Putting It All Together Again (17 May 2009)

“India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator,” Winston Churchill said in 1931. At times during this election campaign that description seemed apt.
The surge of collective outrage after the November attacks in Mumbai quickly dissipated in a high-decibel assault of television and radio advertisements, voice and text messages and everything from YouTube to podcasts that painted every politician in the most garishly evil of hues. What else do you expect when you have to woo 714 million voters, many of whom would not even have heard the names of the 1,000 – yes, exactly that number – “registered unrecognised parties” in the field.

And yet, after a long, long time India’s voters have spoken in a clear voice. It is easy to forget, in the tumult and velocity that besiege us, that we teeter on the edge of the first decade of the 21st century. India has just decided to endorse a gentleman prime minister after one of the crudest campaigns in the past 62 years. Kandahar, Kandhamal, Godhra were thrown around in a frenzy of finger-pointing, but the reality is that a huge number of young Indians, 18 to 21, voted for the first time this year and that begins to explain the seismic shift that has occurred.

A few weeks ago, Manmohan Singh listed Naxalism, regionalism, terrorism and communalism as major dangers facing India. He failed to list negativism. Much is being made of the fact that Singh is only the second prime minister since Independence to sail into a second full term in office. Here is a 76-year-old man who speaks in a near-whisper, his heart patched together by much bypass surgery, and yet an electorate that grows younger by the day decides to give him more time to work for a better, more prosperous – and more optimistic – nation. Indians are weary of bad news.

It is no accident that Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, and Sheila Dikshit in Delhi have triumphed so spectacularly on a performance-based scorecard. The huge mini-nation of the National Capital Region is crawling with young Biharis who work in a myriad of service jobs – plumbers, electricians, watchmen, drivers. They are all exiles from a failed state, from a region that Lalu Prasad Yadav, feted by business schools for introducing clay tea cups on Indian trains, plunged into near-total darkness. The young man from Champaran who came calling on Saturday saw Nitish’s victory in simple terms. “Bihar had fourteen sugar mills in the past,” he said. “Now there are two. But things are beginning to work. There is light again.” A small irony – Lalu’s election symbol is a “hurricane lamp”. So it is performance that has been rewarded – nowhere more so than in Delhi, where Dikshit now not only is a third-term chief minister but has a 100% sweep of parliamentary seats to burnish her image. And in Orissa, where communal violence appeared to have held Patnaik in a pincer grip last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been decisively routed and Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal has won a majority in both the Assembly and parliament elections.

So the only pattern you can see in the election is of hope -- that the global recession will not bite too deep in India, that there will be jobs and income for more people, that universal healthcare and education will begin to glimmer a little brighter on the horizon, that India will take its place as a “soft power” – a concept that Shashi Tharoor is pushing.

The former UN diplomat donned veshthi and angavastram to ride to a decisive victory as a Congress candidate in Thiruvananthapuram. Although he is not, age-wise, a true “digital native”, Tharoor has been adept at using the newest tools of communication. He has regularly transmitted campaign updates from his “TwitterBerry”. “Still sinking in – a majority of over 100,000 votes!” he relayed on Saturday. So Tharoor, and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot, Priya Dutt, and Deepender Hooda form the storm-troopers of the revitalised Congress.

Indeed, in picking its younger candidates the Congress moved decisively to jettison some of its older war-horses who carried way too much baggage – the likes of Arjun Singh and A.R. Antulay. Here it differed from the BJP, whose leadership looked too old and set in its ways. The voters firmly hammered down the overweening arrogance that much of the old political class displayed – across party lines. And they gave some the fright of their lives – P. Chidambaram won by an embarrassing 3,354 votes in Sivaganga.

In the end, people seemed to want to see a return to modesty, even a bit of humility, as they recoiled from the brazen declarations of assets that candidates made when they got their tickets – humble servants of the people whose wealth multiplied by long strings of zeros from one election to the next.

So here you now have a woman whose marble likenesses rear up like poison mushrooms, and a Communist power couple who have never stood for election, or the wily caste-based politician from a Gangetic state who once made it to the Guinness Book, and a chain-gang of murderers, rapists and gangster chieftains who either manipulated the criminal justice system or put their wives or other proxies up – and they have all been humbled in one way or another.

“The trouble is that there are too many old leaders who will not let us do anything,” Manmohan Singh told me quietly in a 2006 conversation. It was a long flight from Delhi, at the mid-point of what was to be his first term as prime minister. “There is so much to do.”

This election has answered Manmohan Singh’s prayers, but there is indeed a lot to do. The Congress manifesto listed several action points – a growth budget within 45 days of taking power, Right to Food legislation, expanded education spending, and an ambitious plan to link every village in the country to a broadband network within three years.

“Rapid growth is an essential condition for getting rid of poverty,” Singh told a group of editors just before the campaign started. He noted that the economy had grown an average of 8.6% over the past five years and population growth had slowed to 1.6%. “If we can sustain that pace, in ten years we will double national income.” In the end, that is what counts for one-sixth of humanity.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on May 20, 2009)