Dr Subir Sinha: Why Development Defines India’s Elections Today

‘India is being ruled by a Hindu Taliban’ and ‘Narendra Modi is clamping down on tolerance and freedom of expression’ wrote Anish Kapoor last month as the Indian premier visited London.

Narendra Modi is certainly an enemy of the ideals of the true socialist democracy envisioned by great Indian politicians such as Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru and Rajagopalachari. Irrespective of whatever else may have divided these leaders, India’s founding fathers would agree that Modi is an extremist – someone whose crusade to cleanse India of its minorities is at least as dangerous as the jihadi campaign to murder innocents in the name of Islam. The difference, of course, is that Modi, whose politics represents the antithesis of secularism, is the premier of the world’s largest democracy. In this post, after our short preface, our comrade Dr Subir Sinha argues that Modi’s grandiose promises of bullet trains and world leadership are proving less attractive to Indians than the alternative politics of redistribution via subsidies, social programmes, transparency and participation in governance and zero tolerance on corruption.

If anything, in terms of Indian constitutionalism, Modi and his fellow fanatics represent the worst possible ideological outcome that the architects of Indian secularism could possibly have imagined. After all, within the meaning of the constitution, India is a “sovereign socialist secular democratic republic” which guarantees for all its citizens justice (social, economic and political), liberty (thought, expression, belief, faith and worship) and equality