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India in the mood for
elections
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - With Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee recommending to the president that the 13th
Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) be dissolved
this Friday, the scene is set for general elections
almost nine months before schedule. The final decision
for the timing of the election rests with the Election
Commission, most likely some time in mid-April.
An early election has been in the cards since
the ruling Bharatiaya Janata Party (BJP) that leads a
coalition of 24 parties in the central government won
largely unexpected victories in three out of four state
elections in northern India a couple of months ago in
straight contests with the largest opposition party,
Congress, which ruled the country for the first 45 years
after independence in 1947. Vajpayee's is the first
non-Congress government to have completed five years in
power.
Vajpayee has declared that he expects the
elections to be a tough fight, but he is confident that
his party will win. Other BJP leaders are setting a more
optimistic goal for the party and the coalition. They
expect the party to acquire a simple majority on its
own, and a two-thirds majority for the ruling coalition
called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
The high expectations of the BJP rest largely on two
factors: the rising stature of the octogenarian prime
minister as an elder statesman; and a feel-good
factor generated by the good monsoon rains and the boom
in the economy over the past few months after four
indifferent years, as well as the prospects of peace
with Pakistan resulting in relative peace in the Kashmir
Valley. The BJP is feeling so good that it has discarded
its stock-in-trade greeting of Jai Shri Ram
(Victory to Lord Ram) and adopted "Feel Good" as the
official greeting. When BJP workers meet or send
telephone messages to each other or to members of the
public, the rallying cry is "Feel Good", "Feel Great" or
"India is on the move". But the hurry to cash in on
feel-good factors obviously means that the party does
not expect to continue to feel good for more than a few
months.
Indeed,
the BJP's assessment cannot be faulted. The mere
appearance of Italian-born Congress leader Sonia
Gandhi's siblings, Priyanka and Rahul, has so rattled
the ruling party that it has now started demanding that
top posts in the government be banned for even those who
do not have both their parents born in India (see Dynastic succession dogs democracy
.) One can't help but speculate that if the BJP's
most experienced leader and a statesman of international
stature, 80-year-old Vajpayee, cannot stand against the
charisma of the completely inexperienced Sonia siblings
in their early 30s, then the BJP indeed has reasons
to hold elections as early as possible lest these new
entrants learn to speak in public with some effect.
The same is true of the feel-good factors. The
economy may not perform as well in the next quarter.
Even as it is, many people doubt that the good
performance is anything more than statistical jugglery
and media hype. After all, farmers have continued to
commit suicide, not to speak of the privations of the
one-third of the population that lives on less than a US
dollar a day. Also, the experience of most democracies
is that while indifferent economic performance always
loses elections, good economic performances seldom win
elections.
And now
the government is beginning to get bad news that it does not want to
hear in the run-up to the elections. In its "Report
on Currency and Finance" for 2002-03, the Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) has sounded alarm bells over the shabby state
of the country's finances. Comments the largest-circulated
newspaper The Times of India, a consistent supporter of
the government: "This is doubly significant. First,
because it knocks the bottom out of Finance Minister
Jaswant Singh's recent reassurances on the fiscal front,
including the claim that the final numbers for the
current year will come as a pleasant 'surprise' to many.
The RBI, to put it mildly, does not endorse the FM's
optimism. If anything, it believes that our fiscal
health, judging at least by the symptoms in the first
eight months of the current year, is becoming
progressively worse. But second, and more importantly,
the central bank has warned that the real fiscal problem
facing the country is no longer one of magnitude or
quantity alone, but of composition and quality. In
simple terms, the RBI is worried not so much about the
government living beyond its means as by the fact that
it is increasingly spending money on the wrong kind of
things: staff salaries, subsidies, interest payments and
the like.
"This kind of spending neither adds to
the productive capacity of the economy nor creates
assets which will yield economic returns in the future.
All it does is to create an even bigger hole in the
government's pocket, leaving less and less money for
current as well as future productive investment.
Referred to as revenue deficit in financial jargon, it
now accounts for 81.9 percent of the government's gross
fiscal deficit, a figure which is higher even than the
projected budgetary estimate of 73.1 percent. The extent
of the problem can be gauged by a simple comparison. As
late as a decade ago, the government's revenue deficit
was only a third of its total fiscal deficit. The
implications are obvious. In the immediate analysis, the
shortfall raises questions about the economic rationale
behind some of the recent pre-poll sops announced by the
FM. Over the medium term, it poses a hugely difficult
challenge. Not only because revenue deficit, once
allowed to escalate, is the most difficult form of
deficit to contain - the government can neither cut down
on staff salaries nor renege on interest payments - but
also because it pushes up the cost of borrowing, or
interest rates. This inevitably hurts the productive
sectors of the economy both in terms of profits and
competitiveness."
Similarly transitory may
prove to be the good feeling generated by the ceasefire on
the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, prospects of
peace with Pakistan, reduced militancy in the Valley
and ongoing talks with separatist leaders. Indeed, one
has no way of knowing whether Pakistan has actually
learned any lessons from sponsoring militancy in Kashmir for
the past 13 years. If it has come to the negotiating
table thinking it can win here what it failed to win on
the battlefield during its long proxy war, then
obviously the talks are bound to fail. India doesn't
really have much of anything to offer to Pakistan except
some cosmetic face-saving devices.
If Vajpayee's
early optimism is any guide, though, he is going to make
a great play on his role as a peacemaker and ask the
electorate to re-elect his party in order to allow him
to finish the peace process he has started with
Pakistan. He could obviously not have been able to do so
if nine months from now the peace process had already
foundered. He can also legitimately claim to have
improved India's relations with the United States,
China, Israel, Iran, the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) and a number of Central Asian and Muslim
countries.
There can be no doubt that Vajpayee
has gained enormously in stature as well as
acceptability among the so-called secular parties that
constitute the bulk of the NDA. He even went to Gujarat
recently and apologized for the massacres and rapes of
Muslims orchestrated by his party's government there a
couple of years ago. But a politician in power is known
by what he does, not by what he says. He is the one BJP
politician who used to get even Muslim votes on account
of his carefully cultivated image of being different
from his colleagues in the party and the extended family
of Hindu fundamentalists called the Sangh Parivar. But
it is doubtful now, post-Gujarat and his flip-flop and
lack of action on the issue, whether Muslims will vote for
him, not to speak of his party.
The BJP has thus
given the Congress a gift of 15 percent of the votes
across the country wherever there is a straight contest
between the two. Before Gujarat, Muslims were
disenchanted with the Congress and were becoming more or
less neutral in their choice between the two, realizing
that the only difference was that Congress was
hypocritical in its profession of secularism, while the
BJP was honest in its profession of communalism and
Hindutva (Hindu supremacist philosophy). Many were
coming around to the view that it is best to start a
dialogue with the party in relation to which they knew
where they stood, rather than continuing to trust a
party that took them for granted just because it claimed
to be secular.
Vajpayee knows that the
feel-good factor is limited to the urban middle class, many
of whom are potential BJP voters. He has tried to
enhance this support through giving them a number of sops in
the past few weeks. But the electorate has enough
experience of politicians and their pre-poll sops to ask where
the billions of dollars promised to all sectors of
economy will come from. It also knows that these poll-eve
promises will be repeated ad nauseam during the
elections, but forgotten the moment polls are over.
In any case, few urban middle-class people
actually go out to vote, unless they desperately want to
get rid of a government. The rural voters still
celebrate democracy and the humbling of the neta
(leader) at election time, but they largely vote on
the basis of their caste affiliation. So caste
manipulation that one now-disgraced BJP leader used to describe
as social engineering has once again come to the fore.
The idea was first to align with the Dalits
(untouchables), and by propping up the Dalit-based Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh (UP), appear to
be their champion and get their substantial votes
(25 percent) across the country. So the BJP's tried
and tested leader in UP, Kalyan Singh, a Backward-caste
leader who had spent his entire life with the Sangh
Parivar, was given the boot. (Backwards and Dalits do
not see eye to eye with each other and can hardly
co-exist.) But as this formula did not work and the
alliance with the BSP broke down, Singh, who had meanwhile
become a sworn enemy of the BJP and had even been
certified as secular by the secularist camp, is being wooed
back. He will no doubt win back his certificate as
Hindu fundamentalist, which he probably is - the
medieval Babri mosque was demolished by Hindu zealots while
he was the BJP's chief minister of UP.
Pursuing
this policy, the BJP has made another Backward leader,
Uma Bharti, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
(Backwards constitute the majority of Hindus.) In large
parts of India, however, Backwards, like the Dalits, are
busy developing their own leadership and not willing to
work, except on a short-term basis, under a Hindu
supremacist leadership, whether that of Congress or BJP.
Already two of the largest states, Uttar Pradesh and
Bihar, are run by Backward chief ministers.
With
the opposition divided and largely leaderless, it should
not be difficult for the BJP-led coalition to retain
power, as a recent India Today poll has predicted.
But elections have a way of proving even the best-laid plans
and most credible predictions wrong. Already, the mere
acquisition of primary membership of the Congress party
by the Sonia siblings has upset the BJP to an extent
that its top leadership seems divided on how to respond.
In reality, the Vajpayee government has been a
failure on most counts of good governance, except
perhaps in managing foreign relations. If it wins,
however, as seems likely, it will be because the
opposition failed to project these failures adequately
and inspire confidence in an alternative leadership.
Indian voters are not known to bring down governments
without being sure of the availability of a credible
alternative leadership.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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