The Bharatiya Janata Party, the dominant partner in India's ruling National Democratic Alliance, has responded to a spate of unfavourable exit polls in India's multi-phase general election by highlighting its Hindu supremacist agenda.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti - infamous for their role in inciting anti-Muslim violence - have been given greater prominence in the BJP campaign, particularly in the pivotal state of Uttar Pradesh.
Meanwhile, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the shadowy Hindu nationalist service organization and militia which provides the bulk of the BJP's cadres, is said to have assumed direct control of the party's campaign.
According to recent opinion and exit polls, the NDA will at best win a bare majority of the 545 Lok Sabha seats. The more probable outcome is that it will fail to reach the 273 seat majority mark.
Should the NDA fall only a dozen or so seats short it will likely be able to cling to power, at least in the short term. But the more its seat tally falls below 260, the greater the likelihood of a hung parliament.
Since the rival alliance led by the Congress, India's traditional governing party, is given no chance of surpassing the NDA's seat total, the balance of power would fall to a disparate grouping of caste-based and regional parties.
In the event of a hung parliament, only after a frantic and probably protracted period of manoeuvring and horse-trading would a new ruling combination emerge - a government that could be led by the BJP or by Congress or even by neither of them, but which would be on life-support from the outset.
The BJP advanced the date of the elections from the fall, believing that it could capitalize on the popularity of its peace overtures to Pakistan, the disarray in the ranks of the Congress, and an economic upswing spurred by an inflow of foreign investment and last year's bumper harvest.
To consolidate its already strong support from big business, the BJP initially made much of the fact that it intended to make economic development - for example, the need to press forward with deregulation and privatization - not its Hindu supremacist agenda the pivot of its election campaign.
But the BJP's claim that India is poised to become a great power by 2020 due to the NDA government's pursuit of neo-liberal policies and military prowess, including the deployment of nuclear weapons, has failed to resonate outside the most privileged sections of the population.
Indeed, the BJP's "India shining" rhetoric has served only to underscore its indifference to the plight of the vast majority of Indians, for whom the dismantling of India's nationally protected economy has meant increased poverty and economic insecurity.
Over the course of the nearly three-month-long election campaign, the opinion and exit polls have shown a steady drop in support for the BJP and its allies. To arrest the decline, the BJP has given increasing prominence to its Hindutva or Hindu supremacist agenda.
Both the BJP's "vision" statement and the NDA manifesto highlight the so-called Ayodhya issue. (In the early 1990s, the BJP led an agitation for the building of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya that resulted in the razing of the Babri Masjid mosque and arguably the worst communal violence since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.)
The BJP and NDA policy documents also pledge legislation to bar those of non- Indian origin - read the Italian-born, Catholic Congress leader Sonia Gandhi - from holding high office.
Now the BJP is turning to Modi and Bharti in an attempt to mobilize sections of their Hindu chauvinist base that have been perturbed by its abandonment of bellicose anti-Pakistan rhetoric and in the hopes of channelling the popular resentment over the lack of job and other opportunities against Muslims and other minorities.
As chief minister, Modi played a major role in precipitating the February-March 2002 Gujarat riots that resulted in the deaths of 2,000 Muslims and rendered tens of thousands more homeless.
Bharti was one of the principal leaders of the Ayodhya agitation. "To improve our nominees prospects," a senior BJP leader told the Hindu, "it is essential to ensure good turnouts. If this has to happen, our workers have to go from door to door to persuade voters to come out. And Modi can inspire them to give all that they have."
The prospect of a minority government and especially of a hung parliament has caused consternation in business circles. The Bombay stock exchange lost 3.6 per cent of its value on April 27, its sharpest drop in more than three years, after exit polls from last week's round of voting showed the BJP-led NDA failing to win a majority in the next parliament.
The more perceptive bourgeois commentators recognize that all of the parties, from the BJP and the Shiv Sena on the far right through the Stalinist Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist), have supported economic "liberalization".
Their concern is that the jockeying for political advantage among the myriad parties will lead to a weak government, unable to take unpopular measures. As it is, business has been pressing since the beginning of the decade for the NDA to make good on its pledge to "reform" India's labour laws by gutting restrictions on the contacting out of labour and making it easier for companies to lay off workers and close down factories.
Declared the Indian Express in an editorial published on April 30, "The concern of the markets is not that a BJP-led coalition would be replaced by a Congress-led coalition. Rather, it is that neither national party may end up leading any coalition". -Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site.