INDIA: Political Parties Gear up for World’s Biggest Poll

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 18 2003 (IPS) - India, the world’s biggest democracy, is not due to hold general elections until next year, but its two main political parties are already in election mode.

In recent months, the two parties have been planning strategies, projecting personalities, championing causes and wooing allies from among smaller regional parties.

As with the two general elections in 1998 and 1999, this one too will feature a clash between the personalities of elderly statesman and prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress party and heir to legacy of India’s dynastic Nehru-Gandhi family.

”It is clear that the Congress wants the next election to be held as an Atal Bihari Vajpayee versus Sonia Gandhi event,” Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, spokesman for Vayjapee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and member of Parliament, said in an interview.

Another BJP leader, Pramod Mahajan, says his party, which affects an ultra-nationalist stance, plans to focus on Gandhi’s foreign origins much as it did in the last elections when it emerged as the largest single party -pushing the Congress party aside to second place.

Admitted a Congress leader at a party conclave held earlier this month in Shimla, a hill resort near Delhi: ”If Sonia were not Italian, she would have been the delight of the middle class with her ideal housewife image.”

Gandhi’s foreign origins and halting Hindi are seen by many Congress party members as a liability.

It triggered off a debilitating split in the party before the last general elections. But the splinter National Congress Party (NCP), which later agreed to partner with the Congress party in running the state government of western Maharashtra, is now in a mood for compromise.

Said NCP leader Purno Sangma, who has served as speaker of the Lok Sabha (lawmaking lower house of Parliament): ”What is important now is for all secular forces to unite against the communal politics of the BJP.”

An obscure party a little more than a decade ago, the BJP seized national power in 1998 through the twin strategy of rousing up fundamentalist sentiment among majority Hindus and by forging alliances with regional parties in the states that were opposed to Congress’ monopoly over power since independence in 1947.

But with elections round the corner, regional parties are showing signs of being uncomfortable with the BJP’s fundamentalist agenda – and this may affect the ruling party’s political fortunes.

The party’s agenda revolves around a campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site in Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, where the party’s top leaders supervised the demolition of a mediaeval mosque 10 years ago.

That had sparked off nationwide rioting and arson, not to mention deepening and politicising the communal divide.

Even the BJP’s biggest single ally, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which rules southern Andhra Pradesh state, has been openly critical of the BJP’s ”anti-poor” policies and the anti-Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat state last year.

The violence, which independent inquiries showed were backed by BJP elements in the state, left more than 2,000 people from the minority Muslim community dead and thousands of others homeless.

Likewise, the National Conference (NC) party, defeated in elections held in Kashmir state in October, announced this month that it was quitting the BJP-led alliance, called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The leader of that party, Omar Abdullah, who has served as minister in Vajpayee’s government, blames the association with the BJP for his party’s loss in the Kashmir poll.

Meantime, at the Shimla conclave, Gandhi formally announced the party’s readiness to forge alliances with regional parties, finally acknowledging that the days of single-party rule in such a large and diverse country as India are finally over.

As the party that led India to independence from almost two centuries of British colonial rule, the Congress party and its leaders enjoy enormous prestige and influence that allowed it to hold sway over the country for 45 of the country’s 55 years of independence.

But the party’s image has been seriously damaged by accusations of dynastic rule, nepotism and corruption. It is now on its seventh consecutive year out of national power.

The dented image, combined with its refusal to deal with powerful regional parties, has seen the Congress steadily losing its vote share from around 48 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in the 1999 elections

But while its grip on national power has been waning, the Congress party rules over 15 states after winning a series of provincial state assembly elections over the last five years.

These were elections in Delhi, which houses the national capital, western Maharashtra, central Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, southern Karnataka and Kerala and northern Himachal Pradesh.

In an interview, the Congress party’s chief spokesman Jaipal Reddy say he is certain of Congress’ win in next year’s elections because of the ”anti-incumbency factor” that he says would work against the BJP.

In contrast to the Congress party’s buoyancy, the BJP is faced with a serious threat from Hindu fundamentalist groups that helped it to come to power – and now want to see it make good on a promise to build a temple at the exact site where the mediaeval Babri Masjid once stood.

The BJP has repeatedly said that its hands are tied on the temple issue becasue of a court order restraining construction on the site. The BJP’s regional allies in the coalition government are opposed to the temple-building agenda.

But just last week, the World Hindu Forum, a sister organisation of the BJP, called for Vajpayee’s resignation. It declared that, come what may, it would rebuild temples not only at Ayodhya but also at other ancient Hindu sites where mosques were constructed by invading Muslims in historic times.