Commenting on the BJP’s defeat in a crucial regional election in Karnataka, one of India’s southern states, the columnist Mukul Kesavan writes in The Telegraph of Kolkata:
“The Congress won more than twice as many seats as the BJP. Modi’s BJP might be a political juggernaut, but right now it lies upended in southern India, its wheels in the air. Congress-mukt Bharat is a work in progress, but BJP-bin Dakshin is an accomplished fact.”
Those not fully familiar with Indian English, which freely employs words from Hindi, Urdu, and other Indian languages, should be informed that “Congress-mukt Bharat” means a Congress-free India, and “BJP-bin Dakshin” equals a South India where the BJP is absent.
Given the rising numbers of Indians living outside India, the world will increasingly hear words like mukt, bin and, of course, Bharat.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigned energetically and at length in Karnataka (whose capital city, Bangalore, re-spelt not long ago as Bengaluru, is perhaps better known than the state it steers). Therefore, his party’s defeat in Karnataka can be characterized fairly as Modi’s personal defeat.
Which does not, however, mean, that Modi’s days as India’s prime minister are suddenly shrinking. That may not be the case at all. The question before Karnataka’s voters was the performance of the BJP’s regional ministry, not the image of Modi or his national cabinet, and some pundits hold that even today Karnataka would want the BJP to be in charge in New Delhi, though not in Bengaluru.
Yet there is significance in Modi’s Karnataka defeat. And in the connected fact that all the other large states of South India – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, and Andhra – are currently in the hands of parties opposed to the BJP’s majoritarian agenda. Some of them are sharply opposed.
Adjoining Karnataka and Telangana is Maharashtra, industrially and commercially India’s premier state, with Mumbai as its capital. Although at present run by the BJP in coalition with a regional grouping, Maharashtra today can hardly be regarded as a wholehearted Modi state, even though the ideology of Hindu nationalism was cradled there a hundred years ago.
It seems, in addition, that India’s great eastern city, Kolkata, capital of West Bengal, continues to love Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister who two years ago trounced the BJP in her state.
Due a year from now, elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, may, however, produce a very different story. Modi and the BJP will start off as firm favourites. Much of northern, central and western India seems to be in their corner. Moreover, when it comes to big media, big money, the megaphone, the big screen, the small screen, access to every Indian mobile, and the power to cripple opponents with criminal investigations, it is advantage Modi in the ratio of 100 to 1.
Yet Karnataka suggests that the battle has been joined. More indications may be offered by regional elections due before the end of this year in three Hindi-speaking states: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
Its numbers continuing to rise, India’s diaspora adds to European and American capabilities. However, this diaspora also adds to the range of problems that American and European societies face. Long familiar with discrimination linked to race, religion, or gender, the Western world now needs to respond to evidence of caste-based discrimination too.
Following a lead recently given by the city council of Seattle, which made caste-based discrimination illegal in the city the world associates with Bill Gates and Microsoft, the upper house of California’s legislature has now gone ahead and passed, with a 34-1 vote, a bill for adding caste to the category of grounds on which discrimination would be unlawful.
By introducing the caste-related bill in California’s upper chamber, an Afghan-origin member named Aisha Wahab showed that those intimately aware of wrongs in the portion of the world to which they were or are connected can promote fairness elsewhere. A Muslim woman from Afghanistan working to secure Dalit rights in California is striking proof of humanity’s oneness.
An earlier California law had laid down that “all people in the state are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments”. Now Aisha Wahab’s bill specifies that caste cannot be a ground for denying rights.
When California’s lower house passes a similar bill, and its governor signs it into law, this famous state will become the first in the U.S. to legislate against caste injustices. It will not be a trivial record.