India

Date range: 1980-2020
The case of India is difficult for several reasons. First, the sheer size of the country and its fragmented party system obscures some of the dynamics we’re searching for. The Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are the only truly national parties in recent decades, but many state-based parties have mobilised on populist bases in individual areas which has shown up as only a fraction of the national electorate (Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu and the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha are good examples of this). The fact that the major parties have formed alliances with these would suggest a case for coding the coalitions. But there is simply too much variation within these coalitions to justify this. The scale of national politics (and the diversity of issue-based mobilisation) also makes it difficult to say that any party relies on a single set of narratives and strategies, as these may vary from state to state. Second, the caste system and caste politics could be considered a mixture of class, religion, and ethnicity, meaning that caste-based political mobilisation is difficult to categorise along our OTH_ variables. We have considered caste-based appeals to be OTH_ETHNIC for the purposes for our study, noting that we should return to this characterisation.

Case notes

Bharatiya Janata Party

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India’s largest right-wing party. As the successor to the Jana Sangh party, it has long been the national flagship party of “Hindutva” (Hindu nationalism) movement, and it is in many ways the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) volunteers movement (a Hindu nationalist paramilitary of sorts). However, the party leadership has oscillated between its more liberal and radical wings – initially led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani respectively – each presenting somewhat different degrees of populism and ethnocentrism (Basu 2001; McGuire and Reeves 2003). The party’s first stint in government (1998-04, led by Vajpayee) is generally seen to have come during one of its more moderate phases, and did not include radical policy changes on the key Hindutva issues such as the Ram temple dispute, Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy, or a uniform civil code. As with other major Indian parties, the party has rarely run true national campaigns, but rather tailored its message to individual states (Palshikar 2015, 725). Narendra Modi became the party’s candidate for Prime Minister for the 2014 election and led it to its most successful period to-date, capturing a majority in the Lok Saba and growing it in the subsequent 2019 election. The BJP has frequently been described as populist (see McDonnell and Cabrera 2019; Saleem 2021; McGuire and Reeves 2003), especially under Modi’s leadership.

The party has always attempted to cast the Congress-led political class as a corrupt ruling elite estranged form the people (Jaffrelot 1993:317). In its 1984 manifesto it claimed that “an unholy nexus has developed between the corrupt politicians, the corrupt bureaucrats and the corrupt businessmen” (cited in Malik and Singh 1994, 68). The BJP characterisations of the elite naturally focussed on the Congress Party, which it described as an irredeemably corrupt entity in service of the Gandhi family rather than the Indian people (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 489). Its conception of the “elite” has also extended to Judges, NGO leaders and other established political parties who were accused of monopolising power and pandering to non-Hindu minorities (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019; Chacko 2018, 543; Sajjanhar 2021, 2). The damage done by this elite to ordinary Indian people was considered by the BJP as intentional and self-serving. “[A]ll pervasive” corruption, according to the party, was not just the work of bad apples, but “reflect[ed] the bad intentions of those in power” (Chacko 2018, 554). In Modi’s own words (in 2014) “This country is not poor. The people of this rich country have been kept poor because of politics” (Jaffrelot 2015, 153). On multiple policy issues, Modi contrasted the will of the people with politicians. He declared that foreign policy, for example “should be decided by the people and not by some politicians sitting in Delhi” (Wojczewski 2020, 406). As with other variables, there is a case for OTH_POLCLASS to be coded 3 for at least parts of the BJP’s inclusion I the dataset. However as the scale and diversity for the party message is so significant, we’ve left this at 2 for now.

The party’s representation of Hindutva cultural majoritarianism has long associated it with political hostility to non-Hindu minorities, especially Muslims. While the party’s official rhetoric has often been careful to not declare an open hostility to Muslims in violation of the secular constitution (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 491), Muslims have always been accused by the BJP of receiving the favour of Congress for its own interests, and were generally constructed as a default “other” to the Hindu majority (Nielsen and Nilsen 2021, 92; McGuire and Reeves 2003, 97; Kaul 2017, 525). In the context of India’s geopolitical tensions with Pakistan, Muslims were often cast as a security threat. While the party has avoided the harshest anti-Muslim rhetoric from the top, various incidents by key leaders have indelibly linked its identity with anti-Muslim hostility. Advani made himself and the BJP the face of the Ayodhya dispute in the 1990s, which essentially drummed up an anti-Muslim pogrom in the name of rectifying the alleged destruction of the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple centuries earlier. There is an argument (Jaffrelot 2013) that the party radicalised in the 1989-1996 period under Advani’s leadership, during which it abandoned an attempt to woo coalition parties and mobilised heavily on the Ram Temple issue. However we don’t think this quite elevates the party to a 3 on OTH_ETHNIC. As leader, Modi talked almost exclusively about the economy in his first election and relied on others to make the Hindutva case (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 492). His image as a Hindutva hardliner was enabled more by his controversial handling of communal violence in the 2002 Gujarat riots as Chief Minister of that state. A number of the party’s actions in government bolstered its anti-Muslim image. For example it attempted to pass a controversial amendment to the Citizenship Act which would have granted citizenship to migrants as long as they were not Muslim (G. Singh 2019, 316). Given the varying strains of ethnocentric rhetoric across the enormous party, we have kept it at 2 on OTH_ETHNIC for the duration.

The BJP’s policies and rhetoric under Modi have been described as “business friendly” (Chacko 2018, 554; see also Kaul 2017), and apart from occasionally accusing the Congress party of being linked with corrupt businesses (see above), the party’s rhetoric could not be considered against economic or financial elites in any significant way. This is in tune with Modi’s market based “Gujarat Model” of development and growth. Texts on the pre-Modi BJP don’t suggest that the party was fundamentally hostile to financial elites, the wealthy or big businesses then either. According to Kaul ( 2017, 525), the party was perceived in the early 1990s as a “party of middle-class commercial traders”. It is therefore coded OTH_ECONOMIC = 1 for the full period of its inclusion in the dataset. In the Modi era anti-Muslim rhetoric often overlapped with anti-immigrant rhetoric (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 491), particularly relating to Bangladeshi migrants who were considered the latest attempt by Congress to build a “vote bank” to keep them in power (Wojczewski 2020, 406). We’ve not found references to immigrants in the pre-Modi BJP, so OTH_IMMIGRANTS are coded 1 until 2014 and 2 after (this could be investigated further).

In conventional nationalist terms, Pakistan and China featured in BJP campaigns when portrayed as a beneficiary of Congress’s policies, and the party has generally benefited from military flare ups with Pakistan in Kashmir. This has often taken the form of collaborationist allegations against Congress: in one speech Modi asserted that if the government was “patriotic” they would put a stop to the violence on the disputed Chinese and Pakistani borders (Wojczewski 2020, 407). The BJP and its affiliates in the Modi era have also equated the Congress-led elite with the British colonial mission to divide and weaken India, and continuing to do their work under the guise of secularism (Wojczewski 2020, 406). Enemies like NGOs and student activists were often portrayed by the party as betraying India’s national sovereignty due to their foreign values and links (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019). None of this quite reaches the level of 3 on OTH_FOREIGN, so it has been coded 2. The BJP has always been a very pro-military party (OTH_MILITARY = 1).

The party’s consistent association with RSS and Ker Sevak militants and acts of communal violence against Muslims are the strongest evidence on the LIBDEMNORMS variable. Although the relationship between the Modi’s BJP and the RSS is arguably more distant than earlier (Palshikar 2015, 721), the attachment is still an important feature of the party. There have also been attacks on Dalit protesters under the BJP’s rule which the party has been silent on (McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 494). Modi and his campaign have also demonised the mainstream (particularly English language) media, portraying him as a victim of their conspiracy, and in government Modi weakened the Supreme Court’s independence (Chakravartty and Roy 2015, 316; McDonnell and Cabrera 2019, 493). In Kaul’s words, Modi’s government delivered an “increase in political and economic violence and overt intimidation at all levels of society accompanied by plummeting levels of media freedom, a consolidation and centralization of power, and an openly hostile attitude to secularism and democratic principles” (Kaul 2017, 529). We have coded the party 2 on LIBDEMNORMS for the entire period, although this could be revisited.

The party has consistently been described as right-wing (Nielsen and Nilsen 2021, 92), and in the Modi era economically neo-liberal. R on LRPOSITION seems appropriate. Given the established institutions and identity of the BJP, it is not evident that the party has ever owed its existence to its serving leader. This is true even for the charismatic Modi – as McDonnel and Cabera (2019, 485) state, “[h]owever popular or powerful Modi is, the party will survive him.” Numerous accounts of Modi’s two elections, however, state that his persona was immensely important to the BJP’s collective meaning and performance to a degree unprecedented in recent Indian elections (Jaffrelot 2015; Wojczewski 2020, 405; Kaul 2017, 528). His personal image and strategy presented him with an “direct and institutionally unmediated relationship to his followers” (Subedi and Scott 2021, 497). For this reason we have coded 1 on CHARISMA until 2014 and 2 for Modi’s two elections.

Bahujan Samaj Party

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was founded in 1984 by Dalit activist Kanshi Ram and led since 2003 by his appointed successor Mayawati. Both Ram and Mayawati are followers B.R. Ambedkar’s tradition of lower caste politics and critique of the Hindu system. The party has its roots in Uttar Pradesh (UP), but has also been present in other states in northern India. The BSP is dedicated to providing a political voice to those at the lower end of the caste system (The name Bahujan Samaj means “majority community”). It peaked in performance around the 1990s and 2000s, when Mayawati served four short stints as UPs Chief Minister. Due to its rhetoric against the upper castes the BSP has frequently been considered populist (Subramanian 2007; Lerche 1999). This is another party whose significance is understated by the scale of national politics, given its relatively small national footprint belies its success as a mass movement.

The party has attempted to win the support of lower caste (especially Dalit) constituencies who have hitherto traditionally supported the Congress Party. While this was initially limited to a few specific castes in the party’s early years, it grew to include a broader coalition of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs), Other Backward Castes (OBCs), and religious minorities in the 1990s (Guha 2013, 6; Sarkar 2021, 73). The BSP accused Congress of treating lower castes as “vote banks”, providing token benefits to excluded groups but acting as vehicles for the upper caste elite that usually led the party (Guha 2011, 1–2; Pai 2009, 339; S. Kumar 2017). While Congress was the principle object of the BSPs critique, Kanshi Ram made it clear that their tactics were shared by the other major parties, such as the BJP and the communist parties, all of which “uphold consciously the degrading character of the social and political system” (Sarkar 2021, 67). In Guha’s words “The BSP’s depiction of the Bahujan Samaj (‘the community of the majority’) turned on a binary that pitted it against Hindu upper castes, who were portrayed as constituting both its political and ideological ‘other’ ” (Guha 2013, 1; see also Gundimeda 2014, 26).

Both Ram and Mayawati have relied on very provocative and exclusionary discourse against the upper castes to mobilise its base. For example Ram often began his speeches by inviting any upper caste attendees to leave the venue, and Mayawati has called Mahatma Gandhi the “son of Satan” (Jaffrelot 1998, 38, 46). According to Singh (2019, 48–49), one of the party’s “signature slogan[s]” was “we have the votes, you have the power, this will not last, this will not last”. In UP, other “deeply offensive” slogans were chanted in public BSP processions in public areas to antagonise upper castes (Duncan 1999, 45; see also Gundimeda 2014, 27–28). A study in Punjab noted that the party recruited voters by insisting that various material compensations by the Congress government do not compensate for the humiliation of the Hindu caste system, the elite of which still governs them in the political class (Chandra 2000). The BSP generally softened its rhetoric against the upper casts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the extant that Mayawati tried extensively to recruit upper caste members into the party (V. Kumar 2007; Pai 2009, 345; N. Singh 2019, 49; Gundimeda 2014, 28). However, it still emphasised that upper castes were generally untrustworthy and maintained its general posture of hostility towards them. Owing to this shift, we’ve coded BSP as 3 on OTH_ETHNIC in the elections up to 1999, and 2 from the 2004 general election on, though this could be revisited. Given that the BSP essentially linked upper caste ethnicity with political power, we’ve taken this as OTH_POLCLASS rhetoric as well. However given that the OTH_POLCLASS dimension of this did not soften as the party tried to bring in upper caste members (on the contrary, it alleged that upper castes too had been abandoned by the elites), we have kept OTH_POLCLASS at 3 for the duration of BSP’s inclusion in the dataset.

Given the overlap between political and economic dimensions of the castes system, one might expect there to be a degree of hostility towards economic “others” like businesses and the wealthy. However this appears not to be the case, as several scholars have noted that the party does not actually campaign on economic issues relating to class-based material redistribution, but rather caste exclusion in strictly social, cultural, and political contexts (Duncan 1999, 36; Chandra 2000). According to Singh (writing on Punjab), the BSP had no social or political programme, relying instead on identity (N. Singh 2019, 51). In Duncan’s words “it’s appeal and campaigning appear to be far more caste based than class oriented and it has been primarily concerned with issues of social oppression and exclusion than with those relating to economic exploitation” (Duncan 1999, 36). For this reason, we’ve coded it 1 on OTH_ECONOMIC. The literature similarly presents no evidence of a significant hostility to the military, immigrants, or foreign powers in the BSP’s discourse(OTH_MILITARY = 1, OTH+FOERIGN = 1, OTH_IMMIGRANTS = 1).

Despite being an “ethnic party”, the BSP in government or opposition has not been affiliated with communal violence in the same way as the BJP has (N. Singh 2019), and there is little evidence that is poses a threat to established liberal democratic norms (LIBDEMNORMS = 1). The party’s heavy association with Ram and now Mayawati (257) earn it a consistent 2 on CHARISMA.

Not included

The Indian National Congress was the dominant party in India for several decades after independence, and was led by Jawaharlal Nehru with a centre-left non-populist platform. When his daughter Indira Gandhi tool over the party in 1966 she took control from decentralised party bosses by building a more personalist leadership with direct communication to the masses and constructed a brand of left wing agrarian populism against local political elites (Kenny 2017). This was well established by the early 1970s, but according to most sources (Subramanian 2007) she toned this down in her second stint in power 1980-84 (only the 1980 election would fall within our time frame). That said, it may be the case that her 1980 election campaign should be considered in more detail. Owing to the lack of clear evidence on this campaign, we’re omitted it from the dataset.

References

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