INDIA. ELECTIONS 2004 INDIAN ELECTIONS 2004: A SETBACK FOR BJP'S EXCLUSIVIST AGENDA Zoya Hasan Nehru University, New Delhi The Indian general elections in which more than 350 million turned out to vote has produced a big political upset, perhaps the biggest upset in Indian politics. No pollster or media pundit or party leader of any significance predicted a verdict in which the Congress, not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would emerge as the single largest party in the 14th Lok Sabha. Nobody could foresee the Congress-led alliance ending up 30 seats ahead of the BJPled combine. Nobody could predict the significant increase in the weight of the Left in national politics, with more than 60 seats in a 543-member Lok Sabha and, given these numbers, qualitatively well placed to influence the economic, political and foreign policies of the new Government.1 The forced exit of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was indeed a momentous day in the history of Indian democracy - one that now has a Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister and a Christian woman of Italian origin as one of its tallest leaders, elected or endorsed by large numbers of the Hindu majority.2 Before she made history by her decision to decline the Prime Ministership, Sonia Gandhi had the support of 322 members of Parliament. There can't be many elected leaders in the democratic world who have renounced the top job after carrying their party on their shoulders to a victory. Perhaps no election result, not even the defeat of Indira Gandhi in 1977, has been as thrilling as this. The 1977 election was dominated by a crisis of regime fostered by the imposition 1 'Meaning of Verdict 2004', Hindu, 14 May 2004. 2 Rajeev Bhargava, 'The Magic of Indian Democracy', www.opendemocracy.net 27 May 2004. Zoya Hasan – Indian Elections 2004: A Setback for BJP’s Exclusivist Agenda – September 2004 1 http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org of authoritarian rule. This election was without a national crisis, no overwhelming national issue, and no prior mobilization. Moreover, the changes in 1977 were directed from above by parties, leaders and slogans. In this vote people's everyday concerns and choices have played a decisive role. For sheer drama and because it represents the most remarkable turnaround in Indian politics, the 2004 verdict will be remembered by future historians of Indian democracy as more significant. What was this election about? Was it about secularism? Was it a mandate against economic reforms? Or was it about the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee versus the foreign origins of the Congress leader, Sonia Gandhi? Was it only about local issues, as the BJP has claimed? Or was it simply a case of rejecting the BJP? Newspapers and the opposition are currently engaged in an intense ideological debate over interpreting the unexpected verdict, a battle that is almost as passionate as the election itself. Those who want to minimise the significance of the verdict are blaming it on anti- incumbency, State-level misgovernance, the choice of alliance partners by the NDA or simply the Indian populations's rising expectations. Breaking his silence, the BJP strategist and former Deputy Prime Minister L.K Advani, has blamed the error of the India Shining slogan for its debacle, while the former Prime Minister Vajpayee has blamed the Gujarat violence as the major factor in the party's shock defeat. Pro-economic reform commentators and media pundits have unanimously blamed the Gujarat pogrom for the BJP's reverses. The actual election results are too varied and too complex to be explained by any single factor. Even though the verdict is a fractured one, there is no uncertainty in this astonishing verdict. It contained three unambiguous political messages. First, it rejected the Vajpayee-led NDA government by reducing the alliance to a minority in the Lok Sabha. Secondly, it dismissed firmly the government's claims - symbolised by the India Shining slogan - about the growth and development the country achieved under it and disapproved of the politics of Hindutva practised by the BJP. Thirdly, the emergence of the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress as the single largest party made it clear that an overwhelming mass of people have rejected the campaign against her on the basis of her foreign origins. All in all, the main message is against political and economic divisiveness. It is an expression of dissatisfaction and frustration with the existing political order and a rejection of the anti-poor, non-inclusivist character of the BJP-NDA. From a broader perspective, this election can be read as a battle over two different ideas of India, one inclusive, the other exclusive and elitist.3 The first is the Nehruvian idea backed 3 Vir Sanghvi, 'Two Ideas of India', Hindustan Times, 16 May 2004. Zoya Hasan – Indian Elections 2004: A Setback for BJP’s Exclusivist Agenda – September 2004 2 http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org by a wide spectrum of Gandhians, Congress, Socialists and Leftists and numerous progressive NGOs. In this version, democracy, secularism and social justice are paramount. This model ensured some level of distributive fairness and still tried to achieve economic growth. The problems with this model were, and still are, that it works very slowly. There is, however, a second model, one that owes a lot to the flourishing economies of East Asia. This model has very little place for liberal values, secularism, social justice, accommodation, and compassion. In this model democracy is a convenience to be used and disregarded as the need arises, witness the BJP's refusal to accept Sonia Gandhi as the Prime Minister. The priority of this model is economic growth and making people rich. The BJP government believed, in essence, in the second model. Even though the right wing BJP never won more than a quarter of the vote, its rise to power represented a dramatic shift in economic and political policy. It mounted the most potent challenge to the first model which is closely related to the inspirations behind the freedom struggle and its modernist ideas. For the BJP the key issue was progress and prosperity, and transforming India into a Great Power by 2020. It believed that as long the upper and middle classes were rich and happy, the bulk of the Indian population did not matter. Indeed it allowed an economic minority to prosper at the expense of the majority. It regarded the level of the Sensex as a measure of India's success, and acted as though rural India was another country and the rural population does not matter anymore.4 But now the second idea of India has been defeated because the Congress in this election succeeded in reviving and projecting the first model with its stress on pluralism, accommodation and social justice. The BJP-led NDA, taken in by its own hype, which was sustained by several opinion polls, decided to advance the Lok Sabha elections by eight months, and campaigned on the slogan of India Shining and Feel Good factor in the air, which it was convinced would pay the coalition rich electoral dividends. It was also banking on the positive impact of Vajpayee's peace initiative with Pakistan. But India Shining campaign backfired spectacularly and completely overshadowed the peace initiative. If economic reforms mean policies that better the lives of millions, then surely people want them. In so far as economic reform in India has come to mean a neo-liberalism that sells Indian assets to foreign investors, relentlessly dismantles anything state- owned, and regards any state intervention in the economy as wrong, then the election results can plausibly be seen as a rejection of reform. The clearest evidence of this comes from the findings of the post-poll survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Society (CSDS), which shows that "there is very little approval among the ordinary citizens for economic 4 Ibid. Zoya Hasan – Indian Elections 2004: A Setback for BJP’s Exclusivist Agenda – September 2004 3 http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org reforms" and that "there is a very high degree of popular consensus on this matter that cuts across class and party lines."5 In other words, the elite consensus on economic reforms is not reflected in public opinion and there is evidence of widespread unease and anxiety among the ordinary voters about their economic conditions and livelihood, an anxiety that was heightened by lack of trust in a government perceived to be pro-rich.6 The choice of India Shining and Feel Good as the campaign slogans had the unintended consequence of making the economy into a central election issue. As it ran a pan-Indian campaign at the cost of Rs 4.5 billion claiming that the nation was on the move, the illogical nature of the slogans became manifest. The middle and upper classes thrived as growth averaged 6.2 percent annually in the 1990s, but 65 percent of the population lives on agriculture, a sector that has stagnated. Through the growth years the gap between the rich and poor and between rural and urban areas grew dramatically.7 The government's so-called achievements benefited only the rich, and the upper middle class, and these sectors did not require any advertisement campaign to be reminded about their progress during the past five years. By contrast, the India Shining and Feel Good slogans only served to remind the vast majority of the population that the government's achievements have not reached it, and this section did not want the NDA to have another term in office. In the end, the ordinary citizen voted to puncture the illusory aspects of this success, with a vote, which even if it was not against economic reforms in principle, was certainly against the perceived indifference of its champions to the plight of those excluded or adversely affected by it.