This Is How India's Modi Boosts His Electoral Base and Consolidating Hinduism

From April 19 to June 4, India will hold the largest elections in the world.

More than 970 million Indians — out of a population of 1.4 billion — are eligible to vote in the parliamentary elections, which polls predict will return Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power for a third consecutive term.

Despite the BJP's recent attempts to win over Muslim voters, violence committed by Hindus against Muslims remains high across the country.

Modi's opponents accuse him of undermining India's secular constitution by appeasing Hindus, who represent 80% of its population, while encouraging discrimination and violence against Muslims, who represent 14.2%.

Religious Polarization

The Italian newspaper La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of trying to achieve an easy victory in the upcoming elections by placing financial pressure on the main opposition, the Indian National Congress (INC), and launching a new campaign of restrictions against religious minorities, especially Muslims.

The newspaper said that since mid-March 2024, the authorities have been waging real financial and judicial terrorism against opposition parties and their leaders, referring to an investigation campaign targeting the transparency of political party budgets.

In late March, the Indian government-imposed taxes on the main opposition party, the INC, estimated at about $218 million, in a move that revealed a clear intention to financially cripple the party weeks before the start of the elections.

Last February, the same opposition party was also asked to pay $25.3 million as part of an investigation into the party's tax returns for the 2018-2019 fiscal year.

On its part, the Italian newspaper accused the Indian government, as part of its attempt to transform the country into an exclusive Hindu monarchy, of marginalizing other religious minorities, especially Muslims.

Last month, Modi and his party began an informal campaign seeking to repeat the landslide victories of 2014 and 2019 by once again playing on religious polarization.

The BJP's electoral strategy has aimed to center the campaign around Modi as a symbol of Hindutva, development and India's global image.

For example, Muslim candidates won 27 seats out of 545 seats in the 2019 parliamentary elections, representing only 5% of parliamentary seats. In addition, the BJP is the first ruling party in India's 75-year history without a single Muslim member in Parliament.

In the last two elections, the BJP fielded a host of Muslim candidates, but they all lost, with some accusing the Hindu nationalist party of not paying attention to their election campaigns.

In the same policy, the Italian newspaper referred to a judicial decision issued on March 23 banning Islamic schools in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in the country, with 240 million people living in it, about a fifth of whom are Muslims.

The court that issued the ruling argued that these schools violate the secularism stipulated in the Indian Constitution, and ordered the students to be transferred to traditional schools.

BJP's Electoral Strategy

In 2002, 58 Hindu pilgrims were killed in Godhra, in the western state of Gujarat, after a train returning from Ayodhya caught fire.

Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, declared the incident an act of terrorism.

After rumors spread that Muslims were responsible for the fire, Hindus committed violence that spanned three days in the state, killing more than a thousand people, most of them Muslims.

At the time, Modi had never faced conviction for any involvement, but the tragedy followed him in ways that served his interests and in ways that hurt him as well.

Minorities were terrified that he was not doing enough to stop the violence, but the message to a large number of Hindus was that nothing would stop him from protecting them.

Twenty-two years later, Modi is the leader of a Hindu party that serves a nationalist electoral base far more diverse than that of Gujarat.

Over the course of his ten years as prime minister, Modi succeeded in moving Muslims to a second-class status in Indian society.

As India prepares to hold the world's most crucial parliamentary elections, Modi's Hindu nationalist government has announced plans to impose the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which first sparked controversy when it was passed in Parliament in 2019.

It is noteworthy that this bill excludes Muslim refugees from obtaining Indian citizenship, while granting it to Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians who entered the country from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, which are countries with a Muslim majority, before 2014.

According to observers, implementing this decision at the present time is considered a strategy to attract Modi's Hindu support base.

Opposition parties have questioned the timing of the government's move, alleging that they are designed to incite religious divisions among voters. 

"The Modi government's decision to implement rules under the CAA appears to be a deliberate attempt to heighten communal polarization for electoral gains," said Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India. 

Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party, also questioned the timing, stating that the law is only meant to target Muslims.

Amnesty International has characterized the CAA as a bigoted law that legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion.

BJP-controlled states also later passed bills making it extremely difficult for Hindus and Muslims to marry or for Muslims to buy property in Hindu-dominated areas. In addition to preventing Muslim women from wearing the hijab, demolishing Muslim homes in many states, or withdrawing citizenship from thousands of Muslims in other states.

In December 2023, India's Supreme Court upheld a decision taken by the Modi government in 2019, revoking the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority region in India, and set a deadline of September 30 of this year, to hold elections in the region.

Hindu Nation

Hindu arrogance reached its peak on January 22, when Modi inaugurated a huge temple to the Hindu Ram Mandir in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya.

The temple, which cost $250 million, was built on the ruins of a historic mosque that had been demolished by extremist Hindus in 1992.

When this happened three decades ago, senior BJP leaders backed down from the violence they had unleashed, while today, the event receives widespread media coverage and public celebrations are held across India.

Modi, who was dressed as a Hindu priest when inaugurating the temple, told an audience of top Bollywood stars and the country's business elite: "The construction of the temple marks the dawn of a new era in the history of India."

"At the heart of the BJP's strategy lies a twofold objective: first, to solidify its support base among the Hindu electorate by reaffirming its commitment to Hindutva, and second, to showcase PM Modi as a stalwart leader who delivers on his promises, particularly in matters concerning nationalism and the welfare of Hindus," argues political analyst Sayantan Ghosh.

In contrast, Indian opposition leaders have viewed the Modi government's construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya as a political stunt and election gimmick.

It is noteworthy that there are growing concerns that Modi is trying to dismantle the established traditions of Indian secularism while transforming the country into a religious state and a homeland for Hindus in the first place.

Indeed, many of Modi's far-right Hindu supporters support these nationalist movements, and even Modi himself comes from an ideological background that stresses the superiority of the Hindus over other sects in the country.

The BJP has strengthened its ideological base by supporting the establishment of more than 45,000 branches of the far-right Hindu organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has paramilitary formations that helped strengthen BJP's spread in various Indian states.

In 1925, a group of upper-caste Hindus founded the RSS, an organization that viewed India as an exclusively Hindu nation in which Christians and Muslims had no place.

In 1980, the RSS created a new political wing: the BJP. In 1998, the party came first in the national elections, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, an RSS-trained politician, became Prime Minister of India but without a parliamentary majority.

In 2014, the BJP came to power again, this time with a parliamentary majority under the leadership of Modi, a Hindu nationalist who has been an RSS volunteer since he was a child.

Today, the RSS is closer than ever to creating the state it envisions. As the organization approaches its centenary, it wants to turn the de facto Hindu nation it has built into a legal state, and if Modi wins a third term, he will do everything in his power to achieve this objective.