Elections Give India’s Poor the Final Say

CALCUTTA — In the end, India’s affairs of state, as they always do, came down to people like Swapan Sarkar, rickshaw puller and denizen of the grimy sidewalks here. He earns 20 rupees, or about 60 cents, daily and must support his father, wife, 6-year-old son and 6-month-old daughter. Most days, he can only afford to eat a tortilla made of dried roasted chickpeas.

And politics? “Elections to me mean the sickle and the hammer,” quickly answers the sinewy, bare-chested laborer who is uncertain of his own age but appears to be in his mid-20s. He means the symbol of the Communist Party of India--Marxist. “That’s all I know.”

In an unparalleled rite of multi-party democracy that ended Tuesday, Sarkar and 590 million other Indians were summoned to the ballot box to choose their Parliament and government. If there is an antithesis of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal, which holds that dire poverty and “the blessings and security of self-government” don’t mix, this must be it.

“India has democracy in the sense that every five years the rulers feel shaky. They need to come to the people--literally, with folded hands,” said Asok Kumar Mukhopadhyay, a University of Calcutta professor of political science.

And sometimes--including the 1996 election, apparently--the people send them packing.

India’s system of governance is complex and flawed, but passing final judgment on how one of the world’s most diverse societies should be run is an electorate that has more poor and illiterate members than any other. In Calcutta alone, 600,000 people, Sarkar among them, live, sleep, procreate and die amid the squalor of public streets.

Though he has never been in a schoolroom, the illiterate Sarkar’s paper ballot counts as much as the opinion of a rocket scientist in Bangalore or a Bombay stockbroker with an MBA.

India’s two dominant realities--an enormous and largely poor population living in a democratic republic--mean that periodically, politicians who decide on defense, foreign policy and other matters of public business in faraway New Delhi must return to the baptismal font of popular suffrage.

This year, for example, the candidates and workers of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress (I) Party needed to persuade a nation where the annual income averages $300 a person that their party’s policies, including tariff reductions, the wooing of foreign capital and the rest of the 5-year-old economic agenda of Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, benefit everyone and not just the urban elite and foreign corporations.

The more than 330 million ballots cast April 27, last Thursday and on Tuesday won’t be tallied before today, but early signs are that Congress failed abysmally to stir up popular enthusiasm for its achievements and plans.

“What is liberalization? I have no idea,” said Satnarian Prasad, 35, a poor day laborer in New Delhi.

Congress and Rao, the party president, also seemed to have been singularly unable to persuade Indians that the scandal-smeared party had turned over a new leaf.

“All of them [the candidates] come to ask for votes and often offer us bribes, liquor or meat,” said Kartar Singh, 50, who runs a tea stall in the capital, making no distinction between party labels.

This time, Congress may end up with a record low total of seats in Parliament. The reasons are numerous, but the results prove a truism of Indian politics: In the words of political scientist Bhabani Sen Gupta, leaders here must “package their reforms into language the people understand”--or court disaster.

India’s recent past shows eloquently what happens to leaders who forget to “keep eye contact with the people,” as Sen Gupta puts it. In 1977, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called a general election after almost two years of “national emergency” rule. Voters alarmed by her government’s policies--such as forced sterilizations to reduce the birthrate--dealt her a crushing blow, ending Congress’ then 30-year reign of uninterrupted power.

Twelve years later, Gandhi’s son Rajiv, who succeeded his assassinated mother as prime minister in 1984, was routed at the polls after a corruption scandal marred his “Mr. Clean” image. The former airline pilot’s love affair with technology as a way to lift India into the 21st century also held little attraction for the rural masses.

For almost 49 years, save during Indira Gandhi’s flirtation with authoritarian rule in 1975-77, India’s system of democratic and peaceful change has functioned, a record that may be unique in the developing world. That the process works as well as it does is a mystery even Indians have a hard time explaining.

But 1996 seems certain to yield results that may represent a break with the past. The venerable Congress, successor of the national movement that piloted India out of the British Empire, is racked by rebellion. At 111 years of age and under Rao’s unglamorous and increasingly contested leadership, it may have finally expired as the perennial dominant force in Indian politics.

“The old lady has gone to heaven,” joked K.R. Malkani, spokesman of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which appears to have passed Congress as India’s top vote-getter for the first time, though apparently not winning enough parliamentary seats to govern on its own.

An era of volatile coalitions between parties jockeying for power and influence seems to be in the offing, with all the uncertainty that heralds for policymaking. The diagnosis given by author V.S. Naipaul of contemporary India--”a million mutinies now”--seems more apt than ever.

“The electorate of India, though illiterate, is very intelligent,” S.K. Magon has concluded after three years as chief electoral officer in West Bengal state. “They know how to vote, who to pull down and who to push up. They have this sixth sense.”

Often, it is in their naked self-interest, since a poor man’s vote is one of the most valuable of possessions. Sarkar, the Calcutta rickshaw puller, may understand next to nothing of politics, but one of his neighbors on Chitpur Road’s grungy pavement knows the name of the legislator from the northwest Calcutta district and even the man’s political history. Such savvy is not atypical. “The vote is the weapon that the poor person can use once every five years, and he values it greatly,” said Sumir Lal, deputy editor of the Telegraph newspaper of Calcutta.

Calcutta Mayor Prasanta Chatterjee, a 37-year veteran of politics, explained: “If you give them services, people vote for you.” But some candidates have bought votes or used goons to guarantee victory.

Crass materialism doesn’t fully explain why the root of parliamentary democracy sinks so deep into the Indian collective consciousness. The country’s independence was won through mass struggle, giving millions of men and women a vital emotional link to the idea of self-government. For themselves, Indians demanded, and got, the same sort of rights and freedoms their colonial masters enjoyed.

Has good government been the result? Many home-grown critics say not any longer. “We have elections, but there is no control over how the system functions between them,” Lal said. “Every five years, you elect a benign dictator. I suppose that’s the way of putting it.”

To begin with, are those chosen for public office the best qualified to guide the world’s second most populous country? Often, the ability to be elected takes precedence over the ability to govern. This time around, the BJP slate included a 52-year-old woman who sells coconuts on the streets of Madras and an actor who played the Hindu god Krishna in a popular television series.

The most nettlesome question of all is whether the Indian brand of democracy delivers what people want or need.

Dilip Manna, another Calcutta pauper, answers by saying he has learned to expect nothing from those who hold office in his name. Two weeks ago, his 9-year-old boy was bitten by a stray dog. Manna earns so little from his job making plastic gallon jugs on the banks of the Hooghly River that he is not able to pay for a rabies shot. He has no one to turn to for help.

“We are poor,” Manna smiles, baring a near-toothless upper jaw. “We are reconciled to that.”

So India has a multi-party system, but almost 49 years after the onset of self-rule, the average Indian lives 61 years--eight years less than his counterpart in nondemocratic China. This country’s press is boisterously free, but the government has managed to teach only half the population to read. Officials approved an assembly plant that is already cranking out gleaming Mercedes-Benz sedans for the well-heeled. But according to recent statistics, 43% of the rural populace still doesn’t have access to clean drinking water.

“I think the central government has said to hell with the 50% who live in the dark villages of the interior,” fumes Sunil Gangopadhyay, a well-known Bengali poet who edits a literary journal. “They’ve said, ‘Let’s open up the country to business so we, the top 25% or so, can benefit.’ ”

Lal of the Telegraph concurs, saying, “The poor really don’t get much in return for their vote.”

But more and more often, there are signs across India of dissatisfaction and change.

For 5,000 years, historians say, India has had no social revolution. Respect for authority is deeply ingrained and given religious sanctity by the Hindu caste system. Even independence, some leftist thinkers charge, only replaced a clique of white colonial rulers with a clique of brown ones.

The Congress Party grew fat on this system as long as it functioned as a broad-based coalition with room for everyone save the extremes of Indian politics, Hindu nationalists and Communists. It was “a party of the haves that ran on the strength of the have-nots,” in the words of one Indian writer.

But since Indira Gandhi’s troubled reign, frustrated untouchables, low-caste voters, Muslims and members of other key “vote banks” have been streaming out of the Congress tent. That exodus seems to have continued in this election.

“In other democracies, people cast their vote. In India, they vote their caste,” Congress spokesman V.N. Gadgil said.

The growth of caste-based, regionally centered political power bases as rivals to a monolithic national party has been the result.

“Now, instead of a single party, you have a rainbow coalition wielding power,” said an approving Sen Gupta, the political scientist, who has written a book on problems of Indian governance. “In India, we don’t need stability, we need dynamic change. These huge masses of quiescent people in the countryside have begun to move. They are beginning to find their identity.”

Often, what is on their minds confounds the conjectures of pundits. The received wisdom had been that the 11th general election in independent India’s history would be a referendum on corruption. But one magazine poll found 63% of the respondents in 50 parliamentary constituencies hadn’t even heard of the hawala, or illegal foreign exchange, scandal in which Prime Minister Rao himself has been implicated.

As the “most important issue” in voters’ minds this spring, official graft was edged out by poverty and unemployment, and rising prices came a close third.

So it is wrong to believe that ordinary Indians saw the election as a plebiscite on Rao’s premiership or Congress policies, contends G.V.L.N. Rao. There really was no overarching national issue this time, he said.

“What people seemed to be voting was their dismay and disgust that their local Congress lawmaker had done so little for them. It was almost palpable across the country,” said the director of the New Delhi-based Center for Media Studies, who is not related to the prime minister.

For a case study of what makes Indian voters act the way they do, consider the constituency in the city of Rohtak, nestled in the wheat-and-mustard-growing plains of northern India. As the warm spring sun climbed into the sky, poor farmers crouched in the dust awaiting their turn to choose from among 34 candidates to the Lok Sabha, or House of the People, the lower house of Parliament. Few voters spoke of national issues. The major controversy was whether the incumbent Congress lawmaker had done enough for them to merit reelection.

Kehri Singh, 76, lame and hard of hearing, cast his ballot instead for a former deputy prime minister, Devi Lal, 81, “because he is an older man than me.”

Another Lal supporter was Narender Singh Ohlayan, 60, a retired civil servant. “Last time, we didn’t elect him and we have spent five years repenting,” Ohlayan said. “He brought a literacy campaign, old age pensions and money for pregnant women.”

Many voters seemed to credit Lal, rightly and wrongly, with any government project that had benefited their area or the state of Haryana, from building dikes for flood control to $3-a-month old-age pensions.

But one 65-year-old woman furiously dissented.

“I have four sons, and two are wrestlers,” Shanti Devi said. “Devi Lal assured me they’d get government jobs, but they didn’t. I sweated with him for two years, sang on stage and tore the shirts off policemen during his rallies, and in return I got nothing.”

So she walked a mile to the polls to vote for the Congress man.