Kavita Krishnan, Delhi
Psephologists, astrologers and speculators alike had used their predictions to campaign for a return of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's right-wing National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to power in the April 20-May 10 Indian parliamentary elections. Voters foiled these oracles, however, delivering a decisive blow to Vajpayee's Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian Peoples Party), as well as most of its NDA allies.
The result of the voters' determination to kick out the NDA delivered an unexpected victory to the Congress Party, once the unchallenged ruling party of India, but which had been written off as a spent force in recent years.
The Congress Party and its allies, with the unconditional support of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have now formed a new coalition federal government.
The NDA regime had been marked by state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogroms, a Hindu chauvinist rewriting of Indian history textbooks, denunciations of writers, filmmakers and plays in the name of preserving "Indian culture", the introduction of the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA, which has used against Muslim minorities and political dissenters), an about-turn in India's foreign policy through the forging of an "anti-terror axis" with the US and Israel, and ruthless policies of economic deregulation and privatisation that caused widespread agrarian devastation, farmers' suicides and a big increase in rural unemployment.
With the BJP's heady victories in elections in three states last year, the NDA had been confident of a victory in the federal elections this year. But the BJP, as well as most of its key allies, suffered a crushing and unmistakable rejection in their own erstwhile strongholds.
Ninety sitting BJP MPs lost their seats. The BJP's ally in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), was wiped out entirely.
In its pre-election campaigning, the BJP had avoided overtly emotive and communal issues, choosing instead to showcase the economic "achievements" of the NDA government. Its main campaign plank was that it had achieved unprecedented growth for India's economy (US$120 billion in foreign exchange reserves was touted as proof of this growth), and that thanks to its five-year stint, India was "shining", and Indians were "feeling good".
Deputy PM Shri Lal Krishan Advani announced that the "Feel Good" slogan coined by him was inspired by an advertisement for a prominent men's clothing brand. It was clearly no coincidence that the BJP's central slogan was inspired by the world of advertising. For the first time, Indian politics adopted the tactics of the world of marketing, with the BJP using TV ads and tele-marketing (recorded phone calls from Vajpayee) to sell itself as a branded product.
Unintended result
The tactic was not ineffective, however. It had an unlikely result, quite unintended by the BJP's campaign managers. It served to put the issues of India's economy, and the well-being of its people, centre-stage in the elections, and voters responded with anger and outrage.
Not only in rural India, but even among the urban middle class, the "Feel Good" slogan was perceived as a cruel mockery of most voters' economic plight and sense of betrayal.
Midway through the election campaign, when Advani's "Bharat Uday Rath Yatra" (nation-wide "India Shining Chariot Tour") got a lukewarm response, and the BJP began to sense voters' hostility, it sought to replace the "Feel Good" slogan with some good old trustworthy xenophobia. It shifted its campaign to targeting Congress president Sonja Gandhi, wife of the late Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi, for her Italian origins. It raised the demand that Indian citizens of "foreign origin" should be barred from holding India's highest office.
Around this time, spokespersons for the stock market began to make public pronouncements that only an NDA government could guarantee "stability" and be trusted to continue with the neoliberal economic "reforms" and not "retreat" under "populist pressures".
The BJP campaign echoed this, targeting the parliamentary opposition for its multiple power centres and lack of a single leader. But the shrill cries of "foreign origin" and "instability" found few takers.
NDA ally Chandrababu Naidu, the self-styled "cyber" chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state, lost his job on May 11 after voters in the state elections took revenge for the drought, suicidal desperation, hikes in rural electricity tariffs, unemployment and rural migration, and brutal state repression which were the costs of Naidu's information technology ivory tower.
Andra Pradesh's newly elected Congress chief minister announced subsidies for farmers and the setting up of a telephone help-line for distressed farmers. But rural Andhra continues to reel under hundreds of farmers' suicides, and the measures the new state government is willing to take as yet are woefully inadequate.
In the federal elections, the AIADMK-BJP alliance did not retain even one of its 40 seats in Tamil Nadu. In the wake of this rout, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha Jayaram's AIADMK government, which had been a faithful and enthusiastic pupil of each of the BJP's repressive Hindu chauvinist policies, promptly began reversing many of the policies she had imposed over the previous two years — including a law against religious conversion, cases against political opponents, and dissenting journalists and newspapers, as well as terminations and punishments of thousands of government employees who had participated in a strike.
Less than two years ago, Narendra Modi had led the BJP to victory in the Gujarat state elections soon after the state had been gripped by an orgy of communal violence which had led to the deaths of at least 1000 people, mostly Muslims.
Gujarat 'laboratory'
With Narendra Modi as its chief minister, Gujarat was touted as a Hindu chauvinist "laboratory" in which the BJP had conducted a "successful experiment". In the federal election, BJP candidates were returned in only 14 of the state's 26 federal parliamentary seats, losing 12 seats to the Congress Party.
The outcome of the federal election was clearly a result of a massive voter backlash against the NDA's neoliberal economic policies and therefore cannot be seen as an unequivocal endorsement for the Congress Party. This is proved by the fact that in the state elections in Karnataka, the Congress government was defeated for aping the economic liberalisation policies of the Naidu government of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
Similarly, in Punjab, where a Congress government has punished farmers and the agrarian poor by pushing through liberalisation in agriculture, the party fared badly in the federal polls.
Where it is not in power at the state level, Congress managed to reap the harvest of popular discontent. But if it pushes the same pro-capitalist, anti-working people policies of economic liberalisation that it pioneered during the early 1990s — when the new prime minister, Manmohan Singh — was finance minister, it is likely to face the same fate as the NDA.
The federal election results caused some strange and unprecedented theatrics. The Sensex, the barometer of the stock market, tried its best to subvert the electoral result by indicating, through dramatic plunges and leaps, the big capitalist investors' "preferences" in the composition of the new Congress-led government.
First, the Sensex plummeted to show the investors' alarm and disapproval at some economic policy statements made by leaders of the CPI(M) and the Communist Party of India (CPI). Then, Singh came forward to appeal to investors not to panic. The parliamentary left, too, made conciliatory noises, indicating that neoliberalism "with a human face" was all it is after and in this they would cooperate fully with the Congress.
Next, the BJP and its Hindu chauvinist parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), declared a virulent xenophobic attack on Sonja Gandhi, who was all set to become prime minister. Conveniently coinciding with this assault, the Sensex took another nosedive.
Gandhi then "sacrificed" her rightful post to none other than Singh, and the presence of this "father of economic reforms" at the helm was enough to reassure the sensitive moods of the Sensex!
Gandhi's decision took the wind out of the sails of the RSS' "foreign origin" plank, and Congress now is well set to recover its lost stature as the favoured party of India's capitalist rulers.
Challenge before left
The major left parties — the CPI (M) and CPI — have broken their previous records of parliamentary performance, winning more than 60 seats. Fifty-five of these seats were won in the left stronghold states of West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala, while the remaining seven seats were won in alliance with Congress or its regional allies.
With this increased strength inside the parliament, the left has a greater possibility of intervening forcefully in national politics. So far most that the left parties have made of this strength has been to extend unconditional support to Singh's new Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), providing it with the crucial numbers to form a government.
It remains to be seen whether the parliamentary left will assert its independent strength to push for decisive changes in policy that will benefit the workers and peasants. If it does so, it could push back the reactionary politics of the BJP. If, however, the parliamentary left restricts its role to defending the Congress-led government in the name of defending "secularism", it will allow the BJP to advance by championing and distorting popular resentment to economic liberalisation.
The federal elections have put the communal, obscurantist agenda of the BJP on the back foot. Several basic issues — education, employment, workers' and peasants' rights, food security, resistance to repressive laws like POTA, punishment for those guilty of communal violence, as well as resistance to US imperialism, have once again taken centre stage in Indian politics. The challenge for the broad left, and other forces of people's struggles, is to grasp the chance to build a powerful movement on these issues.
[Kavita Krishnan is a member of the editorial board of Liberation, the monthly English-language magazine of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 9, 2004.
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