The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) religious extremism against minorities, predominantly the Muslim minority, has exceeded all previous recorded historical records in India.

Hindu religious extremism is propagated or acted upon by the BJP's racist workers. Still, it is potentially being spread by the people in power as a mechanism of control and for consolidating larger economic interests of the elite. This has raised serious questions.

One can ask: what happened to a secular society and how has it become enmeshed in religious extremism?

Who is this religious extremism serving: the BJP or ordinary Indians or the Indian elite or powerful geopolitical interests?

What happened to land the largest democracy in the world into the hell of religious extremism?

Why could more than 73 years of democratic rule not eradicate religious extremism and integrate and unite India's people?

Does religious extremism have roots in the historical caste system of India? Is it a reaction to the prolonged Muslim rule of India?

All these questions are essential; however, let us try to answer a couple of them and leave the rest for readers to decide.

There is no doubt that India has an extraordinarily strong historical caste system.

However, the question remains how and why now, 73 years after independence, has the Muslim minority become the main target of religious extremism? What has changed over the period that brought in religious extremism?

Does it relate to the deteriorating economic and social conditions of ordinary Indians? Does it relate to the neoliberal New Economic Policy (NEP) of the Indian government, which was implemented in 1991?

Most analysts and critics are trying to find answers to the emergence of religious extremism in history, for example, in the Hindu caste system, historic Muslim rule, et cetera.

Instead of this mainstream narrative, let us try to look at the disguised main question: are neoliberal policies behind the rise of religious extremism in India?

It is also essential to discuss the question: who is this religious extremism serving? The BJP or common Indian or the Indian elite or the geopolitical interests of the world powers or a joint venture of the Indian elite and world powers?

In the following, we will try to understand how the current form of religious extremism in India is related to neoliberal policies. And how the tool of religion could be used to disguise the real culprit: neoliberal policy.

Chancel and Piketty conducted important research

Before we proceed further, it is crucial to understand that when the Indian market was not fully open to neoliberal policies, the ordinary Indian's social and economic position was better than the current socioeconomic conditions in general.

In this regard, it's worth mentioning pertinent research conducted in 2019 by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty.

In "Indian Income Inequality, 1922-2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?", they mentioned that “there is a marked decrease in inequality in the early forties ii) an even stronger reduction in top income shares in the 1950-70s and iii) a significant increase from the mid-eighties onwards. Current income inequality in India is higher than during pre-independence period."

“In India, strong government control along with an explicit goal to limit the power of the elite seems to have played a key role in reducing top income inequality after independence in 1947," they wrote. "The set of 'socialist' policies implemented up to the 1970s included nationalizations, strong market regulation and high tax progressivity. Railways were nationalized in 1951, air transport in 1953, banking in 1955, oil industry in 1974 and 1976 to cite but a few.

"Along with the transfer of private to public wealth and reduction of capital incomes they implied, nationalizations came along with government setting over pay scales," Chancel and Piketty continued. "In the private sector, incomes were constrained by extremely high tax rates: between 1965 and 1973, top marginal tax rates rose from 27% to 97.5%. Such evolutions may have reduced rent-seeking behavior at the top of the distribution via a process of discouragement, which in presence of excessive bargaining power and rent-seeking is the efficient thing to do (Piketty, Saez, Stantcheva, 2014).”

Further, they pointed out: “From the early 1980s onwards, the Indian economy underwent reverse transformations. The turnaround of income inequality seems consistent with the implementation of a new economic policy agenda to disengage the public sector and to encourage entrepreneurship as well as foreign investments. The start of the process has been associated with the nomination of Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister in 1984.”

In the following section, I will summarize how neoliberal policies have caused massive inequality in Indian society, and thus became the root cause of religious extremism.

In this regard, a research-based essay titled "Please Mind the Gap: Winners and Losers of Neoliberalism in India" by Angela Martin has great relevance.

According to her, "India’s 7% GDP annual growth has been noted to be the best indicator of its prosperity (Makeinindia.com, 2016), as claimed by supporters of globalization that the integration into the global market has been greatly beneficial in reducing poverty in the country (Girdner and Siddiqui, 2008).

"However, India has also been reported to be one of the states with the highest income inequality in the world, as well as persisting poverty for the majority of its population (World Bank, 2009), trends that have been associated by many with the implementation of the neoliberal New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1991. This, alongside other neoliberal experiences, has exacerbated the debate on neoliberalism and its effects on development and its link with inequality, particularly in developing countries.

"Whereas advocates have argued that neoliberal policies are the best way of increasing everyone’s well-being, many critics have highlighted how these scholars have failed to see that neoliberalism, being a class project, only benefits elites."

She argues that “neoliberalism creates more losers than winners as it impoverishes the less well-off, the majority, and enriches the business elites, the minority".

I will also argue that these elites are the thinkers and promoters of the entire neoliberal project, with the sole intention of increasing their economic and social power.  

In the early decades after independence, the Indian elite relied on the Congress Party to market a bourgeois secular society.

At that point, Tata-Birla's [two industrialists] plan to develop state-monopoly capitalism was dressed up and presented by the Congress Party to build the Indian bourgeoisie and propagated as inclusive.

It is the same elite that today relies on the BJP as the most suitable vehicle for pursuing its interests. 

Elite pursues export-driven capitalist growth

For the first three decades after gaining political independence, the ruling classes in India followed a policy of protecting the home market from the foreign capitalist competition by charging high import duties and restricting foreign investment to a few selected market areas.   

During those times, the world was divided between the socialist and capitalist camps. The Indian government developed economic and cultural relations with both the camps. India was successful in bargaining with both the camps to get the best deal for itself.   

With the advent of the neoliberal era, which started in the late '70s and early '80s, the Indian elite recognized that to grow into a global power, they needed to capture foreign markets and open Indian markets to foreign investments. To fulfill that goal, a former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, issued the call for modernization and Indian globalization.  

Since 1991 after implementing the neoliberal New Economic Policy (NEP), successive governments in New Delhi are following up on the neoliberal agenda. India has liberalized trade and the big capitalists expanded their markets and spheres of influence abroad, even as Indian markets have been opened for foreign capitalists to penetrate.    

As a result of neoliberal policies, the Indian elite has emerged as significant capital exporters in recent period. They have invested their capital in numerous countries in Asia and Europe.

The elite is desperately looking for ways to boost its profits and expand its wealth rapidly. It plans to aggressively capture foreign markets by strengthening the Indo-U.S. alliance.   

Economic Survey of 2018-19, prepared by the Indian Ministry of Finance, reflects the Indian elite's strategic thinking. It emphasizes that the only way to achieve the target of a US$5-trillion economy in five years (Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan) is through rapid export-driven capitalist growth.

It argues that this can be accomplished by inviting foreign capital to produce all kinds of commodities for the world market. India replaces China as the preferred source of supply of manufactured consumer products sold in the U.S. market.   

An economy based on exports will only impoverish the Indian masses further though it will enrich and create some more Indian billionaires in joint ventures with foreign capital. After having used China, foreign capital is now eyeing the cheap labor and cheap land of India while the Indian bourgeoisie is ready to sell their people into enslavement, cheaply.

Indian peasants are being pauperized and forced to leave their land and come to urban metropolises where they will feed the foreign capitalist machine and multiply consumption.   

The deteriorating socioeconomic conditions will eventually force ordinary Indians to question who is responsible for their plight? To disguise the real culprit, the elite has brought in the tool of religion and created a new enemy.

This heinous policy of the Indian elite has divided the relatively homogeneous and tolerant Indian society into communal factions fighting each other.