The Feel-Good Factor, Issues and the 2009 election outcome

Dr. Manmohan Singh deserves our congratulations for becoming the first incumbent Prime Minister to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term since Nehru in 1962. (Indira Gandhi was re-elected in 1971, but she called an election one year early in 1971 to seek a mandate for abridging the Right to Property enshrined in the constitution). In fact, for the first time since the 1984 “sympathy vote” election, anti-incumbency played no role in determining outcomes in most of India’s states. I would attribute the declining importance of anti-incumbency to the fact that India is one of the few parts of the global economy that has not seen either a significant diminution in household wealth or any reduction in household incomes/employment in the past year -- having experienced the fastest 5-year period of economic growth in our history during the previous five years (2002-07).

Competence in governance and economic performance appears finally to be paying dividends. For the first time in 25 years, incumbent parties emerged with the majority of seats in most of the large states (including the UPA-ruled states of Delhi, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Assam, the NDA-ruled states of Karnataka, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and Chattisgarh, and the Third Front-ruled Orissa and Tripura). Naveen Patnaik’s experiment (gamble?) paid off – although his victory in the state assembly was narrower than the seeming clarity of the outcome for him in the Lok Sabha election. The residual presence of anti-incumbency decimated the Left Front in West Bengal and Kerala, and there was an anti-incumbent outcome in the smaller states of Uttarakhand (NDA-ruled) and Jharkhand (UPA-ruled, but with unstable coalitions); otherwise, anti-incumbency played little role in the 2009 election.

Most urban observers accept that Dr. Singh was a “weak” prime minister – in that all his cabinet appointments were ultimately decided by 10 Janpath, thus limiting his ability to lead the cabinet. But this factor clearly did not resonate with voters. The mechanics of top-level decision-making rarely have an impact on individual voters’ lives, and so had little resonance with the electorate. On the substance, there was little doubt that Dr. Singh did demonstrate genuine leadership on one issue – the India-US nuclear deal – on which he first persuaded 10 Janpath (by threatening quietly to resign in November 2007), then a reluctant parliamentary party, the whole of the Lok Sabha (by means fair or foul) and finally the 42-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG, set up in 1974 to deter our nation’s nuclear ambitions) to endorse the deal despite China’s attempts to scuttle NSG assent.

Surprisingly, the Opposition did not attempt to capitalize on the sharp increase in food prices over the past half-decade (and continuing high food inflation even this year), the emptying of our fiscal coffers as the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act was flagrantly contravened by the UPA, the repeated failures of security under the foppish Shivraj Patil (who was appointed Home Minister in 2004 precisely because he had lost his Lok Sabha seat from Latur -- and was thus not a serious rival to the emergence of the prince -- rather than because of any innate ability), and the growing threat to our national security as China encircles us strategically in Nepal and across the Maoist belt through the centre of India while strengthening its 45-year-old alliance with Pakistan and building deeper links with Sri Lanka.

While a significant part of the electorate comprises party loyalists, and basic trends in many states can be predicted in advance, ultimately electoral outcomes in India are determined by the quality of the campaign, and the ability of parties to focus on issues (and a vision) that resonate with voters. The Congress-I has, in the last two General Elections (2004 and 2009), regained ground it had lost in the years since 1991 by running superb campaigns based on the same theme -- “Congress ke haath, Aam Aadmi ke saath” – and variants of it. In the 2009 election, the three Congress parties (Cong-I, Trinamool Congress, Nationalist Congress Party) together won 233 seats – one more than the 232 that the Congress-I (which then included both Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar) won in 1991. The Congress-I had been reduced to 197 seats in 1989, and was able to win no more than 145 seats in any election between 1991 and 2004 – but the 2009 election marks a genuine resurgence in the Congress vote.

The Congress-I delivered on most of its electoral promises from 2004, with the gradual widening of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to all districts, and the waiver of farm loans to small/marginal farmers last year – both popular measures that were financed by the stronger government revenues generated by five years of accelerated economic growth. But, as the outcome in Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, etc. demonstrates, that alone would not have sufficed to deliver victory had the Opposition been able to mount a campaign that resonated with voters across the country, and especially with swing voters in urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai – all of which the NDA lost resoundingly for the second consecutive election (which is especially noteworthy as the BJP’s urban base is traditionally thought to be particularly strong).

With a substantially stronger mandate (260 seats on its own, just 12 short of an absolute majority), the UPA now has the capacity to undertake significant economic reform. The economy cruised during the first four years of its last term – partly on account of the efficiencies generated by substantive economic reform (Privatization, recalibration of the Telecom sector, the Securitization act, Power sector reform) under the previous (1999-2004) NDA regime. But the global economy remains in the grip of its worst recession in half a century, and India can no longer grow through fiscal stimulus alone – as it has in the past 9 months, with the fiscal deficit widening from 1.9% of GDP (on a 12-month rolling-sum basis) in June 2008 to an estimated 6.5% by March 2009.

Unless the UPA lays out an agenda for accelerated economic reform – insurance, pensions, retail being areas of likely progress – it will be confronted with a more sluggish economy that makes it impossible to effectively finance its social-welfare agenda without a further fiscal blow-out. But with the Left no longer an Albatross around his neck, Dr. Singh will be empowered to pursue his reformist agenda with renewed vigour – which may be evident early on with the appointment of a reformer like Montek Ahluwalia as Minister of Finance, and someone like Shashi Tharoor as Foreign Minister. One marker of Dr. Singh’s enhanced stature (or lack thereof) will be the number of appointments of genuinely competent individuals (rather than Gandhi-family acolytes) to key ministries.

Some voices within the Congress-I are already attributing the electoral success to Rahul Gandhi rather than the Prime Minister in whose name the Congress-I and UPA sought the electorate’s mandate. Rahul’s electoral gamble of going-it-alone did indeed pay off quite handsomely in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, but failed even more spectacularly in Bihar and Jharkhand. Had Rahul Gandhi been the UPA/Cong-I candidate for Prime Minister, the outcome might well have been quite different. In fact, the Congress-I continues to be oblivious to the fact that the two seminal policy changes under Congress rule that altered the prospects of modern India most decisively in the past half century – the economic reforms of 1991, and the Indo-US nuclear deal of 2008 – were both accomplished by non-members of the Gandhi family (and perhaps despite it).

The Nehru family has given us abject defeat in the 1962 war, the near-destruction of the economy in the 1970s (when bank nationalization, inflation, FERA, MRTP, etc. nearly crippled industry, and led directly to the Emergency), the crises in Punjab (traceable to Indira’s propping up of Bhindranwale as a counter-weight to the Akali Dal), Assam and Kashmir (largely because of Indira’s ill-treatment of Farooq Abdullah in the early-1980s and the alleged rigging of the Kashmir assembly election of 1987). Yet, the fact that the electorate remains convinced that “Congress ke haath” is “Aam Aadmi ke saath” (and the Congress-I remains wedded to being led by the scions of the Nehru family) demonstrates both the ineptness of the Opposition’s response, and the effectiveness of the branding machine that the Congress-I has been for the Family since its creation in 1978. Rebuilding the old Janata coalition of 1977 has to be the natural course if the anti-monarchists of India are to ever be able to stop the inexorable tide towards the crowning of a new prince from the Family within a couple of years.

A broader coalition that appeals across India is the only way to seriously challenge a quintessentially centrist party that continues to prosper from an organization that was built to turn back Imperialism but was eventually turned into a machine for the electoral advancement of one family’s rule. Those of us who recognize that democracy is India’s greatest long-term strength, also know (and lament) that the dynastic principle is the greatest challenge to building the institutions that will enable Democracy to deliver the economic Transformation that the people of India deserve. The party that has, after ruling the country for 51 of the last 62 years, still left India with more poor people than any other nation on earth, with more than half our people still without basic sanitation, with literacy rates that lag Indonesia and Africa, surely must be held to account more effectively for its manifest failures over those long decades.
Nonetheless, for India’s long-term future, it is a solidly positive development that a National party with instincts that are centrist and unifying has gained at the expense of the many fissiparous forces that seek to divide our country into regional, ethnic, caste and other silos. For those of us who are dissatisfied with what that party has delivered over 51 years of national rule, the task is now to think about how best to develop alternatives that will be able to credibly challenge that “Grand Old Party” (and its Family monopoly), push that party to deliver more than crumbs (such as 100 days of non-productive employment to the rural poor, rather than a genuine extension of health, education, sanitation and housing benefits to all) during the next five years, and continue focusing on the effective delivery of improved services and prosperity in the non-Congress states so that genuine alternatives continue to emerge, and compete for the electorate’s favour at the next General Election with a substantive program of proven change for the better.