The Congress’ surprise victory in the Indian elections

“There are no prizes for guessing that the next election will see an easy victory for the
coalition led by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the Indian People’s Party). The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), consisting of around twenty parties, but under the clear leadership of the Hindu Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee, will reap the benefits of five years of economic achievements, the growing wealth of the middle classes (the main pillar of the BJP), and the modernisation of the country’.

That is what we wrote a few days ahead of the election in the article published in the last issue of this review.

The only consolation for this slip-up is the fact that we are in good company: absolutely no one – either in India or outside – even went close to predicting the result. For that matter, nor did the winners, who hastily proceeded to draft a single program for the coalition to make up for the lack of one before the elections.

But let’s begin with some figures: out of a total of 539 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower Chamber) the Congress won 145 (compared to 114 in 1999) while the BIP’s share fell to 138 (182 in 1999). These figures highlight how the two main parties are far from being able to govern alone. Despite the fact India has the British first-past-the-post system, the proliferation of regionally based parties means that very broad coalitions must be formed: the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led by the BJP is composed of twentyfour parties,while the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), formed by the Congress, has nineteen.

This phenomenon is relatively recent: Nehru, and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi had always been able to count on comfortable absolute majorities, except in brief periods when Indira was forced to sit in the opposition because of the creation of a large coalition which had taken on board most of the other anti-Congress parties.

In the 1999 elections, the BJP and its allies totalled 302 seats, whereas the Congress only had 137 (practically without allies) and the other parties (the so-called Third Front) had 100.

The key to the unexpected success of the Congress lies here: having always dominated Indian politics, the Congress only began to suffer from an inability to make alliances in the 1990s, when it was thus isolated despite its nature as the only real nationwide single party. The BJP, on the other hand, is only rooted in the North, the Hindi-speaking area (more or less half the country), stood out for its ability to weave a network of relations to win votes in those states (South and East India), where the party had no base.

The Sonia Gandhi’s great success caught all observers unawares. They had had little faith in her achieve her objective. But her success was in fact due to an ability to establish a series of alliances enabling the Congress to considerably increase the size of its parliamentary group without actually needing significantly more votes.

But we must be careful about these figures: nationwide the Congress and its allies (NDA) obtained 35.19 per cent of the votes, the BJP and its allies 35.31 per cent, and other groups 27.58 per cent. In terms of seats, the Congress has a majority of 27.58 per cent. Moreover, the left-wing parties who reached a historic record of 56 seats have guaranteed their external backing for the NDA, as have other parties.

The Congress’ parliamentary mandate is thus very solid: for the BJP, which did not actually lose votes, the defeat is even more stinging, because the traditionally reliable opinion polls in India had predicted they would chalk up over 300 seats.

The geography of the elections is, however, very varied: the allies of the Congress, in this case the DMK, whitewashed the important state of Tamil Nadu: 35-0! Significantly, this party had taken part in the BJp government, but abandoned the NDA before the elections. This volte-face cost the BJP very dearly, and it was an alliance of great personal significance for Sonia, given that the DMK had long been suspected of connivance in the plot that led to the death of Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu in 1991.

The BJP’s unexpected defeat also in Andra
Pradesh, an important Southern state, where
the BJP’s ally, Chandrababu Naidu, was
unanimously considered the most brilliant
Chief Minister (i.e. of the state) in India: but
the rural vote swept away Naidu, a keen advocate of new technologies and modernity.
The Congress increased its seats from 5 to 29,
BJP went from 7 to 0, and Chandrababu
Naidu’s TDP fell from 30 to 13. In the simultaneous local elections, the Congress completely dominated the scene and sent the TDP
into the opposition.

The results in these two states alone are significant enough to explain the debacle of the BJP, while the rest of the country didn’t really change much.

Interestingly, the other Chief Minister admired as a paragon of good government, S. M. Krishna (Karnataka), this time allied with the Congress, was also defeated, and lost both the government of the state and his majority of national seats.

Krishna and Naidu had gambled on the rapid development of the Indian IT capitals, Bangalore and Hyderabad, cities which attracted considerable investments in high technologies from all over the world, thanks also to public policies designed for this purpose. Both, however, committed the mistake of neglecting the rural areas, in the throes, moreover, of a serious drought. The rural vote (70 per cent of the Indian population) humiliated the technocrats of the new India: a result that will require some pondering, because in terms of administration the truth is that the governments of Pradesh and Karnataka really were among the best in India.

In Uttar Pradesh, a key state in the North with eighty seats and which had produced seven of the eleven premiers in Indian history, neither the BJp nor the Congress made a breakthrough: ten and nine seats, respectively (including among the Congress seats that of Sonia, who was elected in Rae Bareli and her son Rahul, elected for Amethi, the historical constituency of the Gandhi family). The lion’s share of the votes went to the two local parties, Sp and BSP, whose power base are the lowest castes (the vote in India is strongly influenced by caste links, and this social structure is particularly strong in Northern India).

The BJP was almost totally successful in the densely inhabited states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. There was a substantially even outcome in Maharashtra (the state with Mumbai-Bombay) and surprisingly also in Gujarat, where there was expected to be a high tide of yellow, the traditional colour of the BJP. Most significantly, the BJP candidates were defeated in the constituencies where the worst massacres occurred in 2002.

The key factor in the Congress’s win was the good return from its alliances and the mistakes made by the Bjp in some important states. In the end they paid very dearly for these mistakes.

I thought it was important to present these figures to highlight how certain hasty analyses (such as ‘a vote against economic reforms’, the ‘rural India’s revenge over urban India’) are built on shifting sands.

There are some undeniable facts however: the election result is undoubtedly a great personal victory for Sonia Gandhi, long considered as an inadequate and unsuitable leader for the Congress. The vote swept away any residual doubts about her political role. Her decision not to become Prime Minister, when she was offered the post, was a masterly move, and certainly planned, which hit the mark. It swiped the carpet from below the feet of the BJP, obsessed with the problem of her foreign origins, and deprived them of any reasons for attacking her. Moreover, it raised her moral stature, given that Indian public opinion was deeply impressed by her move, so untypical of Indian politicians. Sonia passed the sceptre on to a convinced reformist, Manhoman Singh, who as Minister of Finance began the economic reforms in 1991. This was a choice welcomed by the markets and Singh is a politician completely loyal to Sonia with no personal ambitions. Moreover, Sonia will continue as party leader, thus breaking with the tradition of the Prime Minister also being the majority party leader, while she will work hand in glove with all the key ministries.

Hats off then. Sonia made a positive impression and has emerged as the key figure in Indian politics.

Another clear lesson from these elections was the rejection of cultural and religious sectarianism stirred up by the BJP. This party has two spirits: a wing proposing liberal economic reforms, but also a fundamentalist wing, embracing a dominant political vision informed by Hinduism (Hindutva), excluding all the other religions found in India. The BJP set about rewriting the school textbooks, and minimising the Muslim contribution or that of other communities to the history of India. It promoted an aggressive pro-Hindu policy in the villages, even going so far as to propose a ban on religious conversions from Hinduism to Christianity or Buddhism (a common phenomenon among members of the lower castes, who wish to get out of the rigid caste system in the rural areas). It wants to promote an absolute ban on butchering cows, the sacred animal of Hindus but regularly consumed by members of other religious confessions. The direst aspect of this political attitude was the Gujarat BJp government’s permissive approach to the mobs who massacred 2,000 Muslims – while the police stood by – in 2002.

The question of continuing the economic reforms is more complex. In the wake of the enthusiasm over the BJp defeat, some people have gone so far as to see the victory as the rejection by the Indian masses of the economic reforms and globalisation. Many rural areas are little affected by the growing wealth visible in the cities, but the Congress’ pro-poor campaign struck home, although in some areas the BJP and its allies did also win.

Leaving aside the obvious need for India to begin serious agricultural reforms to enable 700 million people to raise their currently pitiably low living standards, the nature of the rural vote in India seems to have been more political than strictly economic. The electorate expressed its dissatisfaction over shortcomings in infrastructures (roads, water, electricity) and this would have been paid for by any outgoing government, no matter what their colour. In the states where the BJP did well (Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh), the results confirmed the trend from a few months earlier, when the Congress administrations were defeated in the local elections.

There was thus a widespread desire for change in the Indian electorate, who called into question the capacity of the political class to produce practical results in the field, rather than expressing any overall vision of the pros and cons of the economic reforms.

But it is quite surprising that the BJP, which had staked most of its electoral campaign on the slogan ‘India Shining’, was also heavily defeated in the big cities, where the high concentrations of the middle to upper classes should have been responsive to this message.

In fact an overall interpretation of the vote suggestsa more generalised rejection of the way the cities and the Indian states had been run by a fossilised hereditary political class (a hundred political dynasties are represented in Parliament) rather than clear political choices. In this case, the Congress was favoured because it was the opposition, but things could change quickly.

The first thing the government formed by the Congress and its NDA allies wished to do was confirm that the economic reforms will continue. The man chosen to lead the government, Manhoman Singh, is emblematic in this sense: a distinguished economist, he came late to politics and had never been elected. As Minister of Finance from 1990 he directed the economic reforms launched by the Rao government. They were a real turning point compared to the elitist tradition based on state planning previously followed by Indian governments. The turbulent markets in the days after the elections soon calmed down with the appointment of Singh.

The Ministry of Finance has been taken over by another distinguished economist, P. Chidambaram, who already occupied the post in 1997. He is another figure with a fairly solid reputation.

The Common Minimum Program (СМР), drafted by the coalition led by M. Singh in the days immediately after the formation of the government, introduced some new aspects, but confirmed that no great break can be expected and even less a U-turn in ecоnomic reforms: the external support by the left wing for the government might have implied the contrary, but the need to fuel the sustained economic growth (7-8 per cent annually) to keep pace with the population growth and to improve living standards means there can be no return to protectionism and heavy state control.

But reforms in India have never been wild: on the contrary, India is a very unusual case of economic liberalisation with great prudence. Although the BJP – conservative from the social point of view – wished to avoid any kind of Westernisation, the Congress and the left similarly uphold the idea, albeit in a different way, of preserving the original nature of India. If anything the difference is a question of approach: the BJP aimed at developing the elites, neglecting the rest of the population, while as reiterated in its program, the Congress lays great store with the rural masses, working classes and common man.

Both visions, however, avoid the allure of globalisation sine qua non. India must be true to its nature, and there is unanimous agreement on this in Indian politics. The reforms must be prudent and selective: as stated in the program, they must have a ‘human face’.

This attitude is recurrent in Indian history. The country with thousands of years of culture giving rise to the essential concepts of Eurasian culture and even universal civilisation will not be forced to swallow unconditionally the imperatives of modernisation. After more than a decade of economic reforms, there is still a very different air in India from that in South-East Asia, where the values of Western capitalism have blended with the basic elements in the local culture, creating a cultural shock.

So first and foremost, India is still India, with all its limits and contradictions. You will rarely find an Indian willing to push the accelerator of modernisation to the board.

This government will continue down the path of a selected opening up of the Indian economy to foreign trade and investments. It will move cautiously with privatisation, which will only be applied to state companies in the red. It will not introduce any reforms to make the labour market more flexible and will be very careful not to make international commitments forcing it to rush into liberalisation(e.g. with the World Trade Organisation)

In short, India will do everything in its power to stay at the helm of its own destiny.

Despite the lower per capita income, placing India very far down the table of the emerging countries, it does have a relative advantage. Since the country does not depend significantly on international financial markets, most of its capital is national, and it has abundant money reserves. Although it may be claimed that these are also limits or lost opportunities for the Indian model of development, at the same time such factors make India relatively independent from other countries.

The main Ministers in the new Cabinet are certainly not youngsters: except for Chidambaram (58), they are all of over seventy and are part of the Nehru tradition of the Congress. Many have personal ties with Sonia, others have fought against her in the past but are now important leaders in the party and their presence is required in the new government.

Certainly this group cannot be expected to make original sweeping changes: the main objective of the Congress after the surprise electoral victory is to convey a sense of stability. The new faces, including Rahul Gandhi, must be broken into parliamentary life before they can aspire to leading positions in the cabinet, and this too is basically an Indian tradition.

In foreign policy there will probably continue to be a thaw in relations with Pakistan, begun by the previous government. This is a fundamental chapter to rid India of a serious drawback slowing the country down.

The BJP’s unconditional love for the United States will definitely be reconsidered, without necessarily being denied. The two countries need each other and the Indian community in America is increasingly wealthy, influential and well integrated.

We can also expect the new Indian government to take greater interest in the enlarged European Union, and also in Russia. Relations with China have more unknown factors, but the Vajpayee government did much to overcome the long-standing diffidence. New Delhi-Beijing is still one of the great potential axis of the 21st century.

The new government will probably be less active compared to the previous one in signing bilateral and regional trade agreements, although the South Asian integration process (SAARC) should be reinforced by improving relations between India and Pakistan.

India was surprised by the unexpected electoral result and the gestation of the new government was very slow: twenty days of electoral counts and ten of negotiations to form the government. Only now is the Cabinet getting down to work and a period of adjustment is to be expected. Although the majority is numerically solid, there may be some surprises in store. The large number of regional politicians who have become Ministers and who will tend – in keeping with their tradition – to govern exclusively for the benefit of their own electorate will undoubtedly create problems and tensions.

But this time I will be more circumspect and not so rash as to make any precise forecasts.