CHAPTER 2 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
‘I assure the people that I will provide a government based on the rule of law, justice, free from fear and the mafia. I thank the upper-caste voters who supported us.’
Mayawati, leader of the BSP, on her election victory in Uttar Pradesh on 11 May 2007
IN MID-MAY 2007, Uttar Pradesh caught Indian politics by surprise. For the first time ever, elections in India’s largest state, long considered the weather vane of national politics, returned a thumping majority to a party that champions the interests of Dalits, the lower-caste group sometimes called untouchables. Led by the remarkable teacher-turned-politican Mayawati, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had broken through the traditional pattern of coalitions for the first time to secure an overall majority in Uttar Pradesh’s state parliament.
It remains to be seen how far this will translate into national politics over the next few years. But, with 113 million voters, Uttar Pradesh is a huge state with an electorate three times the size of that of the UK, so it is a significant result. Moreover, it is, many political observers feel, a sign of the dramatic shifting in India’s political landscape over the last decade. In some ways, it is the first sign that India’s less privileged classes are beginning to realise the power of democracy to genuinely change their lives.
An end to coalitions?
To achieve her majority, Mayawati had to ally her power-base of support amongst the Dalit with the upper-caste Brahmin voters. Traditionally, Indian voters have voted along caste lines. There is an old joke that people in India do not cast their votes, but vote their castes. One of the results of this is that votes are divided among a huge range of parties, many of whom have no overriding political vision but simply champion their exclusive caste interests. This is one reason why coalitions have been the order of the day in both state and national government, and why long-term reform programmes are a rarity. Mayawati has been chief minister of Uttar Pradesh before, but only in coalition.
So although the vote has given India’s vast underclass a chance to participate in the democratic process, and Dalits have undoubtedly made dramatic progress in recent years, the government of India has remained in the hands of the political (and social) elite and, maybe, endemic corruption. The lesson of the Uttar Pradesh election is that by putting aside caste differences to concentrate on issues that affect all, such as price increases and social and economic development, the BSP (and other parties) might achieve real political power to change things.
CORRUPTION
For Indians, government corruption has long been the norm. Over two thousand years ago, Kautilya, in his famous Machiavellian treatise on politicking, the Arthashastra, said ‘Just as it is impossible to know when a swimming fish is drinking water, so it is impossible to find out when a government servant is stealing money.’ Some estimates suggest that on every government project in India you can expect at least a quarter to simply vanish. Rajiv Gandhi, a big critic of corruption in government, estimated that 85 per of all development spending was siphoned off by bureaucrats. Even when government officials are not pocketing the money directly, which they often are, they are taking backhanders to award contracts to particular businesses.
Indeed, corruption is so endemic that government officials who do not line their pockets are sometimes seen as naive. In Kerala, apparently, honest officials are said to be pavangal, which not only means highly moral but also gullible. Someone who is adept at paying bribes is buddhi, which means they have the judgement of an adult, not a child. There is a kind of acceptance of the inevitability of corruption among the powerful in India. There is a famous Indian joke version of Einstein’s equation about mass and energy, which goes M + D = C, Monopoly plus Discretion equals Corruption. Just as Indians are happy to haggle in supermarkets, so when it comes to government, everything is negotiable.
One of the ways this works is by keeping many of the disadvantaged just on the wrong side of legal. That way, they have to pay the police or government officials sweeteners to avoid prosecution. In New Delhi, for instance, there are estimated to be about 500,000 bicycle rickshaw drivers, yet there are less than 100,000 permits to operate a rickshaw available. Rather than raising the number of permits available, the local government simply accepts that 400,000 rickshaw drivers will pay regular bribes to the police to keep out of trouble. Similarly, the city’s 600,000 street traders operate illegally, since they are, according to critics, occupying public space for free. But the business carries on because the police, rather than preventing them trading, simply accept a monthly sweetener of about 1,000 rupees (about £12) – which is pretty much one-third of the trader’s scanty earnings. Every now and then, just to keep them in line, the police will swoop and ‘confiscate’ their stock.
One of the more shocking things about corruption in India is that it is often the worst off who are the principal victims. Because of the acute poverty in India, there are generous subsidies available to help those on the bottom of the pile. Free food, for instance, is available for those who are registered as BPL (Below Poverty Line). Yet in some states such as poverty-stricken Bihar, up to 80 per cent of the food is simply siphoned off before it even reaches the distribution points. What makes it worse is that, according to a government survey, 40 per cent of those who are registered BPL got on the list by bribery. So maybe a huge proportion of all subsidised food never reaches the distribution points, and a huge proportion of the food that does is claimed by those who have no right to do so.
In his book In Spite of the Gods, Edward Lucie explains how hard it is for those trying to root out corruption to do so when it goes right to the heart of the system. Police for instance often despair of bringing known criminals to justice when the legal system is corrupt and clogged up with a backlog of cases. The result is that to deal with the worst criminals, they sometimes resort to ‘encounters’ in which the police ‘accidentally’ shoot the suspect. Although not officially condoned, such encounter killings are apparently an accepted part of the system.
The degree to which corruption is accepted in India is shown by the high number of elected politicians who have criminal convictions pending – or are ex-convicts. Yet despite this, there are many Indian government officials who are as straight and incorruptible as any anywhere in the world, and there is no doubt that evidence of corruption is a vote loser. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power by painting a picture of corruption in Congress – and lost it partly because of the exposure of their own corruption (see here). Indeed, more and more Indian politicians are genuinely determined to get rid of corruption, not just for moral reasons and because it gives India a bad image in the world, but because it could be holding the country back.
In a report published in June 2007, consultants Ernst and Young pointed out how corruption might make it hard for India to realise its massive infrastructure update, an update everyone acknowledges is vital for the future prosperity of the country. The improvements depend on private, as well as public, funding and that funding is unlikely to be forthcoming if it is felt that much of it will be purloined. ‘Corruption in India has made international financing for infrastructure hard to come by,’ says the report. ‘Without it [the finance), India’s infrastructure will remain stuck in the previous era.’
Congress and the Gandhis
For the vast majority of India’s sixty years of independence, the government of India has been in the hands of the Congress Party. The Indian National Congress was formed in 1885 to campaign for Indians to be treated equally by the British administration, and was turned by Mahatma Gandhi into a mass movement for independence. But since 1947, it has been seen essentially as the party of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, it developed into, seemingly, the natural party of government in India. Such was Nehru’s extraordinary influence that his offspring have dominated the Congress party, and Indian politics, ever since. In the 1980s, author Salman Rushdie described the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty as a ‘dynasty to beat Dynasty in a Delhi to rival Dallas’.
When Nehru died in 1964, his daughter Indira soon followed him as prime minister, and bestrode Indian politics with dictatorial tenacity for twenty years. When she was assassinated in 1984, his grandson, Indira’s eldest son, Rajiv became prime minister. After he too was assassinated in 1991, the Congress party begged his Italian widow Sonia to take over the reins. She resisted the pressure until 1998, by which time the Congress party had slipped into opposition with a catastrophic defeat to the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After six years in the wilderness, Congress swept back into power in 2004. Surprisingly, Sonia Gandhi resisted the temptation to become prime minister, throwing the Indian stock markets into temporary panic, and then appointed the mild-mannered Manmohan Singh in her place. But both Singh and many other political pundits predict that Sonia’s son Rahul will become prime minister in the not too distant future, and her daughter Priyanka may even play a part.
The Uttar Pradesh election, however, may be a sign that the Gandhis’ time at the top of Indian politics may be coming to an end. Rahul Gandhi was in Uttar Pradesh campaigning furiously at the last minute for the Congress party, but even his presence could not halt the BSP victory.
Indian parliament
At a national level, the institutions of the Indian government are, perhaps not surprisingly, very similar to those of Britain, and the anglophile Nehru played a large part in establishing their form. India is a republic with a president, of course, unlike monarchical Britain, but it is the prime minister, currently Manmohan Singh, leader of the largest party in parliament, who effectively runs the country just as Britain’s prime minister does.
Like Britain, too, the parliament has two houses: a lower house, the Lok Sabha, and an upper house, the Rajya Sabha. The Lok Sabha has about 545 members, elected in British-style first-past-the-post constituency votes, and the Rajya Sabha, with 250 members, mostly elected by the assemblies of the 29 states, but including 12 ‘nominated’ members chosen by the president for their expertise in the arts, sciences and social services. The Lok Sabha is the more powerful of the two since it precedes the Rajya Sabha, and can overrule it when they meet in joint session by sheer weight of numbers. India is also a federal country, like the USA. Each of the states has its own its assembly, and can make its own laws, but the centre has much more control than in the USA, since Indian states have no power to print or borrow money.
Congress in decline
For the first two decades of independence, regional and national elections always took place at the same time, and the national Congress party relied heavily on local leaders to mobilise regional ‘vote banks’. Indian voters tend to vote by community loyalty rather than individual choice, and vote banks are mass blocs of votes delivered by particular communities. For delivering the vote banks, local leaders, of course, expect to be duly rewarded. But then Indira Gandhi decided to break free from these regional ties, which were often deeply conservative in nature. In 1971, she went over the local leaders’ heads to call a purely national election early and stunned them by winning a landslide victory by campaigning on broad national issues with the slogan Garibi Hatao (Abolish Poverty), which few people could disagree with but actually came to mean very little.
THE SCALE OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY
Every time India has a general election, it sets a record as the biggest exercise in democracy the world has ever seen. In the 2004 elections, 380 million people – about 56 per cent of India’s 675 million registered voters – voted at 700,000 polling booths across the country, using 1.25 million electronic voting machines. These vast swathes of voters had 5,398 candidates and 220 political parties from which to choose. They voted in 538 constituencies – each with an average of over a million voters, which means a city the size of Liverpool would be represented by just a single MP.
Although Mrs Gandhi’s Congress had won, the party’s organisation was split irredeemably, and has never really recovered, while the link between national and regional elections was broken. More significantly, perhaps, the careful nurturing of loyalties between elections that had characterised the early years was replaced by national elections, which became big, theatrical events that punctuated the political landscape spasmodically. As the economy ran into deep trouble with mass food shortages, politics was no longer seen as responsive in any way. In the face of nationwide protests, strikes and riots, Mrs Gandhi suspended elections and gave herself dictatorial powers.
Indians strike back
Ironically, Mrs Gandhi’s attempt to centralise power did more than anything to make ordinary Indians aware of their democratic power. Deprived of the careful continuous nurturing of their interests, voters became aware that it was elections that really counted. Participation in both regional and national elections began to climb, and elections, once relatively sedate affairs, became bitterly combative. The combative nature of elections went hand-in-hand with increasingly violent conflicts between different interest groups.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, parties representing particular social, cultural and religious groups began to make their presence more and more powerfully felt. The BJP championed Hindu nationalism; the Lok Dal was linked to caste and class; the BSP to the Dalits; the Akali Dal to religious separatism and so on. The national parliament elected in 1996 contained 28 different parties, while at the same time regional politicians such as Bihar’s colourful chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav began to assume more prominence. As the Congress party’s dominance began to wane, so Indian politics became the battleground of countless factional and local interests.
Hindu power
Out of these parties it was the BJP that made the most impact. A coalition with V.P. Singh, a renegade from Congress, brought them into government in 1989. But the coalition began to splinter when Singh announced a plan to help Dalits and other so-called ‘Backward’ castes by reserving 60 per cent of civil service jobs for them – upsetting the BJP who to start with drew their support mostly from the upper castes. The breaking point, though, turned out to be the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya, which has remained a flashpoint of Indian politics, nationalism and religion ever since.
In October 1990, L.K. Advani, the BJP president, donned a saffron robe, climbed aboard a golden chariot and led a cavalcade of ardent Hindu nationalists to destroy the sixteenth-century Muslim mosque at Ayodhya. The mosque, they claimed, stood not just on the site of an ancient Hindu temple razed by Muslims in 1528 but also on the birthplace of Lord Ram, the mythical hero of the Ramayana. En route, the police intervened and Advani was arrested. The BJP immediately withdrew from the coalition, bringing down V.P. Singh.
THE RSS
Few people outside India have heard of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), yet it is one of the world’s largest political movements, with perhaps up to six million members, and many people feel the BJP is simply the mouthpiece of the RSS. It was founded in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar, and is dedicated to the promotion of Hinduism not just as a religion but as a manifestation of Indian nationhood. Its proclaimed purpose is ‘serving the nation and its people in the form of God – Bharata Mata (Mother India) and protecting the interests of Hindus in India’. These words sound harmless enough, but the RSS believes that it needs to create a form of Hinduism that is more ‘muscular’. India, the Hindu nation, has, the RSS believe, allowed Islam and Christianity to dominate it because Hinduism has been too ‘effeminate’ and disunified. Only by creating a Hinduism that is as strong, manly and as unified as Islam and Christianity, as they see it, will the Hindu nation prevail.
The RSS has been likened to the fascists of the 1930s, and it has been banned in India three times when the government considered it a threat to the survival of the state – once in 1948 after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist, once in 1975 during the Emergency under Indira Gandhi, and once in 1992 after the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque. Like the fascist movements of the 1930s, the RSS promotes many scientific theories that seem to indicate the superiority of Hindu culture – and the wonderful benefits of cows. Like the fascists of the past, tens of thousands of young RSS members rise at dawn every day across the country to don khaki and black uniforms for martial training sessions in groups called shakhas. The intensity of purpose of this training varies from shakha to shakha, but in the RSS’s offshoot the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, or World Council of Hinduism) it is deadly serious. Through its youth wing the Bajrang Dal, the VHP provides the muscle for anti-Muslim riots. Apparently some three to four hundred thousand young Indians have been trained by the Bajrang Dal in the lethal use of swords, airguns and the Indian baton called a lathi. Most RSS members, however, operate through more established channels, and express their views in a more measured fashion.
After a series of crisis meetings, Advani took back his resignation and was welcomed back into the party, but stepped down as party president a few months later – only to step up his campaign for the next premiership.
It was during the ensuing election campaign that Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. But the emotions aroused by the Ayodhya mosque boosted support for the BJP massively. The BJP (Bharat Janata (people’s) Party) is the political face of a vast movement that equates Indian identity with Hinduism. They rose to prominence on a wave of militant Hindu nationalism, which seems to skate over the fact that India has long been home to Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists. Their central creed is Hindutwa (‘Hindu-ness’) in all aspects of national life.
PROFILE: L.K. ADVANI
After Atal [Vajpayee] it’s only Advani; Advani is the natural choice. He should be PM.
BJP president Rajnath Singh, 2 May 2007
It was Lal Krishna Advani who in 1980 founded the BJP with Vajpayee, and as Vajpayee slips into the background after his 2004 election defeat, it is Advani who is coming to the fore, and is tipped as the next BJP prime minister. BJP president Rajnath Singh believes he is the ‘bridegroom’ who will bring the ‘bride’ to Delhi in the 2009 elections. It seems not to matter that by then Advani will be 82. But Advani may also face opposition from the RSS who want him to stand aside to make way for younger leaders.
It seems ironic that the RSS should have turned on Advani. Advani was an ardent supporter of the RSS as a young man, and he was the driving force behind the campaign to demolish the mosque in Ayodhya and build a Hindu temple there – an ideal of the RSS. But he upset a lot of people when he visited the tomb of Pakistan’s first governor-general Mohammad ali Jinnah and apparently praised him for his support of the secular state. Hindu nationalists were outraged, and Advani was forced to resign as BJP president. This was doubly ironic since Advani had been accused of involvement in the plot to assassinate Jinnah in 1947. Indeed, a criminal case against him is still pending, though the Pakistani government has said it has no intention of indicting him at the moment.
India erupts
Interestingly, the BJP’s campaign for the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya coincided with the running of a massive serialised TV dramatisation of the great epics of ancient India – the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. These long-running series caught the mood of the nation perfectly, and a pride in Indian heritage – in particular a pride in Hindu heritage – swept the country. Hindu nationalism, which had previously been a primarily upper-caste movement, began to seep through all the castes.
Congress regained power in the early 1990s, and Prime Minister Rao presided over the loosening of the ‘Licence Raj’ (see here) to stave off the country’s economic difficulties. But the BJP in opposition were gaining confidence, and in 1992 their supporters once more stormed the Ayodhya mosque. This time, the police could not or would not stand in their way. The mosque was demolished, and when bombs went off in Mumbai, supposedly a gesture of Muslim retaliation, it unleashed a ghastly wave of riots and even massacres against Muslims across the country, especially in Mumbai and Gujarat.
It began to seem as if the twin planks of Nehru’s Indian democracy – non-violence and the idea of a secular state – were disintegrating. Rao held on to power for the Congress party through the early 1990s, but the party was torn apart by factionalism, and rocked by accusations of corruption. Finally, the groundswell of disillusion with Congress at regional level made itself felt at the national level, too. At the 1996 elections, the BJP emerged as the largest single party and tried, for the first time, to form a government. They were briefly outmanoeuvred by the United Front who joined forces with a splinter group from Congress to form a coalition government, but the 1998 elections brought the BJP to power at the head of a right-wing coalition.
Vajpayee takes charge
BJP prime minister Atal Vajpayee had swept to government on a pledge to restore India’s national pride. Within weeks, India had detonated its first nuclear weapons in Rajasthan, and not long after performed its first missile test. Pakistan immediately responded with its own tests, but if India was divided about Ayodhya, it was bursting with national pride over its nuclear coming of age. Indeed, the sense of nuclear patriotism was so strident that the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy was warned to check that her taxes were paid and her papers in order before she spoke out against the tests, which she did with some force, declaring them an act of betrayal by India’s ruling class over its people whose interests where forgotten in this nuclear jamboree.
Thoroughly shaken by the turn of events, Sonia Gandhi agreed to become leader of the Congress party. But tensions with Pakistan over Kashmir were reaching their height (see here) and in the 1999 elections, the BJP inflicted on Congress its biggest ever defeat. As Vajpayee returned to power at the head of a BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, it seemed as if the days of the old political dynasty were at an end – especially as the emerging middle classes booted out almost half the sitting MPs, exasperated with corruption and long failure to do anything for the provision of basic services.
PROFILE: ATAL BEHARI VAJPAYEE
Although he was already almost 80, no one quite expected the BJP’s elder veteran campaigner Atal Behari Vajpayee to retire from politics in 2005 as he did. After all, it was barely a year since he completed six years as prime minister at the head of the BJP government, the first significant non-Congress government in India’s history. Although he had lost heavily, and surprisingly, in the 2004 election, he was in some ways a reassuring figure. His six years in office had taken some of the fear factor out of the BJP in government. There had been problems, but the economy sailed through, and he had even managed to see off the worst crisis with Pakistan with India’s pride intact – and no war.
An intellectual figure who writes poetry, Vajpayee started to train as a lawyer but dropped out of law school to run the RSS magazine in the 1950s. Yet although he was a committed RSS member, he was always one of the moderating voices within the movement, and even Jawaharlal Nehru once tipped him as a man to watch – though it took a little longer for Vajpayee to make his mark than even Nehru expected. Interestingly, as prime minister, Vajpayee tried to appeal to Muslims as well as Hindus despite the BJP’s generally antagonistic stance towards Muslims – and this is one reason why his premiership did not hold the terrors that some feared. Indeed, when he called the election in 2004, he had genuinely expected to be re-elected and secure his position as the first leader to seriously challenge the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Sadly, for him it was not to be, and he has decided to slip away into the political shadows, to concentrate on his cooking and poetry and contemplate what might have been.
The elements strike back
Yet the next couple of years saw India hit by a string of terrible natural disasters. First a massive cyclone devastated Orissa. Next summer, record May temperatures following the third successive failure of the monsoon brought drought to Rajasthan and Gujarat. When the 2000 monsoon finally arrived, it barely helped the drought regions, but drenched areas of Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh with rain so intense that 12 million people were driven from their homes by floods. Then finally, on 26 January 2001, Gujarat was rocked by a giant earthquake. Both the international aid agencies and the Indian people criticised the government for its failures in dealing with these disasters.
Meanwhile, corruption scandals were hitting the BJP government. One of their big selling points was that they were going to sweep away all the corruption of the Congress era. So it was a big blow to their standing when the BJP succumbed to the same problems. The worst moment was when journalists from the investigative website Tehelka.com posed as arms dealers and succeeded in bribing defence minister George Fernandes, as well as various other members of the government. Fernandes was actually caught on camera stuffing wads of cash into his desk. Millions of Indians witnessed it before Tehelka were closed down by the government (they are now up and working again).
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the BJP took a hands-off approach when tensions flared over Ayodhya again in 2002. Early that year, Hindu militants had been arriving at Ayodhya in force to campaign for the rebuilding of a Hindu temple to Ram on the site of the demolished mosque. Reports say that their taunts had inflamed Muslim railway workers at Godhra where the train stopped on the way to Ayodhya. On 27 February, 58 Hindu train passengers were burned to death in a carriage at Godhra. A government inquiry failed to reach a conclusion about the cause of the fire, but eyewitnesses insisted that a rowdy mob of Muslims were there when the fire started.
THE HINDU HORSE
In every country, history is politics, but nowhere has this been truer than India in recent years. Over the last century, archaeologists have revealed that India was home to one of the world’s most ancient and advanced civilisations, once known as the Indus valley people, and now usually known as the Harappan culture. The Harappans built sophisticated cities, but mysteriously vanished some four thousand years ago leaving few traces of their culture but their ruined cities behind. At about the same time, or maybe a little later, horse-riding, Aryan-speaking people moved into northern India, some say peacefully, some say by conquest, and over the centuries spread around the subcontinent. Soon after came the golden age of early Indian literature, the Vedic period, which gave rise to the revered Hindu poems of the Vedas, and the great epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Hindu supremacists, however, have been keen to show that the Aryans did not migrate to India, but spread from there to the rest of the world and that India was therefore the sole cradle of world civilization, long predating the Greeks. For this to be true, the Harappans must have been Aryans too, and so under the BJP government school textbooks were revised to show this slant, even though it had no support from academics. Textbooks also claimed that there was new evidence showing that the Harappans were horse-riders, so must have been Aryans. The ‘evidence’ was to be found in the pictures of a horse on one of the famous Harappan seals. No one seemed to care that in 2000, Michael Witzel, Harvard Professor of Sanskrit, showed that the seal was clearly a recent forgery. The textbooks were not revised, and Indian schoolchildren went on learning, erroneously, that before Muslims arrived, Hindus lived in peace and contentment for thousands of years.
The Hindu myth even penetrated higher education, where the BJP’s minister of education Murli Manohar Joshi introduced courses in Vedic maths and science at Indian universities, perpetuating the idea that all maths and science originated in the Vedic period. These courses are still running, and the Hindu golden age textbooks are still being used in Indian schools.
The horrors of Gujarat
With apparently little regard for the consequences, Gujarat’s BJP chief minister Narendra Modi arranged for a mass funeral in Ahmedabad for the victims of the train fire. The funeral turned into a mass assault on Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. The rioters needed little encouragement, but they got it. Asked to comment, Modi merely misquoted Newton: ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Hundreds of Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered as Hindu rioters dragged them from their homes – often in front of TV cameras. Mobs swarmed round as women were stripped and raped, then had kerosene poured down their throats before being set alight along with their children – in ‘fitting retribution’ for the burning of the Godhra train passengers.
One particularly disturbing aspect of this reign of terror was how the rioters managed to obtain electoral registers to pinpoint their Muslim targets. Another was how the police stood by and watched – sometimes even, allegedly, shepherding Muslims into the hands of the rioters. Even the national government stood aside and let the carnage happen. When challenged later, Prime Minister Vajpayee put the blame back on the Muslims, ‘Let us not forget how the whole thing started. Who lit the fire? … Wherever in the world Muslims live, they tend not to live peacefully with others.’
As a result of the Gujarat riots of 2002, over two hundred thousand people were made homeless and were forced into refugee camps. But the government did almost nothing for them. Nearly all the help came from the Islamiya Relief Committee, a charity run by relatively hardline Sunni Muslims – and, not surprisingly, many young Gujarat Muslims, who are predominantly Shia and previously little interested in politics, have become radicalised.
Although the BJP might have benefited in some ways from this terrible moment of ‘Hindu pride’, perhaps the fervour, bloodshed and nationalist drumbeating was too much after all for the ordinary Indian. Moreover, India’s growing prosperity seemed to benefit only the elite who formed the core of the BJP’s support. In 2004, with the economy booming and peace talks with Pakistan over Kashmir on track, Vajpayee decided to call an election, expecting to sweep back to power on the basis of the slogan, ‘India Shining’. Yet, in a dramatic turnaround, Indians turned back to the reassuring face of Congress. Congress was returned as easily the largest party in the Lok Sabha and Sonia Gandhi was invited to form a government.
Sonia stands back
To everyone’s shock, in a ‘Hindulike’ act of renunciation, Sonia Gandhi turned the premiership down, saying that she had been advised by her ‘inner voice’. Perhaps, too, she was aware that as an Italian, her position would never be quite tenable. BJP supporters had insisted they would take to the streets in protest if a foreigner was to lead the country. Following her announcement, the Indian stock market crashed as badly as at any time in its history, and only recovered when Sonia Gandhi appointed Manmohan Singh as prime minister, and he became the first Sikh ever to lead the country.
Since his election in 2004, Singh has proved a remarkably stablilising influence. He is almost uniquely free of the taint of corruption. Perhaps as a Sikh, too, he is not expected to have allegiances to either Muslim or Hindu, and under him Congress have done their best to quell religious tensions. Moreover, his quiet demeanour goes hand in hand with a reputation for financial competence. It was Singh, after all, who was the architect of the breakdown of the ‘Licence Raj’ in 1991, which has stimulated India’s boom. He is, remarkably, seen as genuinely attentive to the needs of the poor, and has pushed forward debt relief and social-welfare programmes, and shown awareness of the need to create jobs for ordinary Indians in the country’s boom economy, as well as the IT elite.
But Singh was already 72 when he came to power in 2004, and it remains to be seen whether he will have the energy and staying power to remain effective for much longer. Moreover, the rise of Dalit politicians such as Mayawati and the disrupting influence of regional tensions are beginning to erode the power of Congress and the central Indian government. The future of Congress may depend on just how quickly and effectively India’s growing wealth spreads to the country’s vast army of poor and underprivileged people, who surely won’t be prepared to wait for ever for their time at the table.
PROFILE: MANMOHAN SINGH
‘It is nice to be a statesman, but in order to be a statesman in a democracy, you first have to win elections.’
Thus admitted Manmohan Singh soon after he became prime minister in 2004, acutely aware that he is one of India’s few leaders not to have been elected democratically, and so someone who has never really had to deal with the cut and thrust of electioneering. Maybe, some people say, that is just why the quiet man of Indian politics has proved such a stablising influence.
Born in 1932 in Gah, Punjab (now in Pakistan), Manmohan Singh was educated, like many bright and privileged Indians, at Cambridge and Oxford, and found the academic standards there inspiring. He later talked about the privilege of being taught by such eminent economists as Joan Robinson and Maurice Dobb.
After Oxbridge, he became an economist by profession, and before he entered Indian politics, he earned himself a substantial reputation in international financial bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the Asia Development Bank. In the late 1980s, he became governor of India’s Reserve Bank, and was a natural choice to serve as finance minister in Narasimha Rao’s government in 1991, although he later said he was very surprised to be asked. Many of his friends were convinced he had been asked to enter politics simply to become a scapegoat for India’s economic ills. In fact, his entry into politics was something of a triumph.
It was as finance minister that Singh introduced the wave of financial liberalisations that has earned him the reputation as India’s architect of economic reform. He has admitted a huge admiration for Margaret Thatcher, and his driving of India towards a free-market economy is in part inspired by her. But unlike Margaret Thatcher, Manmohan Singh does not seem to believe that the markets alone can solve all ills. He believes, like Mrs Thatcher, in ‘getting government out of activities where governments are not very efficient at doing things’, but he also believes in ‘getting government more actively involved where we feel markets alone cannot provide the necessary goods that our people need – basic education, basic, health care, environmental protection measures, basic social safety needs’. And he has been as good as his word, with his National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme – even though its effectiveness has yet to be proved.
Under Singh’s premiership, the Indian economy has grown faster than ever before. Massive investments are seeing India’s infrastructure finally improve. Tensions between religious and regional factions in India have shown some signs of simmering down. And on the international stage, India has emerged as a respected player, most notably with the nuclear deal with the USA (see here). But there are plenty of clouds on the horizon, and coalitions within Indian politics have proved to be notoriously fragile over the past few decades, so Singh’s future success is far from guaranteed.
TWO-PARTY SYSTEM?
On 10 May, 2007, Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam declared, ‘Many challenges need to be responded to; the emergence of multi-party coalitions as a regular form of government that needs to rapidly evolve as a stable, two-party system’. Many people have seen the proliferation of parties in Indian politics and the continual need for parties to form coalitions as a problem that needs to be overcome. They see the, effectively, two-party system in the UK and long for the simplicity of a single election that gives one or other party a clear mandate to take decisions and govern, rather than negotiate and plot. When most of the parties joined together to form just two alliances to fight the 2004 elections, many commentators felt that India was at last moving towards rational, two-party politics. On the one side was the winning, Congress-led, centre-left United Progressive Alliance (UPA). On the other was the losing BJP-led right-wing National Democratic Alliances (NDA). It is only matter of time, people feel, before these two alliances coalesce to form single parties.
However, many political analysts feel that far from moving towards a two-party system, the Indian political scene is actually becoming more and more fragmented. Leading academic Yogendra Yadav, who coordinated the largest ever academic surveys of the Indian electorate, says, ‘Those who believe India is moving towards a two- party system are indulging in wishful thinking’. It’s easy to think of a bipolar scene with Congress the focus on one side and the BJP the focus on the other. In fact, support for both the major parties has dwindled dramatically in recent years. In the 2004 elections, Congress and BJP combined won only just over half the seats in the Lok Sabha. In government, even the UPA cannot govern by itself but has to rely on the support of the Communist and other left-wing parties, while the BSP’s achievement of a majority in the May 2007 Uttar Pradesh elections shows how flimsy the Congress–BJP stand-off really is. Interestingly, many commentators, such as Yadav, feel this is actually no bad thing. He believes that those who want India to become a two-party system like the USA and UK have a ‘narrow and mistaken view of the working of western democracies and should instead look at other countries like France, Germany and Italy which have had coalition governments for many years’. Back in the UK, Scotland, of course, is just beginning to experience the same.
Allies of the Congress party
As Congress’s domination of Indian politics has declined in recent years, so it has been forced to rely on other parties as coalition partners, heading the grouping known as the United Progesssive Alliance (UPA).
The National Congress Party or NCP was formed in May 1999, when three leading Congress politicians – Sharad Pawar, P.A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar – broke away in protest at the party’s adoption of a foreigner, Sonia Gandhi, as their leader. The trio took a lot of Congress support with them to their new party, but they’ve never done quite as well as they hoped, and within a few years they had formed an alliance with Congress, while Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation of the premiership made their differences almost irrelevant.
The DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) is the dominant party in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and holds all 39 seats here. The party was formed in 1949 to champion Tamil interests – and in particular to campaign against the imposition of northern Hindu culture and the Hindi language. Surprisingly, then, the DMK joined the BJP to fight the 1998 elections but now it sees that its interests lie more with Congress, and it has become a key ally to Manmohan Singh’s government.
Led by Lalu Prasad Yadav, one of India’s most colourful politicians, the Rashtriya Janata Dal is one of the country’s leading socialist parties. It has a particularly strong base of support among the lower castes and Muslims, especially in Bihar, which is one of India’s poorest states.
Allies of the BJP
Like the Congress party, the BJP relies heavily on its links with other parties but these are constantly shifting, as new alliances are forged and old ones allowed to melt away. In government, and for the 2004 elections, it headed the grouping known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
The Janata Dal or United People’s party is one of the various offshoots of the breakaway Congress party formed by V.P. Singh in 1989 – and held power briefly with the BJP’s support until the split over the Ayodhya mosque. The breach was mended in time for the Janata Dal to form a key role in Vajpayee’s NDA government of 1999. But it is a socialist party, with a strong power base in Bihar – not one of the BJP’s natural constituencies – so the alliance may not last.
The Telugu Desam party is based in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where its charismatic leader Chandrababu Naidu played a key part in turning Hyderabad into one of India’s IT powerhouses. But despite Naidu’s success in kick-starting Hyderabad’s economic boom, he and his party suffered badly at the 2004 elections after neglecting key local issues.
Shiv Sena is India’s extreme right-wing party, led by Bal Thackeray, who is characterised by India Today magazine as the country’s leading villain. It’s India’s equivalent of the British National Party, but with a violent edge. Its support is focused in Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai, where it gained notoriety for its intimidation of southern Indian ‘outsiders’ working as clerks or in small restaurants who, they said, were depriving native Maharashtrans of their livelihoods.
The AIADMK is a Tamil Nadu-based party formed in a breakaway in 1972 from the DMK. Led by the unpredictable ex-film star Jayalalitha, it has been the spark to many a political fire. But Jayalalitha is not the force she once was, and the BJP may decide the coalition is not worth the effort in future.
The Akali Dal is one of the main Sikh parties, with a history dating back to 1920. It has a strong power base in Punjab, where some more radical party members campaigned for the creation of an independent Sikh state in the early 1980s.
Non-allied parties
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), led by the charismatic Mayawati, has massive support among the Dalits of Uttar Pradesh, and is now making strong headway by uniting Dalit interests with the upper caste. At the moment it is essentially a regional party, but it may soon become an influential national player.
The Samajwadi party was formed in 1992 in a breakaway from V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal. Like the BSP, it has a strong power base in Uttar Pradesh, especially among lower-caste Hindus and Muslims, but it is losing ground to the BSP.
Communist and left-wing parties won 61 seats between them at the 2004 elections, so are a significant force in Indian politics. Indeed, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) is the third largest single party in the current parliament after Congress and the BJP with 43 seats. Other significant parties include the Communist Party of India (CPI), the All India Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist party. Although they are traditionally anti-establishment, and so anti- Congress, these left-wing parties have recognised the dangers of Hindu nationalism and the BJP and so are now more inclined to join with Congress.