| Election punditry? R.I.P.
No one dare take credit — absolutely no one. Not a single psephologist worth his laptop (that’s the new status-symbol and crystal-ball for poll forecasters and analysts, particularly on Indian television) predicted in the run-up to the recent general elections that a single party or coalition group would emerge victorious with enough seats to form a government in New Delhi.
Instead, every one of these so-called experts — and his cousin — was certain that India would once again be saddled with a “hung” parliament, an unmistakable feature of the country’s political landscape for more than two decades now. The curious part of this phenomenon is not so much that the experts turned out to be dead wrong, but that the candidates and their party bosses (who are, in fact, the game players out in the trenches and rubbing grimy shoulders with the aam aadmi as opposed to the arm-chair commentators) bought into this assumption wholesale, and on its basis began earnest and frenzied confabulations with potential coalition partners disregarding their long-standing pre-poll alliances.
That these post-election nudge-and-wink feelers — both public and private — were dispatched days before even the first vote was counted, is a measure of the lack of confidence within the country’s major political parties on where they actually stand and how they really fare at the hustings with the average Indian voter. On the eve of the counting, Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, who reportedly spent several gruelling weeks pumping grimy hands and kissing unwashed babies during the campaign and therefore should have known the score better than most, called an unscheduled news conference to obliquely express his keenness to mend bridges with certain otherwise small-time politicos, who he reckoned might help push his party over the majority seat threshold.
Even the nation’s highest constitutional office, it turns out, is not immune to the vagaries of poll predictions. Anticipating a split vote that would call on her unbiased discretion to invite the most legitimate group to form the government, President Pratibha Patil — a law graduate, to boot — closeted herself with three legal luminaries early on counting day, to ensure there was no needless controversy over her final choice.
Madam Patil need not have worried, though. In the end, which came later the same day thanks to speed-counting of the electronic voting machines, the Indian National Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) galloped way ahead of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) to emerge as the clear winner.
One confronts two broad questions after every election. First, why did the winner win and, by way of a corollary, why did the loser lose? Second, what next?
Analysts are almost unanimous that the single most decisive factor in the UPA’s 2009 Lok Sabha election victory was its government’s decision last year to waive farmer loans and to simultaneously enact the NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), which benefited large sections of the population across state, caste and religious divides. This jab at “economic inclusiveness” worked, they contend, more than any lip-service to the concept of secularism. Without a doubt, fiscal incentives have a strong magnetic pull and serve as a reliable adhesive to bind voters. Ask M.Karunanidhi, the Chennai-based honcho of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, which romped home with a thumping majority in Tamil Nadu state after subsidizing rice supplies and distributing free television sets.
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| Indians by and large have come to regard Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi as honest, sincere and hard-working men who shun flashy posturing and stick to their jobs. | For a largely youthful electorate, the combined appeal of the unspoilt and callow but committed-looking crown prince Rahul Gandhi being guided by the staid avuncular figure of Dr. Manmohan Singh was no less compelling. In a cricket team selection it would be best described in terms of that safe cliché: a balanced combination of youth and experience. But isn’t this a hark-back to an erstwhile royal court? Papa King assassinated by the nation’s enemies, Junior Prince too young to ascend to the throne and Queen Sonia content with her backroom duties in the palace, so a wise trusted loyalist from among the senior courtiers is handpicked to warm the seat till the Prince comes of age. Phew! Don’t we Indians have a talent for historical remakes? Any takers for a true-to-life prime-time television docudrama called The Indian Dynasty?
The Gandhi-Singh appeal, one must admit however, has more than symbolic significance for their respective generations. Indians by and large have come to regard the duo as honest, sincere and hard-working men who shunned flashy posturing and stuck to their jobs, and therefore are willing to take their word that the new federal cabinet will have ministers who are “squeaky clean.” The Indian electorate has, in effect, forgiven the Gandhi family for the Bofors scam, and forgotten that it had voted out Rahul’s father Rajiv Gandhi 20 years ago for allegedly benefiting from the scam’s kickbacks.
Where does that leave the others (the Left, the BJP, a host of regional parties and independents) in the Indian polity? With the Left routed and the right-wing BJP relegated to a distant second, it is clear that the Indian voters gave a centrist verdict this time, a veritable two-in-one slap to the shrill extremes of the ideological spectrum.
The Left lost its political relevance when it withdrew support to the earlier UPA administration over the Indo-US nuclear deal and the latter then survived a no-confidence vote in parliament. More damaging was the Left’s loss of moral relevance after the Nandigram riots over the development of a chemical hub that resulted in 14 deaths and the fiasco over Tata’s Nano car project, which prompted the company to shift the project to Gujarat. Overall, the Left’s exit from the government augurs well for economic reforms under the market-friendly Congress troika of Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia. India’s financial markets celebrated the Left rout as the Bombay Stock Exchange index spurted by Rs. 5.67-trillion in a record 38 seconds when the bourse opened after the election results.
The BJP however warrants a closer look. Here is a party that ruled the country earlier and has seen its days in the sun. However retrograde and anachronistic its Hindutva ideology and however regressive its outlook on contemporary problems, the BJP-led NDA managed in its own bumbling way to keep the ruling Congress alliance honest, in a manner of speaking, for the most part of the UPA’s last five-year tenure.
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| President Pratibha Patil closeted herself with three legal luminaries early on counting day, to ensure there was no needless controversy over her final choice. She needn’t have worried as the voter’s mandate was clear. | But the NDA failed miserably to make inflation, corruption and national security the main planks of debate during this election’s issues. The UPA was doubtless walking on very thin ice as its own hands are not clean. A sting operation had revealed BJP’s then president Bengaru Laxman accepting thick wads of currency notes from a self-proclaimed defence equipment dealer on hidden camera. And the country still squirms at recalling that BJP’s then foreign minister Jaswant Singh had personally escorted three dreaded Pak-sponsored Talibani terrorists to Kandahar, Afghanistan, to swap the release of hostages aboard the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in that harrowing winter of 1999. With what face could the party then accuse the UPA of being soft on sleaze and on terrorism?
BJP’s latest electoral defeat brings with it another danger, not unlike the one faced by the Republican Party in America. The similarity and the obvious parallels couldn’t be more apt. Both parties have lost a major election, have been left licking their considerable wounds, and — in a knee-jerk response — appear to have decided that the only way out of trouble is to go further right. That is, to opt for a more aggressive (even militant) brand of conservatism.
Bush’s former speech-writer and now associate at the American Enterprise Institute, David Frum has dubbed the Republican Party’s post-election shift toward Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk, as “say-it-louder” conservativism. In a recent interview, he explained: “If people don’t like what you’re saying, say it louder! Then they’ll like it.”
BJP’s ultra-conservative fringe is on the same wavelength. The poster-boy of the party’s new avatar is the foul-mouthed Varun Gandhi (Sanjay and Maneka’s son, and Rahul’s first cousin) who delivered vitriolic anti-Muslim speeches during the 2009 election campaign, and met his comeuppance in the state chief minister Mayawati who hauled him into the slammer under the rather stringent National Security Act. The argument goes: He refused to abandon the core values of Hindutva, suffered a jail term, but ultimately won the seat by a thumping margin, didn’t he?
But the real reason for his win probably lay elsewhere. Mayawati, an otherwise seasoned politician, underestimated the sympathy factor: jailing a 29-year-old hothead for a hate speech under a national security statute seemed nothing short of draconian. And the Supreme Court promptly struck her down.
Frum’s analysis concludes on a more sombre note: “One of the stages in the decline of a political movement is the moment when it comes to feel beaten. And in that moment it becomes reactionary, because there’s a sense that to engage with the modern world in any way is to give up your beliefs.” Was Frum referring to the Hindutva movement? Consider the alacrity with which the BJP’s philosophical mentor — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — deputed three of its functionaries to investigate the electoral debacle within hours of the results. Insiders say they carried a three-word mandate from their Sangh bosses: Crack The Whip.
But why should any right-thinking Indian bother about a communal party that is on the verge of an enervating calcification process? Because, in its absence, there is no credible opposition party at the moment to play a watchdog role. Because, unfettered dominance of a single party — in particular, the Congress if you look at its history — is a dangerous development for any democracy. Because Dr. Manmohan Singh, in his election speeches, has consistently belittled and marginalized the regional parties and independents as “spoilers” — a near-fascist perspective coming from the leader of the world’s largest multi-party polity.
Because one out of nearly every five Congress MPs in the new parliament is tainted with a criminal record. And because Dr. Singh and Rahul Gandhi, for all their anti-corruption pronouncements, are now cozying up with their old ally the Karunanidhi-led DMK, which has openly laid claim to the “more lucrative” cabinet berths in the union cabinet. After all, distributing subsidized rice and millions of free television sets has depleted the party coffers, you see sir.
So much for a squeaky clean cabinet. |
