press-clips.com © 2013
By David Alexander
NEW DELHI (UPI) – Politicking reached a fever pitch in the final days before a potential watershed election in the world’s largest democracy but voters are disillusioned about returning to the polls just 18 months after the last parliamentary vote.
Party campaigners with blaring loud-speakers cruise the streets of the capital in trucks and three-wheeled scooters. Political graffiti and colorful posters are plastered on walls in cities and villages across the country.
But gone is the boosterism and enthusiastic display of party banners that marked previous elections. Where voters once appeared confident about showing their support behind a particular candidate, now there is uncertainty and confusion.
No single candidate has captured the public’s imagination and no critical issue has galvanized opinion against a particular politician, as a corruption scandal did against then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989.
“Always before we had a wave, what we call a hawa,” said Khushwant Singh, the country’s leading columnist. “It was generally a negative wave built up against someone to sweep him out. But this time it is very confused.”
Voters will cast ballots Monday, Wednesday and Sunday, May 26, with three distinct choices:
-- Gandhi’s centrist Congress (I) Party, which has dropped its traditional socialist lingo, adopted a more liberal economic strategy and claims to be the only organization that can give government stability.
--The left-leaning National Front coalition of former Prime Minster V.P. Singh, which is promising to protect minorities, improve the lot of low-caste Hindus and redress centuries of inequities caused by the ancient Hindu caste system.
--The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party of L.K. Advani, which is pushing a Hindu nationalist platform, fanning anti-Muslim sentiment and promising to build a temple to the Hindu diety Rama on the site of an ancient Muslim mosque.
Despite the clear choices, voters appear disenchanted with the options, holding each political organization partly responsible for the wave of communal and caste violence and political instability that has swept the country in the past 18 months.
And many believe the coming vote will be no more decisive than the last, that India will once again have a hung Parliament with no party winning a clear mandate to lead the country out of the economic and political quagmire into which it has strayed.
“I’m apathetic. I’m not going to vote for the first time since independence,” said Khushwant Singh. “I’m disgusted, yes. Disenchanted. Disgusted. Given up. Looking for something better.”
Despite the sense of voter frustration, the coming elections are crucial. Pran Chopra, a visiting professor at the Center for Policy Research, said the vote may well turn out to be a watershed event in Indian politics.
At stake in this election is the future of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated Indian politics since independence in 1947. That dynasty is currently led by Gandhi, grandson of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and son of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Gandhi, then an airline pilot and political novice, swept to power in 1984 on a landslide vote following the assassination of his mother. But he led the Congress to defeat in 1989 and observers believe another loss could lead to his ouster as party chief.
“If the Congress is unable to form the next government,” Chopra said, “then I think that the Congress … is not likely to retain the leadership which has failed to bring it home to power.”
For Chopra, what makes this election a potential watershed, is the emergence of a voting block dominated by low-caste Hindus, who make up a large segment of India’s 844 million people.
He said the emergence of such a political block seeking its rights through the electoral process makes a marks a maturing of the country’s democracy.
“What was slowly beginning to emerge as a new demand group in our society operating through the electoral process and energized by the electoral process has now crystalized and has clearly emerged,” Chopra said. “That demand group is the backward classes.”
Singh, who served as prime minister for 11 months following the 1989 election, allowed his government to fall last November on the gamble that he would be able to unify religious minorities and low-caste Hindus of the so-called backward classes into a voting block.
Singh’s government had been weakened by outrage over his support for national government job quotas for the low-caste Hindus and other backward classes. It finally collapsed in a dispute with the Bharatiya Janata Party over the construction of a temple on the site of an ancient Muslim mosque in Ayodhya city.
As the election approached, the strength of the three main political groups remained unclear. Most observers agreed that only the Congress has the potential to win a majority.
What remains to be seen is how seriously support for the Congress has been eroded by the National Front’s appeal to minority and low-caste Hindu voters and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s platform of Hindu nationalism.
Above: A copy of this story in The Nation newspaper; Below, street scenes from New Delhi
Saturday, May 18, 1991
No clear winner in sight in India’s upcoming elections