NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian government minister said Friday that she’s confident her Bharatiya Janata Party will remain in power when general elections conclude this month, and that minorities in Hindu-majority India have nothing to fear from five more years of the Hindu nationalist ideology the party espouses.
“Our assessment is we are coming back and we are coming back with a good majority,” Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told foreign reporters in New Delhi ahead of Sunday’s sixth phase of polling in the six-week election.
While the BJP campaigned in 2014 on promises to supercharge the economy, the tenor of its re-election campaign changed after a February suicide bombing in restive Kashmir, helping the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi turn the focus away from its uneven economic record and toward the stability it offered to confront terrorism.
In the weeks before the attack, the Modi government was under scrutiny for suppressing official data showing joblessness at a 45-year high and for a policy intended to curb illicit cash that ended up hurting the poor.
But Modi and the BJP seemed to gain the upper hand after a self-described Kashmiri member of the Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed detonated a bomb in the middle of an Indian military convoy in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing 40 soldiers.
India retaliated with a “surgical” strike on an alleged militant training camp in the town of Balakot in Pakistan, the results of which remain unclear. The government has declined to say how many people were killed in the strike, saying only that it hit its targets. Pakistan suggested that the airstrike hit only trees.
Still, Modi and the BJP have used the strike to energize supporters at campaign events across India, accusing the opposition Congress party, which governed India for about a half a century after the nation won independence from British rule in 1947, of being soft on Pakistan, soft on terror, pandering to Muslims for votes and pampering Kashmiri separatists.
“From the public you get tiny pieces of paper: Will there be another surgical strike? Talk about that. Will there be another Balakot? Talk about that,” said Sitharaman, who has participated in some of the campaign events. “The moment we start talking about it, you see the response,” she said.
In defending a Modi government-backed bill that would make it easier to strip citizenship from some immigrants who entered the country illegally decades ago while granting citizenship to “persecuted” non-Muslim religious minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, BJP President Amit Shah said “infiltrators” from outside India threatened the country’s national security, likening them to “termites.”
Of such comments, Sitharaman said only, “I wish you could hear it in Hindi,” implying, incorrectly, that the words were less insulting in the Hindi language.
She rejected the notion that Muslims were unwelcome in the BJP’s Hindu nationalist vision of India.
“Any kind of speculation on ‘oh, minorities are in trouble’ is absolutely baseless,” she said.
India’s marathon election reaches next-to-last phase
Indians voted Sunday in the next-to-last round of a six-week-long national election marked by a highly acrimonious campaign that has seen Prime Minister Narendra Modi blame opposition Congress party leader’s family for the country’s ills, ruled more than 50 years in the past.
Sunday’s voting in 59 constituencies, including seven in New Delhi, the capital, completed polling for 483 of 543 seats in the powerful lower house of Parliament. The voting for the remaining 60 seats will be held on May 19, and vote counting begins four days later. India has 900 million eligible voters.
Turnout in the sixth phase of voting on Sunday was 63.3%, according to the Election Commission. There was a drop in people coming out to vote on a hot day, with the temperature soaring to 39 degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit) in northern India. The turnout in the first five phases averaged 67%, nearly the same as in 2014 elections that brought Modi to power.
India’s national elections are underway with the last day of voting set for May 19. Results are expected four days later.
Modi has used the airstrike as a major election issue to project strength in dealing with longtime nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.
Clashes during election rally in east India injure several
Rival political supporters on Tuesday clashed with rocks and sticks during an election rally by the Hindu nationalist party in eastern India, leaving several people injured and a university college vandalized.
Police say they used sticks to disperse the rivals as West Bengal state prepared for the seventh and final round of voting for 543 parliamentary seats in India’s national elections on Sunday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP is seeking re-election in the voting held in phases. The counting is scheduled to begin May 23.
On Tuesday, top BJP leaders Nirmala Sitharaman and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi met Election Commission officials in New Delhi and demanded strict security arrangements to prevent violence in the state. They blamed rival Trinamool Congress party workers for violence.
Naqvi accused MS Banerjee, the top elected official of the state, with provoking her Trinamool Congress party workers to attack the BJP supporters. Banerjee denied the accusation.
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