Contemporary populism in India : assessing the Bharatiya Janata party’s ideological features

Abstract

This paper analyses the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with the aim of characterizing populism in contemporary India. In fact, while the great majority of the research on the topic has pointed its attention towards either the US and Europe or South America, very little work has been done on other regions, and most of it has focused on populist leaders, rather than populist parties. Understanding populism as an ideology whose core principles are people-centrism and anti-elitism, this study conducts a qualitative content analysis of the BJP’s electoral manifestos, and integrates the main findings with interviews conducted with 13 party officials. I assess firstly whether the party can be labelled as populist, and secondly its position alongside the left-right political spectrum, by looking at six distinctive features drawn from the literature on right-wing and left-wing populism: “the people”, “the elites”, “the others”, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, and internationalism. Party literature and interviews show that the BJP is a populist party which combines elements from both ideologies; however, the way it conceptualizes “the people”, “the elites” and “the others” is clearly nativist, and in the interviews its right-wing positions emerge even more visibly. I conclude that the scholarship should address more cases from the Asian or African continents, to assess whether a sort of “southern” populism is emerging in the Global South which adopts nativist stances, while remaining attached to its post-colonial ideological roots. Moreover, the paper highlights an overlooked type of internationalism that the BJP professes, that towards the Indian diaspora.