Is the 2024 Lok Sabha election India’s last chance before the point of no return?

If the Bharatiya Janata Party under Prime Minister Narendra succeeds in winning a third five-year term in the Lok Sabha elections, many fear that India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, will see their second-class status formalised in law and practice.

But for Hindu supremacy to be fully realised, which is the stated aim of Hindu nationalists, they will have to expunge India of any Muslim influence, of which there is much historically. When Indians cast their vote in the coming weeks, they would do well to be aware of the weight of their electoral choices.

A rhetorical question

In a article in January, political scientists, Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs ask the rhetorical question “Is India under Narendra Modi…beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow?” This was a reference to state and local laws introduced in the southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th century that enforced racial segregation.

The authors explain that Jim Crow was aimed at blunting the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and gave equal rights to African Americans. It was designed to make African Americans second-class citizens. Similarly, in India, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalised, less than fully equal citizens.

Jim Crow...

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