Religion and Party Politics in India and Pakistan

Abstract

Until the 1990s, religious influence on party politics in India and Pakistan was primarily through street protests and pressure on mainstream nonreligious parties rather than by religious parties winning power directly. In India, such influence was constrained by the secular constitutional structure and the dominant role of the Congress Party. In Pakistan, however, politically deinstitutionalized parties, weakened by military interference, have never been strong enough to take on the clerics. Instead, party leaders and military regimes have increasingly tried to co-opt or accommodate Islamist parties and pressure groups to strengthen their own positions. Civilian and military governments in the 1970s and 1980s institutionalized much of the Islamist agenda within the state in a way that now seems impossible to reverse. Ironically, the very fact that much of the Islamist agenda is now institutionalized, makes it difficult for Islamist parties to expand much beyond the 10–20% of the votes they now receive. India’s secular consensus, which many observers saw as its greatest achievement, has been profoundly disrupted by the decline of the Congress Party over the past three decades and the rise of the BJP, headed by the dominant figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has deep roots in the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its Hindu nationalist family (Sangh Parivar) of organizations. Modi, especially in his second term (2019–), has used his majority in parliament to try to radically remake India along Hindu nationalist lines, even though that was not central to his campaign platform, nor the reason why most development- and governance-minded voters elected him to office.