19 February, 1998
The dynasty strikes back
By Eqbal Ahmad
THE campaign for India's 12th general election closed on February 15. The staggered polling began on February 16 and will end on March 7. There are six hundred million registered voters in India today. Of these at least half shall actually cast their vote, making it the biggest democratic exercise in the world and in history. Until three weeks ago, the focus of attention was the Hindu revivalist party, BJP, as it was expected to lead a governing coalition. Then the wheels of fortune turned as the Indian National Congress rebounded dramatically.
At the close of the campaign, pollsters predicted the following results: BJP and allies=214; Congress=164; United Front=127. To form the government, a party or coalition needs 273 seats in the parliament. In sum, the prospect again is of a hung parliament and unstable government. The Congress and the United Front may again coalesce to keep their right-wing adversary out of power. In any case, the return of the Congress to the centre of politics casts a definite shadow on the future of Hindutva (Hindu polity) in multi-caste, multi-religious India.
At 113 years, the Indian National Congress is the oldest living party in the Third World. Over the century, it has been led by such giants as Gokhale, Gandhi, Azad, and Nehru, men who are credited with moulding it as a secular, liberal, and democratic all-India party. It led India to independence, and ruled it for 43 of its 50 post-colonial years. Since 1975, its fortunes have fluctuated, reaching an all-time low in 1996 when it came a poor second with 140 seats in the 545-member federal parliament. In order to keep its right-wing rival, the BJP, out of power, it supported the United Front government of I.K. Gujral but in November 1997 Congress leaders withdrew their support, the government fell and a fresh election had to be called.
Ironically, the Congress appeared two months ago to be the sure loser. Pollsters predicted that this election shall consign the Congress to a third place in the parliament. Sensing defeat, some Congress leaders broke rank either to join the BJP, or to form regional splinters so they might be free to strike future bargains with the winning coalition. Others implored Sonia Gandhi - the Italian-born widow of Rajiv, son of Indira, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister from 1947 to 1964, and great-grand-son of Motilal Nehru who too had once served as president of the Congress - to lead their electoral campaign. But Sonia was unavailable and, by all accounts, utterly unprepared. She was a shy, retiring widow, obsessed with maintaining her privacy and, though only 51, without a will to power.
In a surprise move on December 29, Sonia Gandhi announced that she would campaign for the Congress. India's most seasoned pundits said she would make but a marginal difference. They were wrong. On January 11, she appeared at a public rally in Tamil Nadu, precisely at the place where her husband Rajiv was killed on May 21, 1991, by Dhanu, a Tamil Sri Lankan female suicide bomber. "Three generations of my family", she said, "have laid down their lives for this country" as the crowd choked with emotion. Their daughter Priyanka and son Rahul have been with her on the trail. A new generation of the Nehru dynasty is obviously ready to lead the Indian National Congress. None of the three are currently running for parliament but their entry at a later date is not ruled out.
No one had quite expected the electrifying impact of Sonia Gandhi's debut on the morale of party workers and constituencies. She began to pull crowds in the hundreds of thousands, rally after rally. In the four weeks that she and her children were on the campaign trail, the century-old Congress started to appear, not quite young, but a respectable middle-aged party. The latest polls indicate that Sonia's campaign has gained the Congress some 30-40 extra seats in the parliament and that the BJP is not any more the sure government-maker it had appeared to be three weeks ago.
There is a mix of dynastic mystique and political strategy in Sonia Gandhi's lively campaign. That she abjured politics and power for seven years after her husband was assassinated and still does not seek office, has worked to her advantage. Indians have revered politicians - among them Mahatma Gandhi, Rajagopalachari, Jayprakash Narayan - who were active in politics but expressed disdain for power. Her style is reminiscent of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's (no relation of the Mahatma) who was assassinated by her Sikh guards in 1984. There is the brisk walk as she goes up the stage, that same imperious surveying of the crowd, then the vigorous rapid fire waving of hand. Often, she wears the local dress, and though she speaks in accented English, her first words are in one of India's 17 official languages. Daughter Priyanka, beside her in Sari, with a winning smile and hair cropped much like grand mother's, often follows, also in the local tongue, with a one-liner. "All of you, please vote for the Congress", and the crowds go dizzy with delight.
More important for India's future may be the shift in Congress strategy that the entry of Sonia Gandhi and her children has signalled. While banking on her dynastic aura, Sonia has been acknowledging past mistakes and making amends to alienated constituents. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had ordered the Operation Blue Star to dislodge Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple. The holiest of Sikh Shrines was badly damaged and much blood was shed in it violating the temple's sanctity. When she was murdered in retaliation, anti-Sikh riots followed. In Delhi some 3,000 Sikhs were massacred. Rajiv Gandhi's government did not prevent the horror, some leaders of his party encouraged the rioters; and no one ever apologized.
Sonia is the first one to do so. She travelled to Chandigarh, Sikh stronghold and capital of Punjab, spoke of Blue Star and "the hurt it caused the Sikh psyche." And spoke also of the 1984 riots: "As a widow and a mother I empathize with the victims. It should never have happened." Two prominent Congressmen, who were implicated in the 1984 massacres, were denied the party's nomination to run for parliament.
Until 1990, Muslims were solid Congress supporters. The demographic distribution of India's 130 million Muslims is such that in many electoral districts they have the swing voting numbers. For years their votes were crucial to keeping the Congress comfortably in power. As the BJP began to emerge in the late 1980 from a marginal minority grouping to becoming a rival party, the Congress under Mrs Gandhi and later under her son Rajiv tried to outflank the BJP by appropriating some of its religious loaded rhetoric and symbolisms. This did not quite help hold the Congress's old constituencies in India's populous Hindi-speaking region but it did alienate the Muslims, especially when the BJP led the destruction of the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya and the Congress government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao failed to stop this planned and pre-publicized atrocity.
Under Sonia Gandhi's leadership the Congress has made the initial gestures to reverse this legacy. It denied the parliamentary nomination to former premier Narasimha Rao. On the campaign trail she repeatedly emphasized the party's commitment to secularism, attacked the sectarian ideology of BJP, and expressed regret over the destruction of the mosque: "Rajiv told me that they will have to kill me before they touch the Babri Masjid." Should the Congress leadership build on these gestures, state and society in India shall be strengthened irrespective of whether Congress comes to power or stays out of it this time around.
In fact, there are those - for example, prominent Communist leaders and independent intellectuals - who believe that India's interests shall be better served if the BJP comes into power now. It will enter office with a weak coalition, and facing a strong parliamentary opposition, it will not be able to make good on the extremist promises it has made to its constituents. Notable among those are the commitment to: repeal Article 370 of the constitution which grants Kashmir a special status; enact a uniform civil code for India which is opposed by Muslims and other groups who wish to live by their personal tribal codes; induct nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles into India's arsenal; and build a Ram temple at the site of the Babri mosque.
Furthermore, although in Atal Vehari Vajpayee it will have a prime minister of some stature and competence, it is short on leaders qualified to govern a country as large, complex, and problem-ridden as India. In power it will also be subject to the pressures of its ultra-rightist coalition partners, thus augmenting its long suppressed internal contradictions. Out of office, its strengths have grown exponentially in the last decade; in office it is likely to lose the mystique of an outsider.
India's 12th general election has again drawn the world's attention to the unique persistence in South Asia of dynastic politics. From Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to India and Pakistan, South Asian people's yearning for democracy parallels their attraction to dynasties. This phenomenon has had at least one salutary effect. It has tended to obliterate gender discrimination from mass politics. Sonia Gandhi and her daughter Priyanka are the latest to rise to national power.
It is certain that in the future we shall hear more about them. As for the elections, March 7 is the last day of polling. We should be able to offer a definitive reading on its outcome by March 3 when the results of the main constituencies will be before us.