India's Lurch to the Right (original) (raw)

BJP’s resounding victory marks the first time in 30 years, since the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, that a single party has commanded such support across the country. It not only marks a symbolic end to the Nehruvian era of dynastic politics; but also the unprecedented rise of a Hindu nationalist party under a leader whose reputation has been tainted by charges of complicity in the Gujarat communal violence of 2002. Voter fatigue and disillusionment with UPA’s economic record, including the massive scale of corruption, only partially explain the results. They fail to account for India’s reversion to single-party rule in 2014 as opposed to a more divided mandate given Modi’s controversial communal past. The larger than life persona of Modi remains decidedly crucial to any analysis of the 16th Lok Sabha. But while the exact course of his tenure, from a structuralist point of view, remains difficult to predict, the seismic rise of Modi, nonetheless, begs the question: So what has prompted India’s Lurch to the Right? Is this the beginning of a new era for India? Arguably Indian secularism — albeit a defining norm in the Constitution with its corollary set of checks and balances — has not been left untainted by secular parties occasionally pandering to communalism in order to capture vote banks. Does the 16th Lok Sabha, then, signal a mere shift in referents from secularism to development or a qualitative shift in the ethos of Indian mainstream politics?