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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters BJP's potpourri
By Dominic ColdwellIndian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee recently said that apart from writing poetry, he enjoyed cooking in his free time. As if in response to these comments, a spokesperson for Sonia Gandhi's Congress Party in West Bengal, remarked that Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) "is selling something which gives indigestion to the people."
But, ironically, Congress now has to stomach its own losses in the recently concluded parliamentary polls which have returned Vajpayee's electoral bloc of two dozen regional parties -- the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) -- to office with 297 seats in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament. The Congress Party and its allies only bagged 134 seats, watching helplessly as the share of non-aligned groupings rose to 104 seats.
Gandhi's defeat comes despite heavy losses by the BJP in Uttar Pradesh (UP) -- the state which sends the largest number of delegates to the Lok Sabha. Although Vajpayee won nearly two-thirds of all UP votes in last year's general elections, the BJP now lost nearly half its seats.
But in the end, such serendipities were only a mild tonic to Gandhi's flagging electoral fortunes. Chandra Babu Naidu of the regional Telugu Desam Party, a BJP ally in Andhra Pradesh, confounded all predictions of electoral doom and made a strong finish. Nor was Congress able to hold on to the unexpected gains it scored in November's elections to state assemblies in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In the country's second most populous state of Bihar, Congress has not even produced a candidate. Its ally Laloo Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), who had embarked on a scheme for sharing seats with Congress, suffered equally heavy losses owing to mismanagement and corruption charges.
So has the flamboyant former actress Jayalalitha Jayaram of the regional All India Anna Dravida Munetra Khazagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu, whose defection from Vajpayee's coalition brought down the national government on 17 April.
But the secession of Congress bigwig Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra has probably wrought most havoc on Gandhi's prime ministerial aspirations. Pawar recently broke away from Congress and formed the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), saying that Gandhi was unfit to lead the country as a naturalised citizen. Pawar's defection has damaged Gandhi not least because it split the opposition against the BJP. Only one year ago, Congress had milked Maharashtra for its largest share of parliamentary votes.
If Vajpayee has been able to cook up an electoral success story, this is largely because he has curried favour with regional parties. It is true that the recent war against Pakistani-backed insurgents in Kashmir has earned the prime minister approval from India's urban middle classes. But as Gandhi has not tired of pointing out, Vajpayee was unable to prevent the incursion of Kashmiri separatists in the first place.
Even so, nationalist sentiment just barely affected the polls. The urban middle classes, which represent only one fifth of the entire population, have hardly turned up in droves to queue at the polling booths. Instead, India's rural poor -- largely concerned with issues of employment, clean water, and better roads -- have recorded considerably higher rates of voter turn-out, pushing regional issues and the performance of their state governments to the fore. Thus, according to South Asia analyst Ayesha Jalal of Harvard University, "the BJP and its regional allies would have won the elections even without Kargil".
But since Vajpayee's "domestic achievements are rather more threadbare," Jalal maintains that, "the BJP has been able to register its bid to be a viable 'nationalist' alternative to the Congress only by forging the right sort of regional alliances -- ones which make far more practical sense than the hubris-imbued ones made by the Sonia Congress. The BJP may be the largest party in the Indian contemporary scene today. But the size of India makes certain that its policies... represent only one spectrum of the opinion in India."
Thus, for all its talk of unifying the country, the BJP has failed to satisfy India's restive minorities. In Bihar, 50 people have been killed in recent violence by Naxalite (Maoist) rebels fighting wealthy landowners. Leftist rebels from the People's War Group (PWG) have also called for a boycott of the elections in Andhra Pradesh. In Kashmir, citizens were reportedly forced to vote at gun-point, while separatists from the Hizbul Mujahedin, the Lashkar-e Toyeba, and the Harkat al-Mujahedin have claimed responsibility for various explosions and shootings. There have also been bombings by separatists in Nagaland, while a BJP candidate was recently killed by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).
Despite Vajpayee's attempts to portray the BJP as a national party, the movement's support bases moreover are limited to only six regions, mainly in the Hindi-speaking centre of India. BJP candidates have only been competing for 330 of the 543 parliamentary seats, leaving the rest to regional partners with whom the party has entered vote-sharing arrangements. As a result, the NDA's success actually disguises the fact that the BJP has now gained a smaller share of seats than last year.
In addition, the BJP's approval ratings have also been skewed by the absence of qualified majority voting. Although the BJP has held 182 seats in the outgoing Lok Sabha, it had only received around 25 per cent of the popular vote -- roughly the same amount as the Congress with 141 seats last year. A recent survey by India Today also found that only 11 per cent of those voting for Vajpayee would do so because they actually support the BJP.
But not only voters are fickle supporters. At least nominally, the ideologies of Vajpayee's coalition partners are in several cases diametrically opposed to those of the BJP. Thus, the BJP, which largely represents an upper-caste Hindu constituency, has forged a strategic alliance with the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal, which counts a significant number of Muslim followers. The NDA also includes many left-wing parties which are likely to gnash their teeth at Vajpayee's liberalisation programmes.
In Haryana, a BJP ally who swept the state has already asked the government to reverse an increase in diesel prices, which Vajpayee quietly authorised just after the polls closed in order to reduce the costs of a billowing subsidy.
In the end, however, lack of ideological cohesion will probably matter less. According to Jalal, the NDA is especially prone to the "blackmailing, and the ultimate willingness [of regional partners] to change alliances". With local leaders increasingly gaining access to state power by means of short-term, opportunistic loyalties, there seems to be little hope of improving the lot of India's 300 million people living in absolute poverty.
Vajpayee has recently chalked out an ambitious nuclear policy to provide subcontinental 'safety' at the cost of $16 million -- a recipe that will drain the country's foreign exchange reserves at the expense of developmental spending. That this might impose further hardships on India's poor does not seem to bother the prime minister unduly. In his extensive anthology of poetry, Vajpayee mentions destitution only once, when he chances upon "filth and poverty" in New York.
For someone so well versed in the art of cooking, it is perhaps rather telling to look abroad for a definition of hunger and privation.
