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I am grateful to Prakash Kashwan and the other participants of the panel on ‘Democracy, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the New Right in Asia’ at the 2016 International Political Science Association conference in Poznan, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Introduction
The Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) (BJP) is the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement—which also includes the grass-roots organizations, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association) (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) (VHP). Its ideology of ‘Hindutva’ is based on the idea that Indian nationhood should be defined by a particular conception of Hinduism and Hindu culture, with Muslims and other minorities assimilated within this majoritarian national identity. During its 2014 election campaign, however, the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, garnered praise from commentators for not resorting to nationalist sloganeering and instead focusing the campaign on promises of economic growth and development. Ashutosh Varshney argued, for instance, that ‘[a]nti-Muslim rhetoric has been missing in Modi's campaign. Instead, he has concentrated on governance and development’.1 Varshney suggested that ‘Modi's move away from strict Hindu nationalism is consistent with the political science research of the last several decades, which has argued that no leftwing or rightwing party can come to power in Delhi without moving towards the centre’.2 Varshney here was alluding to institutional theories of moderation, according to which democratic electoral politics has a moderating effect on political parties and their ideologies.3 Yet, just two years after the election, Varshney had concluded that ‘India's cultural transformation is the fundamental project of BJP politics today’.4 This suggests that the case of the BJP in India actually reveals the shortcomings of institutional theories of moderation. Specifically, as Ruparelia and Jaffrelot have shown, while theories of moderation suggest that political parties will moderate their ideologies when they become a part of a plural party system, the BJP has vacillated between periods of apparent moderation and periods of polarization, and has sought to reshape institutions and public discourse ‘by pushing the center of gravity to the right’.5 This suggests that no fundamental ideological transformation has occurred as an outcome of participation in electoral politics.
In this article, I...