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Modi’s BJP wants 400 seats … to change India’s secular constitution post-election?
- India’s PM denies his ruling Hindu-nationalist party wants a two-thirds parliamentary majority to strip the word ‘secular’ from the constitution
- But why else has the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies set a target of 400 seats, ask Congress’ Rahul Gandhi and the opposition INDIA bloc?
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As India’s general elections cross the halfway mark, one contentious issue is putting Narendra Modi on the defensive: opposition claims that his ruling Hindu nationalist party will change the constitution if he wins a third term as prime minister.
“This election is being held to save the country’s constitution,” Rahul Gandhi, of the main opposition Congress party, told a rally in Madhya Pradesh on May 6. “The BJP, RSS want to change it, but the Congress and the INDIA alliance are trying to save it.”
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological fountainhead, the right-wing paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, espouse a so-called Hindutva agenda in multicultural India – celebrating as political triumphs the opening of a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a razed mosque; Muslim migrants being prevented from gaining citizenship; and the revoking of the country’s only Muslim-majority region’s semi-autonomy.
But political observers say a sizeable chunk of India’s population is “completely put off by the narrative of communal polarisation” that the BJP promotes – with Congress and the 28 regional parties in its INDIA alliance hoping to tap into that discontent.
Modi’s party needs 272 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, to form a government and secured 303 at the last elections in 2019. But this time round, his BJP has set its sights on 370 seats – rising to 400 when its allies in the conservative National Democratic Alliance it leads are included.
Congress and other members of the opposition claim the BJP wants a two-thirds majority in parliament to amend the constitution, so it can remove all references to secularism from the document and officially transform India into a Hindu state. Others say the party wants to ditch affirmative action for disadvantaged groups. Modi and other BJP leaders have vehemently denied the charges.
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