A Question of Order. Basharat Peer
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son does not become the CEO. When the techies see the Congress Party and its dynastic practices, they cannot relate to it.”
One of the biggest challenges on Modi’s road to prime ministership remained the traditional opposition of the lower and middle castes to his party, especially in the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The two states elect 120 lawmakers to the Lok Sabha, more than a fifth of all members.
In Bihar, Modi was challenging the coalition of two veteran politicians: Laloo Prasad Yadav, a former Chief Minister of the state, who empowered the lower caste and prevented sectarian violence but had also faced serious graft charges during his term, and Nitish Kumar, who defeated Yadav to take over as Chief Minister in 2005. Kumar was praised for strengthening infrastructure and improving security and safety in Bihar, and he ruled in a coalition with the BJP until he broke with them in 2013, when Modi was chosen as the candidate for prime minister. Kumar, a believer in pluralism, found Modi’s majoritarianism unacceptable. “I cannot work with anyone who poses a challenge to that idea, I will fight such a person, I will fight such an idea,” he told his biographer.
Jadhua is a small village 15 miles north of Patna, the capital of Bihar. The traffic moved slowly, becoming nearly impassable once I reached a massive bridge over the River Ganges that linked Patna and the northern parts of the state. Jadhua’s proximity to Patna and Kumar’s infrastructure projects have brought relative prosperity to the village—expansive multi-story houses sit beside tiny, cramped huts; young men on motorcycles race past buffaloes and cows grazing lazily in the alleys.
There I met Dinesh Prasad, a 46-year-old guard with the Indian railways, who lives in a three-room brick house at the edge of the village. As we sat on red plastic chairs, Prasad talked about the history of bitter caste divisions in Bihar. “Laloo Yadav is my god,” Prasad told me. “Because of him we lived without the fear of upper castes, because of him we got jobs in government.” He planned to vote for Yadav in state elections in the winter, but in 2014 it didn’t matter that he and his lower- and middle-caste neighbors had always supported Yadav and the Congress Party, who now were staunchly opposed to the BJP; he was won over by Modi’s aggressive, authoritarian personality. Modi had fielded a blistering campaign in the state that focused on his economic record in Gujarat, middle-caste origins, polarizing Hindu nationalistic rhetoric, and embodiment of a muscular strongman.
“Manmohan Singh is meek, he could barely speak,” Prasad said. “If the head of your house is so weak, then the neighbors will mess with you. Pakistan’s army came and cut the heads of our soldiers and Manmohan Singh did nothing. China threatens us on our borders and they do nothing. We needed a strong man, a powerful man to lead India. If Pakistan cuts heads of two of our soldiers, Modi will chop off twenty Pakistani heads.”
Modi carried the impoverished, semi-feudal Bihar by an unexpectedly wide margin, winning over aspiring youths as well as members of the lower and middle castes, like Prasad—the traditional voters for Kumar and Yadav.
At a campaign rally in late April, Giriraj Singh, a leader of the BJP from Bihar, who is devoted to Modi and Hindu nationalist politics, declared that there will be no place for Modi’s critics in India. “Those who intend to stop Narendra Modi are looking at Pakistan. In the coming days, there won’t be any place for them in India, or in Jharkhand, but Pakistan.” Modi appointed Singh as the junior minister for enterprise in his government.
One early July 2014 morning, I arrived in Varanasi, the holiest Hindu city, in Uttar Pradesh. As street lamps flickered in the blue dawn, I watched crowds of Hindu pilgrims walk briskly through narrow, serpentine alleys, past crumbling houses to the Ganges riverfront. From wooden poles by the riverbank fluttered the saffron flags of the BJP. “Mother Ganges has called me,” Modi declared during a campaign stop in late April. As he spoke, Amit Shah, a former minister in Gujarat and Modi’s closest aide, stood on his right. Shah had been running the Modi campaign in Uttar Pradesh. A burly, balding man in his early fifties, Shah faces charges for the murder of three people the police suspect of plotting to assassinate Modi as revenge for the 2002 anti-Muslim violence. Shah, who insists the murder charges are politically motivated, also has the reputation of being a brilliant and ruthless political strategist.
I fully understood Shah’s shrewd political acumen only after meeting one of his workers, Rajneesh Singh, inside a gaudy shopping mall and office complex a few miles from the Varanasi riverfront. Singh, an athletic man in his mid-thirties from an upper-caste landlord family from a village near Varanasi, wore aviator shades and body-hugging shirts popularized by Bollywood star Salman Khan. Singh ran a small construction company in partnership with a BJP legislator he met at an RSS training camp. Like Modi in his youth, Singh worked as a propagandist and outreach worker for the RSS. Singh had campaigned for the BJP in many elections; but after Shah took over Modi’s campaign in Utter Pradesh, the organization gained new energy. As Singh saw it, “Amit Shah came with a new plan that he had tested in Gujarat.” Singh recalled excitedly how he implemented one of Shah’s ideas for ensuring maximum polling for a BJP candidate.
The sheer numbers of voters in Indian elections can be daunting for anyone trying to make sure supporters get to the polls. In the 2014 election, 814 million Indians voted in 930,000 polling stations. On average, each polling station caters to around 900 voters, who are listed in a sheaf of paper about 15 pages thick. Shah’s organizational insight was to create a new position of “page supervisor,” a volunteer responsible for persuading the 60-odd voters on a single page of the list to vote for the BJP. India had never witnessed such meticulous planning to get out the vote. “It amounts to being responsible for ten families in your neighborhood,” Singh explained. “Every page supervisor looked after his own family and other families who live next door, people he knows. He ensured that they came out on the day of voting, that they knew lotus was the electoral symbol for the BJP and Modi.” I asked Singh if I could meet a page supervisor. He pointed toward the man who had served us tea.
A few hundred miles from Varanasi, the western region of Uttar Pradesh and the abutting state of Haryana form a belt of prosperous middle-caste, land-owning Hindu Jats. The area remains culturally conservative and is infamous for honor killings and female feticide. While Modi spoke of development and governance throughout his campaign, it was in Western Uttar Pradesh that his party’s strategy of religious polarization between Hindus and Muslims, and the exploitation of sectarian tensions to bring various caste groups under the saffron banner of the BJP, became visible.
Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in Western Uttar Pradesh, about 80 miles north of New Delhi, are dominated by miles of sugarcane fields, which form the core of the area’s economy. I met Gul Bahar, a 20-year-old college student from Lisarh, a relatively prosperous village of 8,000 people around 35 miles from Muzaffarnagar town, which is the center of the eponymous district. Muslims once made up about a third of its population. But in late August 2013, intense sectarian violence broke out in several area villages. The troubles began after two Hindu Jats killed a Muslim youth who allegedly harassed the sister of one of the men. They were in turn killed by a group of Muslims who were arrested for the murder, but rumors spread that they were released without charge.
Hindu Jats already saw the ruling socialist Samajwadi Party as partial to Muslims; Jats in the district traditionally voted for a regional party allied with the Congress Party. The BJP saw an opening. They held rallies and made incendiary speeches, arousing passions further.
About two weeks later, Hindu Jats held a panchayat, an assembly of villagers, to “save the honor of daughters and daughters-in-law.” Thousands attended. In videos of the meeting, young Jat men carrying scythes, rods, and swords shouted anti-Muslim slurs. Politicians from the BJP led the gathering, making provocative speeches. Hukum Singh, a BJP leader, roared: “The purpose of this panchayat is Hindu unity.” On their way to the assembly, Hindus stabbed two Muslims; on their way back, Muslims retaliated and killed thirteen Hindus, according to police officials. As word of the attacks spread, mobs of Hindu Jats began attacking Muslim homes in surrounding villages.
Bahar was home with his extended family when he heard the terrifying roar outside his house. A crowd armed with knives, scythes, country-made pistols, and swords flooded his street. Some carried jerry cans filled with gasoline. “They began setting our homes on fire,” Bahar recalled.