India marked its 72nd Republic Day on January 26. This day in 1950 the country had adopted a new constitution after years of deliberations to suit the plural temperament and destiny of a multi-cultural and multi-religious nation. Seven decades later questions are being raised by many: is India living up to the idea and secular spirit of the constitution? Where is South Asia’s biggest democracy headed? Can India resist and live with the rise of the Hindutva or Hindu majoritarianism?

Hindu majoritarian forces under the leadership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been expanding their footprint across India particularly in the northern part of India since the 1990s. The agitation for building a temple at a disputed site of the Mughal era Babri Masjid in the eastern city of Ayodhya galvanised the support for the BJP and consolidated Hindu electorates. The polarisation that the temple agitation injected in the Indian Hindu voters catapulted the BJP from a fringe party to a national party in a very short time. In 1984, the party had got just two parliamentary seats in the elections but after the Ram temple campaign it won 89 seats. By 1998, it had 182 seats and formed a coalition government in Delhi for the first time under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

However, the party’s march got a break in 2004 when it lost to the Congress and remained in opposition for the next decade. The BJP’s fortunes were revived by the controversial chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who won a historic mandate in 2014 defeating a highly unpopular regime led by Dr Manmohan Singh. Modi ‘s slogan for development captured the imagination of not only his hard core voters but also sceptics who were looking for an alternative to the corruption-ridden Congress regime.

Modi became the first prime minister in three decades to get a full parliamentary majority in the election. For long he had been a political pariah in Indian politics for his alleged role in handling the 2002 Gujarat riots that claimed several hundred lives, mostly Muslim. He was accused of not doing enough to save the lives of the minorities. He became a symbol of divisive politics after that.

When Modi started his journey for Delhi he began projecting himself as a man of development. Sceptics feared his ascension to Delhi.

With successive victories in 2014 and 2019 today Modi’s cultivated image of a man of development no longer holds ground. Since he took over the Indian economy has been passing through a difficult phase. It recently went into recession.

Meanwhile, Modi’s image of a divisive and polarising man has got more pronounced.

Today India is less developed but more divisided, less progressive and more polarised. The BJP government has brought the nation to a crossroads where it has re-opened the old debate about the idea of India. The debate centres on two questions. First, should India be a majoritarian state where all other religions survive under the tutelage of the predominant Hindu religion? Or, should it be a nation, as the constitution envisages, where there is no distinction in the name of religion and everyone has equal rights to practice and propagate religion with the state patronising no religion?

Imprint of Modi’s brand of politics is visible in the two mandates that he got. Never before in independent India’s history had a party won without winning Muslims’ support. The BJP does not have a single elected Muslim leader in both the terms. In 2014 one Muslim candidate was given a ticket and in 2019 none. The mandate itself is a message.

The ban on beef eating and persecution of Muslims in the name of eating beef or carrying cattle created a sense of anxiety among Muslims. The BJP has been working overtime to alter the history textbooks and highlight Hindu past prominently and giving short shrift to medieval India when Muslim rulers ruled India.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 was a clear indication of the direction the government wanted to give this nation. The constitution makers had avoided adding religion as a precondition for Indian citizenship. The CAA was meant to alter that idea. It guarantees citizenship to people of all religions from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but not to Muslims. The Act if read along with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) - an exercise in finding the so-called genuine citizens of India - proves discriminatory for Muslims. If a Muslim does not find mention in the NRC he can be declared stateless but a Hindu will have the protection of the CAA. The government crushed the resistance against the CAA brutally and many activists and students are in jail facing draconian terror charges for participating in agitation against the CAA.

The counter protests by the BJP workers led to religious riots in Delhi that claimed more than 50 lives, mostly Muslim. Then the government launched a crackdown on activists. The constitutional alterations done in Kashmir is seen as a larger design to alter the demography of the Muslim majority region.

In recent months some of the BJP-ruled states have passed a law against conversion that is politically intended to stop the union of Hindu and Muslim couples. The law bans conversion after marriage and relies on the belief that Muslims have launched a “love jehad” where they entice Hindu women and convert them after marriage. Several innocent Muslims have been arrested after the promulgation of law. This has created a fear psychosis in the minds of Muslims and is an open attempt to stop communication between communities.

The eco system in India gives majoritarian politics a preeminent position. This is reflected in the behaviour of middle class educated Indians who are getting radicalised and getting into emotional ghettoisation.

In South Asia and the wider world India has been seen as a role model for communal and religious harmony. It has established its identity as a syncretic nation. If South Asia’s biggest democracy turns majoritarian it impacts communal harmony in the neighbouring nations too. It gives more moral space for hardliner and fanatic forces to grow.

There is no doubt in the possibility of a political fight to reclaim the space lost to the Hindutva forces. The worry is about the lack of institutional support to save the nation from falling into the majoritarian trap. In the USA, Trump could be defeated because he failed to win the media, Executive, Judiciary and other independent institutions. In India the institutions are failing us. Today a large section of the Indian media is hand in gloves with the right-wing forces.

India is on a slippery slope of majoritarianism today and struggling to preserve the spirit of its constitution.

The writer is a New    Delhi-based journalist    covering South Asia