Minorities warming up to Narendra Modi
The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church's recent appreciation of Mr Narendra Modi's stellar governance record is only the latest addition to a growing chorus from minority communities in favour of the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. While the Church has shied away from an outright political endorsement — which is fine since the parishioners should be left alone to make an individual judgement on which candidate deserves their vote — the fact that it gave a no-holds-barred approval to Mr Modi's pro-development, business-friendly policies is noteworthy. It shows that the minority communities, which, according to conventional electoral wisdom, supposedly vote only on religious lines, do value good governance records. For too long, opportunistic politicians have employed a cynical carrot-and-stick strategy, with appeasement schemes on the one end and the bogey of communalism on the other, to garner loyalty votes from the minorities. This has not led to any meaningful development for the vote banks — and, over the years minority communities have realised that. By now supporting Mr Modi's politics of progress, they have shown that that they can see through the old strategy and are ready to reject old politics.
Unsurprisingly, then, the Church's admiration for Mr Modi's governance policies came hand-in-hand with its quiet criticism of the Congress-led UDF regime's misrule in the State. While on the one hand, the Church spoke positively of how many of its followers who run businesses in Gujarat have had no problems there with red-tape and bureaucratic inefficiency, on the other it described the State regime as one that was in a flux. Moreover, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church's pro-Modi sentiment comes only weeks after Mr PC George, vice chairman of the Catholic Church-backed Kerala Congress (M), flagged off the Run for Unity marathon in Kottayam, a Narendra Modi initiative. It will hardly be a stretch to suggest that the Christian population is warming up to the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, at least in Kerala.
It is not alone. The Muslims too have shown their appreciation for the good work done by Mr Modi, long since portrayed as a ‘Hindu strongman' by the pseudo-secular lobby. Most famously, in 2011, Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, then the newly-appointed vice chancellor of Darul Uloom Deoband, had said that Gujarat's Muslims benefitted from Mr Modi's development record. The comment cost him his position at the ultra-conservative seminary in Uttar Pradesh but that hasn’t prevented him from reiterating his position, as he did in Ahmedabad earlier this year. More recently, the Assembly results from the States of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh indicate that Mr Modi's popularity among the minorities is on the rise. In Rajasthan, two of the four Muslim candidates fielded by the BJP won while 16 of the 17 Muslims put up by the Congress lost. Similarly, in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won 10 seats from constituencies which have a significant Muslim population. While State factors surely played a role in these results, the larger picture of pan-national support for Mr Modi and development politics, cutting across religious lines, cannot be denied.