Encapsulation without Integration? Electoral Democracy and the Ambivalent Moderation of Hindu Nationalism in India

DOI10.1177/2321023016634946
Published date01 June 2016
Date01 June 2016
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17vbNin0ycL5vJ/input Article
Encapsulation without Integration?
Studies in Indian Politics
4(1) 90–101
Electoral Democracy and the
© 2016 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Ambivalent Moderation of
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
Hindu Nationalism in India
DOI: 10.1177/2321023016634946
http://inp.sagepub.com
Subrata K. Mitra1
Abstract
Has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in power in India’s central government following its massive man-
date in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, become a normal member of India’s party family, or does it remain
the quintessential outsider, whose electoral success is seen as a threat to India’s liberal, democratic
and secular ethos? This article applies the Downsian median voter argument to analyze this puzzle.
A comparison with the gradual moderation of Europe’s Christian Democratic parties helps generate
four enabling conditions that account for the moderation of extremist parties in electoral democracies.
Taking these conditions into account, the article explains why the BJP, while fully integrated within the
electoral system of India, is nevertheless seen by India’s mainstream parties and bulk of the media and
civil society groups as an outsider to the democratic political system, and why the BJP’s ambivalent
moderation is likely to endure, at least in the short run.
Keywords
Hindu nationalism, encapsulation without integration, ambivalent moderation, BJP, party system of India
Introduction
Has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in view of its electoral mandate and record in office, become a
normal member of India’s party family? Or, does it remain the quintessential outsider whose electoral
success threatens to subvert the liberal, democratic and secular ethos of India’s constitution? Posed in
these terms, the profile of the BJP emerges as an ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie, 1956) concept, not amen-
able to a categorical measurement with reference to relevant facts, for the specifics surrounding this
Hindu-nationalist party are open to radically different interpretations. Undoubtedly, the worst apprehen-
sions of the sceptics have not come true. Contrary to the apprehension of the Indian Left, since its eleva-
tion to high office, the BJP has not unleashed a full-scale cultural war in sensitive areas of domestic
policy like education, state support for Haj pilgrimage of Muslims or large-scale replacement of key civil
1 Director, Institute for South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Corresponding author:
Subrata K. Mitra, Director, Institute for South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
E-mails: isasmskr@nus.edu.sg; js3@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de

Mitra 91
servants based on their ideological affiliation. Even more interesting is the policy towards Pakistan,
whose very creation was anathema to the defenders of akhand bharat (‘undivided and indivisible
(Mother) India’). The government of Prime Minister Modi began its tenure with an invitation to the
Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif to the swearing in ceremony. After some initial hesitation, Sharif
accepted the invitation. More recently, the cross-border firings and Pakistani attempts to violate the
territorial integrity of India have not led to full-scale war but by a well-calibrated doctrine of ‘graduated
escalation’ (see Chellaney, 2014).
Despite this evidence of moderation and integration, doubts persist. The moderate conduct of BJP in
office at the Union level during 1998 and 1999–2004 has been always juxtaposed with the Godhra riots
of 2002 in the State of Gujarat, then under BJP rule. That the debate on the political character of the
BJP (integrated versus isolated; moderate versus extremist; pro-system versus anti-system) persists
despite the party’s regular participation in elections at all levels of the political system is puzzling
(see Mitra, 2013b). It is even more puzzling when seen against the fact that similar questions are not
raised about other cultural–nationalist parties like the Akali Dal that appear to have found a niche within
the political space of democratic India. Does the questioning of the very raison d’être of the BJP as
a legitimate player in Indian politics indicate something quintessential and idiosyncratic about it?
Evidence Pro and Contra
Expert opinion on the character of the Hindu-nationalist BJP remains divided. At one end of the debate
is Varshney (2014). Defending the moderation conjecture, he argues that the electoral logic is a power-
ful motivation for the BJP’s gradual transformation into a moderate political party: ‘Although some
lower-level cadres hold such profoundly anti-Muslim sentiments, the BJP’s top brass has shown signs of
moderation since the mid-1990s. It would not be an overstatement to say that the electoral imperative,
by and large, has been the cause of moderation’ (2014, p. 37). However, Varshney admits that Muslims’
and secularists’ opinions of the BJP remain sceptical and unyielding. Ganguly (2014, p. 58) contests this
profiling of BJP’s moderation.
Situated between these two readings of the BJP are Palshikar and Suri (2014) who report BJP’s
moving away from its ideologically extreme Hindu–Hindi–upper caste core constituency towards a
more inclusive social base that includes Backward Classes as well as former untouchables. Still, they
testify to BJP’s ambiguous moderation: ‘Modi desisted from speaking these issues [cultural dimension]
throughout his campaign, and even after the election.... However, there are many among his supporters
who seem to believe that this mandate is for the creation of a Hindu political community’ (Palshikar &
Suri, 2014, p. 46).
Prospects and Perils of Ideological Moderation in Competitive Elections
This article seeks to understand these contradictory views of the BJP and its own ambivalence by
drawing on the logic of spatial models of party competition (Downs, 1957; Riker & Ordeshook, 1973).
This approach suggests that the imperative of vote maximization drives leaders of extremist parties to
the middle of the ideological spectrum.
A necessary condition for the convergence to the median voter to take place is that the political
forces in the electorate are distributed along a principal ideological dimension, such as the Left–Right

92

Studies in Indian Politics 4(1)
dimension. This is the case with most post-industrial, liberal–democratic political systems. That said,
this is not a sufficient condition. In a one-dimensional political space with a polymodal distribution with
proportional voting rules, party strategists have every incentive to stay put on their positions. In a one-
dimensional distribution under simple majority voting rules and singlemember constituencies, however,
even parties with their own distinct modes have an incentive to converge towards the median voter in
order to reach an electoral majority of votes, much to the consternation of their core ideological support-
ers who might feel betrayed (Downs, 1957, pp. 114–131). This Downsian logic, represented in Figure 1,
is contested by the situation where parties have strong, ideologically motivated activists in their midst.
This creates a dilemma for party strategists about whether to moderate their stance with the hope to ‘win’
at the risk of losing extremist supporters, or whether to stay put at their ideological positions and risk
finding themselves in political wilderness. This situation is depicted in Figure 2.
This conjecture, illustrated from British electoral behaviour, where New Labour conspicuously jetti-
soned its Left extremists and moved to the centre, has received powerful empirical support from Kalyvas
Figure 1. Convergence to the Median in a Competitive Party System
Source: Author’s own.
Figure 2. Modal Distance between Voters and Activists, and the Room to Manoeuver
for Political Parties
Source: Author’s own.

Mitra 93
(1996) in relation to the religious extremist parties in Europe. Using evidence from a wide variety of
European democracies, he has shown how, in course of the evolution of the European party system,
extremists fringes within strong Christian movements in Europe eventually faded away, making the rise
of moderate Christian democratic parties possible. The experience of Western, liberal–democratic
systems shows that regular participation in free, fair and competitive elections turns extremist parties
into moderates that follow a middle path, avoiding ideological extremes.
Moderates focus on ‘politics within the system’ whereas extremists concentrate on the ‘politics of the
system’. Between these two polar categories, there are ‘anti-system parties’—the ultimate oxymorons
of a party system—who claim to engage in party politics like all others to get into power so that they can
destroy from within the system that brought them into power. The difficulty of attempts to profile
the BJP is that it can be seen to be simultaneously moderate, extremist and anti-system.
The analysis below briefly specifies the Downsian argument and then examines the empirical
evidence to explain the ambivalent moderation of Hindu nationalism. The evidence consists of ‘encap-
sulation’ (regular participation in elections, holding office and forming part of coalitions), and the failure
of ‘integration’ with the political community, seen in terms of the shunning of the BJP by mainstream
parties of India, to the point where association with it carries the political costs of guilt...

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