By Patricia Lee Sharp e
Man Mohan Singh has been invited to form a coalition government led by the Congress party for another five years. This is good for the long term health of the Congress. It’s also good for India because the only plausible alternative, a coalition led by the BJP (Bharatya Janata Parishad) would most likely have led to increased tensions between Muslims (approximately 14% of the population) and the Hindu majority. A restive 14% would be a very ugly prospect.
The Family Squabble
Among the candidates contesting seats in the Lok Sabha were two cousins, Rahul Ghandhi and Varun Gandhi, sons of the sons of Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, who in turn was the son of Motilal Nehru, one of the original founders of the Indian National Congress. Rahul is considered to be a rising star in the Congress Party; Varun is trying to make his mark through the BJP, which also claims the many talents of Maneka Gandhi, his ostracized-from-the-family and no doubt still embittered mother.
All three Gandhis ran successfully from their chosen constituencies in the recent elections, which means that Rahul will be opposing Cousin Varun and Aunt Maneka in the Lok Sabha. And oh yes, just to make things clear—or to muddy them further, Rahul’s father Rajiv was Prime Minister (now Man Monhan Singh’s job) when a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber assassinated him, at which point Rahul’s Italian-born mother Sonia Gandhi became leader of the Congress party, which she still is—and more expertly than anyone dreamed possible back then. Now, Rajiv was PM because the previous PM, his own mother, the ferocious Indira Gandhi, mother also of Sanjay, husband of Maneka, was assassinated by angry Sikhs after she sent the Indian Army into Amritsar’s Golden Temple to quash a Sikh separatist movement. And did I mention that Maneka is a Sikh? (As is Man Mohan Singh.)
Sounds like something out of a soap opera set in Texas, doesn’t it? For some down and dirty family details, read here and here and here.
Kudos to India
But first, let’s wholeheartedly congratulate the world’s largest democracy for—once again!—running a nearly impeccable election, proving—once again!—how truly India is a democracy. There were over half a billion voters by the time the final phase had been completed, some 60% of the eligible voters. (For a reasonably coherent collection of details, here’s a source. And another. Even the U.S., which tends be undeservedly smug about the reliability of its electoral process, can’t hold a general election any more honestly. In this case, the BJP renounced its government-forming ambitions as soon as ballot tallies made the trend disappointingly clear. If there had been any doubt, if there had been the least sign of systemic corruption or procedural dereliction in any key constituency in the vastly complex, month long Indian electoral process, there would have been some very loud squawking and determined contestation.
Unfortunately the New York Times didn’t pause for hearty congrats once Congress got the go ahead to form the new government from India’s president. Its editorial board launched with little preamble into the carping that has been India’s fate vis-à-vis the American intelligentsia and political class since day one, mostly (I think) because independent India has never felt, spoken or acted as if it should be subservient to the US and has even dared, at times, to offer itself as a rival light unto the world. But President Barack Obama did a little better in the graciousness category when he accepted, a few days later, the credentials of the new Indian ambassador to the U.S. That’s a welcome change, but time alone will tell if he really appreciates conversation more than sycophancy.
So—pip! pip!—here’s to India—with an admonition to the rest of the
world. Clearly, it’s not poverty or illiteracy that prevents a country
from holding recurrent reliable elections.
It’s the absence of courage to face elections on the part of those who
hold power. In many ways, the US
and Europe are not the best examples to hold up as models of
meritorious electoral behavior. India is. If India can do it, any
country can, and—China take note!—these hotly contested, free and fair
elections have been a stabilizing, legitimizing route to averting the
once widely predicted dissolution of an ethnically, linguistically and
culturally diverse post-colonial republic.
No to Foolish Nepotism
Next, from the intra-Congress point of view, why is it good that a jubilant Congress Party has united behind Man Mohan Singh? Well, despite the fractious coalition he had to govern with after the previous election, Singh achieved enough to permit Congress to pick up the seats he needed to dominate a less bumptious coalition this time around. So he deserves it. Success should be rewarded and built upon. But that doesn’t always happen. Especially where the potential for nepotism is strong.
Thus, here’s another reason why it’s encouraging that Congress re-endorsed Singh: he’s not a member of the Nehru-Gandhi clan at a time when Rahul Gandhi, though far from seasoned, is turning out to be an attractive politician. Caroline Kennedy, suddenly ambitious daughter of an assassinated president, might take note of this: Rahul Gandhi is not claiming a seat in the Cabinet, although he gathered useful loyalty chits by campaigning for other Congress candidates even as he was in the process of recapturing his own constituency. A minor cabinet position, at the very least, was his for the asking. Instead, he remains a backbencher, dedicated to rebuilding the party, he says. And that is key. For his own future, and for India’s. India is vast. Obviously no one family can govern it unaided, so Congress needs to be able to recruit and develop a huge talent pool. Singh’s continued ascendency as PM proves there’s potent opportunity for non-clan members under the Congress umbrella. Kudos, then, to Congress and the Gandhis for not taking the self-destructive route of elevating a favorite son too soon.
However, a post script re nepotism is in order. All
is not total idealism here. Even at 38, Rahul is still too young for
top leadership in the Indian context, and family interests are not
seriously jeopardized by the decision to endorse Singh, who is 76 and
unlikely to be available for a third term, no matter how splendidly he
does this time around. As a technocrat, for that matter, as an
economist turned politician, Man Mohan Singh cannot boast a powerful
personal machine in a populous state like Tamilnadu—or Uttar Pradesh,
whose Chief Minister Mayawati had hoped to blackmail Congress into
settling for the junior position in a winning coalition, had Congress
itself not racked up so many votes. In short, Singh’s reinstatement
cannot impede Rahul’s steady progress toward the office first held by
his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru—assuming Rahul makes no serious
mistakes during the next five years. The Congress lions have no
intention of going down to defeat just because a likeable new Gandhi is
on the horizon.
Playing and Rejecting the Anti-Muslim Card
And kudos to Indian voters overall for resisting the Hindutva agenda of the BJP, which is to Hinduism roughly as militant salafism is to Islam: an intolerant, puritanical, violence-prone culling from a complex faith, both lusty and subtle, that deserves better of its contemporary exponents. (To get a handle—good luck!—on the permutations of Hinduism through the ages, see The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger, Penguin Press, 2009, especially Chapter 24, “The Past in the Present.” Yeah, it’s a book.) I am still amazed and full of admiration at how well Indians handled the bloody siege of Mumbai last fall: Hindus did not erupt in a murderous rampage against Muslims; Muslim clerics dissociated themselves and their religion from the vicious actions of Pakistani terrorists and from the interpretations of Islam that encourage terrorism; the Indian government did not launch an attack on Pakistan. Since India, over the years, has been the scene of entirely too much Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, the restraint was truly remarkable.
Surely, if an ambitious 29 year old Varun Gandhi were even minimally politically astute, he would have considered the measured reaction of Hindus generally to the Mumbai provocation before slapping the anti-Muslim card down on the table. Instead, he played the crude demagogue and “was filmed at two political rallies...comparing a rival Muslim politician to Osama bin Laden and threatening to ‘cut off’ the hands of Muslims if they dared to ‘raise a finger’ to the state's majority Hindu population.” Claiming that the tapes had been doctored, Varun nevertheless found himself in jail under the National Security Act "for spreading communal hatred through his speeches." Eventually he was released, but the Indian Election Commission censored and fined him.
Underdogs tend to be scrappy, and Varun was running in a constituency that’s nearly half Muslim and Dalit (once called Untouchables or Harijans), so he no doubt felt compelled to appeal to the deepest fears and worst instincts of any caste Hindus with the least inclination to back a BJP candidate rather than a Congress candidate. As a Hindu nationalist party, the BJP specializes in scapegoating minorities, while making the gullible among the majority feel hopelessly victimized. (Its generally liberal economic policy attracts others who couldn’t care less about religion.) BJP inclinations are by now so well known that the more savvy leaders understate or simply do not mention the party’s Hindutva foundational principles [sic]. Then Varun lashed out, giving the opposition plenty of fuel for riposte. BJP bigwigs played it cool, in public, not exactly condemning him, not enthusiastically backing him up, leaving him essentially to hang himself, which he didn’t quite, having won the election. Even so, Varun has probably not emerged from this contretemps as the promising young comer he’d clearly like to be. The BJP, unfortunately, doesn’t lack for brains.
I find myself wondering what Varun Gandhi thought he was doing and can’t help concluding that there was something atavistic about his swashbuckling choice of tactics. He was a baby when his father died, but he has to know that Sanjay Gandhi, a notorious enforcer for his mother Indira Gandhi during the undemocratic interlude known as Emergency, had bulldozed the crowded, largely Muslim muhallas around the Jama Musjid in Old Delhi. There was also a taint of Muslim targeting in Sanjay’s brutal approach to family planning which added bribery (and sometimes coercion) to the long standing PR campaign to get Indian couples to limit themselves to two children. Like daddy, like son, perhaps.
Several elections back, the BJP rode to power in New Delhi by leading a highly emotional procession to Ayodhya to pull down the centuries old Babri mosque which had—allegedly, since there’s no archeological evidence—been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple dedicated to the legendary god-king Ram. What’s more, Hindu nationalists have so hounded and threatened M.S. Hussein, India’s preeminent modernist painter, that he now lives in exile. His crime was to paint Hindu goddesses naked or nearly so—as if the ladies ever appear otherwise in traditional Hindu sculpture! And so on.
So Varun was definitely following a long standing party
line as well as, perhaps, his own father’s interrupted intentions, but
not very cleverly. It may be that he won his own constituency, but he
no doubt reminded voters throughout the country that BJP economics,
however attractive, could easily be undermined by the chaos stirred up
by BJP bigotry.
All this said, Man Mohan Singh does indeed have an agenda that’s hardly less challenging than Barack Obama’s. America's diplomats, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and all those special envoys, will learn, as their predecessors did, that dealing with India, whoever's in charge, for all the supposed kinship of fellow democracies, will be a challenge.