Voting from the margins
-- Opportunities for the Christian community in a General Election of Virtual and Future Alliances
By John Dayal
[This was written in March 2009 for a special April issue of the New Leadcr, Chennai]
Babri Masjid’s 6th December 1992 demolition is a big black mark in the Indian political calendar, remembered by even those who forget that the day is also the death anniversary of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar, the man who changed the face of political India as much as Partition had, but in a positive, affirmative manner. Will anyone think of 24th August 2008 as a scratch on any political yardstick? And does it matter, really, even to Christians that it was on this day, 24th August 2008, that the community in India saw the beginning of its worst nightmare in modern history since Tipu Sultan put the Konkani Catholics into captivity. Kandhamal 2008 finds no mention in the Election manifestos of political parties as they face off for the general elections 2009. It does not matter to Church groups. Catholic or Protestant, in Kerala as they argue and negotiate with the Congress led UDF for seats for favoured benefactors. It is even forgotten by well-off Oriya Christians seeking tickets from any political party that will have them, even from Kandhamal where there may be not many Christian voters left.
But the pogrom in Kandhamal, which left 120 dead and 50,000 homeless, must matter as another of the touchstones for secular democracy in India. And responses to that event -- rated on a pro rata basis to be emotionally at par with the violence against Sikhs in 1984, against Kashmir pundits, and against the Muslims of Gujarat in 2002 – must expose political parties and candidates to a searing searchlight of their ideologies and commitments.
These are going to be unusual elections for everyone, unusual even by the crazy standards that have come into being since 1977, when Indira Gandhi’s Congress was wiped out in the wake of the excesses of the State of Emergency imposed in June 1975, and her return three years later; more important than the rise of the OBCs after Prime minister V P Singh opened the Mandal floodgates, and of course L K Advani’s Rath Yatra which polarised India on religious lines.
I mention those important events to also recall that in Indian Parliamentary democracy, any election result, howsoever improbable, is possible!
A good thing to remember these days when to the ravenous and undying appetite of communalism has been added the full impact of globalisation and the economic meltdown. And Terrorism capitalised by 24 hour Television news channels. The ambitious middle class, who has BJP once, and in the wake of Mumbai 2008 attacks vowed not to vote for any politician, is feeling the pinch of the economic downtrend. The 9 per cent growth rate has been downgraded to a hopeful 6 per cent or so, but job cuts have become a chilling reality. Telugu `biddas' who were so happy in Silicon Valley till last year are returning home by the planeloads, and some have chosen the short cut of suicide rather than face the ignominy of unemployment and rebuke at home. Karnataka, Mumbai and Tamil Naidu have seen the impact of the puncturing of the big dream. And there are no jobs at home either. Will middle class and once high paid youth vote for hope of the Congress variety or be led by the hate campaigns of the Bharatiya Janata party which is already telling them it is the Semitic religions which are at the root of the crisis in India? Fortunately, India is bigger than its middle classes, though they hog the media limelight.
THE ISSUES:
For the Dalit and the rural poor, nothing really has changed. Even for Dalits who call themselves Hindus, or have converted to Sikhism and Buddhism, and get 15 per cent reservation in jobs as also in the Lok sabha and the State assemblies. For Dalits who became Christians or Muslims, they share all the suffering, but are deprived of the palliative and the curative. It is not a question on the number of Dalits killed, or raped. That runs into thousands every year. It is in the aggravation of poverty. [For the record, the 2005 Annual Report of the National Crime Records Bureau reported a total of 26,127 cases against the Scheduled Castes. A crime against Tribals was committed in every 29 minutes.]
”Poverty is still a grinding reality for millions of people in India.” the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights noted in her recent visit to India. Recalling that the Supreme Court has defined India as “a country of people with the largest number of religions and languages living together and forming a nation,” the UNHCR warned this diversity had the potential for igniting competing claims and even strife if stressed by poverty and inequalities. Twenty or so of 28 States are afflicted by internal armed conflicts. Many of these States are heavily militarised. In our report to the Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Indian Civil rights groups noted that the almost 250 Special Economic Zones, constructions of dams and leasing of areas for mining have become virtual “conflict zones”.
Patently no single political party or group has been responsible. The Congress has ruled the most states the longest. But the others have had their chance. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left parties, too, have ruled the nation in their alliances, and remain in power in several states. They must share the blame as they can also, justifiably, claim a share in all the good that has accrued ever since the visionary Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the Modern India and a scientific temper as its guiding spirit.
It is in this social and economic overview of the Great Indian Reality that the average Indian -- and the Christian voter is just an average Indian with just one more overlay of vulnerability as a religious minority, possibly a Dalit or a Tribal – looks at the players in General Elections 2009.
THE CONTENDERS:
Real politics has dissolved the Great Alliances that were formed to rule India after the last two General Elections. The currently ruling United Progressive Alliance, and its predecessor in office, the National Democratic Alliance, formally exist no more, with constituent parties mostly going their own ways.
But one must not hurry to dismiss the Grand alliances as being ‘dead’ and buried. Alliances are like the Count of Dracula – they are the `Living dead”, phantasms that can take body and shape when the time comes. Till then, they exist as “virtual alliances”; in most states by design or by default, as I will explain, and come into being after the results are declared claims are staked for office. What it means is that the people and issues that hogged television time and headline space have to be taken with a pinch of salt, and breakups of NDA and UPA need not mean the partners have filed for divorce never to marry again. And they may well marry the same party again! But having said it, I need point out it is the Bharatiya Janata Party which loses the most friends, with the sanitising and secular lure of the yet to be born Third Front luring away staunch allies Telegu Desam and All India Anna DMK, and tempting old friend Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal in Orissa.
It is also salutary to remember that the first major defeat the Congress suffered nationally in 1977 was at the hands of a coalition called the Janata Party that was formed while the leaders of various parties were in Jail, put there by Indira Gandhi. It was a party only in name. It was a strategic and tactical coalition forged by Jaiprakash Narain with the support of the Marxists who provided the brain power to the mass bases of the other constituents. That coalition could not last, and broke up when George Fernandes objected to the former Jana Sangh members retaining their membership of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. Several members of that group later rejoined the BJP as electoral allies, as Mr Nitish Kumar in Bihar, or the Akali Dal in Punjab.
The two recent alliances, UPA and NDA. were in actuality only coalitions of two major national partiers -- one of which had lost its country-wide strength for various reasons over a period of time, and the other which could not really expand to cover every state -- forged with regional players who had a caste or linguistic base in at least one State. There was only the opportunism of power which soldered the alliances. There was no ideological glue to bring them together, not even really common policies. The Common Minimum Programmes were their election agendas reduced ad absurdum, with a veneer of populism. For regional parties rising from linguistic, religious or ethnic aspirations, the omnibus nature of the Congress makes it a perpetual opponent locally, and an `impossible ally’ nationally, the necessary evil they need to get central funding and a place in the sub.
The Bharatiya Janata Party formed the fulcrum of the NDA around which a motley group of regional parties, some of them breakaway factions of the Congress, came together in the last few years of the Twentieth century. The BJP does not hide its ideology as a child of the Muslim-bashing RSS, and most of its main partners reconciled themselves to its worldview because they themselves had extremely constricted visions that sought to insulate their communities from outside influences, or nursed real and perceived historic grievances. The Akali Dal in Punjab is a party representing the religious and land interests of the powerful and rich Jat Sikh peasantry which gained strength after Indira Gandhi’s ill-conceived military expedition against the Golden Temple fortress of Bhindrawalen’s armed militants. For the Sikhs, it was felt no national party could represent them after the massacres of Delhi-Kanpur in 1984. The BJP, which in Punjab represented the Hindu business community, was no competition. It was convenient to forget that aggressive elements within the BJP had been quite in the forefront of the anti Sikh sentiment, backing Indira Gandhi to the hilt in her fight against Sikh extremism of the 1970s and early 1980s. Similarly in Assam, the Ahom Students movement against Muslim Bengali migrants gave birth to the Assam Gana Parishad, a natural and permanent ally of the BJP in its anti Muslim theology.
The third major ally of the BJP till recently had been Telegu Desam, born of one man’s ambition, and the political aspirations of a powerful caste combination which had been ignored by the Congress controlled by Brahmins and Reddys in Andhra Pradesh. Actor N T Rama Rao converted his popularity as a celluloid Lord Rama into political success for his caste and the middle class Telegu groups. In Tamil Nadu, both Dravidian groups, Jayalalitha’s All India Anna DMK and M Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, twins born in an earlier Dravida split, have taken turns to partner the BJP, but, like the other BJP partners, have made sure that it is not allowed to grow in their states. That leaves the oddest companion in Bihar’s Janata Dal United, a rump of the once united Janata Party now localised in a small grouping of caste interests. Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav, the Janata leaders, too make sure that the BJP does not grow at the grassroots in Bihar even if it could breach the caste walls.
The RSS long ago realised that its ideological growth as an extreme right wing Hindutva organisation would not be possible without the protection and the resources that came with political party, and the Indian system allowed only political parties to be part of the system of governance and administration, the huge public budgets and the billion dollar contracts. Even as it gave birth to different groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram to cater to niche segments, the RSS founded first the Jana Sangh and after the breakup of the Janata Party, it came up with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP’s agenda remains unabashedly Hindutva, seen to advantage in prime ministerial candidate L K Advani’s Rath Yatra in the late 1980s, and the system of governance propagated by Narendra Modi in Gujarat. Its essentials remain a pandering to the interests of big business and landed peasantry, and a sectarian espousal of what are projected to be Hindu interests. These are constructed from a well thought out strategy to protect Muslims, and now Christians, as threats to Hindus and by extension to India as a country. This combination seems to work in brief spurts, and basically in the cow belt of north India, but has not been able to sustain itself across the country. The BJP entry into Karnataka has to be seen in the context of the fragmentation of the vote collectively garnered by the Congress and the Deve Gowda Lingayat caste group of the Janata Dal Secular. The reverse has happened in Orissa where the Biju Janata Dal, its long term senior ally, has ditched it unceremoniously, and to add insult to injury, has held it responsible for spreading communalism in the state.
Ironically, the BJP has succeeded to an extent in forcing its agenda on the Congress, which has to now continuously stress that it too represents Hindu interests while also protecting the religious minorities. This was best seen in the party’s ambivalent attitude to the Babri issue where it began the process by opening the locks of the mosque, and then Mr Rajiv Gandhi, at the best of his home minister and Cousin Arun Nehru, calling for Ram Rajya. The Congress which led the Freedom Struggle as a rainbow collation of all castes, religions and linguistic groups, has over the decades not been able to hold on to its strategy of welding the Dalits, Muslims and upper castes into a cohesive electoral machine. If the BJP has nibbled away a section of the Brahmins, the Dalits have found a new Messiah in the Bahujan Samaj led by the charismatic Mayawati. The Congress alienated the Muslims repeatedly, and lost them to the Samajwadi party which otherwise represented the peasant back ward communities. The Congress is also indistinguishable from the BJP in its economic dalliance with the rich and the powerful. And yet, the Congress has been able to convince a significant segment of Indian society that it still retains much of the spirit that was given it by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The persona of the Nehru Gandhi family is neither the cause of this strength, nor the fruit of it. It just symbolises the core values of the Congress and its claims to be secular, to be concerned for the poor, and to be capable of protecting broader Indian interprets in the international arena. In this success the Congress remains unique amongst all Indian political parties.
The Third Front is an aspiration of the Left combine, consisting of the Communist Party of India, the CPI Marxist and the minor Leftists of the Forward Block and others. But they have lost the fire that once moved the communist movement. Ideological splits and confusion, and the need to modify strategies in the wake of the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the globalisation of the Chinese economy, have irreparably changed the Left. It can now impose SEZ culture in Bengal, and cohabit with Islamic parties in Kerala with equal élan. This unfortunately has also made it to remain confined to Kerala, Bengal and to the Bengali population of Tripura. [Incidentally, there is no noise about Tripura, unlike Assam, against Bengali settlers!]
While the Yadavs may be confined to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Sharad Pawar’s NCP to Maharashtra, Mayawati has a historic opportunity to build the Bahujan Samaj as another rainbow coalition much as the Congress once was. But her haste to achieve greater political office, the creeping sense that she is betraying Dalit interests by pandering to upper castes and her inability to build a political party infrastructure within the BSP will possibly ensure her ultimate failure to become a future political giant.
The Election scenario is changing rapidly as the poll dates approach. The utterances of Varun Gandhi and the BJP defence of his anti Muslim rhetoric threaten to further polarise the electorate. But perhaps communalism will have to take second place to economic regeneration, the need to tackle the great rural crisis and the increasing urban poverty. These could take the shine off the BJP’s polarising antics.
Will the Congress be able to convince people that it will ensure communal harmony whole repairing the economy remains a matter of conjecture?
And do the people, Christians among them, have any real choice?
The dynamics of the virtual and future alliances gives a window of opportunity. Unless it sweeps the elections in a still to be born Hindutva “wave”, the BJP just cannot muster the strength in UP, Bihar and South India, to dream of forming a alliance that can be called to form a government. It has lost two important allies of the past – the Telegu Desam and Jayalalitha’s to the Third Front, and there are no replacements.
In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Andhra and Karnataka, Bengal and Bihar, it will therefore be possible for secular people to vote for the Marxists, for Deve Gowda, for Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav without fear that this could benefit the BJP. We can be sure that the Left and the two Yadavs, were they to do well in the states they control, will be bound to support, or be supported by, the Congress in a future secular formation, whether they now call themselves the Third Front or no. And Mayawati, a possible ally of the BJP, but not an ally of the Congress, will have to either watch from the sidelines or hold its peace.
This is good news for the Christians. If they wish to vote for the Congress, they are voting for a party professing secularism. If they chose not to, they have an option to still strengthen the secular polity by voting for the Marxists, the DMK and AIADMK, even Telegu Desam. The Muslims have used this to great advantage by choosing candidates with the best chance of defeating the BJP. They call it strategic voting. The Church, Catholic, Protestant or Syrian, cannot dictate who the Faithful should vote for, though it may claim it can influence the Laity. The Church’s interests in protecting its absolute control over institutions can hardly be reason to foreclose options and freedoms that the current elections offer.
I am sure the community is now politically less naive than it was in the last few decades. It does not want to be defined as a vote bank of one party. And it knows it cannot afford to strengthen, even by default, political elements who will damage the secular fabric of our democracy, or constrict its vibrant plurality.
There never was such choice ever before.
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