Indian voters leave Vajpayee
hanging By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - Nearly half of the 670 million-strong Indian
electorate has cast its vote in the first two phases of
the four-phase gigantic democratic exercise that is
India's general elections. Several private television
channels and newspapers are predicting possible results
on the basis of exit polls and other surveys conducted
since the first votes were cast on April 20. These
predictions are so varied and confusing that one
newspaper, the Asian Age, is warning its readers just
below its masthead: Exit Polls may be injurious to your
health.
Some trends are nevertheless discernible
in this welter of confusion. Unless all the polls are
wildly wrong, the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is
not going to acquire a comfortable majority, as was
being predicted earlier. It may still scrape through
with a wafer-thin majority, or more likely will remain
just short of a simple majority - around 260 in a 542
strong lower house of parliament, requiring 272 seats to
cross the halfway mark. Thus the BJP's campaign for a
two-thirds majority so that 80-year-old statesman
Vajpayee may be able to rule a "Shining India"
comfortably in a "Feel-Good" atmosphere in his twilight
years essentially will not happen unless there is a
dramatic turnaround in voting trends.
Yet, even
if the coalition falls short of a majority, Vajpayee is
most likely to form a government with the help of some
smaller parties beyond his present 22-party coalition.
He has already started the exercise by saying that his
party has no ideological differences with the Samajwadi
Party of Backward Hindus in Uttar Pradesh (UP) led by
Mulayam Singh Yadav, though they have been sworn enemies
so far. Ambitious Yadav, a former defense minister and
now the chief minister of UP, may, however, demand the
post of the prime minister for any post-poll compromise,
either with the BJP or with the main opposition
Congress. He has plans to install his son as the chief
minister of UP and move back to the center in New Delhi,
if possible as premier. He is also considering former
prime minister Chandra Shekhar, who is contesting from
UP with his support, as a compromise candidate for prime
ministership in a secular alliance with Congress and
left parties. In any case, Yadav will not accept
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi as prime minister, thus
ruling out her chances. But for his opposition, she
would have become prime minister in 1999 after the fall
of Vajpayee government.
Vajpayee's personal
appeal to the electorate to give his party alone a
comfortable majority so that he doesn't have to grapple
again with the headaches of running a 22-party coalition
has clearly failed to cut much ice with the electorate.
It has only made his coalition partners jittery and
suspicious of his leadership, making his task in the
next government even more difficult.
So what has
gone wrong with the high-voltage BJP campaign to gain a
two-thirds majority so that it would have the same
powers to amend the constitution that previous Congress
governments led by Rajiv Gandhi, his mother Indira
Gandhi and her father Jawaharlal Nehru had? Regardless
of what else happens, one thing has already become
certain: BJP dreams of turning secular India into a
Hindu rashtra (nation) have been put on hold. The
first thing the BJP-led government did after its victory
in the last elections five years ago was to set up a
constitutional reform committee to look into the
possibility.
The "India Shining" campaign - born
of the country's sterling economic growth - has not been
enough to galvanize broad swathes of voters because the
fruits of the prosperity have not yet reached them. In a
country where reports of starvation, farmers' suicides,
children being sold for as little as a few cents and
widespread malnutrition keep coming in routinely from
across the country, the campaign meant nothing for much
of the billion-plus population.
Well-known
novelist and social activist Arundhati Roy pointed out
in a recent lecture at Aligarh Muslim University: "Forty
seven percent of India's children below three suffer
from malnutrition, 46 percent are stunted. Yet the
government allowed 63 million tons of grain to rot in
its granaries. Twelve million tons were exported and
sold at a subsidized price the Indian government was not
willing to offer the Indian poor. [Agricultural
economist] Utsa Patnaik's study reveals that about 40
percent of the rural population in India has the same
foodgrain absorption level as sub-Saharan Africa. Today,
an average rural family eats about 100 kilograms less
food in a year than it did in the early 1990s. The last
five years have seen the most violent increase in
rural-urban income inequalities since independence [in
1947]."
Sari scandal The Election
Commission (EC), the powerful statutory body that
manages elections, was swift and categorical in
indicting both the BJP and its senior Uttar Pradesh
leader Lalji Tandon, the election agent for Vajpayee, in
what has become known as the "sari scandal" in which at
least 22 women were killed in a stampede to get free
saris. Though it happened at a function to celebrate the
BJP leader's birthday, according to the commission, the
function in Lucknow was not a private bash but a BJP
show: "The event was sponsored, managed and organized by
BJP workers with the view to inducing an atmosphere of
advantage and raise the electoral prospects of the BJP."
One doesn't know at this point what the eventual
fallout of the EC's decision will be. Should the vote in
the constituency be declared void, Vajpayee may either
shift to another constituency or may not be a member of
the next parliament, though he could remain prime
minister for six months, during which time he would have
to get elected to either house of parliament to be able
to continue.
But perhaps more important than
Vajpayee's personal plight, the sari scandal exposed the
problems of many Indians: if thousands of women
residents of the prime minister's constituency in the
heart of India could die in a stampede for a sari
costing less than a dollar, then surely India couldn't
be shining for large numbers of people.
Gujarat revisited Another
constitutional body, the Supreme (highest) court in
India also helped spoil the BJP's party. The BJP had
managed to keep Gujarat (meaning sectarian clashes in
which many scores of Muslims died on the eve of state
assembly elections two years ago) off the headlines for
several months in the runup to general elections. But
the Supreme Court gave a judgment right in the middle of
the election campaign that brought the focus back on
Gujarat.
In a severe indictment of the BJP state
government headed by Narendra Modi in Gujarat, the
Supreme Court ordered a fresh investigation and re-trial
in the infamous Best Bakery case, in which all the 21
accused were acquitted by the High Court. Criticizing
the state government for its tardy investigation
resulting in miscarriage of justice to the victims, the
court also ordered the shifting of the case - in which
14 persons were burnt alive - for trial in Maharashtra,
thus expressing total lack of confidence in the secular
credentials of not only the BJP government, but also the
entire administration and the judiciary of Gujarat.
Justice Doraiswamy Raju and Justice Arijit Pasayat
described the acquittal of the 21 accused as nothing but
a travesty of truth and a fraud on the legal process and
said the resultant decisions of the lower courts called
for interference. "It is no acquittal in the eye of the
law and no sanctity or credibility can be attached and
given to the so-called findings," it said.
Gujarat was back in the headlines and television
chat shows as the stinging remarks of this judgment
describing Hindu fundamentalists as "worse than
terrorists" and BJP leaders as "modern-day Neros".
Ironically, though, the BJP could yet be bailed out by
the Muslim vote after the reverses of the first two
phases of the elections. The final results will be known
on May 13 after the fourth and last phase of elections
on May 10.
"Unabashedly", as a newspaper
commented, Vajpayee is going all-out in seeking Muslim
support. "I need your support not because of elections
but because I have been striving for years to ensure
that Hindus and Muslims in the country live together,
foster brotherhood, help each other and make each other
secure so that together they could take the country
forward," Vajpayee told a group of Muslims last week.
He has offered 20 million jobs to Muslims after
the elections, though his party's advertisements in Urdu
newspapers promises only 200,000 jobs. This has prompted
a lot of discontent among Hindu 4/26/2004, whose main
complaint against the Congress used to be against
"Muslim appeasement" for making similar promises which,
of course, were never honored.
The Muslim vote
varies between 10 percent and 25 percent in most
constituencies, and in keen electoral contests even a
few percent of these votes cast in favor of BJP could
make a difference between victory and defeat.
Vajpayee has personally obtained Muslim votes in
his constituency. Many Muslims consider him be different
from the rest of the BJP. He is certainly amiable and
makes secular noises, though he is careful to contradict
himself and make hardline sectarian statements to keep
the Hindu fundamentalists on side. There is a
decades-old debate about what the real Vajpayee is like.
Nevertheless, "The Great Scramble for Muslim Votes",
as The Times of India's front-page headline proclaimed,
has begun.
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