Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I found Raghu S. Jaitley’s post on the Ayodhya ceremony on 22 nd January interesting. He starts with the late 80’s, when Hindu assertiveness started off – slogans like “ Garv se kaho hum Hindu hai ” (say with pride that we are Hindus). “In about a year from then, the Ram Janmanhoomi movement began dominating the Indian political landscape. The door-to-door collection of bricks for the shilanyas, the daily reports of the L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra and the trail it left behind and lumpenisation of Jai Shree Ram and Jai Bajrang Bali all followed soon after.” While it increased the Hindu assertive footprint, it was still limited to pockets of the North, nothing more. But eventually, it led to huge political wins: “To those who grew up in the 80s, the events on the 22 nd of January… will bookend a political issue that dominated all our adult lives.”   While the timing was deliberate (close to the next Lok Sabha elections), it raises a new question, sa...

For once, the exit polls got the big picture right. Modi won, and the BJP got an absolute majority. There were surprises too. Like the BJP getting an even bigger absolute majority than last time. The BJP’s vote share rose from 31% last time to 41% this time despite a massive ganging up of all parties in pre-poll alliances. Rahul Gandhi lost in Amethi. Fortress Bengal was breached big time. See the maps below of who won where in 2014 and 2019. Whatever the BJP lost this time in Andhra/Telengana, it more than made up via the gains it made in the North East, West Bengal and Odisha. Mihir Swarup Sharma writes of the origin of the Congress’ “Idea of India”. At independence, especially after all the bloodshed of Partition, Nehru decided: “India is a bundle of contradictions, of competing group assertions, and it is the duty of the Indian state is to play an arbiter between them, to cover up and manage these centripetal and divisive forces through inclusion, representation and...

There was this joke going around after the recent state election results that Modi and Amit Shah would have already started working on the next set of states… while Rahul Gandhi would be headed abroad for yet another break. The way Goa and Manipur played out, it looks like that’s exactly what happened. Two states where nobody got a majority, where the Congress got more seats than the BJP… and yet the BJP got invited to form the government. That, of course, is a very gray area: there are no clear rules on who gets invited first. The largest party? The one with the “best” chance of forming a government? How does the governor even decide that? No wonder the case has gone to court. The obvious things have happened for sure: horse-trading, and money must have changed hands. That apart, as Mihir Sharma wrote : “The BJP simply appears to have outwitted the Congress… (Because) whatever actually happened, the Congress moved too slowly, and the BJP moved swiftly.” Why didn’t the Co...

After the emphatic Modi (BJP?) win of 2014, some fear that Hindu fanaticism is now in the driver’s seat. Some of the events fueling that feeling/fear are ghar vapasi (re-converting back to Hinduism), the campaign against love jihad, ban on beef in a few states, introduction of the Gita in curriculum, appointment of Sangh-linked people in educational bodies and attacks against churches. Are these events real? Absolutely. But do they mean that we are getting Talibanized or becoming similar to the Islamic countries? That’s highly debatable. (It is one thing to say that we are heading down that road; but it’s nonsense to say that we are already very similar to them). In fact, such gross exaggeration actually has a negative impact. Here’s why. The folks who don’t believe we are anything even remotely like the Islamic countries (not yet anyway) then wonder why even a small to moderate bad act of the Hindu is treated at par with the worst of Islam. From there, it’s a short drive to ...

There is a sea of orange in the map below, indicating the seats the BJP won in the just concluded elections: A lot of people were curious as to the vote share of the BJP nation-wide. Did they win a proportional number of votes? Or did they just get votes in places they won and did not have any “wasted” votes? (Here, a “wasted” vote is one cast in an electoral district where the party did not win). Equally, was the return of a single party majority a sign of the end of regional parties, at least at the national level? Was this the beginning of the move to a two party system? Good questions. Surprisingly, the first answer I saw to these questions was in the Washington Post by a non-Indian guy named Adam Ziegfeld ! So what are the answers? The BJP’s vote share this time was just 31%. In contrast, the Congress despite getting decimated got 19%. It was the distribution of votes that mattered: the BJP hardly had any “wasted” votes. To understand how “useful” every BJP vote w...