ELECTION TO THE FIVE STATES:
An exercise of throwing out the governments of the day for the earlier thrown aways to occupy the vacuum created.
The election results to the five states very clearly show that there is a deep political crisis in our country. The national parties are rejected by the voters and the regional parties are no great politics to choose from.
Punjab: No one had predicted that Akali Dal could make a comeback. This party in combination with BJP had lost its face in Punjab. In 2007 Akali Dal had 49 seats and BJP had 19 seats. In 2012 Akali Dal improved its tally by 7 seats while BJP lost 7 seats. Congress had 44 seats in 2007 and it gained just 2 seats. There are two reasons why Akali Dal and BJP came back to power. One, the PPP played a spoiler game. Arnob Goswamy of Times Now had already stated this. This party did not get a single seat. But it prevented Congress from coming to power. PPP took 10% of votes which could have gone to Congress if people had preferred Congress to Akali Dal. In spite of the accusation levelled against Akali Dall of nepotism and corruption it came to power only because the people rejected both Congress and BJP. The significant fact is the loss of 7 seats of BJP indicates that people would have preferred Congress to BJP. Nobody sheds any tear for Congress not coming to power in Punjab.
In Goa too there is nothing great for the BJP to rejoice. Goa is a very small state and the Congress had consumed enough poison from the mines that its demise was not surprising. The victory of BJP was only the last straw the people had. Their strategy to give some tickets to Catholic candidates was useful. One should realise that Goa had never been a bastion of congress. Manohar Parrikar will be a chief minister for a third time.
Similar to the case of Punjab the Uttara Khand had seen enough corruption under BJP and their effort to cover up all this by bringing Khanduri was like giving a straw to a drowning person. The man who was supposed to save BJP’s sinking ship himself could not save his seat. Here the voters wanted to reject both the BJP and Congress. The people did not want to choose the Congress under any circumstances. There was no third alternative to the voters. It is because of this the congress got just one seat more than BJP.
The UP situation is no better. Strictly speaking the case here is very similar to that of all the other three states. The rejection of BSP was a consequence of the fact that the BSP could not use the political opportunity for the stated objectives of the party. The signs of this were not just the statues built by Mayavathi but more seriously the rampant corruption that had prevented from the daliths, backward class and the poor to get the fruits of their trust reposed in BSP and Mayawati. The health department which caters predominantly to the poor was fraught with corruption. BSP had to settle down with only 79 seats. Though SP won 224 seats, 126 more seats compared to 2007, it is no great certificate to the party. Its vote share is just 2.5% above the BSP vote share. This indicates that the loss of BSP in terms of vote share is not great. BSP still holds its core vote base. There is a widespread belief that SP is a party of goons and goondas. Immediately after the election results were declared the SP cadres did prove this. The ministry formation adds insults to injury.
The congress party with Rahul Gandhi had put in enormous efforts in campaigning for the party. He was seriously campaigning for the change of the face of UP state. Rahul had begun his work long before the election. Even in 2009 election he had worked hard. The leaders of the congress were trying to reach out to the Muslim even at the expense of model code of conduct. Congress had hopes of staging remarkable achievements. Perhaps capturing power was not a realistic hope. Given all the energy poured in and the absolutely miserable performance of the party is an indication that the people have lost hope in Congress Party. The Muslims did not see any hope in the congress party, in spite of the tall Muslim leader Selman Khurshid who stuck his neck out for increased quota for Muslims. The result in Rae Bereli and Amethi are most baffling for Congress. In Rae Bereli not a single assembly seat came to Congress.
BJP had slided down from their position of 2007 both in terms of vote share and the number of seats it won.
It can be confidently said that if the people had “a right to reject” as an option then all the parties in all the states would have been rejected. But there would have been constitutional break down and in that case there would be president’s rule in all the four states. This would mean the most discredited UPA would rule these states indirectly. Since there was a talk, prior to voting, that there could be a president’s rule in UP the people must have hesitantly voted for Samajwadi Party. Here again we feel "the right to reject" would have been no solution to the political crisis.
The people in these states and perhaps in the rest of the country are between the devil and the deep sea. It is clear that neither the national parties nor the regional parties have anything that people should cast their votes for.
BJP had been most vociferous in attacking UPA and the Congress on corruption issues. They spoke for a strong Lokpal and shared dais with Anna Hazare. They had condemned the action of the UPA government against Baba Ramdev and the arrest of Anna Hazare. BJP was trying to give an impression that it was anti corruption and a proponent of a very strong Lokpal bill. But they never stated at any stage their position on Lokpal bill. Their hypocrisy and double standard was exposed in both the houses of the parliament when the Lokpal bill failed in Rajya Sabha where they had an edge over UPA. BJP is not a shining example of providing corruption free governments. The entire struggle of the people for Lokpal bill is a wash out. Anna Hazare and his team have lost the momentum and enthusiasm.
What is evident in these five state elections is that it is not a defeat of the political parties but a defeat of the people and the democracy. There are few politicians and still less political parties that measure up to the expectation of the people and give good governance and development to the nation.
Soon after the election results the BJP started speaking about midterm Parliamentary election. Mamata’s Trinamul Congress was very vocal in saying they would be happy if immediately there is midterm election. This idea was floated through their lone representative in the Union cabinet, the Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi. TMC wants to get more MPs in the parliament to have more muscle power. SP, JDU, AIADMK are hoping that they too would improve their tally in the parliament if midterm polls are held now. One needs to analyse if the hopes of these parties are based on the interest of the nation. Is the objective situation favourable for a clean and viable alternative government? The parties want midterm poll to improve their tally in the Parliament. There is no thought about giving the country a stable government. All the parties will improve their tally and they will create a chaos in the parliament. No one, with whatever combination, may float an alliance and give the country a stable government.
The political crisis is political chaos in the country. No party is above corruption, no party looks at the national interest. Whenever the opposition parties get a chance they gang up together to give rise to instability and chaos. There is no political discourse between the political parties. BJP looks for every chance to put the UPA on the mat. It does not have numbers to give an alternative government. It has no hope of coming to power if the elections are held immediately. They want to discredit the government of the day so that they can improve their chances in the next election. Even if the country’s resources are wasted through the washed out parliament sessions or blockades of the policy decisions the opposition parties and principally the BJP has no problems as long as it improves its chances to come to power in the next election. The voters were clever to see the game plan of BJP.
Above all the talk of midterm poll is a clear indication that no one has learnt any lesson from the elections to these five states. In these elections the voters have not elected any party to power rather they have thrown away the government of the day. Once these governments are thrown away the parties whose governments were thrown out earlier have come to occupy the vacuum. In the eyes of the voters they do not have any merits to form a new government. No party has moral grounds to claim that they have an image good enough to aspire for power.
These parties throw up a smoke screen to attract the votes of the people.
What has the Congress and UPA done all through the years of their rule? They have ushered in reforms to put the country on a fast forward track. It is not only the Congress, who started this reform with Manmohan Singh as the finance minister under Narasimharaj government. This reform process was followed even more vigorously by the NDA under the leadership of BJP. But their ‘India shining campaign did not break ice and the Congress won under their slogan of “aam aadmi”. But Congress combined reform with populist measures for the aam aadmi. They have legislated NREGA which was later termed as MGNREGA. This is a spectacular achievement which has given employment to the scores of rural women and men and has increased their income. This has had a very positive result of increasing the wages of the agricultural labourers. If UPA came to power the second time it is one the merit of this programme. Apart from this the Right to Information Act has been a very bold move. By this bill the democratic character of the country is strengthened and the people are able to enjoy this right to demand transparency in the administration and governance. Even in the rural areas people have used this to get their ration card and other facilities. Though this programme has put UPA in trouble and thought there was a demand to water down this Act Sonia Gandhi has stuck to her stand to keep this Act as radical as it was passed.
Shekhar Gupta had once said on the TV show that the Congress party has done the maximum for the urban people. UPA may pass the food security bill to ensure that 60 % of the people of the country will benefit from this. But the impact of these will be short lived. If the NREGA brought the UPA back to power it did not help the UPA (Congress) to win even one seat more in UP or other states where the elections were held. The new magic of food security bill, if passed now will have some impact for a year till the election and it might give Congress an advantage. But that advantage too will soon wear out.
Two rupee rice was promised by several political parties and this promise was fulfilled. Tamilnadu under DMK had the best PDS, mid day meals, health care and NREGA implementation. DMK gave TV sets to the people, as promised. But all this did not keep DMK in power during the elections in Tamilnadu.
The caste and minority based politics too has shown the signs of weakening. Minorities too are not fooled by the parties that try to champion their cause. The people are beginning to realize that all promises the political parties make and all freebies and populist programmes they come out with contribute very little to achieve their long term interests. People want land, employment, food sovereignty. They want to be in the main stream of economic and political life. They want justice and equity and not doles.
The one thing that got UPA into deep trouble is the 2G scam and Common wealth Games scam. UPA cannot come out of this come what may. Manmohan Singh offered a “compulsion of coalition” as an explanation. This is most unwise if not dishonest way of getting out of this scam. If Manmohan has difficulties in tackling A. Raja, as he belonged to DMK what prevented him and UPA from taking Suresh Kalmadi to task? If A. Raja was restrained and consequently if DMK had withdrawn the support to UPA Congress would have come out very clean. If no other party had bailed out UPA Congress could hold its head high and go to the people for a fresh mandate. The accusation of complicity in the 2G scam is not all that unreasonable. History will not forgive Congress and Manmohan Singh for this failure.
They way Congress leaders handled Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev was another indication of Congress going out of their mind. With the huge 2G scam and CWG scam over their head they should have gone cautiously with regard to Anna’s campaign. The way Congress is handling the Koodam kulam anti nuclear power plant movement shows that Congress is desperate. The manner in which a German national was deported from Nagercoil and the refusal of visa to 30 year old Japanese girl is nothing but lack of self confidence on the part of Manmohan Singh and the UPA. These instances are signs of ruthless undemocratic and almost fascist behaviour on the part of UPA. If the people are afraid of Nuclear plant in their neighbourhood then that fear has to be taken into consideration in the light of Fukushima. The anti nuclear plant got a momentum only after the Japanese Fukushima experience. There was already one tsunami in Kanyakumari. When the government is coming heavily on the foreign funds of the NGOs, supporting the agitation of the people against nuclear plant what about the government taking foreign funds and collaborating with foreign governments to import weapons of mass destruction, either in the form of defence weapons, or nuclear technology?
The reform is talked about all the time. It is not only Congress but all the parties are talking the same language. Only difference is that each of these parties came to power by pulling the other. Mamata pulled down CPM front by opposing the Tata Uno project. But she is not able to escape the reform agenda. Nitish Kumar opposes UPA but wants to follow reform. Narendra Modi is bringing about reform and he is rated as a role model. What is the problem of BJP with Congress? It is only that Congress has power and BJP is out of power. But all the parties regional and national are on the bandwagon of reform. The 2G and Common Wealth Games corruption are part of the problems of reform. If we look across the country all the states are floating in corruption, in Goa the Congress, in Karnataka, MP and Uttarakhand BJP, in Punjab Akali Dal/BJP combined governments. Mayawati had number of ministers who were involved in corruption and murders. They were thrown out just on the eve of elections in UP.
All Governments of all parties serve the interests of the corporate and foreign capital and put the aam aadmi on the street. Every state government, no matter to which party it belonged to had been trying to attract investors to their states. Yediyurappa was trying to build land bank by taking over lands of the farmers so that more SEZs could be created and more industries would come to Karnataka. Foreign direct investment is another big dream all the governments have been seeing. FDI in multi brand retail is thought to be giving employment to vast number of people. But it does not see how many will be displaced from the existing retail traders. The urban middle class are thought to get wide choices to purchase commodities that they do not really need. How many brands will come in from foreign countries and how many brands from India will disappear from the market and production?
Since we do not have power (energy) to support the industrial growth any means to generate power is alright. The maximum pollution is generated from power generation. Nuclear power, the most dangerous source of power is considered to be the best option, in spite of history repeatedly sowing that Chernobyl, Fukushima can keep repeating. The industries that consume the power are located far away from the hazard of power generation. Growth is considered to be a god on whose alter thousands of citizens can be sacrificed. We have several examples of how the government goes out of its way to support the people whose craze for profit had resulted in genocide. The Bhopal gas tragedy is still haunting us.
It is estimated that 600 million will live in the cities by 2030. This is by no means growth of the nation and its people. Some of these people may have homes but all of them will depend on employment at the hands of the multinational and corporate companies. Productive assets and the land will go from the hands of the farmers into the hands of the minority people in corporate and transnational companies. As David Smick has observed in America a small miniscule minority will own capital and the rest will be deprived of it. When there are crisis in Capitalism the non owners of capital will be affected as it happened in the economic crisis in US, UK and Europe.
All the political parties who come to power consider the corporate, industrialists and foreign companies as their godfathers. These governments surrender the fate of the 80% of the population in the hands of the profit seeking monsters. The 20% of these will be pampered middle class who will call themselves civil society at whose feet the government will fall in obeisance.
When all the political parties follow this one dharma of giving full support to the devastation of the majority of the citizens and when these parties go to them for handing over the power to continue their cruel acts what chance will the people have to usher in government with human face. The citizens have only one chance to throw away the government of the day. The election process is not electing a government but throwing away a government. Unfortunately the vacuum created by throwing out one government gets filled by those who were thrown away earlier.
We need a political power and political system that will give governments that are free from corruption and will think of those reforms which promote the long term interests of the 80% of the population of the country.
In order to understand the need for such a magic creating government and it economic policies we need to assess the history of our political economy. Full detailed assessment is not possible here but we can put down main points for further elaboration in the future.
1. Soon after independence India began it path of development with a multiparty democracy and mixed economy. The private sector was given a prominent role in the national economy. The state was having control on the public sector in primary industries and a fair share for invention in the economy.
2. Our experiment was considered as unique and had been looked up on with a lot interest by several developing nations.
3. However the western advanced capitalist countries and principally America looked at our experiment with a lot of hostility. America which has a strong allergy about the word 'socialist' looked at India and our friendship with Soviet Union with suspicion.
4. The noble ideas of mixed economy (democratic socialism) could not make head way as these ideas went counter to the domestic private interests. The land reform which would have contributed to rural transformation was sabotaged by the feudal and landlord interests in the rural area who also held political and administrative power at the state level.
5. The bureaucracy, the vested political interests and the leading private sector capitalists made sure that the noble ideas of democratic socialism did not succeed.
6. The advanced capitalists took advantage of this unsuccessful attempt at socialism tried to bring India into their neo liberal frame work. In 1980ies liberalization was gradually introduced. This led to the increased dependence on import resulting in the imbalance between import and export leading to the crisis in balance of payment. Our foreign reserve went so low that we had to pledge our gold to get foreign exchange and later go in for a huge loan from IMF with a host of conditionalities. Our country opted for a full blown neo liberal economic policies: Liberalization, Privatization and globalization.
7. The neo liberal economic policies by definition cannot reconcile the interests of the foreign and multinational capital, corporate sector with the interests of the 80% of our population. We must be clear that the foreign capital is here to stay. When the trickling down effect of the economy did not do any good to the vast population of our rural masses under the national economic and political dispensation it is bound not to work when the foreign capital is added to our economy with the changed or abandoned state’s intervention in the economy. Now the principle role of the state has come to mean that it would promote foreign investment, growth in industrialization and full freedom for private capital. It is forced to privatise the economy that was under its control. It will work only as an estate agent for the foreign and corporate capital. The role of the state in education, health services and public distribution and services is getting eroded.
8. The growth of the economy cannot happen through the normal means of capitalist laws. Rapid growth in India essentially means a wide spread corruption with the politicians at its centre. As a result politicians and political parties have lost the moral right to rule the nation with more than 40% of the population which is poor.
9. The euphoria of “India shining” is not large enough to spread its light beyond a very limited social space. Political parties cannot come to power only with the votes of minority people on whom India is shining.
This is at the root of the political crisis that we are experiencing now and it will not be over within a short run.
