Table Of ContentThe Algebra of Warfare-Welfare
The Algebra of
Warfare-Welfare
A Long View of India’s 2014 Election
Edited by
Irfan Ahmad and Pralay Kanungo
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To
Democracy to come,
and
all honest democrats worldwide who cannot even think of
contesting elections, let alone win them!
FIGURES AND TABLES
Figures
I.1 ‘Volunteers’ of the PUP at a Polling Booth in
Melbourne, 2013 (top left is the PUP’s logo;
below the map is inscribed ‘Reunite the Nation’) 33
1.1 Modi in Sharma’s A ap ki Adalat 65
1.2 Fake Photograph of Modi Sweeping the Floor 71
1.3 Fake Photograph of Obama Watching Modi’s
Speech on Television 71
2.1 Congress Advertisements in 1984 98
2.2 An Amul Ad Created after the Mumbai Terror
Attacks with the Caption ‘War of Terrorism
Unleashed in Mumbai’ 102
2.3 Photo of Kejriwal as Osama bin Laden Circulated on
Social Media during the 2014 Elections 106
2.4 BJP’s Advertisement in the Run-up to the Bihar Assembly
Elections, 2015 1 13
5.1 An Advertisement for ‘Ready to Use Minarets’
in Muzaffarnagar 1 77
5.2 An Under-Construction Mosque near the Resettlement
Colony of Muslim Riot Victims 178
5.3 Fida-e-Millat Nagar, Muzaffarnagar 179
x Figures and Tables
5.4 Reconstructed Housing for Riot Victims 1 79
5.5 DTH Dish in a Muzaffarnagar Village 180
8.1 Maulana Suhaib Qasmi (second from left in white kurta)
of Jamaat Ulema-e-Hind Mobilizing Varanasi’s Voters for
BJP, 2014 260
8.2 Screenshot from a B BC Hindi (2016) Report on Varanasi’s
Nazneen Ansari Performing the Hindu Ritual of a arti
for Lord Ram (a framed photograph of RSS’ Indresh
Kumar can be seen on the wall) 264
10.1 A Street in Banaras Featuring the Eckleburgian
Presence of the BJP’s Prime Ministerial Candidate,
Narendra Modi, in April 2014 2 92
10.2 Congress Leader Shankersinh Vaghela from Gujarat,
Hemmed in by His Own Party, Standing Outside His
Residence Near Gandhinagar 3 02
11.1 Manifestos of the AAP, the Congress, and the BJP
(left to right) 3 25
Tables
5.1 Crime against Women in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 171
5.2 Religious Confi guration of Muzaffarnagar District 174
5.3 Confi guration of the 2012 UP Assembly (party and
vote share-wise) 183
5.4 Muslim Voting Preference in the 2012 UP Assembly
Elections 184
5.5 Muslim MLAs in the 2012 UP Assembly 1 84
5.6 Political Confi guration of Muzaffarnagar District 185
5.7 Handling of the Post-riot Situation by the
SP Government 189
5.8 Muslim Voting Preference in the 2014 UP
Lok Sabha Elections 190
5.9 The 2014 Lok Sabha Elections in UP 190
5.10 W ho Was Responsible for the Muzaffarnagar Riots? 190
PREFACE
Writing about the 2014 Indian elections, anthropologist M ukulika
Banerjee (2016) described them as ‘rambunctious, great equalizer in
public life’. Calling it ‘the largest human event anywhere in the planet’,
elections bring, she wrote, a ‘carnivalesque atmosphere to public life’,
transform the landscape into a ‘festive one’, and generate ‘exaggerated
civility’ in ‘the world’s biggest festival’. Election time, she continued, is
‘effi cient and exciting’ and the act of voting is ‘beautiful’. Nowhere did
she mention, even mistakenly, that elections also constitute and generate
terror as manifest in the chilling murder of over 40 Muslims in Assam in
the fi rst week of May 2014. The Bodo separatist militants killed Muslims
‘as punishment for failing to vote for their [Bodo] candidate’ ( B BC 2014 ;
Guardian 2014 ). It was not simply that lives of Muslims were eliminated;
they were also eliminated from the subsequent electoral campaigns and
discussions by the advocates of democracy in the world’s largest democ-
racy. For families of the killed and for the people for whom the massacre
was a stern message of warning, elections were an unspeakable tragedy, not
a carnival; elections were a great eliminator of life in public, not an equal-
izer in public life; elections refl ected and produced accelerated enmity,
not exaggerated civility; the act of voting was awful, not beautiful. 1
1 While campaigning for his wife, Shashi Srivastava, in a local election in
Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Ranjeet Bahadur Srivastava issued a threat:
‘You (Muslims) do not have anyone to be on your side in Bharatiya Janata Party.
If you do not vote for BJP candidates, if you do not vote for my wife, not even
xii Preface
The elimination of the massacre in Banerjee’s account is not only
an empirical omission. This narrative elimination—as constitutive of
democracy in India (think also of other massacres, not only those
in Gujarat in 2002 or Muzaffarnagar in 2013)—and the simultane-
ous use of superlative adjectives that inundate her account, I argue,
stem from captivity to a theoretical vocabulary whereby accounts
of democracy secure an auto-immunity for themselves by disguis-
ing, to cite Jason Brennan (2016a) , the ‘rot in democracy’s roots’.
The logical outcome of that captivity is discursive circularity (see
‘Introduction’ ) .
Panegyric accounts such as Banerjee’s thus fi guratively (re)produce
a series of aporias about democracy predicated on ‘a set of impos-
sible concepts: people, border, law, life, liberty, decision, foundation,
sovereignty’ ( R oss 2006: 75 ). They equally display a blindness to
the ‘antagonism against others and xenophobia that are built into its
[democracy’s] very practice’ ( G aon 2009 : 2) . One may add, albeit
with some caution, that antagonism against others and xenophobia are
built into the theory of democracy as well and that hostility is directed
as much against outsiders as it is towards insiders—‘civic enemies’ in
Brennan’s (2016b : 245) terse words.
Superlatives such as Banerjee’s are also at work in the
characterization—by journalists and academics alike—of the result
of the 2014 elections. If L ouise Tillin (2015: 118) described it as an
‘extraordinary’ and ‘critical’ election, R onojoy Sen (2017 : 172) , a
fellow academic, called it ‘seminal’. For Ashutosh Varshney (2014:
34) , it was ‘truly distinctive’. Paul Wallace (2015 : xxi) termed it ‘his-
toric’. Journalist R ajdeep Sardesai (2014) described it as an election
‘that changed India’—a phrase that appears in the title of his book
on the election. Such descriptions are based on political punditry
emanating from a short-termism manifest in the following maxim:
‘In politics, three months can be a lifetime.’ However, for a thorough,
sound political analysis that refuses the seduction of presentism,
the skewed temporal unit of analysis is surely unhelpful. Unlike
Samajwadi Party will be able to save you. That is why I am saying to Muslims,
vote for us. If you vote for BJP you will be happy, else you will have to face
problems.’ Srivastava issued the threat from a public stage in the presence of
two ministers of the UP government who approved of his vitriol ( N ews18 2017 ).
