An Indian voter reads a political pamphlet distributed during a rally of the Indian National Congress in Mumbai. Credit: Al Jazeera English/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Peter Custers
SECUNDERABAD, India, May 27 2014 (IPS)

Held in nine rounds over a period of several weeks, India’s national elections have been described as the most massive exercise in vote-casting worldwide.

The spectacle of witnessing some 814 million voters fan out among 935,000 polling stations that offered a choice between 1,600 political parties was undeniably exciting, but the results – when they were announced on May 16^th – came as an unpleasant shock for those who’ve long admired India’s secular political traditions.

Riding on the aspirations of India’s thriving urban middle classes, and lavishly supported by a booming corporate sector, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which champions a Hindu-nationalist agenda – gained an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, making its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, India’s 15^th prime minister.

Even more troubling, some say, was that the the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) – the electoral coalition headed by the BJP – succeeded in bagging over three-fifths of all seats in the new Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

"While the [BJP] walked off with 282 out of 543 seats, its voter share was a mere 31 percent of the population, representing a discrepancy of more than 20 percent."
The once-invincible Congress Party, which ruled India for the last two consecutive terms, was virtually decimated, its share of parliamentary seats whittled down to just 44, a fifth of its former size.

A veritable media storm followed the announcement of the results, with conservative pundits extolling the BJP’s win as a “landslide”, and others bemoaning India’s descent into consolidated right-wing rule.

But a closer look at the voting patterns tells a story of persistent communalism in 21^st-century India, and suggests that elections in a country that has 1.2 billion people, over 120 linguistic groups, a sizeable proportion of adivasi (indigenous) people and a complex hierarchy of castes and sub-castes reflect, at best, a distorted democracy.

Dizzying diversity

While the Muslim minority constitutes some 17 percent of the country’s total population, they are poorly represented in the new parliament, having secured only 20 out of 543 seats.

Fearing the BJP’s track record of aggravating religious tensions, most Muslims refrained from casting in their favour, maintaining a safe distance from the NDA as well.

This was particularly true of Muslims in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which holds 80 seats in the Lok Sabha.

Here, the BJP’s electoral strategy had banked on both communalism and caste politics. In the state’s northern Bahraich region, for instance, the party sought to reach out to Dalits and other low-caste Hindus by reviving the memory of an 11^th century Hindu king, in the process direspecting the revered Muslim saint Ghazi Saiyyad Salar Masud whom the king had defeated in combat.

This, coupled with memories of gruesome communal riots that rocked the westen region of Muzaffarnagar last August and September – leaving nearly 100 dead and 40,000 displaced – resulted in Muslims giving the BJP and NDA candidates a wide berth.

Similar ghosts haunted other states as well, with memories of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat, which Modi ran as chief minister from 2001 to 2014, no doubt leading many people to refrain from voting for the BJP.

The BJP also received a cold shoulder in India’s populous southern states. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the All India Anna Dravidian Progress Federation (AIADMK) led by Jayalalithaa won a landslide victory, seizing 37 of the state’s 39 seats while the BJP gained just one.

The Hindu nationalists were also trounced in the south-western state of Kerala and the two states of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh, the fifth-most populous region in India that boats a Hindu majority.

Karnataka is the one state in the south where the BJP has made significant inroads. Here, the concept of Hindutva – an ideology centered on Hindu supremacy – gained a foothold in the 1990s partly thanks to a communal campaign aimed at undermining the syncretic Hindu-Muslim worship at the 1,000-year-old old cave-shrine of the Sufi saint Dada Hayat.

In the past, Hindu nationalists mobilised to install images of a low-caste Hindu god in the shrine, and worked to undermine the position of the hereditary spiritual head of the shrine. Though loudly criticised, the campaign paid off. In the recent Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 17 out of the state’s 28 seats.

Votes versus seats: an electoral discrepancy

While much of the post-election commentary has focused on Modi’s sweeping win, few have unpacked the discrepancies between the number of seats secured by the BJP and the share of votes actually cast in their favour.

In what is referred to as India’s ‘first past the post’ system, electoral seats ultimately count more than votes, resulting in a huge gap between the BJP’s victory and its popularity among the majority of Indian voters.

While the party walked off with 282 out of 543 seats, its voter share was a mere 31 percent of the population, representing a discrepancy of more than 20 percent.

Similar figures from individual states are even more startling: various local newspaper reports point to some six states where the Hindutva party won a number of seats that, in percentage terms, was double or nearly double the share of votes it obtained.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the BJP’s vote-share was only 42.3 percent, yet it secured 71 out of 80 seats. In Rajasthan, only 54.9 percent of voters chose the party, yet it bagged every single seat in the state. In New Delhi, its voter share was 46.4 percent, and here again it walked off with all Lok Sabha seats.

Similar discrepancies were registered for the central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, as well as the eastern state of Jharkhand.

Another distorting factor was the extent of corporate funding towards the BJP’s electoral campaign, to the point that they alone could muster huge advertisements in the country’s newspapers, undertake prolonged online advertising (including the use of social media) and gain almost limitless access to television stations.

This sustained media campaign was not, however, accompanied by a countrywide groundswell of popular support for Modi; in fact, a safe majority of the electorate cast their ballots for parties that stood opposed to the BJP’s Hindutva politics.

These facts should act as encouragement for the AIADMK and other regional parties likely to form a joint opposition bloc in India’s new parliament.

Peter Custers is the author of ‘Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labour in Asian Economies’ (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012)

(END)

A protest against a proposed nuclear plant in the Indian state Gujarat. Women are asking for stronger representation in Parliament to voice their views. Credit: Krishnakant/IPS.

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Apr 21 2014 (IPS)

“Men just do not want to give up their seats, it’s as simple as that,” says 67-year-old candidate in the Indian election Subhhasini Ali, voicing a gloomy view across women’s groups in India.

Ali, a two-time member of Parliament and key functionary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), an arm of the Communist Party of India-Marxists (CPI-M), is contesting from Barrackpore, a constituency in the eastern Indian state West Bengal.“This election, we get the feeling that we have lost. Women are getting more and more sidelined." -- Jyotsna Chatterji, the Joint Women’s Programme

She is among a few women contesting. Political parties, even those vociferously supporting reservation for women in Parliament, have failed to put up on average even one woman for every 10 males contesting India’s 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

Women candidates are only seven percent among 3,355 candidates in the first five phases of the nine-stage election, says the Delhi-based public interest organisation, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), that is campaigning for greater transparency and more inclusive representation in Indian elections.

Women activists looking at state-wise trends expect no improvement by way of inclusion of women in the final phases of the election.

Women constitute 388 million, or 47.6 percent of the 814.5 million voters eligible to vote in the election running from Apr. 7 to May 12.

“When our presence is not considered important in the Parliament, when decisions about our future are taken without consulting us, why should we cast our votes to elect another group of politicians who do not believe in the cause of women empowerment in this country,” says Ranjana Kumari from the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research.

“This election, we get the feeling that we have lost. Women are getting more and more sidelined,” Jyotsna Chatterji from the non-profit Joint Women’s Programme (JWP) tells IPS.

In the 15^th general election in 2009, 556 women out of 8,070 contestants from 363 political parties  were given tickets to contest, according to data from the Election Commission. That was just 6.9 percent of the candidates, making representation in this election hardly better. Fifty-nine women – 10.9 percent – won. This was the highest number of women contestants and winners since 1957.

A 1996 Women Reservation Bill (WRB) proposing reservation of a third of the seats to women in the lower house of Parliament and in state legislatures has been stymied by various political parties for more than 18 years now. Women groups pushing for greater representation, for whom the failure to pass the WRB has remained a political raw nerve since, blame this on the entrenched patriarchal mindset of male politicians.

If enacted, 180 berths in the Lok Sabha would be reserved for women. Political parties opposing the WRB say a quota within the quota should be given to women from backward communities. Dalits and tribal communities already have 120 seats reserved in the Lok Sabha. In 2009, 17 women got elected under this quota.

“Many political parties had agreed to the WRB’s stipulation about voluntarily giving 33 percent tickets to women members, legal quota aside,” says Chatterji, who spearheaded the reservation movement in the late1990s with a group of other activists. Political parties have fallen far short of this.

Given women’s visibly increased participation in professional spheres, public debates, and also increased voting in elections, women groups say they had hoped political parties would walk the gender talk and give at least 15 to 20 percent tickets to women, recognising the major socio-political changes under way.

“Nothing is going to change in women’s representation unless the [Women’s Reservation] Bill is passed,” says Ali.

The three main political parties – the ruling Congress party, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) widely expected to form the new government, and the few months old Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) have all promised in their manifestos to pass the Women’s Reservation Bill if voted to power.

“Unless certain attitudes are overcome it is useless to expect individual parties to put up more women candidates, and moreover where no party is obliged to do it,” Malini Bhattacharya, 70, twice member of Parliament and former member of the National Commission for Women, tells IPS.

Ruth Manorama, 62, Dalit women’s rights activist, who heads the National Alliance of Women, and is contesting from the Bangalore South constituency on a Janata Dal (Secular) party ticket, is more optimistic. “To give a bigger role to women in political decision making, we need to go step by step,” Manorama tells IPS.

Others argue for bolder change. “Political party structures and the election process itself need drastic change if women are to participate in large numbers,” says Tapashi Praharaj of AIDWA. “Women’s winning ability is consistently under question, without however attempting to build them up.”

“The huge funds required to fight an election today is another obstacle for women to contest elections,” says Chatterji. The government raised spending limits for a candidate in this election to seven million rupees (116,000 dollars).

Chatterji says while male leaders argue they cannot find suitable women candidates, there are many eligible women who have not caught the eye of political parties.

More than two million women have served in decision-making bodies in India’s local governments, or panchayat raj, under the 33 percent seat reservation since 1993. In some states that quota has been raised to 50 percent. Urban local bodies too have reserved seats for women. These quotas have created a significant mass of grassroots women leaders.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has a mere 11.4 percent women in both houses of Parliament, compared to the world average of 21.8 percent. Afghanistan has 27.6 percent women in Parliament and Pakistan 18.5 percent, according to 2014 data from the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).