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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Saffron swing
By Gamal NkrumahSaturday's penultimate round of polling for India's Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) drew relatively little international media attention despite being part of the world's largest general election. Voting began on 5 September and is scheduled to be completed by 3 October, and what is emerging is that India has a complex political structure that is in the midst of an uncertain transition. Crucial choices are also being made by the Indian people.
After three elections in four years, Indians are suffering from election fatigue and long for a stable government capable of lasting a full five-year term. Although voter turnout was slightly down in the first two phases, by its conclusion some 600 million people will have voted in all. The 543-seat Lok Sabha is no rubber stamp parliament and the world needs to pay it due attention.
The election was waged on new 24-hour TV news channels, and buying influence has become endemic. The parties' campaigns revealed deep fracture lines between the different ideological strands within Indian politics.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has headed the coalition government of the past 18 months, is expected to tighten its saffron-tinted grip on the Indian political scene. Saffron, of course, is the symbolic colour of Hinduism in much the same way as green denotes Islam. Hardcore Hindutva (Hindu fundamentalists) supporters are becoming ever more vociferous, and nationalism is a force to reckon with. The proliferation of caste-based and regional parties is fast changing the face of Indian politics.
While the process comes close to the democratic ideal, the personalities embroiled in dirty politicking fall far short of the Mahatma Gandhi-Jawaharal Nehru model. India's politicians of today lack the dignified bearing of those of the immediate post-independence period. They lack vision and purpose. They are a garrulous, unscrupulous and unprincipled lot. Few have proposed credible solutions to India's intractable problems of illiteracy, malnutrition, poverty and pollution. India's infrastructure is in tatters. They trade insults, and call each other traitors. India's third-rate politicians have cheated their country of the advantages of an ideal democratic system.
India, not surprisingly, is a country not at ease with itself. Many Indians feel that the country has wasted vast resources on the elections. Some 7,000 tons of paper were used for ballot papers. Increasingly Indians are asking what the elections are for, especially the 400 million poor (40 per cent of the population) whose exercising of their democratic rights has not prevented them from getting poorer. Establishing a country that is at ease with itself inevitably requires some redistribution of wealth.
In 1985 the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi publicly stated that only 14 per cent of funds destined for rural development actually found their way to peasants. The rest, he explained, was pocketed by corrupt politicians and officials. Sonia Gandhi, his widow and a political novice, today charges Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP-led National Democratic Alliance with corruption. India's major political parties gloss over their own contradictions, and this strategy of see no evil, hear no evil may backfire badly on the politicians.
Without the polarity of the Cold War or Non-Alignment, India is searching for a new place in international affairs. A tenth of mankind has voted, but India has no permanent seat at the UN Security Council. Soon, India will overtake China as the world's most populous country, but China has far more presence in the international arena. India is forever caught up in a parochial war of nerves with Pakistan; a war that belittles India.
One of the most worrying aspects of Indian politics today is that few politicians speak about development concerns, the economy or employment. Vajpayee's speeches focus on India's victory in skirmishes with Pakistan over Kashmir. His main rival, the Congress Party's Sonia Gandhi, lashes out at Vajpayee and his BJP for failure to check the covert operations of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in 13 Indian states. In a scathing attack on the BJP leadership, Gandhi decried the hypocrisy of the BJP government which she said imported sugar from Pakistan even at the height of tensions over Kargil -- the Kashmiri outpost stormed by separatist infiltrators from Pakistan and held until recaptured by the Indian army earlier this summer.
Moreover, politics has become intensely personal. And no personality has been more maligned than Italian-born Sonia Gandhi. She has come out of the dark into the unforgiving glare of public scrutiny. Arun Nehru, Rajiv's own cousin, is now a leading BJP stalwart. BJP leader Pramod Mahajan warned that his party would reserve high-office posts for Indian-born politicians. Sonia Gandhi countered saying that that would be unconstitutional.
"They cry over the 400 killed in Kargil. What about the 1,157 soldiers who died in Sri Lanka in a bid to get one man the Nobel Prize," Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes said on Sunday referring to Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi respectively.
India needs to face up to the nasty side of nationalism. Not only nationality and nationalism, but caste too, are today the main instruments of identity assertion. Caste loyalties are hardening. Issues of cultural identity are coming to the fore, pushing developmental concerns to the background. The Anthropological Survey of India identifies 4,635 distinct religious communities and castes. And, new alignments between castes are forming, giving rise to strange political acronyms -- KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim), DYM (Dalit, Muslim, Yadav), MAMULI (Marawi, Muslim, Lingayat).
Development has become the sole prerogative of foreign-funded, English-speaking NGOs who oppose everything from nuclear power to hydroelectric schemes. Food security, health care and education are no longer deemed important political issues. The emotive issues of caste, religion and cultural identity are all the rage. Political debates for and against caste-based quotas in education and the workplace are increasingly becoming heated discussions.
Change requires the realignment of political forces. India's Muslims no longer back the Congress Party. They form 12 per cent of India's population, but the splitting up of the Muslim vote has cost Congress a great deal. "Muslim rulers destroyed 3,000 [Hindu] temples," warned the notoriously anti-Muslim Professor Rajendra Singh, better known as Rajju Bhaiyya in Uttar Pradesh's (UP) capital Lucknow recently. "We are not asking for 3,000 temples. Just three -- Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya -- will satisfy Hindu Society," he explained. His widely-publicised remarks prompted a Muslim uproar. Rajju Bhaiyya also happens to head the shady extremist Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS has been quite openly working for the Hindunisation of India's educational system and society at large. Ominously, the populist professor extolled Vajpayee.
According to most opinion polls, Vajpayee stands poised to win the election. If he wins a landslide, he will have a stronger base to push through aggressive nationalistic policies. But a smaller than expected victory will be a warning sign that Kargil or not, there is a limit to how much horse-trading the Indian electorate can stomach.
"Either the poor will survive or the rich. This is not an election but war," declared Laloo Prasad Yadav the self-styled populist messiah of the poor and Janata Party leader currently facing corruption charges. His wife, Rarbi Devi, the chief minister of Bihar, India's poorest and second most populous state, recently remarked angrily: "If [Vajpayee] is prime minister, I am chief minister. He is going to lose his job soon but I am going to be here for long," she said. Janata was once chief ally of the BJP.
The split in the Congress Party with Sharad Pawar, Tariq Anwar and P A Sangma forming the National Congress Party over the issue of Sonia Gandhi's national origins has worked in the BJP's favour.
Much has changed in Indian politics, but certain things still remain the same. Only in India would a cabinet minister, Fernandes, wash his own clothes and fly economy class.
"My government was brought down by one vote," caretaker premier Vajpayee told a rally in UP in reference to the coalition's defeat in a vote of confidence in April. "I beg you," he pleaded, "use your one vote to put me back." Nowhere else in the Third World would a leading politician use such deferential language.
In Bihar over 1,000 fake election booths were seized from district officials. In UP -- India's most populous state and if independent the world's sixth most populous country -- politicians promote caste and communal rivalries to consolidate their support. It is represented by 85 of the 543 elected parliamentary seats, and two-thirds of them are currently held by the BJP after Congress was routed in the last elections. Bihar and UP are at the very heart of north India's Hindu belt -- strongly influenced by Hindutva and caste politics. This is where the saffron scourge is at its most dangerous.
