15 May 2004
The fall of the Indian government is a huge political shock that strikingly echoes the only comparable electoral upset, the defeat of Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1977. Then, as now, just about the entire commentariat was convinced that the incumbent would win; then, as now, the opposition was widely written off; then, as now, India's voters left the politicians and media with egg on their faces. Both elections are high points in the history of Indian democracy. An ornery electorate that doesn't do what it's supposed to do is a fine and cheering thing.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was not by any means a dictatorship, but its leaders have turned a blind eye to some terrible deeds, notably the mass killings, mainly of Muslims, in the state of Gujarat, where the BJP-led state government itself is accused of being implicated in the slaughter. The Congress's 2004 success in Gujarat suggests that voters have been sickened by what they have seen, just as Indira's fall in 1977 was an expression of national disgust at her government's brutalities.
The oldest Indian rivalries of all have resurfaced in this election, as they also did in 1977. Then, as now, much of the urban bourgeoisie voted for the government, while the impoverished Indian masses, in particular the rural poor, mostly voted against. The Indian battle for centrality in the debate about the country's future has always been, to some degree, a battle between the city and the village, between, on the one hand, the urbanised, industrialised India favoured both by the socialist-inclined Jawaharlal Nehru and the free-market architects of "India Shining", the new India in which a highly successful capitalist class has transformed the heights of the economy; and, on the other hand, the agricultural, homespun India beloved of Mahatma Gandhi, the immense countryside-India where three-quarters of the population still lives, and which has not benefited in the slightest from the recent economic boom.
It's no accident that the ruling alliance has lost heavily in the states that wooed such information-technology giants as Microsoft to set up shop there, turning sleepy "second cities" such as Madras, Bangalore and Hyderabad into new-tech boom towns - because while the rich got richer, the fortunes of the poor declined year by year. The gulf between India's rich and her poor has never looked wider than it does today, and the government has fallen into that chasm. The dispossessed of India have dealt a mighty blow to the assumptions of the country's political and economic chieftains, and the lesson should be learned by all parties: ignore the wellbeing of the masses at your peril.
I have two immediate wishes for the new era. The first is that the debates about "foreignness" can be laid to rest for ever. Those of us who are part of the Indian diaspora, and who have fought for years to have Indians recognised as full citizens of the societies in which we have settled and in which our children have been born and raised, have found the attack on Sonia Gandhi's Italian origins highly unpleasant. Even more unpleasant were the BJP's suggestions that her children, the children of Rajiv Gandhi, were also somehow aliens.
You can't have it both ways. If Indians outside India are to be seen as "belonging" to their new homelands, then those who make India their home, as Sonia Gandhi has done for 40 years or so, must be given the same respect. Gratifyingly, the electorate has shown it just doesn't care about the "foreignness" issue. A BJP leader foolishly said in the immediate aftermath of his party's rejection that he thought it "shameful" that India might be led by a foreigner. Such slurs are a part of the reason for the BJP's defeat. They are essentially racist, and must cease.
My second wish is that the study of India's history can now be rescued from the extremists and ideologues. The outgoing government's politicisation of historical scholarship - its determination to impose textbooks peddling a narrow, revisionist, Hindu-nationalist vision of India's past on the country's schools and colleges - was one of its most alarming initiatives. The BJP has often seemed to want to inflame our perceptions of the past in order to inflame the passions of the present.
Delightful as it is to watch democracy on such a scale in action, one doesn't have to give the new government an unreserved welcome. Congress is going to have to re-learn the arts of government after the long wilderness years; and Sonia Gandhi - who has already proved she has the stomach for the fight - is going to have to prove that she is not just keeping the leader's seat warm for her son or daughter to inherit, that she's a true, unifying leader.
Time will tell if the defeated BJP casts off, in opposition, the velvet glove of moderation that Vajpayee imposed upon it during its time of power, and reinvents itself as a hardline communalist force. If that happens the years ahead could be full of conflict and violence. Meanwhile, we can enjoy this rare moment of hope.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=521403&host=6&dir=140
