India's voters face a cacophony of rash promises and bizarre coalitions, writes RAHUL BEDIin New Delhi
WITH THE first of five rounds of voting in India’s general elections a fortnight away, the country is gripped by frenzied and cynical politicking.
Old alliances are crumbling and new ones emerging as rival parties with an eye to the political main chance plumb the depths of sectarian campaigning and reiterate unfulfilled promises to woo over 714 million eligible voters, half of them under the age of 30, many casting their first ballot.
Adding to the overall electoral confusion, exacerbated by India’s complex caste, communal and class structure, burgeoning urban-rural divide and Byzantine politics, is the plethora of prime ministerial aspirants – four at last count and increasing – as hectic campaigning gathers momentum in the world’s largest democracy.
The incoming administration, almost certain to be a coalition like the one it replaces, will succeed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance of 14 parties, following counting of votes on May 16th.
The principal fight to secure 272 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha is largely between the Congress Party and its rapidly crumbling coalition and the equally moth-eaten Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance, which the former ousted from office in 2004.
Over the past few weeks, support for both the Congress and the BJP from their regional allies has been vanishing, largely as a result of a myriad of local concerns centred around subsistence, endemic corruption and mal-governance, rather than the important albeit nebulous issues of foreign or nuclear policy.
More than 70 per cent of India’s population of over 1.2 billion lives on less than $2 day and for them social, economic, and environmental justice remains a dream as the economic divide between people grows exponentially.
India is also home to a third of the world’s poor and a recent survey backed by Unicef revealed that nearly 46 per cent of Indian children under the age of three are undernourished.
No political party had done much to alleviate these conditions since independence 62 years ago and voter antipathy to politicians is soaring.
While the continuing financial crisis and security remain key electoral issues, analysts said the vote, like earlier polls, would also be dominated by caste and regional alliances and local developmental issues. Political parties said continuing terrorist strikes and serial bombings in the recent past culminating in last November’s 60-hour siege of the western port city of Mumbai would figure prominently during campaigning.
The Congress and BJP’s political malfeasance and profligacy has triggered the emergence of a third and even possibly a fourth front comprising powerful provincial parties that could present a challenge but whose MPs will certainly be required by either party to cobble together a majority.
The Congress Party, led by the assertive and powerful Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, has re-nominated Manmohan Singh as its prime minister while the BJP’s former deputy prime minister LK Advani is his rival.
Two other aspirants for the country’s top political job include federal agricultural minister Sharad Pawar, who heads the regional Nationalist Congress Party, and the politically astute and authoritative Mayawati Kumari of the low caste or Dalit Bahujan Samaj (All People’s Party) that secured the government in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state in 2007.
Mayawati’s victory, achieved by stringing together a brilliantly conceived all-caste “rainbow coalition” makes her the leader of the first majority government in 14 years of often unsteady coalition rule in the province of over 170 million people. If independent, Uttar Pradesh would be the world’s seventh largest country.
Over the past two years Mayawati has consolidated her position and frequently declared that she wants to become India’s first Dalit prime minister, an ambition that analysts say is not beyond reach.
Irrespective of the outcome, the elections promise to be as colourful as ever, with candidates campaigning on elephants, buffalo-pulled carts, camels and donkeys, and their unending cavalcades of jeeps, tractors and trucks making their way across the country.
Many are taking their cue from the US elections with e-campaigning, while others prefer the tried-and-tested option of erecting multi-storied and multi-coloured cut-outs of themselves at vantage points across cities, dwarfing the surrounding buildings.
Several eunuchs have also declared their intention to run, claiming that since both men and women had failed them, the electorate should vote in the “neutral gender”. Over the years a handful of eunuchs have been elected to state legislatures but never to parliament.
The month-long staggered voting allows security forces to deploy around the country to ensure free and fair voting, preventing unscrupulous parties from coercing an electorate that is more than twice the population of the United States.
The massive electoral process involves over four million election workers, half of them security personnel, who will man 828,804 polling centres with 1.1 million electronic voting machines.