Religion takes back seat in Indian
polls By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - The big surprise in this week's elections in
four Indian states in the Hindi-speaking heartland in
which 52 million people voted is the fact that religion
has played an insignificant role, compared to issues
such as power supply, drought relief and the sheer
performance of incumbent governments. And also
surprisingly, a series of highly publicized scandals
involving the government appear not to have alienated
voters.
While the results of the elections on
Monday are expected only late on Thursday, exit polls
and television news channels were picking the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) to win the large and populous states
of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The rival Congress
party was expected to win Delhi and Chhattisgarh. Going
into the polls, Congress held all four states. Congress
is favored to easily retain Delhi, a state of 14 million
people and the seat of the central government, where the
pro-Hindu BJP heads the coalition government. The
average turnout was 56.25 percent - the highest being in
Rajasthan and the lowest in Delhi, where just under 50
percent voted.
Analyzing the exit polls, the
chief editor of the Indian Express newspaper, Shekhar
Gupta, said that for the first time, the BJP was showing
evidence that it had transformed itself into a
mainstream party that can take on the monolithic
Congress party that has dominated Indian politics since
independence in 1947.
"Many of the old
stereotypes such as that the BJP is a cadre-based party
supported by traders and upper [Hindu] castes do not
apply any more," Gupta said. He added that poorer and
socially backward sections of the population were now
beginning to identify with the BJP in the same way that
they used to do to the professedly left-of-center
Congress party.
The BJP sneaked into Indian
politics by first creating a pro-Hindu wave in the early
1990s and then riding its crest to national power in
1998. Along the way, it forged alliances with regional
parties that were opposed to the Congress party, but did
not necessarily care for religion-based politics. In
fact, important constituents of the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance (the central government coalition)
have warned that they would not support the BJP's main
agenda of building a temple at the site where its cadres
demolished the 16th-century Babri mosque in 1992,
fanning widespread communal strife between Hindus and
minority Muslims.
Last year, the BJP's communal
politics reached a zenith when the party's government in
western Gujarat state engineered a pogrom in which more
than 2,000 Muslims perished and tens of thousands of
others were rendered homeless. But the BJP, led by Chief
Minister Narendra Modi, swept back to power in
provincial elections held in November. Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee has expressed revulsion at the
violence, finding it difficult to balance the secular
views of coalition partners against that of hardliners
in his own BJP party who at one point prevented him from
sacking Modi.
Vajpayee, widely regarded as a
moderate within his own party, has also expressed regret
at the demolition of the Babri mosque, an incident that
was a departure from the constitutional ideal of secular
state in which all faiths had equal status.
In
the current provincial elections, considered to be the
semifinals to general elections scheduled for October
next year, the BJP has chosen to play down its pro-Hindu
image. This has caught the Congress party by surprise
and pinned it down on issues of development and
governance. For example, in Madhya Pradesh, a sprawling
state in the heart of India with a population of 60
million people, it was the Congress party's incumbent
chief minister Digvijay Singh that was supporting
pro-Hindu issues such as a ban on cow slaughter.
On the other hand, the candidate for chief
minister, Uma Bharti, who wears the saffron clothes of a
Hindu ascetic sworn to celibacy, chose to stress acute
power shortages in Madhya Pradesh. Digvijay Singh seemed
also to suffer from his long incumbency, having served
two consecutive five-year terms as chief minister in one
of India's poorest and most backward states.
The
other state where the BJP is heading to do well, without
being propped up by religion, is the desert state of
Rajasthan, where Congress party chief minister Ashok
Gehlot has been having a rough time countering the ill
effects of successive years of droughts and scanty
rainfall. But what could undermine Gehlot's efforts is
caste politics. A major chunk of the voters from the
largely peasant Jat community, which forms 25 percent of
Rajasthan's 56 million people, have been weaned away by
promises of reservation in government jobs after being
designated a backward caste and deserving of positive
discrimination policies.
Gehlot and the Congress
party are hoping for a swing in their favor from other
genuinely backward castes and strangely enough, from the
high Brahmin (priestly) and Kshatriya (warrior) castes.
Gehlot has promised reservations for poorer individuals
from the higher castes, but it remains to be seen
whether all that social engineering will help him retain
his chief ministership or lose it to the BJP's Vasundara
Raje Scindia. The net result is a piece of irony in
which the elitist BJP has been championing the interests
of the Jats, a peasant group, and the Congress party -
despite its socialist claims, is backing reservation for
upper castes.
India's two main political
formations are thus beginning to look more and more like
each other in a process that analysts like Shekhar Gupta
say is leading to a genuine two-party system. If the BJP
captures Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states over
non-religious issues, it could provide a major fillip
for a party struggling to hold its own against the
Congress party, which has the advantage of having been
around for almost 120 years.
Many believe that
the BJP could even be emboldened to call for a snap poll
some six months ahead of schedule around March 2004 and
seize the initiative from the Congress party, which is
itching to hold the reins after being out of power since
losing a general election in 1996. At the moment, many
things are going in favor of the BJP, such as a steadily
climbing rupee, more than US$100 billion worth of
foreign exchange reserves, an exceptionally good monsoon
and unprecedented stock market rally. All of these add
up to what the economists are fond of calling a "feel
good factor".
In a party-room speech for the
start of the winter session of parliament on Wednesday,
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told BJP
lawmakers to start gearing up for the national poll, but
gave no hint of whether it would be early. Besides
Vajpayee's earlier pledge to go full term, analysts say
two other critical factors work against an early
election. The BJP is in disarray in the largest state,
Uttar Pradesh, which accounts for 80 of the federal
parliament's 545 members. And the large southern state
of Andhra Pradesh, ruled by a key BJP ally, will also go
to the polls early in the new year.
But the BJP
has been bogged down by corruption scandals and
electoral reverses in its flagship state of Uttar
Pradesh - home of the Babri mosque and where it launched
its pro-Hindu campaign more than a decade ago.
BJP embroiled in scandals For a party
that came to power in 1998 vowing to root out
corruption, the BJP has performed poorly. On Wednesday,
parliament reopened for the new session to demands from
the opposition led by the Congress party that government
account to the House for a series of highly publicized
scandals.
The House quickly adjourned, but
Vajpayee will have a tough time in the coming days
explaining why he sacked, but did not have arrested, one
of his ministers who was exposed a fortnight ago on a
video recording accepting wads of currency and promising
mining concessions to the representative of an
Australian firm in return. Dilip Singh Judeo, chief
ministerial candidate of the BJP in Monday's elections
for the mineral-rich state of Chattisgarh, did not care
to deny that he took the money. But he justified his act
by saying that even the ascetic Mahatma Gandhi accepted
money in his campaign to win independence for India from
British colonial rule.
Judeo's defiance tells a
story of the virtual impunity enjoyed by politicians and
bureaucrats in corruption cases, especially when its
suits the interests of the government of the day. Sunil
Sondhi, who teaches political science at the University
of Delhi, says that major factors in the growth of
corruption are the casual and clumsy way in which cases
are handled and the unwillingness of those vested with
disciplinary powers to use them. "Government officials
entrusted with the responsibility of dealing with
corruption do it in a most inefficient and lethargic
manner and this suits the political leadership which
patronizes corruption," said Sondhi. According to
Sondhi, corruption, including bribery and nepotism, has
now found acceptance in the social psyche and behavior.
People who have acquired wealth through unfair means are
accorded a high status in society.
Ministers and
top bureaucrats think nothing of milking large public
sector undertakings to make money for themselves or to
stuff them with their own relatives, critics say. Apart
from the Judeo episode, Vajpayee is under pressure from
the opposition to lay bare the truth in allegations that
several of his ministers had been systematically
exploiting the financial and other resources of
government-owned corporations. "The prime minister will
have to tell the nation whether the ministers were
involved in milking public sector undertakings,"
thundered Somnath Chatterjee, one of India's
longest-serving parliamentarians, soon after the house
adjourned without conducting business on Wednesday.
"Corruption has engulfed this government - there
is a new scam every day and as usual the government is
making selective arrests and allowing political
functionaries to get away scot-free," said Chatterjee, a
lawyer and leader of the Communist Party of India -
Marxist (CPI-M). Chatterjee was referring to
discrimination shown in the arrest Tuesday of Ranjit
Singh Sharma, a day after he retired as police
commissioner of the western port city of Mumbai for his
alleged involvement in a racket to print and distribute
legal stamp paper estimated to have cost the exchequer
at least $750 million. Sharma was only one of several
high-ranking police officers arrested in the scam.
Typically, despite the seriousness of the issue
it is turning into an opportunity to score political
points between the Congress party-ruled state government
in western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is
capital, and the BJP-ruled central government. While the
state government of Maharashtra has asked its own
Special Investigating Team (SIT) to look into the stamp
paper case, the central government has been demanding
that it be handed over to the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI).
It has been left to the
Supreme Court to settle the jurisdiction issue. But the
anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, who was
instrumental in getting the Bombay (older name for
Mumbai) High Court to order the Maharashtra SIT to crack
down on the racket, has argued that handing over the
case to the CBI would only result in the dilution of the
case.
But Chatterjee pointed out that while
police officers are being arrested, their political
masters have remained unscathed by a racket that could
not have run for years without their patronage. Sondhi
blames the lack of commitment on the part of the
political leaderships of the states and central levels
for the failure to tackle corruption effectively. "It is
more than clear that all these institutional
arrangements to combat corruption can be useful only if
correctives come from the political class which is the
final legislative and executive authority in a
parliamentary democracy," he said. "Unless politicians
are made to differentiate private conscience from public
morality and personal profit form national interest the
ongoing unrestrained plunder of the exchequer cannot be
stopped," he added.
Curiously enough, some of
the scams that have taken place under BJP rule are
replicas of those that had taken place under previous
Congress party governments. Thus a stock market scam two
years ago in which millions of investors were cheated
out of their small savings by a stock market broker who
maintained links with the BJP closely resembled another
one in size and scope, where the key figure was someone
who enjoyed the confidence of top Congress party
politicians in the early 1990s.
One of the
features of corruption in India is that the very
agencies that are tasked with controlling corruption and
the growth of a huge parallel economy have long ago been
compromised, critics add. According to N Vittal, former
chief vigilance commissioner, the poor state of India's
economy is a "standing monument" to the corruption and
inefficiency of four departments - customs, central
excise, income tax and enforcement.
(Asia Times
Online/Inter Press Service)
Dec 5, 2003
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