India's Right-Wing BJP Positioning for 1996 Elections

By Marilyn Raschka

India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become a formidable force on the national scene, mixing economic, social and religious ingredients into its political recipe, just as the other parties do. The difference is that BJP does it openly—and very blatantly.

Like Marxism, its philosophy is plain and simple: "the end justifies the means." What is important to BJP is occupying the seat of power, not how it gets there. The end that justifies the BJP's questionable means is the establishment of Hindutva—land of the Hindus.

Both wholesome and unwholesome items are included in the BJP agenda for the 1996 elections. The Enron power generating project is one of them. Anyone who thought that the BJP Maharashtra state government's cancellation of the Enron project was final does not understand the politics of India.

Ms. Rebecca P. Mark, a 41-year-old Missouri native who heads the Enron Development Corporation, understands the BJP decision better than many others. Even before her conglomerate filed papers in September before an arbitration tribunal in London, claiming at least $300 million and possibly as much as $2 billion in compensation for the work Enron already had completed, Ms. Mark had a round of talks with the BJP chief minister of Maharashtra, Manohar Joshi, who earlier had asserted that the matter was closed.

That the two sides reopened talks on the subject indicated a mutual willingness to find a way out of the impasse. "Indians believe in reincarnation," Ms. Marks told journalists in New Delhi. "So this, too, can reincarnate."

The Enron power project was approved three years ago when the Maharashtra state government was run by the Congress party. Ever since the BJP replaced the Congress party early this year in Maharashtra, the BJP has done what it can to discredit the Congress party before next year's election.

A $2.8 billion project that involved several parties and intermediaries in an environment steeped in corruption is bound to have several devils seething within its details. To attack the Congress on several fronts BJP said that Congress, "under pressure from the foreign multi-national" and using questionable procedures and practices (read bribes), signed away "the sovereignty of the people" to Enron.

Taking an environmental position, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Director of the International Institute for a Sustainable Future in Bombay, observed: "If we do not protect the interests of the poor peasants from the vultures of development, whose only interest is to fulfill the runaway demands of the elite and make massive profits, then our people will be obliterated and many developing societies and their cultures will be wiped out." These are mere opening samples of the BJP-sponsored attacks. As elections get closer, the attacks will get worse.

Destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 was only the beginning.

If the graft and inefficiency charges against the Congress administration do not impress the voters, who are accustomed to official corruption, BJP has other cards to play. It is capable of whipping up the communal (religious) frenzy of the Hindu majority against the minorities, particularly the Muslims. On a localized level, BJP and its cohort, the extreme right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, have used the eating of beef by Muslims (because the Hindus consider cows sacred) as reason enough to engage in physical attacks and even murders. On a larger scale, the BJP-VHP have identified more than 2,000 mosques all over India that they allege were built by Mogul rulers on the sites of Hindu temples centuries ago. Hence, the BJP-VHP have plans to demolish the mosques.

Destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 was, according to them, only the beginning. That act resulted in widespread riots and killings all over India. BJP-VHP now want to destroy mosques at Mathura and Kashi as part of their establishment of the Hindutva campaign. They plan to launch the movement in October 1995 and extend it into 1996. If history repeats itself, it's a dangerous election plank.

The VHP has gone so far as to claim that the Muslim minority, which constitutes only 110 million in an overall Indian population of more than 900 million, will outstrip India's Hindus if the present Muslim growth rate is not curtailed. Some alarming figures are quoted to frighten the illiterate Hindu masses, most of whom live in a rural Indian time warp that is at least a half-century behind the rest of the world.

Prime Minister Rao's Other Worries

India's Congress party prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, knows that he has not yet totally removed the challenge posed to his authority by Arjun Singh and Narain Dutt Tiwari. Those two Congress dissidents are undercutting Rao's political base and building alliances for themselves.

Rao had hoped to neutralize the Arjun-Tiwari threat by wooing the political support of Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's Italian-born widow. Those hopes were almost dashed when Sonia Gandhi, with daughter Priyanka at her side, made a much publicized visit to Amethi, former home base of the Nehru dynasty in Uttar Pradesh, the largest Hindi-belt state in India. There she complained: "You can understand my pain. Four years and three months after my husband's death, the pace of investigations into his assassination is still so slow."

She implicitly attacked Prime Minister Rao when she remarked: "I belong to a family that always stood for certain ideals and principles. But today, these very principles are being put to the test and a feeling of divisiveness is spreading in the country."

Amidst shouts of "Rao Hatao. Sonia Lao" (Remove Rao. Bring Sonia) coming from a crowd of over 35,000, Sonia Gandhi gave a hint of a political future for herself and her progeny. "I hope you will continue to love and support us," she told the crowd. Sonia's son, Rahul Gandhi, has returned home after finishing his studies in the U.S. and has maintained a fairly high profile among the intelligentsia of Delhi.

Sonia Gandhi knows that her Italian background would be a political obstacle in a society that is basically caste-laden and digs into the pedigrees of others. She perhaps is carving a way for either Rahul or Priyanka to hijack the Congress party leadership and the office of the prime minister. This is especially pertinent with national elections just around the corner and prospects of the rival BJP forming a government increasing every day.

Flare Up in Indian Punjab

Just when people had come to believe that normalcy had returned to India's Punjab state, and the decades-long demand of militant Sikhs for a separate Sikh state (Khalistan) had cooled off, Punjab returned to the news with a bang. On Aug. 31 a powerful car bomb killed Chief Minister Sardar Beant Singh and his security detail in the state capital of Chandigarb. One government official termed the incident "an inside job" and others saw the hand of militant Sikhs. Beant was described by many as an efficient administrator who had within three years turned the tide in Punjab. Indian Ambassador to the U.S. Siddharta Shankar Ray called Beant "a lover of humanity," and expressed regret that he had fallen "victim to a terrorist conspiracy."

Sardar Gurmit Singh Aulakh, who heads the Khalistan movement in the United States, said: "We condemn violence, whether committed by individuals or by the Indian regime." He added, however, that "Beant Singh was an enemy of the Sikh nation who murdered his own people at the behest of the Indian regime." And he charged Beant with the deaths of "25,000 Sikh young men who were arrested, tortured and murdered."

Beant's death was preceded by an Aug. 13 press report that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had arrested one Daya Singh Sandhu, identified as a leader of the Khalistan Liberation Force, who was wanted by India in an earlier car bombing that had taken eight lives. Sandhu was arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport when he crossed into the U.S. from Canada. Whether Beant's death is in any way linked with Sandhu's arrest and possible deportation is not known. In any case, Beant's assassination has added to the pre-election worries of Narasimha Rao.

To stave off further defections and to hold on to the groups that have stayed with him, Rao has handed out another 15 ministerial appointments in his government. Most went to representatives of groups on the periphery of the Indian political scene, including the Muslims and the Dalits, lower caste Hindus. However, Narasimha Rao probably must do more than just hand out portfolios to field a strong team in the critical May 1996 elections.

M.M. Ali is a professor at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC.