Political and media circles in India’s capital New Delhi are abuzz with conflicting views on whether Narendra Modi’s administration, which assumes office on Monday, will usher in an era of Hindutva, or Hindu hegemony, and pose a serious threat to secularism and the country’s 150 million-plus Muslims.
After the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) spectacular electoral result, many analysts believe frequent meetings between Modi and the upper echelons of the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, are a “disturbing” portent.
The right-wing RSS that provides “spiritual guidance” to the BJP, which it spawned in 1980 as its political arm, appears to be closely involved in determining Modi’s cabinet. The RSS was tasked by its founders with ensuring Hinduism’s purity by insulating it from “damaging influences” like Islam and Christianity.
"It is difficult to dissociate Modi from the RSS," historian Neera Chandhoke says about the 63 year old who joined the organisation as a teenage pracharak, or soldier.
Founded in 1925 as a right-wing, paramilitary volunteer organisation, the RSS, which reveres Hitler and Mussolini, imparts daily military training and ideological indoctrination to millions across India. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, reportedly subscribed to similar tenets.
Modi’s questionable role in the 2002 Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat province of which he was chief minister, in which more than 1,000 died, bolsters these fears.
Several judicial inquiry commissions have cleared Modi of any wrongdoing, but his inability to control the violence, which dragged on for nearly two months, has spawned a legacy of fear and distrust among Muslims.
Significantly Modi, who has personally popularised his nickname NaMo – a command meaning ‘bow down’ in his native Gujarat– and never apologised for the killings does not have a single Muslim among his 282 MPs. Analysts and critics fear this smacks of “calculated exclusivism”.
They claim it spells trouble for Indian Muslims and possibly even Christians – who constitute 2.5 per cent of India’s population of more than 1.25 billion and who were brutally targeted during the BJP’s previous six-year tenure in office that ended in 2004.
But Modi's supporters and colleagues are convinced that as prime minister he will be inclusive and secular, concentrating on vindicating his electoral promises of vikas (development), good governance, official accountability, economic revival, job creation and corruption-free rule.
His strong electoral mandate and his previous record of growth and development in Gujarat signal that, in likelihood, he will deliver to some extent on these assurances.
