Indian elections 2009 - an in-depth overview

Lionel Wijesiri

Currently, India is buzzing with election fever, ever since the 15th Lok Sabha Elections commenced last month. The numbers tell their own story. A country of 714 million will vote in over eight hundred thousand polling stations, choosing between candidates from 1,055 political parties including seven national parties and a plethora of regional and state parties.

Four million electoral officials and 2.1 million security personnel will be mobilized to ensure the fairness and safety of the polls. The people who started voting on 16th April in the first phase would not know the results in their local contests till one month later, after citizens in the rest of India’s 543 constituencies vote in a five-phased process.

Politics of India consists of a framework of a federal parliamentary multi-party representative democratic republic modeled after the British Westminster System.

The Prime Minister is the head of government, while the President is the formal head of state and holds substantial reserve powers, placing him or her in approximately the same position as the British monarch.

Executive power is exercised by the government. The legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of the Parliament of India. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.

Like the USA, India has a federal form of government; however, the central government has greater power in relation to its states. The ‘Centre’ or the central government, can dismiss state governments if no majority party or coalition is able to form a government or under specific Constitutional clauses and can impose direct federal rule known as President’s rule.

For most of the years since independence, the central government has been led by the Indian National Congress (INC), Politics in the states have been dominated by several national parties including the INC, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and various regional parties. From 1950 to 1990, barring two brief periods, the INC enjoyed a parliamentary majority.

The INC was out of power only between 1977 and 1980.

Political parties

In 1989, a Janata Dal-led National Front coalition in alliance with the Left Front coalition won the elections but managed to stay in power for only two years. As the 1991 elections gave no political party a majority, the INC formed a minority government under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and was able to complete its five-year term.

The years 1996-1998 were a period of turmoil in the central government with several short-lived alliances holding sway. The BJP formed a government briefly in 1996, followed by the United Front coalition that excluded both the BJP and the INC.

In 1998, the BJP formed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with several other parties and became the first non-Congress government to complete a full five-year term. In the 2004 Indian elections, the INC won the largest number of Lok Sabha seats and formed a government with a coalition called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), supported by various parties.

As history indicates, Indian politics is often regarded as chaotic. It is said that more than a fifth of parliament members face criminal charges and is not unheard of that most state assembly seats are held by convicted criminals. Corruption among politicians in India is common.

Success story

India’s economic success story of recent years may be tarred by the global economic meltdown. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had insisted in December that India, with its large domestic market and fairly sensible borrowing practices would emerge relatively unscathed from the recession.

In the last five years, the Indian economy has grown at a rate of 8.6 percent. But the country is not impervious to ripples of decline elsewhere.

The southern state of Kerala, for instance, depends in large part on remittances from migrant workers in the Gulf States. Tens of thousands of migrants are now returning home after being laid off in the recession-hit emirates, forcing Kerala to face the prospect of a shrunken economy and an unemployment crisis. The Prime Minister, an economist by training, also has conceded recently that India’s rate of growth may dip below 7 percent in this year.

Many social indicators in India have shown signs of deterioration of the rates of poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy.

A booming middle class cannot mask India’s glaring inequalities of wealth and lifestyle, gaps made all the more unbridgeable by endemic corruption and bureaucratic indifference.

As far as the two major political parties are concerned, in terms of actual policy, the Congress and the BJP share much in common.

Both are keen on steering India towards a closer relationship with the USA, while maintaining strong and independent bilateral ties with Russia, China and other powers. Both are broadly committed to the program of economic liberalization that India embarked upon nearly twenty years ago.

Their main difference remains one of ideology, with the Congress committed to the secular and pluralist principle that India is not defined by any single religion, and with the BJP claiming that a Hindu civilization ethos undergirds modern India.

This general ideological divide makes it impossible for some smaller parties - like those on the Left - to ally closely with the BJP. But the real game of Indian politics is played on a much more minute, shifting field, as the big two parties vie for the backing of a host of regional, caste and issue-based parties.

Alternate parties

It is this confusion of politics in India that neither the Congress nor the BJP will be able to form the next government without the support of other parties of varying shape and character. In the lead-up to this election, both parties’ coalitions have effectively collapsed, with the withdrawal of several major regional allies.

These and other minor regional parties, along with Leftist and caste-based national parties, have in recent months formed a number of alliances under the fanciful nicknames as the “Third Front” and the “Fourth Front”, which exist in name more than in reality. But their message is clear. The Congress and the BJP, the two giants of Indian politics, will have to increasingly accommodate other agendas and interests in building a workable majority in parliament.

Such is the growing strength of these alternative parties that there is a remote possibility for the next prime minister to emerge from their ranks and not those of the Congress or the BJP. For example, Kumari Mayawati, chief of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which claims to represent the interests of the most marginalized castes and tribal peoples, is a potential candidate in this vein.

She is Chief Minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. As a Dalit - an “untouchable” - and a woman, her ascent is already remarkable and a sign of shifting hierarchies and power-bases in India.

Though her becoming prime minister this time remains an unlikely possibility, the BSP, which was once mostly confined to Uttar Pradesh, is now contesting in constituencies across the country and may well have a hand in playing kingmaker by Mid- May.

Challenges

This delicate balance of power has become a cause for concern for many educated middle-class Indians. What India needs, according to them, is the emergence of a new party that cuts across national and identity-based lines, and represents the aspirations of the country’s growing population.

Last month, the first three phases of polling were completed in a majority of States of India; 124 constituencies on April 16, 141 on April 22 and 23 and 107 on April 30. On 7th May another 85 will go to polls. The remaining 86, including the crucial Tamilnadu, will have Elections on 13th May.

All election candidates as well as citizens are expectantly looking forward to the 16th of May, when the votes polled in all five phases of the General Elections will be counted and the results declared.

Now that the 15th general elections are reaching the end, the big question in everybody’s mind is who is going to win? Will one party take it all or will there be no clear winner, which means a coalition government or a political patchwork quilt at the center? We will know the answer in a few days’ time.