Thuggocracy In India

The use of thugs in Indian politics is wide-spread, acknowledged and accepted.

Take the world’s largest volunteer organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an epitome of civil society. Founded in 1925, the flagship of Hindutva today has an all-male membership of 5 million. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, served as an RSS pracharak (a member of a hard core of RSS apostles). According to The Economist: “Some RSS groups exercise quiet influence, lobbying for more “nationalist” economic policy, for instance. Others simply wield muscle. The 2m-member Bajrang Dal, a youth branch of the World Hindu Council, an RSS offshoot, has a reputation for beating up Muslim boys who dare to flirt with Hindu girls. The 3m-strong All India Students Council is aggressive in campus politics. By threat or violent action it frequently blocks events it does not like, such as lectures by secular intellectuals. Just outside the orbit of the RSS lie violent extremist groups, such as one believed responsible for murdering leftist writers.”

At the state level, take Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal, and her Trinamool Congress party. The TMC machine, which critics say is backed in many areas by local criminal gangs, wields an intimidating presence in a state that has long been coloured by political violence. It is often said that whoever controls the ballot box controls the election. It does not help that the state police are seen as subservient to the party. Tales of corruption and extortion under the TMC are rife, and criminality by TMC street thugs has turned poor voters against the the party. Before the election of 2016, aware of West Bengal’s propensity for politically motivated violence, India’s national election commission took vigorous steps. Besides staggering the votes over several weeks, it replaced local police chiefs and election officials with its own functionaries, mounted mobile and stationary patrols and rounded up suspected thugs.  Consequently, the election was the most peaceful in West Bengal’s recent memory. Ms. Banerjee was not pleased. (Nor was the previous lot saintly: after the crushing defeat of the communist-led Left Front – in power for 34 years – in 2011, much of its street muscle went over to Ms. Banerjee.)

When Uber and Ola drivers went on strike last year in Mumbai, the strike was rendered highly effective by the strength of powerful unions, in particular one called Maharashtra Rajya Rashtriya Kamgar Sangh. Thousands would have crossed picket lines but for their colleagues who maintained solidarity by, for example, forcing strikebreakers to strip naked or by smashing their phones. Dozens trying to work were beaten up and their cars damaged.

One of the architects of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December, 1992 was L K Advani. The breaking of the mosque triggered riots in which an estimated 1,000 people died. He  became home minister (twice) and then deputy prime minister. About the state elections in Gujarat in 2002, Kuldip Nayar, an Indian columnist, pointed out that Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi “did best in the area where he planned and executed ethnic cleansing” – a swing of 18 per cent in central Gujarat and 11 per cent in the north. Altogether, the BJP won 126 seats in the 182-member assembly (The Daily Star, December 19, 2002). The Bush administration refused him a visa, blaming him for the pogrom in which 2,000 Muslims were killed, according to The Economist. “He may be a mass murderer,” opined Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times, the newspaper he edits, “but he's our mass murderer.” This was a common reaction among Indians to the Bush administration’s decision. We have seen the role of intergroup bias, in which we are forgiving of our own group’s shortcomings and scathing about the outgroup’s misdeeds. Today, Narendra Modi is India’s prime minister.