The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its efforts to naturalize and depoliticize its politics of identity engendered a narrative that the party is not indulged in majoritarian nationalism and its narrative is about the nation – Bharat Mata that has naturally and historically evolved. The party sought to depoliticise the discourse of majoritarianism by shedding the controversial baggage of Hindutva and subscribing to Indian civilizational values. The narrative of Indian civilizational identity has been assiduously structured by the BJP in contrast to the politics of identity engaged by the Congress Party and many regional parties.
To tone down the religious underpinnings of the concept of Hindutva, the BJP has sought to minimise and gradually eliminate its usage in its manifestos. A careful examination reveals while its 1998 manifesto included Hindutva in the very first chapter as one of its ideological pillars and in 2004, under the ‘India Shining’ branding BJP was hoping to return to power and Hindutva was mentioned as the basis of the party’s national identity. However, a clear shift was perceptible a decade later, as the BJP’s manifesto for the 2014 elections did not use the word Hindutva even once. In fact, the only reference to ‘Hindu’ at all comes in the form of a promise that India will remain a refuge for “persecuted Hindus”. In subsequent manifestos in 2019 instead of Hindu identity, phrases like India’s Civilization/ Cultural Heritage were used and in 2024, similar phrases like Ancient Bharatiya Civilization/Cultural Heritage were mentioned.
Similarly, the RSS from which the party derives ideological resources has evolved over the years by distancing itself from the far more radical interpretations of Hindutva in the Savarkar-Golwalkar imagination in favour of a more reflexive and assimilationist position on Muslims/Christians in the Mukherji-Upadhyaya framework of ‘Integral Humanism’ and ‘Indianization’ (Bharatiyata) For instance, while Shyama Prasad Mukherjee dissociated from the Hindu Mahasabha and formed the Bhartiya Jan Sangh in 1951 on the core question of membership of Muslims and Christians, the RSS opened its membership to the latter in 1979 under the stewardship of Balasaheb Deoras. Since 2002, the RSS-backed Rashtriya Muslim Manch (RMM) has been outreaching Muslims to bring them to the ‘mainstream’.
Discourses on Equality, Justice and Development
The BJP formulated its discourse of equality around the Congress party’s pseudo-secular policies. For instance, it argued the party which dominated the political scene in India for decades in the Post-independence era took measures exclusively at reforming Hindu civil laws while at the same time did not intervene at all to reform minority religions like Islam particularly in the areas that required reform. It has been argued that India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru taking stock of post-partition scenario wanted to delay reforms of Muslim personal laws until a demand came from the community itself which due to Congress Party’s vote-bank politics gradually translated into an ‘inflexible guarantee of absolute non-interference on the part of the state in the internal affairs of Muslims’.
To forge its identity politics effectively on the modern notions of equality and justice specifically gender equality, the BJP has capitalized on the law passed by the Modi government banning Triple Talaq on the first day of August 2019 and juxtaposed it with the Shah Bano’s case of 1985 to substantiate and drive home the point that Congress Party’s commitment to secularism is governed by vote bank politics. The Congress Party’s leader Rajiv Gandhi who led the government as well failed to provide justice to Bano, a Muslim woman who filed a claim for maintenance for herself and her five children. Gandhi’s government passed a law that overturned the Indian Supreme Court’s judgement in favour of Bano which invoked the section 123 of the Code of Criminal Procedure,1973 and put a legal obligation on her husband to provide alimony on the ground that she was unable to fend for herself. However, this judgement ran contrary to Muslim Personal Law in India which required the husband to only provide maintenance for the iddat period after divorce. Afraid of alienating the minority community, Gandhi was instrumental in bringing the law which insulated Muslim personal law from Bano’s striving for justice.
On the other hand, the BJP outlawed the practice of Triple Talaq embedded in Muslim personal law which discriminated against women section of Muslim community by allowing men the privilege to take divorce and break away from marital obligations as per their convenience which was not available to women. The law made such actions punishable offence. BJP claimed this as a milestone achievement of Modi government towards securing gender justice, dignity and equality which stood in sharp contrast with the idea of minority appeasement and it was also claimed that the Bill against Triple Talaq was made a Law despite of obstacle put by so-called “Champions of Secularism” including Congress, Communist Party, SP, BSP and Trinamool Congress.
The Indian Constitution recognises and provides safeguards to religious minorities as group rights which subsume and compromise individual rights. The BJP blames the Congress Party for misusing the group rights for vote-bank politics. On the other side, the BJP government, in line of this argument, has kept the implementation of Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in its manifestos for the last successive general elections.
Many scholars while appreciated the inclusive character of India’s salad bowl model of minority accommodation compared to the assimilation model adopted by several Western liberal democracies, they have nonetheless found problems in the model’s reduction of minority rights to a bundle of cultural and religious rights, overlooking the concrete forms of socioeconomic marginalization of minorities. Further, they expressed their discomfort with the institutionalization of minority rights without a corresponding elaboration of their rationale through public debate and therefore lacked a wider political consensus and the relative noninterference of the Indian state in the religious personal laws of the minorities has contributed to a strong notion of “minority appeasement”. In this light, the BJP has built its critique of Congress Party’s secularism as biased which is directed towards securing the vote bank of religious minorities whereas it cannot address the socio-economic and human rights issues concerning the community. Further in this context, the BJP demonstrated its agenda of inclusive development – Sabka Saath Sabka Bikash- as based on the notions of equality, justice and dignity which can deliver the fruits of development to all irrespective of caste, creed, gender, religious and racial differences. The Party has sought to engage with the socially and economically backward Muslims known as Pasmanda Muslims under Prime Minister Modi belying the notion of the Congress Party that treated Muslim minority community as a monolithic entity by nature. Modi took concerted efforts to construct Islamic identity based on the peaceful tradition of Sufism and sought to engage Pasmanda Muslims around these principles. He said: “India became a principal center of Islamic civilization, our nation also emerged as one of the most vibrant hubs of Sufism. Sufism became the face of Islam in India, even as it remained deeply rooted in the Holy Quran, and Hadis. They are steeped in the democratic tradition of India, confident of their place in the country and invested in the future of their nation….above all, they are shaped by the values of the Islamic heritage of India. It upholds the highest ideals of Islam and has always rejected the forces of terrorism and extremism”. The BJP’s Minority Morcha organised programmes under the Sufi Samvad Maha Abhiyan where Sufis from many dargahs attended.
The BJP used the Sachar Committee Report (2006) to substantiate its accusations by keeping the sordid data before the public in subsequent years that the Congress Party which ruled the country for maximum years in the post-independence era with its avowed secular policies and commitment to socio-economic progress of minority communities did nothing substantial for them except using the communities to serve political ends. The BJP criticized the Congress Party’s secularism more as a political strategy of appeasement rather than its concerns for Muslims as the report displayed grim statistics the Muslims were poorer and had lower social indicators than Dalits. Muslim-dominated areas had fewer government services than average, such as public schools and banking services. Not having access to credit is a particular problem: the ratio of self-employed Muslims is higher than the national average. There were accusations from within the party that “the government made plans and allocated funds, but released very little money and spent even less”.
In this larger context, the BJP leader LK Advani remarked: “I feel Gujarat should be grateful to Justice Sachar for proving convincingly to the country that under Narendra Bhai Modi’s regime, Muslims are far better off than their compatriots in other states.” This argument later evolved into the party’s rhetoric: “Development of all, appeasement of none”.
Use of Religious Card by Secular Regimes
The BJP often cited how the Congress Party used the card of religion to win elections. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not shy away from accommodating Sikh religious extremists, such as the fundamentalist preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the late 1970s and early 1980s to defeat the Akali Dal in Punjab, a political party largely popular and comprised of moderate Sikhs. However, this strategy backfired and Gandhi lost control of Bhindranwale and his Sikh militants, she ordered the Indian Army to invade the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest site, where they resided. All these tragic events culminated in the eventual assassination of Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, which triggered bloody anti-Sikh pogroms across Delhi in which several prominent Congress politicians were implicated.
Much in a similar vein, Indira Gandhi attempted to tilt the 1983 Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections in Congress Party’s favour by raising the bogey of Muslim invasion of Jammu region through a resettlement bill. The bill had been passed by the National Conference government which gave Kashmiris who left for Pakistan between 1947 and 1954 the right to return and reclaim their properties and resettle. While the strategy of stoking Hindu voters’ fears over the bill largely paid off as the Congress Party made big gains in the predominately Hindu Jammu region, the use of the card of religion proved costly in the long-run which only helped sow further divisions between Hindus and Muslims in the troubled state. It also fed into the BJP’s narrative that illegal Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries pose a threat to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The use of religion as an instrument to secure vote banks was palpable when much publicized conversions of untouchable communities in and around the village of Meenakshipuram in South India to Islam in 1981 took place and the Congress government of Indira Gandhi warned against the disuniting of India when “Gulf money” would induce untouchables and tribal peoples to leave the Hindu fold. Scholars argue that this induced the Hindu nationalists to go a step further in 1983 by organizing a revivalist campaign called the Ekatmata Yajna (Sacrifice for Unity), lasting over a month and consisting of processions, rituals, and rallies all over India and Nepal.
The BJP opposed the Congress Party’s moves towards reservations on the ground of religion in Andhra Pradesh and Karanataka dubbing it unconstitutional and party’s long-standing indulgence in minority appeasement politics. It contends that while socially and economically backward Muslims are already getting reservations under the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category and the Mandal Commission at the centre recommended inclusion of many backward classes of Muslims into the OBC fold, there need not be reservations on specific ground of religion. The BJP under Modi made reservations a part of its public rallies to counter the Congress Party’s politics of identity in which it criticised the Congress Party’s insistence on caste census and its commitment to break the Supreme Court’s1998 ceiling on reservation confining it to 50 percent in its manifesto as a political strategy to provide Muslims reservation out of the existing quotas meant for OBCs and Dalits. The party has cited the leader of the Ratriya Janata Dal and an alliance partner of Congress Party Lalu Prasad Yadav’s statement that full reservation should be provided to Muslims. “This word, ‘pura ka pura’ (full), used by him in his statement, is very serious. This makes it clear that they (INDIA bloc) want to provide reservation to Muslims from the share of SCs, STs and OBCs,” the BJP national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi told a press conference at the party headquarters New Delhi.
To corroborate his accusations that the Congress Party is using the card of religion for political purposes, Prime Minister Modi alleged the Congress Party during its previous rule wanted to allocate 15 per cent of the government budget for minorities and he stood against splitting of budget or reservation in jobs and education on the basis of religion.
The BJP has astutely drawn on statements from the leaders of the Congress Party to demonstrate how they did not support reservation without conditions and indefinitely. For instance, the Chairman of the BJP OBC National Morcha K Laxman argued: “Nehru wrote letters to the chief ministers at that time claiming that caste-based reservations would stifle talent and development. Laxman also quoted transcripts of Rajiv’s speech in Parliament, which contradicted the Mandal Commission’s findings, to buttress his accusation”.
Apart from the Congress Party’s leader Rahul Gandhi’s exclusive visits to temples prior to elections, his inconsistent remarks posing challenges to his party’s secular credentials have also played straight into the BJP’s advantages. For instance, in 2012, declaring to the voters in Badaun, Rahul gave credit to his grandmother Indira Gandhi for breaking up Pakistan. He said: “I belong to the family which has never moved backwards, which has never gone back on its words. You know that when any member of my family has decided to do anything, he does it. Be it the freedom struggle, the division of Pakistan or taking India to the 21st century”.
Secular Parties Slam the Narratives of BJP
The secular parties including the Congress Party underlined the fact that despite the BJP’s adept strategies at formulating a narrative of nationalism based on equality, justice and development, ground realities as regards the representation of Muslims by the party pointed to a different reality. The minority community remained underrepresented in the Parliament. Just as the Parliament post-2019 had no Muslim representative from the BJP, the post-2024 General Elections witnessed not even a single Muslim MP becoming part of BJP-led NDA. The Party fielded six candidates in 2019 elections compared to one in 2024. On the other side, the Congress Party has been represented by 09 Muslims MPs post-2024 General Elections. Muslim representation in State Assemblies displays more or less similar statistics. The party has been subject to scathing criticisms from politicians, scholars and commentators with secular outlook on the ground of its inability to field Muslims in the General Elections. However, the BJP is fielding more candidates in local panchayat raj bodies. For instance, in the last elections to urban local bodies in UP in 2023, the party registered victories in several Muslim dominated areas and the party fielded as many as 395 Muslim candidates in the elections.
The secular parties cited the instances of indulgence of anti-minority rhetoric by leaders and policies adopted by the BJP that threatened religious minorities especially Muslims in India such as efforts at rewriting of history with a view to undermining the rule by Medieval Islamic rulers, scrapping of article 370 undermining the special constitutional status of Kashmir, Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), cases of cow vigilantism, and warm reception of many accused in Godhra riots by the BJP affiliated organizations among others as the examples of the Party’s majoritarian ethos that remained untainted.
To conclude, it can be asserted that Identity politics over religion, caste and other identity markers gathers steam only when the government fails to deliver economic development to all. While all the political parties including the secular parties such as the Congress Party did not shy away from engaging in politics over religion, the BJP’s failure to macromanage the economy with hikes in the prices of essential commodities and rising cases of youth unemployment would lead to increasing demands for reservation and representation along the identity markers and the parties to win elections would indulge in identity politics over religion irrespective of their ideological differences.