India votes for stability

It has been said that most of the world ignores India until it takes their jobs or chooses a leader. Asia:NZ contributor Vaughan Yarwood distills the recent election results of the world's largest democracy.

Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia:NZ.

India’s recent general election was prefaced with a great deal of speculation about how the country’s 714 million eligible voters would cast their ballot. The cause of confusion this time around was neatly captured by political commentator Rajdeep Sardesai, who quipped that the country no longer experienced one election, ‘but possibly 543 elections being played out at the same time’.

Most analysts predicted that this increasing fragmentation of Indian politics, along with the growing power of regional parties, was likely to deal a severe blow to the country’s two main competing coalitions, the governing United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The UPA was headed by the 124-year-old Congress party, which appeared to be suffering a serious decline after many years as a dominant force in India’s political landscape, while the NDA was controlled by the conservative Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The threat to these entrenched power blocks came largely from a disparate alliance of secular left-wing, caste-based and regional parties — the ‘Third Front’ — which looked to be forming around the Dalit (low caste) leader Mayawati Kumari, the chief minister of a former Congress stronghold, the populous bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh.

Significantly, the marxist Communist Party of India, which formerly supported the UPA, joined the Third Front in protest at the government’s civilian nuclear deal with the United States in 2008 as did other Left parties.

The opposition BJP saw an equally worrying erosion of support from alliance partners as politicians of all persuasions wrestled to gain traction in a country divided between thriving cities and struggling villages where voting centred on access to electricity, paved roads, children’s education and other basic services.

The election results, when they came in, confounded the critics. Against the odds Congress swept to victory, winning some 250 seats and falling just short of an absolute majority. The party’s strong showing in Uttar Pradesh was seen as evidence that it had regained its traditional support among Muslims, high-caste Brahmins and the poor.

Political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta spoke for many when he said: ‘We pretend to understand the views of 700 million people... We turned out to be worse than astrologers’.

One commentator attributed Congress’ success to ‘an astute balancing of the middle-class and underclass demands’, which included pay increases for millions of government workers along with a US$5 billion rural work scheme and the waver of loan repayments for indebted farmers. Five good monsoons in a row and a booming rural market also helped.

The New Indian Express’ political editor, Neerja Chowdhry, called the election result ‘a vote for political stability’.

For Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science at Brown University in the United States, it was also a rejection of lower caste identity politics divorced from social welfare policies.

Above all, the Congress Party’s resurgence was attributed to the astute guidance of 38-year-old Rahul Gandhi and of his mother Sonia, the Italian-born widow of Indira Gandhi’s assassinated son Rajiv Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi was the Congress Party president. Rahul handpicked many candidates and campaigned energetically on a platform of good governance, ongoing economic reform and a secular polity. He is said to represent the new India and looks likely to become a future prime minister.

Not everyone was impressed. International Herald Tribune columnist Anand Giridharadas lamented the lack of ideology, and the absence of larger-than-life leaders or galvanising principles in the general election. It was, he said, hard to avoid the feeling that despite the numbers involved, the election was ‘pitifully’ small. ‘The understanding of democracy is small. The candidates are small. The conversation is small’, he wrote.

What Giriharadas wanted answered, or at least discussed, were the big questions: what to do with neighbouring Pakistan, how to balance growth with greenness, what parts of the ‘old’ national culture to keep, what brand of capitalism to follow, what values to champion abroad.

‘The politicians, seemingly incapable of ideas, are wise not to attempt any’, he wrote. ‘But the press, whose task is to challenge them, plays along’.

That was perhaps overstating the case. The policies of prime minister Manmohan Singh had in the past been hamstrung by the need to keep the communists on board. Now, with a strengthened majority the 76-year-old Singh, a noted economist, will be free to push ahead with his program of economic reform.

With creaking social and physical infrastructures, the economy slowing and millions of jobs losses recently in export-oriented industries such as textiles, garments, jewellery and handcrafts, much remains to be done.

Singh will need to make good use of his renewed mandate in order to keep India’s voters on side if the comment by a recent visitor to the home — now museum — of India’s first prime minister, the inspirational anti-colonialist Jawaharlal Nehru, is any guide.

When asked what she thought of the country’s best-known leader, she replied: ‘Nehru worked for the country. Not like today’s politicians who only work for themselves. You can’t even compare today’s leaders with anybody like Nehru’.

by Vaughan Yarwood

Fact Box: Democracy at Work

The logistics involved in organising the voting process in a country that is home to a sixth of the earth’s population is certainly impressive. India’s birth rate makes it more of a challenge each time around — since the last elections in 2004 the country has added 41 million to its population.

Polling to elect 543 members to the new Lok Sabha (lower house) was held on five dates spread over four weeks, with results counted on 16 May.  Officials installed 1,368,430 electronic voting machines in 828,804 polling stations for the country’s 714 million registered voters. Some 6.1 million police and officials were on duty and nationwide, 1,055 political parties fielded candidates.

In recognition of the country’s uneven development, 131 seats in the Lok Sabha were reserved for poor castes and tribespeople. More than 80 per cent of voters were identified by photos on the electoral roll and 60 per cent were under the age of 35 - by Vaughan Yarwood