The taxman cometh for India’s weakened opposition as Modi eyes election victory

The taxman cometh for India’s weakened opposition as Modi eyes election victory

The arrest of top Indian opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal on corruption charges weeks before the general elections helped galvanise an opposition alliance against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. But as the investigations and graft allegations against opposition politicians mount, the defections to the ruling party are also rising in the hope of a tax-raid break.

As supporters of a top Indian opposition leader gathered in New Delhi on Sunday, April 7, to protest against his arrest just weeks before the 2024 general elections, Mary Pinto* joined a parallel solidarity rally in the country’s economic hub, Mumbai.

The demonstration came two weeks after Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, an opponent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was arrested in a graft case. Members of Kejriwal’s Aam Aadami Party (AAP) have dismissed the corruption allegations as “fabricated” in an attempt by the BJP government to politically “finish” a rival.

The government and the BJP have denied the accusations.

Since Kejriwal’s shock arrest, his party has held protests primarily in AAP-controlled Delhi and the northern Indian state of Punjab. In a bid to galvanise support, the AAP announced an April 7 nationwide, day-long “samuhik upwas”, or mass fast.

Pinto, a 55-year-old advertising executive, heard about an AAP samuhik upwas demonstration in downtown Mumbai on Sunday morning and immediately decided to attend the rally with a few friends.

It was a heartening, but underwhelming, event. “There was a small crowd, probably around a hundred people, all AAP supporters and a lot of their leaders, local leaders. It was interesting to hear their point of view,” she recounted in a phone interview. “We thought it would be a really big event, but it wasn’t as big as we thought it should have been.”

While the mass fasts in AAP-ruled New Delhi and Punjab got some press coverage, the Mumbai event got none. “There was no media coverage. I waited till the end and there was absolutely no media there,” said Pinto.

After a decade in power, Modi is seeking a rare third term in office and his party is widely expected to sweep the 2024 parliamentary elections. Boosted by a personality cult that sees his image emblazoned on everything from giant billboards to vaccine packages, Modi’s poll ratings are the stuff of dreams for other democratic leaders. Over the past few months, the Indian prime minister’s approval ratings have consistently hovered between 75 to 78 percent, making him the world’s most popular leader on global trackers.

The picture on the opposition front could not be more different. The biggest national opposition party, the once-mighty Congress, has lost ground to the BJP. In the 2019 general elections, the Congress won just 52 seats in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament. The BJP, in contrast, bagged 303 seats. On the 2024 campaign trail, BJP politicians confidently promise “400 paar”, or 400-plus seats, to clinch a resounding parliamentary majority.

Last year, when the Congress and more than two dozen other parties announced the formation of a grand alliance, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope for opposition supporters. The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc includes the centre-left AAP and a diverse range of regional parties.

But that was before the crackdown on the opposition got tougher. Within the INDIA bloc, the tricky business of negotiating and compromising on candidate-constituency lists and seats poses another challenge. The combined burden weighs heavily on voters opposed to Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies as they struggle to prevent a narrative of failure from turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So many regional powers, so many complications

A vast, densely populated country, India is divided into 28 states, eight union territories and is home to more than 2,600 political parties.

For several decades after independence in 1947, the Indian National Congress (INC) – the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru known simply as the Congress party – dominated politics. The decline of the Congress in the 1990s, coupled with the rise of the BJP on the national level and a number of regional parties at the state level, saw India enter an era of coalition governments.

With power at the national level weighted heavily in favour of the BJP, it puts supporters of the opposition alliance at the mercy of backdoor deals and the shifting allegiances of regional parties.

When Pinto opted to spend her Sunday at an AAP mass fast in the western coastal city of Mumbai, she did it out of solidarity for a party that has no political stakes in her region. A relatively new party, the AAP is still trying to extend its national reach beyond northern India after it emerged in 2012 from a New Delhi-based anti-corruption movement.

Pinto, a member of India’s tiny Christian minority, which comprises roughly 2% of the national population, is a Congress supporter.

The Hindu majoritarianism of Modi’s BJP has little appeal for India’s religious minorities. For Muslims, India’s largest minority who make up 14% of the population, the stakes are particularly high. Anti-Muslim sentiment has increased since Modi’s 2014 first term in office, according to experts. After his 2019 re-election, the BJP government “has pushed controversial policies that critics say explicitly ignore Muslims’ rights, restrict religious freedoms, and are intended to disenfranchise millions of Muslims. Under Modi, violence against Muslims has become more common”, notes the Washington, DC-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Since the BJP’s phenomenal rise, the conventional wisdom has been that India’s Muslims and Christians have no choice but to vote Congress.

Pinto, however, says she supports the Congress out of conviction, not resignation. “The Congress has a quiet confidence in themselves and the country. When I look at the BJP, there’s such a deeply rooted insecurity in everything they do,” she noted.

That translates into an intolerance which enters every level of city life, she explained. The successful advertising executive agreed to be interviewed only if her name is changed. “I work in an organisation where a lot of the higher management are pro-BJP. They don’t take to a dissenting voice,” she said. “The minute you come out publicly for a party that’s against the BJP, you are either targeted or told to tone it down … of course it affects you.”

But when Mumbai goes to the polls on May 20 in phase five of the multiphase general elections, Pinto explains that, “as a Congress supporter, I may not have the privilege of voting for a Congress person because of the seat-sharing arrangement”.

The regional powerhouse in Mumbai has been the right-wing Shiv Sena party since the 1990s. But the party has since splintered, with one faction, the Shiv Sena (UBT), joining the INDIA alliance. “I will vote for them, which is fine,” said Pinto. “I’ll end up voting for the INDIA alliance, right?”

But she then worries about party symbols, an important electoral feature in a country with a low literacy rate and a plethora of political parties. Following a fractious fight between the Shiv Sena splinters, the Indian Supreme Court deprived the UBT faction of the old bow-and-arrow symbol, which was awarded to the splinter allied with the BJP. Pinto now fears that INDIA alliance supporters may not be familiar with the new torch symbol of the Shiv Sena (UBT).

‘Tax terrorism’ and the ruling party ‘washing machine’

The complications of regional coalition politics in India are not new. The alarming development in the lead-up to the 2024 vote has been the extensive crackdown on the opposition, according to human rights groups.

Following Kejriwal’s arrest, Amnesty International noted that the BJP-led “Indian government’s crackdown on peaceful dissent and opposition has now reached a crisis point”.

The detention of one of India’s most popular opposition figures sparked international expressions of concern and calls for a free and fair election from the UN, the US and Germany.

“The timing of the arrest is deeply significant,” said Louise Tillin from King’s India Institute at King’s College London, noting that Kejriwal’s arrest came less than a month before voting starts in the general elections. “This more than anything really frames the nature of the playing field … This is a very clear statement from the ruling party in India that the space for the opposition in these elections is going to be heavily managed,” Tillin told FRANCE 24’s Access Asia.

The AAP leader’s arrest came a few weeks after the Congress party accused the government of hampering its ability to campaign by ordering the freezing of its bank accounts over a tax dispute from 2018. “In other words, the government is accused of preventing the opposition from paying its campaign staff. If true, these are tactics to silence the opposition worthy of Vladimir Putin in Russia,” noted Indrajit Roy, a politics and international relations professor at the University of York.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of opposition politicians as well as independent news organisations, including the BBC, have faced tax raids and lengthy investigations by India’s powerful Enforcement Directorate (ED). On the campaign trail, opposition leaders call it “tax terrorism”.

There is “an instrumentalisation of laws and institutions to intimidate the opposition”, noted Roy.

As the opposition weakens, the number of defections to the BJP has increased – and it can sometimes yield magical results. The Indian news site The Wire published an investigation in February, revealing that a dozen opposition members, targeted in recent months by corruption investigations, saw legal proceedings evaporate as soon as they joined the BJP. The phenomenon is so widespread, wags refer to the BJP as the “washing machine”.

“These are tactics that can have a real electoral effect, as they empty the ranks of the opposition and can push certain leaders to keep quiet” to avoid a dreaded Enforcement Directorate knock on the door, explained Adam Ziegfeld, an Indian elections specialist at Philadelphia-based Temple University.

The BJP denies the allegations, with Modi stating that the Enforcement Directorate is an independent federal agency. In an interview with the Guardian, Syed Zafar Islam, a BJP spokesperson, called the allegations “baseless” and stressed that the ED could not bring a case unless it had sufficient evidence to show in court. “Whenever these parties are staring at defeat, they start talking about threats to democracy,” said Islam.

The Indian government does not take kindly to allegations of democratic backsliding. Following calls from Washington and Berlin for a “fair, transparent” legal process in the Kejriwal case, the US and German envoys were summoned by the foreign ministry for a “dressing-down” that “reflected the tough new brand of diplomacy embraced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cheered by his nationalist supporters”, noted the Washington Post.

“India has been reacting strongly to some of those quite muted statements that have been made in Washington and in Germany about the need to respect the rule of law,” said Tillin. “It’s quite striking to me that there’s been very little international media coverage of Kejriwal’s arrest,” she added. “It probably reflects, to some extent, that the narrative of India’s democratic backsliding is by now almost baked into the way that elections are thought of. So it’s not seen as something new to report on. But actually what’s happened is a very important turning point in India’s democracy, which deserves greater international scrutiny.”

After nearly two years of diligently attending every opposition rally she possibly could, including a 2023 walk across India by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, Pinto despairs of the events receiving coverage by India’s mainstream media. But she says she refuses to give up hope. “I think this is our last chance to do something,” she said. “A lot of people have just cocooned themselves and say it doesn’t matter, our lives will run on autopilot. But you have to stand up for something.”

*Name changed to protect identity.