EDITORIAL: DAMNED IF THEY DO, DAMNED IF THEY DON’T: THE DILEMMA OF INDIA’S OPPOSITION PARTIES IN THE MODI ERA OF ONE NATION, ONE PARTY, ONE LEADER AS THE COCKROACH JANTA PARTY EMERGES AS A POTENTIAL OPPOSITION
Vinod Mubayi
After the national elections in 2024, when the BJP lost its majority in Parliament it was able to cling to power by forming a coalition with the help of two regional parties, the Telugu Desam party of Andhra Pradesh and the Janata Dal (U) party in Bihar. Ever since then the BJP seems to have decided that in any state where it has a presence, either as a ruling party or as a major opposition, it is going to ensure its electoral victory, by whatever means necessary. It is only in the more economically advanced southern states of India, such as Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, where the BJP has a small or minimal presence, that it has not made a play to gain power. In most other states, particularly in the Hindi belt of the north but now extending to the west and the east, the BJP is winning elections by hook or by crook and becoming the ruling party.
The first indication that some rot was setting in during the election process was the appearance of the face of a Brazilian lady, later identified as a hair dresser, on the voting cards of hundreds of women in the state of Haryana just before elections. How this happened was never properly explained, but this obvious gaffe was soon followed by other more shocking anomalies that were blithely ignored by the body responsible for conducting elections, the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI is supposedly a statutorily independent body that in earlier years had compiled a stellar record of holding fair and transparent elections in India. Under Modi it has been reduced to a mere appendage of the BJP like other supposedly independent agencies of the government.
The partisan role played by the ECI now shows in the landslide wins achieved by the BJP in recent state elections in Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi, Bihar and West Bengal. Veteran reporter Vidya Subrahmaniam writing in The Hindu newspaper of June 3 comments that “None of these states was considered a walkover for the BJP. Yet it scored a thumping majority in each of them… against all logic, all predictions.” Subrahmaniam goes on to claim:
“It is now increasingly apparent that the BJP has gamed the system. It has set itself up for forever victories through a winning formula of institutional capture, large scale deletion of opposition votes and intimidation through state power. This has meant that while the BJP is able to dodge anti-incumbency repeatedly, some of its rivals lose in just one term. Strikingly, performance has ceased to be an issue. The BJP can win despite an abysmal record in office while the non-BJP parties can lose even with stellar performances. In short, failed governance doesn’t affect the BJP and good governance doesn’t help its opponents.”
Starting with the elections in Bihar, the ECI began to develop different practices with names like Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and Logical Discrepancy to exclude established voters from the electoral roll. ECI’s actions in the West Bengal election included deleting over 9 million voters from the electoral rolls, many with all relevant documents in their possession and many of them minority voters who would not be expected to vote for BJP. Such blatant partisanship on part of a supposed neutral agency conducting the election naturally attracted strong criticism and legal challenge in the Supreme Court. But the judges were loath to take on the ECI or the BJP and let the manipulated electoral process and its predictable outcome proceed unhindered. After the court endorsement of the ECI, political activist and analyst Yogendra Yadav who was a litigant in the case is reported to have said “if till now, voters picked the government, from now on the government or BJP would pick the voters via a BJP-controlled Election Commission, thus delivering to itself a permanent majority.”
In this situation, does it make any sense for opposition parties in India to participate in rigged elections that result in pre-determined outcomes? This is a very problematic issue for all opposition parties since legitimacy to rule at any level of government, local, state, or center has been conferred through the electoral process based on universal franchise ever since India emerged as an independent country 79 years ago. Thus, as far as participation in elections is concerned, political parties are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
For several years, the Modi regime and its parent body the ultra-Hindu fascist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has made no secret of its intention to convert India from its current status as a socialist, democratic country under its existing constitution into a Hindu Rashtra (Nation) based on the Nazi principle of Ein Volk (one people), Ein Reich (one state), Ein Fuhrer (one leader). To achieve this end, the BJP leadership has frequently floated the concept of an “opposition-free India” where one party rules permanently with occasional North Korea-style elections. In such a state, religious minorities, like Muslims and Christians, Dalits, and political opponents would have very limited or no rights. In fact, an earlier RSS Supreme Leader, Golwalkar had explicitly praised Hitler’s Germany for having extinguished the rights of its Jewish minority and termed it a “good example” for India’s Hindu majority to learn how to treat its own religious minorities. In his book We, or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote, “Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole—a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has described the RSS as a totalitarian movement attempting to control society from the inside – an Indian version of fascist control.
This long-standing goal of the RSS that was originally inspired by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, of whom early RSS and Hindu Mahasabha leaders such as Moonje, Savarkar and Golwalkar were staunch admirers, is not unique to India. In an ironic twist, it has also become a goal of Zionist Israel that is now asserting fascist control over the rights of Palestinians.
Beyond the manipulation of electoral rolls and the rigging of elections by the ECI, a more sinister plan seems to be in the process of being implemented to deny selected, marginalized people living in India not only their voting rights or welfare benefits but their very right to be domiciled in the land they live. This plan appears to have been announced in a seemingly off-handed manner by an official in the Ministry of External Affairs who claimed that an Indian passport was only a travel document not a proof of citizenship,
Siddharth Varadarajan, writing in the India Cable of June 26, explains the sinister motives behind the announcement in an incisive article worth quoting at length:
“There are two reasons why the government’s decision to invalidate the passport as proof of citizenship has triggered extensive anxiety.
Until a decade ago, access to government services and facilities was universal, in the sense that citizenship was never an issue. Under Modi’s aggressive politics of demographic insecurity, however, millions of poor Indians, especially Muslims, are being excluded from voting rights, welfare benefits and even domicile rights.
Second, the Modi government is seeking to redefine citizenship on the basis of politically-driven administrative arbitrariness. The goal – as is evident from the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that it is backing – is to penalize and disenfranchise individuals considered politically suspect by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Eventually, the aim may even be to strip bona fide citizens of their citizenship
The passport controversy should be understood for what it is: a reminder to the Indian middle class that there is a more profound and sinister process under way. A process by which a prime minister who saw his electoral strength in the Lok Sabha fall below the half-way mark in 2024 is going about dissolving the people and electing another — to borrow [Bertolt] Brecht’s bitter formulation about the fate of citizens who “squandered the confidence of the government”.
Out of this inchoate political mess, however, a new movement, the Cockroach Janta (Peoples) Party (GJP), has appeared based on significant discontent among the youth on the widespread corruption in the system of examinations in the country for entrance to universities and medical colleges and recruitment to government jobs. While the movement was triggered by the insensitive and crude remarks by the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court who termed discontented students carrying out agitation as cockroaches, it has snowballed into something much larger. The initial demands of the CJP were focused on action against those responsible for corruption in the exam system and the resignation of the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. While these demands remain, the movement has now not only become an expression of the extreme discontent of the youth whose aspirations continue to be denied by a failed education system, widespread unemployment, and the increasing cost of living, it is also becoming a symbol of youth disillusionment with the politics of division and hate stoked by the Hindu-Muslim polarization promoted by the Modi-Shah regime that barely acknowledges the real social and economic problems of the country much less address them in any credible fashion. The CJP is still in its early stages and needs to grow, articulate political positions more comprehensively and join with like-minded parties and groups to fight the corrupt and dangerous politics of the Modi-Shah regime more effectively. The left movement and groups, including CPI (M-L) Liberation leader Dipankar Bhattacharya, have expressed support to the CJP demand and the hunger strike launched at the Jantar Mantar complex in New Delhi by a section of the CJP who have been joined by members of the All India Students Association AISA as well as by the veteran democratic leader from Ladakh, Sonam Wangchuk. As Dipankar said in his statement on the strike “We shall fight, we shall win.” Meanwhile, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), which had led the 2020-21 protest against the now-scrapped central farm laws, has extended support to the ongoing Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led sit-in against alleged exam irregularities and announced that its delegation will join the agitation at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Sunday.
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