May 30, 2004

Was the Congress victory a rejection of BJP’s vacuous rhetoric, or yet another endorsement for the Gandhi dynasty?

FOR quite a while now the images have been hard to ignore. India, supercomputer and investment portfolio in hand, has been surging ahead, feeling good, going places. The IT industry has become a world leader and major international businesses have relocated important parts to India. At the same time, across the heartland highways and bridges are being built, and in glittering urban office towers successful young professionals are churning up the national economy to record levels of growth. India, in other words, has been ‘Shining’.

It’s an extremely powerful and galvanizing collective, and even here in Pakistan (where every positive development in India only reminds us of our own shortcomings) we found ourselves moved and inspired, perhaps even awe-struck, as India appeared to have finally come in from the cold. “I felt that India was on the move at last, the economy was doing well, inefficient public sector enterprises were being privatized, roads were being improved and we were world players,” says Samiran Nundy, a medical professional in Delhi and one of several Indians interviewed for this article.

India Shining emerged as a series of persuasive messages that filled the senses. It left you in little doubt that India was finally cashing in on its share of the Asian boom and, riding the ambitions and aspirations of its mammoth population base, would soon hold a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and enjoy superpower status as a global world player.

India Shining has been an astonishing feat, no less than a perceptual revolution when you consider how starkly it contrasts with the traditional image the world knows only too well — India the despairing Third-World nation, overburdened by hunger and poverty, shackled by corruption and joblessness, hobbled by issues of caste and the rights of minorities, a place that “could beat the restlessness out of any living creature,” as Yann Martel noted famously in the preface to his bestselling Life of Pi.

These are not the things one wants to be known by, but these are also not the kinds of images that can be changed overnight. Faced by these realities, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — until recently India’s ruling political party — resorted to the artifice of propaganda and unleashed a deftly orchestrated publicity campaign on to a gullible and accepting world.

The jig was finally up on the evening of Thursday, May 13, when the results of India’s 2004 General Elections became public. Congress and its allies, with 217 parliamentary seats to the BJP-led alliance’s 185, had scored an upset win and stood poised to form the next government. It may have been a fragmented verdict in terms of parliamentary arithmetic, but there is no denying that BJP losses were huge. Compared with the last general elections held in 1999, when BJP and its allies held a clear parliamentary majority, there was a net loss of 90 seats for the BJP and a net gain of 66 seats for the Congress-led alliance.

Most of the battle was won and lost in the key states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, which saw the highest number of seats being switched. Andhra Pradesh, of course, had wanted to be known for its computer savvy, but building up to the elections it became notorious for drought-stricken farmers committing suicide by the thousands.

Several BJP stalwarts were ousted. People such as Yashwant Sinha, Sharad Yadav and CP Thakur — all sitting cabinet ministers — suffered defeats. Even an ideologue like Murli Manohar Joshi, also a sitting cabinet minister but perhaps better known in Pakistan for his role in inciting the Babri Masjid riots, got defeated; he had been considered a strong challenger for what would have been a record fourth consecutive term. With leftist parties garnering 62 seats and expressing an inclination to support Congress, the writing was on the wall for the BJP leadership. Atalji, party leader and sitting Prime Minister, promptly resigned. If this was a referendum on India Shining — and there are many indications that it was — then the message was clear: India hadn’t been shining, it had been hurting.

The news took the world by storm, as everyone in the print media and broadcasting scrambled to understand what none of them had been able to predict. Exit polls had indicated important strides by Congress, but no one had ventured it would end up being a trouncing. Finally, with the results announced and beyond dispute, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, grand daughter-in-law of Jawaharlal Nehru, emerged to the celebratory glare of a nation that had just proved its point. Relaxed, happy, anointed, right hand serenely raised in gracious acknowledgement, she could’ve been mistaken for a statue of liberty standing in Bombay harbour like a beacon, welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses to a new India.

Adjectives poured forth to best capture the essence of the election result. The one that has stuck is “stunning.” It is an apt descriptor when you consider what a compelling case Vajpayee had made for re-election, with solid advances in infrastructure and economy, and the very real possibility of a genuine peace with Pakistan. But so much had been staked on India Shining, and in the end it proved to be just smoke and mirrors. The problem with India Shining was that rooted in consumerism, exclusivity and concentration of wealth, it held meaning for only a few. There were also undertones of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu supremacy, which obviously alienated the religious minorities but must also have been rather off-putting for Hindus born into the lower castes.

Perhaps the greatest thing to emerge from all this was the greatness of Indian democracy. “You can’t buy the Indian people,” observed Vinod Mehta in a recent editorial in Outlook India, which really cuts to the heart of the matter. With an electorate of 671 million and a voter turnout round 55 per cent, this was a determination of the will of the people that the whole world can learn from. Bangalore-based Ramachandra Guha, India’s noted historian and author, says that while there may be less freedom of information and more corruption in Indian democracy compared with the United States, it is certainly less chauvinistic. “We now have a president and a prime minister who both belong to minority communities, which is as if America had a black president and a Muslim vice-president. When will that happen?” he asked dryly.

The contrast with Pakistan is self-evident; the problem is where to begin. Suffice it to say that while nearly 400 million were casting and getting their votes counted in India, in Karachi we struggled to keep the peace in a local by-election.

Hindu hardliners are bound to feel that their party lost because it had started to scale back some of its extremism. Indeed, Vajpayee had tried to shift the BJP towards the centre in many respects, including acceptance of outsiders into the fold and dismantling of the traditional hawkish stance towards Pakistan. In the buildup to these elections, BJP had even tried to court the Muslim vote (albeit with questionable credibility). The more parsimonious interpretation, however, is that the shift towards the centre was neither believable, nor did it go far enough. One can’t help feeling that BJP and Hindutva must feel to India’s Muslims what at one time Aurangzeb and his extremism must have felt to India’s Hindus. The larger point is that it is difficult to sustain extremism in a vast and multidimensional land as India; indeed, it may well be impossible. Aurangzeb tried, but only succeeded in fatally weakening the Mughal empire. With the 2004 defeat, the BJP too has been weakened, one hopes fatally, because it is a threat to India’s secular ideals.

The defeat of the BJP was a rejection of Hindutva as well. Even a zealot like Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, abettor if not perpetrator of Gujarat’s communal carnage, was unable to shepherd his party through. Congress registered a 100pc gain in seats from Gujarat, right under Modi’s nose. Newspapers reported he was avoiding the media. The BJP now finds itself trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea: the politics of the centre which cannot motivate the party faithful, and the politics of extremism which cannot attract the people of India.

Undoubtedly, there have been other factors at play. A confounding factor whose precise importance is difficult to gauge is the issue of anti-incumbency, which holds that the Congress victory represents simply a rejection of the status quo — not on the merits of the case, but just because it is the status quo and everyone wants a change. Udita Jhunjhunwala, entertainment editor at India’s Mid Day newspaper, suggests that local factors were also important. “There were many, like myself, who voted at the constituency level, without thinking about implications at the centre,” she says.

Many commentators have also pointed to the youth factor. With half the voting public under the age of 30, this was the youngest electorate in India’s democratic history, and of the two major parties, Congress fielded the younger candidates. Youth preferred youth, and the result is before us. It is difficult to say, however, if the youth factor had a significant impact because youth may also be associated with pluralism and secular values, which confounds the analysis. Mumbai journalist Faisal Shariff, an editor with the popular Indian web site Rediff.com, points to yet another factor — overconfidence and arrogance. “Even before the race began, the BJP had declared themselves winners. In a democracy, nothing is more criminal than taking the electorate for granted,” he observes.

Possibly the mother of all factors was that the Gandhi family was also back in the game in a big way. Nehru may have once waxed eloquent about a tryst with destiny, but a more notable tryst has been India’s recurring rendezvous with his descendants. The talk is no longer of their star quality but of their god-like status. Cynics may attribute it to a serf mentality, but you could also say that the Indian people know a good deal when they see one. Motilal, the family patriarch once wrote in a letter to his son Jawaharlal Nehru: “I look upon you, my dear son, as the man who will build upon the foundations I have laid and have the satisfaction of seeing a noble structure of renown rearing up its head to the skies.”

Jawaharlal, at the time just a schoolboy at Harrow, became India’s first Prime Minister and legendary leader, fulfilling his father’s dream as if in a fable. In the process, India got the sincerest and ablest of leaders from 1947 through 1964, and a series of prime ministers from future generations in the bargain — Nehru’s daughter Indira (Gandhi was her married name, no relation to the Mahatma) and Indira’s son, Rajiv.

Waiting in the wings are Rajiv and Sonia’s son Rahul, 33, who has just been elected to Parliament from the family stronghold of Amethi in UP, and their daughter Priyanka, who actively campaigned on the Congress platform but did not contest a seat. Priyanka may have sat out the elections, but her gift of charisma is not in dispute. She recently made a splash in Karachi when she came over for the India-Pakistan One-Day International in March, and her presence in the city was palpable for the duration of her stay.

With the party in free fall during the 1990s, Congress’s wise men had turned to Rajiv’s widow, Sonia. An Italian-born woman whom Rajiv met during student days in Cambridge, she was an unlikely presence on India’s national stage. Analysts said she would keep the seat warm for Rahul and Priyanka, who were yet to come of age, but Mrs Gandhi herself proved greatly adept at the political craft and led her party to eventually force out the BJP. With the 2004 election result, she emerged as the people’s choice for prime minister.

There was, however, a sting in the tail for the people of India, and it kept the democratic overthrow of India Shining just short of being perfect. As Sonia Gandhi contemplated leading India, the Bombay stock market crashed and the BJP went berserk protesting her suitability to govern. Questions of acceptability and ability surrounded her prime ministership. These were non-issues for the masses who had voted her party in, but they stuck in the throats of hardliners and capitalists incensed at the popular verdict. There were also suggestions that Mrs Gandhi had received death threats credible enough to frighten her and her children. All this was enough for her to pass on the offer of becoming the Prime Minister of India. The nation, indeed the world, was incredulous.

It may have been a heart-breaking gesture for the Indian people and specially for her own party, but it is also being hailed as a political master-stroke. Her hand-picked replacement, Manmohan Singh, a doctor of Economics and loyal party elder belonging to the Sikh community, is an acceptable and able choice who will govern on her behalf. Mrs Gandhi remains the parliamentary leader of the Congress and, combined with her increasing iconic celebrity, this means she will enjoy all the powers of leadership without the risk of being muddied. Meanwhile, Dr Singh, the real father of India’s economic reforms predating the BJP, has smoothed the ruffled feathers of the influential moneyed elite.

And what of peace with Pakistan? It has been said that only a trenchant conservative like Vajpayee had the implicit authority for negotiating with Pakistan. In the post-election climate, any peace overtures towards Pakistan from India’s first minority prime minister may be seen as undeserving concessions going too far. This may hamstring the Congress-led government, as peace is now a crucial imperative on both sides of the border. But there is also a great deal favouring Dr Singh’s chances of delivering peace. Everyone genuinely wants it, and there is already diplomatic momentum and significant international pressure. And besides, Vajpayee has already visited Minar-i-Pakistan and tried to rest the demons that have haunted his generation. Mrs Gandhi had been mercifully free from that baggage, but so too Dr Manmohan Singh, who hails from lands now in Pakistan and belongs to what has at times been a persecuted minority in India.

Uniquely, fate has now placed a Pakistan-born leader in India to complement the Indian-born leader of Pakistan, which promises a more novel diplomatic chemistry yet. The conclusion seems inescapable: India’s 2004 General Elections is good for peace, good for India, good for Pakistan, and good for the world.

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