Page 1 of 2 The script goes out the window
By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - It's part of electoral lore that the people of India - that is, its
voting public, spread across a landmass geographically, culturally and
economically as diverse as chalk is from cheese - never fail to throw up a
surprise.
It is, perhaps, because an element of the unexpected is built into the system
that these elections generate so much excitement and lend themselves to such
ethnic festivity and mystique. Every time, in these five-yearly guessing games,
the voters invariably and unfailingly end up embarrassing the political pundits
and the know-it-alls.
In 2004, just about everyone - from foreign governments to local media houses -
had bet their bottom dollar on the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) returning. Even its foes were resigned to the "fact".
The canny
electorate proved the predictions utterly wrong by not re-electing the NDA.
In 2009, amid a global economic recession, they have done the same by
emphatically voting back an incumbent government - the Congress-led United
Progressive Alliance (UPA). Something they have not done in 38 years, never
after India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Not even the charismatic Indira Gandhi, with her huge following among the rural
masses, could extract this from them. Her only repeat mandate was won directly
after the victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan that led to the creation of
Bangladesh.
In many subtle and not-very-obvious ways, we are indeed witnessing history.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - bookish, quietly sincere and almost reticent
(unless, as we discovered in the past few weeks, he is provoked) - defies all
definitions of the quintessential Indian politician. He's the very antithesis
of a US President Barack Obama-like charismatic figure, and does not even
contest the Lok Sabha (Lower House) elections, preferring the remote Upper
House or the House of Elders.
But, despite the Gandhi family feelings being openly floated in a media
all-too-ready to genuflect now, Manmohan Singh's incumbency is crucial to the
government being voted back into power.
The vast swathes of India's hinterland - where the masses are not always
attributed with literacy, political or otherwise, by their urban counterparts -
have exercised a shrewd judgement as always. (Even in the revolutionary
elections of 1977, the first national non-Congress vote, it is their vote that
mattered.) This time, uniquely, even the urban vote has matched theirs - all
the major cities have unequivocally voted Congress.
The unattached individual voter, caught at the moment of casting his or her
vote, is indeed a very lonely creature. He or she has no real inkling about
where other people - millions of other people - are going to vote. It's in the
aggregated graph of their individual actions, if it really forms a coherent
pattern, that we can trace a common map for the inner, psychological desires of
a nation.
And this time, despite the sometimes frightening diversity that India can hold
within itself, and in the face of two decades of politics that celebrated that
diversity, there is a coherent pattern.
They have voted back to power Manmohan Singh. For pundits, he was a man whose
primary claim to fame was his credentials as a neo-liberal economist who as
finance minister authored India's economic liberalization in the early 1990s.
And, following what his then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao started,
completed the re-orientation of its foreign policy in the past five years,
bringing it closer to the US axis.
For the voter, he might just have been the comforting avuncular figure who's
particularly good to have around whenever there's a mini-crisis.
And, sure enough, there is crisis for the asking. The Indian sub-continent
resembles a ring of fire. Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal are all in
turmoil, in various stages of implosion. In that context, the Indian voter
seems to have subconsciously gone for a sane, stable, centrist and
well-anchored political dispensation.
This means that, in a sort of post-modern polity characterized by fragmentation
and dominated by the emergence of regional parties, they went for the
old-fashioned security of a national party.
The Congress-led UPA is at 262 seats, still 10 short of the half-way point, the
simple majority figure of 272 in a House of 545, with two nominated seats.
(They'll easily make up the deficit with a few small parties and independents.)
But the thing to ponder over is that the UPA got about 80 more seats than what
even its most ardent well-wishers expected, and more than 60 of the additional
seats (distributed all over India) came courtesy of the Congress - a truly
astounding figure in a political map carved up into ever-so-many little caste
and regional fiefdoms in the last two decades.
These are decades in which, despite being in government or influencing power
except in the BJP years of 1998-2004, the Congress had come to be recognized as
an effete political entity, well past its sell-by date, and on the wrong side
of history. Its grassroots units were moribund, indolent little cesspools of
corruption.
It had also ceded turf on a big scale - falling off the map from the
"heartland" states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar - and been subject to rebellion
from upstart local grandees who floated their own regional parties. The
Nationalist Congress Party of Maharashtra leader Sharad Pawar - which extracts
a heavy price for being part of the UPA - is an example. The Trinamool Congress
of Bengal, which has just returned to the UPA fold after a decade of grazing on
the BJP side of the political meadow, is another.
But the 2009 poll has put a stop to, even reversed, some of that historical
process of unraveling. The Congress has won a positive national verdict after
decades. In 1984, it had won a huge majority but that was on account of a
sympathy wave after the Indira Gandhi assassination. The relatively more modest
gains it has made now - trumping an amorphous coalition of regional outfits led
by the left, with no clarity on who would head it, and a right wing BJP still
unwilling to give up its anti-minority underpinnings - is all the more valuable
because it has come for authentic political reasons and in the face of a
strong, entrenched opposition.
The BJP's highly personalized slander campaign, which attacked Manmohan Singh
as the "weakest prime minister ever" - in other words calling him a puppet in
the hands of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi - clearly backfired. For a man
alleged to be singularly lacking in charisma and unsuited to the
presidential-style duel the BJP wished for, Manmohan actually seemed to be a
national factor - the voter preferring his quiet, sage-like style to the
overblown grandiosity of its leader, L K Advani.
The BJP's attempt to resurrect the old Bofors gun deal scandal (for which Rajiv
Gandhi lost power in 1989) came to nothing - the last-minute letting off of
controversial Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, close to the Gandhi
family till the 1980s, was evidently an issue too dated for the electorate.
Their other two planks - Indian black money held in secret Swiss bank accounts,
and their repeated demand for the hanging of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted
for being part of the conspiracy in the December 2001 attack on the Indian
parliament - dramatic as they were, did not quite resonate with a fatigued,
cynical electorate neck-deep in their own personal woes thanks to the strained
economy.
Besides, the Indian electorate is now predominantly young - 70% in the 18-35
age group - and they are naturally going to be less encumbered by the history
of Indian politics and more concerned with the future.
This is where Manmohan Singh was complemented well by the other success of this
election. The young scion of the Nehru dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, tapped into this
constituency by leading a charmingly straight-forward, if not naive, campaign
that had none of the labored twists of seasoned political speechmaking.
Outside the party, he was generally derided as a dynastic liability: a shy
legatee of sub-par intelligence, whose education and charisma would weigh down
the royal house. But Rahul Gandhi clicked with the common man, especially the
young. The droves that came to see the "Dimpled Prince" saw an earnest
do-gooder who was desperately trying break out of a political mould, the same
way he routinely broke the security cordon to reach out and mingle with them.
Charmed and conquered by the charisma, or maybe really convinced by his
down-to-earth formulations, they went back and voted for the Congress. Wherever
he campaigned, figures show the Congress has a 100% strike rate.
It might be simplistic to say his statements - "I do not see people in
categories of religion or caste, for me every one of you is an Indian. Just as
I am an Indian" - worked on a people tired of the casteist and communal
politics of the past two decades. But it wouldn't be altogether false,
especially since such politics came with a fair share of bloodletting.
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