Political Revolution: Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and Hindu-Muslim Relations

Political Revolution: Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party,

 And Hindu-Muslim Relations

By Josh Prefontaine

History 3850

Professor Heidi MacDonald

December 3, 2015

The political rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP was a violent time in India’s long political history. Through a political campaign during the late 1980’s through the 1990’s the BJP would indirectly and directly promote violence against Muslims in India and fuel the fires of resentment and anger between Hindus and Muslims. This paper’s thesis will show how the Bharatiya Janata Party rise to power was characterized by violence and manipulation of the people of India. It will begin with looking at how Indian government is structured, reasons for hatred between Hindus and Muslims, and examine the history of the BJP and how it was formed. It will also explain what religious symbolism was used to promote the idea of “Hindutva” or Hindu nationalism, the story of the Hindu epic the Ramayana and the BJP’s Rath Yatra to Ayodhya. Significant protests/riots caused by the BJP’s idea of Hindutva will be discussed as well as the aftermath of each. This paper will also draw upon an interview with Hillary Rodrigues, a Religious Studies scholar and Professor at the University of Lethbridge whose story will be partly used to discuss political tensions between Hindus and Muslims, while also examining the BJP’s idea of religion and politics in India as a whole.

India has an asymmetric government meaning that it has representatives at the local, state, and federal levels that make up the largest democracy in the world. Elections take place every five years and due to India’s massive size and population polls are opened for up to three weeks. India has a Prime Minister who is elected from the lower house of Parliament called the Lok Sabha, government officials are elected through the Electoral Commission of India who gather votes from citizens 18 years or older. India also has a president, who is elected by the Members of Parliament and serves for a term of up to 5 years, and a prime minister. The President holds the highest office and is the commander of all of India’s armed forces, the difference between the President of India and the Prime Minister is that the President is the head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of the government. The President plays more of a ceremonial role meaning that he does not pass any bills or laws himself, but all decisions made in the Lok Sabha are made in his name. If the president does not approve of a bill that is being passed he cannot veto it but rather suggests that Parliament revise it. The Prime Minister on the other hand, being the head of government is the leader of the Lok Sabha and is in charge of all political decisions made within the Indian government, while also playing the role of the Chief Advisor to the President. The fact that the Prime Minister controls what goes on within Parliament makes him even more powerful than the President.

 Relations between Hindus and Muslims in India have for many centuries been violent and strained. After the British left India in 1947 the country violently split into Pakistan, which is a predominantly Muslim country, and India where the majority of the population is Hindu or a variation of Hindu. This division caused more than 11 million people in the Punjab and Bengal regions to migrate between the two countries^[1]. As a consequence of the violence between these two religions more than 500,000 people were killed^[2] during the migration. After the Partition India and Pakistan have been involved in four separate territorial wars over the region of Kashmir^[3], which has led to the deaths of thousands, and has only aided in driving the hatred between the two countries and their dominant religions.

To understand the BJP’s political ambitions one must first become familiar with some of their ideologies and positions on certain political matters. The BJP was preceded by the Bharatiya Janata Sangh (BJS), which later became affiliated with the Janata Party.  An internal split within the Janata party was created when some of its members wanted to support a pro-Hindu nationalist group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS was a nationalist group responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. All of the members of the former BJS party who supported the RSS eventually formed the BJP, who in Rodrigues’s words were “card-carrying members of the RSS.”^[4]  The party quickly formed many key alliances with other Indian political parties with similar ideologies. Using these alliances the BJP was able to gain influence and start to push their pro-Hindu nationalist agenda.

Rajiv Gandhi was India’s prime minister during part of the BJP’s rise in India. He was associated with India’s Congress party, a pluralistic party that focused on the equality of all religions and ideologies within the country. He became Prime Minister when his mother, Prime Minster Indira Gandhi and the first women prime minister of India, was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards in 1984^[5], following a military operation that she ordered to establish control over a group of armed Sikhs and remove their leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale^[6]. Basing themselves out of the Harmandir Sahib, a Sikh temple located in the north-western city of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab. The military operation left the Sikh temple badly damaged which led to the Prime Minister’s assassination by her bodyguards as a show of revenge by the Sikh community. Indira Gandhi’s assassination created a sympathy vote for the Congress party, which won an extremely large amount of seats in India’s parliament in the next election.  

 After the BJP’s loss in the 1984 elections L.K. Advani replaced their current president Vajpayee. Under Advani’s leadership the party attracted the masses of Hindu activists who were angered by the governments catering to minorities.  Advani criticized the government’s policies towards non-Hindu’s advocating for a government that should care about the majority first. He supported the repeal of the special status given to the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir^[7]. Advani also reaffirmed and strengthened the BJP’s ties with the other Hindu nationalist political parties. One of the ways the BJP was able to create a nationalist sentiment all throughout India was its use of religious symbolism, one such symbol was the Hindu goddess Durga. Pro-militant groups in India also used Durga as a symbol in order to justify violence towards minorities, Hillary Rodrigues was conducting part of his PhD research on the Goddess, and witnessed the use of Durga as a symbol of the BJP and pro-militant groups he said “The goddess I was studying (Durga) was being invoked by the pro-militant groups because she is kind of a militant goddess, the goddess of victory… they would say we are under her banner and are doing this for her.”^[8]