A rchive Date
[ 22-05-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ India ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/05/22/468463.html
A dynasty reborn
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2004-05-22
In a world awash with conflicts of one sort or another, the news from India is a remarkable story, rekindling faith in the capacity of people to choose for themselves their government.
The results of the April-May 2004 election in India for its 14th Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament, came as a surprise. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by the veteran parliamentarian Atul Bihari Vajpayee, 79, expected to be returned to power with a majority mandate. This expectation was also commonly shared by most political commentators, business leaders and India-watchers abroad.
The consensus around BJP returning to power arose from the credit it took for the remarkable performance of the Indian economy in recent years. The economy has grown at an annual rate of eight per cent, raising expectations that, if such a pace could be maintained over another decade, India would emerge as a major economic power, given the size of its expanding domestic market.
BJP stressed India's economic gains as its achievement. It campaigned under the slogan, "India shining," pointing toward future promises of higher income and greater opportunities for Indian talents in the global economy.
But there were also other issues, foreign and security policies, building bridges with Pakistan for reaching some sort of final settlement over Kashmir, strategic understanding and co-operation with the United States over the war on terror, improving relations with China and deepening relations with Europe, Israel and its neighbours. BJP and its supporters were confident the electorate, assessing the record of the government and its leader's performance, would give them a clear majority or return them again as the largest party to form another BJP-led coalition government.
India's voters thought otherwise, confounded the elite opinion and voted the BJP-led coalition out of power. In a stunning electoral surprise, Indians voted to give Congress party the most seats in the Lok Sabha.
The circumstances under which Congress won, however, are historic and unprecedented. Sonia Gandhi, the 58-year-old leader of the party, is an Italian-born Catholic widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister of India.
But for Congress voters, Sonia Gandhi's origin mattered less than the leadership she provided to Indians who felt ignored and forgotten in BJP's "India shining," while politicians who sought to exploit negatively her non-Indian origin were overwhelmingly repudiated in the election. And though she has declined to be the prime minister, partly because of the viciousness of those who have made the campaign against her into a matter of "national pride," she remains the principal reason for Congress's return to power.
India is ethnically, linguistically and regionally the most diverse country in the world. All faiths are represented within India. It is home for more than 800 million Hindus and over 150 million Muslims, making India the country with the second-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia.
Lok Sabha, or India's lower house of Parliament, has 543 seats, representing a population in excess of a billion people. The electoral roll for the 2004 election comprised of 668.7 million voters residing in 29 states and six union territories of the Indian republic. Congress elected 145 members to Parliament, BJP elected 138, and the remaining 260 seats went to a mix of regional parties and the two rival communist parties.
India's parliamentary system of government is a British inheritance, with its roots now firmly secure in Indian soil. Indeed, modern India is in many ways an English creation. Nearly 200 years of English rule have planted in this polyglot of a country much of what Indians now cherish that originated in the British Isles.
Winston Churchill once remarked, "India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator."
And yet from the game of cricket to the love of Shakespeare, from English as the working language of a people to the legal and political ideas by which Indians live, the success of modern India as a united country is a testimonial to how a colonial power can have a lasting positive effects over a colony it once ruled.
In the furnishing of the Indian political system, the legacy of Britain is greatest.
Sunil Khilnani in his book, The Idea of India, noted, "the period of Indian history since 1947 might be seen as the adventure of a political idea: democracy. From this perspective, the history of independent India appears as the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the 18th century by the American and French revolutions."
India's continuing democratic experiment is a lesson for her neighbours, for a relatively less diverse China in occupation of Tibet, and for rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, abusing the democratic wishes of her people and their leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But, most emphatically, India's democracy is a lesson for the Arab-Muslim world, a region stretching from Pakistan across North Africa, in denial of history's progress measured in terms of people acquiring freedom and democratic maturity.
The story of Indian democracy is inseparable from that of the Congress party now headed by Sonia Gandhi. It was a party established in 1885 by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, in the service of the British Crown in India. Hume, somewhat of an eccentric civil servant with a radical liberal frame of mind, became the first foreign-born president of an Indian nationalist party dedicated to the idea of self-rule.
In the 119-year history of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi is its fourth foreign-born leader. Her two predecessors in this role in pre-independent India were, besides Hume, Dr. Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta. Two other women, Dr Sarojini Naidu and Indira Gandhi, also led the Congress.
It is Congress that dominated India's politics until the past decade. Within the Congress, the Nehru-Gandhi family has been its most prominent political dynasty, and since 1947 this family has emerged as India's democratically elected "royalty."
There is no similar phenomenon of a family's role - intimately bound with the fortunes of a political party and the life of a country - to be found in any other democratic society. Neither the saga of the Adams family nor that of the Kennedy clan in the United States reflect the degree to which the Nehru-Gandhi family remains connected to the politics of modern India.
The patriarch of the family was Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), a lawyer by profession, elected president of Congress in 1928. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Motilal's only son, became independent India's first prime minister.
Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru, 1917-84), Jawaharlal's only child and separated from her husband Feroze Gandhi, not related to India's nationalist hero, Mahatma Gandhi, became the third prime minister in 1966. She was defeated in the election of 1977, returned to power in 1980 and was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. She was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi (1944-91) as the leader of Congress and India's sixth prime minister.
Rajiv Gandhi's Congress-led government was defeated in the 1989 election. While campaigning in an election called for 1991, he was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber. Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv's younger brother groomed for political office, died in an airplane crash in 1980 soon after Indira Gandhi was returned to power.
Congress won the 1991 election under the leadership of Narasimha Rao, losing power in 1996. Since then, without a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family at its helm, Congress was relegated to the opposition in Parliament.
The return of Congress to power in 2004 is the amazing story of Sonia Gandhi (nee Maino) entering Indian politics as a duty to her family, her husband's political party and her adopted country. She had married Rajiv Gandhi in 1968 and gave birth to son Rahul in 1970 and daughter Priyanka in 1971. In 1998, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from the constituency that had once elected her husband, and then became the leader of Congress.
Sonia Gandhi displayed an uncanny understanding of India's culture and politics. She understood Congress needed to reconnect with the bulk of India's rural and poor population, and give voice to its anguish and hopes, as urban middle-class Indians prospered from economic gains of recent years.
In some ways, India's 14th general election was a referendum on BJP's direction for the country.
Its robust Hindu nationalism - to its critics more akin to an atavistic chauvinism bent on undermining India's carefully crafted secularism as an equal recognition of its religious diversity - strained Hindu-Muslim communal relations unnecessarily. Its economic policies widened the gap between rich and poor.
Congress under Sonia Gandhi tapped into the unease beneath "India shining" of the BJP. It succeeded because she was also a reminder to Indians voting for Congress of the role of the Nehru-Gandhi family in modern India's history, providing them with a symbol or focus for unity and continuity in a maddeningly complex country.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Home Page
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