Hindu hardliners win vote with anti-Muslim agenda

Security forces were deployed across the Indian state of Gujarat, the scene of mass sectarian killings earlier this year, after an overwhelming election victory for hardline Hindus who campaigned on an overtly anti-Muslim platform.

Communal tensions were running high after the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was swept back into power in one of the most emotionally charged and polarised state polls in the country's post-independence history.

The triumph for the BJP, which also heads the federal coalition government, has prompted fears that it will resort to the same tactics in a batch of important state elections next year, exploiting India's explosive Hindu-Muslim divide in order to win votes.

The results were an endorsement for Gujarat's demagogic stand-in chief minister, Narendra Modi, 52, who heads a government accused by human rights groups of failing to stop – and in some cases instigating – the killing, raping, and looting that swept the western state in the spring.

According to unofficial estimates, more than 2,000 people were killed, mostly Muslims, as men wearing the saffron colours of Hindu fundamentalist groups – which have links with the BJP's right wing – were trucked into Muslim areas, and went on the rampage. Many thousands of Muslims fled their homes.

That outburst, the worst religious riots in India for a decade, was triggered in February by an attack by a Muslim mob on a train carrying Hindu activists at Godhra in Gujarat.

The Godhra assault, in which 58 people died, was a central campaign theme of Mr Modi and the BJP, which shamelessly used the bloodshed to unify the Hindu majority by persuading them they were under threat from Muslim extremism, including from neighbouring Pakistan.

"I would be happy if I could say that riots are not a prescription for winning elections," said Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst. "The sad answer is that it has helped them."

It was a bad defeat for the Congress Party, which called the Gujarat election "a battle for the soul of India" – a view shared by much of the country's intelligentsia who view with deep alarm the resurgence of "Hindutva", Mr Modi's brand of Hindu chauvinism entwined with nationalism.

Newspaper commentators – who have written about little else for weeks – portrayed the election as a historical contest between fanatical Hindu segregationists and India's tolerant secular "civil society", which takes its creed from Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Modi – who is being tipped as a future prime minister – began his political career in the RSS (National Volunteer Force), a stridently "Hindutva" group with paramilitary overtones which is linked to the BJP right.

The BJP won 126 seats, giving it two-thirds of the 182-seat state legislature, over which it retains control. This was a reversal of fortune for India's Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a BJP moderate. His party has suffered a series of ballot-box defeats, losing four states this year.

The Congress Party, which won only 52 seats, failed wholly to cash in on popular unhappiness about the state government's dismal performance in other areas, including its handling of victims of the recent earthquake and drought. The Congress president in Gujarat, Shankersinh Vaghela, bitterly described the election as a victory for "aggressive Hindutva".