The state of the Indian state is getting curiouser and curiouser as its Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes his second term and seeks a third one. A Chief Minister, once celebrated as "India's corruption-buster", finds himself behind bars on corruption charges. The bank accounts of the largest opposition party have been frozen. The cult of personality has turned parliamentary elections into a presidential contest. And yet, the liberal voice in what was once the largest democracy in the world remains ambivalent, if not silent altogether.

The polling for the multi-phased elections of the 18th Lok Sabha—the lower house of the bicameral parliament in India—is scheduled to take place between April 19 and June 1, 2024. The last date for filling nominations for the first phase of polls is later this week. Premier Modi has recently taken several contentious steps to ensure that the dominance of his party is maintained upon Indian polity.

Meanwhile, the Opposition claims that the government has been routinely using its investigating agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation and even the Income Tax authorities to harass and neutralise its critics. Credible allegations have been made that the government lets loose its investigators upon opponents to make them fall in line as also to raise funds for the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) through electoral bonds.

Big businesses buy electoral bonds, in what has been termed "pre-paid", "post-paid" and "post-raid" bribes, to escape from the dragnet of investigative agencies. Politicians with shady images jump ship onto the safe vessel of the ruling party to evade credible charges levelled against them. The BJP has been compared to a political “washing machine” that cleanses all sins of its members and supporters alike.

The ruling regime under Premier Modi has unmistakably been moving towards an illiberal direction right from its beginning. It was the pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat that catapulted the then Chief Minister in Ahmedabad to the national stage. The Indian liberals chose to ignore his reprehensible record and gave the benefit of the doubt to the so-called "Gujarat Model" of developmental spectacle sans social justice. Celebrity intellectuals such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashutosh Varshney and Gurcharan Das had enthusiastically endorsed Modi. An enchanted admirer back then but a trenchant critic now, Mehta had celebrated the first victory of Modi as "one of the most gloriously spectacular political triumphs in the history of independent India".

Modi came to power at the centre in 2014 promising “sab ka saath, sab ka vikas”—to which his spin doctors later added "sab ka biswas, sabka prayas" in his second term to complete the alluring stanza—but the emphasis of his regime has always been on the ethnonational Hinduisation of Indian polity and society where religious minorities will have to live with the indignity of being second-class citizens. By refusing to wear Taqiyah (Islamic skullcap), he sent an unmistakable signal to his Hindutva constituency that the country with the second largest population of Muslims in the world was determined not to treat its biggest religious minority as cultural equals.

Bigoted sloganeering

The first term of Premier Modi ended with the horrors of mob lynching of Muslims in the so-called "Gobar Patti (the Cow Belt)" of northern India—further pauperisation of the poor through ill-conceived demonetisation—and the unleashing of a massive propaganda machine against all voices of dissent. The independence of the press died a slow death as the media industry allowed itself to degenerate from watchdogs into lapdogs, termed Godi Media, of the ruling regime. Despite massive failure on all fronts—slower economic growth, lower employment creation and worsening social cohesion—Modi returned for his second term in office in 2019 a determined person to push forward the Hindutva.

Covid-19 was turned into an occasion of trumpeting Islamophobia from the rooftops with dog whistles such as "Tablighi Jamaat", "corona jihad" and even "thook (or spit) jihad". With a base of 88 million registered members, the BJP claims it is the largest political party in the world. However, it had no Muslim lawmakers at the centre or in the provinces. The demonisation of Muslims, however, has been spectacularly successful in consolidating Hindutva votes.

The abrupt abrogation of Article 370, which had given the state of Jammu and Kashmir the power to enact its own laws, has erased the only Muslim-majority state from the map of India. Since October 2019, it has been merely a Union Territory directly administered from New Delhi. The Citizenship Amendment Act aims to turn India into an ethnic refuge for Hindus alone.

With the consecration of Ram Temple on January 22, 2024, at a site where the Babri Mosque had stood for almost half a millennium, the rabble-rousing slogan of over three decades—"Saugandh Ram Ki Khatein Hain Mandir Wahin Banayenge"—has lost its appeal. It will not be surprising if the chant of "Ayodhya toh bas jhanki hai, Kashi-Mathura baki hai" (Ayodhya is a preview, Kashi and Mathura remain) begins to reverberate through the streets if India continues to fall on almost all global indexes of well-being such as democracy (labelled by V-Dem as "One of the Worst Autocratisers in the Last 10 Years"), global hunger (111 out of 125) and happiness (126 out of 143). The dream of becoming a $5 trillion economy in next three years remains just that—a dream.

Conformist responses

It is likely that Premier Modi will push the Hindutva agenda even more forcefully in his third term if the BJP, and its allies, manage to get a supermajority. Constitutional commitments to socialism and secularism will probably be thrown into the dustbin through wilful amendments. Federalism will be further weakened with a reduction in the role of provinces and the concentration of power at the centre. Further curtailment of fundamental freedoms, greater weaponisation of investigative agencies and even more vilification of opposition parties are some of the foregone conclusions. It's not just the media and the civil society. Even opposition parties seem to be mutely waiting for the inevitable continuity of the plutocratic "Billionaire Raj" through an electoral autocracy.

Deservedly idolised as a jurist, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) was also one of the leading philosophers of the 20th Century: He correctly prophesied that institutionalising democracy without dismantling caste, class and gender inequalities was akin to building "a palace on a dung heap". Leaders of the opposition in India are yet to realise that the politics of Hindutva is Brahminical patriarchy on steroids.

The Hindutva ideology has made the idea of secularity almost superfluous in contemporary India as prominent politicos no longer hesitate to take their private beliefs into the public sphere for political purposes. Purportedly a "Shiv-bhakt", Rahul Gandhi is set to visit the Trimbakeshwar. Mamata Banerjee boasts of doing Chandipath every morning before leaving home. Arvind Kejriwal recites Hanuman Chalisa and chants "Jai Shree Ram".