With the conclusion of counting in India’s general elections last week, the Indian National Congress confounded many of the electoral pundits in India and abroad by winning, in India’s terms, a major victory at the national polls.
A prevalent conclusion of many commentaries had been that the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the regional parties would have gained sufficient votes and seats in the Lok Sabha, the national Parliament, to force the Congress to engage in an extensive set of negotiations to ensure a viable majority.
But the opposite has turned out to be the case. Congress and its minor electoral allies gained almost a majority – 261, of the total number of 543 seats. And within its own broad majority Congress on its own, obtained 206. The main regionalist party contender, representing the Dalits (or those who used to be called Untouchables), centred in the state of Uttar Pradesh, obtained for them a disappointing, 61 seats. And the major contending national party, the BJP received what for it, has been also been a disappointing 116 seats.
The victory is, of course, part of the continuing triumph of Indian democracy with its estimated 1.5 billion people. They have continued to demonstrate that in spite of all sorts of cultural, ideological and religious divisions, the particular form of parliamentary democracy and its related one-man one-vote system, retains an overwhelming resonance on the Indian sub-continent. India is among a very few countries on the sub-continent, and in Asia generally, which has not really done the popular thing among ex-colonial countries, and made major modifications to its constitutional system handed down by, or negotiated with, the British.
But the election is also a sort of turn-against-the-tide victory for Congress itself. For many academic and journalistic commentators have, in recent years, deemed it to be on a gradual path of disintegration and miniaturisation, and in the face of both geographical and cultural ‘splittist’ and divisive tendencies, unable to maintain the sort of political dominance which Nehru had bequeathed it. Instead they saw the potential divisiveness as increasing in strength, with any Indian government being an unwieldy coalition, subject to continuing bargaining over policy, and, in effect at the whim and fancy of political blackmailers.
The election result in that regard represents a vindication of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s policy in the last few years, of refusing to concede to his Indian Communist Party allies in the last electoral period, that they should hold a veto over the government, whether in respect of economic or security policy.
Manmohan Singh, an internationally respected academic and policy economist, had taken the risk, after his appointment as Minister of Finance in 1991, of introducing a series of liberalizing reforms into the Indian economy, and reducing the stranglehold which its semi-socialist statist policies were alleged to have over the economy since Indian independence. These reforms Singh found it necessary to introduce at that time in the face first, of the disintegration of India’s main trading partner, the Soviet Union; and secondly, the major increase in oil prices after the US-Iraq Gulf War o f 1990. And they implied accepting the advice of the International Monetary Fund, till then largely anathema to Indian policy-makers, certainly of the Congress.
Singh saw this election as a test of whether the Indian electorate would give him a sufficient mandate to continue these reforms which he had had to slow down, in the face of pressure from his governmental allies, in recent times. And what the Indian electorate has demonstrated, is its general approval of the reforms, whose success has been taken to be indicated by the dramatic rise in the rate of economic growth in the country in the last two decades. The rate of growth averaged 8% between 2004 and 2009, after maintaining an average a rate of 7.6% at the end of the 1980s following some initial liberal reforms by the pro-capitalist BJP. The electoral impact of the later reforms has sustained itself, even in spite of the financial and economic meltdown which has affected India, like other emerging economies.
Manmohan Singh also took another decisive step, opposed by his Communist allies in the last government, by deciding to, as it were, internationally legitimize India’s transformation as a nuclear power, by coming to an agreement with the United States on certain terms of maintaining its nuclear facility. The Communist allies saw these terms as an unnecessary concession to the US and left the coalition rather than support them. But Congress deemed this legitimation, and in effect, reorganization of its diplomatic relationship with the United States, an important card in its relations with Pakistan in particular, whose own nuclear facilities the US has tolerated, on the basis that Pakistan was its major ally on the sub-continent.
The electorate has shown that Manmohan Singh’s changes have not been seen in a negative light. That posture now allows him to proceed more confidently in domestic economic policy-making, and the assertion of a diplomacy of the balancing of economic relations between emerging countries and the major economic powers in the Doha talks, with a sense of assurance that there is a more measured balance on the part of the United States in its postures towards India on the one hand, and China on the other.
The election is, of course, also a triumph for the Indira Gandhi inheritance, specifically Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, believe to be the eventual heir to the leadership of the country, and with the electorate’s position, the country. For India is today led by a virtual political duumvirate, with Mrs Gandhi as President of the party having ceded the leadership to Manmohan Singh, never himself in a political role before his assumption of the Ministry of Finance. Any thoughts that the opposition parties might have had, that the Gandhi family was not up to the task of national mobilization now seem to have been proven false.
But together, this Congress duumvirate has been able to persuade India’s still largely rural population (agriculture represents 60% of employment in the country) that Congress is still the real game in town. As commentators have pointed out, in spite of the large number of persons still in non-industrial occupations, the figures show that there have been, since the end of the 1980s, persistent increases in life expectancy and literacy in the Indian population, and increasing food security for that population as well. It would appear that that, and the access to a new industrialization of the economy provided to India’s large middle class, has been the source of Congress’s victory.
