BJP is caught between toxic ideology and pragmatism

It began with the BJP national spokeswoman Nupur Sharma. In a television debate, Sharma made derogatory comments about the Prophet (PBUH). When her obnoxious diatribe got a pushback within India, her colleague, BJP’s Delhi media operation head Naveen Kumar Jindal, tweeted in her support, fanning the flames. Later, he deleted the tweet but the damage had been done.

What did the BJP government do? Initially, nothing. But then, given the protests in various Indian cities, some violent, the BJP took the perfunctory action of suspending Sharma’s primary membership from the party while Jindal was expelled. It seems the rightwing BJP government thought it had done enough and put the ugly episode behind it. It was wrong. A diplomatic storm hit India.

India’s ambassadors to Kuwait, Qatar and Iran were summoned and given official notes of protest over the comments. Pakistan’s ministry of foreign affairs issued a statement condemning the “highly derogatory remarks” and the BJP’s response. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson stated that “The State of Qatar calls on the Indian government to immediately condemn these remarks and publicly apologise to all Muslims around the world.”

A similar démarche was issued by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the largest interstate bloc after the United Nations. “The General Secretariat of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation expresses its strong condemnation and denunciation of the recent insults issued by an official in the ruling party in India towards the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him,” the 57-member state organisation said in a statement.

Anger also spread to Bangladesh and other parts of the Muslim world with users taking to social media and denouncing the derogatory remarks while calling for the boycott of Indian goods.

The Indian government went into damage-control mode, saying that it was “against any ideology which insults or demeans any sect or religion” and that it did not “promote such people or philosophy”. Its missions put out the statement that the [derogatory] comments did not reflect the stand of the government and were “views of fringe elements”. Keen observers of India — within and without — pooh-poohed these statements, pointing to the government’s systemic support for Hindutva activists since it came to power in 2014 and was reelected in 2019.

Analysts also pointed out that Sharma, one of BJP’s national spokespersons, was not a fringe element by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, as a lawyer with a degree from the London School of Economics, she has not only been a nightly fixture on television talk-shows, defending the BJP, but was the BJP candidate in the last election contesting against the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. She lost to Kajiriwal.

Muslims in India, as also in the occupied and since August 5, 2018 illegally-annexed Jammu and Kashmir, have been subjected to communal violence since Partition in 1947. Suppression and oppression of minorities is not a new phenomenon. But the arrival on the scene of Narendra Modi has turned Hindutva and Hindutvadis into an overt and brash force. Whenever some atrocity happens, Modi goes into silence to avoid being directly linked to the perpetrators. The tactic does not work with the discerning observers of the BJP within and without India. It is clear that most, if not all, Hindutvadis are also Moditvadis.

This is not without reason. Bharatiya Janata Party was begotten from the fascist womb of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Modi, who leads the BJP, was an RSS apparatchik or, in Sangh terminology, a paracharak. Earlier, another Sangh paracharak, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also rose to become India’s prime minister.

The provenance and the ideology of RSS have been definitively chronicled and analysed by eminent Indian jurist and writer, A G Noorani in a 2019 book, RSS – A Menace for India. Noorani says the RSS is a fascist, deceitful and communal organisation. In a pre-book launch interview in 2019 to Huffpost, Noorani had said, “Look, this is the party which floated the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) in 1964, Jan Sangh in 1951 and the BJP in 1980… You see, people say, ‘let it become a conservative and non-communal party.’ You can’t do that. You can’t ask the Pope to become Protestant. This is their philosophy and outlook.”

Noorani opens the book with these lines: “What is at stake is not only the Indian Dream. What is at stake is the soul of India.” If this is not unequivocal, I don’t know what is.

Muslim-majority countries have long known about the plight of Indian Muslims and Muslims in the IOJK. But given India’s heft and interdependencies, most have generally remained quiet. It seems that the Modi-led BJP thought that they could run domestic affairs in a silo and shield India’s foreign policy from the impact of what happens at home. It was a mistake waiting to happen.

While Muslim-majority states, unconscionably and for reasons of statecraft, chose to ignore the oppression and humiliation of India’s Muslims, the status of the Prophet (PBUH) is an issue in another league. Sharma — and with her the BJP — crossed a line and in doing that also put the spotlight on the bigotry that now defines large sections of India.

Since the diplomatic fiasco, many Indian diplomats have pointed out that India cannot hermetically separate domestic ideologies and their expression from its foreign policy. Concerns for human rights violations in India are increasing. In April, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom urged the US Department of State for the third straight year to place India on a list of “countries of particular concern” in terms of religious freedom.

The Gulf states employ over 8 million Indians. After the US, the Gulf constitutes the second largest chunk of remittances to India, standing at a whopping $43 billion by some estimates. The UAE is India’s second-largest export destination and third-largest trading partner. There are several other interdependencies for which the data is freely available. The point is: while the outrage in the Muslim-majority states will get tempered by the realities of statecraft and trade, India cannot, as this episode shows, ignore those sensitivities. Put another way, it cannot have a free run against the Muslim bloc like it has had against its own Muslim population at home.

What are we likely to see here on? Sharma has since apologised and given the FIRs against her she might feel the heat of the law. The reaction from the Muslim world has put India on notice: what happens on Indian TV doesn’t just stay there. It has consequences. That is likely to force the Sharmas and Jindals to be more cautious about what kind of bollocks they put out. Equally, however, the BJP under Modi has put the Hindutva discourse in its orbit, both for ideological and electoral reasons. That’s BJP’s Janus-faced reality. To what extent can the BJP rollback the discourse that underpins its very existence is a moot point.

To quote Noorani again, the struggle for the soul of India is far from over.

The writer is interested in foreign and security policies