Politics
At last, India's imperial phase draws to a close
Published 10 May 1999
Fragile coalitions are the sign of a nation that is no longer governed by an elite
What has happened to India's celebrated democracy that its coalition government was brought down last month by the scheming of three political has-beens (one facing more than 50 corruption charges) and the foreign-born, politically inexperienced widow of a former prime minister?
The political changes now sweeping through India, sparked by radical social developments over the past 20-30 years, have hastened the decline of the once all-powerful but now decrepit Congress Party, and led to the mushrooming of small, special-interest regional parties. The result has been a series of unstable coalition governments that have neither sufficient national focus to implement economic and other policies, nor sufficient coherence to survive for long.
The outgoing prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, failed to lead during his one year in office - and his party does not have national appeal. The Congress Party's president and its likely prime ministerial candidate is the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, a political novice who has yet to move beyond being a dynastic icon. Her party has lost its philosophy and its soul.
The Congress Party has ruled for all but eight of India's 50 years of independence. Once embracing a broad spectrum of ideological, caste, regional and other interest groups, Congress has lost its national authority over the past two decades. It is now dominated by corrupt, self-seeking politicians who have little interest in policy or development, and its role among the poor and minorities has been usurped by new caste-based and regional parties.
Congress looked set to collapse early last year, following a series of defections and splits. The party was saved by Sonia Gandhi, 52, the widow of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. She entered politics as the latest standard bearer of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Although Sonia has no political experience, she has sufficient personality and dynastic charisma to pull crowds and votes across India: with her help, the party achieved a credible number two position in the last general election, 14 months ago. Priyanka, Sonia's 28-year-old daughter, has become her mother's secret weapon: she captivates crowds and photographers with a Princess Diana-like mixture of shyness and confidence and is already giving rise to speculation that she will prove the real heir to the dynasty.
Meanwhile, frustrated Congress politicians see Sonia as their passport back to power. They view her political inexperience as an asset rather than a liability, and seem convinced that they will be able to manipulate her and, eventually, pull her down.
The electorate has yet to decide, however, whether it is prepared to be led by a foreign-born prime minister: that will be tested in the coming general election campaign. Sonia's prominent role in last month's political crisis (when she failed to attract enough supporters to form a Congress-led government) made the nation realise that she was within an ace of becoming prime minister. That sparked the beginnings of a backlash in urban areas, encouraged by BJP nationalists, as Indians ridiculed their country of almost one billion people for having to turn to a foreigner. On the other hand, memories of the Gandhis, and particularly of Indira, Sonia's mother-in-law, are strong and positive in the rural areas, where 70 per cent of Indians live. Sonia will also benefit from a cultural tradition that accepts and absorbs wives into husbands' homes and communities.
But to focus on Sonia-politics is to skim across the surface of the deep changes affecting Indian politics. Sonia's rise is important only because it marks the ending of India's Nehru-Gandhi "imperial" phase of politics (as M S Gill, the chief election commissioner, put it in a lecture last week). The future belongs to the BJP, which is based on high castes and traders; to state-level parties broadly based on low castes in northern India and regional interests in the south; and maybe to the Congress - if it changes sufficiently. "The polity has fragmented because society is being fractured as we move on from dominance by the upper orders," says Jaipal Reddy, a leader of the Janata Dal. "This is a prelude to a new social equilibrium."
The leaders of the state parties are quite different from the Congress elite. In the north in particular, they come from poor, fairly uneducated and sometimes criminal backgrounds. They usually have little vision or interests beyond their own caste or state and only want to play in the national arena to increase their regional prestige. Mulayam Singh Yadav, for example, who was defence minister in the 1996-98 United Front government, is much more at home in the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh - where he has been chief minister and is leader of the intermediate-caste Samajwadi Party - than in the old colonial splendour of Delhi's defence ministry. Other regional parties that formed part of the outgoing BJP-led coalition only intervened on national issues when it affected their own electoral support - for example, to oppose electricity price rises for farmers or cuts in food subsidies.
But these are the politicians of the future and they will, gradually, take on national interests and ambitions (not least to enjoy, as some have already done, the bribes and extortion that go with ministerial jobs.) Some of their parties might collapse because they fail to improve the lot of their constituencies. Others will grow together in coalitions and may eventually link up with each other or with the BJP and, possibly, a revived Congress; but that will take some years because social changes, although under way, are not yet complete.
It was southern India, in the first half of the century, that witnessed the first stirrings of social change. Here, low and intermediate-level castes replaced the elite Brahmins and started reforms that focused on social justice issues such as education, health and peoples' empowerment. As a result, the powerful state-level parties in the south are now based not on caste but on regional and other groups (such as the communists in Kerala).
In the north, however, where Brahmins and big landowners dominated society until after independence, social reforms have only started in the past 30 years. Here the intermediate- and low-caste leaders have focused not on social issues but on seizing political power - often accompanied by violent clashes with landowners in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In addition to Mulayam Yadav, this movement has produced leaders such as Laloo Prasad Yadav of Bihar, a populist figure who was ousted as chief minister nearly two years ago because of corruption charges and currently runs the state through a puppet chief minister - his uneducated, non-political wife Rabri Devi.
This political upheaval has been accompanied in the 1990s by other powerful economic and social changes. Economic liberalisation, begun in 1991, has changed lifestyles by bringing in foreign investment and goods and transforming what is available to consumers. Satellite television has controversially thrust urban and western values deep into rural India at a rate that could not have been envisaged five or six years ago, opening up previously unimaginable and currently unattainable horizons. Spending power has increased dramatically, especially for the urban elite and for millions of rural farmers who have become wealthy as a result of a 30-year-old agricultural revolution.
At the same time, social stability is being challenged by unrealisable job expectations - created, among the young, by a caste-based job-reservation system and unsatisfactory schools and colleges that fail at the primary and tertiary levels of education. A demographic shift since the 1970s towards the young, whose ambitions and attitudes are markedly different from their parents in both urban and rural areas, has exacerbated their frustration with employment opportunities.
"This is a society in great ferment. It is questioning the way the country has been governed for 2,000 years, moving political power from narrow elites to new groups who want the politics of parity and equality of opportunity, not patronage," says Jairam Ramesh, the Congress Party's economic policy secretary and a former government adviser. "The electoral mandate will continue to be fractured till this social transition is complete."
That is likely to take ten, maybe 15 years, raising the prospect of unsatisfactory coalition governments for at least two or three more general elections - though the parties will slowly learn to work together on some issues. Unlike countries such as Italy that have thrived despite years of short-term coalition governments, India needs a strong national administration to drive development. As Vajpayee put it last week at a businessmen's conference, "bad politics is the worst enemy of the economy and business".
The failure of coalitions to perform in the past three years has stalled the 1991 economic reforms and undermined government attempts to balance the country's economic books. It has also affected defence policy. India became a nuclear power a year ago; but no political party, apart from the BJP, has thought through the implications in terms of either foreign or defence policy.
In this fragmented political arena, crime and corruption are increasing, and Hindu fundamentalism is simmering in several parts of the country - as was seen earlier this year with riots (and one killing) against Christians.
The good news for India, however, is that both its (albeit corrupt) democracy and its (often corrupt and mostly lethargic) civil service are built on a sufficiently strong base for the country to survive without the riots and forms of dictatorship that occur elsewhere in Asia. The economy is still protected enough to be cushioned against externally induced crises, and there is a strong and relatively uncorrupt new generation of entrepreneurs who are building a new India despite the uncertainty around them. The removal since 1991 of national economic and industrial control has also pushed power down to the states, which have started their own reforms, for example privatising bankrupt state electricity boards and reforming moribund institutions.
The current political chaos and non-performance by coalition governments, therefore, do not indicate a country on the verge of collapse: instead, they are the inevitable results of slow evolution to a new society. But they do mean that India is unlikely to have the sound and stable national government that it needs to flourish for some time to come. Rajesh Shah, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said last week when introducing Vajpayee to the businessmen's conference, that "India's sorrow is to be constantly reminded of her potential". Sadly, that sorrow is unlikely to end very soon.
John Elliott writes from New Delhi for "Fortune" magazine
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