Sex, Lies & Videotape as Mercury Soars in India's Election

Modi pulls out all the stops as turnout falls

By: Jyoti Malhotra

Revenna on the run. Photo from Mint

The battle for India is peaking just as April gives way to what promises to be an unbearably hot May, with complaints of rape and sexual harassment against a sitting member of Parliament coming close on the heels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing the opposition Congress of favoring Muslims and allocating them a disproportionate share in the nation’s resources.

Just as you thought the political scene couldn't get any more desperate or despicable, well, it just has. In the south Indian state of Karnataka, known to the world as India’s Silicon Valley because it is the center of the information technology boom, a woman who has been working in the house of the sitting MP from Hassan constituency, Prajwal Revanna, filed a complaint with the police Sunday against Revanna and accused him of raping her.

Revanna, it seems, had been video-recording his sexual exploits with her and other women and hundreds of such videos exist – according to one estimate, as many as 2976. As the complaint came to light, the Congress-led government in the state set up a commission of inquiry, but by then the politician had caught a plane to Germany. His constituency had voted only two days before.

One of the reasons this story has come front and center on the Indian political stage – apart from the fact that it is so horrific – is that Revanna’s party, Janata Dal (Secular), is allied with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and both are fighting the Congress. Moreover, Revanna’s grandfather, H D Deve Gowda, is a former prime minister. Second, the charges of sexual harassment fly in the face of Modi’s recent, repeated attempts to make women the center of his politics – from the promotion of gas cylinders to ease the chores of cooking, to reservation for women in Parliament. 

It’s a smart political tactic, not just because no one had thought of the “women’s vote” this systematically before, but also because it seems to be working.

It seems that Revanna's party has decided to finally undertake some damage control and suspend the man. Revanna’s alleged sexual exploits have been the talk of the town for months and local BJP leaders even complained about him to the senior BJP leadership, including the second most powerful man in India, Amit Shah, who belatedly sought to turn the tables, attacking the state’s Congress government over "inaction" regarding the sex abuse case. “This cannot be tolerated. BJP’s stand is clear – we stand with ‘Nari Shakti’,” he said. Local BJP leaders said that if the BJP allied with Revanna’s party, it would spell disaster and doom for the party’s reputation across South India.

The question is how the BJP will continue to manage this charge and whether it will damage its ongoing campaign to return to power for the third consecutive time. The party survived a scare last week when Modi, speaking at a rally in Rajasthan, described India’s Muslim community as “infiltrators” who also had “many more children” – the Congress party took his comments to the Election Commission, charging him with violating the model code of conduct.

It was in this speech that Modi accused the Congress of disproportionately allocating the nation’s resources to Muslims – except that Modi plucked out one sentence from former Congress prime minister Manmohan Singh’s speech delivered 18 years ago in which Dr Singh talked of India’s Muslims being among the poorest and most backward Indians. 

In any other election, this would have been a grave charge. By virtue of tarring one particular group of people – in this case, India’s 14 percent Muslim population, about 220 million people – with one low blow, Modi’s comments would have normally fallen foul of the “hate speech” red line. 

For four days, the nation watched with bated breath – would the Election Commission have the courage to censure the country’s most powerful man for his comments naming the Muslim community?

As it turned out, the Commission took the sting out of its decision by taking the middle path – it let Modi off by warning his party. It then further softened the blow by issuing a similar warning to the Congress on another poll violation charge.

Certainly, Modi’s offensive comments – “a dog whistle,” several observers called it – achieved what they had set out to do, at several levels. That’s the advantage of a dog whistle – there are no words involved, which is just as well because it absolves the speaker of any kind of criticism to do with speech. But it underlines the subliminal message both to the converted as well as to the object of the message – India is a majority Hindu country, and so the majority must rule. As for the unspoken message, it says, "and the rest of you, whether Muslim or Christian or Sikh or Parsee or Jain or animist, you must know your place."

The question is why Modi needed to make these comments in the first place. For someone who has embraced the world's leaders, from Joe Biden to Anthony Albanese, from Mohammed bin Salman to Rishi Sunak -- was this a simple slip of tongue? Or was it a message to its core Hindutva constituency, signaling that the BJP would not abandon its basic ideology, notwithstanding the boast that as the world’s fifth largest economy, it was part of the globalizing world?

One theory is that in the first two phases of the long seven-phase election, voter turnout has been significantly lower than in the last couple of elections where Modi won handsomely – and that, according to some, low turnouts are bad for sitting MPs.

The truth is that Modi remains far and away the most popular leader in India. But that is not equally true for a lot of other sitting Members of Parliament who have done such an abysmal job that a number of them have been replaced by the party.

Combined with the fact that unemployment is high and inflation even higher, people are asking whether the inflamed Hindu-Muslim tension that has been sweeping across the Hindi heartland for the last few years is worth voting for the BJP again. In any case, goes the argument, Modi is likely to be elected prime minister again, so why make the effort for a party that hasn’t fulfilled its promises?

That’s the interesting part about this election. The BJP is likely to return to power and Modi is likely to become prime minister again. As for charges of sexual harassment and rape against sitting MP Revanna, there could be some limited impact. Remember, too, that the Modi government has successfully brazened its way through sexual harassment charges by India’s female wrestlers against the head of the Wrestling Federation and he is a BJP MP.

As the mercury rises and India’s election goes through its remaining five phases, the questions about how India is changing remain. Some of the answers will be known on June 4, when the results come in – the rest will have to wait for when the new government takes over.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Founder-Editor of #AwaazSouthAsia and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel