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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Like Coke and Pepsi
By Dominic ColdwellSonia is running. Sweat is running. Sushma is running. And India's politicians are running out of any creativity that might help them tackle the country's gargantuan problems.
Two weeks ago, Sonia Gandhi, the prime ministerial hopeful of the Indian National Congress (INC), announced that she would contest her seat for the country's upcoming parliamentary ballot from Bellary in Tamil Nadu. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee promptly fielded the viperous Sushma Smaraj to evict Gandhi from the constituency that Congress has ruled uninterruptedly since 1947.
Since then, Smaraj has savagely pitted Gandhi's position as the Italian-born desi beti (the foreign daughter-in-law) of India's late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi against her own credentials as a videshi bahu -- a homegrown Indian daughter.
Vajpayee, however, has urged Smaraj to tone down her jingoism, partly because his prospects for re-election are so secure that he no longer needs to depend on striking below the belt-line.
A recent poll predicts that Vajpayee's National Democratic Alliance (NDA) of two dozen regional and socialist parties will win 42.5 per cent of the popular vote. The BJP alone is likely to bag 216 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of parliament, while the INC is expected to gain no more than 122. Similarly, 51 per cent of voters prefer Vajpayee as prime minister, whereas only 35 per cent named Gandhi as their candidate of choice.
The figures may come as a surprise considering that Gandhi trounced the BJP in last November's elections to the state assemblies of New Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. In April, she also forced a no-confidence vote in the Lok Sabha, which Vajpayee lost by one straw after Gandhi coaxed Jayaram Jayalalitha of the regional All India Anna Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) to side with Congress and pave the way for the upcoming midterm elections only thirteen months after Vajpayee's coalition had taken office.
But the eviction of Pakistani-backed Kashmiri separatists from the Kargil area this summer has won the prime minister wide-spread support. His party is also benefiting from a desire for political stability, as the INC is widely blamed for bringing down India's third national government in as many years.
But if Vajpayee has been urging Smaraj to soften her language, this is also because the BJP is also trying to slough off its image as an extremist Hindu group and project itself as a mainstream conservative party.
To a large extent, Vajpayee has already succeeded. Although prominent BJP politicians have been associated with the violence that accompanied plans to raze a sixteenth mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodhya to the ground in 1992, a recent survey found that 14 per cent of the country's 150 million Muslims might vote for the BJP in the coming polls -- more than twice the tally recorded in the last elections of March 1998.
If the BJP has become more acceptable, this is also because of the joint platform forged with a sundry host of socialist and regional parties. Coalition partners have pressured Vajpayee into dropping from the joint electoral manifesto demands for the creation of a uniform civil code, which Muslims fear would replace the Islamic shari'a with Hindu laws. Although the BJP draws mostly on an upper-caste Hindu constituency, Vajpayee has recently also curried favour with lower-caste Hindus by calling for the introduction of quotas for the impoverished Jat farmers in Rajasthan.
By appealing to the centrist voter, the BJP may thus become the first non-Congress party to be elected on a favourable vote at the national level. The INC has ruled India for 45 of its 52 post-colonial years and only ceded power when voters rejected its leadership in the elections of 1977, 1989, 1996, and 1998.
To prevent such a defeat, Sonia Gandhi has ironically been appealing to Hindu sentiments in her speeches. With both parties angling their opponents' voters, columnist Pritish Nandy has recently suggested that the election "is like choosing between Pepsi and Coke... Both [parties] stand for the same thing... each brand assumes a specific persona for its marketing convenience in a particular environment."
Nandy might have added that soft drinks rarely quench thirst because economic opportunities for India's poor might also dry up regardless of which party wins.
It is true that inflation has fallen to 5.2 per cent of GDP for the first time in a decade. In recent months, there has also been a record output of agricultural production.
But the Kashmir imbroglio this summer has raised pressures for increased military spending. Vajpayee's government has already debated levying a special "Kargil tax". Experts believe that the prime minister will raise dues after his re-election. Most observers also expect defence expenditure to climb from 2.5 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent.
Government spending for non-development purposes has already risen by 28.48 per cent since December 1998 at the expense of development expenditure.
Vajpayee is milking the development budget because of fiscal austerity measures. Plans to reduce the government deficit to 4 per cent of GDP this year mean that the BJP will have to lay off workers in state-owned companies. The Steel Authority of India will already slash 40 per cent of its 174,700-strong workforce over the next five years.
At the same time, the government faces what Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha has recently labelled the "internal debt trap" of interest payments which swallows 50 per cent of government revenues.
But since India recently replaced China as the world's most populous nation, food shortages are expected to grow for the third of India's population that lives below the poverty line. According to INC spokesman Kapil Sibal, "logic demands that more [food] production should mean lower prices, but the exact opposite is the case". In January, Vajpayee fixed prices at 2.50 rupees per kilo of wheat and 3.50 rupees per kilo of rice for those living below the poverty line. But since the BJP government has also set a ceiling of 10kg for purchasing subsidised food, "the poor will have to buy food-grains at market rates" to compensate for the deficiency, says Sibal. Costs here hover around 7.0 rupees per kilo of wheat and 9.55 rupees per kilo of rice. A recent spate of suicides by bankrupt farmers in Andhra Pradesh might thus be an ominous indication of things to come.
However, Vajpayee's ballooning military budget might ironically be the only guarantor of stability if political and economic tensions spiral out of control. While the prime minister has shepherded 24 regional and socialist parties under the NDA's electoral umbrella, these oppose the BJP's pan-Hindu ideology tooth and nail.
But even if the fragile coalition holds, the director of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Kirit Parekh, believes that the BJP might split into a moderate faction headed by the prime minister and a more radical Hindu wing under the thumb of the extremist Hindu movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Despite growing Muslim acceptance of the BJP, Congress politicians claim that RSS followers have quietly taken over administrative posts and revised the secular curricula in schools "with the support of the state" since last year.
Nor has the issue of Ayodhya been resolved. Congress politicians have recently accused the government of indulging in "triple-speak" after a BJP spokesman said that "Ayodhya [was] a closed chapter". The party's Secretary-General Lal Krishna Advani then announced that plans for the destruction of the mosque had been put into cold storage for at least five years, while the leadership of the BJP-fringe group Ramjanmabhooni trumpeted its intention to construct a Hindu temple on the site.
Such ambiguity has nourished fears of a 'Hinduisation' campaign. But if India's Hindi-speaking heartland imposes its norms on the subcontinent's linguistic, cultural and religious minorities, separatist sentiment is likely to grow. Vajpayee has tried to present himself as a unifying force, crowing that "the entire country was free from communal tension" during the Kargil crisis. But his boasts are already wearing thin.
Representatives of the All Parties' Hurriyat Conference (APHC) in Jammu and Kashmir have called for a boycott of the coming elections. The government has meanwhile arrested Muslim cleric Umar Farooq and APHC Chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Members of the Kashmiri Hizbul Mujahideen have also promised reprisals against the ballot's organisers.
At the same time, the Indian army has threatened to suspend a two-year-old 'cease-fire' with tribal guerrillas fighting for an independent Nagaland after three militant leaders were killed by a rival faction. Since the 'armistice' was signed in August 1997, 314 militants have lost their lives. Meanwhile, police have seized explosives from Sikh separatists in the Punjab, raising the spectre of renewed tensions. In West Bengal and Assam, security forces also confiscated bombs.
These developments are an outgrowth of the centralisation campaign headed by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. Before her assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984, Gandhi actually tolerated the rise to power of radical Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the hope of destabilising Punjab's moderate Akali Dal government which had upset Gandhi's plans for control of the regional assembly. In the early 1970s, Gandhi first wrested from state assemblies the right to appoint state chief ministers and subsequently dismissed several state parliaments. However, encroachment by the central government closed the arena of official politics to opposition forces, which have often resorted to violence to make their voices heard.
None of these issues have yet been shelved. While the INC's current manifesto glibly advocates a "strong centre, strong states and strong panchayats [local governments]," the NDA's programme chalks out "devolution of more financial and administrative functions to the states". But neither alliance has yet proposed striking Article 356 of India's constitution -- frequently used to dismiss state governments.
According to the enironmentalist Suresh Heblikar, "all parties talk about giving stable governments, as if stability in itself was a great virtue...To most governments stability is just another opportunity to loot the place."
The one state that has resolved the dilemma of devolution at a local level is Kerala. Boasting India's highest literacy and the country's lowest fertility rates, the communist stronghold has granted far-ranging financial and administrative powers to the panchayats and municipalities, which, in the words of Chief Minister E K Nayana "perform their role not only as units of self-government but also as agents for local planning and development".
Vajpayee meanwhile seems occupied with loftier concerns. During the campaign, he released a tape of his poetry written when he was "travelling by rail or in jail". However, the prime minister has said that he is currently suffering from writers' block, since train rides and prison terms are no longer an option for a statesman. Perhaps, there would be some poetic justice if Vajpayee awoke to India's real problems after the elections.
