Modi wanted an election scapegoat. He has one

Record turnout in 2019 had helped Modi’s BJP immensely, and the party hoped the popularity of its star campaigner – and his inauguration of a Hindu temple at a disputed site earlier this year – would lead to a repeat. That doesn’t seem to be happening, and people have already voted (or chosen not to) for just over half of the 543 parliamentary seats that have gone to the polls. While the BJP is still the pollsters’ favorite to win, the party and its leaders seem strangely nervous and are ramping up the fear-mongering accordingly. “If you have two buffaloes, Congress will take one,” Modi said at a rally in his home state of Gujarat.

The Congress party has not said anything about wealth redistribution. However, it has promised an expansion of affirmative action. This is where the BJP sees an opportunity to pit Muslims against other disenfranchised groups. “If you are a non-Muslim,” says a now-deleted video posted under the party’s Instagram account, “Congress will take your wealth and distribute it to the Muslims. Narendra Modi is aware of this evil plan. Only he has the power to stop it.”

This was followed by a 17-second cartoon clip, in which Gandhi hatches just such a plan to benefit Muslims at the expense of marginalized Hindu groups. But is that what Gandhi really proposes? In any case, Muslims cannot get religion-based reservations in higher education and government jobs. This would be contrary to the secular Constitution of India. What the main opposition group has promised in its manifesto is that it will increase the overall 50% limit for affirmative action, after first conducting a caste census.

The last such exercise, which divided the population into roughly 4,000 groups and sub-groups, took place under British rule in 1931. After independence in 1947, the government gave itself constitutional powers to make special provisions for the advancement of backward classes, castes and groups. tribes. India’s affirmative action program, which predates the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, began with the most marginalized castes, often called Dalits (broken people) and Adivasis (indigenous people). They are counted every ten years, but other disadvantaged groups are not. The caste data from a 2011 socio-economic survey has not been made public.

Refusing to assess the extent of a malaise will not make it go away. Although the over-representation of disadvantaged castes in certain industries, such as leather and waste management, has declined sharply, it has not stopped even after eighty decades of affirmative action.

In the 1980s, more than 80 percent of the sons of temporary workers also had irregular jobs. That figure has fallen to 53 percent for upper castes, but still remains at 76 percent for Dalits, according to last year’s State of Working India report from Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Women’s participation in the economy is terrible: every second young woman neither works nor studies. Separate data shows that India’s Muslim youth are doing worse in education than Dalits.

Can quotas be given to some Muslim communities, not because of their religion, but because of their socio-economic disadvantage? Creating new rights will not be politically easy. When I was at Delhi University in 1990, mass protests broke out over a 27 percent quota in federal jobs for so-called Other Backward Classes. The policy survived, but not the government that introduced it.

Muslims in Karnataka and Kerala are already eligible for state-level quotas. Tamil Nadu offers them to 95 percent of Muslim communities. Andhra Pradesh also reserves jobs and educational seats for some Islamic sects. These states happen to be located in the more prosperous south of the country. It’s time to start a mature conversation about how we can create more opportunities for Muslims in a rapidly modernizing economy. Demonizing them, as the BJP does with its animated videos, is hardly a way to create such a dialogue.

Even if a pliant Election Commission looks the other way, Modi must weigh the consequences of his dog whistles. The Indian Prime Minister’s desperation for a third term puts a target on the back of a vulnerable minority – and puts millions of lives at risk.