Tag: asia

New Delhi, India – Prince Patel cancelled his vacation plans after the dates were announced for India’s ongoing weeks-long elections. The 61-year-old retired engineer said he had waited patiently for five years to cast his vote in Surat, India’s diamond hub in the western Indian state of Gujarat, “to give my referendum against the policy failures of [Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s] government”.

But when the May 7 date arrived for the city to vote along with 92 other constituencies in the third phase of India’s election, there were no polling booths set up in Surat.

Two weeks earlier, the Election Commission of India (ECI) had already called the seat in favour of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after cancelling the nominations of the opposition Congress party’s candidate and five others. The eight remaining candidates all withdrew.

Patel said he was devastated. He had voted for the BJP in 2014, lifted by Modi’s promises of “acche din” (good days). But by 2019, disenchantment had set in. Unemployment and price rise are some of his biggest worries, he said – sentiments that mirror recent opinion polls.

“I would rather vote for a pigeon than choose the BJP,” he said. “My children have graduated but there are no jobs.”

Yet, Surat is only the most extreme example of a peculiar phenomenon that is playing out in multiple constituencies across India: opposition candidates dropping out, joining the ruling BJP or alleging threats to their lives. Even as the BJP has denied any foul play, opposition candidates claim these instances are evidence of an uneven political playing field.

“The government is their [BJP’s] own, and the election commission cancelled several nominations on one point or another,” said Vijay Lohar, who was the candidate of a regional party, the Bahujan Republican Socialist Party, before his nomination was rejected by election authorities. “The BJP is the referee of this game. Where should I complain?”

‘Show of dominance’

More than 400km (250 miles) miles away from Surat, the city of Indore in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is also preparing for what is shaping up, effectively, as a non-contest.

The city’s vote is scheduled for May 13. But Akshay Kanti Bam, the candidate for the Congress, withdrew his nomination on April 29, the last date for withdrawal of candidatures – after the deadline for filing nominations had passed. In essence, that has meant that the Congress cannot contest against sitting BJP member of parliament Shankar Lalwani, who is also the party’s nominee this time around. Bam, meanwhile, has also quit the Congress and joined the BJP on election eve, claiming that the party that nominated him for the constituency did not support his campaign on the ground.

The Congress party has called on voters in Indore to pick the ‘None of the Above’, or NOTA, option on electoral voting machines – which allows them to show displeasure with all candidates who are contesting – even as it accuses the BJP of pressuring Bam to switch sides on election eve. Bam did not respond to repeated requests from Al Jazeera for an interview.

The BJP insists it has had no role in the decisions of opposition candidates who have withdrawn their nominations.

“People have withdrawn as per their discretion and these are absolutely baseless allegations,” said Zafar Islam, a national spokesperson for the BJP. “Thousands of candidates are fighting in this election across hundreds of seats peacefully – these allegations are only aimed at maligning the BJP’s image.”

But some analysts see a pattern in the constituencies affected by candidate withdrawals. Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are both bastions of the BJP: The party won all 26 of Gujarat’s seats in the Lok Sabha – the lower house of India’s parliament – in 2014 and 2019. It won 27 out of Madhya Pradesh’s 29 seats in 2014 and improved that to 28 wins in 2019.

In the public eye, the pull-out of opposition candidates from key contests in these states is akin to “booth capturing”, said Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research (CPR), referring to the illegal practice of seizing control of a polling station during elections, which used to be common in parts of India until a few decades ago.

“At a level of the booth, you capture the booth you are strongest at, and that is done to demonstrate dominance,” said Sircar. The idea, he said, is to “signal to the opposition that we can win elections whenever we want”.

And however the ruling party wants, if Jitendra Chauhan, a candidate who withdrew his nomination from the Gandhinagar seat in Gujarat, is to be believed.

‘Threat to our lives’

Chauhan’s name was supposed to be among the options on the voting machine on May 7, when Gandhinagar voted.

But the 39-year-old painter, who was contesting as an independent candidate, pulled out of the election against India’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah, who is widely seen as Modi’s deputy.

“There has been extreme pressure upon me, and I have been mentally tortured to the point where I gave up,” Chauhan told Al Jazeera. He claimed that “BJP people” approached his extended family to pressure him to quit. If they could reach his family, they could hurt them too, he feared.

“So I backed off and withdrew my nomination,” he said.

Father to three daughters, Chauhan released a video on April 21, sobbing and alluding to a threat that he received of consequences – including for his very life – if he did not back down. Many other candidates also pulled out from the contest against Shah.

“I have a responsibility to raise my daughters,” he said, adding that he moved his children to safety outside Gujarat, which is ruled by the BJP, before coming back to vote on May 7. “I’m not financially well-off and I cannot afford to resist the BJP because anything can happen to our lives.”

The BJP has not lost the Gandhinagar seat since 1984. In the 2019 elections, Shah won the seat by a margin of 550,000 votes, and there is little evidence that he would have faced any risk of a loss even if all candidates had contested as they had planned to. But his campaign has set its eyes on doubling Shah’s 2019 victory margin, and fewer contestants could help.

In the 2014 and 2019 elections, “there was a booming turnout for anticorruption promises and nationalism”, but the BJP has lost that wave, said Sircar of the CPR. “The BJP is certainly the most popular party in India, but you have to manufacture some ways of keeping these markers of dominance,” he said.

A Gujarat-based political analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears over their safety, said these incidents pointed to holes in India’s claims to be the world’s largest democracy simply because of the scale of the election it holds. “The worst of democracies also have elections – you cannot do away with elections,” they said. “But the question is about the fairness of the electoral process, and that seems compromised in India.”

It is a sentiment that Chauhan echoed. He said he had thought of contesting because, as a common man who had grown up in poverty, he felt politics was the only vehicle for change.

“But it will always be like a hole in my heart that I was forced into withdrawing,” said Chauhan, his voice cracking, as he spoke on May 7 after voting. “When I voted today, I did not feel like an independent citizen. I felt like a subject of King Modi.”

‘Future in darkness’

In India, a walkover is rare for candidates. An uncontested win has only been recorded 23 times since the country gained independence in 1947.

But for a little more than a decade, Indian elections have also offered the NOTA option. That’s what the Congress is pushing voters in Indore to pick on May 13.

Anuj, a 60-year-old from Indore, who wished to be identified by his first name, was first drawn to the Congress when he drove the campaign jeep of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as a young man more than three decades ago. Since then, he has been loyal to the party, he said, and has campaigned for the Congress this time too.

“We all will vote NOTA. My party candidate is not there, and the other option is the BJP,” he said. “It may not change anything, but it will give comfort to my heart that I resisted.”

Meanwhile, a group of lawyers working with civil society activists are also planning to take India’s election commission to court for calling the result of the Surat election without allowing people to vote on NOTA.

“Is NOTA not seen as an independent candidate on the machine?” one of the lawyers said in a conversation with Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity, citing fears of pressure aimed at pre-empting the petition.

Back in Surat, Patel, the retired engineer, was more blunt about his frustration.

“My right to vote has been snatched,” he said.

Bengaluru, India – As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a grand Hindu temple in the northern Uttar Pradesh state on January 22, a crowd of about 100,000 devotees gathered at a mausoleum nearly 2,000km (1,242 miles) away.

The sombre congregation at Mulabagilu, a small town in the Kolar district of the southern state of Karnataka, was called to mark the Urs (death anniversary) of the 12th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Baba Haider Ali, revered mainly by Muslims but also by other communities in the area. A procession taken through the town, about 100km (62 miles) from the state capital Bengaluru, is the highlight of the annual five-day event.

Shaikh Jaffer Sadiq, who runs a hotel in Mulabagilu, and his friends were preparing for the procession this year when they learned about a photo of the mausoleum – called a dargah in Urdu and Persian – morphed with images of the Hindu god Ram and a saffron flag doing the rounds on social media.

“One of my friends told me about the social media post which had angered the Muslim community. It was a deliberate attempt to hurt the sentiments of Muslims,” Sadiq, 39, told Al Jazeera. A young Hindu man was accused of being behind the incident.

To defuse mounting tensions, Sadiq and his friends met the members of the mausoleum’s management and advised them to file a police complaint against the accused man. “After a police complaint was filed by the dargah members, the Hindu boy was called to the police station and given a strict warning before being let off,” he said. The police made the accused delete the social media post.

The incident made Sadiq, born and raised in Mulabagilu, remember a different, more peaceful time in his hometown, when Hindus and Muslims lived together in apparent harmony. That spirit of coexistence, he says, has cracked in recent years with the rise of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially after the right-wing party returned to power nationally in 2019.

As India votes again in a long drawn-out general election, Sadiq wanted to do what he could to combat hate speech and attempts to polarise the society. Parts of Karnataka voted on April 26, and the rest of the state goes to the polls on Tuesday.

In February, Sadiq went to Bengaluru to attend a workshop of Hate Speech Beda, or Campaign Against Hate Speech, a collective founded in 2020 by a group of lawyers, academics and activists to track, identify, catalogue and fight incidents of hate speech. The collective approaches authorities, urging them to act on their complaints. It also does advocacy and conducts workshops to train people in identifying and reporting hate speech.

Its members know they face an uphill battle – especially in a state that has witnessed a spike in inter-religious tension, and where the BJP has been accused of pushing Islamophobic tropes during the country’s ongoing election.

How the collective works

When Sadiq reached the workshop held in a decrepit Bengaluru building, he saw about 50 other attendees huddled on plastic chairs in a hall. A large screen on one of the walls read: “How to fight hate speech?”

Hate Speech Beda representatives kicked off the day with a brief tutorial and panel discussion on what hate speech is, who spreads it and why, how it drives religious tensions and its social, political and economic impact on Muslims as well as other marginalised communities.

Among the audience were members of various rights and Muslim organisations in Karnataka and other Indian states, including Gujarat, where official records say more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in a days-long massacre when Modi was the state chief minister in 2002. Estimates by independent groups suggest close to 2,000 people were killed in the riots. Modi has denied any responsibility for the killings and India’s Supreme Court has exonerated him.

“If not stopped, hate will disintegrate the country,” said Mohammed Yusuf Kanni of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Karnataka, a prominent Muslim organisation, as he addressed the workshop.

Mujahid Nafees, the convener of the Gujarat-based Minority Coordination Committee, said that as hate spreads, so does ghettoisation. He cited the example of Juhapura, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s biggest city, where the community became further ghettoised after the 2002 violence.

Nafees lives in Juhapura. “People prefer to stay in ghettos for their safety. It has its advantages but it pushes for a further marginalisation of Muslims,” he said.

Mamatha Yajaman, a women’s rights activist in Karnataka, said hate speech disproportionately affects women, especially from vulnerable Muslim and Dalit communities. Dalits fall at the bottom of India’s complex caste hierarchy and have faced centuries of discrimination.

The collective insisted that the best way to fight hate was to approach the police and register criminal cases against accused individuals. Participants were briefed about various sections of the penal code under which cases related to hate speech could be filed.

An hour before they broke for lunch – a simple meal of rice, sambar and mixed vegetable curry – the participants split into groups to brainstorm ideas and processes to combat hate speech.

Sadiq told Al Jazeera he joined the workshop to understand the laws involving hate crimes better.

“We are ordinary people. Our life revolves around earning a decent livelihood and looking after our families. The authorities should fight hate speech and hate crimes. But I can’t sit quiet and see my community being victimised only because we are a minority,” he said.

Activist Karibisappa M from Davanagere, the city headquarters of the district by the same name, about 260km (161 miles) from Bengaluru, said the rise in religious polarisation in his district had “astonished” him.

At least 18 incidents of communal violence were recorded there between 2019 and 2022, according to state government data. Overall, the state recorded 163 cases of such violence in the same period, when the BJP governed it. The Congress Party, nationally in the opposition, returned to power in Karnataka in 2023.

“Davanagere has become a communal hotbed. As a conscientious citizen, I have often joined protest rallies denouncing Hindu-Muslim tensions. I didn’t know what else to do until I came to know about the Hate Speech Beda. I came here to find better ways to deal with the menace,” he told Al Jazeera.

Why was the collective formed?

Hate Speech Beda member Vinay Sreenivasa said the collective came into being in the aftermath of nationwide protests against a controversial citizenship law passed towards the end of 2019 by the Modi government, and a hate campaign against Muslims during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Tens of thousands of people hit the streets to oppose the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which fast-tracks Indian citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian refugees who came to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh before 2015 due to “religious persecution” in those Muslim-majority countries.

Despite critics saying the law, by keeping Muslims out of its purview, violated India’s secular constitution, it was enforced in March 2024, ahead of the election. Many Muslims fear the law, coupled with a National Register of Citizens proposed by the BJP, could be used to further marginalise them.

In February 2020, Hindu mobs in the capital New Delhi attacked the anti-CAA protesters, leading to clashes in which more than 50 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. Dozens of mosques and homes were torched in one of the worst religious riots in the city in decades.

Days after the riots, the world was in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tablighi Jamaat, a prominent Muslim missionary movement, was accused by Hindu groups and a section of mainstream Indian media of deliberately spreading the virus, leading to the arrest of several members of its members. Muslim vendors selling vegetables and fruits on roadsides were attacked for allegedly spitting on their produce to spread the virus.

It was against this backdrop that the Bengaluru residents formed a collective that challenged hate. Today, Hate Speech Beda has nearly 120 members in its WhatsApp group, at least 15 of them volunteering on a daily basis. It also coordinates with other progressive organisations and grassroots groups across Karnataka.

Lawyer Manavi Atri, a member of Hate Speech Beda, said the initial days were challenging.

“We were new to the task and didn’t know what to expect. Despite being lawyers, we had not engaged in such cases before. There was a degree of uncertainty about the kind of relief we would get. We had to be patient with the process,” she said.

Among the first cases the collective took up was the media vilification campaign against Tablighi Jamaat. At least three news channels were reprimanded and fined by the authorities following the Beda’s complaints against them.

“Such cases take months. Once we file a complaint, we doggedly follow them up with authorities over phone calls and emails,” said Shilpa Prasad, also a lawyer and Hate Speech Beda member. She added that they give elaborate submissions for arguments and objections when the cases reach the court.

Atri said the collective has filed about a dozen complaints with the police and other regulatory bodies this year. Among them was a case involving Hindu right-wing groups and a local news channel.

In February, the Hindu groups alleged that a nurse in a government hospital in Karnataka’s Kalburgi district had forcefully converted a Hindu patient to Christianity. A mob barged into the house of the woman, assaulted her and hurled casteist slurs at her. Videos of the attack were run on a local channel, which also accused the nurse of religious conversion.

“The channel did not bother to verify facts. It did not speak to the woman or her neighbours. The channel merely echoed the voice of the right-wing groups. By doing so, it fanned communal tensions between Hindus and Christians,” Atri told Al Jazeera.

Atri said the “biggest struggle” for the collective is to convince the police to file a formal report (called first information report or FIR) in cases involving hate speech. “We have to convince the police to take up the cases, which is unfortunate,” she said.

‘Victims of hate’

Karnataka is the only southern Indian state where the Hindu nationalist BJP has been able to make significant inroads, forming its first-ever government there in 2007. The party’s critics say that since then, the state – otherwise an economic powerhouse that is the capital of India’s information technology, biotech and startup ecosystems – has witnessed a surge in hate speech and attacks.

Towards the end of 2021, the then BJP government in Karnataka banned female Muslim students from wearing the hijab inside classrooms. Several Hindu students staged rallies to support the ban, which remains in place even under the current Congress government, despite new Chief Minister K Siddaramaiah announcing that it would be revoked.

Addressing the Beda workshop in Bengaluru, a 50-year-old Christian lawyer from coastal Karnataka – a BJP stronghold – said hate campaigns by Hindu groups have ” created an atmosphere of fear” in the region. He did not want to reveal his name for fear of reprisal.

“I have been physically attacked by right-wing goons and trolled on social media for my opinions. I prefer to work quietly,” said the lawyer who works for a child rights organisation, which he says will be “unfairly targeted if I speak openly and unabashedly against the BJP’s communal politics”.

But, he added, “we can’t let our children become victims of hate”.

BJP spokesman Narendra Rangappa, an orthopaedic surgeon by profession, rejected allegations that the party provided tacit support to hate speech for political gains. “It is a political narrative shaped by the Congress against us,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We never support hate speech or crime against any community, religion, caste or gender. Calling us hatemongers is an insult to Indian voters who have elected the BJP to power twice since 2014,” he said.

Rangappa added that if any BJP leader was charged with fanning religious hatred, “the law should take its course as we don’t support such behaviour”.

“In fact, our party’s motto is encapsulated in PM Modi’s popular slogan: Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas [unity for all, development for all, trust of all],” he said.

But as recently as May 4, the state BJP posted an animated video on X claiming that Muslims, backed by the Congress, were plotting to take over government benefits provided to traditionally marginalised caste groups.

And a report by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) in January said at least 84 instances of religious conflict occurred in Karnataka’s coastal districts last year, 44 of them listed under hate speech.

In February, a report by the India Hate Lab, a United States-based research group, documented about 700 hate speeches in the country in 2023.

None of this is surprising, political analyst and author N K Mohan Ram told Al Jazeera. He blamed the BJP and its politics for deepening “hatred and division”.

“A sustained negative campaign against any community, like the one against Muslims by right-wing groups, is disastrous for the country as it leads to marginalisation, dehumanisation and violence against the targeted group,” said Ram, who is also the author of Alienation of Muslims in the 21st Century.

The members of Hate Speech Beda say they will not give up. During the Bengaluru workshop, Atri was nursing a leg injury from a road accident. She needed a walker to move around. But the pain, she stressed, was worth enduring.

“Fighting hate is a serious job and it can’t stop,” she said.