Heba al-Adawy
Heba Al-Adawy, MPhil (Oxon), is a Research Analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies.
DOI: http://DOI Number
Keywords: Hindu nationalist, NaMo, Sangh Parivar, BJP, Lok Sabha, dynastic politics, secularism
Abstract
After a nine-week election marathon, India finally gave its judgement on May 16th, awarding a landslide mandate to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which received 282 Lok Sabha seats and hence the majority to establish the government. Indeed, the BJP’s stunning triumph is the first time in 30 years, since Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, that a single party has commanded such widespread support. It not only symbolises the end of the Nehruvian period of dynasty politics, but also the extraordinary emergence of a Hindu nationalist party led by a politician whose reputation has been damaged by allegations of culpability in the Gujarat sectarian violence of 2002. Voter tiredness and dissatisfaction with the UPA’s economic record, including significant corruption, hardly explain a portion of the outcomes. They fail to account for India’s return to single-party government in 2014, rather than a more divided mandate, given Modi’s contentious communal past. In many ways, the 16th Lok Sabha heralds the start of a new era in Indian electoral politics. The 2014 elections reflect a shift away from federalization and toward a “re-nationalization” of Indian electoral politics, which has come a long way since the era of Congress control. But, while the precise course of his stay remains difficult to anticipate from a structuralist perspective, Modi’s rise in popularity raises the question: What has driven India’s Lurch to the Right? Is this the beginning of a new era for India? Arguably Indian secularism — albeit a defining norm in the Constitution with its corollary set of checks and balances — has not been left untainted by secular parties occasionally pandering to communalism in order to capture vote banks. Does the 16th Lok Sabha, then, signal a mere shift in referents from secularism to development or a qualitative shift in the ethos of Indian mainstream politics?
First Published
June 25, 2014
How to Cite
Heba al-Adawy, “The 16th Lok Sabha: India’s Lurch to the Right,” Regional Studies 32, no.3 (Summer 2014): 51-71, https://regionalstudies.com.pk/wp/article/the-16th-lok-sabha-indias-lurch-to-the-right/
Issue
Volume 32, Issue 3