The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India's general elections last year was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably: they read the fact that the BJP lost a solid 3.4 percent of its previous poll share as evidence that Indian voters had rejected the majoritarian politics of Hindu pride and prejudice, peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. The general consensus is that the ideology of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has lost its appeal among the urban youth and middle classes – that secularism has won and "God has left politics," to borrow the elegant title of a recent essay by Delhi journalist Hartosh Singh Bal. Market reforms and globalisation emerge as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP agree that it is the fervour for making money in India's roaring economy that doused the flames of Hindu nationalism from the hearts of the middle classes. But that is not all. The 'free' market, we are told by a section of influential Dalit intellectuals, will not only free India from the menace of communal violence, but will also lift the curse of caste oppression. It is fair to say that the gospel of globalisation is gaining ground in India.
The story about how the markets defeated the BJP goes as follows. Hindutva appealed to the middle classes and youth back in the bad-old-days of the 1980s and 1990s, when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and 'pseudo-secularism', which, in their view, gave undue preference to Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early 1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the 21st century as India's Century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism, about which the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping? This story has found great favour among the self-proclaimed Friends of the BJP, who want the party to drop Hindutva altogether, or at least to make it sound less communal, and emerge as a 'normal' pro-market, pro-defence, anti-'minority-appeasement', right-of-centre party.
A similar story is being told from the opposite end of the political spectrum, made up of Dalit intellectuals, most of whom are no friends of the BJP. Influential members of this circle, notably the journalist-activist Chandra Bhan Prasad and the economist and Planning Commission member Narendra Jadhav, have claimed that economic liberalisation, fostered by globalisation, is improving the living standards of Dalits, liberating them from the caste norms that consigned them to degrading work for generations. They derive their evidence exclusively from two districts of Uttar Pradesh that have access to labour markets for semi-skilled work in Delhi, Lucknow and other cities, while ignoring significant evidence that the incorporation of Dalits in the unorganised sector is taking place only on extremely exploitative terms, without any legal protection to speak of. Yet such thinkers remain convinced of the powers of the market, and are pushing to bring affirmative-action policies into the private sector, which they say will open the doors for Dalits to enter the modern, hi-tech economy. The markets' blow against caste norms in employment is naturally seen as a victory for secularism, because by destroying the material conditions of caste hierarchy the markets are seen as loosening the hold of Brahminical justifications for caste. Thus, at least some friends of Dalits, like the friends of the BJP, have come to embrace the gospel of globalised markets in the name of upward mobility for Dalits.
India is not the only country where markets are supposed to be exorcising the demons of religiously inspired fanaticism, patriarchy and other sources of oppression. Parts of the Islamic world – Dubai, Turkey, Malaysia, and even Egypt and Iran – are cited to support the proposition that "global capitalism is the single best hope for combating Islamic extremism," as the American-Iranian author Vali Nasar put it in his new book, The Forces of Fortune. Nasr and others refer warmly to Turkey, where the deeply pious and deeply capitalist-minded middle-class entrepreneurs from small towns have been able to moderate the Islamist instincts of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In a reversal of the idea that 'McWorld' breeds jihad, as put forth by the US journalist Benjamin Barber in his well-known 1995 book Jihad vs McWorld, the charms of 'McWorld' are now being hailed for aborting jihad by seducing the actual and potential jihadis into shopping malls.