Sol Sanders Archive

These thoughts came to mind reading the results and the commentaries of Indians and foreigners about the recent elections. And, of course, as in every election, what the voters meant by their ballots may well be interpreted or misinterpreted by those they have elected.

One basic thought one must preface any attempt at analysis with is the miracle of the elections themselves. In a vast country with 1.2 billion people, most of them alas! living in subnsistence on the edge of disaster, voiced their opinion of their leadership in relatively free polls with a minimum of violence. That, in itself, is a miracle. Estimates of the electorate ran to 714 million voters, an increase of 43 million over the 2004 elections, and it could be that more than half a billion voted. An idea of the complexity of the effort was that of the total of 543 parliamentary constituencies, 499 had been newly delineated according to a multiparty commission set up in 2002.

The results confounded the experts. A new leftwing coalition was decimated – even in its home districts of West Bengal and Kerala of the Communist Party [Marxist], the pro-Beijing wing in a split lost in the ideological sands of time. The epidemic of smaller caste, ethnic, linguistic, and regional parties was halted, at least for a while. New Delhi’s old “government party” – the Indian National Congress – came back stronger than in 25 years when it had almost been written off by many critics. The Hindu-revivalist Bahratiya Janata Party [BJP] lost heavily despite being a better spokesman on economic and perhaps security problems, but tied to an ugly anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat from where its next leader is likely to come.

But beyond the back-slapping and congratulations for the fact that the Congress and its United Progressive Coalition has a near majority and seems more likely to supply stability in what will be a continuing plethora of parties and ideas, there is also a stark darker reality. The Congress, more than much of the rest of the Indian polity, has never emerged from the shadows of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Fabian prejudices.

Despite the fact that as far back as the Soviet implosion, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – who will at least for the time being take up the nominal leadership – has become a stalwart advocate of market economics, his inability to carry through new reforms is likely to continue. Indeed, to win this election, the Congress had gone back to the same kind of phony populism it had preached under Nehru. A guaranteed minimum income through inverse tax payments to villagers, most of whom are still marred in poverty, ignorance and graft, was only recently one of its “innovations” that will lead to new graft and disappointment.

In a worldwide recession and credit crunch, the Congress’ left – using their battalions of “babu” clerks in government – will continue to wage a guerrilla against foreign investment with their transfers of technology at a time when those worthies are even harder to court. Yes, the information technology software industry exports are probably guaranteed in an even more competitive international market seeking to “outsource” call centers and routine accounting. But the golden ghettos which have been created for what by Indian standards are highly paid “graduates’ in Bangalore and Hyderabad and Madras are going to continue to be isolated Americanized pockets of relative luxury in a population soon to surpass China’s as the world’s largest.

Congress’ left will take comfort and argument from the financial and economic disasters in America and Europe as proving that their preference for state-owned “commanding heights” is indeed the magic formula for escaping India’s peculiarly unique poverty, the worst in the world. And they will continue – despite the present beginning of doubts in the leadership of their competitor, China – that there is a top-down formula for achieving the prosperity of America and Europe.

That’s why an aging and ailing Singh – his quivering voice could not be heard in the Congress headquarters where he announced the acceptance of victory – may have to give way to 38-year-old Rahul Gandhi. Already the backers of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty are persuaded that the gains in the family’s native Uttar Pradesh state, against a flamboyant outcaste matriarch, is proof of the political perspicacity of Jawaharlal’s greatgrandson. The martyrdom of his grandmother and his father in the traditional Hindu [and Indian Moslem] iconography have enshrined him even were he turn out to be more of a mediocrity than his nright, handsome face suggests. In the coming months as the economy continues, probably, to deteriorate, the handover may come sooner than later with his mother, Italian-born Sonia, steering the Congress from the backseat.

But whether the bulk of Indian voters or, indeed, Indian politicians are prepared to face it, India’s major problem – Singh has sometimes said so – is the question of security. The country is engaged in a vast program of purchase [and some generally misdirected local manufacture] of heavy, hi tech weaponry, from new aircraft carriers to one of the greatest purchases of fighter planes anywhere for decades. These are seen as necessary for India to reinforce its claims to increasing its emerging great power status. And in the past, BJP spokesman have been outspoken that – along with their nuclear weapons – is aimed at the potential enemy, China.

Again, despite old pseudo-Gandhian domestic evaluation of New Delhi-Beijing relations as building toward understanding and accommodation, the fact is that China continues to build up its forces on the high ground in Tibet, that there is still no border settlement [which produced the 1962 short won which Beijing won decisively], that the Chinese are expanding along a series of commercial basis, their “string of pearls”, with a blue water navy in India’s own Indian Ocean, and that they have made enormous inroads in influence with surrounding neighbors who were once part of the British Indian Empire. That almost a dozen Indian states have half bandit-half political insurgencies that theoretically take their cues from Maoist doctrine [long since abandoned in Beijing] is critical for Indian defense.

More than anything else, peace and progress is threatened by events in neighboring Afghanistan – and Pakistan, the Indian nemesis with whom it has fought three and a half wars in the last half century since independence and partition of the old British India. Cerebrally, perhaps, Indian politicians understand the threat posed by the Islamofascists who oppose a modern state in Afghanistan and are threatening with the same terror now the secular elite which has dominated Pakistan since independence. But for those Indian politicians, the acceptance of the Muslim state on the permanently unstable western reaches of the Subcontinent, is still something that they still view in the dark of night as threatening for a secular Indian state which itself has a Muslim population probably larger than Pakistan’s.

The question of the hour – with a Pakistan not only under attack but rapidly expanding its own nuclear arsenal – is whether there will be in the new Indian government leaders so brave as to gamble for a “breakthrough” with Pakistan. The momentary stance that failure of the Pakistan leadership to acknowledge fully the extent of its citizens’ implication in last year’s Bombay Massacre is a stumbling bloc to further progress for a reconciliation. The three-minute speech from the heart by another young politician, Omar Abdullah, grandson of the Lion of Kashmir who originally built a political movement among Muslims loyal to the Indian state, to a recent parliamentary audience was the stuff of which such overtures must be made.

But time is running out.

Pakistan leader Gen. Ayub Khan told me repeatedly more than three decades ago that if an Indian-Pakistan compromise were not achieve in his lifetime – the lifetime of those who had lived in a pre-partition India – it would never come. Perhaps the fact that Singh was born in what is now Pakistan and the still active Gen. Pervez Musharraf was a native of Delhi gives that old prophecy continued validity today.

It is clear that without further accommodation between India and Pakistan, the effort by Washington with all its weapons of war and treasure for a bankrupt Pakistan to overcome the continuing threat from fanaticism to peace and stability in the region, cannot succeed. Precisely because of the victory of electoral democracy in India, the initiative probably must now come from New Delhi.

Is the new coalition which will be cobbled together capable of it?