ELECTIONS to the 15th Lok Sabha are crucial for India and for India’s two major national parties – more for the BJP than the Congress. If the BJP manages to form a coalition government headed by it, the nature of a future government of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will surely be different from the one that Atal Bihari Vajpayee headed for six years between 1998 and 2004. In that case, the Congress will of course bide its time until the next parliamentary polls, secure in the hope that the kursi has been well warmed-up for the ‘Yuvraj’.

If the Congress returns to office at the head of a new coalition, the chances of which are distant, the BJP will find it difficult to withstand the tremors of a second successive setback. If the 1996 experiment of a Congress-supported ‘Third Front’ government is repeated, the country will see political turmoil and instability of a fairly unprecedented kind. In either of the three cases, the changes in India’s political landscape that the 15th Lok Sabha ushers in will have far-reaching implications for politics as well as governance in our country.

With dates for the five-phase polling process having been announced at the time of writing, three things are obvious. First, so far there is no single emotive issue influencing the minds of voters across the country. Second, India will once again have a hung Parliament, with no clear majority for any single political party. Hence, a coalition government is a certainty, with a good deal of unpredictable post-poll reconfiguration of alliances. Third, and most important from the point of view of the likely outcome of the polls, the people of India want change.

The last point is obvious to one and all, except to the drumbeaters of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The pre-election overconfidence in Congress circles shows that the party is repeating the mistake that the BJP committed in 2004, one which proved costly for it. The absence of a strong wave in favour of the opposition is being interpreted by those in government that the people are waiting to give it a renewed mandate.

The high-visibility advertising campaign on the achievements the UPA government, on which several hundred crore have been spent, may not have influenced the aam aadmi, but it surely has had an effect on many in the top echelons of the Congress party. Most politicians are delighted to see good things being said about them and their government in print and television, even if it is in the form of paid advertisements or advertorial coverage. They take such positive publicity as a reflection of what the people are thinking. Advertisement is thus being mistaken for endorsement. It is an exercise in self-delusion that has persisted despite ample empirical evidence that government advertisements have little bearing on poll results.

 

Apart from the ad campaign, two other factors are being interpreted by Congress strategists and supporters as proof of an impending verdict in favour of their party. First, they point to a dip in the rate of inflation – from 11.05% in June 2008 to 3.92% in mid-February 2009. Second, they reckon that the people have appreciated the government’s handling of the situation after the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai, and rejected the opposition’s, especially BJP’s, allegation that the UPA has been soft on terror.

As someone who was in the NDA government for six years, and was actively associated with the BJP’s election campaign in 2004, I know how ad campaigns and positive media publicity make an incumbent government believe that the people want to give it a second term. India Shining was first an ad campaign of the government; it then became an unofficial election slogan of the BJP. The listless state of the Congress party at the time – especially after its governments were decisively voted out in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in November 2003 – had further contributed to the mood of overconfidence in the BJP. The voter, however, was in a different mood, which articulated itself as a mandate against the NDA government in May 2004.

 

The moot question now is: why is the public mood in favour of change in May 2009? How the collective mind of voters thinks and acts is of course a complex subject, worthy of being studied by the best scholars in political science and mass psychology. Many factors that are peculiar to India, and owe their salience to India’s social, regional, economic and political diversity, come into play in a national election. A new factor – local – has also begun to significantly influence the poll outcome in recent decades. ‘What has the government or the sitting MP done for our constituency or our biradari?’ is a question that voters are increasingly asking the campaigners.

Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, a longtime Speaker of the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress, once described this phenomenon in the famous words: ‘All politics is local.’ Why the local has begun to assert itself in this age of globalization is another complex subject that deserves a serious multi-disciplinary study.

Local factors were relatively less important in Indian parliamentary elections so long as a single party dominated national politics, or whenever an emotive issue of a pan-India or pan-state nature was at play. The situation is different now. All pre-poll indications in 2009 suggest that state-specific issues, sub-state issues and constituency-level conditions will have a considerable impact on the overall verdict of parliamentary elections. Even in the 2004 elections, the defeat of half of the sitting MPs of the BJP was, inter alia, on account of what has come to be known as ‘local anti-incumbency’. The party failed to choose the right candidate in many constituencies and also to integrate local issues in its campaign.

 

The play of state, sub-state and local issues, and also caste- and community-related factors is, of course, important in parliamentary polls. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to overstate their importance and belittle points of nationwide relevance. After all, experience has shown us time and again that Indian voters are guided by a robust national consciousness. After 14 parliamentary elections and many more assembly and local body elections, voters in our country have become sufficiently mature to know the difference between a poll to elect the government in New Delhi and other polls. They now know the power of their vote, the poor more than the rich, as can be seen from the oft-observed phenomenon that the poor vote more enthusiastically than others.

Aware of the power of their vote, the people have also become more demanding. When the time comes to exercise their power of vote, they judge any incumbent government on two interrelated criteria: Has this government made my and my family’s life better in these five years? And has this government made the nation’s life better in these five years? Their concern is not only personal but also national. Indeed, it is the commonality in the personal narratives of crores of people, belonging to different regions and communities, that gives their individual concerns a national character.

 

On both these counts – personal and national – the UPA government, after five years in office, fares poorly in the estimation of voters. In 2004 the Congress had sought votes in the name of the aam aadmi. Today the aam aadmi is deeply disenchanted. Prices of essential commodities and services have risen to unprecedented levels, and all the talk about the dip in the rate of inflation cannot hide the fact that family budgets of a majority of Indians, including the middle and upper-middle classes, have gone haywire.

The current economic crisis has worsened their woes. In a country where unemployment is already high, people are confronted with the curse of large-scale job losses. Estimates vary. The Federation of Indian Export Orgnisations (FIEO) has projected one crore job losses by the end of this fiscal year. Work has stopped on most construction sites in urban India and workers, mostly belonging to the unorganized sector, have no social security to fall back upon.

Many companies in steel and cement and other core sectors, as also manufacturing units in automobiles and auto-ancillaries, have cut production and working hours. Layoffs in export-dependent IT and ITES companies are widespread. With banks in no mood to lend, the economic downturn has created a virtual credit drought for enterprises. Commerce is badly affected all along the trading chain, including in the last link of roadside vendors who serve the needs of the last man. And since the livelihood of the last man is also linked to the broken links of commerce and industry, a hawker is unlikely to be swayed by the hoardings of Bharat Nirman while pulling his cart of unsold wares or looking for daily wage employment in a recession-hit market.

The growth model that the UPA government adopted relied, first, on the stock market bubble and, second, on reckless spending without taking the trouble of strengthening the delivery mechanism. The stock market bubble burst, spreading pain all around. The effect of the latter factor is that overall central government deficit has reached nearly 9% of GDP. To make things worse, infrastructure development in key areas like roads, power and irrigation were badly neglected in the past five years. Clearly, the UPA is going to leave behind the economy in a bad shape for the next government. And it will take a long time, and determined effort, to restore hope and a feeling of security among the people.

 

The feeling of livelihood insecurity is accentuated by physical insecurity due to a long string of terrorist incidents in different parts of the country in the past five years. Although Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism in India has a history of nearly three decades, it is worth noting that more terrorist strikes took place during the UPA rule than at any time in the past. The common citizen now thinks twice before going to a crowded market place because the concern for personal and family safety is beginning to alter people’s behaviour. The number of people needing psychiatric treatment rose sharply after the horrific 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai.

The quick damage control measures that the UPA government took after this incident were in themselves an admission of its earlier flawed approach to fighting terrorism. The Congress had opposed POTA in 2002. One of its first decisions after forming government at the Centre in May 2004 was to repeal POTA. Thereafter, every time the BJP demanded its re-promulgation, government leaders maintained that existing laws were sufficient to combat terrorism. But, post-26/11, the government did a sudden U-turn. It hastily brought in many POTA-like provisions in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act. People are not fools to applaud the Congress for taking this action, since they know that it was taken under compulsion and not out of conviction.

A section of the media feel that the UPA government’s handling of the post-26/11 situation has ‘taken away’ the issue of terrorism from the BJP. This is both a flippant and faulty analysis. Terrorism as a political issue cannot be the monopoly of any political party, BJP or Congress. The point of differentiation is how each party has responded to the issue.

In 2002, the Congress opposed the bill on POTA – which was introduced after the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001 – so vehemently that the NDA government had to take recourse to a rarely invoked constitutional provision to convene a joint session of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha to pass the bill. In contrast, when the UPA government introduced the bill for amending the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in December 2008, in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, the BJP lent wholehearted support to it. Indeed, the bill was debated and passed in a single day, without any glitches and acrimonious discussion that marked the passage of POTA.

 

Mention needs to be made here of an important aspect of 26/11 since it explains why a temporary pro-government mood prevailed in the country after the Mumbai attack. It is well known that a serious breach in coastal security had taken place. But once the people became aware of the unprecedented scale of the attack and, more importantly, of the fact that the attackers had come from Pakistan, a mood of national unity and solidarity set in. The Indian people display exemplary unity whenever the nation is under attack from outside and rally behind the government of the day. Political divisions lose their importance at such times.

The pro-government mood also endured for some time because senior leaders of the UPA government had repeatedly stated that ‘all options are open’ in dealing with Pakistan. This created apprehensions of a likely Indo-Pak war, which further reinforced the spirit of national unity. The opposition in Parliament also wisely decided not to adopt an accusatory and confrontational approach on 26/11.

 

Congress strategists have interpreted this temporary pro-government national mood as an endorsement of their handling of the issue of terrorism. They fail to recognize that the mood has dissipated in the absence of any military confrontation between India and Pakistan. When the time of voting comes, the people will take a broad five-year view of the UPA government’s handling of the issues relating to internal security.

Therefore, they will not ignore as irrelevant the questions that the BJP will raise in its election campaign: If Shivraj Patil was sacked as Home Minister for his incompetence, why was he kept in that position for four and a half years? Why has the UPA government not implemented the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the death sentence for Afzal Guru, who has been convicted for his role in the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament? Why has it turned a blind eye to large-scale infiltration from Bangladesh, which the Supreme Court, in striking down the IMDT Act as unconstitutional, has warned as ‘external aggression’ on Assam?

 

People’s preference for change of government is also strengthened by the weak, uninspiring and lacklustre leadership it provided to the nation for five years. Manmohan Singh hardly looked or acted like the prime minister. He made no attempt to dispel the truth that he was a nominated PM, who owed his office to the Congress president. In the scheme of India’s system of parliamentary democracy, the prime minister’s is an office of political authority. He is not expected to function like a CEO reporting to his chairman. Having never been in the hurly burly of politics, Singh had no mass contact before he came to 7 Race Course Road. And he made no efforts to assert his political authority, as that would have brought him in conflict with 10 Janpath. Thus, India’s governance for the past five years presented an unusual sight of dual leadership – the person holding office had no authority, and the person with authority had no accountability to Parliament. This is an unsustainable model of governance, and one that is designed to make governance weak.

The only time when Manmohan Singh acted decisively was when he, defying the limits set by the UPA’s own Common Minimum Programme and also disregarding the Left parties’ critical support for his government’s survival, went ahead to conclude the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Left parties, predictably and angrily, withdrew their support to his government. To ensure its survival, his party strategists made a shady deal with the Samajwadi Party, which surfaced as the ‘cash for votes’ scandal during the trust vote in Parliament in July 2008. It dealt a severe blow to Singh’s image as a man of integrity. Of what use is the personal integrity of the prime minister when he is incapable of curbing corruption by his ministerial colleagues and, worse, when he colludes in deal-making with leaders of the Samajwadi Party?

Is it hidden from anybody that the deal within the nuclear deal had much to do with the curious turn that the case of disproportionate assets, involving Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav, subsequently took in the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court slammed the CBI for ‘acting at the behest of the Law Ministry’ and used some particularly harsh words: ‘If the government says you should withdraw (the case against Yadav), you will and if they say file, you will do that. You are not acting on your own... It is incomprehensible.’

 

This is just one of the many instances in which Manmohan Singh allowed misuse and devaluation of the institutions of governance. A more appalling instance was when the Law Ministry helped Ottavio Quattrocchi, the prime accused in the Bofors case, to go scot-free. Clearly, the halo of integrity around Singh and the halo of ‘sacrifice’ around Sonia Gandhi has worn thin in the past five years.

Although the Congress party has declared that Manmohan Singh will be its prime ministerial candidate in the 2009 elections, it is obvious that it is projecting another scion of the Nehru dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, as India’s future leader. Rahul already dominates over the prime minister in the Congress party’s election campaign. Thus, the Congress, as it did in 2004, is again deceiving the public by not being open and transparent about who actually would lead the government in the event of a Congress-led alliance winning the 2009 mandate. Rahul’s own inexperience is not hidden from anyone. The party is thus both weak and confused as far as leadership is concerned. The voter is not going to ignore this factor at the time of voting.

A quick look at the so-called Third Front alternative shows that it is a non-starter. It has followed the on-again-off-again pattern throughout the past five years. The United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) came into being and quickly collapsed. Now the Left parties have again been trying to cobble together a non-Congress and non-BJP front comprising many regional parties. These parties are hoping for a repeat of the 1996 experiment when, in order to isolate the BJP, the Congress supported first H.D. Deve Gowda and later I.K. Gujral to form two United Front governments. Neither of the two governments lasted more than a year, both falling victim to the Congress party’s game of destabilization. However, with barely 40 days to go before the first phase of polling, the Third Front is nowhere to be seen. Nor is there any clarity on who is going to lead it.

 

It is against this background that the BJP, as the head of the NDA, is seeking the people’s mandate in 2009. No doubt, both have their share of shortcomings. The BJP’s biggest weakness is that it is not a force to reckon with in several large states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It has a weak presence, limited to the Telangana region, in Andhra Pradesh, another large state. So far, it does not have any allies in these states. Its traditional alliances in Maharashtra (with Shiv Sena) and Orissa (with Biju Janata Dal) have suffered some hiccups. The latter has recently snapped its ties with the BJP. On the positive side, the BJP has tied up new alliances in Haryana (with Omprakash Chautala’s INLD), Assam (with Asom Gana Parishad) and Uttar Pradesh (with Ajit Singh’s RLD). These will certainly prove useful.

Uttar Pradesh, once the BJP’s stronghold, continues to be an area of concern for the party’s strategists. The party won only 10 Lok Sabha seats in 2004. It fared badly in the 2007 assembly elections, which saw Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party win a spectacular victory. The BSP’s rise has considerably eroded the traditional support base of the BJP, although the performance of Mayawati’s government has lately disenchanted many people in the state. The BJP’s revival in UP will be crucial for its prospects of forming an NDA government at the Centre in 2009.

The BJP went through a period of internal turmoil after its shock defeat in the 2004 parliamentary elections. But that phase is now over. There is far greater cohesion within the party organization and a far stronger resolve to win the next election. The BJP’s leaders and cadres have also overcome the disappointment that came with the party’s unexpected defeat in the recently concluded assembly elections in Rajasthan and Delhi. After all, the BJP managed to win renewed mandates in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Also, the party’s victory in Karnataka last year – and in Gujarat in end-2007 against a vicious campaign mounted by the Congress – was a big morale booster.

 

The greatest strength of the BJP and NDA in the 2009 elections is the leadership of Lal Krishna Advani. There is nobody in Indian politics today to match his experience in politics and service to the nation. Now 81, he entered public life at the age of 14, when he became a swayamsevak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Karachi (his hometown) and soon a full-time activist of the RSS. In Sindh, he campaigned against India’s partition and later became its victim. After migrating from Sindh at the age of twenty, he has devoted his life fully and uninterruptedly to building his party – first the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later the BJP. He is one of the heroes of the struggle for democracy during the Emergency (1975-77), having spent 19 months in jail.

Along with Vajpayee, with whom his loyal, close and unbroken political association goes back to 1951, he built the BJP brick by brick. After the BJP’s debacle in the 1984 elections held in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when it won only two seats in the Lok Sabha, it was Advani who led the party’s remarkable revival. Along with Vajpayee, he was the principal architect of the BJP’s success in forming two NDA governments at the Centre, first in 1998 and again in 1999.

 

Advani’s leadership of the Ayodhya movement in 1990 may have been criticized by many of his adversaries, but no one since Independence has mounted such a vigorous intellectual and political argument against pseudo-secularism as Advani did. He proved his courage of conviction yet again when, in the aftermath of his controversy-ridden visit to Pakistan in 2005, he refused to budge from his stand. He was initially misunderstood by some of his own colleagues in the BJP and the ‘Sangh Parivar’. But the fact that both the party and its supporters have accepted him as their prime ministerial candidate shows a leader who has proved his mettle. His 986-page autobiography, My Country My Life (Rupa, 2008), highlights Advani as a leader who is true to his values and principles, a man of impeccable integrity, and a thinker-politician who is also a mass politician.

Much is being made about Advani’s age. As a matter of fact, his age is his strength. His health, vigour, stamina, enthusiasm, intellectual alertness and articulation at the age of 81 are such as will impress any unprejudiced observer. He has travelled more across the country, and addressed more mass political rallies, in the past year alone than any other political leader. He has made good governance, development and security the three big inter-linked themes of his campaign, and articulated his views on each of them with refreshing clarity. In parliamentary performance, there is no match between him and leaders of the Congress – the prime minister, Sonia Gandhi (who rarely spoke in the 14th Lok Sabha), Rahul Gandhi or others. He has repeatedly called for televised debates between prime ministerial candidates of various parties, but there have been no takers.

A key question that will weigh on the minds of voters in Elections 2009 is: who should lead India at a time when the nation is facing daunting challenges, both internally and externally? Can India afford a weak prime minister, heading an unstable government, when the economy is in crisis, internal security is frequently challenged and India is surrounded by a troubled neighbourhood? On this count, Advani’s candidature will surely come across as more attractive than that of any other contender to the country’s most important political office.

My own analysis tells me that India is going to vote for change. Switching from analysis to hope, I will say, ‘May the change be for the better.’