Shehzad Arshad
In June this year, Narendra Modi was elected as the Prime Minister for the third term. Even though the Hindu-nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party = Indian People’s Party) was unable to win an absolute majority in parliament and needs to rule in alliance with smaller parties in the NDA (National Democratic Alliance), the new government stands for continuity.
Modi’s right hand man and long term trustee, Amit Shah, has also become Home Minister again. Although at the swearing-in ceremony Modi repeatedly referred to the new government as an NDA government, most of the ministers of Modi’s second government are included in the cabinet. Unlike in the previous two elections, the BJP did not get enough seats to form the government on its own, but it needed the support of its allies, especially Janata Dal (United) (People’s Party United) led by Nitish Kumar and Telugu Desam Party (Party of the Telugu Land), led by Chandrababu Naidu.
640 million people voted in these elections, with almost half of the voters being women. The six-phase elections from April 19 ended on June 1. The BJP won 240 seats in the election, short of the 272 required for a majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. Compared to the 2019 election, the BJP lost 63 seats while the NDA alliance received a total of 293. The results are a personal blow to Modi, who has always won elections both as the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and as the Prime Minister of India. This is even more the case because, before the elections, the BJP claimed that it could win more than the 400 seats that would give it a big enough majority to actually change the Indian constitution.
The results are a stunning recovery for the Congress-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.). It approximately doubled its seats in the Lok Sabha, winning 99. Even though I.N.D.I.A. stood in fewer electoral districts than in 2019, it gained 234 seats, almost as many as the BJP, which is remarkable given the restrictions, threats, intimidation and arrests.
Anti-muslim racism
The elections demonstrate that significant parts of Indian society have been disillusioned by the BJP in government, despite its control of the media, massive slanders and repression against the opposition. Indeed, some of the rosy predictions of a landslide victory for Modi, which had been published in spring this year before the elections, may have been not just deception of the public, but also self-deception.
At the beginning of the election campaign, symbolically held at Ran Mandir in Ayodhya (where, according to Hindu belief, the god Rama was born and which has become a rallying point for Hindu chauvinism since the demolition of a mosque on the site), the BJP hoped that a weak opposition coalition could be easily defeated.
Hence, Modi raised the slogans of „Congress Mukt Bharat“ (Congress-free India). From the beginning, but even more so as it became clear that a land slide victory would be difficult, the entire BJP election campaign was based on slander and hate against its opponents, specifically targeting Muslims as “infiltrators” and “procreators”. Muslim men are accused of committing “love jihad”, which is a supposed plot to “steal away” Hindu women by making them fall in love with them. BJP slanders also claimed that the sacred cows were to be distributed among Muslims. Congress was also accused of planning to give “Other Backward Class” status, which grants access to education and jobs to members of lower castes, to Muslims. This whole campaign is another lie, aiming to play Muslims and other oppressed strata against each other.
Attacks on opposition
Constant attacks on the opposition were another important part of the BJP’s election strategy. One part of this was to split and break up opposition parties, including via intimidation, pressure and arrests by state forces. In order to weaken the opposition, the accounts of the Congress party were frozen so that they could not participate fully in the election campaign. Two chief ministers (heads of state’s governments) and 7 state ministers were arrested.
The increase in votes and seats won by the Congress and its INDIA Alliance reflects a growing discontent with the economic policy of the outgoing BJP government as well as electoral disillusion with the government’s actions.
Economic problems of persistent price rises, unemployment without growth, sluggish private investment, stagnation of real wages, widening wealth and income inequality, underfunding of essential social welfare programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and nutrition programmes, are all factors that have led many people to vote heavily against the BJP, especially in the rural areas of the north, west and parts of the south. It is likely that these rural and semi-urban voters will continue to be deeply affected by these issues in the future. In Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, the BJP’s performance fell short of expectations and it lost both significant vote share and seats.
Whilst India’s economy has been rapidly growing, this has benefited the Ambanis, the Adanis, the big capitalists and the upper middle class. For the working class, Modi’s governments have implemented anti-labour policies.
Continuity in the government
Whilst the BJP does not have an absolute majority in parliament, the Modi 3.0 government is back in power with the same arrogance and agenda. It is a message of continuity, not change. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Janata Dal (United), along with smaller allies, have declared Modi as the leader of a new India. In an unusual fashion, 72 ministers, 60 of whom belong to the BJP, were sworn in on June 9. All the crucial ministries that define the political role of the government like Home, Defence, Finance, Foreign Affairs and other such ministries were not only retained by the BJP, they were given to the very same ministers as were in charge of them in Modi 2.0.
The initial steps of the new Modi government are clearly a message of continuity of the Hindutva policies and no real change is possible with the existing government. This can be clearly seen if we look at the continuity of the anti-Muslim racist agenda of the new government.
Muslims constitute more than 14% of the country’s population. However, there are currently only 22 Muslim members in the assembly, all of them belong to opposition parties.
Statements made by ministers after Modi became Prime Minister have expressed commitment to completing the pending Modi 2.0 agenda, such as the introduction of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and new and tougher criminal laws. Attacks on Muslims started again after the elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat. Likewise, repression against oppositional voices will continue. The writer Arundhati Roy, one of India’s most prominent voices of dissent, faces prosecution for a speech she made 14 years ago. This clearly shows that the new government is continuing the policies of the past.
Liberal illusions
Nevertheless, there are illusions among liberals and the left that, because the Modi government is dependent on the support of the alliance, particularly the TDP and JD(U) that are not Hindutva parties and have a secular tradition, Modi and the BJP cannot implement their hard-line agenda as they did in the past. According to this complacent idea, the government will have to go through consultations with the alliance rather than continuing its previous authoritarian style. Apart from a minor complaint from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) for not getting a ministry in the cabinet, however, none of the parties have yet raised any disagreement. Rather the opposite is true. JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar showed a gesture of surrender by touching Modi’s feet at the NDA Parliamentary Board meeting. Other senior party leaders like K.C. Tyagi from Janata Dal (United) have declared their full support for the BJP’s candidate for the Speaker’s post and agreed with the idea of the BJP’s planned more repressive Uniform Civil Code. The JD(U) has even declared that it is not against the Agnipath scheme (a recruitment scheme for the Indian armed forces introduced in 2022) and only requests revision of some clauses.
Scenes from TDP’s swearing-in ceremony of Chandrababu Naidu as Chief Minister in Andhra Pradesh and the cheerfulness of the Prime Minister and Chief Minister made it clear that this alliance is here to stay. The Modi government appears to be meeting Naidu’s demands for resources for his state, so it can be assured of the TDPs support on the national level.
Neither the TDP nor the JD(U) is ideologically or politically opposed to Modi’s BJP’s neoliberal Hindutva policies. In fact, the JD(U) has already supported all the draconian bills introduced by the BJP in the 17th Lok Sabha aimed at revoking the Constitution, CAA, abrogation of Article 370, including new criminal bills etc. Moreover, it is a pre-poll alliance and neither JD(U) nor TDP had any objection to Modi’s hateful polarising election speeches.
Likewise, smaller allies of the BJP like Ajit Pawar’s Shiv Sena or the National Congress Party have neither a political ideological problem with the Modi government nor can they afford to oppose the BJP when it faces an existential crisis after this election in Maharashtra. The future of these parties in Maharashtra and the future of the Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP) and Manjhi’s party in Bihar is tied to the future of the BJP. All this makes it clear that, contrary to the hopes of the liberals and the left, these parties will also join the government and the Modi government does not face any threat from them, because their political interests are tied to the Modi government.
Even though the mandate is not enough for Modi to overturn constitutional provisions on social justice and secularism, the working class, Muslims, national minorities and the poor will face another term of constant attacks. If he faces massive difficulties in the Lok Sabha, Modi could even dissolve the 18th assembly under the pretext of national importance. Such an adventure is possible, even if unlikely at the moment given the subservient role of the BJP alliance partners.
The Communist parties
The alliance of communist parties (CPI(M), CPI, CPI (ML) Liberation) won 8 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, which is an increase compared to 2019, but much less than in 2004 when the left won 61 seats. We called for a critical vote, but we completely reject their participation in the INDIA Alliance because this bourgeois alliance will not fight against Hindutva and neoliberal economics, but rather lead to a continued subordination of the working class and its organisations to the “oppositional” bourgeoisie. In this context, it must also be remembered that it was the Congress that introduced neoliberalism in India in the 90s.
We call on the Communist Parties, trade unions and all social movements of students, women, peasants, Dalits, nationally and religiously oppressed groups to break with their bourgeois „allies“ and prepare for the inevitable struggles to come. We call on these organisations to form a workers’ united front against the Modi government and to unite with all oppressed sections against the attacks on democratic and social rights. We need a working-class defence militia to counter attacks on Muslims, other minorities, peasants, students, and likewise against attacks by strike-breaker groups or state coercion. Communist parties and the trade union movement need to organise them and if they do not, socialists need to contact their members and the working masses to force the leadership to do so.
The CCA, farmers‘, students‘ and workers‘ movements that have emerged in recent years have the power to keep Modi’s BJP from implementing its attacks, but the influence of Hindutva is deep and a conscious struggle against it is necessary. It is necessary to clarify how BJP has imposed neoliberal policies on the basis of Hindu-Muslim division, due to which inflation, unemployment and poverty are increasing and this is not caused by Muslims, but by the capitalist system. If we want to get rid of this system, we have to end this division and struggle against the authoritarian Hindutva government, but our struggle cannot be limited to this, we have to struggle against the capitalist system.
The struggle against the coming attacks will needs to be based on mass mobilisations, on mass strikes and the creation of fighting organs like committees of action and militias and centralised by a national council of action. In order to organise the fight back against the new Modi government, we call on the organisations of the working class and oppressed to convene a national conference to discuss, work out and implement a plan of joint struggle.
At the same time, we need to have a discussion inside the workers’ movement, what kind of programme, what kind of party is necessary to win against Modi and to organise independently of the bourgeois opposition.
The crisis of leadership that has existed in India for decades is now acute and needs to be resolved by building a workers‘ party based on a revolutionary programme, a programme for working class power and a workers‘ government based not on bourgeois state institutions, but on workers‘ and peasants‘ councils and armed popular militias. Such a government would confiscate large scale capital and introduce an emergency plan to meet the needs of the masses while managing a democratically planned economy. It will introduce genuine equal rights and opportunities for all exploited and oppressed people. To build this government we need the working class to provide leadership for such a revolution.
True peace and equality can only be established through a workers‘ government that begins the struggle for the formation of the United Socialist States of South Asia. We appeal to all workers, peasants, socialists and the oppressed to join us in this mission and be a part of building the Fifth International.