Indian polls result will furnish insights for Malaysia

 

From Terence Netto

Results of the Indian general election will be announced on Tuesday (June 4).

Polling was staggered over six weeks, culminating in a final round of voting on Saturday (June 1).

People who followed the election campaign on YouTube would have found it riveting, as this scribe did.

The debates and a lively media’s coverage of every shade of opinion validated the writer Rudyard Kipling’s opinion that India is the most democratic nation in the world.

Critics claim that under Narendra Modi, plumping for his third term as prime minister, India has become an electoral autocracy.

That is what it almost certainly will be if a decisive majority of its nearly 969 million voters give Modi and his Hindu revivalist party BJP victory.

A Hindu Rashtra which Modi and the BJP will usher in during what will be an unprecedented third term in power will see the diminishment of India as a secular republic, which was what its founders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru decreed for it.

That would be a loss for not only India but also the rest of Asia: the Indian experiment in constitutional self-government, begun in 1947 and whose constitutional framework was painstakingly drawn up by 1951, has been a lighthouse for other Asian nations striving to construct their polities.

The Hindu revivalists of the BJP are similar to Islamists in that both find secularism anathema.

They claim secularism is a colonial imposition when actually it only means a principled distance between religion and state; no more, no less.

This distance is necessary for the protection of minorities.

Modi breached this distance when he inaugurated, on Jan 22, at the opening of the Ram Mandir, the Hindu temple that was built on the site where the 16th century mosque, Babri Masjid, once stood.

Hindus believe the site was the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram in the north Indian town of Ayodhya.

India’s Supreme Court later condemned the destruction by Hindu zealots in December 1992 of the Babri Masjid.

At the end of a long legal battle, the apex court, in an act of judicial equipoise, allowed for the building of a new Hindu temple at the site and held that an adequate plot of land be allocated to Muslims as replacement for the destroyed mosque.

It can be argued the whole saga, from its beginnings in the 16th century, is a demonstration of the necessity for secularism in a polity; if for no other reason it serves to protect the minorities.

Doubtless, Hindu revivalists will disagree.

True, they correctly point to Hindu tolerance of minorities such as Zoroastrians (Parsees) and Jews, past refugees from oppression.

The Hindu revivalists of the BJP have a distaste for what it terms as non-Vedic religions – Islam and Christianity.

A triumphalist Modi bodes ill for followers of both minority religions in India.

Would the Islamists of Malaysia, if and when they witness this prospect, be chastened and look at secularism with less loathing? - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.