|
|
 |
 |
 |
| Saturday, 22 May 2004 |
 |
|
 |
Features | |
| News Business Features Editorial Security Politics World Letters Sports Obituaries
|
India: Sonia pre-empts gathering storm On my watch by Lucien Rajakarunanayake After the leadership she gave to the Congress-led alliance to achieve victory, although not in full measure, Sonia Gandhi has again stunned India and the world by her refusal to accept the office of Prime Minister. Her decision to follow her inner feelings, after being chosen leader of the Congress Parliamentary Group and back by her allies, which would have assured her the office of PM, will now silence the opposition that was being stoked by the defeated BJP, using the issue of her non-Indian birth. The BJP had already made clear that it will use this chauvinistic policy to maximum effect to prevent her from carrying on a successful administration. She has now avoided the difficulties of a minority government that will have even more problems with her as Prime Minister, due to her foreign birth, to direct the government through her own choice for PM, Manmohan Singh, the former Finance Minister, who was in fact the architect of India's change in economic policies and opened the windows to modern policies. The common factor The success of Sonia Gandhi and the Congress Alliance in the recent Indian election has much in common with what took place in Sri Lanka in April this year, making the UPFA the party with largest number of seats in parliament. Both gave plenty of political lessons on voting patterns in South Asian countries in the context of a market led economy, privatization, globalisation and seeking to conform to the World Bank and IMF standards of progress. Amy Waldman reporting on the Indian Election to the New York Times (May 15), writing under the headline "What India's Upset Vote Reveals: The High Tech Is Skin Deep" observed that, as India prepared to vote this spring, strategists from its ruling party mapped the country's first modern electoral campaign. The leap into the age of technology was not confined to electronic voting. Those who organized the BJP campaign based on the record of economic success of the BJP, had boasted of sending four million e-mail messages to voters and transmitting an automated voice greeting from the popular Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to 10 million land and mobile phones. But, Amy Waldman observed, the campaign obscured these other statistics: In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India's 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 a day, only an estimated 659,000 households have computers. The message that the Hindu-nationalist-led government had delivered the country to a new era of prosperity was belied by the limited reach of the media to deliver it. Don't we see a comparison to what took place in Sri Lanka, following President Kumaratunga accepting the challenge of the UNF and dissolving parliament to hold a general election on April 2? She responded to those who while insisting she should not dissolve parliament until the end of three years from December 2001, were at the same time daring her to do so at any time, to demonstrate the certainty of the larger mandate the UNF would obtain. We do not know how many e-mail messages the UNP strategists planned on sending, but the UNP's pundits of the technology cum corruption age such as Milinda Moragoda and Ravi Karunanayake, as well as the Ranil Wickremesinghe organization itself, did seek to contact as many householders as possible by telephone, to tell them of the UNF's success in the peace process, the unreal rate of economic growth and overall economic success. They too did not take into calculation the reality of the limited number of telephone lines in Sri Lanka coupled with their concentration in cities and suburbs, and although rapidly growing, the still limited reach of mobile phones that can carry this message even if it were credible. Those who carried on these campaigns were satisfied with winning in their areas only, and bothered little about the UNF candidates in the deprived rural areas. They now regret the decision to boycott the State media that had by far the largest reach, especially in the rural areas, compared to any private print or electronic media and also the credibility it still has. Having a Ministry for Samurdhi Affairs, they did not know the number of families living below the official poverty line in Sri Lanka, or that it exceeds 40% of the population. To quote Amy Waldman from the NYT: "That gap - the coexistence of a growing middle class with the growing frustration of those excluded from it - helps explain why Mr. Vajpayee's government has been turned out of office in the biggest upset since 1977, when Indira Gandhi lost after imposing a state of emergency. "It was a huge popular rebellion," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. The result was that at the conclusion of the election the ruling BJP coalition in India, failed to win anywhere near enough seats to form a government, just as in Sri Lanka, the then ruling UNF led by Ranil Wickremesinghe, failed to come within range of winning near enough seats to form a government. The BJP itself, which when the polls campaign began was expected to win easily partly on the strength of an economic boom, hailed by the World Bank and IMF, emerged as only the second largest party, just as the UNF is here today. The comparison on this matter, however, is somewhat distorted. While in India there was real economic progress judged from any standard under the BJP coalition led by Vajpayee, in Sri Lanka there was only a media-manufactured chimera of economic progress to even have a trickle down effect to the people that mattered. The advantage of the peace process was also lost because that too raised many doubts among the people over the many concessions given to the LTTE (as against the Tamils) and once again the failure of the people to even have a slight feel of what was promised as the "peace dividend" once open fighting stopped due to the ceasefire, largely observed in the breach by the LTTE. There is an irony in the comparison though. It is that Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, steered the Congress and its allies to victory, albeit without an outright majority in the Lok Sabha. Yet, it will form a government with support from the left wing parties that will not join the Government. That is true democracy at work, on issues of policy and principle. However, in Sri Lanka the UPFA with over 45% of the popular vote in the country is still without a working majority in parliament, due to the peculiar aberrations of Sri Lanka's electoral system of Proportional Representation, and the undemocratic attitudes of the parties not in the UPFA. Attributing the election results in India only to economic factors would be an oversimplification, says Waldman: "Caste, communalism, alliances with smaller parties, anti-incumbency, and local issues and personalities all played a role. But it would also be a mistake, analysts said to underestimate the role of economic discontent." This is true of Sri Lanka too. In addition to the economic and other related social factors there was also the strong emergence of the JVP as a powerful force representing the general resentment with the style of government of major parties over the past 50 years, and the discontent of the poor, especially in the rural agricultural sector and urban underclass. In most respects, for all the boasts of an economic boom by the BJP government, India is still a developing nation that is being transformed in many ways, but the transformation has yet to reach most of the population. The entire information technology industry, the pride of modern India and the bogey of employment loss to some Americans, still employs fewer than one million people, compared with 40 million registered unemployed. Growth in the preceding five years has averaged only about 5 percent, nowhere near enough to lift hundreds of millions from poverty. And the policy reforms, like privatizing state-owned industries or allowing more foreign investment, that have helped unleash the economy and boosted the Bombay Bourse, have yet to help an increasingly struggling agricultural sector, which supports some two-thirds of the population, says Amy Waldman. She quotes N. Ram, editor in chief of The Hindu newspaper, saying voters "turned on those who were callous to it or perceived to be pro-rich or didn't do enough in a drought." |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
Produced by Lake House |
