India: Economic reforms play out in the
polls By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - An electoral rout of the regional party that
leads India's showpiece for economic reforms - the
southern state of Andhra Pradesh - threatens to drag
down with it Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's
right-wing coalition in the just-concluded national
elections.
The chief minister of Andhra Pradesh,
Chandrababu Naidu, resigned on Tuesday after his Telugu
Desam Party (TDP) suffered a shock defeat at the hands
of the Congress party in provincial polls held in the
state alongside the four-phase parliamentary elections,
which ended on Monday.
The TDP currently holds
36 seats in the lawmaking Lok Sabha - or lower house of
parliament. It is not expected to fare any better when
the national-level ballots are counted on Thursday.
According to election analysts, the utter defeat
of the TDP would make it that much more difficult for
Vajpayee's right-wing and pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) to cobble together a viable multi-party
alliance that could take on whatever alliance its arch
rival for national power, the Congress party, can
muster.
Exit polls and analyses were already
giving the BJP and the Congress party even chances of
forming the next central government when the shock
defeat of the TDP in Andhra Pradesh became known.
The TDP and its allies could muster just 48
seats in the 294-seat Andhra Pradesh state assembly,
against the 229 seats captured by the Congress party and
its partners.
Other states where elections were
held simultaneously included Karnataka and Orissa, which
are adjacent to Andhra Pradesh, and also northeastern
Sikkim.
At a televised press conference in
Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, the man who is
slated to succeed Naidu as chief minister, Y S R Reddy,
said his rivals came to grief because of overemphasis on
economic reforms and information technology that failed
to benefit farmers and the rural masses.
"Of the
4,000 farmers who are known to have committed suicide in
the last few years, 3,000 were from Andhra Pradesh,"
Reddy said.
Mass suicides by farmers in the
state, many of them cotton growers who had experimented
disastrously with genetically modified seeds supplied by
large multinationals, were frequently cited by Congress
party workers to blunt the BJP's "India Shining" motto
during the election.
Commenting on the TDP's
defeat, the secretary general of the Federation of
Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Amit Mitra,
said in an interview that the lesson to be drawn was
that "economic initiatives in the IT and services sector
should be extended to the rural areas and to such
industries as food processing and rural industry".
World Bank documents describe Andhra Pradesh as
one of the largest and poorest states in India. Its 80
million population approaches the size of the
Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the
world.
The bank has noted that "even as its
high-tech industries develop rapidly, Andhra Pradesh's
overall literacy rate remains a modest 44 percent and
one-third of the population lives in poverty".
Meanwhile, Congress is now poised to harvest a
crop of parliamentary seats from Andhra Pradesh in its
determined bid to lead or support a "secular, socialist"
dispensation.
This, it hopes, would include the
Left Front parties, which rule West Bengal state, the
Rashtriya Janata Dal in eastern Bihar state and other
"like-minded" regional formations.
"We expected
to do well in Andhra Pradesh, but we were pleasantly
surprised by the actual outcome," said Anand Sharma,
spokesman for the Congress party.
On Monday, the
party announced that it was willing to sit together with
its allies to decide on a prime ministerial candidate
acceptable to all. It suggested that it would not insist
that the coalition be led by Congress party chief,
Italian-born Sonia Gandhi.
Gandhi's foreign
birth has been a major issue not only with the BJP but
also with many allies of the Congress party, such as the
regional National Congress Party in western Maharashtra
state. But going by the exit polls and the Andhra
Pradesh results, voters were interested in more serious
concerns such as exclusion from the benefits of reforms
in places like Hyderabad, which counts among the global
hubs for information technology and activities such as
business process outsourcing.
In fact, Hyderabad
is often called Cyberabad for the vast glass and chrome
buildings there that vie for attention with medieval
palaces and mosques from its past as an outpost of the
Moghul empire.
Naidu styled himself as the chief
executive officer of Andhra Pradesh. But while he
impressed pro-reform visitors to the state - ranging
from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates - with his skill at
running the state out of a laptop, he failed to see the
plight of farmers starved for steady supplies of power,
water and up-to-date farm credit.
India embarked
on a policy of reforms under a Congress party government
in 1992, but anger against it led to the defeat of the
party in 1996. From that time on, it has remained out of
power.
Its successor, the BJP, prided itself on
its ultra-nationalism and its swadeshi or
self-reliance rhetoric. After gaining power, however,
the BJP abandoned its stance to pursue reforms with
greater vigor than ever before in a bid to make India a
global economic power along the lines of its Asian
neighbor, China.
But despite the unpopularity of
economic liberalization among India's rural masses,
there is little likelihood of a policy reversal even if
the Congress party returns to power in India's
government.
In fact, the Congress party is
already pushing the candidature of Manmohan Singh, a
respected economist credited with introducing India's
reforms, as the country's next prime minister.
