Narendra Modi, who swore in as India’s prime minister for the third time on June 9, projected himself as a God-King in the run up the polls. The people’s mandate has stripped him of that title — he is now neither God, nor King. Modi is back to being what he was elected to be, that is, a (biological) prime minister.
But, does a fractured mandate against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also imply a rejection of Hindutva? Have voters cut Hindutva to the same, diminished size as its primary political frontman?
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Those are trickier questions to answer, for Indian elections are almost always fought on a disparate mix of ideas, identities and policies. It is also nearly impossible to precisely define the behaviour of an average Indian voter. Moreover, besides emerging as the single largest party, the BJP’s overall vote share has fallen only by a marginal 0.7%.
Yet, based on its critical losses across the Hindi heartland and parts of the Northeast, it is safe to say that Hindutva is facing a bottom-up resistance from competitive forms of identity politics.
Data analysis of the results has shown that large sections of the non-upper caste electorate from both dominant and non-dominant Dalit-Bahujan communities who had reposed their faith on the BJP in 2014 and 2019 rejected it this time. This is especially so in the caste heartland of Uttar Pradesh, which has also emerged as the BJP’s Hindutva heartland.
Was this because the so-called “subaltern” no longer buys into the Hindu nationalist rhetoric, which if some observers are to be believed, was so far the case?
That is difficult to discern. However, it is certainly a rejection of Hindutva that is dismissive of socio-economic concerns. It is also a rejection of Hindutva that dangles a sword of Damocles over their heads by threatening to amend the Constitution, which many voters from marginalised castes likely saw as an impending loss of their guaranteed rights.
In that sense, the “caste revolt” against the BJP may not automatically imply a rejection of Savarkar’s vision of a Hindu India or an embrace of Nehruvian secular nationalism, but it is a reaffirmation of the Ambedkarite idea of India where social justice must prevail over cultural justice. More importantly, it is about the “subaltern” defying binaries and reclaiming its agency as an agent of electoral change, rather than a passive subject of study.
Also read: From Change in Dalit Politics to Resurgence of the Coalition Era: Ten Takeaways from 2024 LS Polls
From a wider perspective, this also means that religion isn’t yet the catch-all, totalising social ideology in Indian society, as many of us might have been led to believe in the last one decade. Religious mobilisation isn’t failsafe, and caste still matters, as it should. But, caste mobilisation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
The Opposition’s talk about social inequality, rising commodity prices and soaring unemployment created a strong secular platform against the BJP’s sweeping religious nationalism. It offered a material basis for the INDIA bloc’s strategic coalition-building, which seems to have outmanoeuvred the BJP’s social engineering in Uttar Pradesh.
Therefore, it would be wrong to see the caste-based counter-mobilisation against pan-Hindu mobilisation as a reemergence of some form of atavistic or parochial form of Indian politics. Rather, it should be seen as the consolidation of an agile social base that gave expression to a sophisticated secular political platform based on economic and ideological concerns.
Beyond the ostensible secular resistance, the 2024 results show that the BJP’s Hindu-centric ethnnationalism is facing headwinds from other forms of religious ethnonationalisms. While the Muslim voter base continues to largely reject the saffron party and vice-versa, with some aberrations here and there, Christian voters in the Northeast are turning their heads away from the BJP.
The BJP and its local allies lost four of its existing seats across four states in the region, all with large Christian populations — Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. On the other hand, it won big in the three states where Christians are a minority — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura. Except in Assam and Tripura, the NDA also lost vote shares in all the other states — the largest being in Manipur (by 23.4%).
These losses reflect a steady unravelling of the multi-ethnic rainbow alliance that the BJP had managed to stitch in the Northeast through a mix of strategies — tactical alliances with tribal groups, political sops to address demands for social and economic autonomy, and moderation of its hardline Hindutva rhetoric to appease Christian voters.
However, the saffron ecosystem’s animus towards Christians across India hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Northeast. Even in the Northeast, right-wing apparatchiks have tried to impose their writ on Christian institutions, such as schools and Churches, using intimidation and physical violence. Add to this the particularly brutish Hindu nationalism of Assam’s chief minister and the NDA’s regional convenor, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who has rooted for laws — such as the Uniform Civil Code — that religious minorities see as a threat.
Even after the results, Sarma seemed to blamed Christians for the BJP’s losses in the Northeast, which immediately drew flak from other regional ethnic leaders. Such projections further mar the BJP’s self-professed image as an inclusive party. This is especially so because by alienating its Christian vote banks in the Northeast, the party risks undoing its strategic alliances with tribal groups in a region where religion and ethnicity go hand in hand.
Also read: Akhilesh Yadav’s ‘PDA’ Trumps Modi-Adityanath’s Hindutva in Uttar Pradesh
In fact, ethnocentric, tribal-dominated parties that allied with the BJP also took big hits in Christian-majority blocs. So, if the BJP thought that it could affix its Hindu nationalism to local ethnonationalisms in the Northeast to gain political depth, it might have to have a rethink after these results.
So, while Modi’s BJP might still be the dominant pole of Indian politics, Hindutva may no longer be so. Because of these emerging forms of counter-politics and compulsions of running a coalition government with leaders who are not exactly Hindu nationalists, the party would find it difficult to perpetuate Hindutva through brute force legislations.
The 2024 mandate is a landmark one not just because it has humbled the political pantheon of Hindu India, but also because it contains important lessons for political parties around the world seeking to challenge right-wing populism.
It has thrown up two striking possibilities: one, even where people are emotionally invested in a toxic combination of culture, nationalism and “strong leaders”, it is possible to engage in a sombre politics of justice, equality and dignity; and two, even when they try hard, no form of majoritarian religious nationalism can truly sustain its façade of being inclusive for too long.
Angshuman Choudhury is a New Delhi-based researcher and writer, formerly an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.
Read all of The Wire’s reporting on and analysis of the 2024 election results here.
