Author: Narasimhan Ravi
Publication: www.boston.com
Date: April 26, 2004
URL: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/04/26/indias_remarkable_dance_of_democracy/
India, Seen variously as a country
with massive poverty, an information technology power, and more recently
as an outsourcing destination taking away jobs, is over the next two weeks
staging the dance of democracy. With most of the world preoccupied with
the Iraq war, however, the world's largest exercise in democracy -- in
which 645 million voters elect their representatives between April 20 and
May 10 -- may well go unnoticed. In essence, the voters will deliver a
verdict on the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who has been in active
political life for almost half a century and has been prime minister since
1998. Vajpayee is a man of many parts and contradictions -- a liberal and
moderate by instinct who has kept company all his political life with Hindu
fundamentalists. He is a peacemaker leading a hawkish party whose dislike
of Pakistan is visceral, an advocate for tolerance and moderation in the
midst of extremists and religious fanatics. A man of considerable literary
and oratorical skills, he has used his masterly ambiguity to make statements
that at first appear to please the extremists but are nuanced enough to
be politically correct and even unexceptionable.
Ranged against Vajpayee and his
National Democratic Alliance coalition is the Congress Party led by Italian-born
Sonia Gandhi. Giving up its earlier reluctance to work with other parties,
the Congress Party has put together a broad alliance with smaller parties.
Almost all opinion polls and the latest projections based on exit polls
in the first round, which was completed on April 20, predict that Vajpayee's
National Democratic Alliance will return to power, though they are uncertain
whether it will be with a slightly increased or somewhat lower majority.
The election is in many ways remarkable,
not the least because the Bharatiya Janata Party led by the 79-year-old
Vajpayee is seen as the face of high technology-shaped modernity while
the Congress with a much younger leadership is seen as the old guard. The
Bharatiya Janata Party is flaunting his leadership and record in office,
during which period the country has seen a 6 percent growth, the last year
recording 8 percent -- a development it is seeking to market through the
Madison Avenue-style slogan of "India shining."
Beneath the surface lurks the issue
of whether one would accept as prime minister a foreign-born leader. Sonia
Gandhi is the widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the
daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi's status as a foreigner
is a potent weapon for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the cities and among
the middle classes, but the issue probably does not find much resonance
in the countryside.
The Congress Party's main charge
against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is that it has marginalized
the minority Muslims and Christians and tries to keep the religious fires
burning over the issue of building what is claimed to be a preexisting
Hindu Ram temple at a site where a 16th century mosque was pulled down
by Hindu fanatics in 1992. A major blot on the Bharatiya Janata Party's
record was the communal strife in the western state of Gujarat in 2002
where with the complicity of its party government over 1,000 Muslims were
killed by Hindus in riots after a Muslim mob had attacked and burned alive
59 Hindu pilgrims in a railway carriage.
From the standpoint of the outside
world, a Bharatiya Janata Party government would probably turn out to be
somewhat more pro-Western than the Congress Party, where policy making
is still in the hands of veterans of the Indira Gandhi era of pro-Soviet,
anti-American nonalignment. In substance, there is not much difference
between the two parties on the question of Kashmir and troubled relations
with Pakistan, but a Vajpayee-led government will probably be bolder and
more willing to take risks in keeping negotiations going.
India has a long way to go in the
area of economic reform, particularly in government finances, where belt
tightening has become inevitable, and in the financial system, which is
burdened by loan defaults. In the specific tasks of pruning subsidies and
directing them towards the really poor, as well as in selling loss making
public enterprises, the new government would face major challenges in gaining
the support of the smaller parties in the coalition that are tied to populist
policies laced with leftist rhetoric.The biggest challenge before a new
government, however, would be to heal the wounds of the communalized politics
of the last decade and gain the trust of the minority Muslims and Christians
who have been in a virtual state of siege.
Narasimhan Ravi is editor of The
Hindu, one of India's larger English language newspapers, and is a Shorenstein
Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
