The Hindu : Reinventing India for elections

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Saturday, Feb 21, 2004

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Reinventing India for elections

By Rajeev Dhavan

Elections need issue-based campaigns on the things that matter to the least advantaged; and not the gimmicks of parties falling over one another to capture power.

POLITICIANS ARE subject to the three visible major restraints of the law, public opinion, and periodic elections, other than money, muscle, and their own ambitions. Increasingly, each of these restraints is being manipulated. The law is observed in its breach to impregnate governance with lawlessness — invariably without remorse or even apology. Governance suffers public opinion with discomfiture but has to confront it. Politics periodically submits to general elections by the largest electorate in the world. Indian elections are not 543 mini-elections individually fought in each district; they are magnum elections fought without magnanimity. As Richard Crossman argued in 1963, the parliamentary system has become a presidential system fought on national images linked to prime ministerial power. The constituency cannot be ignored, but it is a part of the general campaign that subsumes it.

Elections are not about promises but are about images. Every time an election takes place, India is reinvented. It does not matter if the reinvented images have nothing to do with social realities. If these images lead to victory, it does not matter if they are untrue, wrong or skewed. There is little in the electoral law that prevents the creation of a winning image that a political party can conjure up. After the ruling in the Hindutva cases of 1995, electoral speech cannot cross the constitutional limits of public order, security of state, defamation, contempt of court and the like. The Indian Penal Code creates several electoral offences, which includes promoting hatred and ill will between classes, especially in places of worship. The Representation of the People Act, 1951, covers a number of corrupt practices and electoral offences, including making false statements about one's opponents and invoking religion, race, caste, community, language, religious or national symbols or glorifying Sati. The Supreme Court permitted the glorification of Hindutva as a national sentiment in ways that had the Sangh Parivar laughing all the way to its vote bank. But within these broad contours, political parties can `re-invent' India to their hearts' content and fool at least some (if not all) of the people for some of the time during elections.

Given this latitude, all political parties have coined slogans and images of India. Jawaharlal Nehru portrayed an image of planning, progress, social justice and secularism to depict an image of India as a nation on the move. Indira Gandhi, cashing in on the buoyancy of her Bangladesh victory turned to the vote bank of the poor through her garibi hatao (remove poverty) slogan. In the 1980s, the Congress went hi-tech, but succumbed, after Shah Bano's case, to skewed secularism with indifferent results — whilst maintaining the Nehru-Gandhi social justice image without its shine.

The calculated rise of the BJP was on a fundamentalist Hindu platform to gain dividends in State elections in principally north India and Maharastra, and in national elections. India was portrayed as a Hindu India. Bharat became Hindustan — a kind of sequel to Pakistan. The BJP and the Sangh Parivar used Ayodhya and other `Hindu' images continually. Despite its electoral dividends, the `Hindu' appeal spun out of control. Both the slogan and its message were lumpenised. A nation, which watched the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, was dismayed to see wanton destruction of books at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. Even the BJP's Hindu supporters are uncomfortable with such ravages in the name of Hinduism.

The BJP is faced with a self-created dilemma. Since its surfacing as a national party was based on lumpen support for lumpen images, it cannot risk losing this support. India is greater than the aggregate of its parts. The BJP knows that it must draw support from other Hindu ranks as well as other faiths, including Muslims. Nor can the party alienate its general `Hindu' support. Apart from its generality, the new electoral Hinduism has too many neo-fascist components. In the past two decades, the minorities have been feeling increasingly insecure and persecuted — even more so in Gujarat after Godhra. The BJP has evaded the challenge of this neo-fascism that it implicitly supports by a conspiracy of planned silence. When the Poona book-destruction occurred, the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, frowned — refusing to be more vocal than that. Ayodhya is notionally not a central electoral issue. But it simmers on. Kalyan Singh has been re-inducted into the party to do the needful — including in relation to Ayodhya. Muslims have been put under maximum pressure to compromise on Ayodhya — with no promise of rebuilding the mosque, no regret and no truth or reconciliation. Typically, the Prime Minister started his electoral campaign from Ayodhya. So everything that brought the BJP to power is kept alive. The crude neo-fascist elements are not silenced. They are part of the brew to be invoked where needed.

The BJP, as a national party, cannot be seen to be fundamentalist. But it lacks a view and vision of India as a whole. Consequently, the BJP has now created a campaign of `India shining' because it `feels good' to do so. In an odd sort of way, the India shining-feel good campaign imitates Nehru's idea of `India as progress.' But the BJP's is a Disneyland version of that great image. Nehru's image of `India as progress' was comprehensive in its social justice and secular goals for all communities. `Shining India' does not shine in quite the same way. In its campaign mode, it shines on the BJP's alleged achievements in Government.

There are two aspects to the `Shining India' campaign. The first concentrates on the BJP-led Government's contribution in the last five years. This often becomes a matter of heated exchange between the BJP's Arun Jaitley, the Congress' Kapil Sibal and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s Sitaram Yechury and others. Statistics are vehemently exchanged with each side declaring that whatever the other did, it did better. Out of this is born the allegation that Nehru, Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, and Narasimha Rao ruined the nation and that the BJP did a rescue act — as if the BJP started from scratch. The second aspect to `Shining India' projects the entrepreneurial vision of the Government and private business taking the nation forward with increased productivity, positive balance of payments and dividends to the lower and the middle class. Other Indians are relegated to possible hypothetical benefits resulting from the trickle-down effect of the general advancement of the economy. This vision is an illusion. The true face of `Shining India's is to make the advantaged classes feel good about what they have and are about to receive as India's entrepreneurs become global players.

The truth is that apart from some Reserve Bank data, India is not shining. The Sangh Parivar has plunged the nation into the worst communalism since Partition — without remorse. Shining India has little or nothing to offer those below the poverty line. Dalits and tribals have little to look forward to. Minorities live in fear of their lives and identity. The educational system is caught in the labyrinth of ideological thinking to service dangerous ideas for dangerous reasons. Apart from the privileged and the fundamentalists, who is feeling good about what? Having already abused its power to call an early election, the Government is abusing the privileges of its incumbency by large `one-page' advertisements in newspapers with the photographs of Mr. Vajpayee and others demonstrating progress in the BJP years.

This takes us back to the importance of the issues of social justice and secularism that lie at the heart of constitutional governance in India. Mass communication has made images more important to elections than issues, enabling the BJP to play hide and seek with what matters. Issues concerning dynastic rule or Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin are over-profiled. But the Congress must know the risk it runs. India's elections need issue-based campaigns on the things that matter especially to the least advantaged; and not the gimmicks of parties out to capture power. India cannot be reinvented at will in ways subversive of its constitutional goals.

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