In the end Sonia graciously, gracefully declines, but not before the President invites her to don the mantle of India’s Prime Minister. You can’t renounce what you don’t have, now can you? She resigns with tact, and dignity, and clarity of purpose. She speaks only of her ‘inner voice’, makes no allusion to the vicious opposition forces arrayed against her. She does not renounce power, just the power that rests in the PM’s position. Instead she remains Party Chief of the Congress Party, becomes Chairperson of the party’s parliamentary wing, and, with a lightening quick change to the Congress’ constitution, she becomes Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha. This one carries the power to nominate the Prime Minister. In the days to come, she will take on leadership of the governing coalition, the United Progressive Alliance. Down the road she will achieve the status of a cabinet minister as Chairperson of the National Advisory Council.
On the day the ballots are counted I stay home, glued to the Hindi TV news. I read the numbers, catch the odd English word. It’s been quite a four-phase process, with about 165 million people eligible to vote in each of the four rounds; a total of 660 million eligible voters. Average turnout seems to be about 55%. In poorer states like Bihar people boycot the polls, and turnout is as low as 24%. Early results show surprising strength for the Congress, and unexpected losses for the BJP, the right-wing party that governed India for the past eight years. Voter dissatisfaction in the rural areas is immediately evident. The urban economic focus of the BJP appears to be their undoing. Pundits postulate about the anti-incumbency factor. I grin.
That night I realise I have only one paper, and hit the streets in search of other editorial opinions. There are no papers to be had, but a young man hearing my request takes me to his house. I wait outside as he runs in, emerging with a freshly creased Times of India, the paper of the right. I suggest his dad might want to read it; he assures me dad is away. He eagerly shows me a message on his cellphone. It decrys the Congress win and ends, “Now we will be ruled by another foreigner”. It takes me a minute to put it together: the message refers to the Raj. I ask this young man to tell me more about the fears regarding a Congress win. He replies, “They like the Muslims”. No kidding, those are his very words. Taking in the caste mark on his forehead, I suggest there is not much for Hindus to worry about. After all, I remind him, Hindus make up 75% of India’s population, while Muslims account for only 12%. His eyes register that this is new information, probably untrue. Our brief conversation is over. I walk home reflecting on the immense power of Hindutva. Militant Hinduism. “Cultural nationalism”, as it was softly peddled by the BJP in the dying days of the election.
Top of the news the next morning is the suicide of a 26-year-old man, whose note repeats that inaccurate cellphone message, “Now we will be ruled by another foreigner”. The voices of the right, in the home where I live, point to this news item as living proof of the Congress horror. I share my impressions on reading the cellphone message last night. I cannot speculate on why the young man choose to kill himself, but Sonia seems too convenient.
The post-results day brings new excitement. The BJP is out in force, flogging the foreign origin issue. Uma Bharati, Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, [synonomous with the Premier of a Canadian province], hands in her resignation and energetically plans to lead a nation-wide “agitation” against Italian-born Sonia, whose impending role as PM is “an insult to the country and a threat to national security”. A senior BJP leader, Sushma Swaraj, threatens to tonsure her head, sleep on the ground, eat only roasted grams [lentils] and wear white sarees. This last refers the traditional Hindu practice of sati, where a widow would don a white saree before immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre.
And in the midst of the furor and the frenzy, Sonia declines. With such quiet elegance. Not so her adherents. Congress party women activists stage a demonstration; they don white sarees and lay in the street to in front of Sonia’s home. Rowdy young party workers protest at her home and her office. The police are out in force. Elected MP’s threaten to commit suicide. Yup. So do a few young men. The BJP calls her ‘fickle-minded’ for not taking the PM post. I laugh out loud. The National TV station runs three full hours, live, of Congress MP’s responding to Sonia’s decision, some weeping, all pleading with her to reconsider. You gotta love Indian politics, and I do.
The smoke settles and Sonia chooses Manmohan Singh, an enormously respected politician, brilliant economist, quiet pragmatist, experienced cabinet minister and highly principled man to be the Prime Minister of India. Great choice. There is not much for the BJP to complain about, so they remain quiet. The papers, reaching for copy, trumpet that a Muslim President just swore in the first-ever Sikh Prime Minister; who was chosen by an Italian immigrant. They mindlessly herald a new era of communal harmony.
This is pure silliness, of course. Communal harmony will move slowly through India with hard work at the community level, honest dialogue, tons of education, and the political will to create change. It will not be the result of a series of coincidences. At the same time, it is true that the spectre of Hindutva, or the militant wing of Hinduism, has lost a little of its power. A review of state-by-state election results shows where pockets of Muslims and Christians joined with secular Hindus to unseat the BJP. Great!
I’m surprised that the Congress party makes only occasional references to the role of communalism in securing their win. I’m a little sad when the first party-name choice for the Congress and allies coalition changes from the Secular Progressive Alliance to the United Progressive Alliance. I thought the ‘Secular’ part would help keep them focused. And honest. They choose instead to focus on the rural-urban split and economic reforms. This shows in the Common Minimum Program [CMP] agreed to by the Congress and its allies.
The CMP identifies three major problems in rural areas: under and unemployment, poor irrigation to cope with the drought, and chronic malnutrition. They talk about the importance of rebuilding the agricultural sector through interest relief on current debts, low cost loans and irrigation. They promise to tackle malnutrition with food-for-work strategies and food security strategies. They say every adult in India will have at least 100 working days each year, at a wage better than the bottom. They promise economic reforms to help small-scale industries, and a stop to the sell-off of public service units like power projects. It sounds like it might be a tax and spend budget, most especially in the area of education. A national program will provide primary and secondary students with noon-day meals, and there’s a promise of steps to reverse the communalism currently present in school curriculums. More children will enter school under the CMP, and there will be an effort to retrieve the school drop-outs.
These are not the only post-election changes. The news changes. One day I hear that 40,000 women in India died last year in maternity-related deaths. It appears that health care for pregnant women is abysmal. In the rural news I read that over the last twenty-four months 3,000 farmers killed themselves in Andhra Pradesh alone. They died burdened by farm debt loads they would never repay, facing another drought, another loan, and another year with political promises of irrigation that never bring water. I hear about current suicides in states affected by the drought - three, or five, or more, reported from one state or another every day. In early June the CM of Andhra Pradesh is at the top of the TV news; he begs farmers to stop committing suicide and seek out relief programs recently put in place.
Back at the ‘Centre’, in Delhi, it’s not just a matter of the Congress assuming power; they only hold 145 seats to the BJP’s 138. Their 217-seat Coalition, the UPA, comprises over a dozen left-linked parties they must work with, and appease, in order to govern. In Parliament, the BJP and allies will hold 185 seats, while a combine of ‘Others’ sit in 136 seats, all of whom are supporting one or the other of the main parties “from the outside”. I hold faint hope for a five-year government, but I hope deeply for at least two years.
Incidentally, of those 538 seats in the Lok Sabha, 44 are held by women. For several years there’s been a Women’s Reservation Bill lurching from session to session, never making it to the front of the house. This Bill would provide a Constitutional guarantee that each party would reserve 33% of its seats for female candidates during an election. In 2004 the Congress fielded 43 women out of a total of 417 candidates, or 10.3%; the BJP ran 30 women out of 363 candidates, for a total of 8.1%. Men see women as missing the ‘winnability’ factor, although when they run, an average of 33% of women candidates win. During the election I met almost a dozen women contesting as Independents; denied a party ticket. And I don’t even speak Kannada!
A friend recently observed that women enter politics through widowhood. Party leaders believe that women who walk in their dead husband’s footsteps will win - the ‘sympathy’ vote. This is yet another glaring problem with the patriarchy in India, whose depths I still have not begun to plumb. But the new government promises to make the Reservation Bill a reality early into their mandate. And I hope they deliver.
Before any laws can be passed, coalition politics must play themselves out. The process of forming the Congress Coalition took nearly a week, and was not without problems. As I watched highly placed men in Coalition parties vie for position, I marvelled at the naked power and ego issues as they played out in the press. And the justice issues. In the end seven members of cabinet, chosen from the various Coalition parties, were awarded minister’s posts although they are currently charge-sheeted. To be charge-sheeted is to have charges pending against one – some for allegations of murder, rape and kidnapping, others for fraud and racketeering, still others for unreported alleged crimes. To be fair, some of the charges date back more than six years, and have yet to come to trial. At the same time, it gives the BJP a huge cat o’ seven tails and they are using it to flay the government. In the news there is much rhetoric about how men in prison cannot vote, but the Constitution allows them to run their election campaigns from well-appointed cell blocks, and sit in Parliament, even cabinet, tho’ they are “tainted” by allegations of serious crimes. I am baffled by this tainted minister’s fiasco. How did it happen? Oh to be a fly on the wall . . .
In days that follow the election the Sensex, monitor of India’s stock exchange, falls through the floor. Actually, it falls way more than merely through the floor. The Times of India runs a graph over their banner on page 1; the bleeding red trail ends well into the text above the fold. Seriously graphic. Economic columnists write dire predictions, drafted in blood I’ll bet. Socialists respond that the Sexsex affects only 6.9 million people in this country of 1 billion souls. I take comfort in the fact that PM Singh is an economist. Interestingly, I also take comfort in the fact I am not. It’s great fun to sit on the sidelines and comment when one knows ‘a little bit about a lot of things, but . . .’
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