India, Eager for Stability, Frets at Another Indecisive Vote
Joydeep Mitra
India, Eager for Stability, Frets at Another Indecisive Vote
By JOHN F. BURNS: March 8, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>
NEW DELHI, India -- As India's election results flowed in last week, a
television advertisement captured a widespread apprehension that this huge,
impoverished nation may be headed for another period of revolving-door
governments that lack the political clout to tackle the country's problems.
"The Vajpayee government," a voice intoned, "lasted for 13 days. The
Deve Gowda government lasted for almost 11 months. The Gujral government
lasted for a little over 10 months."
Having listed the three governments India has had since the last election in
1996, the voice, brightening, added, "Jointly, none of them lasted as long as
Amazer -- Amazer, the long-playing radial from Apollo tires."
Finding something to chuckle at in politics has become harder for many
Indians as four successive elections have failed to produce a majority for any
party. In the new Parliament there will be at least 38 parties, none with
anything close to a majority. The largest, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party, will have 177 seats, 95 short of a majority of 272 seats
in a Parliament with 543 elected members.
The frustration found loud expression as results of the latest election
became known, with many Indians saying they wondered when, if ever, the
country would have a strong government again.
"It is a crying shame that 50 years after independence, 350 million of our
people live in poverty," said Deepak Nayyar, an economics professor at
Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "That's more than all the people who
lived in British India in 1947. Year after year, election after election,
political parties have promised the moon, and absolutely nothing has happened."
Maneuvering by Bharatiya Janata for enough additional seats to form a
government is likely to continue until at least Thursday, when the election
commission, which is still awaiting results for nine seats, is expected
to make its formal announcement of the outcome.
Then, Indian President K.R. Narayanan is expected to ask Bharatiya Janata
parliamentary leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee to become prime minister. As
expected, the party formally named Mr. Vajpayee its candidate for prime
minister Saturday.
But efforts to outflank Bharatiya Janata by the election's second- and
third-place finishers, the Congress Party and the United Front, mean that a
last-minute reversal cannot be ruled out.
In the election, Bharatiya Janata sought to offset misgivings about its
Hindu nationalist philosophy, with its undercurrent of hostility toward
India's 120 million Muslims, by presenting itself as the only party able
to bring "stability" to the country, because it was the only one likely
to approach a parliamentary majority.
In fact, it managed to win only 17 seats more than in 1996, when it
finished as the largest single party in Parliament for the first time.
Still, Baratiya Janata came within striking distance of a parliamentary
majority by making deft decisions in its choice of election allies among
regional parties. These parties added 72 seats, bringing the total for the
alliance led by Bharatiya Janata to 249 seats, according to the latest count.
Bharatiya Janata's closest challenger, the Congress Party, won 140 seats, and
added 31 more through alliances with regional parties.
Now a second round in the contest for power has opened, one in which the
344 million voters are bystanders. In a game of baffling arithmetic complexity,
leaders of Bharatiya Janata and Congress, along with the United Front, an
alliance of 13 regional and leftist parties that won 95 seats, have been
maneuvering among five other parties that won seats.
With almost every hour bringing reports of a new alliance made or an old
alliance broken, the odds have shifted back and forth, but most politicians
believe Bharatiya Janata will emerge the winner. Although its combined seat
total of 249 is lower than the 266 seats of the Congress Party and the United
Front, the Congress' efforts to build a majority have been confounded so
far by dithering.
Among other things, the Congress Party has divided over who would become
Prime Minister, and parties within the United Front have wrangled over whether
they should stay with the front, join Bharatiya Janata or remain neutral.
The most likely Congress candidate for prime minister is Sharad Pawar, a
57-year-old former defense minister, but he has run into opposition from the
party's old guard. The choice of a leader has been tossed to Sonia Gandhi,
the Italian-born widow of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; it was she who
led the party's election campaign.
Some Indians have hailed the inconclusive result as a reflection of their
country's diversity and of the political flexibility that democracy affords.
But others fear that governments that have to rely on a galaxy of small parties
to sustain them, many of which have little in common with one another or
with the party leading the government, will be incapable of effective action
against the country's enduring problems of poverty, illiteracy and disease.
Some Indians believe the country is locked into a cycle, with frustration
among voters producing fractured parliaments and fractured parliaments
producing weak governments that do little to tackle entrenched interests
that impede economic and social change.
The election results showed that voters across the country sought to
exorcise their sense of blighted hope by punishing incumbents. More than
half the members of Parliament who ran for re-election were defeated,
and many others failed to win party nominations to run again.
The disillusionment showed up, too, in the way voters turned against ruling
political parties in their home states. In 10 states accounting for more than
400 million people, state governments that won strong victories in recent
elections found voters moving against them in landslide proportions. Only
four states, Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, produced results
that favored the ruling state governments.
The most remarkable result was in Tamil Nadu. There, the party led by
Jayalalitha Jayaram, an actress who became the state's chief minister in 1991,
lost every single seat in a state election in 1996 after allegations of
influence-peddling and fraud. But with criminal cases still pending against
her and her associates, Ms. Jayaram's party won 18 of 39 parliamentary seats,
making Ms. Jayaram, a Bharatiya Janata ally in the election, a potential
kingmaker.
Some Indians believe this volatility reflects a sea change in the
country's politics.
In this view, recent elections have represented a transitional period
between the Congress Party dominance in the first 40 years after independence
and a new political alignment that will eventually produce larger and more
stable political blocs -- possibly one centering on Bharatiya Janata and
another on a merger of the Congress Party and the United Front.
One who takes this view is former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who has
described the 1998 election as a "semifinal," with the "final" between two
more stable blocs likely to take place in an election a year or two from now.
A rival view has Bharatiya Janata forming a coalition government, making
good on promises to provide "good governance," then going back to the
electorate and asking for a majority mandate that will make it the Congress
Party's successor as India's "natural" ruling party. Many Indians think this
improbable, given Bharatiya Janata's reliance on upper-caste Hindu voters, but
party stalwarts are hopeful.
"If we really govern well, the stability thing will be there," said
Susha Swaraj, the most prominent woman in the Bharatiya Janata leadership.
user-Narotham Reddy
From: Joydeep Mitra <joy...@bcmp.med.harvard.edu>