Tag: narendra modi

Can the vote be rigged? Ahead of India election, old debate gets new life | India Election 2024 News

New Delhi, India – As he launched the main Indian opposition alliance’s election campaign in the middle of March, Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi hit out at two targets: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he described as the “king”, and the electronic voting machines (EVMs) that the country uses to cast ballots.

“The soul of the king is in the EVM,” Gandhi said in Mumbai.

The allegation: that the machines can be hacked, and that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) owes its electoral dominance over India to that malpractice, even though multiple opinion polls suggest the prime minister’s party is resoundingly the favourite among voters in many parts of the country.

The charge isn’t new. The Congress and some other opposition parties have previously too questioned the trustworthiness of EVMs, machines that are not connected to the internet yet run on chips that critics say could, in theory, be programmed to record votes in a way that doesn’t match the buttons that voters press.

The Election Commission of India (ECI), which conducts the country’s votes, and even the Supreme Court, have rubbished these allegations and no conclusive evidence has emerged yet to substantiate the claims.

But as India now heads for national elections over seven drawn-out phases starting April 19, Gandhi has made the possibility of election fraud a central talking point. The Congress leader, who has been on a long march, is demanding that India return to the paper ballots it used in elections until the late 1990s, which were counted manually.

That demand was rejected last week by the Supreme Court. The Election Commission called it a “regressive” proposal. Yet, the chorus of demands from the Congress and its supporters isn’t going away – even though opposition parties lead governments in almost half of the country’s states, formed through elections also conducted using EVMs. Elections that they won.

Congress leader Digvijay Singh – the former chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh – is a consistent campaigner against the machines. He leads a loosely built group of critics from the country’s opposition parties and nonprofits demanding a return to paper ballots.

Ritu Singh, a young Dalit academic, has been going viral on YouTube, X and Instagram with her comments, speeches and videos, in which she alleges that Indian democracy has been imperilled by EVMs.

In New Delhi, traditional Congress voter Gregory Ekka said he no longer trusts the elections.

“We all vote for the Congress, but we do not know where our vote goes. Till there is EVM, BJP would continue to be in power,” said Ekka, whose tribe from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has historically voted for the Congress.

To build confidence in the EVMs, the Election Commission in 2013 introduced the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, or VVPAT, which is a slip of paper that is visible to the voter for seven seconds before it slides into a box kept alongside the voting machine. On the paper, a voter can check whether their ballot has been recorded correctly.

In 2017, the Election Commission decided that votes on VVPAT slips would be counted, in a handful of polling stations in every constituency, to randomly test whether the tallies matched with those shown by EVMs. The Congress and some other opposition parties are now demanding that VVPAT slips be counted for all polling stations across the country.

But veteran election officers and independent analysts say the opposition is mistaken in questioning the credibility of EVMs.

Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi said he is convinced that any election rigging cannot be “through EVM”. He said he supports counting VVPAT slips to rebuild trust in the Election Commission as an independent body that holds elections. “Even if it takes more days to count these VVPAT slips to match the EVM count, it should be done,” he said.

But any electoral malpractice that might happen occurs before the actual voting, he said. “Elections can be won or lost before elections,” Quraishi said.

Before every election, the Election Commission puts out advertisements asking voters to check their names in the voter list – to make sure they haven’t been accidentally removed.

“If they do not check how can ECI be blamed,” Quraishi said.

Yet maintaining and updating electoral rolls accurately – and fairly – is no easy task. Weeding out names that are either duplicated or of people who have died is critical, said an Election Commission official who requested anonymity. “After COVID, many names had to be removed,” the official said.

According to the World Health Organization, almost four million Indians died in the pandemic – though the Indian government’s estimation is much lower.

Many civil society activists fear that the revision of electoral rolls is used to remove voters who are inconvenient for the government of the day. “Some of those who would not vote for a political party are weeded out,” said Major General (retired) Anil Verma, who heads the Association for Democratic Reforms, which was at the forefront of the successful efforts to get the Indian Supreme Court to lift the veil on controversial electoral bonds used to fund political parties. “The ECI is not doing enough.”

Ahead of the 2019 elections, activists said tens of millions of Muslim and Dalit voters were removed from the electoral list, prompting fears of a suppressed turnout from segments of the population that often do not vote for Modi or the BJP.

After elections to the legislature of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh last year, Congress leader Praveen Chakravarty wrote in the Indian newspaper Deccan Herald that he analysed seven pre-poll surveys, 10 exit polls and two post-poll studies that all predicted a higher vote share for the Congress than the BJP. Yet, the Congress lost by 4 percentage points.

Sanjay Kumar, professor at the New Delhi-based Centre of Study of Developing Society, however, said that a “mismatch between survey findings and the final outcome does not mean that the elections have been rigged.” Kumar said he had seen no evidence of “mass rigging” in elections since the introduction of EVMs.

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Rohingya in India accuse Modi of double standards on citizenship law | Rohingya News

Kolkata, India – Muhammad Hamin has been unable to sleep at night since March 8 when the government of the northeast Indian state of Manipur ordered the deportation of Rohingya refugees.

On that day, the state’s Chief Minister N Biren Singh – who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – posted on X that his government had deported the first batch of eight refugees from a group of 77 members who had “entered India illegally”.

The deportation was later stopped after Myanmar authorities refused to work with India on the matter.

Hamin, a Rohingya who came to India in 2018, is in New Delhi, some 1,700km (1,050 miles) away from Manipur. But the 26-year-old, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration in India’s capital, spends his time watching television or scrolling through social media platforms on his mobile phone for any updates on attempts to deport members of his community.

He does this even as he observes the dawn-to-dusk fasts during the holy month of Ramadan.

“The news of deportation has certainly triggered a panic button among most of the Myanmar nationals living in India as nobody knows who would be the next to go out and face the same horror of violence and bloodshed,” he said.

For many Rohingya refugees in India, that fear is tinged with bitter irony. Three days after the Manipur government began its crackdown on Rohingya, Modi’s government on March 11 announced the implementation of a controversial citizenship law aimed at granting Indian citizenship to persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) grants nationality to six religious minorities – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians – who had come to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before 2015 and faced religious persecution.

Missing from the list of potential beneficiaries are Muslim communities from these nations, who are the targets of violence, such as the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan and the Hazara in Afghanistan. Also absent are the Rohingya, from another bordering nation, also persecuted, and also mostly Muslim.

“We are also the victims of religious persecution, just like the citizens of three other countries that will be granted citizenship. We are also a minority in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar. But the Indian government is not bothered about us simply because we are Muslims,” a Rohingya rights activist told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals from the government.

Rohingya children at a refugee settlement in New Delhi [Handout via Al Jazeera]

A long struggle

The Rohingya are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar, which denies them citizenship, thereby rendering them stateless and without basic rights. The community, most of whom are residents of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, has been facing violence and repression in the Buddhist-majority country for decades.

In 2017, more than 750,000 Rohingya were forced to flee Myanmar after it launched what the United Nations has called a military campaign conducted with “genocidal intent”. The people fled to the coasts of southern Bangladesh, transforming the region into the world’s largest refugee camp.

Many also fled to neighbouring India or reached the country after fleeing the camps in Bangladesh.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says nearly 79,000 refugees from Myanmar, including Rohingya, live in India, with about 22,000 registered with the UN refugee agency. Most Rohingya in India have been given UNHCR cards that recognise them as a persecuted community.

Hamin arrived in India in 2018 – a year after his family of 11 members landed in Bangladesh’s cramped settlements.

“My family is still in Bangladesh but I came here for my education and started living with my friends who had come here before me,” he said.

But like other Rohingya refugees in India, his existence in the country is precarious.

India is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which spells out the rights of refugees and a state’s responsibilities towards them. The South Asian country also does not have a law protecting refugees.

Critics have slammed the government for excluding persecuted minorities such as the Rohingya from Myanmar or the Ahmadis from Pakistan from the scope of the citizenship law, calling it a double standard aimed at pandering to anti-Muslim tropes ahead of the general election starting next month.

‘Reckless statements’

During a hearing last week on a plea challenging the deportation of Rohingya, the government told the Supreme Court the group did not have the fundamental right to live in India.

The Rohingya activist who requested anonymity said: “We have the refugee cards issued by the UNHCR but the Indian government claims we do not have the fundamental right to live in India.”

Supreme Court lawyer Colin Gonsalves condemned the government’s stand.

“The right to live is not only for Indians but covers all citizens in the territory of India, including the Rohingya and others who flee religious persecution. The Indian Constitution protects their rights but it is surprising that senior officers in the government are making reckless statements,” he said.

“The top court makes it clear that protection of the lives of the refugees is a constitutional right. They are protected under [the] non-refoulement or non-return policy that states a refugee cannot be sent back to the place from where he or she had fled due to the fear of physical or sexual assault.”

Rohingya men and women at a shelter in New Delhi [Handout via Al Jazeera]

‘Future seems dark’

Salai Dokhar is a New Delhi-based activist who runs India for Myanmar, a political campaign creating awareness of the rights of refugees. He fears the deportation of Rohingya could endanger the lives of the refugees amid a civil war in Myanmar that arose after a military coup in the country in 2021.

“We fear the refugees might be used by the [Myanmar] army as human shields in the [civil] war or would be treated badly for leaving the country,” he said, adding that if the Indian government was adamant about deporting the Rohingya, it should hand them over to the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), a platform of opposition parties in Myanmar.

For years, the Rohingya in India were also subjected to a hate campaign by alleged right-wing Hindu groups on social media. In January, Hamin and a fellow Rohingya, Muhammad Kawsar, 19, filed a petition in the Delhi High Court demanding action against Facebook for providing a platform for an anti-refugee social media campaign. The petitioners urged the court to order the United States-based social media company to remove hate speech and other harmful content.

“We have been noticing that there are hate campaigns against us on Facebook but the company has done nothing to stop them. Some posts are briefly suspended and soon restored on social media. Such posts heighten the risk of attacks on the vulnerable community by branding them as terrorists,” said Hamin.

Germany-based Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin, also the co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, a non-profit fighting for the rights of the community, said the Indian media’s frequent portrayal of the Rohingya as a potential national security threat has compounded their challenges.

“The right-wing Indian government doesn’t hold a favourable outlook towards us and the situation is only made worse by the apathetic attitude of the media,” he said.

“We just need some protection to live here [until] the situation normalises in our country. But the future seems dark for us.”

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‘Dead democracy’: Will Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest unite India’s opposition? | India Election 2024 News

New Delhi, India – The arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by India’s financial crime investigation agency on Thursday night has triggered near-unanimous condemnation from the country’s fragile opposition, with some leaders warning of a people’s “revolution” against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kejriwal’s arrest, weeks before the first round of India’s mammoth seven-phase national elections, comes on the heels of similar arrests of opposition leaders and raids on their properties by law enforcement agencies. India’s biggest opposition party, the Congress, said Thursday morning that it was unable to continue campaigning because all its bank accounts had been frozen in connection with an ongoing tax dispute.

The latest arrest also plunged India’s capital into an unprecedented constitutional crisis – it is the first time that Delhi’s serving chief minister has been arrested. Calling it “dirty politics” by Modi over a “bogus case”, a spokesperson for Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) told Al Jazeera that the party leader would not resign, and, rather, “run the government from jail”.

India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) has been investigating corruption allegations in a liquor policy implemented by Kejriwal’s government in 2022. The policy allegedly gave undue advantages to private retailers and has led to the arrests of ministers, officials and an executive of the Indian arm of French spirits giant Pernod Ricard.

Before the arrest, the agency had summoned 55-year-old Kejriwal nine times for questioning. The chief minister refused to appear before the authorities. Now, he joins almost the entire top leadership of his party – former deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia, and former ministers Satyendar Jain and Sanjay Singh – in prison, deepening challenges for the AAP, which runs two opposition-ruled states: Delhi and Punjab.

AAP has denied allegations of corruption, while the Modi government has rejected charges of any political vendetta.

“Whatever the PM fancies, he can do. So far, they have arrested two chief ministers, and it’s possible they can arrest more chief ministers,” Saurabh Bharadwaj, Delhi’s health minister and a close aide of Kejriwal, said in a statement to Al Jazeera.

Last month, the agency arrested Hemant Soren, hours after he resigned as the chief minister of Jharkhand state, on charges of corruption. Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, like the AAP and the Congress, is part of the INDIA opposition alliance that hopes to take on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming elections, in which the prime minister aims to secure a third term in office.

However, some analysts suggest that the arrests could prove politically risky for Modi and the BJP, potentially galvanising sympathy for targeted leaders and coalescing an otherwise divided opposition into greater unity against the shared threat of a crackdown on all of them.

‘Common man’ to ‘martyr’?

Devender Singh, a 34-year-old AAP worker, joined hundreds of protesters who gathered near the chief minister’s residence in Delhi while the agency questioned Kejriwal on Thursday before his arrest. “This is unbecoming of the Indian democracy,” he told Al Jazeera. “[An elected CM] is being harassed and tortured in daylight, what has gotten into Modi’s mind?”

“First time, I voted for Kejriwal; next time, I was campaigning for him,” said Singh, amid a building police presence and slogans lamenting a “death of democracy”. He added: “It is a witch-hunt of opposition leaders by the government that is afraid of any alternatives.”

Kejriwal founded AAP, Hindi for “common man’s party”, in 2011, riding on an anticorruption crusade. He went on to pull off thumping electoral wins over Modi’s poll-strong BJP in 2015 and in 2020, when he won 67 and 62 seats in successive elections to a 70-member assembly.

However, in the national election of 2019, the BJP swept all seven seats from Delhi in the parliament. The voter bases of the two parties partly overlap, including on elements of Hindu majoritarianism, analysts told Al Jazeera.

By closing in on Kejriwal, the Modi government not only risks positioning itself as authoritarian and arrogant, said Asim Ali, a political commentator, but could also alienate voters undecided between the BJP and AAP. Now, they “may stick with AAP out for sympathy, or even vote for Congress out of spite”.

“The risk for BJP is to make Kejriwal into a martyr,” he said.

Amid arrests and raids of opposition leaders, critics and journalists, India has slipped in international democratic indices under Modi. The government has said the reports are unreliable and, now, plans to come up with its own index.

“[The arrests] demonstrate the desperation of the Indian authorities and a blatant disregard for human rights,” Aakar Patel, chair of the board of Amnesty International in India, told Al Jazeera. “What we are witnessing is a government consolidating its power by consistent weaponisation of laws and central financial agencies at the expense of the people – and rights – that it deems dispensable.”

Since Modi came to power in 2014, 95 percent of the cases taken up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – India’s premier investigative agency – and the ED have been against politicians from the opposition. This represents a rise of 60 percentage points for the CBI, and 54 percentage points for the ED, from the days of the previous Congress-led government that ruled from 2004 to 2014.

“It’s imperative that all state institutions function properly and with complete respect for human rights, including the Enforcement Directorate, the Election Commission and the justice system, to guarantee that the Indian population can fully and fairly exercise their civil and political rights before, during and after the general election,” Patel added.

‘INDIA will give befitting reply’

Kejriwal’s arrest also set off a wave of condemnations from opposition political parties – including those that have drifted away from the INDIA bloc in recent weeks.

Minutes after the arrest, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said: “A scared dictator wants to create a dead democracy.”

The Trinamool Congress that rules in the eastern state of West Bengal and has in recent days decided to contest the national election on its own — after previously being part of the INDIA alliance — also criticised the arrest.

“How can we expect fair elections in India if sitting CMs and prominent opposition leaders are arrested weeks before polls?” asked Trinamool leader Derek O’Brien on X.

In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister MK Stalin described the arrest as a “fascist” step. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the arrest was “outright vicious and part of a callous plot to silence all opposition voices just ahead of the general elections”. Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Vijayan’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) are both part of the INDIA bloc.

Akhilesh Yadav, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh whose Samajwadi Party is also part of the INDIA bloc, said Kejriwal’s arrest would “give birth to a new people’s revolution”. He said the arrests of opposition leaders showed that the BJP was “imprisoned in the fear of defeat” in the coming elections.

Most opinion polls suggest Modi and the BJP are positioned for a comfortable win in the elections, with the prime minister setting a target of 400 seats in India’s 543-seat lower house for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that the party leads. The NDA won 353 seats in 2019.

Meanwhile, AAP’s remaining leadership is trying to pick up the pieces. “They can arrest [Kejriwal], but they cannot arrest his ideology,” said Bharadwaj, Delhi’s health minister. “[He] is an idea which is germinating in each lane and neighbourhood.”

The BJP, however, lauded the arrest, describing Kejriwal as the “kingpin of the liquor scam”.

Late on Thursday evening, Sambit Patra, the BJP’s national spokesperson, took a dig at Kejriwal. “[AAP says] Arvind Kejriwal is not a person, he is an idea. I should say he is a bad idea.”

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Indian opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal arrested over corruption claims | Elections News

Kejriwal is a key leader in an opposition alliance challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP in elections next month.

Delhi Chief Minister and prominent opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal has been arrested by India’s financial crime agency in connection with corruption allegations related to the city’s liquor policy, his party has said.

The arrest of Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday means the main leaders of the decade-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are in jail, following the arrests last year of two of Kejriwal’s deputies in the same case, which the party has called “dirty politics”.

Atishi Singh, Delhi’s finance minister, rejected the allegations and said that the AAP was seeking to quash the latest arrest.

“We have asked for an urgent hearing by the Supreme Court tonight itself,” she said.

Kejriwal will continue to be Delhi’s chief minister while the party fights the accusations, Singh said.

She described his arrest as a “political conspiracy” orchestrated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The financial crime agency, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), is investigating allegations that a liquor policy implemented by the Delhi government in 2022, which ended its control over the sale of liquor in the capital, gave undue advantages to private retailers.

Kejriwal’s administration’s controversial policy ended a government monopoly on the sale of liquor.

The policy has since been withdrawn.

The AAP has said no evidence of wrongdoing has emerged in the investigation and Kejriwal has previously said that if he is corrupt, “then there is no one in this world who is honest”.

He will be presented before a court on Friday where the charges against him will be made public, local media reported.

The ED had issued nine summons to Kejriwal for questioning but he did not answer them, saying that he feared he would be arrested.

He also sought protection from arrest from court, saying his party would be weakened in elections if that were to happen.

Virendra Sachdeva, the head of the BJP’s Delhi office, said Kejriwal had been “making excuses” to avoid explaining his role in the case.

“The kind of political theatrics he was doing has been put to an end today,” Sachdeva said. “Today, finally the truth has won.”

Kejriwal’s lawyer, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, told the court on Thursday that the agency was being misused by the Modi government to weaken his party in the run-up to India’s national elections.

Opposition parties expressed concern over the incident, including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who said, “The arrest of elected Chief Ministers has become a common thing.”

AAP is part of the 27-party “INDIA” bloc, an opposition alliance that hopes to challenge Modi’s BJP in national elections beginning April

Kejriwal founded the AAP, Hindi for “common man’s party”, in 2011.

His supporters protested outside his residence and clashed with security forces as news of his arrest broke.

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Can India’s Rahul Gandhi defeat Narendra Modi with ‘unity marches’? | India Election 2024 News

Mumbai, India – Loud chants and songs on justice echoed around Shivaji Park in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, as thousands of people gathered at the iconic venue that had played frequent host to rallies by freedom fighters when the country fought for independence from the British decades ago.

This time, the slogans called for a different “freedom” – from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government.

On stage, Bollywood singers Vishal and Rekha Bhardwaj sang classic songs from popular films, new and old. The park was decked in flags and life-sized cardboard cutouts of politicians from the opposition Indian National Congress (INC) party. Police officers were everywhere, but the atmosphere was festive – almost resembling that of a rock concert. The man at the centre of the event: Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that ruled India for most of its first 50 years after independence.

On Sunday evening, Gandhi and a bevy of leaders from other opposition parties launched the election campaign of their Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) from Shivaji Park, a day after the Election Commission of India announced dates for the world’s largest vote. Nearly a billion Indians will elect their next government in a seven-phase election that starts on April 19 and ends with the declaration of results on June 4.

The INDIA alliance hopes to challenge Modi’s BJP, which is aiming to win a third straight term in office, riding on the back of the prime minister’s personal popularity, even as the Congress and other critics have accused it of dividing the nation on religious lines and favouring select industrialists.

At the heart of the opposition alliance’s efforts are long marches undertaken by Gandhi across the length and breadth of the country, to galvanise support against Modi. His Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra (Uniting India for Justice March) had culminated in Mumbai on Saturday.

The marches and Gandhi’s message of unity and justice resonated with supporters at Shivaji Park on Sunday.

Ganggu Bai, a 40-year-old cook who lives in Mumbai’s Dharavi – one of the world’s largest slum clusters made famous globally by the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire – was among those at the Sunday rally.

“I am here to support the future of our country. and women’s rights,” she said. “This event gives me hope and feels like it is actually for the people of India,” she added.

But for Gandhi, the Congress and the INDIA alliance to turn that sentiment into a national wave against the ruling government, they’ll need the votes of more than their core supporters: In the last national elections in 2019, the Congress won just 52 seats in the Lok Sabha or lower house of parliament, while the BJP won an overwhelming majority with 303 seats.

 

Life-size cardboard posters of Rahul Gandhi are seen at a rally to mark the end of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, India [Priyanka Shankar/Al Jazeera]

Political message

Addressing the rally, Gandhi insisted that the INDIA alliance’s fight was not against a political party [referring to the BJP] or the prime minister – but for a vision of India.

“There is a word ‘Shakti’ in Hinduism. We are fighting against a Shakti. The question is, what is that Shakti. The soul of the king is in the EVM (Electronic Voting Machine) and every institution of the country, including the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Income Tax department,” he said, adding that these institutions are the only reason the BJP is in power.

The allegation: The “king” is Modi, EVMs can be hacked, and the government is using law enforcement agencies to coerce opposition members and business leaders into submission.

Several key politicians from the INDIA alliance, like Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Tamil Nadu state Chief Minister MK Stalin and former Maharashtra state Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, the former chief minister of Maharashtra, also attended the rally.

“Ab ki baar, BJP tadipaar [This time, the BJP will be exiled],” Thackeray said and added that those who tried to divide them [the INDIA alliance] would be defeated.

“Wherever Rahul goes, it looks like a festival,” Stalin told the cheering crowds.

Then, he alluded to the litmus test that awaits the alliance.

“The real victory of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra stands in defeating BJP and capturing Delhi,” he said.

Are Gandhi’s marches working?

Gandhi’s rally at Shivaji Park came a day after he concluded his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra – a 6,600km (4,100-mile) march from India’s east to west, with detours in each state he passed through. His promise: “panch nyay” or “five pillars of justice” for women, youth, farmers, labourers and justice in terms of equity.

During the walk, he announced a one lakh rupee ($1,200) annual payout to every woman below the poverty line, and a 50 percent reservation in in all new recruitments of central government jobs for poor families.

He began walking on January 15 this year in the conflict-torn northeast Indian state of Manipur, promising to bring peace to the region where tensions between the state’s mainly Hindu Meitei majority and the predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo have led to violence killing hundreds and displacing more than 60,000 people. Traversing west from Manipur, Gandhi ended his walk in Mumbai on March 16.

Previously, he also walked from South India all the way to Kashmir in the north, between September 2022 and January 2023, in a march called Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India walk), which focused on fighting against poverty, unemployment and growing polarisation between Hindus and Muslims in India.

Those messages are what inspired Sudha Prakash to walk with Gandhi in his first Bharat Jodo Yatra.

People hold placards demanding justice and education at Rahul Gandhi’s rally to mark the end of his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, India [Priyanka Shankar/Al Jazeera]

“I walked to show solidarity. I also walked to derive strength and hope from the thousands of others who walked, each with their own vision – and yet one that was also shared – of a better India for every single Indian,” Prakash, 60, who works as a teacher in elementary education in Mumbai, told Al Jazeera.

“I got an opportunity to meet so many people, people from different parts of the country, doing different things, belonging to different communities, representing so many Indias … it was wonderful. I came back exhilarated, emotionally charged and filled with hope,” she added.

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Aiyshwarya Mahadev, a spokesperson of the Indian National Congress hailed both the yatras as the largest exercises the Congress party has undertaken in its recent past to connect to the masses.

“We wanted to hear the voices on the ground and give them a voice. So during both the yatras we saw Rahul Gandhi listening to voices that hardly ever get heard, of people from communities that have been traditionally oppressed and marginalised,” she told Al Jazeera.

“This yatra is not about political pomp or any chest thumping, It was honestly about reaching the people on the ground, hearing their voices and becoming their voices. In this aspect it has been a massive success.”

But many Indians are not convinced. The BJP has often derisively termed snubbed Gandhi’s marches as designed to “break”, not “unite”, India.

Ujal Bhatia, a former Indian civil servant, said he doesn’t believe that Gandhi’s marches will lead to electoral gains for the Congress.

“The narrative of the BJP holds sway over much of the country – Hindutva, strong government plus welfarism which delivers palliatives to the poor,” he told Al Jazeera. Hindutva refers to the Hindu majoritarian political ideology  of the BJP. The Modi government has also, over its decade in power, initiated a series of welfare schemes targeting women and other traditionally disadvantaged sections of society, though critics question the government’s claims on the scale of delivery of these programmes.

“Rahul will get a lot of good vibes from his travels but Congress cadres are weak and the Gandhi family is reluctant to cede power to regional leaders,” Bhatia added.

Raj Malhotra, a 33-year old lawyer from Bangalore, shared a similar view.

“Enough people in the country are fed up with the divisive politics and crony capitalism but the opposition seems clueless in using this to its advantage. A huge part of this is because for more than a decade, the Congress party has neglected to pay attention to organisational weaknesses,” Malhotra told Al Jazeera and accused the party of nepotism and dynastic politics.

“While Rahul Gandhi might still be a viable candidate, he suffers from being made out to be a “pappu” by BJP’s propaganda factory. The party really needs to look inwards and sort its internal mess out,” he added. The BJP and its social media supporters have long described Gandhi as “Pappu”, a pejorative in Hindi-speaking northern India for someone who is intellectually dull.

‘Democracy’ vs ‘command and control’

Sam Pitroda, telecom engineer and adviser to two former Congress prime ministers of India, Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, conceded that the party looks far more chaotic than the BJP. But that, he said, was in essence what democracy is about.

“The BJP is based on command and control, while the Congress party is not structured and based on cooperation and co-creation. So sometimes this looks like chaos. But that’s the core design of the party,” he told Al Jazeera. “People get confused that arguments and disagreements over party policies means there is lack of organisation and unity. But if you want democracy, you have to let people argue and not be dictatorial.

“Rahul Gandhi is also a smart and capable leader. It is the BJP propaganda which invests in defaming him. How about before elections we have a national debate between Gandhi and Modi and then we can see who the real “pappu” is,” Pitroda said.

Mahadev added that the marches have also played a positive role in uniting the Congress party’s members and workers.

“Through the yatras, Rahul Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Priyanka Gandhi [Rahul’s sister] and other leaders were all on the ground and the workers got the chance to meet and interact with them. That further galvanised the cadre and emboldened them to work with renewed vigour,” Mahadev said.

“It is a reality that in today’s India, the voices of the opposition get stifled and at times, the future looks bleak, but through this sort of engagement where a worker is shown that the work that he is doing on ground is important, helps the party and is reminded of the huge role he plays in our success.”

Rahul Gandhi holds a rally to mark the end of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra and launch the INDIA alliance’s Lok Sabha elections campaign at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, India [Priyanka Shankar/Al Jazeera]

What’s next?

The INDIA alliance has also experienced fissures with key leaders exiting the bloc over political differences. But Mahadev said that through the yatras, the opposition’s manifesto has been shaped.

“When we did the first phase of the yatra, we walked through different states and interacted with different stakeholders across the board who spoke about their issues. This helped shape our narrative and gave us the basis for several of our manifesto,” she said. “Several regional parties and our allies in the INDIA bloc also have representations and ideas which will be put forward as the promises we make during elections.”

Mahadev acknowledged that it was unclear how much the marches would directly lead to votes for the Congress or its partners. But that, she said, was never the primary intention behind the yatras, in any case.

“His footsteps may not always transform into votes in place but the idea of the yatras was to talk to people on the ground who came from various socioeconomic structures, vocations and even marginalised communities,” she said. “These meetings were not political gatherings but his interactions to listen and to understand their reality, understand their issues and be a voice for them.”

For Gandhi, she said, the marches were about striving for “peace and unity”, and to “fight for India as a democracy”.



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Just how big is India’s 2024 election? Find out in seven numbers | India Election 2024 News

New Delhi, India – India, the world’s largest democracy, has kicked off its two and a half month long parliamentary election to decide who will rule the South Asian nation.

On Saturday, the Election Commission of India – the country’s independent poll-conducting body – announced the dates for a democratic exercise that is unmatched in scale globally, and in history.

From the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, from the hills of the east to the deserts in the west, and in concrete jungles that are some of the world’s biggest cities to the smallest of villages, an estimated 969 million voters are eligible to cast their ballots. They will elect 543 politicians to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. Two other members are nominated, to make up a total strength of 545 in the house.

India’s election is colossal, colourful and complex. Here are seven ways in which it is unparalleled in size.

[Al Jazeera]

82 days, seven phases

The election process that started on Saturday will continue for 82 days until results are announced on June 4. With the announcement of the schedule, a model code of conduct also kicks in – campaign rules now apply, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is not supposed to announce new policies that could influence voters.

Voting will run in seven phases from April 19 to June 1, said Rajiv Kumar, chief election commissioner of India. The counting of votes will take place on June 4. Assembly elections for the states of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim will also take place along with the national elections.

After April 19, the other voting dates are April 26, May 7, May 13, May 20, May 25 and June 1. Some states will complete voting on a single day, while others will have voting spread out across several phases.

Over the years, the number of days over which voting has stretched has varied a lot – from the shortest ever four days in 1980 to 39 days in the 2019 election, to 44 days in 2024.

The primary reason for the multiphased election is for the deployment of huge federal security forces required to check everything from polling-related violence or attempts at rigging, according to N Gopalaswami, the former chief election commissioner of India.

Still, staggered polls are no guarantee for free and fair elections as longer campaigning favours the ruling party of the day, said N Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies, and a pioneer in election research in India. Rao argued that the process should be shortened. The longer the process, the more the opportunity for the ruling party to use government infrastructure to campaign.

969 million voters

The size of India’s electorate is more than the population of all the countries of Europe combined.

They will cast their votes through 5.5 million electronic voting machines at 1.05 million polling stations, of which some are located in the snow-clad mountains in the Himalayas, the deserts of Rajasthan and sparsely populated islands in the Indian Ocean.

The Election Commission will deploy about 15 million polling staff and security personnel to conduct the elections. They will trek across glaciers and deserts, ride elephants and camels, and travel by boats and helicopters to ensure every voter can cast their ballot.

Yogi Adityanath, chief Minister of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, waves to his party supporters as he disembarks from a helicopter to attend an election campaign rally in Sambhal district of the northern state, India, February 10, 2022 [Pawan Kumar/Reuters]

A $14.4bn election bill

It is expected to be the world’s most expensive election. Spending by political parties and candidates to woo voters will likely cost more than 1.2 trillion rupees ($14.4bn), said Rao, whose organisation regularly estimates the country’s poll expenditure.

That would be twice what was spent in India’s 2019 elections – 600 billion rupees ($7.2bn). The total spending on the US presidential and congressional races in 2020 was also $14.4bn.

Most of India’s election spending is not publicly disclosed. Candidates spend unaccounted money to woo voters. The election scrutiny machinery is weak in detecting cash transactions, said Gopalaswami, referring to attempts by candidates to directly bribe voters with money or other enticements, from alcohol to clothes.

Women wait to collect their voter slips before casting their votes at a polling station during the first phase of general election in Majuli, a large river island in the Brahmaputra river, in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, India April 11, 2019 [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

Polling booth at 15,256 feet

Holding elections in the world’s seventh largest nation by area is a complex task.

In 2019, election workers travelled 300 miles (482 km) over four days across winding mountain roads and river valleys to set up a polling booth for one voter in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders China. Beijing claims a part of the state, and ensuring elections are held there is vital for New Delhi to demonstrate its sovereignty over the region.

Election officials also set up a voting booth at 15,256 feet (4,650 metres) in a village in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, making it the highest polling station in the world. Far off the country’s east coast, on the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, workers travelled through crocodile-infested mangrove swamps and dense jungles to reach polling booths.

In Malkangiri district of Odisha, where left-wing Maoist fighters have a presence, polling staff walked 15km (9 miles) through forests and hills to protect electronic voting machines from the rebels after voting. Intelligence agencies had warned them that using cars could have made them easier targets.

“On sheer numbers, it’s gigantic and complicated, but in a sense simple also because at each level the law is very clear about what are the duties and responsibilities of each polling official,’’ said Gopalaswmi. “Complications are arising as competition is becoming fierce,’’ he said, adding, that implementation of the model code of conduct has become increasingly challenging for the election commission.

2,660 parties

A multiparty democracy, India has about 2,660 registered political parties. Parties competing in elections each get symbols – like the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s lotus, the opposition Congress party’s hand, and others, ranging from an elephant to a bicycle, and a comb to an arrow. These to help voters easily identify candidates, in a country where almost a quarter of the population is not literate.

In 2019, seven national parties, 43 state parties and 623 unrecognised political parties participated in the elections. Parties that have a significant footprint in a state legislature are recognised as state parties. Those with a meaningful presence in multiple states get the national party tag.

In 2019, 36 parties were able to win one or more seats in the Lok Sabha. In all, about 8,054 candidates, including 3,461 independents, contested those elections. Of the 543 winning candidates, 397 were from national parties, 136 were from state parties, six were from unrecognised parties and four were independent.

A record 612 million people of a 912 million strong electorate cast their votes in the last election, registering the highest ever voter turnout at 67.4 percent. Women’s participation also increased to an historic 67.18 percent in 2019.

India’s opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi interacts with his supporters during his month-long cross-country march, in Lucknow, capital of northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Tuesday, February 20, 2024 [Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP Photo]

303 against 52

The principal protagonists of the 2024 battle are Prime Minister Modi and his BJP, who lead a coalition of more than three dozen parties; and the main opposition Congress party-led alliance of about two dozen parties.

In 2019, the BJP secured a landslide victory with 303 seats. Its coalition had a total of 353 seats. The Congress party won got 52 seats, and 91 with partners.

Currently, the BJP is in pole position following recent state victories and is expected to win a majority, according to opinion polls. The BJP alone controls 12 of India’s 28 states, while the Congress governs in three states.

Still, Indian political history is littered with instances of parties winning major state elections only to lose the national vote soon after. The BJP knows that better than most: In 2004, its then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called early elections after winning the key state elections of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh before losing the Lok Sabha vote to a Congress-led coalition.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, centre, sits during the launch of the redevelopment project of the Sabarmati Mahatma Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, Tuesday, March 12, 2024 [Ajit Solanki/AP Photo]

370 or 404?

Modi has set a target of 370 seats for the BJP, 67 more than in 2019; and for its alliance to cross 400 seats. He is seeking a third term in office.

The last time any party crossed 370 seats was in the 1984 election. The Congress party won 414 seats following the assassination of the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

If Modi wins and completes five years, he will be the third longest serving prime minister in Indian history. The country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ruled for about 16 years and 9 months consecutively, while his daughter Indira Gandhi governed for a total of about 15 years and 11 months.

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Bollywood ‘takeover’: Pro-Modi films swamp Indian voters ahead of election | India Election 2024

Mumbai, India – A grimacing police official, staring into the camera, declares her intent to publicly shoot dead “leftists” while attacking “left-liberal, pseudo-intellectuals” as well as students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a left-leaning university space in the cross-hairs of the Modi government.

Men in skull caps, the visuals intercut with bloody violence, declare that Rohingya Muslims will soon displace Hindus and make for half of India’s population, while a harrowed Hindu woman fighting against these men says she wants to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A biopic on the early 20th century Hindu nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has a voiceover that insists that India would have freed itself of British colonial rule over three decades before it did, if not for Mahatma Gandhi.

These are scenes from upcoming Hindi films slated for release over the next few weeks.

As India’s nearly one billion voters get ready to pick their national government in general elections between March and May, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are receiving campaign support from an atypical ally: cinema.

A slew of new films, timed with the elections and often helmed by major production houses, are relying on storylines that overtly either promote Modi and his government’s policies or target rival politicians. Not even national icons like Gandhi or top universities like JNU are spared – the institution has long been a left-leaning bastion of liberal education, often antagonistic to the BJP’s Hindu majoritarianism.

Many of these stories peddle Islamophobic conspiracies commonly circulated among Hindu right-wing networks that are aligned with the BJP’s political agenda. At least 10 such films have either been released recently or are poised to hit theatres and television in this election season

“This is part of a larger attempt to ‘take over’ the Hindi film industry, just as other forms of popular culture have been infiltrated,” said Ira Bhaskar, a retired professor of cinema studies at JNU who also served as a member of the country’s censor board until 2015. Bhaskar was referring to the growing Hindu nationalist narratives found in pop culture forms like music, poetry and books.

The latest films include biopics that glorify the controversial legacies of Hindu majoritarian heroes and BJP leaders. Savarkar, a controversial anti-colonial Hindu nationalist, advocated rape against Muslim women as a form of retribution for historical wrongs.

Two of the upcoming films, Accident or Conspiracy: Godhra, and The Sabarmati Report, claim to “reveal” the “real story” behind the Godhra train burning of 2002 where 59 Hindu pilgrims died in a fire that was the spark for anti-Muslim riots orchestrated by Hindu right-wing groups that claimed over 1,000 lives, mostly Muslims. The riots happened when Modi was the state’s chief minister.

Another film, Aakhir Palaayan Kab Tak? (Until when will we need to flee?), shows a Hindu “exodus” purportedly due to Muslims. Then there’s Razakar, a multilingual release on what it calls the “silent genocide” of Hindus in Hyderabad by Razakars, a paramilitary volunteer force that inflicted mass violence before and after India’s independence in 1947. The film has been produced by a BJP leader.

In late February, Modi himself praised Article 370, a newly released film that lauds his government’s contentious decision to strip Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir of its special status and statehood while placing hundreds under house arrests and imposing lockdowns in the region. Film reviewers have called the movie a “puff piece” and a “thinly veiled propaganda film” in favour of the Modi government while treating its critics and opposition leaders with “derision”.

Bhaskar said the new films were “clear propaganda, no doubt about it”.

A growing trend

The surge in such movies builds on a pattern also seen before the 2019 elections when Modi returned to power for a second time. On the eve of that vote, a clutch of films tried to bolster the BJP’s popularity.

Some tried to take down the ruling party’s critics, like the Accidental Prime Minister (PM), a searing take on Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh. Others stoked jingoism, like Uri: The Surgical Strike, which recreated the military strikes that Indian forces made inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in retaliation against a terror attack on an Indian military camp in Kashmir’s Uri region in September 2016. The film ended with a scene of a pleased-looking Modi-resembling prime minister. Both films were released in the same week, days before the elections.

But Bhaskar said that while the trend isn’t new, it has grown since 2014, when Modi came to power, starting off with the changed way that the Indian film industry dealt with historical representations.

“Over the last few years, we have seen a shift in the representation of Muslim rulers who are all, now, portrayed as barbarians and temple-destroyers,” Bhaskar said. “This was also propaganda, though in a not-so-direct way, where the message was: Muslims don’t belong to India, they were invaders.”

These positions align with the Hindu right-wing ecosystem’s publicly-stated aims of purging Mughal history from public consciousness.

Such films, in the past, have faced allegations of amplifying social divisions and hate speech. Screenings of films like The Kashmir Files, depicting the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of the 1990s, often saw audiences, at the end of the film, rising up and calling for violence against Muslims and advocating their boycott.

Another film, The Kerala Story, panned widely for inaccuracies in depicting an alleged ISIL/ISIS conspiracy to lure Christian and Hindu girls to join the group, played a part in igniting societal tensions among communities, leading to violence in the western Indian region of Akola in Maharashtra.

Fear and opportunism

Film industry insiders attribute this new genre of films to a mix of unease, opportunism and a helpful nudge from the establishment.

A number of industry insiders this writer contacted refused to speak on record, for fear of retribution.

Bollywood, in the recent few years, has frequently been a victim of high-decibel campaigns, often endorsed by BJP leaders – from boycotting films to calling for bans on them. Hindu right-wing groups have often targeted films and shows for broadcasting “anti-Hindu” content.

In 2021, BJP leaders had called for the arrest of the director and officials of the Amazon Prime streaming service over a web show Tandav because it had scenes that protesters allege were defamatory towards Hindu gods. Police complaints, calling for their arrest, were filed in six different cities before the country’s top court stayed them.

Many insiders said these instances had produced a “chilling effect” on other creators. “Often, ideas get nixed or get altered at the pre-production stage itself, because makers are now constantly censoring themselves and anticipating the trouble that the content might court in the current political climate,” said a film producer, requesting anonymity.

Others, however, believe that these films are not just a result of such fear but also a tinge of opportunism. A Mumbai-based director, who had been approached to make a film that aligned with a pro-Hindu majoritarian agenda, said makers often get enticed to “cash in” on the current political atmosphere. “With the success of a few such films in the past, many filmmakers are now tempted to try and appease the ruling ideology in the hope that they also find commercial success,” the director said.

Others echoed this sentiment. Speaking to Al Jazeera, a popular Hindi film actor revealed how a streaming service drastically altered a show he was part of, based on the life of a historical character, to portray the character to be a Hindu legend taking on Muslim invaders. “The streaming service thought that such ‘repositioning’ of the character would make it a good sell,” the actor said. The show, the actor said, did “decently well” among rural audiences.

And when movies pander to the ruling party’s ideology, they often receive a leg up from the government. In the past, contentious films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story have been rewarded by BJP governments – taxes were waived off. BJP units also organised free screenings of these films, helping them get wider audiences. Modi has publicly praised both these films, thereby granting them greater legitimacy and insisted that films should be made on the state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 – during which several fundamental rights were suspended – as well as on the Partition of India in 1947.

Al Jazeera sought comments from Sudipto Sen, the director of The Kerala Story. Sen said he would respond but had not done so by the time of publication.

Others, like National Award-winning filmmaker R Balakrishnan, however, believe that the rise of such films reflects a demand for such content from the audience. “Suddenly, people are interested in incidents that they don’t know about. There is an interest in political films and historical films based on incidents,” he said.

The danger, he added, was that this curiosity was being “subverted” since filmmakers were not researching their subjects adequately. “When you make a political film on an event or incident, the onus lies on the filmmaker to do the research and make it accurate. If you use films to subvert the truth and use it for other purposes, then you are depriving people of knowledge of what really happened there,” he said.

Here to stay?

Balakrishnan, the director, said that such “weak films” would stay limited to a few filmmakers. “Some are trying to ride a wave, but this won’t become a mainstream phenomenon. After all, the audience does not want to watch political films every day.”

Others, however, point to a newer trend – that of mainstream films, starring A-listers, also serving propaganda purposes. Fighter, a film released in January, with top actors Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone starring in it, had a character playing PM Modi mouthing bombastic lines, insisting that it was time to show Pakistan who the “boss” was, before deciding to launch air strikes against the neighbour in 2019.

Bhaskar, the retired JNU professor, said this was a sign that the trend was only going to deepen.  “This is no longer episodic, or tied to any events like the polls any more,” Bhaskar said. If anything, she added, the scale of such films is now going to grow. “You will now see big-banner, big-budget films being made to serve propaganda purposes.”

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India’s Modi to visit Kashmir, first since special status scrapped in 2019 | Narendra Modi News

The visit comes ahead of India’s national election due by May, the first since the region lost its autonomy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will shortly hold a rally in the main city of Indian-administrated Kashmir, his first visit since the disputed region’s semi-autonomy was scrapped in 2019.

Modi’s government stripped the Muslim-majority territory of its special constitutional status, splitting the former state into two territories – Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir – directly ruled from New Delhi. Inherited protections on land and jobs given to the Indigenous residents were also removed.

The move, widely welcomed across India, angered many in the densely militarised territory. Rebels in the Himalayan region have waged a rebellion since 1989, seeking independence or a merger with Pakistan, which controls a smaller part of the Kashmir region and, like India, claims it in full.

On Thursday, thousands of armed police and paramilitary forces in flak jackets were deployed, and new checkpoints were set up across Indian-administered Kashmir’s main city Srinagar, where the Hindu nationalist leader is scheduled to address a public gathering at about 2pm (08:30 GMT) local time.

The forces laid razor wire and erected checkpoints as they patrolled all the roads leading to the football stadium where Modi will speak. They randomly frisked residents and searched vehicles while navy commandos in motorboats patrolled the Jhelum river that snakes through the city.

“Various development works will also be dedicated to the nation,” Modi said in a statement on social media platform X ahead of the visit, including programmes “boosting the agro-economy” as well as tourism.

A government statement said Modi will also inaugurate infrastructure around the revered Muslim shrine of Hazratbal.

Thursday’s event is seen as part of Modi’s campaign ahead of national election scheduled in April and May, the first since the region lost its autonomy. The last election for the region’s legislative assembly was held in 2014.

Modi’s government claims New Delhi’s direct rule of Kashmir brought about a new era of “peace and development” in the region, but critics and many residents say it heralded a drastic curtailment of civil liberties and press freedom.

Most schools in the city are shut for the day, and the authorities have called on government employees to attend the rally.

Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir, accused the government of organising buses to bring in crowds to attend the rally, alleging that “almost none” would be attending willingly.

“Government employees are being herded at five am in sub-zero temperatures into vehicles … ferrying them to the PM’s rally,” Mehbooba Mufti, another former chief minister of the region, posted on X.



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After gains against Modi, India’s Congress party slips before election | Elections News

New Delhi, India — A little more than two months ago, the Congress party, India’s biggest opposition force, seemed to be on a roll.

Rahul Gandhi, the leader of what is the country’s oldest political movement, the party of Mahatma Gandhi, had attracted large crowds on a nationwide march, rekindling hopes in the Congress that had been struggling for relevance after a series of political setbacks.

In May, the party won legislative elections in the southern state of Karnataka that is home to startup capital Bengaluru, unseating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. And it was projected, in opinion polls, to win four out of five states – Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Chattisgarh and Mizoram – that voted for their state assemblies in November.

Those predicted wins, party veterans said, would have provided the ballast for the Congress to take Modi on in the general elections that are now weeks away.

Just the opposite happened. The opinion polls were wrong. The Congress won only Telangana.

“All opinion polls showed Congress was ahead by 2 percent votes in Madhya Pradesh elections, but we lost by 8 percent of votes. How did the final results go contrary to these opinion polls?” asks senior party leader, Digvijay Singh, former chief minister of the central Indian state.

Answering that question and similar ones tied to the gulf between the party’s hopes and recent results, quickly could be central to the chances of the 138-year-old party as it prepares to lock horns with Modi in the coming national vote, say analysts and Congress leaders.

A strong showing in those state elections would have validated Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra (Uniting India March), which had seen him walk more than 4,000km (2,485 miles) over 150 days, from the country’s southern tip, Kanyakumari, to Indian-administered Kashmir in the north. In most of the states that voted in November, the Congress was in a direct one-on-one contest with the BJP and was in the opposition, hoping to reap the benefits of anti-incumbency voter sentiment against the ruling government.

What went wrong?

One Congress leader in Madhya Pradesh, who requested anonymity, claimed that he had warned the party leadership that it needed to concentrate mobilisation efforts around the state’s 21 percent tribal vote, but that his attempts at persuasion failed. “Congress was very complacent,” the leader said. The BJP, he said, gained, focusing on tribal communities, and securing their votes. Many of the seats that the Congress had won in the 2018 assembly elections flipped to the BJP. The same script played out in Rajasthan and Chattisgarh where the BJP also won the bulk of seats where tribal votes dominate, reversing what had happened in 2018.

Party insiders also accuse leaders of arrogance, in spurning the offers of smaller regional parties like the Samajwadi Party, which is primarily based in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, but also has a small presence in Madhya Pradesh.

Some, like former chief minister Singh, see a more nefarious plot unfolding: he alleged that the rigging of electronic voting machines and a mechanism to keep a paper trail of voting had allowed the BJP to buck opinion polls in the recent elections.

But there is little hard evidence of systematic rigging in those elections, and critics of the Congress point out that it is quick to accept results when it wins using the same processes that it criticises while losing.

Many Congress leaders do not agree with Singh’s assertion. One of them said that in Madhya Pradesh, it was clear that the party was losing – not because of any foul play but because of poor “both management”, a reference to the practice of party workers ensuring that their voters come and vote at every polling station.

The Congress has tried to revive its fortunes by embracing regional parties in a national coalition called the INDIA alliance. That move forced the BJP to rethink its own strategy.

But since then, the BJP has successfully chipped away at the INDIA alliance: Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of the northern state of Bihar has broken away and joined the BJP-led NDA coalition. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has also walked out of INDIA, though it is unclear whether she will join the NDA that she was once a part of two decades ago.

Many Congress allies have faced the wrath of law enforcement agencies controlled by the Modi government in New Delhi, such as the former chief minister of the central state of Jharkhand, Hemant Soren, who was arrested in January on corruption-linked charges that he denies.

Yet, the Congress itself is also to blame for parties breaking away from its alliance, admit party insiders. One reason? Its refusal, they say, to adequately accommodate partners in seat-sharing, a concern that Bihar’s Kumar raised, too.

At the heart of that failure is a challenge that the Congress faces, said Sanjay Kumar, political analyst and professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. It wants to collaborate with smaller parties at the moment, but in the long run wants to compete from all parliamentary seats on its own.

“The Congress party is suffering from a dilemma between the short and the long term,” said Kumar.

In a bid to shift public opinion in favour of the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi has tried a repeat of his earlier long march. The Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra (Uniting India Through Justice March), the latest iteration, promises to cover 6,500km (4,000 miles) from the country’s east to the west.

However, experts have questioned whether it makes sense for the party to be focusing on grand philosophical questions when the country is in the throes of winner-takes-it-all election campaigning.

“The yatra is oddly timed. When the party’s attention and imagination should be fully geared for the Lok Sabha poll, it has become a distraction,” said political analyst Harish Khare, referring to the lower house of the Indian parliament. “Neither has Rahul managed to snatch the narrative away from the BJP, nor has he enthused the Congress rank and file.”

Many of the states that the new march had passed through – including West Bengal and Bihar – were at the time ruled by INDIA member parties. Banerjee, the West Bengal chief minister, publicly questioned the intent of the march passing through an ally’s state.

Critics have asked whether the march is part of an effort to build Rahul Gandhi’s own brand.

But former Indian finance minister and veteran Congress leader P Chidambaram disagrees. “Rahul is not hankering for power. If he had wanted to, he would have been PM long ago,” Chidambaram said.

Chidambaram pointed out that in a vast majority of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, INDIA alliance members would be in direct fights with the BJP and its coalition.

But while the Congress has been arguing that the coming elections are fundamentally a fight over the survival of Indian democracy, and has been painting the BJP as an authoritarian-minded force, analysts say it is struggling to win voters over to that narrative.

“The Congress does not have a positive agenda,” said Kumar, the CSDS analyst. “Even on the issue of the BJP constituting a threat to democracy and freedom of expression, the people are not really convinced about it.”

The disquiet within the party has grown in recent days. Ashok Chavan, a senior leader and former chief minister in Maharashtra – which boasts the most seats in the Lok Sabha after Uttar Pradesh – left the Congress to join the BJP. He promptly got nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament.

On Friday, the Congress party alleged that its bank accounts had been frozen over allegations of tax default.

Chidambaram, who is part of the Congress team drafting the party’s manifesto, said that people were worried about inflation, which has persisted at more than 4 percent for almost all of Modi’s current term in office, and unemployment, which hovers around 8 percent.

But he acknowledged that the party would need to channel any public anger in its favour for the Congress to be “in a position to win against the BJP.” And it doesn’t have much time left.

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Ban on India’s electoral bonds: How will it affect coming elections? | Narendra Modi News

New Delhi, India — The Indian Supreme Court verdict on Thursday scrapping an opaque, election funding system has set off powerful tremors in the country’s politics, with transparency advocates arguing that it could expose those involved in a controversial form of political financing ahead of national elections.

Opposition leaders say the judgement represents a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose government introduced the electoral bonds scheme seven years ago and which battled long and hard in the top court to defend the funding mechanism.

But the BJP itself has insisted that the court order will not affect its chances in the coming elections, expected between March and May, in which Modi is aiming to secure a third straight term in office.

Electoral bonds, introduced by the BJP in 2017, allowed individuals and companies to donate money to political parties anonymously and without any limits. A five-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, observed that the “political contributions give a seat at the table to the contributor” and that “this access also translates into influence over policymaking”.

The Supreme Court described the scheme as “unconstitutional”. It also directed the state-run State Bank of India (SBI) to halt issuing the bonds, furnish identity details of those who bought them, and provide information about bonds redeemed by each political party. The information will be made public on the website of the Election Commission of India. The SBI is the only organisation authorised to issue the bonds under the scheme.

The release of that information, because of the court order, could give nearly one billion Indian voters their first look at the donors who secretly shelled out billions of dollars to political parties since 2017, and open up scrutiny of the potential benefits they secured in return.

“This judgement essentially upheld the need for transparency in the funding of political parties and reinforced that people’s right to know in a democracy overrides any anonymity,” Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, told Al Jazeera.

“Political funding is the fountainhead of corruption in India and [electoral bonds] funnelled unlimited flow of ‘black money’ to political parties anonymously.”

‘Slap in the face for the BJP’

In all, the SBI has sold electoral bonds worth $20.3bn, including the latest tranche in January this year. The BJP received nearly 55 percent of these total donations.

“The ruling party has received huge amounts of money which it used in [the last national election in 2019]. It has been a travesty of the parliamentary democracy that has been corporatized in India by anonymous donations,” said Brinda Karat, a senior leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), speaking to Al Jazeera.

The left-wing party, currently in power in the southern Indian state of Kerala, was among petitioners before the Supreme Court who had demanded that electoral bonds be declared illegal. It was also the only major party to formally decide that it would not accept any donations through these bonds.

“The judgement has called out this government’s legalisation of political corruption. The BJP will be now accountable to people for money it has taken from corporates and policies it has formed for the corporates in quid pro quo,” Karat said.

Pramod Tiwari, a Congress party MP and the deputy leader of the opposition in the upper house of India’s parliament, described the court verdict as a milestone moment for the country.

“The judges have laid bare the violations of the Indian constitution by the BJP, who employed legislative powers with wrong intentions,” Tiwari said, “to facilitate black money into political funding.

“This is a slap on the face of the BJP,” he told Al Jazeera. Tiwari said the judgement would dent the prospects of the Hindu majoritarian party in the upcoming national vote. “The government has been caught in the act of robbery and pumping money in the shield of legislative powers.”

‘People decide’

But the BJP on Thursday suggested that it was not too concerned by the court order.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, a BJP leader and MP, took a swipe at opposition claims that electoral bonds were responsible for giving the party a dramatic edge over its rivals.

“As for a level playing field, the question is whether you are in the field or outside it. People decide whether you are in the field,” he told reporters.

Critics of the opposition have also pointed out that barring the CPI (M), other political parties also took donations through the electoral bonds scheme. The Congress, for instance, received 9 percent of all secret funding funnelled to political parties under the scheme – though that is a sixth of what the BJP secured.

And while the scrapping of the electoral bonds scheme might eliminate one form of controversial funding, political parties still have other avenues to receive big dollars.

Among them is direct funding from corporations, which political parties are required to declare to the Election Commission of India. And there, the BJP’s dominance over other parties is even greater than it has been with electoral bonds. In the 2022-23 financial year, the BJP received nearly 90 percent of all corporate donations – not including electoral bonds – according to research by the Association of Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit focused on electoral transparency.

In all, political parties spent $8.7bn on India’s last national election in 2019, according to the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies, and analysts expect 2024 to eclipse that figure comfortably.

‘Celebrations’ and ‘awkwardness’

For activists who have been fighting the electoral bonds scheme, Thursday’s order was a moment to celebrate.

Commodore Lokesh Batra, a 77-year-old retired naval officer and transparency campaigner, who filed more than 80 requests under India’s Right to Information Act to procure some details of the scheme, spent the day fielding congratulatory calls.

“Electoral bonds were creating an unequal field and it was a non-transparent form of political funding,” he told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “Corporate doesn’t give money unless you have a quid pro quo. In this case, any foreign company could create a subsidiary in India and donate; our democracy [was vulnerable to] be influenced by countries abroad.”

The timing of the judgement at least prevents the parties from accepting bonds in another tranche before the national election, Batra added. “The political parties need to become more transparent about funding and uphold internal democracy.”

Venkatesh Nayak, the director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, said his organisation’s research found that after the introduction of electoral bonds, opaque donations became more and more prevalent. Now, he said, institutions like India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the Election Commission of India (ECI) “need to stand up to the occasion”.

Both the RBI and the ECI had initially expressed reservations about the electoral bonds scheme but had then, in effect, accepted it.

“The RBI and ECI would be embarrassed,” SY Quraishi, former chief election commissioner of India, told Al Jazeera, on the about-turns these institutions took when they “came out in the Supreme Court with language similar to the government”.

“The election commission must be feeling very awkward today,” Quraishi said.

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