In India’s elections, 970 million are eligible to vote, including 22.31 million Christians. Despite their numbers, Christians remain nearly invisible in electoral discussions, overshadowed by prevailing xenophobic narratives and policies under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration.
By John Dayal
With two of seven rounds of the great Indian elections over, it is a very long wait for the results on June 4, when the world will know if an election campaign based on xenophobic hate can still sway the people of an India preparing to land a man on the moon next year.
But perhaps no one will be as anxious about the results as India’s estimated 200 million Muslims and 30 million Christians. The numbers remain an approximation, extrapolated from the 2011 census. The 2021 census was not held in the wake of the Covid pandemic. It is not known when the census will now be held.
For the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, approximately 970 million people out of a population of 1.4 billion people are eligible to cast their vote. Among them would be about 22.31 million Christian voters. This is seemingly a large number, but Christians are all but invisible in the election debate.
Both communities, however, have borne the brunt of laws and programs enforced in the ten tumultuous years of Mr Narendra Modi’s rule as prime minister. So ruthless has been his grip on every aspect of life in the country that India is now described by international human rights groups as an “elected dictatorship”.
“The Hindu is in danger”
Expectedly, Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have reverted to their political strategy of pandering to the religious right sections of the country’s billion-strong Hindu community. He has roused them with slogans that their existence is threatened by a sharp rise in the Muslim population through birth, conversion and migrations from neighboring Bangladesh.
This story was originally published in international.la-croix.com. Read the full story here.