India election: fears that Modi’s BJP will polarise voters in fight for key state

The sun scorched the carpeted car park at Mudipu Junction outside Mangalore in Karnataka state as volunteers arranged rows of red plastic chairs and placed mounds of biryani and fruit on the table for a public iftar, the moment Muslims break their fast during Ramadan.

But this was no ordinary iftar. India is in the midst of a general election during which prime minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeking a third term, and factionalism is rife.

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The BJP, a formidably well-oiled machine, is going all out in Karnataka because it is the only state in south India where it has a foothold. Its presence in the other southern states is negligible. For a party with vaunting ambitions to reshape the political landscape for generations to come, this has frustrated the leadership.

In the last general election in 2019, the BJP won 25 of Karnataka’s 28 seats. But the BJP may not be able to repeat such a decisive victory this time round; while the Congress party has languished in opposition for 10 years at a national level, it won a handsome victory in state elections last year.

It is not yet clear whether BJP candidates will rely on the party’s familiar tactics of drawing on religious divisions and polarising voters, but given such high stakes the campaign has the potential to turn vicious.

Amid such a climate, the organisers of the iftar decided, they said, to make a point of inviting Hindu and Christian residents in Mudipu to share the meal earlier this month.

“The Hindu-Muslim polarisation in this area is so deep after decades of the BJP’s divisive politics that we thought we’d make it an iftar for everyone. Let us sit, eat, talk and remember we are all Indians,” said Ibrahim Mohammed, who has several businesses in the area.

Among the non-Muslim attendees were Dr Sureka Shetty, a local Hindu gynaecologist, and Catholic nun Sister Philla. “I live here. I work here. I want to be on good terms with my Muslim neighbours and that’s why I accepted the invitation,” Shetty said, shouting to be heard over the sound of film music blaring from speakers.

A long history of communal violence

Mangalore is the main city in the beautiful coastal region of Karnataka. From a plane, the 200 miles of sandy beaches along the Arabian Sea, fringed by a forest of palm trees, stretch like an idyll.

Yet this area has, since the 1990s, been a bastion of Hindutva, the BJP’s ideology of assertive nationalist Hinduism that seeks the establishment of a Hindu, rather than a secular, state.

Dubbed the “Hindutva laboratory”, the coastal region has been a testing ground of sorts for the party to see how certain divisive policies play, from the banning of cow slaughter and halal to moves to ban Muslim traders from putting up stalls in Hindu temple fairs.

Unlike north India where Muslims form 14% of the population, in Karnataka they comprise 24%.

Mangalore is modern, wealthy and multicultural, thanks to the myriad influences of waves of traders over the centuries who arrived on its shores. The city is an education hub, full of schools and colleges set up by the church. But tensions remain beneath the surface, say residents. “It has a long history of communal violence. It takes nothing to provoke a flareup,” said local journalist Shivani Kava.

The bishop of Mangalore, Peter Paul Saldanha, described the shocked reaction of a Christian teacher at the local school who was sacked at the behest of BJP politicians. They claimed the teacher, Sister Prabha, had insulted Hindu gods and “poisoned” children’s minds against Hinduism. Bishop Saldanha insisted that all she did was to recite a Rabindranath Tagore poem called Work is Worship in the English class.

“We tried to persuade the management not to sack her until an investigation had been carried out but they sacked her anyway,” the bishop said.

At another school, St Aloysius College, some students gathered in the shade of a long corridor to cram in the hour before their exams. Abbey Jose made a wry face when he said his exam was on the constitution. “We don’t even know if we will have a constitution if the BJP wins,” he said.

With hardly any jobs, their parents are urging them to go to the Gulf or seek their fortune in the west after graduating. “We don’t have a future here if the BJP comes back,” said Fiza Mayin, a psychiatry student. “As Muslims, there will be nothing for us. People don’t even look at the candidate. They look at his religion and decide.”

‘The crucial factor is Modi’

What observers have noted, though they are not prepared to go so far as to call it a shift in thinking, is that the BJP has dropped two of the state’s senior sitting MPs who are known for their hate speeches: Ananth Kumar Hegde and Nalin Kumar Kateel. The latter notoriously told party workers last year to “focus on love jihad and not on drains, roads and development”.

“It’s possible that the BJP is going to dial down the polarising rhetoric and talk more about development in light of the Congress party’s victory in the state election and its many welfare benefits,” said Ashish Goyal, a Congress supporter.

Goyal believes that the welfare benefits his party has distributed since coming to power last May will win voters over. Political scientist Sandeep Shastri, director, academics, at the NITTE Education Trust is more circumspect, saying it depends on whether Congress can create the public perception that the benefits are reaching everyone.

“The crucial factor, though, is Modi,” said Shastri. “The election here and across India is about him and him only. No one else. If the BJP can make Modi the central issue, then it will be hard to defeat.”

Modi has set a hugely ambitious target of 400 seats for his party and its allies out of the 543 seats in the lower house of parliament. An opinion poll by India TV-CNX published last week suggested it might not be a pipe-dream. It said the Modi-led coalition could win 393 of the 543 seats, which would amount to a staggering victory.

As for Congress, the poll said it could be almost wiped out, winning only 40 seats, a record low and worse than its earlier record low of 52 seats in the last general election.

At the iftar, where organisers had hoped to bring together people from all communities, BJP politicians were invited too. None came.