The Congress Partys Decline: Push for theocracy or the death of a machine?

Patrick Maynard

Prepared for the annual imaginary meeting of the American Conference of Imaginary Political Scientists (ACIPS) and presented December 1, 2003 at the ACIPS annual referendum on international policy in my dorm room before an audience of paperclips and soda cans. Attendance was mandatory.

Fifteen years ago, Narendra Modi was a little-known opposition leader in the Indian state of Gujarat. The mid-sized Western state, with about 40 million people (Census), has been oscillating between leadership by the Congress Party which is descending from national longstanding national dominance, and a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is quickly gaining power (Harding, Modi). The liberal Congress Party, which claims Mahatma Ghandi as a former luminary, has been in decline through most of the last decade, and has finally reached the point where it is struggling to wrest power back from the growing Hindutva (commonly defined as Hindu nationalist) tendencies of the BJP, which continues to gain power as the major player in an alliance of relatively diverse parties. This paper will argue that despite the presence of several powerful factors, the main impetus behind the rise of the BJP and its NDA coalition is the sheer power that its sense of purpose and national identity brings voters; this sense of drive transcends the power of forces such as demographic changes, media reorganization, and even ideological shifts, and when combined with national dissatisfaction over Congress corruption, it allows for many powerful changes. Congress corruption is indeed a strong reason for voter angst. Ever since the 1970s, when the partys then-prime-minister Indira Ghandi (not directly related to Mahatma) temporarily carved her elected position into a dictatorship, there has been substantial voter disillusionment (Heitzman and Wordon, 54). Aid through the Scheduled Caste List (a method of social reform to be discussed later in this paper) is seen as distributed unevenly on both national and local levels (Wyatt, 268 and Gill, respectively).Furthermore, internal efforts by the Congress party to clean up have been halfhearted at best. As Krishna K. Tummala writes in an overview of Indian corruption,

even the panels and commissions appointed to cleanup duty tend toward corruption (55). Marshall Bouton cites Congress corruption as a severe economic limitation through the 1990s, noting that large infrastructure plans have been almost entirely ruined by skimming and closed deals (Bouton, 6). Corruption is the biggest sign of a great problem with the Congress party; the loss of identity. This identity can be partially defined by ideology, but is not limited to that definition. Has Indias ideology shifted then? Has Hindutva suddenly become the desire of the Indian people in the last two decades? It is unlikely. On one hand, 82 percent of the population declared itself Hindu in the 1991 censusthe last for which numbers are readily available, through either Indias national census website or the Heitzman and Worden text (119) where I looked. On the other hand, 85% percent of Americans identify as Christians (Barna), and while some conservative laws get passed, most would agree that the US is not headed toward theocracy. One could even go so far as to argue that the BJPs rise signals a growth of Christian power in India. As Andrew Wyatt shows, many Christians of late vote more against the Congress partywhich they perceive as slighting them in educational and social programsthan they do for the opposition (Wyatt, 267). This, of course, is fairly trivial stuff; Christians only account for about 20 million of the roughly 850 million people in the country (census). This just backs up the case that while some elements of ideological change and action will always be present, there is little to suggest that recent changes have been drastic enough to bring about a mass desire for Hindutva in India. Studies of trade, emigration, and the exchange of ideas has lead some to speculate that the inflow of media and the outflow of certain demographic groups could

create this type of ideological change. The newly-minted upper middle class of India certainly are leaving in impressive numbers. Binod Khadria notes that in a 47-country hierarchy, India ranked 42nd at retaining skilled workers, followed only by Venezuela, the Philippines, Russia, Columbia, and South Africa (KhadriaA, 49 and 67). In a more detailed report to the UNs International Labour Office, Professor Khadria notes that the US approved H-1B visas (foreign professional classification) for over 55,000 Indian immigrants; the next largest group was from the UK, with only 6,665, followed closely (5,779) by China (KhadriaB, 14). Many of the migrs are low-caste urbanites who have benefited from the relatively barrier-free educations provided to by the Congress party to the historically oppressed. To say they are low-caste is not an anachronism; the caste system is still very active in rural areas, as author Pritpal Singh Bindra writes in an open letter from Delhi. This is not a topic of debate: article 46 of the Indian Constitution specifically states that educational favor is to be shown those who have weak social standing. This makes the education policies of India quite arguably more socially influential than those of any other large country. The system still has some work to do, however; Mizoram, the Indian state with the least low or scheduled castes has a literacy rate of 82.3 while Punjab, the State with the highest number of scheduled castes has a literacy rate of only 58.5 (Census). As was mentioned, earlier, there are accusations of corruption within the system. Decades after the constitution went into effect, the results are still coming in; the much-lauded, relatively caste-less India lives in the cities, while the truly casteless class of Indians is mostly to be found in other countries where they have emigrated to find just such a situation.

This creates a situation where a large portion of the political influence in India is coming from relatively wealthy, well-educated individuals who have in many cases bought into US values, whether they are expatriates or have been repatriated. Some would argue that Indias politics are not influenced as substantially by money as are other countries contests. However even Fritz Plasser, who generally acknowledges Indias hesitancy in buying into American techniques, notes that India has been opening to media-and-television-driven politics and that Indian politicians are exploring the new frontiers of impression management in front of TV cameras and have used the electronic media extensively, if not always effectively (Plasser, 44). Meanwhile, the government has been privatizing many of its media operations over the last decade (Financial Express), allowing increasingly polarized elections to take place. While this media polarization certainly has an effect on the nature of Indian electionsthe newly-powerful media conglomerates readily admit to Geetika Pathania-Jain of UNTs media department that they use local partnerships as a mere cultural faade under which industrial (sensationalist/polarized) content lies (172)it only serves to magnify existing issues. Those issues, so the argument goes, are influenced heavily by the flight of educated Indian workers to other countries, with those left behind making more conservative choices in politics. All of this, of course, is of relative unimportance. The nature and effectseven the definitionof brain drain are still very much debated, fifty years after the term was coined. Professor Khadria is quick to point out that while the US might get more of its imported brains from India than from anywhere else, it also imports more knowledge workers from India than any other country; in the 1990s, 80-90 percent of Indias brain

drain has been US-bound. (KhadriaA, 49) Furthermore many of those who leave would be underemployed in India were they to remain. Khadria makes mention of a striking facet of this, noting that Indian women participate at the high end of the labor market in the US, whereas in India the female labour participation is high in low-education, lowskill occupations like farming and fishing. (KhadriaB, 12). Others are quick to agree; negatively perceived migrations often do more to liberalize values in the local society than they do to drain power away from liberalized local groups. (3) Here I look at neighbor-state Pakistan as another example. Homira Nassery of the World Bank argues that many members of what would be considered the lower classes in Afghan society have had access to education and opportunities in the United States and that this offers greater diversity to Afghans when the women return. Nassery goes on to mention that certain older values remain prevalent in the society; these will continue to fade as interaction with expatriates and with the repatriated continues to rise. Belinda Dodson reaffirms the example of women using South Africa as the subject, mentioning that the categories for which skilled women expressed higher dissatisfaction relative to men were employment related factors such as their job (sic), income, job security and also included basic amenities like schools (15). Economist Andrew Mountford, among others, contends that brain drain leads countries and individuals to invest more heavily in western-style education (9). This in turn would push the countrys general values in a more secular direction over time. Clearly brain drain causes many changes; it is however quite unlikely that it was the primary factor in the success of a major national political alliance.

No, the main factor in the power of the alliance is not the flight of elites, nor a change in the media structure, nor a large ideological shift in the population; the main factor in the alliances rise is the nature of the alliance itself. As a group led by the BJP, the NDA has a certain amount of innate cultural and nationalist credibility which, combined with the relatively non-corrupt, non-entrenched nature of its structure, helps make it incredibly popular. As discussed, problems within the Congress party made it much less popular over the last two decades, while at the same time it was losing the core values that had defined it during the 1950s and 1960s. As K.R. Malkani argues in Indian Express, the BJP had Gandhism before 1947 and Nehruism (mostly centered around caste reforms -pm) after 1947. Today, the Congress is neither Gandhian nor Nehruite; it is IMF-World Bankite. And this is not going to cut any ice with the Indian people. Meanwhile, the BJP has received plenty of press showing them as puppets of the RSS, a far-flung Hindu political group (Ghimire, 2), while it has (intelligently) avoided doing anything of actual serious controversy. While entering the nuclear arms race was something which could be construed as anti-Islamic, it could also be viewed as simple post-cold-war realism; most ethnic Indians of Hindu or other origin believe that China and Pakistan are threats, and this is to a great extent truer now than it was during the years of a weaker China and an alliance (albeit shaky) between Congress-controlled India and the USSR. As for other issues of note, the BJP has been relatively moderate lately. Mosque destructions are a mere publicity event and a thing of the past; now that the BJP has gained power within its coalition framework, it has more to lose than it does to gain from

such stunts. And therein lies one of the most encouraging things about the situation; Hindutva will be kept at bay for the foreseeable future by the BJPs reliance on allies. Both Yubaraj Ghimire and Marshall Bouton take note of the fact that while the BJP might lead the NDA, it must curry favor with the group in order to remain in power (Gmire, Bouton). We have seen here that most of the more academic assumptions about why Indian power is changing hands are subservient to the boring fact: the old group was unpopular. The new group isnt them. As with American politics, theres sometimes simply a strong urge to throw the bums out, even on a party-wide scale. As the BJP has come to power, it has also moderated its actions. While the BJP may have used flashy and brutal methods to gain attention and power, it will stay the moderate course.

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