BJP is in, what next?

After 30 years, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has again won the majority in the lower house of India’s parliament and Narendra Modi will soon be sworn in as the new prime minister. The other possibility that seems likely to materialise is the “election” of Abdullah Abdullah as Afghanistan’s next president. What is common between them is their dislike for Pakistan.

Both these developments are significant for Pakistan. In one of his election campaign speeches, Modi said that since he cannot “change” India’s neighbours, he will try to find a way for India to live with them. Impliedly, if he had the choice he would “change” India’s neighbours. As for Abdullah Abdullah, his feelings about Pakistan are fairly well known.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and along with it the “Third World”, convinced a Congress-led India (courtesy then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh) that it must open up its economy, and since the highway to Washington goes through Tel Aviv, relations between India and Israel must expand. Today, India is the largest buyer of Israeli arms.

The burgeoning arms trade with Israel, collaboration on counter-terrorism techniques, and cultural ties with Israel, led to places such as Dharamsala and Khajuraho having sign boards in Hebrew and shopkeepers learning Hebrew to converse with their Israeli guests. These are clear signs of how close is the BJP to Israel, with its implications for Pakistan. But India’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil and millions of Indians employed in that region may prevent India’s joining any radical Israeli initiative targeting Pakistan.

In this setting, the political scene in Pakistan amazes Pakistanis because all they see is a chaos; no politician appears serious about putting his personal interests above national interests. Cronyism still tops the list, and for its sake, institutions are either being rendered headless or handed over to incompetent individuals while deficits of all kinds keep escalating.

That democracy has become a joke is true not just of Pakistan. After the 2002 riots in Gujarat, that killed over 2,000 mostly Muslims, the US and EU decided not to issue Modi a visit visa. But now the State Department says that Modi would be eligible for an “A-1” visa and the German Ambassador has informed Modi that he doesn’t even need a visa to visit Germany.

This implies that those even indirectly involved in genocide become innocent on being “elected”; that elections are “filters” that cleanse individuals of their sins; that expediency is the ultimate decider of what is right and what isn’t. Because containing China’s rise is the urgent “expediency”, anyone who can serve that end is acceptable, no matter what his track record.

India’s election results also prove that Indians have ignored the role of the RSS – BJP’s militant wing – in demolition of the Babri Mosque and the killings it entailed, Samjhota Express tragedy, and the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, although inquiries into these tragedies pointed a finger at the RSS. BJP’s success manifests the electorate’s suicidal tendency for ‘living only in today’.

Election results also manifest how little the Indians care for India’s secular image. That BJP – innovator and propagator of the Hindutva philosophy – is a Hindu nationalist party, is a known fact, not just in India but the world over. Many Islamic countries carry the same stigma and are paying its price because they defy the Islamic tenet that disallows “enforcing” religion.

Modi will take over from Singh, who remained India’s Prime Minister for a decade but couldn’t stop corruption that eroded the impact of all the good he did. The mega scams surfacing during his term (auction of telecom licenses and award of coal-mining tenders, to mention just two) led to the worst ever defeat of the Congress party in a general election.

India is in the grip of stagflation – GDP growth has fallen to 5 percent from 9 percent in 2012, and consumer inflation is at 9 percent – highest in the mega emerging economies. People voted overwhelmingly for the BJP in the hope that Modi will deliver what Singh couldn’t; lower inflation, faster growth, new infrastructure, and more jobs for a burgeoning youth population.

Modi’s BJP-touted success has been Gujarat’s economic growth whose momentum beat the country’s average during the past 11 years under a BJP regime. But that wasn’t a miracle; Gujarat is known for its clever trading community for the past two centuries; it is probably the biggest foreign entrepreneurial group now operating in the whole of Africa.

With a complex mix of state and federal administrations, India isn’t easy to govern, more so with huge trade, balance of payment, fiscal and infrastructure deficits, and investment at 9 percent of the GDP. Inflexible labour laws limit employers’ freedom to hire. The banking sector is in a mess because its losses courtesy zombie loans could be almost 4 percent of the GDP.

How Modi – the tea boy – could muster the support of Gujarat’s businesses and its powerful corporate sector is a mystery. Is it another case of the businesses creating a “proxy” for achieving their own ends – a practice common in the US? Let us also not forget that politicians who make glossy promises to win elections soon face the wrath of the electorate.

That reality is starkly visible in Pakistan. PML-N’s promise of plugging the nation-crippling supply-demand gap in the power sector in a matter of months is now its biggest headache, not to mention unchecked inflation and corruption in state’s offices. Together with the demand for accepting massive rigging of election results, these failures may spell the doom for PML-N.

To the Communist Party of India’s Sitaram Yechury, “We are on the morrow of the pay-back time to those who financed this [BJP’s] election campaign. This can only mean further imposition of burdens on the people” and that a campaign with “Hindutva undercurrent will only sharpen communal polarisation and threaten our secular democratic foundations…”

Given these challenges, how would the BJP react to its failure is a frightening prospect. Political parties, especially those winning elections with a huge majority, and thus not forming coalition governments, rarely accept failure; they rely on their majority to bamboozle their adversaries (in this case, including Pakistan), though they alone are responsible for every failure.

What makes such prospects worrisome during a recession is BJP’s extremist character; besides its role in the tragedies mentioned above, even in Gujarat where it ruled for 11 years and crystallised a remarkable economic recovery, its virtual supervision of the genocide in 2002 shows how it deals with its opponents – prospect that should worry everyone. Western governments too don’t appear too optimistic.