Indian Politics 101: The Odyssey of the Indian Republic

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Thousands of years ago, the Mahabharata triumphantly claimed, “Whatever is here, may be found elsewhere; what is not cannot be found anywhere else.” That line doubly applies to the grandiose yet guttural nature of Indian politics. And I love it. Animating everyone from the local chaiwala spitting out his paan on the street to the legacy admission charlatan plagiarizing his PhD to the raucous symphony of screaming heads on an Indian news debate TV, there is something about Indian politics that generates a vibrant passion in anyone who delves into it. Like India itself, Indian politics possesses infinite dichotomies, and I think that’s one of the biggest reasons why people are fascinated by it. The verses of the Vedas sung on the riverbed of an extinct river are debated over to determine the building or breaking of a future society. Billionaires of Bombay and Bangalore use technology to transform the lives of hundreds of millions who’ve just received their first permanent home from the government. Politicians who have traversed the Himalayas in the saffron robes of ascetics strike deals with gangsters cum politicians who make those profanity-laced sepia-toned Indian Netflix shows look like a Disney movie. There truly is everything and anything in this great game of India. With the 2024 General Elections on the horizon, I think it’s a perfect time to understand this quintessential saga of human conflict and compromise.

Let’s start from the beginning…

The Parting of Minds

The tiny island of Great Britain had shamed the subcontinent. In the 19th century, a corporation headquartered in London was making Indian maharajas and sultans quake in the midst of their tectonic conquest of India. Over a century prior, the Maratha Empire had attempted a reconquista against the Mughals. Their patriarch, Shivaji Bhosale, would blow the conch of self-rule or Swarajya for India’s Hindus as the Marathas freed Hindu lands from Islamic rule. But it was not to be so. The Maratha expansion was cut short by infighting and strategic blunders. The Maratha Confederacy, along with all other Indian kingdoms, would soon fall to the British Empire as provinces became a Pangea uniting India politically. The Battle of Plassey, where Robert Clive led 3000 troops, 8 small cannons, and 1 howitzer to decimate Siraj-ud-Din’s 50,000-strong army and artillery, encapsulates the gulf between the Empire and the Indian. British technological, financial, and administrative superiority fueled a British officer-led, Indian mercenary-manned juggernaut that laid the base for colonialism’s lucrative zenith: the British Raj.

A religious awakening and political reconfigurations in the home country compelled British rulers in India to enact reforms interfering in Indian religious affairs, leading to increasing local resentment that culminated in an open rebellion in 1857. Regiments divided by region, religion, and caste clashed with each other ultimately leading to a failed revolution. The echo of this event would reverberate into independence. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the framer of the Indian constitution and an activist from and for the untouchable castes, notes the predominately Hindu character of the rebellion despite the deposed Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, featuring as a figurehead of the uprising. This caused the British to begin favoring Muslim subjects and heightening fissures within Hindu society. Differences between Hindus and Muslims, a battle raging for over a millennium at the time, led to discourse over separate electorates and soon nations. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a Muslim intellectual and British loyalist, laid the seeds of separatism with his Two Nation Theory declaring that Hindus and Muslims were fundamentally different people who would require their own nations. Many Indian Muslim revolutionaries categorically rejected Khan’s Two Nation Theory, but the inception of the idea would be carried forth by intellectuals such as Muhammad Allama Iqbal and later realized by political leaders, namely a certain Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Early Indian election systems would emerge with the British disseminating power into elected representatives who would parley with the Crown. Parties began to arise including the Indian National Congress (secular centrist), the Hindu Mahasabha (Hindu focused), the Muslim League (Muslim focused), as well as other parties focusing on niche electoral interests such as the National Agriculturist Party which catered to the interests of feudal landlords. Granted, much of the voting was restricted to the educated and rich, but these leaders clearly galvanized their communities in mass movements the likes of which India had never seen. The lay of the land began to form where most Hindus shifted to the Indian National Congress (INC) along with a minority of Muslims while most Muslims batted for the Muslim League. The Hindu Mahasabha swept up the leftover Hindus, and ironically, many would agree with Khan’s Two Nation Theory. Essentially, one group chose the pursuit of power, the other chose the promise of peace. I’ll let you decide which is which.

In the midst of this, emerged a legend. Mohandas Gandhi donned the white robes of ascetics, revered in India for millennia, and left the subcontinent spellbound. He became known as a great soul, a Mahatma, due to his invoking of both ancient Hindu values of non-violence or ahimsa as well as reaching out to Muslims in the Hindu spirit of pluralism. Even his most ardent enemies were flabbergasted by Gandhi’s fanatical devotion to his ideals, no matter how much self-harm it caused to himself or his Hindu community. It is quite possible that there is not a single human being who has captured the hearts of so many during their lifetime as Mahatma Gandhi. But Gandhi’s dream in his own heart, a united India, would not come to be.

Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other INC leaders made it a strident point to eschew communalism and went out of their way to cater to Muslims with exclusive cells dedicated to galvanizing their votes. Gandhi and Nehru’s idealism would all be in vain as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and founder of Pakistan, injected communalism into the veins of the independence movement by propagating the Two Nation Theory. Ambedkar sharply notes how Jinnah’s Muslim League would purposefully direct Muslims to antagonize Hindus with acts such as slaughtering cows instead of goats during Eid and banning music near mosques even in mixed Hindu-Muslim areas, deeds which other Muslims across the Islamic world did not engage in. Hindu Congress candidates would naturally appeal to Hindu sentiments during election season which the Muslim League pointed to as an ill omen of Hindu rule, despite Muslim Congress candidates doing similar Islamic appeals. Ultimately, Jinnah would successfully convince Congress leaders for a partition after proposing multiple extreme conditions for a united India such as separate electorate policies where India’s 25% Muslim population would obtain 50% share in various government operations as well as other radical concessions. To cement this divorce, Jinnah ensured violence was a repeated affair as he provoked Muslims into agitations such as the Noakhali riots or Direct Action Day where Muslim League members attacked Hindus brazenly. Hindus would, of course, respond in kind.

Mother India would soon be ripped apart by her sons. Massive communal riots and forced migrations erupted across the country with blood quenching the soil of Hindustan in the heat of hatred. Muslims leftover in India noted the magnanimous approach of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian independence leaders who went out of their way to protect Indian Muslims and heal the freshly opened, festering wounds. Hindus in Pakistan were not so lucky.

Many Indian Hindus felt they had gotten a raw deal as a secular Indian Republic was born and accused Gandhi of appeasing Muslims with actions such as fasting unto death when Hindus responded to attacks or when he forced the Indian government to give aid to Pakistan. This anger would climax when Nathuram Godse, an ex-Hindu Mahasabha member, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. The fall of the Mahatma would crush the Hindu Nationalist movement under the weight of his martyrdom. Gandhi became a God. Nehru and Indian secularists would ban the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other Hindu Nationalist organizations, as Hindu Nationalism or Hindutva, an early wellspring of Indian independence, would be banished.

An Uncertain Republic

With the exile of Hindutva, communists would become the 2nd largest party of India’s first elections while the INC captured the pole position. Before his death, Gandhi toyed with the idea of dissolving the INC as a political party in order to create a more vibrant political environment. The debate never materialized within the INC as Nehru took charge reorienting the Congress Party as a political party from a revolutionary organization. The tragedy of Gandhi’s assassination and the ousting of his much more popular rival, Sardar Patel, meant Nehru had a blank policy check to cash in. Nehru viewed socialism as a decolonial balm to heal the ravages of colonial capitalism. It also served as a dilution of the Communists’ unique selling point, gradually reducing them to irrelevance. Yet as Karl Marx has noted, a nation needed to be an industrialized capitalist economy in order to transition to socialism and then communism. India was impoverished with its industries destroyed by years of colonialism. It had nothing to redistribute in socialist schemes. The republic’s growth became anemic.

Nehru however laid many of the hallmarks of the Indian republic. He wisely shaped India into a strongly centralized state that could reign in the various fissures and fractures rumbling across its geography and ethnography. Many long-standing institutions such as the much-heralded Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs) and India’s magnificently efficient space program, ISRO, have their roots in Nehru’s passion for scientific temper. Nehru loved India, but he was very different from Indians. He was an anglophone atheist who wanted the country to fulfill his wide-eyed quixotic Idea of India rather than see eye to eye with the average Indian who had blind faith in their traditions, ways, and gods. This disconnect between elite and everyman would be a fundamental yet creeping theme of Indian politics.

Yet despite India being firmly within the grasp of its elites, populism has been a pillar since its inception in the form of reservation. BR Ambedkar sought opportunity and welfare for India’s marginalized untouchable communities who still faced intense caste discrimination. He proposed a temporary affirmative action scheme for India’s untouchables and tribals, now denoted as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes respectively. 22.5% of seats in higher education were allocated for affirmative action for these groups. This amount would balloon and permeate across other sectors, something that has gone on to become a defining feature of Indian electoral machinations.

India would go on to lose a war with China at the end of Nehru’s tenure, win a war with Pakistan under the 2nd PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and then an untimely death of Shastri would pave the way for dynastic politics to solidify in India as Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, became the PM. Along the way, the Green Revolution, a series of agricultural reforms and innovations, would create much-needed food security for India. It also empowered many land-owning agricultural castes who now found themselves essential and richer players in the Indian economy. This rise would lay the foundations for political upheavals a few decades later, but we’ll return to that when the time is right.

The Iron Lady

The diminutive Indira Gandhi became a giant in India. “India is Indira and Indira is India” rang across Congress rallies to great effect. Indira kicked off her term with the mission of “Garibi Hatao, Desh Bachao” meaning “remove poverty, save the country. Indira decided to double down on India’s socialist streak, which only further worsened India’s economic growth. Sections of the economy would be nationalized and businesses would encounter the dreaded “License Raj,” a bureaucratic nightmare for building businesses or even purchasing mundane things such as phones and televisions. In the midst of this market malaise, however, Indira would lead India in the War of 1971 whereby India avenged partition by splitting Pakistan apart and creating Bangladesh. A resounding victory made Indira iconic. In spite of her popularity with the masses, Indira was found guilty of election fraud in the elections of 1971 conducted prior to the war victory. The judiciary, which was now thoroughly compromised, suspended her membership of Parliament but curiously allowed her to stay on as Prime Minister. Protests erupted from the opposition, and Indira responded by suspending Indian democracy and declaring the Emergency. Indira would curtail many freedoms of Indians as a dictator and persecuted her political enemies. Not just this, she would also change the Indian Constitution, adding the words “Socialist” and “Secular” into the preamble and duly follow it up with conforming policies. After a return to democracy and a prompt election loss to a spirited but shaky coalition, she returned to power again in 1980. This decade would begin one of the most trying periods for the Republic of India.

The charismatic Indira, the superstar of Indian politics, would play too clever by half this round, resulting in a deadly overreach. In a bid to win in Punjab, a border state in India with a majority Sikh population, Indira propped up a religious leader named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Already inspiring and popular, a political tint was combined with his vibrant religious color as the lines between Sikhism and Hinduism, faiths that experienced hundreds of years of syncretism prior, started to bolden. Agitations for special rights for the state of Punjab and a preference for Sikhism over secularism would boil over as Bhindranwale defied his sponsor in Indira and went rogue accusing Indira and the Indian state of preparing to commit atrocities against Sikhs.

Bhindranwale’s most extreme followers would begin a series of murders across Punjab to enforce his vision of Punjab. As the violence spread, the Indian state began to zero in on Bhindranwale and his followers. Bhindranwale eventually took refuge in and militarized Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple. Indira ordered an attack on the temple itself in 1984, during a Sikh holy day at that, as Sikh regiments of the Indian Army tragically led the charge into the complex damaging the structures and killing both militant and innocent inside. Bhindranwale would die and become a martyr as the attack on the Golden Temple complex only emboldened separatist Sikh elements who wanted to establish “Khalistan,” a theocratic Sikh country in Punjab. Subsequently, Indira Gandhi’s own Sikh bodyguards, incensed at the sacrilege she committed, would assassinate her. The cycle of blood continued as pogroms against Sikhs were then carried out by mobs led by INC leaders. Khalistani terrorists would unleash hellfire across the Punjab particularly aiming their ire and fire at Hindus and heterodox Sikhs. Punjab would burn for nearly a decade thereafter with the rebellion eventually brutally put down by the Indian government.

A grieving India would elect Indira Gandhi’s son, the inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi at a record tally. Yet despite a mammoth mandate, the most important character in this chapter is the opposition. So far, I’ve barely discussed them. That is because for most of India’s history, they were an ineffective motley crew of various ideologies. Early communists gave way to an assortment of socialists, regionalists, and a very small spark of saffron. It is the latter that we will now be looking at. The long shadow of Godse’s assassination was finally beginning to fade.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the offspring of 2 earlier parties. Its saffron father is the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which was founded in 1951 by ex-Hindu Mahasabha members. Its mixed mother was the Janata Party, founded in 1977 as an amalgam of parties and ideologies opposed to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. After the Janata Party dissolved in 1980, the BJP was born and started its political journey with a humble 2 seats in 1984. India would now be entering its most chaotic phase of its existence. And it is under this storm of chaos that the party of the lotus would bloom.

Churning of the Ocean

The Puranas tell of a legend where the cosmic ocean was churned by the gods and demons. Out of this great celestial ritual, both boons and banes came. India was now experiencing another great churn. An old ideology would return anew. Hindutva loomed over the horizon.

I only briefly mentioned Hindutva prior, but now is a good time to expand upon it. Many Indian revolutionaries took inspiration from their Hindu faith. Whether the early calls for independence from Shivaji or the nationalistic rhetoric from monks such as Vivekananda or Aurobindo, the fire of rebellion was kindled by ancient notions of a divine homeland in India and Dharma, a selfless God-inspired duty towards righteousness. Revolutionaries of the independence era embraced the Bhagavad Gita as an inspiration for battle and selfless sacrifice for a divine cause – the freedom of India. However, the word Hindutva itself, meaning Hindu-ness and now synonymous with Hindu Nationalism, was coined by Chandranath Basu only in 1892 and then zealously propagated by Veer Damodar Savarkar.

A controversial man, Savarkar earned the title “veer” or “hero” through his early violent revolutionary activities in the British Raj, much before most other independence leaders. Savarkar would be jailed later by the British and sent to life imprisonment and hard labor in one of the most dreaded prisons in the world, Kala Pani – “Black Water.” Sounds like most Indians would naturally laud him, right? Savarkar, though an atheist himself, was committed to making a free India as a Hindu state. His writings frequently rail against the perceived duplicitousness of Muslims and extol an existential struggle with Islam. Savarkar would also petition for clemency from the British multiple times, which was eventually granted. His critics say this is a sign of treason, but the context here is many revolutionaries and independence leaders did the same in order to contribute to the revolution outside bars. Additionally, Savarkar had a strong association with Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin. For this reason, Savarkar would have a fairly ignominious end in his life, tarred by Godse’s murder. But just as Savarkar’s ashes were taken by the winds and waters across all of India, so did eventually follow the sparks of his pragmatic and fiery ideology.

This churn birthing the resurgence of Hindutva was accelerated by a series of cultural upheavals in quick succession. An old Muslim woman named Shah Bano was divorced after her husband took on a second, younger wife. This routine affair would spiral to the steps of the Supreme Court as Bano pointed out the double standard of Islamic civil law for Muslims, which many a time disadvantaged Muslim women. Bano’s husband simply uttered “Talaq, Talaq, Talaq” and Bano was cast out to fend for herself. No alimony or assistance. The Supreme Court then agreed with Bano and awarded her alimony. Subsequently, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board was furious and agitated Muslims to protest this encroachment onto Muslim Personal Law.

What a minute – that’s right, Muslims have their own separate civil law codes in India. Now we start to get into contentious territory; this is the turf that stimulates much of Indian culture wars today. India does not have a uniform civil code for its citizens. Rather they have codes based on religion. The party that is batting for equality before the law is actually the right-wing party, the BJP. Why is that you may ask? Well after the Supreme Court’s judgment, Rajiv Gandhi annulled the judgment with a law in parliament to appease the INC’s Muslim constituency. This would incense Hindus who felt this was a travesty of justice and appeasement towards Muslims. One can say one of the main reasons Hindutva even remerged was as a reaction to the uneven and untrue secularism of India on display here and in the next few incidents we will discuss.

You see, Indian politics is based on the patronage of different groups. The INC for much of the republic’s history relied on a formula of upper castes (known bureaucratically as General Category), untouchables (Scheduled Castes), and Muslims to come to power. As Muslim and Hindu interests began to clash, their calculations would unravel. India would undergo rule by various shaky coalitions as Rajiv’s government fell to corruption charges. This instability in parliament pulsated across the country and back again in a feedback loop that profoundly shaped India.

Royalty would return to rule in the form of Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Descended from a line of kings and the leader of a short-lived eclectic party, Janata Dal, VP Singh would preside over a short but very consequential tenure that is pivotal in the BJP’s rise. Singh’s tenure began with trouble in the north and an issue that threw more fuel in the fire of the BJP’s Hindu resurgence. For in the snowcapped peaks of the Himalayas, lies the Vale of Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir, consisting of the Vale of Kashmir, the region of Jammu, and the highlands of Ladakh, was India’s sole Muslim-majority state. At the time of partition, it was ruled by a Hindu king. Pakistan declared since it was Muslim majority, it must join Pakistan. As princely states acceded to either Pakistan or India, Kashmir’s Hindu king idled in indecision. Eventually, Pakistan sent armed tribesmen and troops into the kingdom of Kashmir in order to integrate Kashmir by force. Kashmir’s king then called for help from India who answered it with steel & justified it with secularism. Indian and Pakistani troops met at a stalemate, and Kashmir was divided along a Line of Control with both sides still claiming the entirety of Kashmir.

The abode of snow would be set alight once again in 1990. A victory of Pakistani intelligence set bodies in motion in Kashmir. Separatists fanned out like wind across the mountain passes. Their idea of supremacy and separatism lay two-fold: one being an ethnoracial difference between light-skinned and light-eyed Kashmiris versus the dark masses of India; two being the much more volatile notion of religious separatism which became a famous clarion call – “raliv, galiv, ya tsaliv.” Convert, die, or leave. The latter religious supremacism caused Kashmiri Hindus to be cleansed from the vale. As news of the murders and exodus spread across the country, the sea of Hindu sentiments began reaching a boiling point. And this sea was now beginning to part, opening its arms for a new political and religious covenant.

To tone down the heat emanating from the Himalayas and break this emerging Hindu unity, various parties under Prime Minister VP Singh would propose the execution of the Mandal Commission, an extension of the reservation system we discussed earlier. Under this new reform, Other Backwards Castes (OBCs), who were various middling Hindu castes, would qualify for reservation as well. Some weren’t well off, but a chunk of this Mandal movement was spearheaded by well-to-do groups who benefited from the Green Revolution we briefly touched on earlier. The reservation limit skyrocketed to 50% in 1990. The implementation of the Mandal Commission also galvanized OBC political parties to form, particularly in the north of India. The domination of the INC in the populous and politically pivotal Hindi belt fractured into a squabble of caste parties. The vice-grip of the INC on India has significantly weakened since.

Singh, who was from an upper caste background himself, also enacted the draconian SC/ST Act in 1989, an act which meant one could go to jail without bail simply on an accusation of casteism from a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe person. Almost akin to a blasphemy law, the SC/ST Act is frequently still abused to this day and a major source of inter-caste angst. Hindus would indeed be divided as a result of the Indian bureaucracy, but the BJP leaned on their Lord in reaction. Their prayers would soon be answered.

The Birthplace

Religion is everywhere in India. A hillock can be holy. The ground is godly. Divinity has gifted footprints across India and left many tales in its wake. But there is one tale narrated eons ago by the great sage, Valmiki, that would revolutionize Indian politics. Valmiki’s classic would allow the arrow of Hindutva to be let loose by the BJP.

There is a city that is said to have birthed a God. Ayodhya, in the bucolic and populous province of Uttar Pradesh, is the site where Lord Ram, an extremely popular Hindu deity, was born. Etched in the hearts of Hindus across India, Ram’s life inspired an integral epic of Indian literature, Valmiki’s Ramayana. Revered and refashioned across eras and areas, the Ramayana is a literary artifact that binds the diverse peoples of India together. Ram and the Ramayana are one of the biggest reasons that the notion of “India” even exists today.

As you will see, so many political tussles in modern India are steeped in the liquid of lore. In the 16th century, the first Mughal, Babur, rampaged across India. It is said that Babur came upon the birthplace of Ram and demolished the temple atop it, replacing it with a mosque instead to humiliate the indigenous Hindus. This stamp of supremacy, known since as Babri Masjid, has been controversial ever since with a legal battle over it dating well into the British Raj.

As the inheritors and invigorators of Hindutva, the BJP naturally took up the cause of reestablishing Ram Janmasthan, or Ram’s birthplace temple. As the political winds blew in favor of the saffron flag, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi opened the previously closed gates of Babri Masjid in 1986 calling for both sets of worshippers to pray there, but the BJP remained steadfast in their goal of consecrating the idol of Ram under a grand temple. A great wind in the sail of their spiritual and political voyage would come in the form of television airwaves.

In 1987, a serial was filmed in India based on the Ramayana. But the Congress government at the time was reluctant to allow the airing of India’s national epic on television. On the surface, this is such a ridiculous notion. One would assume it would be a beautiful sight for Indians to finally see their legendary epic alive on screen. Originally the government channel Doordarshan where the Ramayan aired did not air religious content. But in the wake of Shah Bano, Rajiv thought it was time to monkey balance. His fear, along with other INC leaders, was that the airing of this serial would give fuel to the flame of a tiny political party named the BJP that was agitating for Ram Janmabhoomi. His fears were completely correct. Indians would crowd around any television they could find for an hour each week to gaze upon their legends coming alive. Hinduism sprung from their hearts. And how could one’s heart beat with Hindu pride knowing that a symbol of hatred and humiliation lay upon their beloved God’s birthplace? Reclamation began to ring in the minds of Ram’s devotees.

Years later and despite (or perhaps due) to the BJP’s ambivalent attitude toward Prime Minister Singh’s government, Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, BJP stalwarts and veterans of the political battlefield carried out a march across India with the final destination being Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya in 1990. Advani would be arrested prior with the government desperately trying to stop the movement which had snowballed into a chariot of fire. The procession still reached Babri Masjid and a pitched battle between paramilitary and protestors resulted in the deaths of many. As the bodies of believers fell, so did Singh’s government with the BJP raising a massive tally come fresh elections as anger over the deaths of devotees spilled into ballot boxes.

The BJP would not be deterred. A second wind to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement would arrive a year later in 1992. A last-ditch attempt at reconciliation would come from the Hindu side as they asked Muslims for 3 sites – Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura, and Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi – some of Hinduism’s most sacred sites, which all had mosques built atop them by the Mughals centuries ago. Many hundreds of other sites had similar situations, but Hindu organizations wanted to bury the hatchet and settle for these 3 holy sites. The Muslim side remained obstinate, despite almost all of these sites having trivial religious significance for the Islamic faith. The patience of the Hindus broke, and they answered with 150,000 people descending upon the mosque in December 1992. Ordinary Hindus did what no king could in half a millennium. They tore down Babri Masjid brick by brick. India exploded into riots.

An Invisible Hand

While a social churn engulfed headlines, an economic compulsion rooted in the Gulf would change India forever. As Saddam Hussein invaded the deserts of Kuwait, oil prices would skyrocket. India’s reserves dwindled under the rising price of a barrel as an economic meltdown and currency crisis materialized. VP Singh’s tenure would be short-lived as he gave way to another unstable interregnum featuring Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. Rajiv Gandhi, then leader of the INC, met the unfortunate fate of his mother as he was assassinated by a member of the LTTE, a Tamil secessionist group from Sri Lanka, for interference in the Sri Lankan Civil War. A sympathy wave came next elections, and a man known as the “half-lion” came to power, INC’s Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao. Prime Minister Rao would be the one to bite the bullet of economic reform as the IMF took aim at India’s economic maleficence. The license raj of the Nehru-Gandhi family was torn apart by the gales of reform as India’s animal spirits breathed their first air of freedom. Rao’s courageous reforms would be the most consequential of India’s history paving the way for an economic transformation.

The 1990s was an era of fixing the friction of the 80s. Punjab and Kashmir would settle down as the Indian state’s boot brutally overpowered the fists of rebellion. After India’s independence, many foreign observers believed India would balkanize. Indeed, most other countries with the level of diversity India has would descend into a Yugoslavian bloodbath. But India did not. It is a credit to the Congress Party and various other political players in the precarious decades leading up to the 90s that India did not balkanize. In a way, India is a country of a million minorities. Divided by religion, ethnicity, caste, and so on, it truly is a miracle to see India intact today.

With the defenestration of the INC after the Mandal Commission, India was beginning to decentralize politically. VP Singh’s enacting of the Mandal Commission, the policy that enabled an increase in reservation, also empowered new parties based on regional and caste identities. From the smoldering remains of Babri and the sacrifice of Hindu activist lives, the BJP was reborn as a powerful electoral force. They would find their first Prime Minister berth in 1996 as the provocative poet-politician, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, would lead India for 13 days. On the cusp of a no-confidence motion, Vajpayee delivered a resignation speech for the ages humbly accepting defeat inches from the finish line yet defiantly roaring an oath to return. Vajpayee and the BJP would gain power again a few years later in 1998 and would follow in Rao’s footsteps laying the foundations for a new India.

This is a phrase you hear a lot these days – “New India.” But exactly is it? What is then, the “Old India?”

Reincarnation

Like many post-colonial nations, the transfer of power from the British to Indians had a mediator. A half-way people. Brown in body but Western in intellect and tastes. India was an illiterate society where many people believed Indira Gandhi was related to Mahatma Gandhi (she was not and the INC used this ruse to full effect). The upper crust of India had a profound disdain for the average Indian. They viewed Indian culture as dismal, religion as dirty, and all that was good in India owing its origins to the foreign. Marxists, famous for their involvement in decolonial movements across the world, would ironically carry water for colonial narratives in academia as an oikophobia developed amongst India’s educated elites (the only ones who could afford to be Marxist). The majority was malcontent in the eyes of the mighty. Some argue the “Old India” was a colonial hangover. A feigned emancipation. A halfway house to freedom. And in some ways, a mirage of independence. 

The anglophile Indian elite would interface with India via a second rung of vernacular elites. Those of the second rung, the vernacular varna, would later pose the primary challenge for power as Chanakya’s Mandala theory of politics posited ages ago. The foremost of these came in the form of the BJP, a party that went beyond parochial caste and region as other challengers still were restricted by. Their binding was Hindutva, the long-exiled ideology that had burst forth with the hailing of Lord Ram. 

Vajpayee, though, was relatively moderate. He was a reformer cut in the cloth of Rao. A continued liberalization of the Indian economy and the beginnings of an infrastructure drive brought India in a new direction away from socialist stagnancy. Oppenheimer smiled as Indians split the atom and echoed his awestruck verses from the Bhagavad Gita. After a ploy for peace with Pakistan, Vajpayee was played as Pakistan launched an invasion of Kashmir. Vajpayee would have the last laugh with a decisive victory in this conflict now known as the Kargil War. The poet’s sweet words were frequently used to become a coalition builder and consummate parliamentarian. Ironically enough, Nehru had foreseen his potential long ago predicting his Prime Ministership. Despite his speeches that had singed Ayodhya nearly a decade ago, Vajpayee’s orations these days were more about inclusive nation building, rather than a fiery religious reclamation. Vajpayee would go on to nominate India’s most beloved President, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. A Muslim. A scientist integral in building India’s nuclear and space capabilities. An inspirational voice that cut across all lines in India. Kalam’s nomination exemplified Vajpayee’s comprehensive nationalism.

But it is one deed or rather the lack of, that would be his contemporary contribution to the Hindutva cause. In 2002, a mob of Muslim rioters were said to have torched a train of pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. The site of this arson was Godhra, Gujarat. Riots would spread across the state with Hindus and Muslims exchanging blows and bowels. Many called this a pogrom of Muslims due to their disproportionate deaths and laid the blame squarely on the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, a man by the name of Narendra Modi.

The Pressure Cooker

Gujarat burned. Narendra Modi claimed that he committed as many men as he could to quell the clashes and that adjacent states ruled by Congress refused to lend manpower. Rumors came out of Gujarat suggesting a conspiracy hatched by Modi himself, though Modi has been given a clean chit by the Supreme Court during the INC’s tenure. Vajpayee considered relieving the novice Chief Minister less than a year into his term. Yet the mood of many Hindus pushed him to stay his hand. Hindu-Muslim riots were a regular feature of India. The heinousness of the incident that sparked this round led many Hindus to view the riots as the culmination of frustration and the breaching of a limit of tolerance. A pariah was born in the world, but a strongman was born in India.

Narendra Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah rose to power in Gujarat through a strategy he would replicate later across India. The duo courted the 2nd most popular candidates in contestable seats and consolidated stray votes around them, toppling various stalwarts. Modi would garner a reputation for wearing his saffron on his sleeve and for economic development. He embarked on an economic revolution in the mercantile state of Gujarat, doubling down on its capitalist nature to make it a financial powerhouse amongst Indian states.

The popular Vajpayee would be shockingly defeated in 2004 as bad alliance arithmetic and a dismal monsoon led to political miscalculations and economic stress. Vajpayee’s reforms would be reaped by the incoming INC-led coalition helmed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Yet in truth, this Prime Ministership was one mostly just in name. In plain sight of all, Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian wife and now the INC’s Party President, Sonia Gandhi, ran the show using an extra-governmental body called the National Advisory Council. The Congress Party had frankly become a family affair. With economic tailwinds in full flight, the INC embarked on an ever-familiar socialist venture with plenty of welfare and big government. A favorable global macro scenario provided fuel to India’s economic engine leading to some of India’s highest ever growth rates. The floundering opposition futilely tried their best to battle the tide, flailing even during the dark days after 26/11, the infamous Mumbai terror attack. The INC would come back with a romp even after this catastrophe.

The gust of Vajpayee’s economic reforms began to subside in the INC’s 2nd term. To counteract this, the INC massively upped spending leading to high inflation and a monetary nightmare in India’s banking sector. Charges of Muslim appeasement policies and being soft on Islamist terror ran rife. The usually mute PM Manmohan Singh compounded this charge as he claimed that “minorities must have first claim on resources.” Additionally, the Gandhi family’s corruption had become too brazen as scandals rocked the government. A national movement against this corruption formed around a rustic activist named Anna Hazare.

Hazare championed non-violent protests in the style of Mahatma Gandhi. His iron integrity as a social reformer in the backwoods of the state of Maharashtra inspired even the apolitical to join his India Against Corruption movement. The movement petered out in 2012 as the Indian parliament passed a neutered anti-corruption law, the Lokpal Act, that has since been fairly ineffective. More consequentially, the leadership of the movement split as Anna Hazare’s opportunistic disciples parted ways with him by starting a political party called the Aam Aadmi Party, something the grassroots leader abhorred. However, the charges of corruption would stick tightly to the INC on their way into the 2014 election.

Inflation ran red hot as did the prospects of a certain Mr. Modi in the run-up to the 2014 elections. Modi touted his “Gujarat Model” of development and ran a muscular campaign around nationalism with a similar tinge of Hindu reclamation as the earlier Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Perhaps even more crucial was Modi’s charisma. Modi came from a poor and lower-caste background, situations that a large majority of the population resonated with. He wore his caste and class as a sword and shield against the elites of the INC to stunning effect. Modi became someone that the average Indian could see themselves, their parents, and even their children in. He was running for a post that was not his place. In a hierarchal society like India, Modi began to represent the common man’s ambition and defiance. The ruling Congress government reinforced this rhetoric with leaders mocking him as a “chaiwala” referring to his humble origins as a tea-seller and referring to him as “neech,” a not so veiled barb at his lower caste background. Up against a dynastic challenger and part-time politician in Rahul Gandhi, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s son, Modi would deliver a blitzkrieg victory to the BJP come the 2014 elections.

The Special One

There is a reason that Narendra Modi is consistently ranked as the world’s most popular political leader. Beyond his background and rhetoric that I covered prior, it is what he has done in the past decade in office. Modi inherited a fairly dismal situation. Inflation was nearly 11% and the Indian banking sector was teetering. A fiscal discipline stereotypical of the commercial Gujarati ethnicity that Modi hailed from would be enforced on the budget resulting in years of substandard growth. Modi attempted a labor reform law that would’ve transformed the Indian economy but backed down on jibes of a “suit-boot sarkar” from the opposition, an allusion to his close ties with capitalists especially from his home state. This retreat turned out to be a decisive political move. For India had long punished reformers with election losses and was endeared to socialism. So what Modi would do is flank the opposition from the left.

In 2016 just as Trump had shocked the world with an election victory in America, Modi would shock India with a demonetization of all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes. He claimed it was an offensive against corruption and black money. The sudden move led to many inconveniences for the common Indian and a massive disruption of the informal economy, which meant a significant hit to a large majority of the Indian economy. But strangely, it won him plaudits from many voters. The common Indian viewed it as an earnest move and deliverance against the corrupt elites they despised. Results post-hoc paint a mixed picture of the move, but its biggest impact was more so a forced formalization and digitization of the Indian economy. As hundreds of millions of Indians visited banks to exchange notes, they also created bank accounts for the first time.

Modi would enact a series of policies capitalizing on this digital formalization which included things such as digital authentication, micro-loans, and most prominently welfare connected to these newly made digital bank accounts. The corrupt middleman who skimmed cash was now cut out by technology. This public reform would be followed by a private innovation as Mukesh Ambani, someone many critics of Modi claim as his too-close billionaire buddy, would start Jio, an extremely cheap mobile service that put phones and the internet in the hands of hundreds of millions. Jio enabled mobile interfacing with Modi’s numerous digitally connected welfare policies. Add the bedrock of digital authentication in Aadhar, a digital ID system developed by the Indian government, and you get the policy trinity of JAM – Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhar authentication, and Mobile provided by Jio. JAM would be the driver of a digital revolution in India with its crown achievement being India Stack, a digital infrastructure that serves as the foundation for various digital services and transactions in India.

Digital infrastructure was met with physical infrastructure as well. Whether roads, toilets, electricity, water connections, airports, railroads, etc… Modi would in many cases eclipse the infrastructure work of all prior governments combined. Schemes that delivered gas cylinders, health insurance, housing, and many other basic amenities to India’s poor built a strong case for term 2 of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a parliamentary coalition led by the BJP. Beyond tangible benefits these policies yielded for India’s poor, it also gave them a basic sense of human dignity. Terror attacks almost ceased in India as Modi took over with multiple strikes into Pakistani territory signaling a very different India to the one prior that shrugged its shoulders to its citizens being slain by terrorists. A bombastic response to a terror attack in Kashmir manifested in February 2019 as Indian planes struck the town of Balakot, Pakistan targeting terror camps. This type of counterattack, unheard of prior in India’s timid history, served as the tip of the spear in Modi’s aggressive 2019 campaign which already was backed solidly by an arsenal of development work and small cultural wins. He would return to power with more seats than prior, an extremely rare achievement in Indian politics.

A Game of Thrones

I’ve written much about modern Indian politics, and I don’t think I’ve encapsulated it better than this:

“There is nothing that quite mimics the bloodsport and realpolitik of Game of Thrones like Indian politics. Hereditary houses and regional satraps are now collapsing as a dragon-bellied leviathan engulfs India in an unending fire. From the ashes of the old guard spawn new elites eager to stamp themselves into the saga of the saffron march. A peerless leader of ordinary origin puts storied royalty to the sword as internal rivals are bashed by his hilt and banished to the hills.”

-From “The Indian Overton: Saffron Secularism”

Like Indira Gandhi before him, Modi has become the nucleus of Indian politics. The BJP has become the most potent political machine on the planet under the helm of Narendra Modi and his trusted lieutenant, Amit Shah.

Term 2 of the NDA began with a bang, three to be precise. Since independence, Kashmir had a temporary law that enabled it more autonomy than most other Indian states. Combine this with the latent supremacist and secessionist sentiments mentioned earlier, and the state has always gone through fits of rebellion as a result. The government abruptly removed this act, Article 370, as well as removing the statehood of the province of Jammu and Kashmir. Terrorism has plummeted since then with a trickle of Indians from other states moving in, something not allowed prior. As critics raged against this decision, the BJP would celebrate another controversial and emphatic victory via the Supreme Court.

Over a century in the making, the Supreme Court gave a unanimous decision in favor of establishing a temple on Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya while allocating funds for a mosque elsewhere. The fulfillment of this bloody struggle was jubilation for many Hindus and etched Modi not just into the Indian Republic’s history, but into Indian civilization’s history. Finally, the BJP would pass a law called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December. This law essentially granted accelerated citizenship for non-Muslim refugees of several South Asian countries. It would be twinned with another law called the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was essentially a citizenship confirmation exercise. Both innocent on their own, but combined they stoked fears of Indian Muslim citizens being disenfranchised of their voting and citizenship rights. Indian Muslims had enough and began large-scale protests across India, which soon went awry into riots.

The CAA would be delayed and the NRC shelved. What appeared to be a tactical victory for Indian Muslims transformed into a strategic catastrophe. Hindus viewed these riots not as a fight for rights but an assertion of supremacy and petulance that stopped a humanitarian law aimed at some of the most oppressed people on the planet. CAA was seen as addressing one of the errors of the partition, leaving non-Muslims to the wolves in these Islamic states, something even the godfather of secularism, Nehru, acknowledged as a grave wrongdoing. The pulverization of non-Muslims in these states and apartheid-like laws were well observed as the internet penetrated Indian eyes. The alienation of Indian Muslims has accelerated greatly since.

This alienation has been a long arc. The BJP’s Hindutva is greatly dependent on the othering of Muslims, which aids in blurring caste identities and emphasizing a Hindu unity. The rhetoric is powerful because the history and present is damning. Almost every ancient temple in the northern half of the Indian subcontinent has been either destroyed or defaced by Islamic invaders. Wounds of the partition are still fairly fresh and contemporary troubles between Hindus and Muslims are a regularity. Double standards such as how the government interferes regularly in Hindu institutions but leaves other religions alone, the lack of uniform civil laws, or societal issues such as a recent spat of beheadings conducted by Islamists due to perceived insults to the Prophet only exacerbate this fissure. This is all without mentioning the aggression that arises from the Hindu side as well as notions of Hindu identity comes to the forefront. While recent Pew data polls indicate a large majority of Indian Muslims are proud Indians and feel free to exercise their faith, one cannot help but notice the vitiated atmosphere of communal relations in India as social media illuminates inter-religious tensions never before witnessed by most. 

Hindutva is an ascendant ideology. As India urbanizes and becomes more cosmopolitan, parochial identities such as caste and region experience the pressure of modernity. Indians are mixing. The infrastructure explosion has enabled more commerce and travel across the country. An overarching Hindu identity, one where a Gujarati can take pride in the achievements of Tamil kings, Bengali saints, and Telugu scholars, is a paramount interest for the BJP. Every time caste conflict erupts, a Hindu ceases their Hinduness and falls back into being a Rajput, Ramgarhia, Ror, or various other caste identities. The BJP must balance caste interests in the short-term while grinding against the idea of caste in the long-term. This is a very difficult endeavor considering how deeply caste is embedded in the minds of Hindus.

One very under-discussed evolution of their ideology is the co-opting of lower caste icons into the Hindutva fold. The BJP was for so long known as the Brahmin-Baniya party, the party of successful upper castes. Now the BJP reaches out frenetically to lower-castes leading to large electoral success. Icons such as BR Ambedkar, the Phules, and various others had led to an almost fanatic zeal towards them from the BJP. This is despite many of these icons having dismal views of Hinduism at large. This is a delicate game. For too much outreach and caste-based doles could easily anger other castes as accusations of unfairness and appeasement abound.

The opposition has been mostly flummoxed by the BJP’s combination of Hindutva as a cultural nationalism, outreach to lower castes as a uniting force, and a dynamic development agenda. The BJP today serves as a mostly uniting, centralizing force if you are a Hindu. To break this newfound united voting bloc, the opposition is leaning back on the reliable dividers of region and caste. This combination, something I refer to as Jatitva, emphasizes caste and region over Hinduism and India. While the BJP is in power, it is essentially still fighting against the decentralized default and is in a way a challenger ideologically. Some form of Jatitva is the norm, while Hindutva is an aberration. Therefore, Jatitiva is naturally proving to be a powerful counter to Hindutva as the BJP is finding it difficult to retain a footing in successive state elections where local issues dominate.

The BJP is essentially attempting a cultural revolution, albeit at a much more steady pace. Renamings of sites and buildings, anti-cow slaughter laws, textbook changes, anti-missionary acts, temple renovations, and a slew of other laws have pushed an incremental reshaping of Indian society. While the BJP government publicly professes odes to Mahatma Gandhi and an inclusive India, Modi and company have been pushing the Overton window towards Hindutva inch by inch each year. That being said, with proposals such as a uniform civil code and freeing Hindu institutions to be on parity with other religions, the BJP is indeed becoming a force for legal secularism, not the lip-service kind of the past that led to the rise of Hindutva. In a way, Hindutva is the ultimate decolonial movement. Note – the left in India believes India was colonized once by the British. The right in India believes in 2 colonizations, one by the British and one by Muslims. This is the great divide of Indian culture wars. Hindutva seeks to simultaneously emancipate India from both colonizations, while also embracing British institutions and modes of modernity to forge a New India. Just another classic Indian dichotomy.

Reign of Chaos

If the BJP represents a centralizing pull of a New India in Indian politics, India’s vibrant and various opposition represents a decentralizing push back to the Old India. You see, India has long been a land with a weak state yet a strong society. The republic is a mission of unity, previously done under the secular vision of the Nehruvians, but that vision did not meet the gaze of the average Indian. The romantic ideals of Gandhi and Nehru would be muddied by the lust for power amongst India’s diverse groups. Concessions to the extremities of Islamism for Muslims and caste parochialism amongst Hindus meant Nehru’s Idea of India was laid bare. People could not take secularism seriously with the legal and societal favoritism they saw emphasized by the INC and other parties. Hindutva itself is in danger of succumbing to caste parochialism as the BJP has to balance the interests of the rainbow of castes under the big saffron tent of Hindutva, but for Hindus, it at least doesn’t engage in the level of minority appeasement that the INC did.

Today the opposition is diverse simply because it stands for that decentralization. The INC tries to position itself as the main opposition party but has been reduced to near its lowest tally ever in parliament. It continues to orient around minority rights, socialism, and now especially the Jatitva of caste and regionalist politics.

Regional parties are aplenty in India. The strategy of parties such as the Bengali Trinamool Congress (TMC), Telugu Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), Tamil Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), etc… is mainly to rile up the uniqueness of regional identities in India along with reaching out to minorities beleaguered with the rise of the BJP. In a sense, they are also evolved caste parties as their dominance usually derives from power from landed castes who while technically not upper caste per se, they do hold a disproportionate economic and political power in their states.

Pure caste parties in India are mostly concentrated in the northern Hindi belt. The offspring of the Mandal Commission of 1990, parties such as the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Bahujan Samaj Party, etc… bank on the chaotic caste cold war that has consumed the Hindi belt dooming its economic prospects for decades. Caste groups function as mafioso entities in these hinterlands as organized crime rackets graduate to disorganized political parties that jostle for power. The rise of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh led by Yogi Adityanath, the controversial ascetic descended from a line of warrior-monks, has proved a formidable foe against formerly powerful caste parties. The saffronization and transformation of Uttar Pradesh, a state that would be the 5th most populous country in the world if independent, is an integral part of the BJP’s long-term Hindutva vision.

The wildcard amongst the opposition is the Aam Aadmi Party. As discussed earlier, the AAP was born out of the India Against Corruption movement. The AAP opened its account with an emphatic victory in the 2015 Delhi elections. The city-state territory would be helmed by a man named Arvind Kejriwal, the estranged disciple of Anna Hazare. Kejriwal advocated an even more comprehensive welfare agenda than other Indian parties along with a streamlined startup-esque approach to politics. A party of the urban and up-and-coming, the AAP followed it up with a 2nd victory in 2020 and expanded forming a government in Punjab in 2022. The AAP represents a long-term danger to the INC as it seeks to occupy the center-left pole of Indian politics that is quickly being vacated by other parties. The BJP has mostly taken up this space as well leading to its moderation as well as dominance becoming a Big Tent Party. The AAP’s bet is an overstretched BJP and increasingly extreme left INC will cause an opening as it aims to occupy new grounds across India. The problem with the AAP is that it is increasingly a 1 man show with Kejriwal’s top-down power structure. Additionally, in an almost Animal Farm-type fashion, the AAP has been rocked with numerous corruption scandals sinking Kejriwal’s lieutenants as well as accusations of controversial back-end funding via foreign NGOs and governments. 

As the showdown in 2024 approaches, much of the opposition has banded together in the cleverly labeled I.N.D.I.A. or Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance. Pillars of their platform are emerging. A return to socialist policies abounds as the digitization of welfare helps even greater delivery of doles as the BJP has done to powerful effect. The fiscal discipline of the BJP government will be thrown out as freebies have shown to be powerful vote catchers not just in India’s past but also in recent state elections.

Additionally, the opposition seeks to rake up caste as the perennial breaker of Hindus. A caste census has been proposed. The reason for this is that the opposition wants to instigate the OBCs, SCs, and STs who together make up around 60%+ of India’s population. Those freebies from prior will be directed towards these communities in an almost naked bribe, a mainstay of Indian politics. Rahul Gandhi, who seems to be the Prime Ministerial candidate for the INC, has termed this redistribution based on population as “Jitni Abadi, Utna Haq,” loosely translated to however much one’s population is how much power they should be given. The opposition wants to implement proportionality in India akin to Lebanon. Reservation already breaching 50% in many states will be increased further in the public sector and even into the private sector as the opposition has freshly proposed this as well. Merit will die in India, as will most likely be the story of the Indian Republic as every other attempt at proportionality in the world has shown us.

The BJP’s rejoinder to this will most likely be indulging in freebies and caste politics as well, albeit in a diluted form. They know that these tactics are necessary for an electoral win against this type of opponent. But the long-term strategy is the liberalization of the economy. The BJP has been slow in reforming India’s economy and has faced a number of walk-backs of reforms, yet this government has quite possibly been the most reformist in India’s history via a slew of stealth and cumulative small reforms. BJP state governments have been more aggressive inspiring a glimpse of competitive federalism as India becomes the most attractive emerging market in the world for investment. Their bet is a burgeoning private sector and economic growth are the greatest weapons against India’s usual zero-sum economic policies.

Indian politics rhymes. The centralization of Nehru and Indira gave way to the chaotic coalitions of the 90s and 2000s. Now we see a recentralization emerging under Modi’s Hindutva. Moderating his method just as Vajpayee did, Modi is integrating elements of Nehruvianism and Ambedkarite thought with efforts to reach out to Muslims underway amongst the BJP on the back of already successful efforts of integrating lower-castes into the Hindutva and party fold. Just as Mandir met Mandal in the early 90s, we have Hindutva facing off against Jatitiva in the 2024 elections and for the foreseeable future. This contest will be the one that decides the fate of the grand experiment and continuous miracle of the Indian Republic, the largest nation ever created by humanity.

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“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

-Joan Robinson