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THE results of the five State elections powerfully reassert the abiding relevance of some central tenets and trends at the heart of India's democracy, and reaffirm the urgent need for the United Progressive Alliance to correct its policy course. The high (70 to 80 per cent) voter turnout shows that the electoral process remains extremely important for the masses. In India's most politicised States, including West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, there is no exhaustion with the process of democracy. It draws in people like a magnet.
The elections showed that polices and programmes remain far more important than personalities. Issues central to India's social reality - including public services, agrarian distress, growing indebtedness and unemployment - easily take precedence over the middle class' obsession with gross domestic product growth without regard to distribution. Pluralism and inclusiveness are rewarded by the electorate, just as sectarianism is punished. The results also reaffirm the salience of probity in public life.
The Left and its ideas were undoubtedly the greatest winners. Although it was widely expected, the Left Front's return to power in West Bengal for the seventh consecutive time was a stunning achievement, probably unparalleled in a country or province of comparable size anywhere. While the success is partly attributable to the Left's extraordinarily effective organisational machine, and to opposition disarray, its positive aspects, including improved margins and better performance in the cities, cannot be denied.
One reason why the Left has regained the urban middle class vote was the service-sector boom in Bengal, led by Information Technology, and rising incomes of the elite. This class will exercise pressure for "free-market" policies. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has promised to resist such pressure even as the ruling Front roots for "greater industrialisation". In his first response to the results, he stressed the importance of improving access to and the quality of health and educational services.
The elections' two biggest surprises were Kerala and Tamil Nadu - less for the aggregate outcome than for their magnitude, composition and causes. The Kerala verdict was a resounding affirmation of popular resentment at the United Democratic Front's economic and social policies, and the UPA's pro-United States foreign policy.
Foreign policy clearly emerged as an election issue in Kerala (and elsewhere) — perhaps for the first time since 1972 when Indira Gandhi dissolved many State Assemblies following the Bangladesh war. The focus here has been India's shift towards the U.S. and its willingness to toe the Western line, including its votes against Iran. Several Left leaders, including Prakash Karat, noted this trend. This writer's personal experience as a speaker at two recent conventions in Kerala related to foreign policy also confirmed this.
Kerala's economy experienced stagnation and decline under the UDF, with considerable deterioration in health services and growing agrarian distress. The Left Democratic Front mobilised people on these issues, including a Coca-Cola-centred campaign against water privatisation. As the state increasingly withdrew from provision of public services, the electorate's resentment grew. Significantly, the Karunakaran factor at best played a marginal role. Far more noteworthy was the ignominious defeat of tainted leaders like P.K. Kunjalikutty of the Muslim League and R. Balakrishna Pillai. The Muslim League also paid a price for its policy of not giving tickets to women.
In Tamil Nadu, the electorate repeatedly beguiled pollsters, who first predicted a major turnaround for the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) against the trend established by its rout in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. They twice revised their estimates. In exit polls, they gave the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-led alliance a 10 percentage-point and forecast 157 to 167 seats for it. In the event, it won 163 seats, but with only a lead of less than five percentage points, which calls for some explanation.
At any rate, at least five factors seem to have played a role in ensuring the Democratic Progressive Alliance's victory: promise of rice to ration card-holders at Rs. 2 a kg and land grants to the poor; waiving of farmers' debts from cooperatives; substantial votes of the religious minorities; and resentment against the AIADMK regime among State government employees for its handling of their strike in 2003, leading to 170,000 dismissals, later rescinded. (State employees represent a high proportion of the population in Tamil Nadu.) The fifth factor was foreign policy.
The first two factors speak to the agrarian crisis in Tamil Nadu of the past five years, including three years of bad drought, and persistent agrarian distress - which could not be counterbalanced by high GDP growth. The DPA presented a more confident inclusive agenda to the minorities - in contrast to Jayalalithaa's past support for the Babri Masjid demolition and her silence over the Gujarat pogrom. Other subsidiary factors, including actor Vijayakanth's 8.3 per cent vote - probably further helped the DPA.
Assam and Pondicherry also conform to the pattern favouring broadly centrist alliances. In Assam, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made small gains but failed to take advantage of the Congress' disarray. Everywhere else it drew a blank, performing especially badly in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. This can only further aggravate the National Democratic Alliance's crisis, itself reinforced by the growing alienation of the Trinamool Congress from the BJP.
The Left's role
With the elections, Centre-Left forces have on the whole emerged stronger, and the Left's weight vis-à-vis the UPA has increased. This will allow the Left to play what Karat calls a more "interventionist" role and insist on conformity to the National Common Minimum Programme.
The Left should waste no time in demanding that the UPA correct its pro-Washington bias in numerous areas: energy, agriculture, trade, intellectual property, and security and foreign policy.
The erosion of India's independent policy making space has been growing particularly since the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal of last July. The latest instance is mounting pressure on the UPA government to abandon the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline in favour of the far riskier Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project favoured by U.S. business interests, including companies like Unocal.
In the 1990s, Unocal hired powerful U.S. neoconservatives as "consultants" to lobby for TAPI, in collusion with the Taliban, then ruling in Afghanistan. (This almost led to the Taliban's recognition by Washington.)
The IPI pipeline is a far more mature project than TAPI. However, none other than the Ministry of External Affairs has been promoting TAPI, although it is fraught with greater uncertainty and political hazards.
Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, no less, has commended the TAPI pipeline to the Petroleum Ministry in an official letter (The Indian Express, May 11). His argument is not just that this would give India greater "leverage" over Iran, but "would also be in tune with the latest U.S. strategic thinking for the [Central Asia] region."
This is an utterly shocking statement. Perhaps no other Indian Foreign Secretary has tied India's energy options (or any other policy) to the apron-strings of U.S. strategic interests in such a brazen way - an act of treachery, if there were one. The Left must put its foot down on this and demand corrective action as well as an explanation from the UPA.
No less important will be the Left's intervention against moves to allow foreign investment in retail trade, grant Western corporations access to Indian pension funds, tailor a host of other policies to suit global capital's interests, as well as encourage foreign providers free access in education, health care and other services.
These moves are all fraught with harmful consequences. Multinationalisation of retail trade through hyper- and super-markets has proved disastrous in many European countries. It has not only wiped out small traders and wholesalers, but has also ruined primary producers, especially in agriculture and horticulture. Sacrificing pensions to speculative investment by predatory multinational firms means playing with the people's hard-earned savings.
The UPA urgently needs to make a radical correction to all such misbegotten policies and adopt humane, people-centred approaches, with an emphasis on the poor.
The UPA might be tempted to play down this need simply because the latest election results do not threaten its survival immediately. But it would be ill-advised to do so. The issue is not whether it survives for the next couple of years.
At stake is its medium- and long-term future. If it follows pro-rich, neoliberal and pro-U.S. policies, the people send will it packing. The state elections show that the people have become more assertive, more aware of their rights, and more discriminating. Our rulers stand warned.
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