In India, weapons of mass
rejection By K Gajendra Singh
One evening in the Jordanian capital of Amman,
while discussing democracy over hands of bridge, a
former prime minister quoted an Arab president as
saying: "Of course we are all democrats and we love
democracy, but the problem is the elections." Many
rulers around the world have found solutions to this
"problem" of pesky voters not doing as they should, by
rigging polls, intimidation, getting themselves elected
for life, or even resorting to legal shenanigans.
In India, while many attributes of the
government of the people, by the people and for the
people have been distorted, undermined or even
eliminated by a generally corrupt ruling political
elite, the neglected and impoverished Indian still has a
vote. However faulty the pluralistic choice on offer,
the elected representatives, especially those who become
distant rulers, must come to their subjects for
legitimacy.
What really established India's
credentials as a fully-functioning democracy was first
the electoral defeat of then premier Indira Gandhi
herself and of her Indian National Congress party in
1977, after she had lifted the emergency she imposed in
1975, and her subsequent re-election in 1980 elections,
something unique and unusual in the developing world.
Having got parliament's term extended, Indira
could have ruled until 1978 , but she felt that the
masses looked sullen and went for legitimacy. As often
happens, the sycophantic and politicized intelligence
and civil services in an authoritarian regime tell the
rulers what they want to hear. So it was in 1977. And it
was no different 27 years later. Misled, the slogan of
"India Shining" sold by the marketers of consumer
society, the rulers thought , would be the icing on the
cake.
The people have spoken, and the Hindu
fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led
coalition has been tossed out of office, and Congress,
with support from communist parties, is back.
As
most Indian political parties are weak on ideology and
the leaders concerned more with the pursuit of power and
wealth than the interests of the voters, there is a
large floating electorate which only decides which way
to vote just before polling day. Normally, these people
do not disclose their preferences to slick media people,
who deign to venture out to outlying and neglected areas
only during elections. City bred, experts in
communications, they cannot easily relate to village
folks. Seventy percent of the voters, impoverished and
neglected and remembered only during election times,
have now spoken firmly that they will not be taken for
granted.
The staggered April-May elections
proved all pollsters wrong, even though the second round
of exit polls at the end of April indicated a voter
surge in favor of the Congress. The final results make
the Congress the largest party in the 543-member
parliament, with 145 seats (compared to 112 in 1999) and
commanding 217 seats when its allies are counted in.
But as the Congress leader and
premier-designate, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, prepared
on Monday to form a new government, a senior leader of
the largest communist group, the Communist Party of
India (Marxist), said that leftists would not join the
coalition, but would instead support it from outside.
The stage is now set for Catholic Christian
Sonia Gandhi, widow of prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and
daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi to become India's 4th
prime minister from the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The first
was Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime
minister in 1947.
Pre-poll allies of the
Congress and the left parties proposed Sonia Gandhi as
the next prime minister on Sunday evening. She was due
to meet the president of India on Monday, and a
Congress-led coalition government could be sworn in as
early as Wednesday.
Earlier, with predictions of
a hung parliament, the chief of the Uttar Pradesh
(UP)-based regional party, Samajwadi Party (SP), Mulayam
Singh Yadav, nursed ambitions of playing kingmaker, even
becoming a prime minister as a compromise candidate. "No
government formation will be possible at the center
without the participation of the Samajwadi Party," he
had proclaimed. While his SP won 36 of the 80 seats in
UP (the BJP slipped from 29 in 1999 to a mere 11) he has
now become irrelevant.
Mayawati's Dalit-based
(former untouchables) Bahujan Samaj Party, another party
centered around UP, which won 19 seats compared to 14 in
1999, also finds itself rendered politically irrelevant.
She had also expressed the desire of becoming prime
minister. These two have now been reduced to making
overt and covert moves to join the Congress-led
coalition. Both are bundles of trouble and compete with
the Congress for the same Muslim and Dalit votes in UP.
Sonia Gandhi said at the weekend that the
country had decisively rejected the divisive ideology of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP - World Hindu Forum), the BJP and their
allied Hindu fundamentalist organizations. She added
that the people had also rejected the politics of
arrogance and personal attacks (she came under intense
criticism over her foreign origins. She concluded that
"the people of India have chosen us to represent their
aspirations, not ours", and that she and her party
better remember that.
An overconfident BJP, now
reduced to 138 seats in parliament (compared to 182
seats in 1999) and totaling 189 with its allies the
former National Democratic Alliance (NDA) , remains in a
state of shock and denial with many party leaders still
opposed to Gandhi becoming prime minister. Some threaten
not to attend parliament. The RSS and the VHP have
already shown signs of wanting to go back to the
divisive Hindutva (Hindu supremacy) policy which it had
somewhat softened for the elections. When asked about
the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi, many villagers
replied that once a bride was accepted, she became part
of the family.
With excellent economic growth,
India in the broad sense is certainly shining, and
especially for the political and economic elites and the
middle classes, but 70 percent of India's billion-plus
population remain impoverished and neglected. They want
drinking water and cheap electricity, public
distribution systems for essential consumer goods and
medicine. Farmers want irrigation water and subsidized
power, protection for crops like wheat, cotton and
sugarcane, and not uncontrolled subsidized imports from
rich countries. They do not want plants and factories,
built with the nation's own resources since
independence, to be closed down or sold off cheaply to
friends of politicians.
Silently, these ordinary
men and women marched to the polling stations and
expressed their wrath. These also included a vast army
of the unemployed (about 30 percent rural unemployment
in India) and others scrounging for a livelihood, the
hungry and emaciated peasants and masses and a
cross-section of old and middle-aged people whose
savings have shrunk because of low domestic interest
rates to help industrialists. On the other hand, the
beneficiaries of "India Shining" the chatterati
or disputati were not bothered to stand in a
queue and vote. Often in upper-income sections in Mumbai
or south Delhi, voter turnout was around 33 percent,
compared with a national average of about 55 percent.
State-wide results With a population
of over a billion, India, although it has an underlining
unity and universality, does not make for an easy
forecast. In northern India, rural voters are divided
more by caste than united by demands for more resources.
Given the complexity of regional, caste and class
interests and the many parties that reflect these, no
simple explanation of electoral results is possible. But
a striking feature of the latest result was the defeat
of incumbent governments in the states, as well as at
the center, barring some exceptions.
Like the
obscene use of the term "collateral damage" to cover
civilian deaths and damage in the Middle East, the
phrase "anti-incumbency" is used to hide the failures of
Indian political rulers. But voters were not fooled.
About two-thirds of incumbent legislators were shown the
door. The exceptions were those constituencies where
dynasties are well entrenched, and they have looked
after the people, or they rule by money and muscle
power. Elsewhere, the law-and-order machinery has
completely broken down or become too coercive, as in
Bihar, UP and Andhra Pradesh. Here, Marxist
revolutionaries, Robin Hood-type criminals and caste
bandits provide instant justice to the masses and get
themselves or their nominees elected.
This
pattern began in November 2003 state elections in the
Congress-ruled states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan,
Chhatisgarh and Delhi. Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee and the BJP celebrated an almost unexpected
windfall of massive victories in all these states except
Delhi. The BJP-led NDA successfully exploited the
failure of the Congress-ruled governments to provide BSP
ie bijli (electricity), sarak (roads) and
pani (water). It is the same double-edged sword
which brought down the NDA and cut short the BJP's dream
of ruling for another five years.
In these
states, ie Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh,
the momentum of the November 2003 victory, the initial
honeymoon period and the assiduous efforts by the new
BJP governments to keep the masses contented paid off.
The BJP swept the boards, winning 24 out of 25, 24 out
of 25 and 10 out of 11 seats, respectively. During a
visit to these states, when I pointed out that unlike
Delhi there were few power breakdowns, the reply was:
"Wait till the elections are over." But strangely, even
after the second exit polls on April 27, which showed a
surge in favor of the Congress, except for a few
meetings by Sonia Gandhi, very little attempt was made
by the Congress to organize meetings in these states. So
demoralized and disorganized had become the Congress
party machine.
The case of Gujarat is the most
fascinating, where after a landslide victory in 2002
state elections, following the Godhra burning of Hindus
and the subsequent government-supported pogrom against
Muslims, it was expected that the BJP would sweep
through the state and do better than in 1999. Instead,
the Congress, by taking 12 seats against 14 by the BJP,
has stunned the leadership of the latter. It would
appear that after the communal frenzy sustained by the
state government until the end of 2002, there is now
some normalcy in thinking. The people of Gujarat realize
that the events have tarnished the state's reputation
and affected economic growth in an economically
prosperous state known for the financial acumen of its
people. When the 1992 and 1993 communal riots in Mumbai
and counter explosions carried out by the Muslim
community and its supporters from abroad affected the
state's economic growth, Maharastrians also cooled down.
Riots and tensions make investors very cautious. Also, a
large chunk of the skilled and semi-skilled workers are
Muslims.
In the Congress-ruled Punjab, of the 13
seats in the state, the Congress won two, against the
eight held by it in the previous parliament. Akali Dal
with eight seats and the BJP gained most. The Congress
chief minister had started with a cleanup campaign, but
then lost his way, with corruption allegations against
his family members. Internal squabbling in the party
made the situation worse. Congress has done badly in
Uttaranchal, too, where it is in power, with the BJP
winning four out of five seats.
In Haryana the
ruling Indian National Lok Dal became a victim of the
anti-incumbency factor, made worse by the BJP opting out
of a 1999 alliance, when the two had won most of the
seats. Now the Congress won eight out of 10 seats. In
Delhi, Congress wrested six out of seven seats from the
BJP. In Jammu and Kashmir, chief minister Mufti Mohammed
Sayeed's party has done badly, while the Congress and
the National Conference won four and two seats
respectively.
After a cyclone and famine a few
years ago in Orissa, and the abysmal failure of an
incompetent Congress chief minister to handle it, the
party took a heavy beating. The Congress has no
worthwhile organization there. It resurrected an old
scandal-ridden and discredited politician, J B Patnaik.
In spite of the lack of progress, the clean image of the
regional Biju Janata Dal's young chief minister, Navin
Patnaik (foreign-educated, he is still learning the
local Oriya language) and his attempts to improve the
state economy went in his favor. His party, in alliance
with the BJP, did well in winning 18 seats, with
Congress getting only three. In neighboring BJP-ruled
Jharkand, the Congress won 10 seats out of 14.
In Bihar, ruled by the illiterate wife of
charismatic Laloo Parsad Yadav, messiah of his backward
Yadav clan, the state remains backward and impoverished,
with the highest level of illiteracy and little law and
order, but the masses are quite content to see their
caste man, a Yadav, ensconced in the ruler's chair. The
previous high caste rulers had done little for these
people. The rustic but clever Laloo made an alliance
with the Dalit Paswan leader for their votes. His
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD ) won 20 out of 40 seats.
While Laloo did declare his ambition to be India's prime
minister, as did others, after the second round of exit
polls and with his ear to ground, he was the first to
accept Sonia Gandhi as the next prime minister. He is
entangled in a court case known as the "fodder scam",
but would love to become the home minister.
In
West Bengal, where the Communist Marxist and other
leftist parties have ruled the state for decades, they
have molded the system in such a way that no other party
can win easily. They won 30 out of 42 seats. Soviet
Union leaders would have been happy to learn how to
organize victories in almost open elections. The West
Bengal governments have certainly improved the plight of
the masses, specially in rural areas, by implementing
real land reforms, but aggressive trade unionism has
scared investment and kept down industrial development.
In the former Soviet states and other communist
countries, trade unions were always under the thumb of
the ruling party, and were rarely allowed to go on
strike.
The cases of Andhra Pradesh and
Karnataka are in some ways quite similar, where
information technology-led urban economic growth made
the two states shining in the capital cities - but the
poor, specially farmers, were neglected, more so in
Andhra Pradesh. Their situation was made worse by
droughts. Many thousands have committed suicide. The
computer-savvy Andhra Pradesh chief minister,
Chandrababu Naidu, and his party got a hammering.
Congress won 34 seats out of 42, while Naidu's Telgu
Desham party was reduced to five from 29 seats in 1999.
The anti-incumbency factor applied two-fold because
Naidu was a member of the ruling NDA coalition at the
center in Delhi. The results in Karnataka, where the
anti-incumbency factor operated, were shared by the NDA
government too. In a quirky outcome, while the BJP won
18 out of 28 seats in parliament, with Congress getting
eight, the latter is the second largest party in the
state legislature and might form a coalition government
with a regional party, Janata Dal (United) .
In
Maharashtra, the Congress and the National Congress
Pawar (NCP) coalition hung together for their life
against a challenge by the NDA. The BJP's local ally,
Shiv Sena, lost its two-decade-old stronghold in Mumbai.
It was revenge by north Indian voters from Bihar and
Uttar Pradesh, a large chunk of whom are in Mumbai, but
also a thumbs-down by minority communities. The BJP held
on to its previous tally of 13 seats and won 25 seats
with its allies, while the Congress-NCP allies won 22.
In Tamil Nadu, with its great swings, results
are normally difficult to predict, but with the
heavy-handed behavior of chief minister J Jayalalitha of
the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIDMK) became
unpopular by her long incarceration of opposition
leaders and the use of draconian laws to stifle others.
The state went over to a Congress-Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (DMK) alliance which won 35 of the 39 seats,
with Jaylalitha's AIDMK and the BJP combine getting
none.
In India's most populous sate of Uttar
Pradesh, sometimes called Ulta (upside down) Pradesh,
there were mostly four-cornered contests involving the
SP, the BSP, the BJP and the Congress, making it a
nightmare to guess the outcome. In spite of the BJP's
and the prime minister's efforts to undermine Muslim
support for the SP, the party won 36 out of 80 seats. In
fact, the BJP came out worst with 11 seats. Congress got
nine seats, but it was not able to tie up an alliance,
in spite of the best efforts of Sonia Gandhi. The
Congress, the SP and the BSP were all competing for the
same Muslim and Dalit votes.
National
parties The Congress party, despite its weak
state in the cow-belt states of UP, Bihar, Madhya
Pradesh and Rajasthan, especially in the first two,
remains the only national party with an historical
legacy of India's freedom movement, and is usually
associated with leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi,
Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Its
brand name still attracts nearly 20 percent of voters
from all over India, whatever its health. It got 26.69
percent of the total votes cast, while the BJP got 22.16
percent.
The BJP, which started as the Jan
Sangh, is based on the philosophy of retrograde militant
Hindutva and its membership was primarily composed of
shopkeepers, small traders, commission agents and
others, who are all associated with the exploitation of
poor villagers and refugees from Pakistan with bitter
memories of communal killings during the partition of
1947, conservative Brahmins and similar elements.
Despite the cosmetic entry of retired military
generals and ambassadors, jaded film actors and
sportsmen, its base remains very narrow. The entry of
has-been Muslim leaders and some mullahs (for a
consideration) into the BJP has been met with great
media hype, but impressed few in the Muslim community.
Any threat to revive the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute,
now pending in the Supreme Court of India, or
anti-Muslim and Christian policies would make it only
more unpopular among the masses, who have now understood
that their religious sentiments have been exploited by
ruthless BJP leaders to get into positions of power and
pelf.
Open denunciation of the top BJP leaders
occupying senior ministerial posts before judicial
commission hearings by those who participated in the
destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya on the site where it
is said a Hindu temple existed, is a clear pointer.
After Ayodhya, Sangh Parivar organizations would like to
demolish mosques in Varanasi and Mathura. In all these
places, BJP candidates lost at the polls.
Political dynasties Over many years,
India's polity has developed on the basis of caste,
religion, language and region. In some states, like West
Bengal and Kerala, the polity is partly organized on the
economic basis of communist and leftist ideologies, but
the bhadralok (high castes) still rule the roost.
With extended families and relationships based on caste
and religion, the emergence of one or the other family
on top of the political heap is natural, with other
members providing it support in return for favors. This
has led to the emergence of political dynasties in
India.
This process began with the leaders who
participated in India's independence struggle. Apart
from Jawaharlal Nehru, others like Govind Ballabh Pant,
Ravi Shankar Shukla, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kamlapati
Tripathi, Sheikh Abdullah and Charan Singh to name only
a few, also established political dynasties. It is
interesting to note that some of their children, even
those who trained as professionals, could not resist the
power and the pelf of the political legacies of which
they were a part. For example, Ajit Singh ,son of Charan
Singh, who studied computer engineering and worked in
the United States for decades, could not resist the
attraction of a political career and took over his
father's legacy in Baghpat in UP. Sheikh Abdullah's son
Farooq studied medicine, but joined politics, as did his
son Omar Abdullah. The sons of late prime minister
Shastri left their comfortable jobs as professional
managers to become politicians and ministers.
Post independence political leaders like the
Lals of Haryana (Devi, Bansi and Bhajan) and Laloo Yadav
and Mulayam Singh Yadav, M Karunanidhi and others in
Tamil Nadu, K Karunakarans in Kerala, the Scindhias in
Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the Raos and Reddys in
Andhra Pradesh, the Pawars and Thackerays in
Maharashtra, have also spawned political dynasties.
There are many other such examples. Many of the younger
political family scions from all parties, led by Sonia
Gandhi's son Rahul, fought and won in the recent
elections. They will play important roles in Indian
politics and need to be watched.
Therefore, it
is churlish for the BJP to pick on the Nehru-Gandhi
dynasty alone. Relatives of Vajpayee, a bachelor, were
also given party tickets. After Rajiv Gandhi's
assassination in 1991, when Sonia Gandhi categorically
declined to take over the party's mantle, a retired
Congress leader, V Narsingh Rao, a self-styled Chanakya,
was resurrected from his sick bed. He succeeded in
remaining in power for five years by bribing opposition
MPs to vote for his government. He was convicted, but
the case is now pending in a higher court. He fiddled
like Nero when the Babri mosque was being pulled down in
Ayodhya, thus losing the Muslim vote for the Congress.
His actions almost decimated the Congress in the north,
specially UP and Bihar. Many senior leaders even left
the party and returned only later. What could one expect
from the likes of leaders like Sita Ram Kesari, who
followed him. Unfortunately for the Congress leaders,
people like Rajesh Pilot and Scindhia, who could have
built up the Congress party, died in accidents. It was
finally left to Sonia Gandhi to resurrect and build up
the party.
Of Sonia Gandhi's two children,
daughter Priyanka (now married with two children and
reluctant to enter the political fray) is known for her
astuteness in handling the masses. Son Rahul was often
seen as a reluctant and taciturn young man before the
elections. Starting his campaigns hesitantly in his
family borough of Amethi, now allotted to him, he made a
few successful forays into east UP. The way in which he
mingled with the crowds in Kanpur shows he could blossom
into a confident politician with a sure touch. He looks
partly the image of his grandfather Feroze Gandhi,
Indira Gandhi's husband and a backbench Congress
politician, who persevered in exposing corruption
scandals under Jawaharlal Nehru, and father Rajiv
Gandhi's gentle and winsome smile. Rahul and Priyanka
established instantaneous rapport with India's younger
generation too, which has been turned off by India's old
and corrupt political elite.
Rahul and many
other sons of the Congress political elite are
definitely going to play a very important role in the
party and the country. The Congress is full of geriatric
backroom boys and needs infusions of youth and their
fresh ideas and energy. Rahul's task is clear-cut, to
attract young voters and to build up the party in UP and
Bihar. Out of 80 and 40 seats in the two states, the
Congress could win only nine and five respectively.
An interesting contest took place in Bhiwani
(100 kilometers west of Delhi), the author's birth
place, among the heirs of Bhajan Lal, Bansi Lal and Om
Prakash Chautala (son of Devi Lal), who have dominated
Haryana politics for decades. They were chief ministers
in the state of Haryana, and also ministers in Delhi.
Their sons Kuldeep, Surender and Ajay fought for the Lok
Sabha (lower house) seat, in what was dubbed the "mother
of all dynastic battles". Born into politics, the assets
disclosed (following a election commission ruling
applicable for this election ) by the trio at the time
of filing nomination papers ran into many tens of
millions of rupees each, much property and many fancy
foreign cars.
Sonia Gandhi's leadership Sonia Gandhi, 57, who has gone through the rough and
tumble of life, showed perseverance and political
humility when required, meeting with Mayawati and
Mulayam Singh Yadav many times for an alliance for the
crucial UP state. But she was rebuffed time and again.
Both in Bihar and Tamil Nadu, Laloo Yadav and
Karunanidhi exploited the Congress' weak bargaining
power and fobbed her off with a few seats only. Next
time it will be a different ball game.
While
electioneering, Sonia Gandhi has modeled herself on
Indira Gandhi in mannerisms and style. She has succeeded
in becoming an Indian daughter-in-law. (The author
observed how Indira Gandhi was trying to teach her
Hindi, as the future prime minister's wife, when they
made an official visit to Bucharest in October 1981.) Of
course, no one then envisioned the mantle of prime
minister falling on her. Under the second exit polls of
the three-week polling exercise, which showed a surge
towards the Congress, she appeared to be ploughing a
lonely furrow, reminding of Indira Gandhi's election
campaigns in 1971, when she was personally attacked, but
she emerged with a very comfortable majority.
After the second exit polls, Sonia Gandhi
appeared to be quite a different person all together,
full of confidence and determination. The Congress has
every reason to be grateful to her for holding the party
together over the past eight years and having the
courage to fight on when most people, including many of
her own party colleagues, had despaired. She was the
Congress' leading campaigner, addressing 90 public
meetings in a fortnight and traveling over 70,000
kilometers. While she drew the crowds, her opponents
poked fun at her and her children. Some BJP leaders used
gutter language. But the grit kept her going. Apart from
some Bollywood stars, almost the entire Congress Working
Committee remained confined to Delhi. Those who traveled
out had their meetings called off as they could not
attract crowds. Ambika Soni, Ahmad Patel, Mohsina
Kidwai, Motilal Vora, R K Dhawan, Oscar Fernandes and
several other "senior leaders" stayed in Delhi or paid
odd visits to the states in which they were in charge as
party general secretaries. Most were seen in Sonia's
company when she toured their states, waving to voters
who often asked who they were. It was literally a
one-woman show.
But the effort has paid off. She
is now the undisputed leader of the party. Priyanka and
Rahul, who were her main supports during low times, will
now become advisors. The young Congress party scions
will the nucleus of power around Rahul Gandhi. Some of
the old party courtiers and faithfuls can be retired to
raj bhavans (governor residences), soon to
emptied of BJP nominees. It will be some time before the
BJP can provide another prime minister. An unusual and
many-facetted personality, Vajpayee is now close to 80
years. Only if he had implemented his raj dharma
(duty of the ruler) and eased out Gujarat's chief
minister Narendra Modi after the pogrom against the
minority community of Muslims. It runs against the
Indian ethos, culture and civilization. It was a
Himalayan blunder.
K Gajendra Singh,
Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to
Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he
served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and
Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for
Indo-Turkic Studies. Email Gajendrak@hotmail.com
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