Militant Hindu monk and UP Chief Minister, Shri Yogi Adityanath (pictured here with President Shri Ram Nath Kovind), has, along with PM Narendra Modi, led an Islamophobic campaign laced with fear.
(Credit:President’s Secretariat/WikiCommons)

Sajeda Haider

India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has retained control of the state Assembly following a successful election campaign laced with Islamophobic subtext and fear-mongering.

Leading the charge was the Chief Minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), the militant monk and poster boy of aggressive Hindu nationalism, Yogi Adityanath. He was closely followed by the PM, who was the chief campaigner and overarching face in all the five states that went to the polls.

The BJP retained power in UP and Uttarakhand in the north, Manipur in the northeast, and Goa in the southwest. It made scant headway in Punjab, in the northwest, where it is only a minor player, but where the ruling Congress Party was ousted by the Aam Aadmi Party – a party that is not even 10 years old.

However, the real electoral prize was the BJP’s astonishing win in UP, the most politically important state, with the highest number of MPs and where Modi is elected.

Although the BJP did not get the overwhelming mandate in UP that it did in 2017, when it won 325 of the total 403 Assembly seats, its retention of 273 seats was no less impressive, giving it a comfortable majority to continue with its Hindutva (Hindu nation) agenda.

Ironically, even the BJP did not expect to do so well in the elections after a disastrous term that included crippling inflation, record unemployment rates, deadly COVID mismanagement, and a farmer revolt that forced a pre-election repeal of three unpopular agrarian laws.

However, despite all these governance failures, the BJP was able to extract electoral victories simply by alienating and “othering” Muslims.

Both, Modi and Yogi ran fear-mongering, religiously polarising campaigns, with Yogi talking only of the 80:20 divide – there are 80% Hindus and 20% Muslims in UP – and speaking in terms of ‘us vs. them’. Modi, Yogi and all the BJP leaders campaigned based on ‘security’ and ‘law and order’ brought to the state by Yogi during his five-year rule by getting rid of the ‘Muslim mafia’.

The BJP raised fears among voters in UP with claims a victory by the main opposition party, the Samajwadi Party, would mark a return to mafia control under the pretext that it would be ruled by Muslims.

Modi went even further, referring to ‘Muslim terrorists’ using ‘bicycles’ to plant bombs in Ahmedabad in retaliation for the 2002 Gujarat pogrom unleashed against Muslims. He juxtaposed this with the fact that the Samajwadi Party emblem is a bicycle, implying that the party is Muslim, teeming with terrorists, who both Modi and Yogi claimed were waiting for a Samajwadi Party victory, so they could be freed to resume their ‘reign of terror’.

Using this fake but effective messaging, largely on social media, the BJP was able to blunt the impact of the yearlong farmer protest, youth discontent over unemployment and public anger at COVID mismanagement during the second wave last year that saw people dying on the streets due to lack of oxygen, crematoriums being overwhelmed and bodies floating down the River Ganges.

The BJP and its affiliated media failed to mention the Islamophobic campaigning, and instead credited the Government’s welfare programmes, Covid food rations, and appeal to women voters for the spectacular electoral victories.

“Modi has turned the infamous inefficient, corrupt, corroded system of governance into a huge garib-kalyan mela (poor-welfare fair)”, writes an Indian journalist in Rediff, and it was the “last mile development projects” that were giving Modi votes.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Several non-BJP governments have, over the past 75 years, launched a multitude of welfare programmes with no comparable electoral rewards. During this very election in UP, the pan-Indian secular, Congress Party, had promised, ₹6,000 (£60) to every family below the poverty line, far more than any handout by any BJP government anywhere in the country. Yet, the Congress won only two seats, their worst performance since independence.

The BJP’S false, “poor man’s champion”, narrative is peddled to distract attention from its divisive election campaign, a campaign that, like many others over the past decade, was Islamophobic in tone and content, aiming at aligning majoritarian sentiment with the larger objectives of Hindutva.

Yogi retains power in UP after five years of consistent baiting and berating of Muslims—imprisoning Muslims on false charges or getting the police to carry out extra-judicial killings. He has done this all openly and wears it as a badge of honour, and UP has rewarded him for it with a huge mandate. Many see this as a preview of the 2024 general election, and if that is the case, then the future for India’s Muslims is extremely bleak.