Elections 2014 may or may not deliver a landslide for the BJP but campaign 2014 failed to mark the much-promised watershed event in Indian politics. All we got was a replay of the tired and vested post-Mandal-Mandir-reform rhetoric.
YahooNews, 12 May, 2014
The last votes in the 2014 general elections will be cast today. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, is confident that India will give his party the biggest mandate since Rajiv Gandhi rode to a landslide victory in 1984. The Congress and several proponents of the so-called third front are contesting this foregone conclusion with the promise of a non-BJP government. The verdict is another 100 hours away. But it is time to call the disappointments of Elections 2014.
We were told that these elections would be contested on the issue of good governance. The parties were estimated to have spent over $5 billion in campaigning and on an overwrought media, but all we got were more of the clichés we have been hearing for over 20 years.
Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, three momentous shifts changed Indian politics forever: the rise of the ‘lower’ castes, the Hindu mobilization through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and economic liberalization. These somewhat simultaneous phenomena also changed how India’s two principal political parties –the Congress and the BJP –would make electoral calculations in the years to come.
Unfortunately, those tired strategies are still playing in a loop in 2014.
A quick recap to put these templates in context: The Congress traditionally represented the interests of the ‘upper’ caste elites who were never numerically sufficient to win in elections. So in the early decades of Independence, the grand old party gathered its numbers through a coalition of extremes by co-opting the ‘harijans’and the minorities.
Together, this combination of ‘upper’ caste Hindus (17.6 percent in 1931 when they were last enumerated) voting with people from the Scheduled Castes (14.6 percent in 1971) and minorities(16.5 percent in 1971) outnumbered the vast middle population of the Hindu Other Backward Castes (43.7 percent, according to the Mandal Commission in 1980). A scattered and smaller population, the Scheduled Tribes, never really mattered electorally.
The BJP, and its earlier avatar the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, had a predominantly Hindu ‘upper’ caste leadership and represented the urban Hindu middle class. It joined the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement to create a larger Hindu constituency in the late 1980s and snatched a significant chunk of the ‘upper’ caste Hindu vote from the Congress. Dramatically, the BJP improved its tally from 2 to 85 MPs in the ninth Lok Sabha in 1989.
That was the year the Congress’s vote share slid below 40 percent for the first time (barring the exception in 1977 following the Emergency). Nevertheless, the party polled 10 percentage points more than the Janata Dal (17.8 percent) and the BJP (11.4 percent) taken together. Yet, the Congress’s 39.5 percent vote share translated into only 197 seats, while the JD and BJP took home 228 MPs for their 29.2 percent vote share.
Suddenly, distribution patterns of support became crucial. In 1998, for example, the vote share of the Congress (25.8 percent) and the BJP (25.6 percent) almost evened out. Yet, the BJP won 182 seats against the Congress’s 141. By 2009, the vote share of the Congress climbed to 28.6 percent, translating into 206 seats. The BJP will possibly need a few more seats than 206 this time to prop up a Modi government without borrowing too many coalition crutches.
To that end, the saffron party should not struggle to bag a 30 percent vote share in 2014. About 3,000 towns with a non-farming population of at least 5,000 each are spread over 200-odd Lok Sabha seats. Modi’s ‘development model’ has many takers in these urban and semi-urban constituencies. Besides, Hindu ‘upper’ castes constitute an estimated 25 percent of the population and about half of its voters back the BJP. But securing a 30 percent vote share does not guarantee 200-plus seats. In 1996, the Congress ended up with 140 MPs for its 28.8 percent vote share; in 1989, it had 197 seats for its 39.5 percent share.
As things stand today, a party requires a vote share in excess of 40 percent to be reasonably confident of a 200-plus tally unless its votes are evenly distributed across hundreds of constituencies. This is despite the emergence of a number of strong regional players who have made the elections multi-cornered. To secure that kind of decisive support, the BJP cannot depend any more only on its base among ‘upper’ caste Hindus and the urban middle class (or the Congress on its coalition of extremes). Naturally, both have been eyeing the middle space of the OBCs, with limited success, since the 1990s.
Post-Mandal politics has seen the emergence of several strong regional contenders for the OBC vote, in fact the entire non-‘upper’ caste Hindu vote, in north India. The southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh witnessed this political transformation even earlier in the 1970s through the ascent of ‘intermediary’ castes such as the Reddys and the Kammas. This has made the task of both the Congress and the BJP difficult in a number of states, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The result has been a quasi-intellectual attack on the caste-based support for parties such as the BSP, Rashtriya Janata Dal or the Samajwadi Party. But why do leaders of the two principal parties and a host of political pundits so loathe vote bank politics when interest groups are deemed perfectly legitimate? Why do they not bemoan others, such as the trading communities, voting en bloc but lament OBC or minority consolidation?
It is a flawed argument that rallying around birth identities, such as caste or religion, is irrational and therefore regressive. If socio-economic realities put entire populations at a disadvantage based on their birth identities, their electoral response will naturally follow the same lines. Besides, do we consider ‘upper’ caste vote banks ‘natural’because such mobilizations are a ploy for maintaining socio-economic dominance, and not a defensive alliance against persecution?
Both the Congress and the BJP were wary of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations till the former had to implement the report during PV Narasimha Rao’s tenure as Prime Minister. The BJP ventured into “social engineering”masterminded by its ideologue KN Govindacharya, by appointing‘lower’ caste functionaries (such as Uma Bharti) across the organization. By the turn of the last century, the Congress managed to grab 35 percent of the OBC vote while the BJP claimed 20 percent. By 2009, the BJP climbed to 27 percent and the Congress slipped to 31 percent.
So in the middle of these elections, the Congress released an additional manifesto to promise a 4.5 percent quota for backward Muslims in the existing OBC reservations, and extension of Scheduled Caste status to all Dalit minorities, including Muslims and Christians. Modi, on the other hand, positioned himself as a Modh Ghanchi (a sub-caste on the OBC list) chaiwala, particularly while campaigning in Bihar and UP. Addressing a rally in Motihari as the deadline for winding up the 2014 campaign drew close, he warned that “vote bank, communal and caste-based politics have ruined the country”.
Ironically, the more the Congress nurtures its minority support base knowing well that physical safety is the biggest concern for a large section of Muslims, the more it allows the BJP to peddle the bogey of a minority vote bank to scare Dalits and OBCs in joining a pan-Hindu vote base. On the other hand, shaming Dalit and OBC vote banks as narrow, shortsighted politics is part of the BJP’s game plan to consolidate Hindu votes to secure the interests of the upper class Hindus, who are a minority themselves.
These tired ploys complement other, more obvious attempts at a Hindu mobilization that are a direct legacy of the Babri movement. After Giriraj Singh and Pravin Togadia did their early bids, a giant portrait of Lord Ram formed the backdrop of Modi’s stage in Faizabad last week, where he appealed the voters to let the lotus bloom in “the land of Shri Ram”. Similar attempts at polarization were made in Bengal and Assam, where Modi threatened those who did not worship the goddess Durga with summary deportation.
Along with fighting OBC consolidations and engineering communal polarization, the third stereotype that played out this campaign season was the attempt to grab the vote bank of the post-reform middle class, mostly urban, but with a smattering of its moneyed and aspiring rural counterparts. This 300-million-strong population is the prime beneficiary of the trickle-down effect of liberalization and largely backed the Manmohan-Montek-Chidambaram-led Congress in 2009.
Sold on the immediate benefits of more jobs and better wages, this vote bank cheered as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments pushed for unbridled growth and alienated large sections of farmers and Adivasis. But UPA-2 sent mixed signals when Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and Jairam Ramesh stood in the way of the growth hawks in the government who, eventually almost always had their way. While the faux ideological battle within the Congress made for confusing headlines, it managed to alienate both the poor and the rich.
Believing a Modi sarkar would have no compunction delivering what it wants, corporate India switched sides. A large section of the urban middle class promptly took the cue from their corporate masters. Another section responded to the anti-corruption campaign but their anger was directed at the petty symptoms – bribes or payoffs –rather than the official policies of squandering natural and human resources.
When an upbeat Modi hawked his Gujarat model and an apologetic Congress claimed high growth figures, both addressed this urban middle class constituency that they knew would not go further and question them on far more serious issues of procedural transparency and the human cost of their respective development models. Those who paid and continue to pay that price are other people.
Even with a voter turnout of 80 percent, a 40 percent winning vote share effectively requires the committed support of only about one third of the total electorate. It was easy for both the Congress and the BJP to feel tempted to target the swelling middle class and fuel paranoia to shore up caste or community support to consolidate that core constituency. But both forgot the fate of the 2004 India Shining campaign when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost in spite of urban middle class support.
The BJP may well romp home on May 16. But leading them, will it be a chaiwala, a Modh Ghanchi, a lotus dreamer in the land of Shri Ram, a punisher of non-believers in goddess Durga or a messiah of growth? For all the promises of campaigns on real issues, if governance had anything to do with the election of the next government, it was only the bad governance of the outgoing one.
YahooNews, 12 May, 2014
We were told that these elections would be contested on the issue of good governance. The parties were estimated to have spent over $5 billion in campaigning and on an overwrought media, but all we got were more of the clichés we have been hearing for over 20 years.
Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, three momentous shifts changed Indian politics forever: the rise of the ‘lower’ castes, the Hindu mobilization through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and economic liberalization. These somewhat simultaneous phenomena also changed how India’s two principal political parties –the Congress and the BJP –would make electoral calculations in the years to come.
Unfortunately, those tired strategies are still playing in a loop in 2014.
A quick recap to put these templates in context: The Congress traditionally represented the interests of the ‘upper’ caste elites who were never numerically sufficient to win in elections. So in the early decades of Independence, the grand old party gathered its numbers through a coalition of extremes by co-opting the ‘harijans’and the minorities.
Together, this combination of ‘upper’ caste Hindus (17.6 percent in 1931 when they were last enumerated) voting with people from the Scheduled Castes (14.6 percent in 1971) and minorities(16.5 percent in 1971) outnumbered the vast middle population of the Hindu Other Backward Castes (43.7 percent, according to the Mandal Commission in 1980). A scattered and smaller population, the Scheduled Tribes, never really mattered electorally.
The BJP, and its earlier avatar the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, had a predominantly Hindu ‘upper’ caste leadership and represented the urban Hindu middle class. It joined the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement to create a larger Hindu constituency in the late 1980s and snatched a significant chunk of the ‘upper’ caste Hindu vote from the Congress. Dramatically, the BJP improved its tally from 2 to 85 MPs in the ninth Lok Sabha in 1989.
That was the year the Congress’s vote share slid below 40 percent for the first time (barring the exception in 1977 following the Emergency). Nevertheless, the party polled 10 percentage points more than the Janata Dal (17.8 percent) and the BJP (11.4 percent) taken together. Yet, the Congress’s 39.5 percent vote share translated into only 197 seats, while the JD and BJP took home 228 MPs for their 29.2 percent vote share.
Suddenly, distribution patterns of support became crucial. In 1998, for example, the vote share of the Congress (25.8 percent) and the BJP (25.6 percent) almost evened out. Yet, the BJP won 182 seats against the Congress’s 141. By 2009, the vote share of the Congress climbed to 28.6 percent, translating into 206 seats. The BJP will possibly need a few more seats than 206 this time to prop up a Modi government without borrowing too many coalition crutches.
To that end, the saffron party should not struggle to bag a 30 percent vote share in 2014. About 3,000 towns with a non-farming population of at least 5,000 each are spread over 200-odd Lok Sabha seats. Modi’s ‘development model’ has many takers in these urban and semi-urban constituencies. Besides, Hindu ‘upper’ castes constitute an estimated 25 percent of the population and about half of its voters back the BJP. But securing a 30 percent vote share does not guarantee 200-plus seats. In 1996, the Congress ended up with 140 MPs for its 28.8 percent vote share; in 1989, it had 197 seats for its 39.5 percent share.
As things stand today, a party requires a vote share in excess of 40 percent to be reasonably confident of a 200-plus tally unless its votes are evenly distributed across hundreds of constituencies. This is despite the emergence of a number of strong regional players who have made the elections multi-cornered. To secure that kind of decisive support, the BJP cannot depend any more only on its base among ‘upper’ caste Hindus and the urban middle class (or the Congress on its coalition of extremes). Naturally, both have been eyeing the middle space of the OBCs, with limited success, since the 1990s.
Post-Mandal politics has seen the emergence of several strong regional contenders for the OBC vote, in fact the entire non-‘upper’ caste Hindu vote, in north India. The southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh witnessed this political transformation even earlier in the 1970s through the ascent of ‘intermediary’ castes such as the Reddys and the Kammas. This has made the task of both the Congress and the BJP difficult in a number of states, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The result has been a quasi-intellectual attack on the caste-based support for parties such as the BSP, Rashtriya Janata Dal or the Samajwadi Party. But why do leaders of the two principal parties and a host of political pundits so loathe vote bank politics when interest groups are deemed perfectly legitimate? Why do they not bemoan others, such as the trading communities, voting en bloc but lament OBC or minority consolidation?
It is a flawed argument that rallying around birth identities, such as caste or religion, is irrational and therefore regressive. If socio-economic realities put entire populations at a disadvantage based on their birth identities, their electoral response will naturally follow the same lines. Besides, do we consider ‘upper’ caste vote banks ‘natural’because such mobilizations are a ploy for maintaining socio-economic dominance, and not a defensive alliance against persecution?
Both the Congress and the BJP were wary of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations till the former had to implement the report during PV Narasimha Rao’s tenure as Prime Minister. The BJP ventured into “social engineering”masterminded by its ideologue KN Govindacharya, by appointing‘lower’ caste functionaries (such as Uma Bharti) across the organization. By the turn of the last century, the Congress managed to grab 35 percent of the OBC vote while the BJP claimed 20 percent. By 2009, the BJP climbed to 27 percent and the Congress slipped to 31 percent.
So in the middle of these elections, the Congress released an additional manifesto to promise a 4.5 percent quota for backward Muslims in the existing OBC reservations, and extension of Scheduled Caste status to all Dalit minorities, including Muslims and Christians. Modi, on the other hand, positioned himself as a Modh Ghanchi (a sub-caste on the OBC list) chaiwala, particularly while campaigning in Bihar and UP. Addressing a rally in Motihari as the deadline for winding up the 2014 campaign drew close, he warned that “vote bank, communal and caste-based politics have ruined the country”.
Ironically, the more the Congress nurtures its minority support base knowing well that physical safety is the biggest concern for a large section of Muslims, the more it allows the BJP to peddle the bogey of a minority vote bank to scare Dalits and OBCs in joining a pan-Hindu vote base. On the other hand, shaming Dalit and OBC vote banks as narrow, shortsighted politics is part of the BJP’s game plan to consolidate Hindu votes to secure the interests of the upper class Hindus, who are a minority themselves.
These tired ploys complement other, more obvious attempts at a Hindu mobilization that are a direct legacy of the Babri movement. After Giriraj Singh and Pravin Togadia did their early bids, a giant portrait of Lord Ram formed the backdrop of Modi’s stage in Faizabad last week, where he appealed the voters to let the lotus bloom in “the land of Shri Ram”. Similar attempts at polarization were made in Bengal and Assam, where Modi threatened those who did not worship the goddess Durga with summary deportation.
Along with fighting OBC consolidations and engineering communal polarization, the third stereotype that played out this campaign season was the attempt to grab the vote bank of the post-reform middle class, mostly urban, but with a smattering of its moneyed and aspiring rural counterparts. This 300-million-strong population is the prime beneficiary of the trickle-down effect of liberalization and largely backed the Manmohan-Montek-Chidambaram-led Congress in 2009.
Sold on the immediate benefits of more jobs and better wages, this vote bank cheered as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments pushed for unbridled growth and alienated large sections of farmers and Adivasis. But UPA-2 sent mixed signals when Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and Jairam Ramesh stood in the way of the growth hawks in the government who, eventually almost always had their way. While the faux ideological battle within the Congress made for confusing headlines, it managed to alienate both the poor and the rich.
Believing a Modi sarkar would have no compunction delivering what it wants, corporate India switched sides. A large section of the urban middle class promptly took the cue from their corporate masters. Another section responded to the anti-corruption campaign but their anger was directed at the petty symptoms – bribes or payoffs –rather than the official policies of squandering natural and human resources.
When an upbeat Modi hawked his Gujarat model and an apologetic Congress claimed high growth figures, both addressed this urban middle class constituency that they knew would not go further and question them on far more serious issues of procedural transparency and the human cost of their respective development models. Those who paid and continue to pay that price are other people.
Even with a voter turnout of 80 percent, a 40 percent winning vote share effectively requires the committed support of only about one third of the total electorate. It was easy for both the Congress and the BJP to feel tempted to target the swelling middle class and fuel paranoia to shore up caste or community support to consolidate that core constituency. But both forgot the fate of the 2004 India Shining campaign when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost in spite of urban middle class support.
The BJP may well romp home on May 16. But leading them, will it be a chaiwala, a Modh Ghanchi, a lotus dreamer in the land of Shri Ram, a punisher of non-believers in goddess Durga or a messiah of growth? For all the promises of campaigns on real issues, if governance had anything to do with the election of the next government, it was only the bad governance of the outgoing one.
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