abrogation of, 153–54
Association of Billion Minds (ABM), 139
Ayodhya Act, 1993, 155–56
Ayodhya controversy, 94–95, 96–97, 153–54, 155

Babri Masjid demolition, 2, 4–5, 18, 95–97, 112, 155

backward caste politics, 152
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 182
Balakot air strikes, 122, 131–34, 160
Banerjee, Mamata, 29, 44
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), 1, 8, 20–21, 37, 54, 65. See also communal politics
agenda of national security, 122, 127–28, 131–34
amendment of citizenship law, 130–31
battle against corruption, 167–68
centrality of nationalism, 121, 122, 129–31, 187–88
‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ (Congress-free India), 166–67
corporate donations, 70, 162–64
curbing dissent, 157–58
dilution of RTI, 168–69
election campaign, 66–67, 74–76, 121, 122, 129–30
election manifesto, 2019, 128–29
election spending, 141–42
2019 election victory, 140
electoral bonds, 164
electoral success of, 124, 186
 Hindu consolidation, 111–13
Hindu–Muslim polarization, 152, 155
Hindu nationalism campaign, 129–31, 142
institutional takeover, 158–62, 166–67
leadership credentials, 77
media controls, 164–66
nationalist discourse, 141
social media control, 166
support of urban middle classes, 70–71
use of media and social media in election, 70–71
‘vipaksh/virodh mukt Bharat,’ 166–67
Bhattacharya, Anirban, 125–26
Bhushan, Prashant, 56
BJP-RSS combine
ideology of, 91–92
position of panna pramukh, 27
on reservations for OBCs, 3–5

cadre-based party, 22–23, 27

castes, role in politics, 3, 181–82
Mandal Commission’s recommendation, 3–4, 95
Central Bureau of Investigation, 159–60
Central Vigilance Commission, 159–60
centrism, 181–82
Chancel, Lucas, 47
Chellakumar, A., 25
Citizenship (Amendment) Bill/Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 130–31, 153–54, 156
Coalgate scandal, 49–50, 51
Commonwealth Games scandal, 49–50
communal-authoritarian regime, 151, 153–57
communal politics, 91, 93, 152
advocacy of uniform civil code, 98
Ayodhya controversy, 94–95, 96–97
Congress’s publicized Hinduness, 109–11
dwindling representation of Muslims in parliament, 102–3
Hindu-Muslim polarization, 152, 155, 156, 182
minority appeasement, 106–9, 121
political influence of religion, 93–97
problem of targeted violence, 103–6
reservation politics, 99–100
Shah Bano verdict, 93–94, 95, 97–98
surrender of Muslim women’s rights, 93–94
Communal Violence Bill (CVB), 103–4
Communist Party of India, 182
Communist Party of India (Marxist), 182
Congress-led UPA government, 1, 37
on CAA, 156–57
coalition troubles, 38, 42–44
 corruption scandals, 38, 47–48, 49–54
criticisms against, 37–38
crony capitalism, accusation of, 37–38, 52
differences and divergences in, 40
duality of power, problem of, 41–42
economic slowdown and disgruntlement against, 46–49
election defeats, 140
electoral manifesto, 134–35
foreign direct investment (FDI) policy, 53–54
‘idea of India,’ 130–31
issue of wages under NREGA, 45–46
leadership credentials, 76–77
NAC reconstitution, rift over, 45–46, 49
NCMP and minimum framework of cooperation, 40
political differences within, 44–46
politics of food security, 48–49
right-wing groups against, 38
UPA-1 (2004–2009), 37
UPA-2 (2009–2014), 37
welfare measures and economic reforms, 38–40
withdrawal of Left parties, 39–40
WRB, rift over, 45
‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ (Congress-free India), 166–67
Congress party, 188
All India Congress Committee (AICC), 15–16
blueprint to revamp, 24–25
breakaways from party, 29
Central Election Committee (CEC), 15–16
centralizing drives, 17–18
conflict mediation, 14
Congress Parliamentary Board (CPB), 15–16
Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP), 26–27
Congress Working Committee (CWC), 15–16, 19–20, 24–25, 26–28, 154–55
contrast with BJP, 27
crisis of, 182, 187, 189
criterion of loyalty, 17
criticisms, 169–70
decision-making process, 18
domination of Nehru–Gandhi family, 14
election campaign, 80–82
electoral performance, 186
electoral strength, early years, 14
feudal mindset, 1
high command, role of, 17, 28
‘Idea of India,’ 187–88
ideology, 13, 92
importance of state leaders, 18–19
during Indira Gandhi (see Gandhi, Indira)
 inter-generational clash, impact of, 25–26
intra-party democracy, 16–17
intra-party reforms, 22–23
lack of media strategy, 71
leadership, 17–18
mobilizing voters, 27
nature of, 13, 170–71
no-changers, 23–25
as opposition, 169
organizational degeneration, 21
organizational neglect, impact of, 31
organizational stagnation, 25–28
organizational structure, 15–16
organizational weakening, 184–85
party elections, 19–20
party membership, 15
party’s financial troubles, 163
political consequences for party, 28–31
Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC), 15–16, 19–20, 22, 27–28
as pro-Muslim, 107, 108–9, 112–13
during Rajiv Gandhi, 17–18
reorganization process, 2000, 22
Scindia’s exit, 25–26
under Sonia Gandhi, 20–23
split of, 16
struggles and debates within party, 15–16
‘The Group to Look into Future Challenges’ committee, 22–23
Congress party split, 17
arrival of Indira Gandhi, 16–17
centralization of power, 16–17
New Congress Party or Congress, formation of, 16
consensual politics, 181–82
cow vigilantism, 105–6
crony capitalism, 37–38, 52

Data Analytics and Operation Shakti, 138

Debbarma, Pradyot Manikya Bikram, 27–28
demonetization, 129, 188–89
Dikshit, Uma Shankar, 22–23
dissent, curbing, 157–58
as an anti-national activity, 157–58
preventive detention, 158
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), 42–43
Dreze, Jean, 46
dual centres of power, problem of, 41–42

economic liberalization of 1991, 3

election campaign
 ‘Bharat Ke Mann Ki Baat’ campaign, 139
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), 66–67, 74–76, 121, 122, 129–30, 134
‘Chowkidar chor hai’ campaign, 138–40
Congress party, 80–82
Hindu nationalism as focus of, 129–31
hyper-nationalism agenda, 128–29, 136
#MainBhiChowkidar campaign, 138, 139
minimum-income guarantee scheme of Congress, 137
of Modi, 74–76, 77, 129–30
narrative of a ‘Modi way’ of securing India, 133–34, 135–36
national security as focus of, 131–34
‘Nation with NaMo’ campaign, 139
terrorism-Pakistan-Muslim threat, 134–36
Election Commission of India (ECI), 159–60
accusations against, 160
institutional integrity of, 160
electoral bonds, 164
Emergency period, 1975–1977, 13–14, 159–60
European hyper-nationalism, 128

farm laws, 188–89

Film and Television Institute of India, 126
Forest Rights Act, 38–39
freedom of expression, opposition and curtailment of, 157–58

Gandhi, Indira, 3–4, 14, 16, 23

nationalization of banks and abolition of princes’ privy purses, 16
political supremacy, 16–17
Gandhi, Mahatma, 14, 92
organization of Congress, 15
Gandhi, Rahul, 1, 14, 23–25, 83, 108–9, 111–12, 132–33, 183–85, 187, 188–89
‘Chowkidar chor hai’ campaign, 138–40
criticism against leadership of, 140
denouncement of Supreme Court verdict, 41–42
leadership credentials, 77–78
Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), 137
as party president, 25
party reorganization, 25–26
as party vice president, 28, 78–79
response to dynasty charge, 79
Gandhi, Rajiv, 3–4, 14, 17–18, 23, 93–94, 96
Gandhi, Sonia, 6, 9, 14, 20, 23, 37, 38–39, 41–42, 45, 47–49, 51–52, 71, 76, 79–80, 108, 159
crucial political decisions as chairperson, 41–42
Gehlot, Ashok, 25–26
general elections, 2014
BJP’s electoral juggernaut, 82–83
fall of Congress and victory of BJP, 65
leadership credentials, 76–80
 rise in media power, 65, 70–72
‘save cow’ campaign and ‘love jihad’ propaganda, 74–75
Ghatak, Maitreesh, 37–38
Giri, V. V., 16
Gogoi, Gaurav, 25
Gogoi, Justice Ranjan, 161
Gogoi, Tarun, 30–31
Golwalkar, M. S., 125
Goods and Services Tax (GST), 129
Grievance Redressal Bill, 45
2G spectrum scandal, 49–51, 187
Gujarat assembly elections, 2017, 109–10
Gujarat model of development, 65–66
anti-Muslim stance, 73–74
as a booming industrial hub, 67–68
as business-friendly administration, 67, 73–74
comparable to Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, 68
corporate sector’s view, 69–72
criticism of, 68–69, 72
economic achievements, 68
Economic Freedom, 67
GDP growth-rate, 68
investments, 67–68
political feature, 72–76
private enterprise and commercial development, 69–70
role in BJP’s dramatic victory, 83–84
social development and employment generation, 68–69
Tata’s Nano project, 67, 70
Gujarat violence, 2002, 4–5, 69–70, 72–73

hate crimes, 105

hate speech, 157–58
Hazare, Anna, 54–55
Hindu Code Bill, 97
Hindu nationalism, 2, 97, 111, 121, 123–24, 125–26, 127, 128, 142, 151–52, 187–88
centrality of nationalism in BJP’s electoral campaign, 129–31
Kashmir and, 154
‘surgical strikes’ against Pakistan-based terrorist camps, 122, 132–33
Hindu nationalist idea of India, 124
Savarkar’s definition of Hindus, 125
Hindu Right, 91, 96–97, 105
‘Hindu terror’ conspiracy, 134–35
Hindutva, 2, 4–5, 75, 93–94, 111, 123–24, 152, 153, 170–71
Hindu unity, 4–5
Hindu vote bank, 152
OBCs and Dalits, 153
hyper-nationalism, 128–29, 136
 IIT Madras controversy, 126
inclusive nationalism, 122–24
income inequality in India, 47
India Against Corruption (IAC), 6–7, 54
India as a nation, 122–23
Indian nationalism, 127–29. See also Hindu nationalism
BJP on, 127
Congress on, 127–28
institutional crisis of Congress, 3
castes, role of, 3–4
economic policies and transformation, 5–6, 7
emergence of right-wing alternative, 5
Gujarat violence, 2002, 4–5
Hindu nationalism, rise of, 8–9
identity politics, 5
influencing factors, 3

Jadavpur University, 126

Jaish-e-Mohammad, 131
Jaitley, Arun, 128–29
Janata Dal (United), 104
Janata party, 13–14
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) controversy, 125–26

Kejriwal, Arvind, 54–55, 56, 132–33

Khalid, Umar, 125–26
Khalistani separatism, 127–28
Kumar, Kanhaiya, 125–26

Lamba, Rohit, 99
Land Acquisition Ordinance, 169, 188–89
lobbying power of corporations, 162–64
Lokpal bill, 45, 56

Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 6–7, 37–39, 45

majoritarian politics, 151–53, 155, 158
media
corporate control of, 164–66
role in elections, 65, 70–72, 141–42
Menon, Shiv Shankar, 136
Merit-cum-Means Scholarship scheme, 99–101
Mid-day Meal Scheme, 6
minority appeasement, 106–9, 121. See also communal politics
mob lynching of minorities, 105, 129
Modi, Narendra, 5, 65, 69–70, 83–84, 91–92, 135, 152, 160, 183
communication and speech-making skills, 77–78
as ‘development man,’ 67–68
election campaign, 74–76, 77, 129–30
 against Gandhis, 79
image of ‘development man,’ 73, 74
#MainBhiChowkidar campaign, 138, 139
media strategy, 70–71, 72
narrative of securing India, 133–34, 135–36
plebeian image, 78
as polarizing politician, 72–73, 74
popularity, 186
‘pro-capitalist’ economic agenda, 69–70
references to Hindu nationalism, 74, 142
Moily, Veerappa, 22–23
money, role in election, 141
corporate funding, 70
election spending, 141
moral policing, 105–6
Mukherjee, Pranab, 42, 43–44, 105–6
Mumbai attacks, 2008, 127–28, 135
Muslims. See also communal politics
candidates in elections, 102–3
divorce law, 98
dwindling representation in parliament, 102–3
lynching incidents against, 105
as ‘other,’ 4–5, 142
policy of preferential treatment, 102
reservation politics, 99–100
Sachar Committee recommendation for, 99, 100
scope for government intervention, 101
secularism vs, 93–95
Shah Bano verdict, 93–94, 95, 97–98
under-representation of, 98–99
Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage Act), 2019 (MWA), 98
Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act (MWA) of 1986, 93–94

Nath, Kamal, 25–26

National Advisory Council (NAC), 6, 39–40
National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP), 39–40
National Food Security Act (NFSA), 6, 37–38
Nationalist Congress Party, 29
National Register of Citizens (NRC), 130–31, 153–54, 156
National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), 38–39
national security, 122, 127–28
breach of, 129
‘surgical strikes’ against Pakistan-based terrorist camps, 122, 132–33, 135
National Students Union of India (NSUI), 23–24
nationhood, 125
Nehru, Arun, 18
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 13–14, 92, 122–23
Nijalingappa, S., 16
Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), 137

Operation Green Hunt, 45

Other Backward Classes (OBCs), reservation for, 3–5

Pawar, Sharad, 19–20, 39–40

Piketty, Thomas, 47
Pilot, Sachin, 25–26
pluralism, 91–93, 113, 121, 122–23
political financing in India, 70, 162–64
political history of India, 1
Congress party’s defeat, 2–3
formation of right-wing government, 2, 5, 7
political polarization, 152
populist nationalism, 9
Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM Kisan) scheme, 137
Prasada, Jitendra, 20
Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Repatriation) Bill, 2011, 104
Prevention of Communal Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2013, 103–4
prime-ministerial autocracy, 159
Pulwama attack, 122, 132

Rafale deal, 131, 138, 139–40, 168–69, 188–89

Rai, Vinod, 50–51
Ram temple movement, 4–5, 94–95, 155
construction of temple at Ayodhya, 155–56
Supreme Court’s verdict, 155
Rao, Narasimha, 19–20, 96
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), 182
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 2, 122–23
cadre and shakhas, 123–24
Hindu nationalism of, 125
idea of a Hindu nation, 122–23, 124
theory of Hindu primacy, 125
Reddy, Jaganmohan, 29, 30
Reddy, Kiran Kumar, 30
Reddy, N. Sanjeeva, 16
Reddy, Y. S. Rajasekhara, 29
Reserve Bank of India (RBI), 159–60
rights-based welfare policies, 6
Right to Education (RTE) Act, 6, 38–39
Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement
Act 2013, 52–53
Right to Food, 38–39
Right to Information Act (RTI), 38–39, 45, 158, 168–69
right-wing government, emergence of, 2, 5, 7, 91, 121–22, 151
communal-authoritarian regime, 151, 153–57
Rosaiah, K., 30
Roy, Aruna, 23

Sabarimala temple controversy, 111–12

Sachar Committee Report (SCR), 98–99
Saeed, Hafiz, 125–26
Samajwadi Party (SP), 182
Sangh Parivar, 2
Sangma, P. A., 22
Sarma, Himanta Biswa, 29, 30–31
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), 38–39
Savarkar, V. D., 125
Scindia, Jyotiraditya, 25–26
secularism, 91–92, 113, 121, 122–23, 154, 156–57
BJP’s views, 94
historical background, 92–93
as ideology of Congress, 92
Muslim fundamentalism vs, 93–95
for Nehru, 92–93
pseudo-secularism, 97
Sangh Parivar’s anti-secular agenda, 96–97
true, 97
secular nationalism, 2, 121, 123–24, 125
secular politics, 92
sedition laws, 125–26
Seshan, T. N., 160
Shah, Amit, 74–75, 83, 130–31, 132–33, 135
Shah Bano case, 18, 93–94, 95, 97–98
Sibal, Kapil, 50–51
Singh, Arjun, 19–20, 23
Singh, Digvijaya, 14, 108, 112
Singh, Manmohan, 37, 41–42, 46–47, 48–49, 51–52, 99, 183
leadership credentials, 76–77
Singh, V. P., 3–4
social democracy, 6
social media, role in election, 65, 70–71, 83, 166
soft Hindutva, 107–8, 109
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) Act, 53–54
Subramanian, Arvind, 99
Supreme Court, power and stature of, 161–62

Tata, Ratan, 67
Telangana fiasco, 29–30, 45
Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), 29
Telugu Desam Party (TDP), 29
Tharoor, Shashi, 127
Trinamool Congress (TMC), 29, 42–43, 104
Tully, Mark, 41
Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 2019, 158

Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 39–40

Varthaman, Wing Commander Abhinandan, 131
Vemula, Rohith, 126
Vibrant Gujarat Summit, 67–68, 69–70, 83–84
victim of communal violence, 103–4. See also communal politics
‘vipaksh/virodh mukt Bharat,’ 166–67
Vodafone controversy, 52
vote bank politics, 106
vote share of Congress, 1, 2

Whistle-Blower Protection Bill, 45

Women’s Reservation Bill (WRB), 45

YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), 29, 30