A third Modi term will forever change India’s secular identity
https://arab.news/p2877
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid for a third five-year term is pivoted around his campaign against religious minorities, particularly Muslims and anti-Pakistan rhetoric. He vows to establish a Hindu state shedding India’s longstanding secular identity and his tenor against Pakistan has become increasing belligerent.
India’s seven-stage Lok Sabha polls have begun from April 19 and the results are to be announced on June 4. The 45-day contest is for 543 seats and the winning party needs 272 to form a government. Modi hopes of crossing 400 seats tally with his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners. The rival INDIA group, an alliance of disparate political parties led by Congress, expects to evict Modi from office in the elections with nearly 970 million voters across India.
Most opinion polls show that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is most likely to return to power, but Modi’s dream to get a two third majority that would allow his party to alter India’s constitution may not come true. Many analysts predict the BJP getting even less than the 303 seats that it won in the last election.
Yet the prospect of a hard-line Hindu nationalist party winning the third term will have serious implications for the world’s largest democracy as well as regional geopolitics. There is a fear that the efforts to establish a Hindu supremacist state would formalize the second-class status of over 250 million Muslim citizens in law and practice.
While contentious religion-based citizenship legislation that the United Nations has described as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature” was passed in 2019 it has been implemented on the eve of the polls in order to galvanize support in the Indian heartland. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said the action is in breach of India’s international human rights obligations.
The prospect of a hard-line Hindu nationalists returning to power is a bad omen for Indian Muslims and for Pakistan
Zahid Hussain
Under the Modi government, attacks on Muslims have increased exponentially. There has been an increase in the number of lynching cases as well as reports of attacks on Muslim worshipping places by Hindu extremist groups affiliated with the ruling party under the supervision of the administration.
Prime Minister Modi and other BJP leaders during the election campaign have vowed to expunge India of any historic Muslim influence. He has been constantly looking for issues that would click with the voters. The Ram temple he inaugurated on the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya a few months ago was a prime example of his increasing communal politics. The destruction in 1992 of the 15th century mosque was legitimized by the Supreme Court of India in 2019.
Claims for several other historical mosques to be converted into temples have been set in motion across the country following the inauguration of Ram temple. Some Hindutva leaders have also been openly calling for the extermination of Muslims.
Human rights groups warn against an escalation in the scale of mass atrocities and an increased level of state involvement in said atrocities with the return of the BJP government. Only a vote against the BJP could forestall the institutionalization of Hindu nationalism in India before it reaches a point of no return. A third term for the Modi government could completely destroy India’s secular identity and democracy.
The prospect of Modi’s victory in the Indian elections will certainly not be a good omen for Pakistan. The relations between the two countries have hit a new low under the two previous Modi governments. It’s not surprising that the Indian prime minister has upped the ante against Pakistan on the eve of the polls.
On the eve of the 2019 elections, Modi launched an air strike inside Pakistan after false flag terror attacks at Pulwama in Indian-administered Kashmir killed dozens of Indian soldiers. A retaliatory action by the Pakistan air force brought the two countries close to a war. The Pulwama incident was used by the BJP government to whip up nationalist sentiment that contributed hugely to Modi winning his second term.
Following the 2019 election victory, the second Modi government illegally annexed Indian-administered Kashmir in August that year. The action led to the reduction in diplomatic relations between the two countries and blocked any possibility of normalization of relations.
Now, a looming, third Modi term promises to have disastrous consequences not only for Pakistan but for the world.
- Zahid Hussain is an award-winning journalist and author. He is a former scholar at Woodrow Wilson Centre and a visiting fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and at the Stimson Center in DC. He is author of Frontline Pakistan: The struggle with Militant Islam and The Scorpion’s tail: The relentless rise of Islamic militants in Pakistan. Frontline Pakistan was the book of the year (2007) by the WSJ. His latest book ‘No-Win War’ was published this year. Twitter: @hidhussain
