Despite its flaws — and there are many — India is among the few countries in the emerging world that has remained a democracy for 66 years since it gained Independence from Britain.

It was blessed with tall leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and many others who set the tone for both a democratic India and an inclusive power structure. It is a predominantly Hindu country, but the size of the Muslim minority — some 14 per cent of a population of 1.2 billion — is larger than all Muslim countries bar Indonesia and Pakistan. There have, of course, been blips in India’s progress, including periodic Hindu-Muslim riots leading to deaths, defeat at the hands of the Chinese in a border war in 1962, two-and-a-half wars with Pakistan and, more notably, the 21-month long Emergency of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in mid-1970s.
The Opposition parties have made significant forays in winning elections in the states but the first and only time thus far the Bharatiya Janata Party got a chance to form the government at the Centre after some hiccups was towards the end of the 1990s for a total of six years under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was in his own way a generally acceptable figure across the political spectrum although he often had to perform verbal twists and turns to placate the party’s mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The BJP failed to win back power at the federal level in two subsequent general elections in 2004 and 2009, with the venerable Congress returning to power with the help of other parties. The next general election, scheduled for 2014, portends to be highly significant not only because the BJP has a realistic chance of returning to power in New Delhi but because it is projecting the highly polarising figure of Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, as the prime ministerial candidate.
The 2002 pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat, which led to the death of thousands of Muslims, happened under Mr Modi’s watch. In the long-running court cases relating to the anti-Muslim riots, one of his ministers received a long prison sentence for complicity in the riots. Mr Modi has never expressed regret for his own and his administration’s actions. The nearest he got to attempting it was recently, when he told Reuters that he would naturally feel sorry even if he were a passenger in a car that had run over a puppy.
Yet Mr Modi has won three successive elections in his state. He has been denied a US visa on account of the Gujarat riots on his watch, much to the distress of the large and prosperous Gujarati diaspora in the United States and his own admiration for the American way of doing things. Mr Modi touts the Gujarat model of development. Indeed, his state has made remarkable economic progress, partly because of the speed and efficiency of government decisions and the famed entrepreneurial skills of his people. But in human indicators Gujarat has fallen behind several other Indian states. However, Mr Modi remains a shrewd politician with an unerring instinct for choosing the right moment to land a punch on his opponents.
The problem with Mr Modi is two-fold. He has an autocratic bent of mind with a penchant for running an efficient government with the help of trusted official advisers, rather than politicians belonging to his own or other parties. Second, he is the favourite of the party’s mentor, the RSS, because it believes he is the only one who can win the prize for the BJP in 2014. The subtext of Mr Modi’s election campaign will be Hindutva because the RSS has a messianic zeal to spread Hinduism in a country of many religions. Its concept of India is that all permanent residents of the country are Hindus, whatever faith they might profess. Thus for the first time in the country’s Independent history, the Congress’ idea of India is being challenged frontally, posing a serious threat to India’s future as a united republic.
While the Mahatma conceived the idea of India in spiritual terms, effectively employing Hindu imagery to get his message across to the people, Nehru, who had received his schooling in Eton and went to Cambridge, was responsible for laying the foundations of a parliamentary system of government. He lived in a milieu of great intellectual minds.
Indeed, it was the Congress that had enunciated the concept of modern India. The Mahatma was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic on January 30, 1948, less than a year into Independence. Nehru’s view of India was of a country of composite cultures (mindful of the long periods of Mughal rule). He was greatly distressed of the bloody Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 in which millions lost their lives in savage butchery as Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other scrambled to reach to safety amidst marauding mobs along a hastily announced new border line. He was, in a sense, partial to Muslims because he wanted them to feel at home after the tragedy of the Partition.
And what began as a remedy to alleviate the traditional suffering of the “untouchables” and lower castes in the Hindu caste system by enacting reservations for them in government jobs and elected positions for a limited period became a semi-permanent feature of politics. There was one important section of opinion that opposed the scheme of things espoused by the leaders of the Congress. That opinion was represented by the RSS, founded in 1925 to bring back the glories of ancient Hindu India of a past heavily laden with myths and a belief that long periods of foreign rule over large parts of India were due to Indians’ lack of physical toughness. Hence it became de rigueur for members of the RSS taking to parade grounds across the country wearing khaki shorts and carrying sticks, and sometimes dummy rifles, to indulge in various exercises.
For a time, the organisation was proscribed because the assassin of the Mahatma, Nathuram Godse, was an RSS activist although the organisation claimed he had left it in mid-1930s. Indeed, in its chequered history, the RSS has donned the robe of a cultural organisation hiding behind the skirt of the Jana Sangh, which later morphed into the BJP. The BJP has reconciled itself to losing the bulk of Muslim votes and those of other minorities, except for the Sikhs of the Akali Dal who are allied with the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance and jointly rule Punjab for their own political survival. The BJP and the RSS believe that if the former secures the largest number of seats in the Lower House — a majority seems out of reach — regional parties will agree to join a coalition at the federal level for opportunistic reasons.
It is a high-risk strategy, but one that speaks of the Opposition’s desperation to return to power at the Centre. If Mr Modi does win, it would test the idea of India as never before. The extreme left, the Maoists, are treated as outlaws. The right is tempered by subsidising the poor and underprivileged while the government follows neo-liberal economic policies. The arrival of a polariser as the national leader is a disturbing prospect.

The writer can be contacted at snihalsingh@gmail.com