Commentary | Shweta Jha, with Rishiraj Sen, Terrorizing the Hindu Voter: Political Gimmick of Secularism
In an interview with the reporters of India Today TV, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing allegations of engaging in communal Hindu-Muslim politics, accused the opposition of minority appeasement politics. In his justification, he further blamed the Indian National Congress party and labeled his speeches as a strategic move to disclose their anti-secular politics. He claimed that the manifesto of the opposition mentioned Muslims. However, he fails to understand the difference between secularism and communalism, like many other people these days. Secularism in the Indian context is not the absence of religion from the public sphere but the coexistence of all religions. Therefore, the opposition’s mentioning of the Muslim community cannot be termed as anti-secular, as Modi claims, as it does not create a binary between Muslims and Hindus, which Prime Minister Modi himself does. Communalism, on the other hand, is a blatant Othering of a religious community based on a binary, like we see in the Prime Minister’s statements.
During an election rally in Banswada, Rajasthan, on April 21, Modi criticized his predecessor as Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, saying: “Earlier, when his government was in power, he had said that Muslims have the first right on the country’s property, which means who will they collect this property and distribute it to – those who have more children, will distribute it to the infiltrators. Will the money of your hard work be given to the infiltrators? Do you approve of this?” Modi continued: “This Congress manifesto is saying that they will calculate the gold of the mothers and sisters, get information about it and then distribute it. Manmohan Singh’s government had said that Muslims have the first right on property. Brothers and sisters, these “Urban Naxal” thoughts will not let even your mangalsutra escape, they will go this far.” Despite the mass outrage over this statement, Modi escalated his inflammatory rhetoric about threats to the Hindu population during a public address in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh: “if the Congress, SP, and their INDIA partners come to power, our Ram Lalla would have to return to the tent again as they would run a bulldozer over the Ram Mandir. They should take lessons from Yogi-ji (Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath) on where to run bulldozers and where not to.”
Hindutva, as an ideology, describes India as the land of Hindus and identifies Muslims and Christians, specifically, as an alien population to the land. As Prime Minister Modi belongs to the political party that adheres to the Hindutva ideology, it is difficult to not look at his statements as embedded in this ideology. Therefore, it is crucial to understand in which context words like “infiltrators” and phrases like “those who have more children” are being used. While the former is used to historically disenfranchise the citizenship of the Muslim community in context of partition and further solidify the narrative of India as a Hindu Nation, the latter attempts to reinforce the narrative of an overwhelming population rise and higher fertility rates among Muslims.
These statements are specifically made to address the religious majority – that is, the Hindu population, as evident in his references to mangalsutra (a type of jewel worn by married Hindu women) and Ram Temple. Amidst the background of Congress being a ruling party for a majority of the history of independent India, Modi’s use of words like “hard-earned property” and his invocation of mangalsutra and Ram Temple are a strategy to convince Hindus of a danger looming over their everyday lives. Such statements might end up enhancing the sense of victimization among Hindu voters. Further, the two statements are made in one election rally after another. This act of producing and reproducing this sense of victimization may yield a terrorized voter in the upcoming election. Not considering the danger of the breakdown of social fabric, these statements are intended to produce this terrorized voter, as a terrorized voter will obviously look towards the state to seek security from the imagined danger. Also, the binary construction of “they/them” to refer to the Congress and “our” in the statement “our Ram lalla” when addressing the Hindu population is an act of Othering the opposition in the mainstream discourse, while associating with his audience to build a sense of collectivity in the face of a shared threat.
As Gulam Jeelani has shown in an in-depth fact-check on Modi’s criticism of the Congress manifesto, not only has Modi misquoted the manifesto, but he also made deliberate attempts to misdirect his audience. The Congress party manifesto doesn’t mention wealth redistribution in reference to any community. Likewise, the reference to the comment made by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is misrepresented as it lacks the clarification made by the Prime Minister’s Office, that the statement meant that those with the first claim to resources should be minorities and the under-privileged. Further, by using a term like “urban-naxal,” that gained huge popularity during the tenure of PM Modi, to refer to the Congress in parallel with the statement that referred to Dr. Manmohan Singh, he portrays an isolated and out of context event from the past as a continuous trend. By evoking a sense of continuity, the sense of a looming danger to the Hindu population is intensified. Against the backdrop of this scenario, the references to bulldozers and the act of turning towards Yogi Adityanath, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, is an attempt to cast himself as a savior for the terrorized and passive Hindu voter bloc that he is trying to create in his election rallies. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that the communal nature of this political gimmick is overshadowed and branded as an attempt to reinstate India’s secular social fabric.
Rishiraj Sen is Research Associate at IIM-Ahmedabad and Shweta Jha is an independent academic researcher based in India.