The South Wing

An old line of thought says that when a nation undergoes a violent national crisis, the resulting “rally around the flag” effect will cause the populace to lurch rightward in a more nationalistically militaristic direction. The Republican success in the 2002 U.S. Congressional elections could be partially explained by this effect. In the most notorious Senate election from that year, incumbent Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, lost to Saxby Chambliss after the latter ran ads connecting Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One can easily imagine that if November 2001 had seen major Congressional elections, the Republican victories would have been even greater.

Such thinking, however, underscores the limits of a lot of seemingly true theories about the way societies function. These theories are based on a small number of data points; when analyzing politics in a nation of a billion people, a greater understanding of the society is necessary.

Take India. The country’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has partly banked its electoral success on appealing to anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistani sentiment among the Hindu majority. In the wake of the Bombay terrorist attack late last year, India was set to hold multiple state elections. The BJP “had expected a clean sweep over these elections,” according to an AOL India story. The New York Times (using that sneakiest of all words when discussing social sciences: “many”) noted that “many had expected” that the Congress Party would “suffer [a] political body blow.” BJP ads proclaiming “Fight Terror: Vote B.J.P.” on a black background with red blood splatters were printed in New Delhi papers.

Suketu Mehta’s excellent account of his time in Bombay, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, illustrates how a cycle of Hindu vs. Muslim violence in Bombay has helped anti-Muslim groups like the Shiv Sena at the local polls. According to some reports, even Congress Party officials were expecting to lose. A victory for the party that gave the world the Indian nuclear tests in the 1990s would be another data point in favor of the late Samuel Huntington’s “Class of Civilizations” thesis, which in part envisions India teaming up with the West and Israel against Islam and China.

Instead, less than two weeks before Huntington’s death, the electorate in Rajasthan, Delhi and Mizoram decided to not follow his thesis, rallying instead around the incumbent. The voters focused on local issues and elected the Congress Party, which has controlled the center since the 2004 elections. Then galaxy quest dvd download

, as now, economic concerns among the rural poor trumped following a more dangerous, hyper-nationalist-fueled course. As Sagarika Ghose put it in the Hindustan Times , “the Indian voter shunned the big slogans of ‘terrorism’ … and resoundingly elected plain homespun hardworking leaders.”

After what had been the most peaceful year in Jammu and Kashmir in recent memory, following a more hard-line path with a nuclear-armed Pakistan would likely just make things worse. All-out war to crush the terrorist-backing Pakistani military and intelligence-service structures would do more to undermine the weak Pakistani civilian leadership and create a nationalist backlash among Pakistanis. The risk of such blowback benefiting the Pakistani military would likely be too great.

Also, a war with Pakistan would not bring food to the tables of rural India. While the poor and uneducated worldwide have historically been easily swayed by nationalist sentiments, romantic nationalism often finds its most receptive audience among the upper-middle and the upper classes. Rural Indians have seen the BJP in charge and noticed how while those in the high-tech sector enjoyed a boost in income, farmers did not share in the benefits. As the party of the higher castes, the BJP is not well suited to reacting to the concerns of poorer farmers and workers outside of major cities.

These elections point to a weakness in the worldview behind “Clash of Civilizations” thinking and the nationalists worldwide who would wish to take advantage of such a paradigm. In the long term, only voters who already have all the butter they need can always afford to vote for more guns.
If Islam’s “bloody borders” were real, government-backed Islamic forces in Bangladesh would likely have followed the Bombay siege with a second wave of terrorist attacks against Indian targets to weaken and kill Hindus for the sake of weakening and killing Hindus. Instead, at the end of December in Bangladesh, the center-left Awami League routed its opponents, resulting in Islamist leaders of Jamaat-e-Islaami losing their seats in Parliament.

Understanding the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir and related issues of terrorism, communal violence and nuclear weapons actually requires understanding local history, culture, politics and society. The same goes for understanding electoral politics in South Asian nations–or for that matter that of nations anywhere. Indian society and civilization is too complex to be summed up in glib phrases like “Hindu civilization,” especially considering the prominent role Sikhs and Catholics like Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi play in the country. The same goes for the billions of Muslims around the world whose lives add up to more than just “Islamic civilization.” If these recent elections signify anything, it is that now is the time to put such glib ideas as a worldwide “Clash of Civilizations” to rest in favor of genuine, informed understanding.