Indian
General Elections Begins on Monday
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- India's elections are like
India's trains--lumbering along at no great speed, taking
days before the destination is reached but, despite the
discomfort along the way, reliable, sturdy and arriving at
the station more or less on time.
The world's largest democracy will soon
be in action for the second time in two years in a desperate
search to find a stable government, an extraordinarily
difficult task now that the founding party of India's
independence, Congress, is a pale shadow of its original
self and the strengths of local, regional, religious and
caste parties, not to say the phenomenal rise of the Hindu
nationalist, Bharatiya Janata Party, are now the deciding
factors in Indian politics. Yet it is safe to predict it
will be probably the fairest ever, without significant
violence or vote-buying. Indian democracy is cleaner by the
year. This is partly thanks to the former election
commissioner T.N. Seshan who presided over the last election
with an iron hand. He later lent himself to a spot in a tv
commercial, promoting vegetarianism, in which his line was
that though he only eat fruit and vegetables what he really
liked was "eating politicians for breakfast".
Thus India's problem is not the
honesty of the ballot but the coherence of the politicians.
India now requires one of the most delicate political
balancing acts as only a minority of the elected performers
are likely to have a recognizable ideology that can be
turned into conventional political discipline.
Until comparatively recently India was
a predominantly poor, agricultural-based economy that chose
to shut itself off fromthe world behind high tariff walls,
trusting, often quite effectively, in its own ingenuity.
These days it is a growing industrial power which, after six
and a half years of high-speed economic liberalization under
successive governments of varying political hues, now has
the largest middle class in the world, is an ever more
enticing lure for foreign direct investment and is
economically stable enough to have escaped the financial
storms that have wrecked much of east Asia. And, according
to the World Economic Forum, is topped only by the U.S. and
China in an index that combines growth prospects with
economic size.
This country with nearly 1 billion
people has long shed what was mockingly called "the Hindu
growth rate"--1 to 2% a year--and now regularly turns in a 6
or 7% annual growth in GNP every year and could reach, if it
found itself with a government that accelerates the pace of
liberalization, a comfortable cruising speed of 8 to 9%,
without theinstability that plagues its competitors in east
Asia and without the lack of political and judicial
transparency that is China's main handicap. No wonder that a
significant number of well-informed investors predict that
within a couple of decades India will have leap-frogged over
China. India has made its transmtion, to a modern society
democratically. China has yet to make its and has no popular
elected institution to act as shock-absorber.
While academics and journalists
rightly debate the extent to which ordinary people exercise
real power in the Indian parliamentary system, dominated as
it is by various political and economic power structures, a
look back over the 50 years of Indian independence does
provide some evidence that it works for the poor and the
commonweal as well as for the better off and privileged.
Land reforms have succeeded in
containing excessive concentrations of agricultural land.
Affirmative action has given more opportunities to the
downtrodden scheduled castes. The institutions of the
judiciary, the press and the bureaucracy do act for the poor
at least some of the time, and are independently minded. A
means of widespread local participation has been established
by reviving the panchayat system and today one third of
parliamentary seats have been reserved for women.
Much more needs to be done if economic
growth is to have more impact on the lives of India's
masses. Because India does not have an effective human
development plan it still has the largest illiterate
population in the world. It still has a quarter of its
population without access to safe drinking water and so on.
Yet when a part of India has taken the
trouble to invest in education and health it has reaped
dividends. The best example is Bangalore where investment in
skill formation has resulted in India's own "Silicon
Valley", the second largest exporter of computer software in
the world. If India as a nation could do as well as its four
premier states, Andhra Pradean, Haryana, Kerala and Punjab
its poverty--and its prospects as an economic supower--would
be transformed.
The other item for India's next
government to get on top of is its growing military budget
which eats away more scarce resources as each year goes by.
Continuous confrontation with Pakistan does not become this
great nation which has much more important things to think
about and which could afford to make the gestures to appease
Pakistan without too much political effort. What it will
lose on the Pakistani swing it will more than gain on the
Chinese roundabout. An inflated military budget is dragging
the country down and hindering it from overtaking China
sooner rather than later.
February 11, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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