Encapsulation without Integration? Electoral Democracy and the Ambivalent Moderation of Hindu Nationalism in 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 amenable 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 apprehensions of the sceptics have not come true. Contrary to the apprehension of the Indian Left, since its elevation 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 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 powerful 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 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 supporters 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.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: Author’s own.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Source: Author’s own.

This conjecture, illustrated from British electoral behaviour, where New Labour conspicuously jettisoned its Left extremists and moved to the centre, has received powerful empirical support from Kalyvas (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 ‘encapsulation’ (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 by association with the virus of ‘Hindu communalism’. ² The BJP itself sends out conflicting signals. The efforts of the Modi government to replace Hindutva with vikasvad (development) sits uncomfortably with Prime Minister Modi’s eloquent silence on the issue of beef-eating as a legitimate ground for lynching.

Based on this evidence I ask: is this ambivalence between moderation and extremism specific to Hindu nationalism, caused by forces that are idiosyncratic, and intrinsic to Hinduism, or are they structural factors, affecting other extremist movements linked to religion and ethnicity? In intra-systemic comparison, why does electoral participation produce mixed evidence for Hindu nationalism with regard to integration with the system at large, but not for parties drawing on ethno-nationalism in India? In conclusion, the article suggests four boundary conditions that can reinforce the generality of the moderation hypothesis by making it more context-relevant and help generate a short-term prediction.

The BJP and the Challenge of Moderation

Following Downs (1957), in a competitive political arena, regardless of the distribution of political forces across the whole spectrum of the ideological space, the process of majority coalition building causes competing parties to converge towards the median voter. When a general left–right dimension underpins the electorate and the ideal points of voters are distributed along this dimension, competing parties, keen to maximize their share of votes, converge towards the median voter. Extending this logic, Jaffrelot (2010) suggests that participation in electoral games usually transforms extremist parties into ‘more moderate political actors’. After Independence, partition and the departure of the Muslim League from Indian politics, Hindu and Sikh nationalists remained active as the main adversaries of the Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (CPI). As Pakistan went on to establish an Islamic state, India, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved to constitute a secular state based on liberal principles and competitive elections. In terms of the Downsian logic, one can see the effects of the moderation hypothesis. The catch-all Indian National Congress (INC), located right in the middle of the political spectrum, managed to get overwhelming majorities in the parliament (Mitra, 1980, pp. 235–263). Within the Congress Party—effectively a coalition of factions and regional parties—there emerged a Left and a Right tendency, with the central leadership constantly mediating. Outside, there were the Communists to the Left and the Swatantra and the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Jan Sangh to the Right, the former based in economic liberalism and the latter, cultural politics. The percentage of votes and seats gained by Hindu nationalists in the early elections were miniscule.

The Left–Right dimension that underpinned Indian politics of the 1950s was in turn supported by a consensus on values that would be roughly synonymous with the modernization approach that dominated the approach to the politics of developing countries in the West at that time. Following India’s Independence, the main plank of the INC’s electoral campaigns was to protect minority rights against the Hindu ‘majority’ in order to create a ‘secular and modern’ nation. The main challenge to this political programme came from Hindu nationalists who drew their inspiration from Swami Dayanand who founded the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement on 10 April 1875. The core ideas of this movement were subsequently enriched and complemented by Vivekanand, the founding of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (1915), and, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1935. A major theoretical foundation for the movement was provided by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s concept of Hindutva, which was articulated with great force in his book Hindutva—Who Is a Hindu? (1925). ³ The RSS was banned briefly after the assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, who was associated with the Hindu Mahasabha, but the ban was lifted to enable Hindu nationalists to compete in the elections of 1951–1952. They were led by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a party founded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to act as the political wing of the RSS which by its own constitution prevented its members from taking part in politics directly. However, thanks to the effective hold the Congress System (Kothari, 1970) the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (and the left-wing parties) made no electoral headway at all.

The realignment of forces at the macro level of the system thinly disguised the discontent that lay just under the surface. Political protest started once again after the euphoria of India’s victory against Pakistan in the 1971 war, which had led to the creation of Bangladesh, wore off. The Left and Right joined together as forces of resistance in the mid-1970s to oppose Indira Gandhi who had by then imposed authoritarian rule through the exercise of the emergency provision of the Indian constitution. Once elections were announced in 1977, those opposed to her went to the polls as the Janata party coalition and won the parliamentary elections, forming the first non-Congress government at the centre. This was the first time that Hindu-nationalist leaders held ministerial responsibility in the central government of India. But bickering soon started between the socialists and the Hindu nationalists. Isolated within the Janata Party, most (but not all) Jan Sangh leaders walked out under the new name of Bharatiya Janata Party and fought the 1980 election under their own name.

The Emergence of Anti-system Politics

The core ideology of the newly formed BJP was summed up under ‘Five Principles’, namely (i) nationalism and national integration; (ii) democracy; (iii) positive secularism; (iv) Gandhian socialism; and (v) value-based politics. Right from the outset, the party became a dual presence, with a division of labour between the political wing espousing a hybrid liberal Hindu nationalism and the organizational wing, supported by the RSS which supplied the dedication, energy and staff to make the new party work. Its network of several thousand pracharaks—full-time, educated, unmarried, male staff workers—was put at the service of the BJP, giving the party overnight an effective group of campaigners. They based their campaign on a broad range of issues that drew as much on politics within the system as on politics of the system.

The political strength of Hindu nationalism soon became clear once the Ramjanmabhumi issue galvanized Hindu sentiments and eventually propelled the BJP to power in 1998 (Juergensmeyer, 1994). In the early 1990s, the Bharatiya Janata Party had confirmed its position as the main challenger to the INC in northern India. Its spread outside the Hindi heartland of North India, where neither Hindi nor the religious dispute centred on a temple for Rama in Ayodhya had little political traction, signified its status as the main challenger to the INC. In the course of its rapid rise to power, the party had drawn on the desire of many Hindus to see a more prominent role for Hindu culture within the institutions of the secular state and to deny special treatment to minorities, such as a special status for the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. The BJP came to power riding the crest of Hindu resentment against what some saw as the penchant of the INC to pamper the Muslim minority as a part of its winning coalition, and promising to build a temple for Rama in the city of Ayodhya on the same spot where the Babri mosque once stood. When the mosque was demolished by a mob of Hindu zealots, the State government of Uttar Pradesh, led by the BJP, accepted responsibility for its failure to uphold law and order, and resigned.

Subsequently, the imperatives of India’s coalitional politics have caused the party to moderate its stand on cultural and confessional issues. During the short-lived tenure of Vajpayee as prime minister (1998–1999), the party spoke more of good governance and less of Hindu nationalism. Back in office in 1999 with a clear majority for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Vajpayee announced that the government would follow the same moderate policies that he had launched during his previous tenure. The party put the three divisive issues—the Ram temple, personal law and Article 370—on the back-burner. The NDA manifesto did take on the temple issue, however, albeit in a muted fashion. It said, ‘We continue to hold that the judiciary’s verdict in this matter should be accepted by all. At the same time, efforts should be intensified for dialogue and a negotiated settlement in an atmosphere of mutual trust and goodwill’ (NDA, 2004, cited in Llewellyn, 2011, p. 55).

In view of its emphasis on Hindutva as the core of its political programme and its strong links with extremist Hindu cultural and social organizations, such as the RSS, the BJP is seen by many as the electoral voice of Hindu nationalism. Some of its numerous opponents believe that the BJP’s moderation is only tactical: given a chance, the BJP will endanger liberal democracy, threaten minorities and enhance intercommunity conflict between Hindus and Muslims, as well as against Christians. On its part, the BJP vociferously denies charges about its anti-system character. Nevertheless, it continues its firm links with a group of extremist Hindu movements collectively referred to as the parivar—Hindi for family—which for the ‘secularists’ of India is nothing but an alliance of Hindu fanatics. This gives the BJP, both in terms of its policies and its perception by experts and laymen alike, an ambivalent character.

Reaching out to Pakistan, to refurbish its anti-Muslim image internationally and to placate India’s Muslim electorate, Vajpayee undertook a bus trip to Lahore and signed the Lahore agreement which promised to engage Pakistan in a bilateral dialogue to settle all outstanding issues between the two countries (Wirsing, 2003). Juxtaposed to this record, however, there is also the evidence of anti-systemic behaviour, such as communal violence and ethnic exclusivity. Any similarity with European conservative parties does not take us very far because, entangled with the party and overlapping in personnel, policies and attitudes, are the Hindu political and social organizations that do not share the moderation officially espoused by the BJP. In consequence, allegations are often made that religious violence and antipathy towards Islam (which became visible during the last stage of the campaign in the 2015 assembly elections of Bihar) are still a part of the larger repertoire of Hindu nationalism. The close links between the RSS—which many suspect to be instigators of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian riots—and the BJP continue to undermine the efforts of the BJP to distance itself from its extreme image. ⁴

The political fortunes of Sikh nationalism provides a counterexample to Hindu nationalism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had waged war against the Indian state and engaged in the killing of Hindus. After their sacred shrine, the Golden Temple of Amritsar was attacked by the Indian army, two Sikh bodyguards killed Indira Gandhi in retaliation. But now the Sikh party, the Akali Dal, has become ensconced as a legitimate party in power and coalition partner (including, that of the arch-secular Congress Party) in the State of Punjab. This provides a stark contrast to the vicissitudes of Hindu nationalism, constantly monitored by judicial and electoral watchdogs (see Mitra, 2013b).

The ‘Enemy’ Within? Electoral Basis of BJP Ambivalence

Until recently, the Hindu-nationalist movement was caught in the dilemma between political mobilization versus electoral representation, integration versus accommodation, ideology versus populism, shakha (cadre) versus janata (mass, people), reminiscent of the internal struggle of the various strands of Akali parties in the late 1990s. Many suspected the BJP of running with the hare and hunting with the hound, inclined to go along with electoral democracy as long as it brings in the votes and power. When it does not work or control slips, however, the political leadership tends to wake up the sleeping giant of a mobilized majority Hindu community, or, as the Indian ‘secularists’ argue, to play the ‘communal’ card. Moderation entails compromises and the dilution of ideology which is vital for activists; on the other hand, extremist sentiments of solidarity with activists lead to ostracism by coalition partners. That was the essence of the BJP’s dilemma: either become inclusive, move close to the position of the median voter and appears moderate and, in the process, lose its specific identity, or continue as extremists and risk a permanent exile to political wilderness in a simple majority voting system.

The value conflict among BJP supporters shown in survey data demonstrates this point (see Mitra & Singh, 1999). On the four issues that we have analyzed below, the BJP electorate in 1996 revealed the presence in the ranks of its electors both a strong moderate section and a substantial extremist section. Of course, all Indian political parties have their extremist flanks and this was not specific to the BJP. Only in the BJP, however, were the two sections—moderate and extremist electors—balanced, which explains the relative ambivalence of the party compared to its competitors. We shall analyze below the comparative partisan responses to four salient questions.

The first question refers to the demolition of the Babri Mosque, for its time (1996) the most salient issue in Indian politics. The respondents were asked: Some people say that the demolition (of the Babri Mosque) was justified, while others say it was not justified. What would you say, was it justified or not justified? About 40 per cent of BJP electors said it was justified, and 25 per cent said it was not justified, creating a gap of 15 per cent between the two tendencies. This hiatus between the extremists (justified) and moderate (not justified) among Congress supporters was 27 (43/16 per cent); for the National Front a hiatus of 24 per cent (48/24 per cent), and for the Left Front, the largest hiatus—46 per cent (55/9 per cent). The relatively small hiatus between the two tendencies among the ranks of BJP supporters explains the ambiguity of the rhetoric of BJP leaders on the Ayodhya issue.

With regard to the resolution of the Kashmir problem: People’s opinions are divided on the issue of the Kashmir problem—some people say that government should suppress the agitation by any means, while others say that this problem should be resolved by negotiations. What would you say, should the agitation be suppressed, or resolved by negotiation? In the case of the BJP, the gap between negotiation (35 per cent) and suppression (18 per cent) was 17 per cent. Among Congress Party supporters there was a gap of 23 per cent (33/10 per cent), National Front 20 per cent (32/12 per cent) and Left Front 28 per cent (33/5 per cent). Once again, the two flanks were more evenly balanced in the BJP than any among its major adversaries.

On the general issue of being friendly towards Pakistan, the question asked was: India should make more efforts to develop friendly relations with Pakistan. Do you agree or disagree? The gap between those opting to be friendly and those not friendly was 19 per cent in the BJP (42 friendly, 23 not friendly), 29 per cent for the Congress (46/17 per cent), 39 per cent for the National Front (51/12 per cent) and 27 per cent for the Left Front (45/18 per cent). These figures explain the BJP’s equivocation with regard to relations with Pakistan.

The final one of the four questions relate to the issue of a common civil code for the whole of India. The question asked was: Every community should be allowed to have its own laws to govern marriage and property rights. Do you agree or disagree? The answers help us contrast the two dominant views on nation-building in India. The first, corresponding to the extremist view, styles itself after the Westphalian nation—state with its insistence on the rule of one: one state, one nation, one law, one religion, one language and so on. The second, a more moderate stance, goes under what is fashionably called a ‘multi-cultural’ state where several parallel nations can live within the rubric of one territorial state. Among the BJP supporters, there is a gap of 4 per cent, with 36 per cent opposed to the idea of a multicultural state and 40 per cent in favour of it. The pattern repeats what we have already seen in the case of the other parties. In the Congress, the gap is 16 per cent, (30/46 per cent); in the National Front, it is 13 per cent (29/42 per cent) and in the Left Front, a difference of 38 per cent (22/60 per cent). This last question completes the picture of the ambivalence that has characterized the position of the BJP on these salient issues about state, society and nation compared to its main adversaries. These opinions give credibility to Llewellyn’s observation (2011) that it is difficult to be categorical about the tendency of the BJP voters ‘as a whole’ to become more moderate or stay immoderate.

The social base of party support gives another reason for BJP ambivalence. On the one hand, rather like the Congress Party, the BJP has also developed a tendency to be a catch-all-party, cutting into each social group. ⁵ However, its representation among the educated, upper-caste males is substantially higher than other parties. In view of its sharply defined Hindu–upper caste profile, the BJP is at a disadvantage compared to the INC, which can mobilize minority groups such as, Muslims and Dalits (former untouchables) against the Hindu nationalists. Therefore the BJP has to moderate its stance to seek allies, for its own social base does not allow further advance on its own (see Mitra & Singh, 1999). On the other hand, moderation and coalition-building dilutes ideology, alienating the activists.

A contrast with a similar dilemma among the Indian Left helps bring the BJP’s specific problem to a sharper focus. Once the Telangana uprising led by the Communist Party of India in 1947–1948 was suppressed by the Indian army, the dilemma between revolution and the parliamentary path to social change created a deep fissure within the party. Eventually, this led to the split of 1964, after which the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) slowly became a Bengali party while the CPI adapted itself to the Kerala political environment. A split of this kind where the BJP could adapt its Hindutva ideology to the specific context and opportunity structure of the region could probably have created the same kind of acceptance that the communist parties (who actually never broke with their loyalty to revolution) have achieved from parties that have nothing to do with a Marxist revolution. But a split on regional lines is difficult to imagine from a party that sees itself as a family (parivar), which binds the party organization together as a strong and flexible sinew by the disciplined cadres of the RSS, and which has devised an effective method of internal policing that combines reward for loyalty through upward mobility and punishment against dissidence. The BJP is, above all, a nationalist party, whose essential raison d’être comes from its invocation of Hindu unity which would make splits on grounds of region, generation or any other ground familiar to other political parties of India difficult. Other parties (like the INC) also consider themselves ‘national’, but the BJP’s usage of the term has an ideological connotation that differs from the more accommodationist Congress Party (Carolyn Elliott, personal communication, 17 January 2015).

Four Enabling Conditions for Integration of Ethno-nationalist Movements within Liberal Democracy

The Indian case casts the moderation hypothesis in a new light. Despite the tendency of convergence towards the position of the median voter, the logic of moderation has built into it the seeds of resentment on the part of potential losers on the extreme flanks of religion-inspired political groups. Post-industrial liberal–democratic societies with deeply rooted modern political institutions also have the problem of rising extremist parties. They seek to overcome the potential danger to legitimacy through a combination of techniques, aimed at co-opting the ‘naysayers’, neutralizing opposition to the core values of the system, or keeping the extremists out of the arena through explicit or implicit rules of exclusion. Where the rules of exclusion end up excluding a substantial number of voters and candidates through restrictive electoral laws, however, the results of these elections cannot claim full legitimacy from the underlying society. The second-ballot system in France, which was designed to exclude the extreme Left and Right is one such mechanism, a point that the National Front uses in its campaign as an unfair method of exclusion by the political establishment. The rules of exclusion, the price that liberal democracy has to pay to sustain moderation, can imperil a democracy in a transitional society.

Seen from this angle, Indian democracy in the 1950s was put under a double bind. In the first place, its electoral rules had to rein in anti-system forces to balance representation, effective lawmaking and governmental coherence. However, the new post-colonial state, lacking the credibility that comes through long and incremental evolution, had to generate trust from the vast, new, inchoate, sprawling and often physically inaccessible national electorate. The ‘Congress system’, in this sense, was a masterly invention that maintained a personal linkage with the society through the founding generation of the state like Nehru who had led the national struggle for decades prior to Independence. The one-party dominant system that resulted gave the Congress Party a hegemonic position from which to steer the society from colonial rule towards popular democracy. As Congress started losing strength in the 1960s, the alienated and excluded flank voters started moving towards a new, radical and anti-system dimension. The availability of large anti-Congress coalitions helped mobilize the discontented into large anti-regime blocs which in some instances produced chronic instability. The memory of the 1960s when a grand coalition of the extremists brought a new, anti-system dimension to Indian politics remains fresh in the strategic calculations of dissidents in current Indian parties and serves to keep up their hopes to gain power without having to become moderate.

Stable moderation of the kind anticipated by the moderation hypothesis requires a strategic decision by the extremists, their rivals and the institutions in which they are ensconced to move from extreme positions in the ideological spectrum to the modal position in the political space. A ‘lock-in’ (North, 1991) in terms of a stable equilibrium at a moderate position is possible if and only if rational expectations of anticipation and delivery are congruent. The Indian data suggest that such a lock-in is possible only when four enabling (boundary) conditions are in operation. These conditions are cumulative.

The first of these is the dimensionality of the issue space. A situation that splits the issue space in terms of two orthogonal dimensions—for example, class and religion—might create the scope for an electoral cycle leading to high political instability. If the two dimensions merge into a meta-dimension that captures the essence of both, however, then competition to converge towards the median provides an incentive to extremists to moderate their political stance. The potential availability of an anti-system dimension keeps the hopes of extremists within the BJP alive. The moderate wing can ignore the existence of these activists, indispensable for campaigning, only at its peril. Merging the two dimensions of policy and identity—politics within the system with politics of the system—requires reimagining the constitutional rules that underpin everyday transactional politics. Even in stable democracies, this can be a formidable challenge as one can see from the difficulty that the French concept of laicity as the meta-dimension of the state shows. The Nehruvian solution of treating the Hindu religion entirely as a private matter, subsumed under the meta-dimension of modernity, had worked reasonably well during the high point of the Congress system. The rise of popular support for the BJP questions that particular solution, but leaves the issue of what the new meta-dimension of politics could be, both open and problematic. ⁶

A second condition is the efficacy of methods of power sharing, based, in particular, on federalism. A regional niche and the capacity of the regional government to accommodate the core values of extremists, as we have seen in the case of the Akali Dal, can integrate an ethno-nationalist party into the democratic political system. The induction of Sikh values and leaders into high governmental office in the State of Punjab (e.g., the 1999 recognition by the Punjab government of Sikh religious values and leaders) took the sting out of religious extremism. ⁷ An honest split, creating something like regional variants on the pattern of the Akali Dal or CPM in West Bengal could have recreated successful niches for several Hindu nationalist parties and saved the Bihar BJP from the opprobrium of ‘Bihari vs Bahari’ (‘sons of the soil versus outsiders’). Such a scenario, however, is unlikely for the BJP whose very raison d’être is based on the primacy of the ‘unity’ of India over its diversity. This forecloses the option of splits on the basis of regional identity, and developing a moderate profile.

The third condition puts the onus on the inner organizational and power structure of the religion itself. The capacity of a political party to self-police, and rein in the more extreme elements into politically brokered moderation (or expel them) is a crucial part of the bargain. Same is the case of the Sikh religion, which is equipped with its one and only holy book (the Guru Granth Saheb), a religious order (the Khalsa) and religious properties (Gurdwaras), and is governed by a high administrative act and order (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee [SGPC]). This institutional capacity is conspicuously lacking in Hinduism. To solve the credibility dilemma, the religious extremist party would require the firm backing from ecclesiastical authorities that put the weight of their authority behind moderation. Such a gesture has not been made by the ecclesiastical authorities in the case of Hindu nationalism. The Hindu community, split among so many different sects, competing orders and belief systems and an ontology that conspicuously denies the existence of one ultimate and supreme truth, does not have a central coordinating bureaucratic body that can generate the basic agreement on scripture, sacred beliefs and symbols, in order to strike a deal with its adversaries. And one can hardly expect Hindu nationalism—tied together with political Islam in an action–reaction syndrome—to be willing to conceptualize, specify, institute and deliver a moderation deal when a similar deal from India’s Muslims is not yet forthcoming.

The fourth enabling condition—the motivation of party activists ⁸ and their salience vis-à-vis the party management—introduces a new parameter to the Downsian spatial model of party competition (see Figure 2). Indian political parties—particularly, those like the BJP which were born out of social movements—differ from American political parties that form the backdrop to the Downsian model with regard to the role of party activists in trying to push the party to their specific ideological position. Every political party must simultaneously seek to maximize the chances of winning an election and projecting a policy position. Party activists are crucial for door-to-door campaigning, raising funds and ‘getting the vote out’. When party activists are motivated by patronage—which made the Congress system work and in its later stages, earned it the sobriquet of ‘license and permit raj’—the party leaders have a lot of room to manoeuvre in terms of the public positions they take on ideology. In a party like the BJP this is not easy because of the powerful presence of the RSS, a special body of full-time pracharaks who dedicate their lives to the promotion of Hindutva.

Conclusion

In an electoral democracy, trends towards moderation, and integration with the party family, or for that matter, cultural exclusivism and isolation are best measured in terms of perception of stakeholders, such as the main political parties, the media and the civil society, the character of the leadership of the party concerned and the platform on which it solicits votes. By all these criteria, despite its electoral success, the ambivalent moderation of the BJP leadership, especially of Prime Minister Modi, remains high. Even in the United States, a lawsuit linking Modi—and by allusion, the BJP—to the Godhra riot, lingers on.

The bumpy cohabitation of Hindu nationalism and India’s liberal democracy does not by itself negate the contention of the article that given the appropriate mix of guaranteed space, self-policing and the experience of office, a move towards moderation by extremist parties is possible. The task for the analyst, in search of policies and institutions that might accelerate the consolidation of liberal democracy in India is to continue the search for those enabling conditions that might make durable moderation feasible on a terrain with no deep cultural roots of liberal values (see also Mitra, 2013a). This remains a salient issue for contemporary India where Hindu nationalism is ensconced in electoral power while opinions about its legitimacy as an integral part of the secular democratic political system as ordained by the Constitution remain sharply divided. On the basis of the enabling conditions identified in this article one can understand the causes of the BJP’s ambivalent moderation, but by the same criteria it is possible to predict that BJP’s ‘encapsulation without integration’ is unlikely to disappear any time soon.