Riven by squabbling, India’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be forced to name a new leader in a crisis that could reshape the main opposition party, strengthening the left and hindering government efforts at financial reforms.

An election defeat in May touched off a leadership struggle and a debate over whether its Hindu-revivalist agenda, once its passport to power, was now irrelevant for younger voters. Moves are underway to replace 81-year-old leader L.K. Advani with someone from a younger generation, but the BJP is struggling to find a candidate who balances its pro-Hindu ideology (”Hindutva”) with its history of pro-market reforms.

(Photo: L.K. Advani campaigning, 29 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

Narendra Modi, the firebrand chief minister of western Gujarat state whose pro-market image saw leading Indian industrialists float his name as a potential future prime minister, appears to be sidelined. That signals the party is worried about losing the middle ground by boosting Modi, accused of turning a blind eye to religious riots in Gujarat in 2002 in which hundreds of people, mainly Muslims, were killed by mobs.

“For the BJP it is not only about leadership but also about what kind of politics the party would want to pursue — one that hinges on the Hindu identity or a liberal, responsible opposition,” said political analyst Amulya Ganguli.

Read the whole analysis here. For more on religion and politics in India, see Holding back the “religion card” in India’s election campaign.

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“Bewildingerly diverse” is the way Asghar Ali Engineer describes his native country, India. This 70-year-old Muslim scholar has written dozens of books about Indian politics and society, Islamic reform and interreligious dialogue. As head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, he works to promote peace and understanding among religious and ethnic communities through seminars, workshops, youth camps, research and publications. The centre even organises street plays in the slums of Mumbai to teach the poor about the dangers of communalism.

Our long conversation at the Centre in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz neighbourhood of Mumbai during a recent visit to India provided a few key quotes for my earlier analysis and blog post on religion in the Indian election campaign. Since these issues are crucial to the general election taking place in India, I’ve transcribed longer excerpts from his answers and posted them on the second page of this post.

(Photo: Asghar Ali Engineer, 14 April 2009/Tom Heneghan)

(more…)

Hindu nationalism, Muslim “vote banks”, anti-Christian violence, caste rivalry — Indian politics has more than enough interfaith tension to offer populist orators all kinds of “religion cards” to play. Coming only months after Islamist militants killed 166 people in a three-day rampage in Mumbai, the campaign for the general election now being held in stages between April 16 and May 13 could have been over- shadowed by communal demagoguery.

(Photo:Voters show IDs at a polling station in Ayodhya, 23 April 2009/Pawan Kumar)

But in this election, the “religion card” doesn’t seem to be the trump card it once was. It’s still being used in some ways, of course, but the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played down its trademark Hindu nationalism in its drive to oust the secular Congress Party from power in New Delhi. A BJP candidate who lashed out at the Muslim minority saw the tactic backfire. During a recent three-week stay in India, I found religious issues being discussed freely and frequently in the boisterous election campaign. But they were usually not the main issues under debate and not isolated from the pocketbook issues that really concern voters. Click here for the rest of my report quoted above.

(Photo: BJP leader L.K. Advani, 8 April 2009/Amit Dave)

This is one of those stories where context is king. Thanks to the internet and India’s lively English-language media, anyone around the globe can find Indian reports highlighting the religion angle. One of the news magazines, The Week, ran an interesting cover story about the “high priests of hate.” On balance, I think it looks a bit overdone — it was written at the height of the Varun Gandhi controversy — but it had this classic anecdote:

“A former BJP minister once said that he had won five times in a row using a simple trick: his men would make an issue of a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl or the death of a cow in a Muslim area on the eve of elections. He lost the last Assembly election when he campaigned with a development agenda.”

But religion isn’t just on the politics pages. Outlook, another news weekly, reported that an American investor long associated with the Hare Krishna movement has offered to build a huge Hindu temple in a planned Himalayan ski resort as part of a project previously nixed by religious leaders who feared it would desecrate the mountain home of their gods.

(Photo: Elderly voter helped to cast her ballot in Puri, 23 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

The Economic Times reported on its property pages that “more and more Indians want to have homes in religious centres.” Real estate developers and analysts differed on whether the financial crisis would hurt this trend, some seeing a lack of faith in the market while others firmly believed these investments were good. And the tabloid Mumbai Mirror had this story about a court defending religious names on clothes.

While in Mumbai, I went to see Asghar Ali Engineer to talk about the role of religion in politics in India. He explained the central role of communalism — the use of religious, ethnic or other loyalties to mobilise social groups — in Indian politics. A noted Muslim reformer, interfaith dialogue advocate and head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Engineer said:

Communalism is not actually a conflict between two religions but between the interests of two or more communities. It is using religious identity for political mobilisation. That is where religion becomes a tool. Religion is not a fundamental cause, religion per se does not cause any problem. Nobody is fighting whether Islam is right or Christianity is right or Hinduism is right. The main point is what the government does for Muslims, for Christians, for Hindus… The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and inclines towards them, does a lot of favours for them. ‘The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,’ that’s what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on the Hindu vote bank.

India is not a nation in the classical sense as in Europe. France, for example, is built on the French language and culture. But India is a bewilderingly diverse country and we have made it one nation. Declaring it a nation was easy, but in the process of nation-building, all these forces have come into play. Whatever development takes place is not based on justice. It is highly skewed. Some religious communities get much more than others, some castes or regions get much more than others. That is why this question of identity has become so important. Those who are left out use their identity to mobilise their people. Similarly, those who are privileged see a threat when other communities mobilise, so they also have to use their identity to ward off this threat from lower castes and backwards religious communities. This is the interplay of religion and politics.

More from that interview in a later post. For more on the Indian election, see the Reuters India website and its special section on the 2009 election. Click here for a slideshow of election pictures.

Here’s a video from the second round of voting on April 23:

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India's general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

"Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony," he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad's campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: "The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place."

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory "hate speech" against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country's home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP's pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won't necessarily help Kumar's attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally's pledge:

"The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda," he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India's economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

"In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar."

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar's ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

"It's a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani," Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad's party, told me. "L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism."

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

One of the weakest responses when someone reads about religious strife in a developing country is to mutter something about “ancient enmities” or “religion is the root of all evil” and turn to the next story. It takes only a little scratching beneath the surface to find there are often clear present- day political motives behind the violence and religion is being used as a pretext to help press one group’s claims.

Alistair Scrutton from our New Delhi bureau has just done a bit of that scratching in Orissa, where at least 35 people — mostly Christians — have died in religious strife since late August, and he got a very direct response. Look at how his analysis “Religious card being played in India election game” starts off:

“Asked when he thought attacks by Hindu mobs against Christians would end in this remote part of eastern India, local Christian leader Ranjit Nayak replied immediately, and with a resigned smile. “March,” Nayak said, referring to a general election due in early 2009. “This is all totally politically motivated.”

It’s not only about the oppression of Christians in Orissa, either. The Hindu- nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is accused of trying to exploit the Orissa strife to rally Hindu voters, is also suspected of pressing a tough line on terrorism as a way to stoke Hindu mistrust of Muslims. The BJP denies any part in the attacks, but many people blame its grassroots organisations for them. The government is considering banning one such group, Bajrang Dal.

“It is not by accident that these incidents are increasing,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is from the Sikh minority, told the National Integration Council on Monday. “We need to collectively consider whether short-term narrow political ends are driving some of us to encourage forces of divisiveness.”

While in Orissa, Scrutton also took a look at the issue of forced conversions and produced a grim account of the strife in his story “Tit-for-tat conversions haunt India.”

Raphael Cheenath, the Roman Catholic archbishop in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, calls the religious violence there “ethnic cleansing of Christians.” Pope Benedict, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Italian government have all called for an end to the killings in the eastern state. The death toll is now 13 and possibly up to 10,000 people — mostly Christians — have sought shelter in makeshift refugee camps. More than a dozen churches have been burned. Catholic schools across India closed in protest on Friday. Local officials say the week-long violence may be waning, but this remains to be seen.

The criticism from outside the state hinted the critics believed authorities in the state had not done enough to halt the violence. No names are named, but anyone who knows Indian politics can connect the dots. The violence by Hindu mobs broke out after a Hindu leader in Orissa, Swami Laxmananda Saraswati, was killed. The state is run by a coalition which includes the main Hindu nationalist opposition party the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), so suspicions immediately fall on a party that has also been already accused of turning a blind eye to the deaths of about 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. The BJP’s Lal Krishna Advani, head of the opposition in the Indian parliament, has said Maoists were suspected of the killings.

As our correspondent Jatindra Dash in the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar wrote: Most of India’s billion-plus citizens are Hindu and about 2.5 percent are Christians. In the Kandhamal area, more than 20 percent of the 650,000 people are mainly tribal inhabitants who converted to Christianity. Religious violence has troubled the tribal regions of Orissa for years, with Hindus and Christians fighting over conversions. While Hindu groups accuse Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to change their faith, the Christians say lower-caste Hindus convert willingly to escape a complex Hindu caste system.

See also our factbox on religious violence in eastern India.

A year can seem like an eternity in India, especially for a foreign correspondent discovering how complex the links between religion and politics can be here.

The last time I went from New Delhi to Uttar Pradesh was in January 2007 to cover the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. Around seven million Hindus and thousands of holy “Sadhus” descend on the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to pray and make offerings.

I stood where the two rivers meet along with thousands of poor Hindus performing their ritual baths. At night, whole families huddled together to keep warm on the river bank. Small paper boats with candles floated precariously down the river.

At the time, this felt like the essence of Hinduism — a relationship with nature and its cycles, its running rivers, the elements of fire and water. New to India then, I don’t remember thinking about caste once in my three-day visit.

The second visit to the state this month was an eye-opener.

A journalist’s early impressions on a trip are often gleaned from the back seat of an airport taxi. Uttar Pradesh is the heart of the Hindu “cow belt” and one of the poorest, most populous and caste-ridden places in India. Yet what we drove through this time looked like a birthday bash for royalty.

The state capital Lucknow was decked out in mile upon mile of blue decorations, light bulbs and banners to celebrate the birthday of the new chief minister — a Dalit (”untouchable”) former teacher known as Mayawati. She has stormed onto the national stage as such a champion of the rights of the poor that she’s known as the “Untouchables Queen.”

Welcome to caste politics in Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati is everywhere in Uttar Pradesh. Statues of her abound thanks to a building spree she launched that employs many Dalits and other lower castes. She has spent lavishly on one of India’s biggest highway projects, creating even more jobs for the poor, and on parks dotted across the country’s most populous state. A huge park in honour of her party’s founder is being built in Lucknow for around $100 million. Hundreds of poor women bricklayers toiled nearby, their children camped out next to them.

Mayawati is a politically astute politician. Many analysts rate her as a middle-of-the-road leader who surrounds herself with well-meaning technocrats. But her rise highlights the importance of caste in northern Indian politics — and what Indian critics of this kind of caste politics call the darker side of Hinduism.

Despite the secular ideals of modern India, whose founders prided themselves on not being a religious state like neighbouring Pakistan, Uttar Pradesh shows that caste politics is alive and kicking in this part of northern India.

Much of this surfaced because the Indian government decided two decades ago to introduce caste quotas into civil service hiring and college admissions. Around one-third of state jobs are now dished out by caste preference.

It pays to have a caste and be proud of it. Academics and reformers may say the essence of Hinduism does not have to be related to caste and that one can coexist without the other. But it’s hard to see that on the ground in India these days.

The rise in caste politics has also been accompanied by the rise of Hindu nationalist political parties that say the prevalence of caste shows India is a religious, not a secular nation. The main Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), just scored important victories in the western state of Gujarat last month and the southern state of Karnataka (its capital is high-tech centre Bangalore) in November.

I spent three days in Uttar Pradesh visiting Dalit villages where poor villagers were beaten up by higher castes for collecting firewood from the wrong forest, and where water supplies are so bad and appeals to officials for help so ineffective that their only hope left is their rain god. I talked to politicians, academics and NGO workers.

All their talk was related to caste. It was a sobering look at the flip side of the modern hi-tech India that so often hits the headlines. For all the talk of a globalising India, Mayawati’s focus on caste may be a sign of things to come. She has talked about running for prime minister in the next elections, in 2009, and some Indian analysts think she could pull it off.

My second trip to U.P. left me wondering what path caste and Indian politics will take. Can Hinduism keep the spirit I saw last year on the banks of the Ganges, where caste seemed secondary, if even only for a few days? Or will caste stay and grow in India’s political fabric, justifying those politicians that say India is religious, not a secular society?