An Indian election primer

By Dan Twining

The Indian elections beginning today will be the largest organized activity in human history (always true of Indian elections given the country’s growing population). As many as 714 million eligible voters will be marking ballots for a new Indian parliament that will convene in June. The scale of this election is staggering: There are close to 1 million polling stations, 6 million deployed security personnel, and over 1,000 registered parties whose candidates are contesting 543 parliamentary constituencies.

Given democracy’s roots in the ancient Greek republic, with its limited franchise and minuscule population, a national election on this scale is historic. It is also normal and unsurprising. It is hard to imagine how else India could be governed, given its scope and diversity (as opposed to its equally big northern neighbor, where 90 percent of the population is Han Chinese).

The history of Indian elections shows that prediction is a fool’s game; Indian voters have constantly surprised pollsters, politicians, and pundits alike, and they may well do so again this time around. With that in mind, here are a few markers by which to make sense of this election and what to expect from it.

National vs. regional parties

India’s pan-national Congress party has been in secular decline. Since 2004 it has governed India with just over a quarter of seats in Parliament thanks to alliances with smaller regional parties. The other national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is polling at or below this threshold. This means that for either party to govern will require alliances with regional parties, with varying and diverse agendas and a focus on leveraging their roles as kingmakers.

One way to predict whether Congress or the BJP will govern is to assess the prospects of their likely coalition partners. At the moment, the BJP’s regional allies look to be in more trouble than those of Congress. But Congress bears the burden of incumbency: The BJP was predicted to win the elections in 2004 but lost power in part because of voters’ desire for change, a pattern that recurred in state elections last November. And despite the impeccable pedigree of its prime minister, the Congress-led government has utterly failed to implement further economic reform, calling into question its governing credentials.

A Third Front?

If regional parties do too well, India faces the prospect of a government led not by one of the national parties but by a coalition of regional parties. In one scenario, such a coalition would enjoy the support of Congress or the BJP. In a more interesting scenario, such a coalition would exclude either national party.

The primary pretender to lead what is called a Third Front in the second scenario is Kumari Mayawati, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (population: 185 million), and a Dalit outcaste whose ascendancy would be revolutionary in a political system where upper-caste, Western-educated elites have dominated. Interestingly, India’s foreign policy would likely not change much in such a scenario given the strength of the bureaucracy. But the impact on the Indian economy could be significant — and negative — if a Mayawati-led government pursued a populist agenda of extending government affirmative-action programs into the private sector.

Rural vs. urban India and the question of economic reform

India’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of 9 percent since 2004, a growth rate that produces dramatic social change. Indeed, The Economist and other observers judge the Indian middle class to be as large as the population of the entire United States. Redistricting also makes this national election the first in which India’s expanding urban population will punch its weight electorally. The BJP’s modernizers have attempted to redefine the party’s identity away from an exclusive Hindu nationalism toward one that emphasizes economic reform and competence, appealing to the urban middle class that values these qualities. In some respects, Congress has moved in the opposite direction, putting in place extensive rural welfare schemes and showering money on Indian farmers.

This is astute, because 65 percent of Indian voters still live in rural areas. It was rural voters that turned the BJP out of office in 2004 in a backlash against its "India Shining" campaign: How can India rise as a world power when it has more people living in absolute poverty than all of Sub-Saharan Africa? On the other hand, widespread, rapid economic growth premised on aggressive liberalization and infrastructure development is more likely than government welfare schemes to pull rural India out of poverty.

Security

Beyond pocketbook issues and local concerns, security threats — Indians are the world’s leading victims of terrorism — could impact the elections. Conventional wisdom that the 11/26 Mumbai terrorist attack would benefit the BJP’s harder line on security was upended when multiple state elections held only days later saw the BJP underperform and Congress do rather well. On relations with Pakistan, the hard-line BJP can claim a Nixon-to-China quality: it was the last BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who launched Indo-Pakistani rapprochement at a groundbreaking summit in Lahore in 1999, and it was current BJP leader L.K. Advani who recently was savaged within his party for going back to Lahore to praise the vision for peace of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

In its favor, the current Congress government made important progress in back-channel negotiations with Islamabad before the Mumbai attacks, which emanated from Pakistan, and has shown remarkable restraint thereafter. But militant attacks across the Line of Control in Kashmir have tripled this spring, and cities like Mumbai and Delhi are braced for election-season terrorism. The Naxalite insurgency that afflicts vast tracts of the Indian heartland, identified by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the country’s gravest national security challenge, could also affect the vote: Only yesterday, insurgents conducted a "triple strike" in Jharkhand and Bihar that Indian’s Home Minister described as an attempt to disrupt the elections. Which political party can best claim to boost Indians’ prosperity while strengthening their security against these dangers?

What’s not on the table 

As important as what Indian political candidates are running on is what they aren’t. U.S.-India relations are not an election issue, reflecting the widespread consensus among all but the far left of the political spectrum that a cooperative relationship of equals with the United States can only benefit a rising India. Polling shows that the civilian-nuclear deal was popular even in rural Indian villages — not because farmers understood the technical details but because partnering with the United States to make India more prosperous and powerful is inherently attractive at all levels of society.

Nor is Islamic extremism a compelling election issue in the sense that radical Islamist parties are contesting the elections on platforms of sharia law and anti-Westernism/anti-modernism of the kind that impact elections in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia. Such parties are absent from the Indian election outside Jammu and Kashmir, and there, Islamists either boycott elections — or lose them.

Nonetheless, big issues are at stake in India’s elections. A weak coalition government will find it hard to move on economic reform, potentially condemning the Indian poor to another generation of grinding rural entrapment and constraining India’s great power rise. A government of ideologically and politically diverse parties will find it hard to define an agenda that makes India an active leader in international politics — rather than a country that remains, in some respects, insular and unwilling or unable to assume international responsibilities on issues like climate change.

A Congress-led government in which Manmohan Singh serves only as a placeholder leader until the ascendance to the prime ministership of Rahul Gandhi, scion of India’s first family, will reinforce the dynastic quality of Indian political life. A BJP-led government in which the party’s sectarian warriors rather than its economic modernizers hold the upper hand could foment communal discord within Indian society in ways that artificially and ahistorically divide its Hindu and Muslim communities, creating an opening for radicalization and sectarian violence.

Amid all this uncertainty, however, one thing in clear: When the votes are counted on May 16, not only Indians will be watching; the world will be too.