Assembly Election Verdict

The election results of the five States that went to polls in the last month have made quite a few interesting, even stunning, revelations on the Indian electorate’s maturity, farsightedness and cool judgement. It has restored to the Congress party some of its old respectability and durability in the first few decades after independence and confirmed the people’s trust in this middle-of-the-road party ignoring its recent failures on the security front in favour of its long term perspective on the Indian situation. The people, specially in urban areas, have rejected the oft-repeated paranoia of the BJP on the question of minority appeasement, or the ridicule heaped on the Prime Minister as being only a mask or too weak to lead or govern and to take hard decisions. There were more weighty factors in the Prime Minister’s and his government’s favour, namely, his integrity and massive competence in dealing with economic issues in the current economic crisis straddling the global economy.

Rahul Gandhi’s open conviviality with the disadvantaged people and Sonia Gandhi’s setting standards for her government towards helping the poor have also been positive signals for the people.

The people have also voted their approval in at least three States in the north of the policy of economic reforms championed by the Prime Minister and the Congress party. It has put their stamp of approval on economic progress through globalisation and greater industrialisation with a degree of support to the agriculture sector. There is a subtext to this approval. It is the people’s view of what will lift them from poverty, which is the biggest curse of life of a common man. Although from experience they have learnt that poverty cannot be banished overnight nor can every poor get out of the poverty cycle all at a time, it is only industrialisation that can make a visible change in the lives of some of them. After all, besides class conflict and tension in the poor there is also intra-class rivalry or conflict. This is a point I have repeatedly made to my Naxalite friends as the reason for at least some of the poor opting to support the pro-reforms and globalisation policies of the Congress and the BJP as a means of stepping up industrialisation, unconvinced by the Left’s argument that the capitalist system, which is the main economic force in India, mainly helps the rich. The poor by instinct support whatever promises to deliver them from poverty or a higher income than land can give them with the skewed land distribution in the country. This could be some comfort to the pro-industrial elements in the CPM like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on the issue of the Tatas’ exit from Singur.

The people have also rejected the noisy Left opposition to the nuclear deal as a sell-out to America and a mortgage of our sovereignty and their reason to withdraw support from the UPA Government. In fact the nuclear deal does not seem to have been an election issue at all.

On the question of the terrorist attack and the government’s inability to prevent it the people seem to have taken a very sensible and mature view. They remember a similar failure of the BJP and become aware of the complexity of the problem and the reasons for the failure residing in a lackadaisical administrative system and failure to enforce accountability. In response to the outcry in Mumbai and in the media and the party and Parliament, political accountability has been enforced and bureaucratic accountability should follow. They also remember the debit side of a very strong police force as during the Emergency which directed its power as often at the poor as at the terrorists. It has also sunk in them that acts that have gravely provoked rage in Moslem countries like the Babri Masjid demolition or the Ahmedabad riots have partly to blame for the terrorism extending itself from Kashmir to the whole of India which has through history enjoyed great respect in West Asia by her pro-Arab policies after independence

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ONE of the important pointers in this election has been that the stabilising role of the heartland States has shifted from UP and Bihar to the other less populous States of the north, the centre and the south. While any party that has UP and Bihar in its kitty will form a government with a clean majority, the two States being out of the reckoning of both the major parties (the JD-U’s position on alliance with the BJP being still uncertain as also the results of the Parliament elections because of the backlash of the Kosi floods despite a good relief operation and good governance by Nitish Kumar) will compel the formation of coalition governments at the Centre. The importance of forming alliances with like-minded parties has gone up .

In the two States that the BJP has won, good policies, for example, the subsidised rice scheme and not ideology, have brought victory made easier by the infighting in the Congress. We need a Centrist party more concerned with the needs of the poor, if it wants to win power. But the allegations of corruption in the BJP from top down in MP will cost it dearly in future, unless corrected by stern action.

The Congress party also needs to remember that the election results have a good deal to do with their belated pro-poor policies like the remission of agricultural debts, the employment guarantee scheme, their education policies and infrastructure projects and price reduction measures. Any slippage from them and the honeymoon with the people could be over.

A significant feature of Indian democracy, other than corruption, caste and a slack bureaucracy is the general lack of political vision among political parties in the country. There is little ideological divide between the two principal parties except that they quarrel over the issue of secularism but run the administration on broadly similar lines, except in the extreme case of Gujarat which proved the BJP’s nemesis at the Centre. Ideological convergence also marks the politics in Europe and America. Differences between them are either incremental or tactical. Even the Left parties have been sucked into political pragmatism as the Centrist parties evidenced by their deeds and not their words.

The only different political agenda offered in the country by a political force, the Naxalites, is land based and champions the interests of the poorest. Unfortunately they insist on being revolutionary both in their programmes and their methods and seek to achieve their aims by violence. They are out of sync with the popular mood of all classes of people to put their stakes on democracy, which because of the collective power of their votes as mobilised by Mayawati in UP has begun to address their needs. Democratic consolidation of the poor is also beginning to cure the ills of purely caste-based politics.

Revolution will not come to this country if the democratic parties honestly and diligently apply themselves to addressing people’s problems. On the oither hand, the Naxalites, by turning to the democratic process, will be able to offer to the people a solid and credible alternative to the Centrist parties. Even an issue-based tie-up with democratic elements as in West Bengal lately can also be educative for both sides in terms of radicalising the democrats and democratising the radicals.

The vision of Mahatma Gandhi to totally transform the country by an alternative polity and decentralised economy or of Vinoba’s bhoodan movement or the ideals of political accountability and probity enshrined in the JP movement have been overlaid by the political pragmatism of his once believers. But they continue to be alive at the back of our minds as an alternative to our political process if the present democratic process goes seriously wrong or unresponsive. Democracy will not suffer but grow stronger by people’s movements as recently in evidence at Mumbai.

The author is the Convenor of the Lok Paksh, Patna/Delhi.