The BJP simply exposes existing tensions

The argument

Indian society is divided by religion, region, language, caste and ethnicity, and proponents of this view begin from the age of those divisions rather than from any recent government. Communal, caste and regional tensions continue to haunt Indian politics, threatening its long-standing democratic and secular ethos, but on this argument they are the inheritance a government works within rather than something a government manufactures. Although the BJP government stoked the fires of unrest during its first term, these societal divisions already existed. That concession shapes the argument: what is denied is not that the party has used the divisions but that it created them, and those are different charges carrying different conclusions about how dangerous the party is. The historical record is offered as the test. India has a long history of politically instigated sectarian riots that existed long before the BJP came to power. Most notably, under the Congress party, at least 2,733 Sikhs were killed in the streets of Delhi after the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. If mass sectarian violence occurred under a party defined by its secular commitments, then on this reasoning such violence cannot be a property of one party in particular, and treating it as one misidentifies where the danger lies. The BJP did not create this undercurrent, but revealed them: beneath the surface of what the elite had believed was a liberal syncretic culture, India was indeed a cauldron of religious nationalism, anti-Muslim sentiment and deep-seated caste bigotry. On this account it was the elite's picture of the country that was false, and the party's rise made that visible rather than making it so. Communal, caste and regional tensions continue to haunt Indian politics, threatening its long-standing democratic and secular ethos.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the premise and the conclusion come apart: that divisions predate a party does not establish that acting on them is harmless. The body itself concedes that the government "stoked the fires of unrest", which is an admission of agency — exposing a latent condition and inflaming it are different relations to it, and the danger alleged concerns the second. The 1984 killings of Sikhs in Delhi under a Congress government do show that sectarian violence is not one party's property, but that is a tu quoque: it distributes the fault rather than dissolving it, and on this reasoning no party could ever be dangerous so long as a predecessor had done something comparable. Critics add that the case rests on a claim about what was always latent, which is difficult to test, since any incident can be reassigned to the underlying cauldron rather than to the actor who invoked it. The specific objections raised by the party's critics also concern acts of government rather than atmosphere — citizenship legislation, the change to Kashmir's constitutional status, and pressure on media and civil-society organisations are decisions, and whether they are dangerous does not turn on how divided society was beforehand. The argument's own closing sentence, that these tensions continue to threaten India's democratic and secular ethos, sits uneasily beside the conclusion that the party it says stoked them is not dangerous.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics reply that the antiquity of India's divisions is not in dispute and does not bear on the charge: citing violence under a Congress government distributes blame rather than removing it, and on that reasoning no party could be dangerous if a predecessor had acted similarly. [Rejecting P2] The premise concedes the government "stoked the fires of unrest", which describes agency rather than mere exposure; and because any incident can be attributed to a latent cauldron the claim resists testing, while the objections actually raised concern legislation and administrative decisions whose character does not depend on prior division.

Further reading

Narendra Modi is taking India down a dangerous path. Financial Times Editorial Feb 29 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/e0dff26e-5a38-11ea-a528-dd0f971febbc