NEW
DELHI - In a stunning upset, belying all predictions of
India's proliferating pollsters, the electorate have
given a decisive mandate in favor of the Italian-born
scion of the Nehru dynasty, Sonia Gandhi, and her
Congress party and its allies, including communists,
rejecting the communal and sectarian politics of the
Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led
coalition in no uncertain terms.
From all
indications, a Gandhi-led coalition government will soon
be formed. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has
resigned and has been asked by President Abdul Kalam to
remain as caretaker until alternative arrangements are
made.
Contrary to the expectations and
predictions of a "hung parliament", the final figures
for the 14th Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament)
indicate an unambiguous mandate for the Congress and its
pre-election allies. On its own, the Congress has
emerged as the largest single party, with 145 seats
under its belt. Along with the Left parties (62 seats),
the Congress coalition (with 216 seats) is comfortably
placed to cross the halfway mark in the new Lok Sabha.
It is also getting offers of support from other parties,
like the party of Dalits called the Bahujan Samaj Party
led by Mayawati, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh
(UP) and that of the Backward castes, called the
Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, the present
chief minister of UP and a former union defense
minister. While Yadav has some reservations about
Sonia's foreign origin, he is nevertheless running his
own government with her party's support in UP. Mayawati
has clarified that she sees nothing wrong in the
proposition. "If people of Indian origin can run for
office in the US and other countries, what is wrong with
a foreign-born Indian citizen running for office here,"
said Mayawati on Thursday.
The BJP's defeat is
quite comprehensive. Over two dozen of its ministers,
including some cabinet heavyweights like external
affairs minister Yashwant Sinha, have lost. Vajpayee
himself won by a poor margin. The most galling is the
BJP's failure to retain its position as the single
largest party. A couple of hours after the swift
counting through electronic voting machines started
giving out the disastrous results, the BJP and its
coalition leaders gathered at the 79-year-old prime
minister's residence and decided to gracefully accept
the electorate's rebuff and rejection.
The
nature of the electoral verdict can be understood from
the fact that the biggest upsets have come in the two
states, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, where the respective
chief ministers, Jayalalitha and Narendra Modi, ran an
extremely xenophobic and almost abusive campaign
centered on Sonia's foreign origin and Catholic
Christian faith. Jayalalitha, the first Brahmin to have
ruled Tamil Nadu in half a century, already convicted in
one of many criminal cases, has passed legislation
virtually banning conversion of lower caste Dalits
(untouchables) or Adivasis (aboriginals) to Christianity
and other "foreign" religions. This is what has made her
the darling of the extended family of Hindu
fundamentalists called the Sangh Parivar. Her party,
All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, is a recent
ally of the BJP that dumped its old ally Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam led by respected 79-year-old Backward
caste leader Karunanidhi after Jayalalitha passed the
anti-conversion legislation.
Banning conversion
has so endeared Jayalalitha to the BJP that it not only
overlooked the mercurial Tamil lady's reputation for
corruption and conviction in a court of law, but also
the fact that it was her withdrawal of support from
Vajpayee's earlier government in 1999 that had led to
its fall by one vote. Jayalalitha's party and the BJP
lost all the 40 seats they contested in Tamil Nadu and
Pondicherry.
Similarly, Modi's diatribes and
invectives against Sonia and her foreign origin have
created so much disgust that it led to the secular
Congress party achieving its biggest success in 25
years, even in the state of Gujarat, which is regarded
as a bastion and laboratory of Hindutva (Hindu
supremacist philosophy) of the Sangh Parivar and its
patriarch, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, as well as
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu Forum).
Gujarat became notorious for giving a two-thirds
majority to the BJP following a month-long genocide of
Muslims believed to have been virtually sponsored, if
not organized, by the Modi-led state government and the
Sangh Parivar, as well as the central Vajpayee-led
government. Modi's anti-Sonia campaign was the most
abusive in Gujarat as elsewhere and his audience seemed
to be lapping it all up, but it seems better sense
prevailed and the voters of Gujarat, too, rejected
communal and sectarian politics, as well as xenophobia
in all its forms. The BJP leaders, however, continue to
say, as top leader Pramod Mahajan did, that they would
feel ashamed as Indians if foreign-born Sonia Gandhi
became prime minister.
Rejection of communal
politics is also one of the main factors in the defeat
of BJP's so-called secular coalition partners in other
states, like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. The
Andhra chief minister, Chandra Babu Naidu, for instance,
made a great play of his secular distaste for pogroms
and massacres following Gujarat, and threatened to
withdraw support from the Vajpayee government unless
Modi was sacked. But once Vajpayee refused to take any
action against his party's government, or even against
Modi, Naidu, along with other "secular" coalition
partners, kept quiet.
While several other
factors, like growing unemployment, farmers being driven
to commit suicide, general disenchantment with his party
in rural areas, etcetera have contributed, one of the
main reasons for his ignominious defeat is total
withdrawal of support from minorities and others for his
backing off from his avowed secular platform.
Though BJP officials are not willing to discuss
the reasons of the party's debacle, analysts feel that
the BJP made a major mistake by making Sonia's foreign
origin its main campaign theme following the failure of
its India Shining campaign to enthuse the masses, and
even sections of the urban middle class. The BJP has
lost almost all seats in its urban citadels, like Delhi
and Mumbai, the places where India is shining at its
brightest. The US$20 million of public money it spent on
its so-called "Feel Good" campaign inspired nothing but
laughter and derision in the cities and revulsion in
poverty-ridden areas, particularly after 22 women died
in a stampede in the prime minister's constituency where
his election agent was trying to influence voters by
distributing cheap saris.
Throughout India, even
from distant Kerala in the deep south, voters could be
seen commenting on television channels that if women can
die collecting saris worth less than a dollar in the
prime minister's own constituency, then what is the
meaning of this India Shining campaign and how could
India be deemed to be shining. In the words of the
prestigious Hindu newspaper: "India Shining must be
given an award for the worst advertising campaign of the
last five years: by seeming to mock the deprivations of
the mass of voters in rural as well as urban areas, it
opened up a huge credibility gap for the ruling party.
In the final analysis, this election was lost by the BJP
and its allies - and also by the Congress where it faced
the Left - on mass livelihood issues."
This
episode also made a dent in the BJP's Vajpayee versus
Sonia campaign, even though the Congress was not
projecting Sonia Gandhi as its prime ministerial
campaign on grounds that though she was Congress chief,
the alliance leader had to be decided by the coalition
partners after elections on the basis of their
performance. The BJP and its coalition partners went on
arguing endlessly that they had a great statesman like
Vajpayee to lead their government, whereas the
opposition had only an inexperienced foreign-origin
Sonia. But with the sari scandal, people started asking
why did even this great leader need to apparently bribe
his voters? But Vajpayee's local election agents
obviously knew the ground situation, for his performance
in his own constituency has been dismal, despite the
fact that all his major opponents fielded minor
candidates in his Lucknow constituency, not willing to
annoy him by making it a real fight.
The BJP
also lost much of its credibility by trying to project
itself just on the eve of elections as a secular, and
particularly as a Muslim-friendly party. It bought the
support of some discredited mullahs and Muslim
politicians. A Vajpayee support committee of a
coach-full of mullahs was also formed to campaign for
Vajpayee in his constituency, which has a considerable
Muslim presence. Vajpayee promised to create 20 million
jobs for Muslims, who have been traditionally kept out
of government jobs by successive Congress governments
since independence in 1947 and several million dollars
for Muslim missionary schools called madrassas.
In the absence of any concrete action and no evidence
whatsoever of his secularism during the past
six-and-a-half years of his rule, this failed to have
any impact. Muslims could in particular not forget that
in the wake of the Gujarat massacres, Vajpayee had said
from his party platform that wherever in the world
Muslims live they have problems in co-existing with
their neighbors.
According to Harish Khare of
the Hindu, had Vajpayee shown the courage of his
convictions after the recent Supreme Court severely
chastising the Gujarat chief minister and shown Narendra
Modi the door, he could have arguably won 300 seats for
his own party. Every single Muslim voter throughout the
country, Khare says, would have gone along with the
Vajpayee support committee. Instead, he invited Modi to
campaign for the BJP in the very same constituencies
where he was seeking Muslim support.
The Indian
Express commented: "Vajpayee for the Muslims, Modi for
the rest." Vajpayee and other BJP leaders told Muslims
that they should vote for the BJP as he had sought to
promote good-neighborly relations with Pakistanis. For
Muslims, this amounted to a repetition of the Sangh
Parivar's charge that at heart Indian Muslims are all
Pakistanis, and hence not worthy of trust as Indian
citizens. It is on the basis of this argument, first
advanced by Congress leader and independent India's
first deputy prime minister and home minister,
Vallabbhai Patel, that Muslims have until today been
kept from employment in sensitive government departments
like intelligence, and other high-profile security
services.
While this campaign thus did not bring
any Muslim support, it did serve to alienate the BJP's
core supporters. RSS spokesman Ram Madhav charged on
Thursday that the BJP had "paid the price for diluting
its ideology". He regretted the absence of ideology as
an issue in the elections. "As a result of this, local
issues came up prominently," Madhav said.
The
VHP or Hindu Forum's top leader Praveen Togadia hit
harder. "Hindus have punished the BJP. It left the path
of Rama and adopted that of Ravana [the villain of the
epic Ramayana]," Togadia said. In a scathing
attack on the BJP and its top leadership, including
Vajpayee, Togadia accused them of "betraying" Hindus,
sacrificing national security and using Pakistan to get
Muslim votes. "The BJP betrayed the Hindus. The party
left the core ideology of Hindutva and the trust for
which they were voted to power. The Hindus have punished
them," Togadia said over phone from south Gujarat.
Accusing the BJP of tying with the jihadis, and
even Imam Bukhari of Delhi's Jama mosque, he said,
"Vajpayee and L K Advani [deputy prime minister and home
minister] used Pakistan and President Pervez Musharraf
to get Muslim votes. They opened the borders and
sacrificed national security for the sake of Muslim
votes." He said investors, the unemployed youth,
farmers, laborers; the poor and the women "trusted them
only due to their ideology. They left it, and the Hindus
punished them." Asked whether the BJPs redemption lay in
going back to Hindutva ideology, Togadia said: "The
leadership has lost the trust of the people and the
Hindus will not trust them."
Clearly, a lot of
introspection lies ahead of the BJP and the larger
fraternity of the Sangh Parivar. As always, India has
spoken strongly in favor of social and communal harmony,
secularism, multiculturalism and inclusive politics. In
the words of India's largest circulating newspaper, the
Times of India: "In the event, it was a near-unanimous
verdict for the politics of inclusiveness - economic,
social and cultural - and against the rhetoric of
divisiveness and xenophobia. Indeed, it was the BJP's
relentless 'feel-good' hype and its anti-Sonia
videshi [foreign] invective that ultimately
pushed the other 'un-shining' India towards the
perceived underdog - the written-off Congress Party."
One can only hope that the Sangh Parivar as a
whole, as well as the secular formations that are
secular mostly in name alone, will learn the right
lessons from the electoral verdict of 2004. It is not
for nothing that the BJP candidates lost from all three
constituencies in UP - Mathura, Kashi and Ayodhya -
where demolition of mosques and building Hindu temples
is on their agenda.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
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