NaMo's Second Go

Homes and businesses burned by Hindu nationalist rioters in the Muslim neighborhood of Shiv Vihar, in northeastern Delhi. The violence took place in late February. Photo by Hemant Banswal.

With each new draft of this article, I had to update a statistic: the death toll from the violence that has engulfed Delhi in recent days. Every morning new corpses are dragged from public drains. At the time of writing, 53 people have died. As Air Force One approached Indian airspace last week, carrying President Donald Trump on his first official visit representing the United States, communal riots exploded across parts of the capital, pitting Hindu and Muslim neighbors against one another. 

There are several levels of analysis required to explain why this calamity happened. The most immediate cause even has a proper name: Kapil Mishra. Mr Mishra, a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), had just lost his seat in Delhi’s parliament. Seeking to bounce back, he gave a vitriolic speech warning the police that if they failed to clear protesters who were occupying a nearby road, he would do it himself. Hours later, clenched palms were filled with stones, storefronts with Muslim names draped in sheets of flame.

A wider explanation involves the two pieces of administrative legalese that provoked the protesters who aroused Mr Mishra’s ire: the Citizenship Amendment Act (C.A.A.) and the National Register of Citizens (N.R.C.), introduced last year and due to be implemented in the coming months. This implementation will occur in a two-part process. The N.R.C. will first require Indian residents to present identity papers proving that they are Indian citizens—an impossible task in a country notorious for subpar documentation, especially among the poor and illiterate people who comprise a large portion of its population. Those who cannot provide such papers risk being labeled illegal immigrants. This is no problem, however, if they are Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, or Christian: the C.A.A. will fast-track their naturalization process and they will be granted Indian citizenship. Muslims, who form India’s largest minority, are explicitly excluded from this privilege; those who cannot prove their Indianness with documentary evidence face being rendered stateless.

The C.A.A. and N.R.C. have sparked outrage. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest, asserting that these processes discriminate on the basis of religion, and thus violate India’s constitutionally-bound secularism. The outpouring of anger has led to the first sustained street-based opposition to the B.J.P. government, crossing boundaries of religion, socioeconomic status, and geographical divide. There is no sign of the movement losing momentum: new protests arise in towns and cities across the country every day, and the female-led sit-in in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh has been ongoing since the 15th of December of last year. Even B.J.P. allies have voiced displeasure at the law.  

The Shaheen Bagh protest. The sit-in is blocking a major road in Delhi. Photo by DTM.

The government has been taken aback by the backlash. The N.R.C./C.A.A. combination had been loudly trumpeted by Amit Shah, the home minister, who promised to implement the system across the country to rid India of illegal immigrant “termites”, whom he would “throw into the Bay of Bengal”. Soon after the protests began, however, Mr. Modi appeared to contradict him, asserting that there were no plans to implement the N.R.C. nationwide. There is mixed messaging from the government—perhaps indicative of the public pressure it has been facing. As of now, though, the C.A.A. itself appears unstoppable.

The roots of the C.A.A. issue, one that has left India at its most viciously divided in perhaps thirty years, may be traced to Mr. Modi’s reelection in last year’s national polls. Since then, in a marked departure from his first term, he has put economic and administrative reform on the backburner, choosing instead to focus on a radical remaking of India to actualize his party’s vision of the country as a Hindu homeland with a unified body politic, moving away from the secular, syncretic ideals of India’s founding fathers Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. With this goal in mind, the government has wielded influence through law, institutions, and even language. One of the new government’s first actions was to release a draft education policy that would require schools in every state to teach Hindi, spoken in the populous north of the country: the B.J.P.’s voter heartland. Southern states, fiercely proud of their linguistic heritage, launched a furious response, accusing the government of eroding pluralism to impose their worldview—of which having a single national language is an important part—on the whole country. The policy was quickly withdrawn.

In other matters, however, the party has been less responsive to criticism. In August, the government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that had enjoyed autonomy as part of its agreement to join Hindu-majority India at independence in 1947. This status, outlined in the Indian constitution, had long been a bugbear of Hindu nationalists, who saw it as unfair minority appeasement. The government undertook this operation by detaining local political leaders, cutting off communications, and severing transport links. Seven months later, the general public still cannot access broadband internet.

The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status was the first big move in a second term that has thus far been marked by high drama. It was the protests against the C.A.A., however, that laid bare the government’s polarizing nature. The Delhi riots were not the first instance of violence in recent months. During the course of the protests, several prestigious universities—traditional hubs of dissent—have been under sustained attack. In December, police entered the library of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, a major hub for anti-C.A.A. protests, and beat students using sticks. The police denied this until CCTV footage of the assault was broadcast by The Quint, an independent media house. The video also shows policemen trying to destroy the security cameras in the room. Jawaharlal Nehru University, a left-wing bastion, had its gentle membrane ripped apart in January when mask-wearing goons invaded the campus and went on a rampage, thrashing students and wrecking property; a photo of student union president Aishe Ghosh, blood streaming down her face, was distributed widely. The Delhi police, which is controlled by the central government, did not intervene and have failed to arrest any suspects, despite many having been recorded declaring their allegiance to an extremist B.J.P.-allied Hindu group. Instead, the police have filed charges blaming the brutality on Ms. Ghosh and her fellow students.

Jamia Millia Islamia students protest on December 15th, just hours before being attacked by police. Photo by DTM.

Universities are not the only independent institutions to face immense pressure. The Supreme Court has been roiled by controversy, with critics accusing the government of politicizing the judicial branch. Arun Mishra, a justice on the Supreme Court, which is charged with oversight of the government’s actions, last month publicly called Mr. Modi a “visionary” and a “versatile genius.” Justice Mishra’s nomination to the Court had been blocked three times by his fellow judges after background checks revealed his ties to the R.S.S., a right-wing Hindu group that is the B.J.P. 's parent organization. He was finally elevated immediately after Mr. Modi’s election in 2014. Last week, a Delhi high-court judge who berated the police for not filing charges against anti-Muslim rioters was transferred to a different state.

Beyond the courtroom, the fourth branch also shows signs of saffron-tinted discoloration. Much of the mainstream media is in thrall to the government: after exit polls predicted a B.J.P. loss in state elections in Delhi, one popular Hindi anchor ranted that “selfish” voters did not care that “Mughal rule” would return to India; Arnab Goswami, the host of an English-language channel that dominates the airwaves, wrote the prime minister a glowing birthday message and ceaselessly mocks opposition leaders. Mr. Modi, who has never held a press conference during the six years of his premiership, has in recent months targeted critical journalists using financial and legal means. The government has withdrawn advertising from three of the most prominent dailies, sparking speculation that they were being punished for their scrutiny of government policies. 

A few months ago, Aatish Taseer, a British-born writer and the author of a Time cover piece that criticized Mr. Modi, was informed that his Overseas Citizenship of India had been withdrawn. This effectively prevented him from ever returning to India, where he was raised. “I felt that they were weaponizing the idea of citizenship, and they were trying to have the idea of Indian citizenship conform to a more blood-and-soil idea of being Hindu,” he told me recently at a bar on the Upper West Side. “Their M.O. is to settle each of their scores. It’s an unbelievable culture of pettiness.” He refers to one particularly notorious incident: a primary school that organized an anti-C.A.A. play was raided by police, who interrogated the children and jailed the headmaster.  

Such stories have stoked the anger of the placard-carrying crowds who fill the streets of Indian cities and stand outside Indian consulates abroad. The movement is entirely borne by ordinary people; the political opposition is widely seen to have failed to respond adequately to the government’s actions. Wracked by internal strife, the Indian National Congress, the only national opposition party, has a negligible presence in parliament. The Congress was developed out of the independence movement and is formed on values of secularism, equality, and social justice, as shaped by its early grandees including Gandhi and Nehru. In modern India, though, the party is notorious for two things. The first is the corruption that ran rampant during its last period in government, from 2004 to 2014. The second is the perceived stranglehold of Nehru’s descendants on the party, and by proxy that of a detached elite. In recent months, it has been led at various points by Rahul Gandhi, Nehru’s great-grandson, and Rahul’s mother Sonia. The Gandhis are unpopular among voters, and the party’s internal structure makes changes at the top unlikely: it is run by an old-guard politburo, directly appointed by the central leadership. One senior Congress leader I spoke to mused that “In a normal party, you’d have elections. Many of these people have never won an election in their lives.”

The Congress produced a dismal result in last year’s general election, but has wrested power from the B.J.P. in five states since 2018. The B.J.P. has won just five of the last sixteen state polls, most recently being trounced in Delhi, where it had conducted a campaign driven by vitriolic religious rhetoric. Some analysts have linked these defeats to an economic slowdown in the country. The economy has been a source of trouble for Mr. Modi, who made his reputation as a pro-business stalwart and won his first term on a platform of economic development. Earlier this year, the I.M.F. downgraded India’s growth outlook, and unemployment has remained disappointingly high. Jagdish Bhagwati, a renowned economist known to be close to Mr. Modi, cautions against reading too much into short-term economic studies. “The I.M.F. never gets anything right,” he told me last week. “I would bet several bottles of champagne with you that in five years we will see substantial growth in the Indian economy.” 

In his first term, Mr. Modi did face plenty of controversy. His demonetization of most Indian banknotes, in a deeply cash-heavy economy, in an attempt to fight tax evasion was divisive; he appointed a fanatic Hindu monk to run India’s largest state; questions lingered about his deep roots in the R.S.S., as well as his role in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, the state he governed for thirteen years. Several aspects of his rule, however, hinted at a technocratic mindset, a desire to improve by tinkering. A UNICEF study suggests that Mr. Modi’s Swachh Bharat, or Clean India, initiative has led to improvements in groundwater quality and sanitation coverage. Schemes to build affordable houses and provide cleaner cooking fuel to rural households are also considered successes. That first term’s issues-based focus now appears to have disappeared in favor of grand schemes to transform the more fundamental meaning of India. 

Protesters march in the city of Kochi on December 23rd. Photo by Mujeeb Rahman.

Mr. Modi’s actions in Kashmir and on citizenship created vortexes of rage and division, and critics have questioned the actual effectiveness of his policies. Mr. Modi is like “a director who can deliver half a movie, but he can never deliver the second half,” says Mr. Taseer. Dr. Bhagwati defends the prime minister, lauding his reforming power, and blames opposition parties for stoking communal tensions through false narratives. He does not believe that Mr. Modi is anti-Muslim, pointing to his appointment of Muslims to key positions, including ambassador to the United Nations. For him, under Mr. Modi’s leadership, “We are moving in the right direction.” 

The communal question does loom large, however, and it is difficult to write meaningfully about Mr. Modi’s B.J.P. without highlighting the religious division it has propagated. The party’s MPs since last year’s election include an under-trial terror suspect who considers Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin a “patriot”; a former McKinsey partner who publicly garlanded so-called “cow vigilantes” who lynched a Muslim man; and one man, given a ministerial job after the last election, who led a call-and-response chant exhorting a crowd to shoot the “bastards” and “traitors” who were protesting the C.A.A.. This sort of rhetoric from a government representative symbolizes the religiously-charged atmosphere that has taken root in the country—a marked departure from the secularism that made multi-religious India an exception in its region. “India is becoming the country it always wanted to be,” sighed one senior Indian journalist to the New Yorker earlier this year. 

In 2014, voters had elected a Mr. Modi who spoke of foreign investment and of applying his pro-business “Gujarat model.” He appeared to have learned from his questionable communal past and transformed his outlook into one that put prosperity before ideology. Ten months into his second term, it has been the slow thighs of Hindutva that have carried him forward, deep into the hearts and minds of ordinary Indians. Whether the state-level electoral defeats the B.J.P. has been facing will translate into a national backlash remains to be seen. In the meantime, Kashmir remains in lockdown and northeast Delhi simmers. Across town from the raucous sandstone parliament, the women protesters of Shaheen Bagh continue to sit with their anti-C.A.A. placards, the colored cloth of their saris and dupattas filling the cracks in the black tarmac road.

Aditya Sharma is staff writer at CPR and a junior studying Political Science and English in the dual B.A. Program with SciencesPo. You'll probably find him buying coffee in Butler. Talk to him about fiction, free speech, and politics in India, Britain, and Europe.