The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won by a landslide in elections in the province of Gujarat.
In an election that was widely viewed as a referendum on India’s secular character, Hindu nationalists won a landslide re-election victory today in the western state of Gujarat, which was convulsed by Hindu-Muslim riots early this year.
The vote seemed to affirm the success of the campaign strategy of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party, which had focused on uniting Hindus against a threat of Islamic terrorism and implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, against the state’s Muslims.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which also leads the national coalition government, won 126 seats in the 182-seat state assembly. The Congress Party, the main opposition, won 51 seats.
The party’s greatest gains came in areas where rioting took place last spring, and where tensions were high. The riots —- prompted by 59 Hindu pilgrims’ being burned to death in February in a train compartment that had been surrounded by a Muslim mob —- left 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslim.
The Bharatiya Janata Party won 52 of 65 seats in riot-affected areas. In central Gujarat, where the rioting was concentrated, it won 45 seats, 30 more than it had in 1998. Even candidates whom witnesses had described as leading or inciting rioting mobs won handily.
I guess extremism helps in the short term.
Why “in the short-term”?
Because eventually people want their mundane stuff taken care of by their government. In the short or medium term, people can ignore their welfare and vote for xenophobia etc.