May 21st 2009 | DELHI, NANDIGRAM AND WARDHA
From The Economist print edition

The Congress party romps to victory by a surprisingly big margin. Its next government will be expected to do rather more than its current one


EVER unpredictable, Indian voters delivered their pentennial surprise on May 16th, when over 417m ballots were totted up. Reversing decades of decline, the Congress party had won the country’s month-long election, which ended on May 13th, by a bigger margin than its most enthusiastic cheer-leaders had dared dream of. Congress and its electoral allies won 261 of 543 available seats. With support from a few tiny regional parties and independents, they will have a majority in India’s 15th parliament. On May 20th India’s president, Pratibha Patil, therefore reappointed Manmohan Singh prime minister, making him the first prime minister to achieve this distinction at the end of a five-year term since India’s first, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Congress itself won 206 seats. This was the best result by any party since 1991, when the murder of Congress’s leader Rajiv Gandhi half way through the poll gave it a huge sympathy vote. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’s main rival, won 116 seats, its lowest tally for two decades. In a double boon for Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader and Rajiv’s widow (shown above with Mr Singh), Sri Lanka’s government on May 18th declared a final military victory against the Tamil Tiger rebels, her husband’s assassins.

Even some who mourn the BJP’s lesser thrashing are encouraged by Congress’s victory. The outgoing government, formed after Congress surprisingly triumphed in the 2004 election, winning 145 seats, was hobbled by the many venal and incompetent regional and Communist allies that it needed to make up its majority. Unencumbered by this rabble, Congress’s next government is expected to be more stable, less corrupt and, at a time of economic crisis, more efficient. Shorn of the Communists, who blocked a clutch of liberal measures before they abandoned the government last year, it could also pass some overdue economic reforms. On May 18th, in two dramatically curtailed sessions of trading, lasting a minute in total, the Bombay Stock Exchange jumped by over 17%. This was close to its biggest daily gain, and roughly the same proportion by which the markets plummeted on May 17th 2004 in response to the current government’s formation.

Completing the symmetry, the Communists, who in 2004 won 62 seats, their best result ever, won 24 seats, their worst since 1952. Their decision to campaign against Congress on an arcane foreign-policy issue, a nuclear co-operation deal with America, which was sealed last year despite their efforts to kill it, backfired utterly. According to the National Election Study, a post-poll survey of 30,000 voters by the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), only 37% had even heard of the deal.

Voters in the Communist stronghold of West Bengal, where Congress made a formidable alliance with the Trinamul Congress party, were more concerned by the Communist state-government’s thuggish efforts to acquire farmland for industrial development. Congress and its ally won 25 of West Bengal’s 42 seats, and are now hoping to wrest control of a state the leftists have ruled for over three decades. In Nandigram, a picturesque rice-growing region, where West Bengal’s rulers tried to acquire land for a petrochemical hub in 2007, sparking battles between peasants and party thugs, crowds gathered to cheer the left’s defeat. Abdul Daiyan Khan, a peasant whose son was shot dead by the police during the land war, said he and his neighbours had voted against the Communists for the first time, because: “The party that gave us land now wants to take it away.”
In Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state, for which 80 seats are reserved, another would-be kingmaker, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), also collapsed. Dedicated to dalits (Hinduism’s former “untouchables”), the BSP had hoped to win most of UP’s seats, replicating its success in the 2007 state assembly election. With 50 seats, its autocratic leader, Mayawati, had planned to bargain with either the BJP or the Congress to become India’s first dalit prime minister. But the BSP won only 21 seats, largely because its sometime non-dalit supporters forsook it. Many of these Muslims and higher-caste Hindus voted for Congress, which came away with 21 seats, more than double its previous tally.

As Miss Mayawati takes revenge for her humiliation—on May 18th she sacked 100 senior civil servants to whom she had given the task of delivering her victory—Congress’s progress in UP has inspired some excited analysis. The rise of regional and caste-based parties, such as the BSP, has been the dominant theme in Indian politics for two decades. Some pundits see an end to this. They argue that Indian voters, showing unsuspected perspicacity, have recognised the need for stable central governments, which only national parties can provide. The survey by CSDS seems to agree with this. Only 20% of respondents did not consider coalition governments harmful, down from 31% in 2004.

Yet the results do not support this theory. The combined vote-share of India’s two national parties has continued to fall, to 47.3%. And the increase in Congress’s share, from 26.5% in 2004 to 28.5%, was quite modest considering that, with fewer allies than in 2004, it contested 23 more seats. Congress’s relative leap in seats bespeaks an increasingly crowded field. This worked to its advantage in many places, including Mumbai, Tamil Nadu and, especially, Andhra Pradesh (AP), where it won 33 seats and retained control of the state government in a concurrent poll.
According to AP’s chief minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, who has now delivered Congress’s biggest tranche of seats in consecutive elections: “The credibility of the government of India and of Andhra has been established in the minds of the people.” But without the vote-splitting debut of a small party led by the state’s most revered film-star, known as Chiranjeevi (the “immortal one”), Congress would have suffered.

In fact, many regional parties did fine, including two with well regarded governments in Bihar and Orissa. Perhaps the most that can be said is that Indians are growing impatient with parties that appeal to them only on the basis of caste, region or religion, neglecting their welfare. Congress may have prospered in UP, speculates Yogendra Yadav of CSDS, partly because it was the only main party not to have run a dreadful government there recently. Vinay Tiwari, a Brahmin landowner in the remote village of Harihar Patti, in a region of northern UP swept by Congress, is a speck of evidence for this. He had previously voted for the low-caste Samajwadi party and the BJP. But he was turned off by the record of the former party’s candidate and by the Hinduist party’s habit of inciting violence against Muslims. So Mr Tiwari plumped for Congress—“the party of my forefathers”—and instructed his 12 relatives and 50-odd dalit labourers to do likewise.
Yet he would not have done so if he, like millions of others, had not felt surprisingly sunny towards the Congress-led government. According to CSDS’s survey, 57% of Indians wanted to give the government in Delhi another go, compared with 48% in 2004. Thus, Congress fulfilled, or surpassed, its most optimistic expectations in almost every state.
In Rajasthan, a sometime BJP stronghold, it picked weak candidates, ran a ragged campaign, and won 20 of 25 seats. In Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP retained power in a state election last December, and expected to clean up, Congress won 12 of 29. In Gujarat, India’s most industrialised and Muslim-phobic state, where the BJP has won four successive state elections and has its most talismanic leader, Narendra Modi, Congress got 11 of 26 seats. Clearly, this election was more than the usual aggregate of state-level verdicts.

Two explanations suggest themselves, starting with the obvious one. In the past five years, India’s economy has grown at an average annualised rate of 8.5% a year, including a relative slump to less than 7% in the financial year that ended in March. Driven by services, which contribute over half of GDP but employ only a quarter of the workforce, this boom has benefited too few Indians—yet more than is often supposed. Blessed with four good monsoons and high food prices, agriculture, which contributes around 20% of India’s GDP but supports over 60% of its 1.1 billion people, has grown at a relatively healthy 3.4% a year. Until late last year, most Indians’ main economic worry was inflation, which soared to 13% last August, largely because of high oil prices. But in the slowdown, from which rural India is somewhat immune, inflation has fallen sharply.

A thank-you to Congress

Under Mr Singh, who as finance minister in 1991 unleashed historic economic reforms, Congress can claim to have managed the economy quite well. Despite failing to bring much further reform, it has clearly allayed the market’s dread. It is, CSDS suggests, the most popular party among the richest 20% of Indians, who traditionally vote BJP. This helped Congress get every seat in Mumbai and Delhi.

On the back of some lavish welfare schemes, Congress also strengthened its base among the rural poor. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a huge public-works project from which the government says 44m families have benefited, was especially popular in Rajasthan and AP. A massive debt write-off for some 43m farmers last year, which cost 1.6% of GDP, was another vote-winner.

In north-eastern Maharashtra, a parched cotton-growing terrain where rates of indebtedness and suicide among farmers are high, Congress and its regional ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, gained four seats. In Keljhar, a village in Wardha district, where one farmer took poison last year and another hanged himself, everyone seems to have voted Congress. Asked why, they cite the loan-waiver scheme, the decent price for cotton set by Maharashtra’s Congress government—and their fear for the future. “This is among the worst years ever. There has been little rain and the canals are dry,” said Ganand Dada Narad, who had been forgiven almost half his 50,000-rupee debt ($1,100), which he had incurred when marrying off his daughters.

Wardha was also where Rahul Gandhi, who is Mrs Gandhi’s 38-year-old son, Mr Singh’s presumed successor and Congress’s most energetic campaigner, opened his campaign. Mr Gandhi, who entered politics in 2004, can seem naive and awkward—and by extension, in India’s filthy politics, sincere and uncorrupted. Credited with Congress’s decision to fight alone in UP and Bihar, where it won a healthy 10% of the vote though only two seats, he suddenly appears more astute.

Reinforcing this impression, he is reported to have declined to join the new cabinet in order to spend time strengthening the party. As a faint echo of his mother’s hugely respected renunciation of prime ministerial office in 2004, in favour of Mr Singh, this strikes some as further proof of Mr Gandhi’s integrity.

Leader wanted for the BJP

The Congress trinity—the two Gandhis and Mr Singh—does not set Indian hearts ablaze. Yet their quiet virtues look uncommonly good against their vagabond peers—including the 72 about to enter the Lok Sabha, India’s parliament, charged with serious crimes.

This may be another reason for Congress’s strong showing. Asked by CSDS
who they wanted to be prime minister, 14% of respondents named the BJP’s chosen man, L.K. Advani. Congress’s three leaders got lower ratings, but together were selected by 38%. By contrast, the next-placed BJP man, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mr Singh’s now non-functioning predecessor, was named by 3%, and Mr Modi, Mr Advani’s expected successor, by only 2%.
That leadership is a problem for the BJP has long been clear. Mr Vajpayee, a charismatic and conciliatory figure, had been able to appeal to the BJP’s Hinduist ideologues—and also allay the concerns of his secular allies over their crackpot, Hinduised version of history and enthusiasm for inciting religious violence. Mr Advani, an octogenarian Hindu hardman, who led the campaign that propelled the BJP to power in the 1990s, demanding that a Hindu temple be built on the site of a 16th-century mosque in UP, is more divisive.

With Indians showing little appetite for Hindu chauvinism, he has downplayed it, but fitfully. His stuttering failure to take action against a BJP candidate, Varun Gandhi, who in a campaign speech issued vile threats against Muslims, suggested either weakness or approval. Unsurprisingly, Mr Advani has failed to woo back the several important allies who deserted the BJP after its 2004 defeat. He must also have unnerved the party’s main remaining ally, Bihar’s leader, Nitish Kumar, who has many Muslim supporters. Mr Kumar demanded that Varun Gandhi be prosecuted and, until the voting in Bihar was over, avoided appearing alongside Mr Modi.

Meanwhile the BJP failed to convince with its pet secular boasts: that it could manage India’s economy and national security better than Congress. Against the sagacious Mr Singh, Mr Advani is an economic illiterate. Nor, given most Indians’ aversion to liberal reform, can the BJP boast of its relatively pro-reform record. Twisting the dirk, Congress’s manifesto includes a rejection of “the policy of blind privatisation followed by the BJP-led…government”.

Congress’s attack on the BJP’s national-security credentials was more sophisticated. In particular, the government’s response to the devastating attack in Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists last November was impressive. Mixing aggressive statements at home with resourceful diplomacy abroad, it managed to seem tough, but not reckless. By sacking its home minister and forcing out the Congress chief minister of Maharashtra, it assuaged public anger over its lousy first reaction to the crisis. The BJP, by castigating Mumbai’s police and using blood-spattered images of the tragedy for its propaganda, presented itself as opportunistic, if not unpatriotic.

Even without these failures, the Hindu nationalists were always bound to struggle against a resurgent Congress. Given the usual anti-incumbency instincts of Indian voters, they were expected to lose ground in several of their northern strongholds, including Rajasthan where they fared well in 2004. The BJP and Congress were both relatively unbolstered by electoral allies—and Congress has more national appeal. The BJP ran 433 candidates in this election, almost as many as Congress, and 69 more than in 2004. But whereas Congress came in first or second in 350 seats, the BJP achieved this in only 225. Indeed, the difference between the two parties’ reach has widened. In UP, where the BJP surged in the 1990s and had hoped to win 30 seats, it won ten. And more than 30 of its candidates allegedly lost their deposits.

The Hindu nationalists can recover. As Indians become rapidly more urban, consumerist and, perhaps, nationalistic, the BJP’s target-audience is growing. But to take advantage of this, the party will have to ease its ideological strictures and expand geographically. Under Mr Modi, who is currently barred by America because of his alleged complicity in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 in which 2,000 people died, it might find this impossible. He is clearly the party’s most charismatic leader. Yet on current form the 182 seats won by the BJP in 1999, after a small war with Pakistan roused nationalist and Hinduist sentiment, look like its peak potential. If so, all it can hope for is to lead the sort of fractious coalition government that many now pray to have seen the back of.

The challenge of rising expectations

It would be unwise to bank on Congress answering that prayer. With a history of arrogance and infighting, it could squander its advantage—a decade ago, after all, it had only 114 seats. But that was after several years without Gandhi leadership. And, remarkable as it would have seemed then, Mrs Gandhi, Italian-born and a reluctant politician, has proved sufficient to restore order to the party’s disparate factions and regional parts. On the strength of this poll, Rahul Gandhi, for all his shortcomings, now has a fine opportunity to rebuild Congress. And if it could do even better in UP in India’s next general election, as seems possible, its government in Delhi could prove awfully hard to dislodge.
Then again, Indian voters are not to be second-guessed. And Congress must now earn their support. In a country with 60m malnourished children, 40% of the world’s total, and an abysmal record in providing its citizens with the basic education and medical care that is supposed to be theirs by right, there is much to be done. And freed of its most troublesome allies, Congress will have no excuse for failure.

Mr Singh, who says the party’s victory “comes with a challenge of rising expectations”, appears to welcome this. On May 19th he challenged his new government to provide “a social and political environment in which new investment can be made.” If that promises some liberal reforms, of the country’s statist financial sector, for example, or its ruinously politicised higher education, Congress’s victory would be welcome indeed.

Few in Congress claim to want such changes, however, and Mr Singh, beholden to Mrs Gandhi, does not command his party. Sadly, not much reform may follow. But for many Indians, and all who wish the country well, this is still a pleasing moment. The divisive BJP and belligerent Communists have been forced to think again. The venal SP, whose manifesto included a pledge to curb the worrying spread of computers and English, is not in the government. And Miss Mayawati, who had hoped to be India’s next prime minister, is stuck in UP, inspecting the many statues of herself that she is building there.