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At the time of Independence Mahatma Gandhi suggested that the Indian National Congress, which he had successfully led till then, should be disbanded. As its function had been to produce a coalition towards achieving independence from British rule, its historical role was over. This was an entirely logical yet an entirely un-practical suggestion. Politicians active inside the Congress wished, not unnaturally, to turn their sacrifices into potential investments in an independent state. Independence was accompanied by Partition which degenerated into riots and massacre of civilians. There was no other political organization except the Congress to establish effective government. In any case, Congress was too successful a political organization to be dissolved purely by the power of argument. The Congress, therefore, turned from an independence movement into a governing party, a difficult transformation under all circumstances, and flourished. The historical significance of the eleventh general elections in India after Independence represents the actual realization of Gandhi's suggestion. India must now find a political structure which can function without the overwhelming presence of the Congress, a party universally reviled but, ironically, treated as indispensable.
What happened in these elections must be seen thus in the context of the place Congress has occupied in Indian democratic politics, both in the long and the short term. After Independence Congress went through three phases of political evolution. In the first twenty years, under Jawaharlal Nehru, it enjoyed a secure if unspectacular dominance in Indian politics. Nehru's three election victories were never, considering his stature, of the utterly spectacular kind that Indira Gandhi achieved later. Congress never won a majority of votes.1 Yet due to the system of winning by pluralities, it always won quite comfortably, both at the centre and in nearly all the states. Its electoral dominance in the political system was so overwhelming that opposition parties were forced to seek influence by forming coalitions with groups inside the Congress sharing their ideological or economic predilections.2 Congress victories across the spectrum were an important element in India's democratic governance in the Nehru era. Nehru recognized the irreducibility of India's regional and social diversity and, in line with earlier Congress tradition, considered it proper that the political structure should allow this to be expressed rather than smothered. Accordingly, although in many respects India established a typical nation-state, its constitution sanctioned a distinctive two-tier nationalism which encouraged its citizens to be both Tamils/Bengalis/Gujaratis and Indians. Indeed, it was believed that there was no way of being an Indian pure and simple, without going through one of these identities.
Generally, Nehru's practical politics showed his belief that if state governments were strong, and handled state political problems with effectiveness, the result was a strong centre. The central government would then be relatively untroubled by regional political issues about which it knew less than the state politicians. This avoided a tendency towards centralization, although formally India appeared to be under the uncontested control of a single unassailable political party. The Congress Party was indispensable precisely because, due to its dominance, major issues of regional conflicts and their settlement were handled and solved inside the Congress. Congress, it was sometimes argued, ruled India well precisely because it was internally diverse, like India. A better way of putting it would be to recognize that there was a duality in the nature of the Congress system: it was, at one level, rule by a single political party; but, in fact, inside, it was a coalition. Plural interests could seek and receive attention within it precisely because of its ideologically heterogeneous character; yet, the fact that these negotiations took place inside the institutional boundaries of a single party meant that the conflict of interests rarely exploded into overt political violence, or that the bitterness and disappointments they generated went out of control. Congress, because of its sociological diversity and the coalitional nature of its internal politics, developed a culture of negotiation and non-extremism. When interests were represented to its bodies, these were usually recognized, and promises made to further them; but this was rarely done with the decisiveness or total commitment characteristic of parties that were composed of single or more homogeneous interests. Congress thus followed characteristically moderate, unradical policies which irritated opinion at the two ends of the political spectrum, but left the bulk in the middle in a state of moderate contentment. From the early decades of the century it developed strong ties with the business community, yet it also expressed mild propensities towards reform and at least a formal obligation for distributive justice. It always sought support from the peasantry and working-class groups, promised them redistributive policies, yet never at the expense of expropriation of the propertied classes. Thus these social groups could provide Congress with support mixed always with a minor dissatisfaction at its lukewarmness about what they considered the evident justice of their sectional interest.
Indira Gandhi, when she entrenched herself in power after splitting the party in 1969, altered some of the basic features of this system of coalitional and negotiated democracy inside the Congress Party. Soon after she came to power, Congress fared badly in the fourth general elections in 1967, losing control over a large number of North Indian states. But she brought Congress back to power dramatically in 1971, with an unprecedented two-thirds majority in the central parliament.3 This historical instance is of some significance, as it shows Congress's peculiar ability to come back to power from seemingly hopeless situations, a feat she repeated in 1980.4 However, the manner in which this victory was achieved, which installed Indira Gandhi in a position of unchallenged supremacy in Indian politics, altered the character of Indian democratic politics. She froze and stifled internal democracy inside Congress. Elections were never held for the state levels of the Congress organization; leaders were nominated from the centre. She appeared to think, since the initial challenge to her power had come from powerful state bosses inside the party, that the relation between state and central governments must always be a zero-sum game, irrespective of whether the state government was run by her own party or the opposition. In the more intense electoral contests during the 1970s and early 1980s, she often used an appeal to the sense of vulnerability of minorities wherever possible—Hindus in the states of Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, Muslims who constituted a large and highly sensitive minority in Uttar Pradesh.
This strategy subtly but fatally altered the Congress claim to secularism. From a party under Nehru which would never use communal appeals for electoral advantage, it turned into one which used such appeals to all communities. Since it received support from all communities, it could hardly be called the party of anyone. But its electoral appeals and subsequent policies invited voters to look upon themselves in terms of their religious identities. This was obviously a dangerous game. The Congress, because of its historical legacies and internal character, could only use such appeals up to a point; others could use this in more extreme forms. That precisely happened in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh in varying ways in the last decade.
The Congress Party did not lose its internal complexity and suppleness entirely under Indira Gandhi, but its internal hardening, decline in democracy, and increasingly divisive uses of electoral politics gave rise to widespread resentment in different regions. Indira Gandhi believed that the single solution to India's problems was centralization of power—inside the Congress, in its central leadership, ultimately in her own personal coterie. In parallel, in the federal system, power was to be concentrated in the centre. Yet, this seemed to run up against a historical trend in Indian democracy. One long-term effect of democratic mobilization was the entry and increased assertion of lower social groups in electoral politics. Since their cognitive horizons, the context in terms of which they thought about their own place in politics and their own interests, were limited and local, this led to a powerful surge for regional parties from the 1970s. Mrs Gandhi misread this development completely and sought to counter it with more frenetic centralization. In the 1970s and 1980s, the political system began to face new and more intransigent challenges from regional movements in Punjab, Assam, and later Kashmir. As she ran out of negotiative options in these political confrontations, the policy of centralization, when driven to desperation, always degenerated into the use of armed force. By the time Indira Gandhi was assassinated, the traditional Nehruvian Congress system—based on accommodation, negotiation, compromise—was in irreversible crisis.
The short rule of Rajiv Gandhi did nothing to reverse the trends of conflict. In some ways, his combination of inexperience and managerial arrogance, his ‘modernist’ contempt for the unpicturesque fixers of the old Congress system, helped exacerbate the crisis. His modernist rhetoric did not stop his administration from negotiating deals which aroused suspicion of large-scale bribery and corruption, and the systematic obstruction to legal inquiries did not dispel these doubts. Rajiv Gandhi also continued his mother's strategy of balancing one illegitimate concession to a sectarian demand by conceding another equally illegitimate. His concession to the most reactionary elements in the Muslim community in the Shah Bano case was ‘balanced’ in his short-sighted view by a concession to Hindu fundamentalists in the crisis over the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. In the last phase, after the inconclusive general elections of 1991, India was ruled increasingly insecurely by a minority Congress government, under Narasimha Rao, which survived on support from some opposition parties.
However, there were some surprising features about the recently voted-out government of Narasimha Rao. Newspaper reports express admiration about his undying instinct for political survival. He came from a section of the Congress leadership which was put in the shade by the dynastic rule of Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv. As a result, some believed, when Rao came to power, that he might try to revive the earlier Nehruvian rules of party functioning and restore comparative rectitude in financial matters. These expectations were most rudely dispelled. Congress was riven by internal factionalism after Rajiv Gandhi's death, and a continuing devotion to the principles of dynastic rule by an elite which saw itself as modernist. Indeed, their simultaneous devotion to techniques of modern management and medieval monarchy is one of the great unsolved puzzles of modern Indian politics. Since Rao always felt threatened by powerful internal factions inside the Congress, his early enthusiasm for principles of open government and party democracy soon declined. Internal democratic elections within the Congress Party could provide entrenched and legitimized positions to some of his rivals. Corruption charges mounted and came too close for comfort, with Rao and his son implicated in some of the largest financial scams. There was considerable scepticism at first that his government would last its full term. In the event, he carried on successfully for an entire term of parliament with a minority government, which secured support from a few odd MPs by questionable means.
Yet there were two great achievements during the Rao regime. First, Rao's government ruled the country through a period in which the Hindu supremacist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) gained increasing influence through its stridently divisive campaigns. The BJP's predecessor, the Jana Sangh, had suffered electoral stagnation for a long time in the 1960s. Government attacks on its organization during the Emergency were sufficiently potent for it to join a coalition of forces in 1977 against Indira Gandhi. Even when it came out of the crumbling Janata coalition, it seemed inclined to revise its earlier image of Hindu extremism in favour of a centrist platform. But from the mid-1980s the BJP began a startling new campaign of Hindu extremism, using the central symbol of the Babri mosque. The new campaign was surprisingly successful, gathering support apparently from both urban-educated young Hindu voters and the rural population across North India. However, it was the success of the BJP which, paradoxically, ensured the survival of Rao's government.
The BJP campaign divided the country more deeply than ever before along a line of conflict between Hindu communalists and secular parties. Relatively leftist opposition parties, including the communists, were strongly opposed to the Rao government; but they were even more apprehensive of a BJP takeover. Between the two evils, they preferred Rao, and his government survived with the parliamentary support of parties who heartily detested him and the policies the Congress was implementing under his leadership. But like Rajiv Gandhi before him, Rao too showed signs of a strategy which would try to appease the creeping force of Hindu sentiment rather than fight it directly. At the time of the destruction of the Babri mosque by fundamentalist volunteers, the forces of the state were suspiciously absent; and after the demolition Rao showed even more peculiar indecision about the symbolic restoration of the structure. He was scrupulously ambiguous about whether a mosque or a temple would be built at the site of the Babri Masjid. It could thus be legitimately said that he acquiesced in the great symbolic humiliation of the Muslim community, probably with an eye on the Hindu vote.
Rao's regime accomplished something more striking. The Congress government under his leadership introduced some of the most radical economic measures in the history of independent India. Some unsure and faltering measures towards liberalizing the Indian economy had been taken under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, somewhat more energetically under the latter, for he fancied himself as a technical-managerial leader who was at home in the advanced ideas of modern management. But despite his vast parliamentary majority Rajiv Gandhi's moves in this direction were indecisive and inconsistent. Astonishingly, Rao astutely turned his own parliamentary insecurity into an advantage. With a government which did not command a majority, Rao pushed through liberalizing reforms of an astonishingly radical nature—considering the historical evolution of India's political economy. He was in effect daring opposition parties to topple his administration. They could not do that for two separate reasons which became conjuncturally linked. Politically, they could not overturn his government for fear of putting power in the hands of the BJP. Economically, they feared that any other government, given the structural constraints of India's economy and its current crisis, would be forced to follow substantially similar policies. It was thus better from their point of view to allow the Congress to carry out these policies and make rhetorical noises in the opposition without offering any serious obstruction. The communists, who were the most likely opponents of liberalization, were obliged to introduce similar policies in their own captive state of West Bengal.
Rao's administration was noteworthy for one related feature. There was considerable instability in his cabinets, and large numbers of Congress leaders gained and lost cabinet posts. But Rao was remarkable in providing entirely steadfast support to his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, a former academic and bureaucrat and a complete outsider to the Congress Party machine. Precisely because Singh did not depend on support from any social group, or a particular constituency inside the Congress Party, he could force liberalizing policies through with a rare consistency and single-mindedness. This in part explains the great puzzle of the Rao phase in Indian politics: how could the weakest government in history carry out some of the most radically unpopular measures within the economy?
Consequently, two issues dominated the eleventh general elections. First, there was the proposal for unprecedented religious polarization of Indian politics coming from the Hindu communal forces. These included not only the BJP, but also some of its supporting organizations, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and its militant youth wing the Bajrang Dal—which played a key role in the actual demolition of the Babri mosque, and over which BJP politicians had rather inadequate control. Second, there was the fate, the pace, and the management of the liberalization programme. Psephology and market research have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, and there is in addition to official electoral statistics a considerable wealth of material about voter intentions, exit polls, and general analysis of elections.
These elections were historically crucial in more than one way. The slow but steady decline of the electoral fortunes of the Congress since Rajiv Gandhi's time indicated that Indian politics was going through a period of transition, an interregnum between solid Congress rule and something to follow whose outlines were not yet quite clear. At this particular election, two crucial issues were raised for settlement by the electoral verdict: what should be the constitution of the Indian state, and what should be the fundamental structure of the Indian economy? Should the design adopted in the Nehru era be revised, and in which direction? But as some of the shrewder observers realized, there was also another change.5 Greater interest by the ordinary voter meant that local and state issues often intruded into the electoral struggle and complicated the nature of the questions the electorate thought they were voting about. Although elections to state assemblies were not being held at the same time, there was an obvious infusion of state issues and concerns in the voting. So, in a sense, it was two elections in one. At one level, the electorate was responding to the larger issues of the politico-economic constitution of modern India; at another, they were also responding to other, less general, less fundamental, but more immediate problems of social life. In most of North India, the central and local issues tended to coincide. The central problem was the relation between the two projected mobilizations: the BJP slogan to vote on the basis of religion, seeking to produce an unconquerable Hindu majority, and the anti-BJP slogan of voting in terms of the basic caste divisions within Hindu society, which isolates high-caste Hindus and produces a majority coalition of the middle and lower castes with the Muslim minority. Other regional contests also got interwoven with national issues. In West Bengal, for example, the election was an opportunity for interests discontented with uninterrupted Communist Party of India(Marxist)—CPI(M)—rule for twenty years to try out the option of either the Congress or the BJP. In Tamil Nadu, it similarly afforded an opportunity to a resentful electorate to show their hostility to the discredited film-star politician Jayalalitha. Through fifty years of capitalist economic integration, India has become a single unit for some significant purposes, e.g. economic policies. The same fifty years of federal democracy have also made India, equally effectively, a collection of discrete political and social regions, with their specific, diverse interests, imaginations, and conflicts. There is much avoidable disputation in academic literature about which of these pictures is true. This is the wrong way of asking the question. For, in fact, both are true; and the Indian political universe is complex and layered. The electorate's way of asserting this fact was to turn this election into a dual process of decision-making.
Before the elections, it was clear that there were four corners to the electoral contest: the Congress bloc, the bloc around the BJP, the combination of leftist and reformist parties (their combination was called the National Front), and mainly regional political groups with limited local objectives but often with intense support. The eventual results were not entirely surprising, though the major departure from earlier periods was the utter inability of the Congress to regroup and win back the support it had lost. Its inability to recover support was on account of several reasons. First, the Congress gradually disintegrated into factions. In sharp contrast to earlier splits, this time the faction in power did not offer the credible hope of winning office to attract ambitious politicians back into its fold. Congress had gone through a number of splits before without substantial damage. Although initially these splits had appeared ideological and irreparable, Congress politicians had fought for political advantage, not for high principles. Once the split went through and a clear winner emerged, followers of the losing faction had usually scuttled ship and been taken back into the party with easy generosity. The party had thus avoided the debilitating effects of real splits. On this occasion, however, no faction won convincingly. While Rao's group effectively controlled the resources of the government, others used the dynastic name of Indira Gandhi's family, and the considerable resources allegedly in its hands, to counteract Rao's moves. Congress remained organizationally deeply divided until the time of elections, as Rao formally expelled from the party intransigent leaders from dissenting factions who challenged his leadership.
Congress also lost support because of its policies. Although Rao made astute use of his vulnerability and turned it into a virtual advantage, in the nature of things this could last only for a short period, only as long as the peculiar circumstances continued. Liberalizing reforms in India were slow and circumspect in comparison to other countries; but they were, in the Indian context, quite radical. As the effects of liberalizing the economy started to bite, the discontent of social groups who suffered went against the Congress. Rao's indecision, or for some his deliberate inaction in the face of Hindu communal provocations, particularly the demolition of the Babri mosque, cost him dearly. Secular supporters of Congress among the Hindus, and the entire Muslim community, now saw Rao as unreliable, willing to barter away secularism for electoral gains. If his indecision was calculated to appeal to communal Hindus, it backfired. They had a much more reliable instrument of communal politics in the BJP, and found him unreliable for the opposite reasons. It appears that Rao's initial invocation of principles of rectitude injured his image deeply in the end. Evidently, this struck a chord in an electorate resentful of the increasing corruption and illicit wealth of the political class. Foreign agencies which supported and demanded the liberalization policies also emphasized the need to reduce corruption. Most interestingly, in a climate of the diminishing stature of and support for politicians, some supervisory institutions, particularly the Election Commission headed by T.N. Seshan (a man many saw as a maverick, deeply narcissist, and self-righteous bureaucrat), as well as some courts, began to show an oddly unexpected assertiveness. They laid down rules, which was not new, and threatened to implement them to the letter, which was. Politicians unused to such a strange climate—in which laws were suddenly meant not merely to be promulgated but also observed—fell easy and frequent victims to this flanking attack from a wholly unexpected adversary. Rao is suspected of having instigated court cases against most of his troublesome cabinet colleagues on charges of corruption; but unexpectedly, the long arm of the courts started coming uncomfortably close to his own person. His initial noises about corruption therefore tended to show him in a particularly unfavourable light.
The BJP always benefited from an impression it gave out of decisiveness and organization, though this was perhaps misplaced, or exaggerated to some degree. Certainly, compared to the Congress, the BJP was more united, particularly because it had the luxury of running practically no government policy except the gratuitously offensive idea of righting wrongs concerning mosques built in early medieval times. The Indian electorate needed some other, more contemporary problems, something other than disputes allegedly remaining unsettled from the eleventh century. However, there were great advantages in the BJP's invitation to amnesia; it kept controversies away from existing disputes and avoided alienating social groups who might have had potential conflicts of interest. The BJP had also managed without an economic policy for about forty years; now it showed signs of taking a nationalist stance against Congress's liberalizing reforms, trying to take over from Congress its now unused slogans about fighting to protect the country from foreign economic domination. Still, the unity of the BJP appeared an illusion. Immediately before it found unexpected success over the temple issues, it had slowly, out of frustration, steered towards a more centrist, less communal line. Politicians who supported that shift still form a sizeable section inside the party; and they prove peculiarly useful to the BJP when, occasionally, it has to deny charges of being a semi-fascist Hindu fundamentalist force. At such times, the BJP relies on these token figures and promotes a display of their moderation. More significantly, the BJP has also consistently followed a complex electoral strategy, seeking to influence one type of voter by an increasingly strident anti-Muslim strategy, and to another kind speaking a language of civility and urbane restraint, deploring the Congress's slide into corruption and incoherence. The Hindu communal side is also divided between two segments whose approach to politics is somewhat different. One group, mainly active in the BJP political party, looks at the anti-Muslim rhetoric instrumentally, as a vote-gathering technique. This group probably deplores the actual demolition of the mosque: a standing mosque was a potent vote-gathering issue, a demolished one is an ideological liability. But a more fanatical, religious group, based in the VHP, seriously wants to restart the unfinished ‘religious’ wars of medieval times. Their slogan, meant quite literally, is to destroy about two hundred mosques built, in their view, on destroyed Hindu temples by victorious Islamic rulers—a claim historians have treated with contempt. The political elements in the BJP must look at this extremist agenda with some discomfort, as this would completely disrupt the social fabric of everyday life in India. But these are potential rather than actual differences, and, compared to the Congress, the BJP obviously went into the elections in much better order. At least, in the short run, it benefited from the support of the Shiv Sena in Bombay which ruled the city and the state of Maharashtra through a mixture of populism and organized quasi-criminal violence.
Although in the 1960s it seemed that the only credible opposition to Nehru's Congress was the communist left, the scene has changed unrecognizably. Communists were fatally weakened by their internal squabbles of the 1960s, and were reduced to strange contentment at holding on to electoral power in the state of West Bengal. West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura—their fortresses in one sense—have also proved to be their prisons. Failing to expand out of their electoral strongholds, the communists have been forced increasingly into unstable alliances with other parties—with very different agendas and techniques of mobilization which, by radical acts of imaginative interpretation, they have construed as ‘progressive’. Thus they have formed a stable but somewhat forlorn group of leftist parties, now reduced to utter historical incongruity after the fall of the Soviet bloc, unable to reimagine a socialist agenda for India. They do not produce much ideological conviction or attract idealistic youth support, as they once did. They speak like Stalinists but act like liberalizers, hardly a recipe for producing ideological conviction. The parties of the National Front, a title that mocks their transparently regional support, have recently used the appeals of lower-caste mobilizations as the only effective slogan against the BJP. The recent electoral history of Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the federation, is a curious record of this struggle and its utterly startling twists. This has led mainly to a regional bi-party system where the BJP and lower-caste parties have controlled alternate governments, without decisive advantage. In a more recent phase, a party explicitly based on the support of the untouchables (Scheduled Castes), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), went through a split and a dissident leader formed a short-lived administration with BJP support. Thus, although social groups play a fundamental part in the electoral arithmetic, purely electoral considerations of power can, at times, complicate these trends and produce coalitions, however short-lived, which are considered impossible in terms of the standard grammar of castes.
These transformations in Indian politics are happening not merely in the realignment of social groups and political parties. There are interesting signs of a shift in relations between political institutions. With the help of popular support, driven by exasperation with political corruption, some supervisory institutions like the courts and the election commission emerged to play a surprisingly assertive role. Coalition government, with minority administrations for the last decade, has reduced the dominance and the aura of invincibility that politicians like Indira or Rajiv Gandhi enjoyed, despite the widespread belief that they condoned corrupt deals. Since politicians, including central ministers, hardly command such parliamentary power, supervisory institutions have found some space to play their role more energetically. The Election Commission demanded that political parties must file returns of their expenditure, both as parties and as individual candidates, on pain of disqualification. Newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts supported the impression that in some areas at least the most egregious uses of money to influence voters were curbed during this election.
Given the short-term context, the election results were, not surprisingly, inconclusive. But they showed some interesting patterns, and might give some indications of longer historical trends. The BJP for the first time in the history of Independent India, pushed Congress aside and emerged as the single largest party. Congress came a close second, and the united front of the National Front parties and the Left came third. But smaller regional parties and independents captured a relatively large number of seats, likely to be crucial in the coalitional negotiations which must continue until the next election. One interesting feature of the polls was the strikingly close predictions by pre-election surveys. The poll conducted by the magazine India Today and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi came close to predicting the exact number of seats that major parties actually won. This might also show that electoral decisions are made well in advance, rather than on the spur of the moment by most voters, including the least literate.
Of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the BJP won 194 seats with its allies. The Congress won 137 seats, the National Front parties and the Left taken together 179. Of the regional parties, some were quite significant not only for purposes of post-election coalition-building, but for showing the growing entrenchment of some regional political trends. The Shiv Sena continued to dominate the politics of Bombay city by the use of petty-bourgeois frustration and plebeian gangsterism; but its solid alliance with the BJP shows its attempt to widen out towards a more national perspective through Hindu nationalism. In Uttar Pradesh, important not only because of its size but also because the major flashpoint of the Ayodhya mosque controversy, the BSP made a fairly strong showing. But the split between the untouchable base of the BSP and the consolidation of the intermediate castes in the Samajwadi Party (SP) ensured a much better showing for the BJP, since the votes against its candidates were divided.
Congress. The Congress did badly compared to earlier elections. Along with its allies, it won only 137 seats—far short of a majority in parliament. Taking all of India into account, Congress suffered a vote loss of about 8.4 per cent. Its all-India vote share fell from 36.5 per cent in the last elections in 1991 to 28.1 in this one. The Congress also suffered the ignominy of coming in third in several states, including the crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It came third in 144 parliamentary constituencies compared to 92 in 1991. In earlier elections as well, including ones in which Congress had scored its most dramatic victories, Congress's share of the vote remained around 40 to 45 per cent; the number of seats it actually won depended on the nature of the opposition it faced. With a wholly united opposition, it did badly—as in 1967. But this time its vote share fell so precipitously that it crossed a threshold. It is hard to build back into any serious electoral contention from this level of vote share. Yet it is interesting that in terms of vote share over the entire country, the Congress remains the largest single party. The major difference now is that its voting support is too thinly and widely scattered to give it much electoral advantage. It still remains the only party with support in all parts of India. Its support is not concentrated in a region, or in particular social constituencies, but has become too diluted to provide majorities in a sufficient number of seats.
The BJP. The largest single party in parliament turned out to be the BJP, which secured 160 seats on its own, 194 with its electoral allies: the Shiv Sena in Bombay, the Samata Party, the Haryana Vikas Party, and the Shiromani Akali Dal from Punjab. Its crucial gain was in Uttar Pradesh where it won 53 seats, turning the ultimate tally decisively in its favour. However, the vote share shows that if the anti-BJP vote had not been split, the party would have got far fewer seats. Although its all-India vote share was less than that of the Congress, at 23.5 per cent—up by 2.7 per cent on the last elections—its support was concentrated in the northern and western states, particularly the four large states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Maharashtra, with considerable strength in Rajasthan and Gujarat, which enabled it to turn this into a far higher number of seats. The CSDS study offers considerable insight into the sociology of voting in this election. Contrary to what some argued, the support for the BJP does not come exclusively from ‘traditionalist’ rural voters. Its support is strongest among the graduate, Hindu upper-caste males, primarily in urban centres. Among the really backward and exploited groups, like Dalits and the rural poor, its support is remarkably low. It thus represents a phenomenon of ‘a revolt of the elite’ rather than of the masses. It is also interesting that in opinion surveys about the viability of democracy, this group shows the greatest discontent about the way democracy has functioned.6 Its support is also the greatest among the youth,7 which evidently gives it greater dynamism, and occasionally aggression. With the support of youth, many of them unemployed or very lightly employed, it has got a huge reservoir of energy to draw upon, sometimes crucial in the politics of the streets between elections. From the statistics, it appears that the BJP has not been able to persuade Hindu voters to act as a solid single bloc. Twenty-nine per cent of Hindu respondents to the exit polls voted for the Congress in contrast to 27 per cent for the BJP. But this could be seriously misleading, as disaggregated state-level responses would surely show much higher voter support for the BJP in the North-West belt. But the most significant feature in the voting of religious communities is the clear evidence that Muslims, traditionally devoted supporters of the Congress, have moved solidly away towards the leftist or third parties wherever an option exists.
State and Regional Parties. Another interesting feature of the polls was that several regional parties, without any national aspirations, did remarkably well in their regions, showing that for their supporters at least the national elections were essentially a state-level poll. If we accept the idea that there were two distinct elections taking place within one, this shows a trend towards a greater regionalization of Indian politics. The four parties at the top of the table—the BJP, Congress, the Janata Dal, and the CPI(M)—are followed immediately by a roll of state parties. In fact, the Janata Dal and the CPI(M) are themselves somewhat complex cases, with national or universalist ideological positions, but with actual support in specific regions. Like the Tamil Maanila Congress or TMC (20) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or DMK (17) in Tamilnadu, the SP (17) and the BSP (11) in Uttar Pradesh, the Telugu Desam (16) in Andhra Pradesh, and the Shiv Sena (15) in Maharashtra all have purely regional projects of political mobilization, and, considering the number of seats from these states, did extremely well. In some cases, their national allies probably leaned on their regionalist support to do well against their other national adversaries. It is difficult to say, for instance, whether the BJP needs the Shiv Sena more than the other way round. This might indicate that the ‘national’ messages of some large parties cannot communicate themselves to ordinary voters without translation into the relevant vernacular through these regional groups.
Leftists and the National Front. India's leftists lost their way after splits in the mid-1960s. After the split in the Communist Party, they never recovered their influence on political life as the most serious opposition to Nehru's Congress. The CPI(M), the segment which broke away from the parent party on the grounds of its revisionism and dedication to the ‘electoral path to socialism’, has itself been remarkably successful electorally. Though its declarations condemned bourgeois democracy as a sham, it showed itself particularly proficient in its intricacies, and has retained power in the state of West Bengal for decades. But its unbreakable grip on the West Bengal assembly has been counterbalanced by an inability to expand its base elsewhere. Since it is not preparing for an imminent revolution, at least for the time being, its electoral ineffectiveness in other states has forced it into alliances with the Janata Dal and other parties.
These were all breakaway factions from the Congress during the years of Indira Gandhi. Initially, their politics was indistinguishable from the Indira Congress, but gradually they found a distinctive strategy by supporting the intermediate and lower castes in their demands for high levels of job reservation on grounds of social justice. In the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, their politics of caste mobilization, although divisive generally, has sometimes successfully split the Hindu community and prevented the success of the BJP. Not surprisingly, the BJP and these parties see each other as their main enemies. Due to personal rivalries between individual leaders, their project of uniting all the intermediate and lower-caste groups against the BJP could not be realized, leaving the BJP easy victors in Uttar Pradesh. But this group of parties is seriously undermined by several factors in its bid for power at the centre. First, most of these parties’ objectives have been entirely regional, and they lack a credible national political platform. Second, they are troubled by factionalism between groups and their leaders to an extent not common even in the fractious world of Indian politics. There is also a serious underlying difference in the modernist, individualistic communist thinking about poverty and their deeply caste-based demands, which both sides opportunistically ignore at the time of electoral alliances.
The results were such that both sides could claim a kind of victory. The BJP had the moral satisfaction of emerging as the largest single party. The Congress and the United Front could equally claim to have defeated its campaign of Hindu fundamentalism. Despite its inconclusiveness the results reveal some interesting features of current Indian politics. Two facts stand out equally clearly and inconveniently. The first is that the supporters of the BJP constitute the largest single bloc of voters. If we take into account the fact that the BJP's national vote is not at all well spread, a feature that some commentators tend to welcome, it shows that in some parts of the country the support for the BJP is quite intense, and much higher than for any comparable political group. Democratic politics is not only about elections. Politics goes on between elections as well, and what happens during these intervals often determines outcomes of polls. Such concentration of support gives the BJP greater strategic power than other parties. It might not be able to win an election, but at least in those areas it can mobilize by far the largest groups on the streets. It is remarkable that other parties seem to have already lost the art of street mobilization to the BJP. Leftists who were experts in such mobilizations, mainly around economic demands, until the 1960s, seemed held back by fear of raising issues which might hurt the government in power. But the silence of others plays into the hands of the BJP which has mounted popular mobilizations to set the agenda of politics in its own terms. The measure of its success can be seen from the fact that even communists have been forced to concentrate on the ‘fight against communalism’ to the utter neglect of economic issues. This shows an implicit victory of the BJP in dragging the fight on to the terrain it prefers.
The second equally significant fact is that the majority of voters overall are opposed to the BJP and its brand of Hindu nationalism. Its provocations have alienated the Muslims and a large segment of lower-caste groups among the Hindus. This hostility is supplemented by the opposition it faces from those who would not like secular institutions to be undermined. Thus, even if the BJP is able to form governments in future, it would not be easy for it to rule. The two facts, taken together, do not make for much governmental stability in the near future. The BJP would find it impossible to rule because the coalition of forces against its simple majority would be too strong. The others would find it perhaps equally difficult to rule because their unity is merely a negative opposition to the BJP. Typically, such coalitions find it easy to win elections, but hard to carry on government. It is usual in such circumstances for the small groups in the middle to carry a lot of weight, though for short periods. Multi-party systems tend to have high turnover of governments due to shifting coalitions, and in the middle term Indian politics might go in that direction. In fact, for the last decade or more democratic politics in most Indian states has already acquired this multi-party coalitional character. What was true of the states is now coming to be true of the centre.
After the elections, however, the Indian president, a veteran Congress politician, stuck to formal propriety and called on the BJP to form a government. The BJP, in this position of relative weakness, chose to present Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a moderate, as its prime minister to project an uncharacteristic attitude of accommodation. Interestingly, however, even Vajpayee found no support from other parties; no one agreed to form a coalition with the BJP. As expected, Vajpayee's government was asked by the president to prove its majority in parliament, but failed—ending, for the time being, India's first experience of a Hindu majoritarian rule. Logically, the Congress should have been the next in line; but Rao would not have received support from the National and Left Front for a Congress-dominated coalition. Consequently, he settled for a coalition led by the NF-LF to be supported from the outside by the Congress. He can try to play these parties’ game in reverse: they would take the blame for the policies of the government, and he can choose a time to topple the government when it becomes convenient. It seemed, despite defeat, a fairly advantageous position for the Congress, to set the terms within which the UF government's policies had to work, and to enjoy a comfortable invisible veto. However, immediately after the elections a host of cases pending against Rao in the courts have come down heavily on him, threatening even imprisonment, an unprecedented affair in Indian politics. Given the internal factionalism of the Congress and the dire difficulties of its veteran leader, Congress might lose coherence completely and fail to take advantage from its position of providing crucial support. Indeed, it might depend on the generosity and consideration of the government to avoid utter humiliation, inverting the relationship of dependence. Institutions like courts and the election commission, once released from their customary caution, are acting with increasing boldness. Restrictions placed by the commission on party expenditures have made it difficult for all parties to prepare for an immediate election. In such circumstances, the coalition government of Prime Minister Deve Gowda (a Janata Dal leader and former chief minister of Karnataka) might last for some time, not because of its skills but because of lack of initiative by others.
But the most significant problem of modern Indian politics, which these elections have placed at the centre of political life, is the question of a redefinition of Indian nationalism. Should India abandon its idea of a secular, democratic, pluralistic nationalism? Should it adopt the BJP's suggestion of a drastic revision into a nation that imagines itself as homogeneous, Hindu, and exclusivistic? These are two opposite strategies in the face of diversity. Both strategies have to take into account the various types of pluralities in Indian society—religion, caste, region, culture. The soft strategy seeks to find policies which would not exclude any segment entirely, or even impose sacrifices which would be found intolerable. It is the recognition of the soft strategy that imparts the irreducibly coalitional character to Indian politics. The hard strategy views diversity as a threat to the state, an impediment to economic development and political coherence, and tries to devise policies by means of which such plurality can be ground down into cultural uniformity by a reinvented anti-plural Hinduism. For the secular forces in Indian politics, the last election was not a triumph but a reprieve.
First published in Government and Opposition, vol. 32, no. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 3–24.
1 Congress's share of the vote has declined steadily from around 47.8 per cent at its peak in 1957 to 37.6 per cent in 1991, barring an unusual 48.1 per cent in 1984 after Indira Gandhi's death.
2 This was famously called, after Rajni Kothari, the ‘one-party dominant’ Congress system.
3 Interestingly, the difference in vote share was not very large, from 40.8 per cent in 1967 to 43.7 per cent in 1971.
4 In the elections held after the Emergency in 1977, Congress's vote share fell dramatically to 34.3 per cent.
5 For instance, Yogendra Yadav in his reports on the CSDS–ICSSR–India Today Surveys, reported in India Today, 31 May and 11 August 1996.
6 Yogendra Yadav, ‘How India Voted’, India Today, 31 May 1996, p. 25.
7, Ibid.