My Dazzling Ignorance

(Column written for class. Indian election result prediction, happily gone wrong.)

Why Congress should not come back to power? (Thank god it did)
New York
May 4, 2009

Manmohan Singh, then the future Prime Minister of India, was greeted with stone pelting by staunch supporters of Sonia Gandhi, the chief of the Congress party in India. His car reversed is great speed away from the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, where Gandhi had just declared that she would not become Prime Minister after the election in 2004. India’s obsession with dynastic politics was manifest in a man who held a gun to his head, threatening suicide if Gandhi did not lead the new government. I was one of the hundreds of bystanders watching the circus even as my editor kept calling from office to stop having fun and come back to office to file the story. That was five years ago. Gandhi nominated reformer Singh as Prime Minister and he did pretty much the same, for most of his term for the next five years: bowed to pressure in every form, whether from Gandhi, or his coalition allies and reversed his reformist reputation with great speed.

Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born head of Congress party decided to give up ruling the country to her more trusted lieutenant Singh, who had ushered in far-reaching economic reforms in 1991 that saved the country from a sovereign default. Singh, an economic scholar of impeccable repute, unfortunately turned out to be one of the most indecisive PMs ever.

I remember walking ‘into’ a new government in 2004 when popular vote threw out the right-wing ruling party. One could easily sense the change just walking around in the corridors of power; the brokers of the erstwhile government had been rendered powerless. The left parties had won an unprecedented 62 of over 500 seats, big enough to make them powerful negotiators in the coalition government. In the months to come, they would oppose every important reform crucial to the economy from labor issues to infrastructure. Government’s ceaseless attempts at pushing reforms in the financial sector to reduce its equity in state-owned banks and insurance companies were stymied by political pressures.

Singh’s tenure was punctuated by constant threats by the Left allies. They finally pulled the rug, when Singh went after his prized trophy of striking the nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2008. The only credit the government deserves is to have ignored the hawks and steered clear of a war with Pakistan after the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008.

The government has left the economy in shambles. The government’s fiscal deficit is projected to rise 10% of the gross domestic product, much worse than what it inherited from the previous government. Its off-balance sheet expenditure has risen largely because of it populist schemes of waiving loans for farmers, subsidizing oil and fertilizer. If the Congress does come back, it will have to clean up the mess it created in its previous stint.

Its plan for guaranteeing 100 days of employment is one of the biggest sources of corruption. In 2006, his government implemented the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to provide 100 days of work to 30 million families in 200 of the nation’s poorest districts. It is unclear how many India’s 40 million poor farmers, many of whom hold less than 2 hectares of land, benefitted from Singh ill-advised, hastily drafted loan waiver scheme. It appears, the program that costs nearly $15 billion did more to enhance bottom-lines of state-owned banks than to improve the lot of poor farmers.

Every quarter, the government conducted self-congratulatory press conferences taking credit for the rising stock market levels signifying investor confidence (or speculative activity as they case was) and the high GDP growth rate. The economy grew for 8% per annum for four straight years. In 2009, India’s $1.2 trillion economy may grow 4%, the fastest pace after China, at a time when the global economy is expected to contract by 1.7%, as per World Bank estimates. It grew by 5.5% in 2008.

Luckily for Singh, just as the rate of inflation touched double-digits, spiraling out of control on the back of ill-defined policy gaps in agriculture and infrastructure bottlenecks, the price of crude began to fall. Though inflation is now close to zero, the prices of essential commodities continue to be elevated.

Never before has there been greater clarity in the outcome of the Indian elections: a hung Parliament according to both the most astute political pundits and the most flippant commentators on TV. The Indian voter is cursed with this lack of choice, born as a result of years of disengagement with politics. However, the middle class in enraged this time. Apart from complaining about slower broadband connections and congested roads for their ever bigger cars, this is the first time, they were exposed to the unprecedented terror in Mumbai last November, bang in the middle of the financial district, unlike in the faraway valleys of Kashmir.

If Congress survives the anti-incumbency tide, it will form a government after cobbling together an opportunistic post-poll alliance. The alternate scenario of the saffron brigade - India’s Hindu right wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) heading a coalition is anathema. It has barely been able to wash the blood off its hands. Despite a rather saleable slogan of ‘India Shining’, the BJP’s spin doctors, could not ensure a win last time chiefly because of its non-secular credentials, besides leaving rural Indians out of the fabled growth story. Singh’s government has as much blood on its hands, by the sheer inaction as it stood mute to over 60 bomb blasts across several Indian cities in the last year alone.

The pressure of coalition politics has almost been the most fashionable excuse for successive governments in recent years. Rising influence of regional parties will be the most defining change in this year’s elections. Some of the states in India have a population as big as Europe. More than one regional politician has the potential to play king maker, since neither the BJP nor the Congress can win absolute majority.

Heading the largest Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), is Ms Mayawati who belongs to what is reckoned as one of the lowest rung of India’s caste system. She may be within touching distance of playing queen and negotiating for her pound of flesh in the new coalition. Congress has virtually no presence in UP. This possibility is already giving sleepless nights to majority of the upper caste politicians and middle classes. As much as she is a symbol of Dalit empowerment, she exemplifies the venal nature of Indian politics. Her administration has done little to uplift the plight of the downtrodden in her state.

There are a couple of dominant themes in Indian elections that manifest year after year: addressing urgent issues of water, sanitation, education; lawlessness; the ever-widening gap between the rural and the urban; ensuring safety for minorities, and of course terrorism. More things change more they remain the same. The government does not even come close to solving these fundamental and some recalcitrant issues. Congress which has ruled nearly five of the six decades since India’s independence hardly seems right for the job.

Ends