A Warning To Trump And His MAGA Movement?
Totally by chance, almost every time heinous genocidal monster Narendra Modi has run for anything, I’ve been in India— uncanny. And depressing for me… that he keeps winning. This time I wasn’t in India for the election— and he took a pretty bad drubbing… not bad enough, but he’s not a happy little religious bigot today (just a religious bigot). His extreme right wing party, the BJP, lost its parliamentary majority. It’s still the biggest party and it’ll still head a government but they will be forced to negotiate with other parties to do that. It was totally unexpected— particularly when you consider the lengths Modi has gone to disable democracy.
Prominent activist Arundhati Roy covered that jihad against democracy several years ago for Jacobin: terror campaign against Dalits (Untouchables); terror against Muslims (India has 205 million of them) and the push towards a one-party state. In April, Le Monde noted in an editorial that India’s election stood out for its undemocratic nature. “Modi,” wrote Christophe Jaffrelot, “no longer wants to appear simply as the guardian of the Indian nation against the Pakistani threat… He now also wants to be seen as the high priest of the Hindu community. He donned these new robes on January 22, when, in front of a sea of cameras, he performed the rituals himself to inaugurate the Ram Mandir, whose construction, built on the rubble of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by BJP supporters in 1992, the BJP had championed. The inauguration of the temple, allegedly built on the birthplace of the god Ram, launched his campaign and set the tone… [The BJP lost that seat yesterday.] His government seeks to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu nation-state, where Muslims would be no more than second-class citizens. This project has been legally enshrined through laws excluding Muslim refugees from neighboring countries from access to Indian citizenship and making conversions to religions other than Hinduism, as well as interfaith marriages, very difficult. In addition to legal discrimination, Muslims are targeted by Hindu nationalist groups who act as veritable cultural police on the highways— which they patrol to ensure that Muslims are not taking cattle to the slaughterhouse, the cow being a sacred animal— or in the streets and on campuses to prevent young Muslims from dating Hindu women, lest they seduce and convert them. This cultural policing comes with beatings and even lynchings.”
I’ve been to India a dozen times starting when I drove there in 1969.This isn’t what it was like then. Modi’s a Trump-like fascist. I was in India with 3 friends over the Christmas-New Years holidays. The air in Delhi was so much worse than it ever has been before that two of my friends left after a few days, one of them with heart palpitations. Was that Modi’s fault? Absolutely. Would a Congress-led government do what is necessary to make the air more breathable. Maybe, maybe not. But we’re not going to find out this year.”
From the Hindustan Times: “The BJP-led NDA coalition led in a majority of seats but faced a stronger challenge from the opposition than expected. The BJP is likely to win around 240 Lok Sabha seats while the opposition INDIA bloc could win around 232 seats. The biggest setback has come from Uttar Pradesh, which holds the key to power. The BJP also saw a significant decline in seats in Rajasthan and Haryana where it swept in the last general elections.”
When all the votes are counted, it looks like the BJP will have lost around 60 seats, bringing it down to around 30 fewer than the 272 needed for a parliamentary majority, although his coalition will still have around 290 seats.
This is the first time Modi’s party failed to win a majority since his first victory in 2014. Saraakshi Rai reported that the Congress-led “opposition, largely written off heading into the election, defied all expectations and poses a serious threat to Modi’s majority.”
According to Rohan Mukherjee, an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, if current projections hold, Modi’s BJP will need to change its approach.
“Modi will have to govern more cautiously as there will be parties in his coalition with the power to undermine his government’s initiatives,” Mukherjee added.
Before Modi’s meteoric and overwhelming rise to power in 2014, this was often the case in past coalition governments.
And it stands in stark contrast to predictions ahead of the election that Modi would use a massive mandate at the ballot box to push ahead with divisive reforms.
“This rests speculation that he could embark upon a dramatic agenda on things like constitutional amendment, that’s just not going to be possible,” Dhume said of Modi’s shrinking majority.
“It’s going to be, have to be much more negotiated, much more of the kind of governance that you would normally see in a highly contested parliamentary democracy.”
According to Dhume, Modi’s shrinking majority could be attributed to a complex mix of politics, economic dissatisfaction and concerns about democracy.
…In April, Modi was accused of using hate speech after he called Muslims “infiltrators”— some of his most incendiary rhetoric about the minority faith.
Critics of the prime minister— an avowed Hindu nationalist— say India’s tradition of diversity and secularism has come under attack since his BJP won power a decade ago.
They accuse the party of fostering religious intolerance and sometimes even violence. The party denies the accusation and says its policies benefit all Indians.
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