Bewildering bevy of choices in India's elections should make for interesting times

About ten days ago, India kicked off what Kanishk Tharoor at openIndia calls "the world's biggest exercise in democracy". Reuters has the colourful detail:

Some election officials rode elephants to remote polling stations near the Myanmar border. Other ballots were brought by two-day sea trips to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

In Varanasi, the northern sacred city on the Ganges River known for its Hindu gurus, many voters arrived on bicycles and bullock carts to cast electronic votes.

"Such is the size of national elections in a country of over one billion people," Tharoor writes, that results won't be in for a month, after voters in some 650 constituencies have voted in a five-phased process:

An electorate of 714 million will vote in over eight hundred thousand polling stations, choosing between candidates from 1,055 political parties [..]. Four million electoral officials and 2.1 million security personnel will be mobilised to ensure the fairness and safety of the polls.

Humbling numbers if you're used to fretting over a margin of a few hundred votes this way or that in a Ferencvaros, Budapest by-election or a special election in congressional district NY-20.

The result will, by all accounts, be appropriately bewildering. "India's elections are notoriously hard to predict and polls have been wrong in the past," Reuters reports; "exit polls are banned." What is clear is that the hegemony of the two main parties, the Congress Party and the Hindu nationalist BJP, is over.

Once, of course, Congress dominated the scene all by itself, from Nehru's times to those of Indira Gandhi. Its monopoly collapsed in 1989, when upper caste and middle class voters defected to the BJP. Since then the two parties have alternated in power, but only thanks to increasingly fractious coalitions. The incumbent, Congress-led UPA coalition encompassed twenty parties. The BJP-led government before it included 23 parties. As Sumantra Bose reports on openDemocracy:

[T]he United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has substantially unravelled in the run-up to the polls, as key regional allies have deserted the Congress. Further unravelling may be on the cards after 16 May. The BJP-led opposition coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), also rocked by the departure last month of one longstanding regional ally, is barely holding together, with further unraveling plausible in the post-poll scenario.

All of which may pave the way to a different face of Indian politics altogether. Regional parties, along with Leftist and caste-based national parties, Tharoor writes, "have in recent months formed a number of mercurial, fractious alliances under [..] fanciful monikers" like the "Third Front." It is "not totally inconceivable" that the next Prime Minister might come from its ranks. The Third Front, Bose explains, is masterminded by India's main communist party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) - but that party's own base is confined to just three of India's 28 states (West Bengal, Kerala and the tiny state of Tripura).

Some of these developments sound familiar enough. The same phenomena of regionalisation and fragmentation are reflected around the world. It's the manifestation of the splintering, niche-fied societies being created by the complementary forces of globalisation on the one hand and regionalisation and particularisation on the other. Just take a look at the European Union, where national governments are yielding ground to both supranational and regional authorities - and identities.

Bose's description of the waning grip of the Congress "behemoth" sounds similar enough to political patterns here as well. The "party's once-formidable organisation gradually withered away in key states," writes Bose, from the eighties onward. This was partly the result of an increasing emphasis on the personality of the party leader under Indira Gandhi (and a concentration of power in her hands). In Europe too, the nationally-organised political families, organised around ideology rather than personality, crumbled in the eighties. They made way for more centralised and mediatised structures, focusing more on winning over floating voters than on maintaining their mass membership, and increasingly organised around the party leader's image. So that part rings familiar too.

Finally, Congress didn't just lose upper caste votes to the BJP, it also lost its mass support among  the lowest-caste Hindus to populist parties to its left, like the Socialist Party in Uttar Pradesh. Much, one could argue, like many of Europe's social-democratic parties have bleeded working class support to smaller parties on their left.

In short, this splintering of the vote, traditionally consolidated in a couple of mass parties, to the benefit of regional, one-issue and interest group parties as well as more radical parties on the flanks, at first blush invites comparisons with Europe or a country like Israel. But as with everything else, the scale on which things happen in India is so much larger than life, we're talking about a different phenomenon altogether.

If you're American and the European multi-party systems are already confusing, the new face of Indian politics must be a veritable nightmare, not least because almost all the Third Front-type parties have a mass base in only one state. Bose:

India's politics is an alphabet-soup that is certain to bewilder the uninitiated. [..] Uttar Pradesh - the country's most populous state, a vast sprawl across north India's Gangetic plain - is being contested between three parties whose acronyms are SP, BSP, and BJP.

In the neighbouring state of Bihar, the chief contenders are the RJD, LJP, and the JD (U) - the last not to be confused with the JD (S), which is active in the southern state of Karnataka.

In the deep-south state of Tamil Nadu, the major parties are the DMK and the AIADMK, with the PMK, the MDMK and the DMDK also in the fray.

The consequence is that the country's government risks becoming fractious to the extreme. Its likely dependence on parties with "narrow, identity-based agendas", Tharoor notes, makes people worry that it becomes impossible "to coherently tackle major issues like education, healthcare and foreign policy." The regional parties tend to switch from camp to camp, often depending primarily on who will offer them the juicier positions in government and administration. Reuters quotes an observer who invokes Italy's old system, with governments falling "every year or year-and-a-half."

But India has a population 16 times the size of Italy's. Can a country as enormous and diverse as India remain governable in the absence of strong, unitary and national political forces? Won't ethnic and religious strife proliferate as centrifugal forces gain hold? The BJP and its leader Lal Krishna Advani already constituted a type of politics that pitted ethnic and religious groups against each other, with at times bloody results. Will the political fragmentation further increase the threat of sectarian politics - and violence?

Neither Tharoor nor Bose seem acutely concerned on that count. The regionalisation hurts the Hindu nationalists as much as the Congress party's ideal of a strong political nation. When Indians are juggling overlapping national, local, religious, caste and ideological identities, I suppose, it may actually decrease the chance that they'll band together in some overarching struggle of Hindus vs Muslims. Bose seems more concerned with the corruption that comes with local fiefdoms:

The problem is that most of the regional satraps (barons and baronesses) who call the shots in the devolved framework of political power in India are notorious for poor governance and venality.

Nevertheless, both authors see the party proliferation also as a sign of the vibrant and dynamic character of Indian democracy. The old parties failed, new parties jump into the breach. It's not, after all, as if the Congress party lacks corruption or nepotism; the party has all but devolved into a dynastic force, "a family firm controlled by [..] Sonia Gandhi."

Moreover, the new parties sometimes reflect a budding emancipation of previously un- or underrepresented groups. "The regionalisation of India's politics post-1989," Bose posits, "has enhanced the representative character of India's democracy [..]. It has, in particular, enabled the political enfranchisement of middle and lower-caste Hindu groups across a vast swathe of northern India." Tharoor notes the best-known example:

Mayawati, chief of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which claims to represent the interests of the most marginalised castes and tribal peoples, is [..] Chief Minister of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which boasts a population equivalent to that of all of Brazil. As a Dalit - an "untouchable" - and a woman, her ascent is already remarkable and a sign of shifting hierarchies and power-bases in India. Though her becoming prime minister remains an unlikely [..] possiblity, the BSP [..] is now contesting in constituencies across the country and may well have a hand in playing kingmaker come 16 May.

He concludes:

Viewed from the perspective of China [..] the horse-trading in New Delhi may look criminally inefficient and venal. But seen from within, it is part of the organic, incremental evolution of India's political system, one that is still striving to better govern, through the ballot box, a country of incomparable diversity and size.

Is he right?

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