India: General Election 2014

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has done us great service in introducing this debate, and I am honoured to be among so many Indian friends. We know that the noble Lord has done this country a service as the Deputy Prime Minister’s adviser. We give him full credit for what he has achieved.

I acknowledge Prime Minister Modi’s success in the election. I fully accept that he has made an excellent start in both foreign and domestic policies. I am sure his support for the business community will have attracted a lot of admirers in this country, although I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, about our immigration rules possibly keeping out some of those people. In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Modi made some impressive and even moving promises. He said he comes from a poor family and wants dignity for the poor. He spoke up for gender equality and the low castes. He expressed disgust with poor sanitation and the condition in which millions have to live in his country.

Last year, the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and I took part in a march in Nepal for better water and sanitation and in a conference attended by MPs from all over South Asia. I know how important the WASH programme is worldwide and how seriously it is being taken by India. I know Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Kathmandu went down well in Nepal and it should mean greater co-operation between the two countries, not least on energy.

Prime Minister Modi was not elected for promising these things but because of the business sector’s confidence in him since the Gujarat miracle as well as the electoral failures of Congress and, even more, perhaps, the momentum of the BJP in building support over many years. He also stands before the vast majority of the electors as one of the poor. They will identify him with themselves and expect him to live up to these promises. On the global scale, despite its economic advance under Manmohan Singh, which has now faltered, India remains one of the poorest countries yet one of the most influential. With its membership of the BRICS group, the post-2015 agenda coming up and the setting of new UN sustainable goals, Modi is going to have to deliver a range of promises both to the world at large and to his own people. As he says, good days are coming.

The stakes are, as usual, very high. The report of the high-level panel, on which the UK played a leading role, states that the new order must “leave no one behind”, transform economies, build peace and effective institutions and forge a new global partnership. No one will be surprised that, when you come closer down to earth, India falls very short of these aspirations, especially when it comes to the situation of the low caste and the minorities. The fact is that there are atrocities and examples of hatred or prejudice every day against the lowest caste, the Dalits, and no one is stopping or reporting them except a fairly small number of NGOs that have the power to attract law enforcement agencies to these cases. I have personal experience of this in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Only last week the Guardian reported that a 15 year-old Dalit boy was set alight with petrol for allowing his goat to stray into a neighbouring landowner’s field. One extraordinary recent case is of the newly elected Chief Minister of Bihar, himself a Dalit, who visited a local temple, after which the whole temple was disinfected by high-caste Hindus.

A European Parliament library note says that there are 112 newly elected MPs in the Lok Sabha with a serious criminal record; that is one in five. Many of them, perhaps most, are of course in the ruling party. Against that background, can we expect legislation any time soon? In fact, there is a positive move by the Indian Government to translate the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Ordinance 2014, enacted by the previous Government, into a new Bill. Many human rights organisations are hopeful that the new legislation, which is under consideration now, will be passed at the earliest opportunity and be able to fix many loopholes in the existing law to protect the excluded communities. I also assume that our own DfID will do its best to support the NGOs working in this field, and perhaps the Minister could confirm that on the record.

I would also be grateful to hear the Minister’s analysis of the Muslim vote. Here we have a country with a vast Muslim population—the world’s third largest—grossly underrepresented in the Lok Sabha with only 20 MPs, its lowest ever number, with no seats among the ruling party. I am told, and indeed have read, that there were Muslim families, especially those who had admired the BJP’s success among the business class in Gujarat, who were not only sympathetic to but actually voted for the BJP. This seems extraordinary in the light of the terrible events in Gujarat in 2002, when hundreds died, mainly Muslims. Everyone remembers the Prime Minister’s long involvement with the RSS/Jan Sangh movement. However, it also perhaps shows the depth to which traditional Muslim support for Congress has fallen over the years.

According to one source, there was one Muslim group that completely turned a blind eye to anti-Muslim violence in 2002 because “as a thriving business community they didn’t want principles to come in the way of their market share in goods and commodities”. Having said that, I know from talking to Muslim friends before and since the election that the BJP still inspires fear among many Muslim minorities in several states, especially in Gujarat, Maharashtra and UP. There are deep divisions in many urban communities, amounting in some places to ghettoes. Basharat Peer, a well known Kashmiri journalist, writing in the New York Times earlier this year just before the election, described the situation in Ahmedabad. I will not quote the whole story, but it provides an example. He writes that he rode around Juhapura—the city’s largest Muslim ghetto at about 400,000 people—

“on the back of a friend’s scooter … The deeper we went into the neighborhood, the narrower the streets, the shabbier the buildings, the thicker the crowds. The edge of the ghetto came abruptly … ‘This is The Border,’ my friend said. Beyond the field was a massive concrete wall topped with barbed wire and oval surveillance cameras. On the other side, we could see a neat row of beige apartment blocks with air conditioners securely attached to the windows—housing for middle-class Hindu families”.

He quotes a 41 year-old resident, Mr Pathan, who says,

“‘The sun is allowed into Juhapura. The rain is allowed into Juhapura. The wind is allowed into Juhapura … I get a bill for water tax and pay it, but we don’t get piped water here.’ The locals rely on bore wells, which cough up salty, insalubrious water”.

Mr Pathan explained:

“‘My father said, ‘When the storm comes, you don’t get more than 10 minutes to run’”—

a clear reference to the threat of sectarian violence.

I quote that story because a friend of mine lives in Ahmedabad and he knows it to be true. He says that there are two very separate real estate markets, originally arising from the Disturbed Areas Act, which prevents Hindus from selling property to Muslims. That was originally intended to prevent communal violence, but in practice it is a recipe for apartheid.

Finally, another concern of Muslims is that, whatever assurances are given, the Prime Minister refuses to condemn his own MPs and senior leaders when they indulge in inflammatory rhetoric. I quote no less an authority than Siddharth Varadarajan, former editor of the Hindu, who has regularly described the BJP’s demonisation of Muslims and its dirty tricks during political campaigning in UP. It being Diwali, I wish the new Indian Government continuing success, but the point is that, however many promises the Prime Minister makes, he has to live down a long record of prejudice and discrimination in his own party. More importantly, he has to carry out and implement the legislation that he is proposing so that minorities can all see and believe what they are hearing.