Last update - 10:24 28/04/2009
The planet's largest democratic exercise
By Aditi Bhaduri
NEW DELHI - On April 16, the first phase of polling began in the largest democratic exercise on the planet. That was when elections for India's 15th Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian parliament) commenced. A total of 714 million voters, divided into 543 constituencies across 28 states and seven union territories began electing the leaders they wanted to govern for the next five years.
A second round of voting took place on April 23. It will be followed by three more runoff rounds through May 13, with final results to be declared three days later. The new government must be announced by June 2.
A total of 828,804 polling stations have been set up across the country, one of which will serve but a single elector - Guru Shree Bharatdasji Bapu, the priest of a temple in the middle of the Gir Forest. More than 1,000 parties are running.
India is currently in a recession, testimony to the fact that its economy has gone global. Arvind Virmani, chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry, calls it the "worst recession in 60 years." There have been massive layoffs. Infosys, one of India's premier IT companies, has been issuing pink slips to its workers, something that claimed its first suicide victim earlier this month.
The western state of Maharashtra has seen farmer suicides, and in the eastern state of West Bengal people have held off developmental activities by foreign farms, and the state's "red bastion" of left-wing rule has been crumbling. Orissa has been wracked by violence after the murder of a Hindu clergyman last year, and thousands of Christians have been displaced, their houses burnt down by Hindu extremists.
Five states - Jammu and Kashmir state in the north, and Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura in the northeast - are being wracked by insurgencies. Infiltration from Pakistan-administered Kashmir into Indian-administered Kashmir is increasing as the winter snows melt. A large swath of central India - known as the "red corridor" - is in the grip of leftist extremists, the Naxals, who advocate class war and unleash violence at will.
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has been engulfed by outrage at the predicament of the Sri Lankan Tamils, with politicians demanding that New Delhi cut its ties with Colombo. There have been warnings by Indian intelligence that the Tamil Tigers may try to strike President Sonia Gandhi and her family.
High-profile politicians are also facing potential attacks by Pakistan-based jihadi groups. And the country is still recovering from the shock of the fedayeen-style terrorist attacks in its commercial capital, Mumbai, last November. The trial of the only attacker caught alive began two weeks ago. The American think tank Stratfor has warned there may be more such attacks. The high-profile Indian Premier League cricket matches, slated to be held during the elections, had to be moved to South Africa, as the authorities here were unable to guarantee adequate security.
None of this, however, has deterred Indians from either campaigning or from going out to cast their ballots. In fact, it was the "red corridor" that went to the polls first, giving the elections a bloody start when Naxals killed 17 people, including police, paramilitary personnel and election officials in four states.
Yet the country is enveloped in a carnival-like atmosphere. Speeches, rallies, visits to religious places by candidates in a country proud of its "secular" character, campaigning by glamorous Bollywood actors in remote villages - these have become the order of the day. So have the routine violations of the election commission's code of conduct. Just recently, Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt, of the Samajwadi Party, was charged with making "sexist" remarks - he offered Ms. (Kumari) Mayawati, the female chief minister (that is, head of government) of the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and leader of the rival Bahujan Samsj Party - a "magic hug." And a few days earlier, Varun Gandhi, a grandson of Indira Gandhi, was jailed for making a communally charged speech against Muslims in the constituency where he is conducting his maiden election campaign. He was paroled recently, but not before the public was treated to a war of words between Gandhi's mother, Maneka Gandhi, who is also running in the elections, and Mayawati, who had ordered the younger Gandhi jailed. Citizens refer to the entire event as the big Indian tamasha (circus). In many constituencies, the election commission has rapped candidates for distributing money to the public.
Yet, in spite of the raucousness, and a fair amount of glitz and glamour, local issues are dominating these parliamentary elections. Issues of bijli, sadak and pani - electricity, roads and (clean) water - remain the buzzwords, and are playing a more prominent role than they did in the past. Popularly called Bipasha (after another popular Indian actor), these are the issues that experts feel will determine the fate of the candidates.
All politics is local
Sanjay Kumar, an election scholar and fellow at New Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), says there are almost no national issues at stake in these elections.
"All are local issues, and these are being made into the national issues - the same old concerns about water, roads, electricity, jobs, development, good governance," he says.
Issues like terrorism, national security and foreign policy do not really figure. "These are urban issues, and the urban voter forms just 30 percent of India's voters," explains Kumar.
Kumar Ketkar, the editor of the Mumbai-based, Marathi-language daily Loksatta, goes further. "These elections are characterized by micro-local issues," he says. Having covered elections since 1967, Ketkar says he has never seen people raise infrastructure issues as much as they have this time. "And if it's about political issues, then it has to do with caste and community. There are hardly any national issues, no one is talking about the recession." Even in Mumbai, following the November 26 terror attacks, which killed more than 170 people, Ketkar finds "terrorism is not really an issue for many, even though the terror attacks have prompted the middle and upper class urban youth to come out and vote this time." He further observes, "The electorate is completely fragmented, with 'micro-Balkanization' of issues centered around people's daily and personal lives."
Parvathi Deora, an urban slum dweller in the eastern city of Kolkata, says she will vote for the regional Trinamool Congress Party, because it built proper public toilets for her quarter, and helps her get medical care for her children. Thousands of miles away, in Ayodhya, in the Hindi heartland, Ratna Bai, a 65-year-old flower seller, says she will vote for any party that can give her uninterrupted electricity.
Indeed, analysts find that India's polity has been rapidly changing over the past decade. For many years now, the average urban voter has been apathetic to election campaigns. (This time numerous advertisements on prime-time TV simply implore voters to fulfill their national obligation by coming out to vote.) Bad governance has made India's politicians the people Indians love to hate. Madhu Kishwar, also a senior fellow at the CSDS and the founder of Manushi Sangathan, an organization for strengthening citizenship rights, observes that Indian politics can increasingly be characterized as a game of "loot and plunder." "People get into politics to become rich quickly," she says. This fact is borne out by the findings of the National Election Watch (NEW), a nationwide movement working for electoral reform that has been monitoring the candidates for the Lok Sabha. NEW has found at least 50 candidates with criminal records contesting in each phase till now.
Anil Bairwal, the national coordinator of the Association for Democratic Reforms, a partner of NEW, says, "There is no transparency regarding how political parties choose the candidates they field or how they manage their finances. There are members of parliament with all types of criminal cases against them, but they continue to get elected to parliament." He adds: "Look at the manifestos of the main parties. They tell us nothing about how money will be generated for all the promises that are being made." In fact, both the Congress party (as the Indian National Congress is known) and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manifestos have been called populist, promising enormous loan waivers and subsidies, both of which will cause a huge state deficit.
The regional parties aren't far behind. While a party in north India has promised to do away with computers (so as to generate more employment) and English language schools (so as to promote Hindi), another in the south has promised every family living below the official poverty line a color TV.
Hence, observers say, it is not surprising that local issues have taken center stage. In spite of the country's vastness and diversity, local issues, whether in conflict-ridden Kashmir or Naxal-infested Chattisgarh, remain remarkably alike. "Naxalism, for instance, is not a law-and-order problem, as the government makes it out to be," says Kumar. "It is a question of haves and have-nots, it's people's way of fighting back."
States with a strong Naxal presence, such as Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, are some of the country's poorest and most backward.
Madhu Kishwar finds the 15th Lok Sabha elections to be characterized by "the increasing role of regional parties." From the time India won independence, in 1947, the Indian National Congress (INC), the grande dame of Indian politics, had been the ruling national party, winning almost all general elections through 1991, with few setbacks. While there were regional parties, they were restricted to their respective states. The parties of the left had limited presence, ruling in three states.
The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw the emergence of the BJP, whose ideology is based on Hindu nationalism. The emergence of the BJP and other regional parties, analysts believe, stems from a combination of factors, primarily the Congress party's policy of over-centralization, especially under the autocratic rule of Indira Gandhi. As a result of this policy, says Kishwar, "states began to want to secede because of the tendency of the Congress party to rule from the Delhi Durbar over the states as if the latter were its colonies."
Regional parties have since proliferated. Most are caste-based, and they have begun rising to significance in national power politics. The Samajwadi Party (SP), the party of the Backward Castes, and the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP), the party of Dalits - those who had been at the bottom of India's caste hierarchy for centuries - are two such parties in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state. With 80 seats, UP has the largest number of seats in the 543 seat Lok Sabha, which gives the ruling party here substantial bargaining power in the formation of the new central government. UP is also where the mother-son duo of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, president and general secretary of the INC, respectively, have their constituencies.
Arise the coalition parties
The 1990s were characterized by the rise of coalition politics in India. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the BJP with its regional allies, was the first coalition government to complete a full term in power, in 2004. General elections in 2004 saw the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) - led by the Congress party, which was joined by its regional allies - come to power, with the outside support of the left parties.
This, Kishwar points out, is good for Indian democracy. Though the caste card has been overplayed, with parties mobilizing people not as citizens but as members of castes and communities, she points out that this has had its benefits. "For one, it has given the lowest castes a voice, and led to a deepening democracy at one level. Otherwise, could you imagine Mayawati ruling India's biggest and most populous state?" she asks.
Mayawati is the flamboyant Dalit leader of the BSP, which is currently in power in UP. She loves diamonds and statues of herself, among other things. Many believe she may be India's next prime minister. She has kept her party's options open when it comes to alignments and has become a force to reckon with. Though she came to power through her Dalit identity and community, over time her party has also reached out to other "backward" castes, as well as upper-caste Hindus and Muslims, the latter of whom constitute a considerable bank of votes in her state.
Identity politics, however, does not go down well with all urban voters. Jayashree Shrivastava, an educator based in Noida, grumbles at what she calls "the ever-increasing communalization of everything and obfuscation of real issues." Real issues for Shrivastava are development - good roads, uninterrupted power supply and employment. Delhi is unsafe, she feels, because of unemployment, and this also contributes to terrorism, she says.
Adds Shrivastava's businessman husband, R.K. Shrivastava, "We are so unsafe. We need a strong government in power. The UPA government has made India more unsafe."
The Congress-led UPA government is perceived by many to be soft on terror, allegedly in order not to alienate its "Muslim vote bank." "That's the reason that Congress has not made terrorism an election issue, focusing rather on its fiscal achievements, such as loan waivers for debt-ridden farmers," says Wasbir Hussein, director of the Center for Development and Peace Studies, in Guwahati, and a former member of the National Security Advisory Board. In contrast, the Congress' main rival, the BJP, the main opposition party in India's parliament, has made terrorism one of its twin key issues. It has been projecting its prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, as the "Iron Man." In Hussein's own state, Assam, in the country's northeast, India has been facing an insurgency for more than a decade, and early this month, it was rocked by a series of bombings. It has been fueled by unchecked infiltration from across the border from neighboring Bangladesh.
Hussein says, "Whenever the Congress is charged with being soft on terror, they make counter-allegations against the BJP saying that it was under their rule in 1999 that the NDA government released terrorists held in Indian prisons, in exchange for the release of passengers of an Indian Airlines flight hijacked to Kandahar by Pakistan-based terrorists." He concedes that terrorism, nonetheless, is an "urban" issue, and people in the rural areas are too caught up in their daily struggle for existence to worry about it.
'Secular credentials'
However, perceptions differ among urban youth. Saurabh Banerjee, one of tens of thousands of Indian IT techies, works for a multi-national company in Gurgaon, one of Delhi's new satellite townships. He says he would like to see the UPA government retain power. "The economy has been doing well under the UPA, and the recession is not the fault of the government, it's part of a global financial meltdown," he says. He does not want to see the BJP form the government, because, "the only thing they talk about is Hindutva," the party's ideology of Hindu nationalism. Banerjee prefers the Congress "secular credentials."
Secularism, however, is not an issue, says Wasbir Hussein, though parties like the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which has its base in the eastern state of Bihar, have tried to portray themselves as being against "communal forces," again with an eye to Muslim voters. Ajmer Alam Wani, a journalist from the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, believes that voters are far too smart to be taken by slogans appealing to their secularism, though religion is an emotive issue in India. "They know who is who," he says.
Shahira Naim, a Muslim journalist from UP, where Muslims constitute 15 percent of the electorate, points out that even in the tense UP city of Ayodhya, development is the key issue - not religion. Ayodhya is the town where the 16th-century Babri Mosque was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu zealots, under the watchful eyes of the BJP and some of its allies, to make way for a temple to Lord Ram, who was born there under Hindu tradition. To the extent that the erstwhile raja (that is, prince) of Ayodhya has joined not the BJP, but Mayawati's BSP, in exchange for the promise of a huge financial package to develop the twin towns of Ayodhya and Faizabad.
Secularism has also been the refrain of the left parties that have floated a "Third Front" this year with allies from different states, which include, among others, the regional AIADMK party of a faded Tamil actress known as Ms. Jayalalitha, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The left had backed the UPA government but withdrew support in 2008 to protest its pro-U.S. tilt and the signing of the Indo-American civil nuclear deal.
In an interview with Shekhar Gupta, the editor of the Indian Express daily, on the NDTV interview show "24x7," Sitaram Yechury, the leader of the Communist Party of India, the main Marxist left-wing party, said: "In the last 15 years or so, all major [coalitions] were forged post-election. United Front came into existence after the 1996 elections, the NDA after 1998, the UPA after 2004. This time, too, a Front will emerge."
Subhashini Ali, a member of the Central Committee of the CPI(M) told Haaretz that the left is offering "more than a third front, it is a third alternative." "From our experience of the last 11 years, we have seen that the policies of both the NDA and the UPA government have been disastrous. After 11 years of rapid development, 70 percent of the population is still living on less than 22 rupees [under 50 cents] a day. It means that the vast majority have not benefited from India's economic strides. So basically we need a paradigm shift to address issues that have remained unaddressed till now, things like education, health, food security."
Ali believes that the rise of regional parties and coalition politics reflects the sheer diversity of the country. Kishwar attributes the rise of regional parties to the maturation of the Indian electorate. "It shows the devolution of power from the center to the states," she says.
Yet, analysts say that post-poll alliances are what count.
Kumar: "These elections are characterized by the fact that many of the regional parties are out to test their own strength." He believes, "Most regional parties that have been part of the national coalitions are really looking forward to the next elections." Hence all predictions are for a coalition government to emerge, headed by a greatly weakened national party. "There will be all sorts of pressure on the coalition government, whoever forms it, as numerous parties will be vying with each other to impose their agenda," predicts Kumar.
Whether these predictions turn out to be true or not will be known only after millions of Indians keep their once-in-five-year tryst with destiny.
Aditi Bhaduri is an independent journalist based in India, writing for the Indian and international media.