Democracy on the road, p.21
Democracy on the Road, page 21
In some ways the most perplexing question about the Bengal Marxists was how they had survived in office as long as they had. Supporters would say it had much to do with their early land reforms, which at least gave former tenant farmers a sense of ownership and empowerment, if not middle-class comfort. Detractors would cite the strong-arm tactics and desire for complete control that had characterized their long rule, and exploded into view with the clash over the Tata plant in Singur.
Later we had a chance to interview one of the leading Marxist thinkers, Gautam Deb, and asked him too how his party had held power for all these years. He was the Bengal state housing minister, and had been building new townships, talking about the need for the communists to reinvent themselves, yet his answer was pure nineteenth-century Marxist jargon. Referring to Bengal’s self-image as a state of intellectuals and artists, he spoke of the ‘heightened political consciousness’ of Bengalis and how it had not been ‘adulterated by materialistic temptations’.
Deb did acknowledge that some party members had not always acted in the interests of the people, and that these errors contributed to their setbacks in the 2009 national election, when along with their allies they won just fifteen of West Bengal’s forty-two Lok Sabha seats, their worst showing ever. He said the party was mobilizing to renew its appeal to voters, and in his campaign speeches he was promising rice at 2 rupees per kilo for families earning under 10,000 rupees a month, medical insurance for the poor, electricity for all, transport coupons for students in the eleventh and twelfth grades and a pension fund for rickshaw pullers, maids and other low-wage workers. As for Mamata, Deb dismissed her as a loner with ‘the mental age of a child’ and without a real party, saying the All India Trinamool Congress was a vehicle built to advance her personal ambitions.
The face-off between the Marxists and Mamata galvanized Bengal voters as never before. Turnout in Bengal had averaged 75 per cent, 10 points above the national average, and it spiked to 85 per cent in 2011.16 Tapping popular frustration with thirty-four years of Marxist rule, Mamata’s party won in resounding fashion, taking 184 of the 294 state assembly seats, and she became the new chief minister. The Marxists finished a distant second, and Bhattacharya lost his seat in the assembly. With just forty-two seats, the Congress had to settle for a role as a junior partner in Mamata’s government. The BJP didn’t win a single seat.
For the first time in decades, Bengal had tossed out the incumbent, and indeed this election would mark a broad revival of anti-incumbency—including in states with a much better development record than Bengal. Between 2004 and 2010, the share of elections in which the government got tossed out had fallen to around 40 per cent. During that period the Indian economy was booming, with low inflation, and voters had shown a new willingness to reward incumbents for superior economic performance.
But that era proved fleeting. After 2011, seated chief ministers went back to losing two out of three elections, the same broad pattern of rejection that has held since the late 1970s. Moreover, my data shows, incumbents did not see their electoral prospects improve even if their state economy had accelerated on their watch, or posted growth faster than the national average. Even if a chief minister produced blockbuster economic success—with growth above 8 per cent—they had a 50:50 chance of getting tossed out. In 2011, the state of Tamil Nadu also went to the polls, and voters there discarded Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, despite a growth rate of nearly 9 per cent during his term, and brought his nemesis, Jayalalithaa, back to power.
Seventy years after Independence, India has changed in so many ways but can feel the same in one: there is much less connection between politics and economics than you would expect. We had seen many of the big hopes for a new kind of politics focused on growth and development, from Naidu and Pawar to Gehlot and Kumar at the state level to Narasimha Rao at the Centre, suffer some kind of battering and humiliation on the campaign trail. Indian voters are so worn out dealing with a broken state that rapid economic growth and development is not enough to make up for their daily struggles.
26
Naked Power, Covered Statues
State Assembly Elections, Uttar Pradesh, February 2012
In the five years since we had seen Mayawati rise to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, she had grown more and more regal. Other chief ministers had encouraged a cult of personality but none on the same scale as Mayawati, who was building towering statues of herself and her party symbol, the elephant, all over the state and its capital. When she came to power, Lucknow was building the ambitious new Ambedkar Park, and she had added as its centrepiece a monument to herself and other Dalit leaders, surrounded by elephants.
Truth be told, the 38-hectare park was strikingly well designed and built, compared to typically haphazard Indian public spaces, especially given that it was built by the normally inept Public Works Department. But the statues had become a lightning rod. Opponents were attacking Mayawati for spending millions on self-glorification while her Dalit supporters were mired in poverty. The Election Commission had ruled that the elephants were effectively campaign ads, improperly financed by the state, and ordered Mayawati to cover them up. As we arrived, the Commission was debating what material and colour to use for the coverings, ultimately settling on pink plastic tarps—wrapped so tightly they ended up making the huge sandstone elephants look like huge pink plastic elephants. The fix was nearly as absurd as the problem.
As we drove through UP it became clear that the vote was once again dividing along caste and religious lines, and leaving the two national parties, the BJP and the Congress, fighting for third and fourth place. In 2007, Mayawati had won by courting Brahmin voters and became the first important Dalit leader to draw significant upper-caste votes. But the taboo-shattering alliance soon unravelled. Many of her Dalit supporters were angry at Mayawati for giving top posts to Brahmins, and by 2012, Mayawati had not only dumped the Brahmins as allies, she was blaming them for the corruption in her government.
We attended a Mayawati rally in Ghatampur, just outside the city of Kanpur, where the warm-up songs praised her as the Goddess of Justice, the Lioness of UP and the Iron Lady. Around 60,000 people poured into the rally grounds, most of them Dalits, waving the blue flag of the BSP and listening raptly to Mayawati’s every word, despite the fact that she was reading from a prepared text, barely making eye contact. Mayawati allowed very few other leaders on her stage, leaving the impression that she was accompanied mainly by a large fan that blew only on her.
Our search for lodging took us to the medieval village of Orchha, a tourist destination on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh that had acceptably clean hotels, not far from critical battleground constituencies around the neighbouring city of Jhansi. Like many temple towns, Orchha had recently moved to confirm its holy authenticity by banning the sale of liquor and meat within town limits—a decision that clearly rankled some of the town’s non-vegetarian voters and tourists.
The main attraction was the stunning collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forts and palaces, including the hard-to-believe Jehangir Mahal. A sprawling four-storey marvel of Rajput and Muslim architecture, this castle was said to have been built by local royalty to house the Mughal emperor Jehangir—for a one-night stay, for which the emperor never showed up. Though it would be hard to match that extravagance in modern times, Mayawati seemed to have tried: it was revealed long after this trip that as chief minister, she had spent 85 crore rupees (around $20 million) combining seven bungalows inside the official compound into one sprawling sandstone and pink marble palace featuring, of course, statues of herself.17
To the Dalits of UP, Mayawati was more a hero than ever, and few if any begrudged her regal airs. To the rest, she was running a government mired ever more deeply in corruption and favouritism for her own community. Stories abounded about how she personally dispensed all her party’s campaign funds, and distributed nominations to the highest bidders.18 Voters told us the culture of graft was choking commerce: one young pharmacist said that the official 3500-rupee ($75) licence fee was nothing compared to the 70,000 rupees he had to pay in hidden fees and bribes to open his store.
Though Mayawati was credited with a crackdown on street crime and thugs, her own government was gaining a thuggish reputation as well. There was, for example, widespread debate about whether a government doctor found hanging in a toilet inside the Lucknow prison was really a suicide, as the official story was told. Opposition parties were claiming that he might have been killed owing to his links to corruption inside the state health and family welfare department.19
The spread of corruption was particularly galling in a state rife with complaints about the lack of jobs, and how graft was driving up prices, particularly for animal feed and fertilizer. The decade-long boom in India had brought some improvement to roads and elementary schools even in the smaller towns of Uttar Pradesh, but no voter we spoke to was satisfied.
To gain a decent livelihood, villagers said, they needed schools that run up to twelfth grade, and access to higher education including medical, engineering and teacher’s colleges. Above all there was a desperation to learn English, and a huge demand for the so-called ‘convent schools’, often named for a Christian saint or Hindu god, that teach in the language of global commerce. In the town of Lalganj, on the way from Kanpur to Orchha, we had met a group of students celebrating a twentieth birthday, and while they appreciated the state subsidies that helped them attend a nearby private college, they all said they would have to go to Lucknow or another big city to find a job.
One night on the road to Jhansi we turned off the highway to interview voters and found ourselves in a small village that was dark and still, yet strangely loud. From the edge of the village came the rumble of diesel trucks, moving with their headlights switched off through giant hills of sand. This hive of after-hours industrial activity, in a place where the homes had no power, seemed glaringly suspicious. When we asked villagers what was going on, they shrugged off the scene as business as usual, but gradually it came out that the trucks were involved in an illegal mining business. It was, they said, one of many clandestine sand-mining operations that state leaders in UP were turning a blind eye to in exchange for a cut of the profit.
This one on the road to Jhansi was operated, according to the villagers, by a liquor baron, by then a well-known symbol of alleged corruption in UP, and a less well-known case study of the way crony capitalism operates in many states. One of the most valuable concessions politicians can grant is the right to supply state liquor stores, which they often grant as a monopoly to one favoured supplier. The monopolist jacks up prices to both increase his own profits and cover regular payoffs to his political benefactors, who avoid angering consumers by cutting the tax on liquor. The politicians and their cronies gain, the consumer doesn’t get hurt, and the big loser is the state treasury.
Mayawati blamed the corruption and lack of progress on the three other main parties. She traced the culture of graft in UP to the previous government run by Mulayam, and said his tainted party needed to be kept out of power. She mocked Rahul Gandhi as a ‘yuvraj’ or prince, and accused the Congress-led national government of holding back funds for development in UP. The BJP couldn’t be trusted either, she said. As for corruption in her party, Mayawati blamed upper-caste ‘infiltrators’, and claimed to have either sacked the Brahmin offenders or denied them a party ticket. Despite that claim, word was that Brahmins could still buy a ticket for the right price.
Mayawati had long since abandoned her 2007 promise to run a government in ‘everyone’s interests’, and seemed to be retreating back into her caste comfort zone. A founding slogan of her party was a rallying cry to Dalits and a threat to Brahmins: ‘Vote Hamara, Raj Tumhara, Nahin Chalega, Nahin Chalega.’ The vote is ours but the power is yours, this can’t go on. Now, she was telling Dalits at her rallies: ‘Satta ki chabi hum isse jaane nahin denge.’ We got hold of the key to power and we cannot let it go.
To reach Mayawati we needed to go through S.C. Mishra, the Brahmin who had become her bridge to the outside world back in 2007. He arranged a brief audience following her rally in Ghatampur, in which we asked if she planned to court new allies. ‘Why should I?’ she responded. ‘My vote base is so committed to me that it will bring me back to power.’ And what of the monuments to her in Lucknow? ‘I hope they vote me back so I can build more of them across the state,’ she said. Then Mayawati walked away, and over time her interactions with the press would grow more brief and infrequent.
Mulayam, meanwhile, was fighting to regain power in UP by moving away from his early ties to the anti-foreign, anti-English sentiments of the socialist movement founded by Ram Manohar Lohia. A portrait of Lohia hung alongside other socialist giants on the wall of Mulayam’s home in Lucknow, where we met him over plates of the best ladoos we had ever been served. Mulayam is all seriousness, making a meeting with him the exact of opposite of our cuss-and-comedy encounters with Lalu in Bihar.
Though Indian party bosses often bring their sons and daughters into the family profession, they rarely relinquish the top party post before death, disability or mutiny forces them to step down. Mulayam, however, made it clear he was already passing the leadership of the Samajwadi Party to his thirty-eight-year-old son Akhilesh—an old-fashioned dynastic succession, but to a successor with an engineering degree from Australia, promising a more modern Uttar Pradesh.
When later we met Akhilesh in Lucknow, he was accompanied by an adviser from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, a top management school, and had not an ill word to say about foreigners and English speakers. Akhilesh was working hard to present himself as the forward-thinking leader of his party, playing up, for example, that he was in a love marriage—not a traditional arranged marriage—with his wife Dimple. In that light Simran asked him the pointed question: ‘How do you explain the Samajwadi Party’s reputation as a party of thugs?’ To that Akhilesh responded, ‘Main goonda nahin hoon!’ I am no goon!
We attended a rally for Akhilesh in Salon, near the Gandhi stronghold of Amethi, where his speech was tailored to UP voters’ yearning for less corruption and better access to education—especially English-language education. However, when he attacked a scandal involving the sale of 2G spectrum by the Congress government in Delhi, saying, ‘these people put a price on air and sold it’, the crowd hardly responded. When he blamed the Mayawati government for the outbreak of ‘khaad-chori’ or fertilizer-theft, in which middlemen had pocketed state subsidies for fertilizer, the crowd roared.
We have seen this often in our travels. Delhi will be consumed with talk of some issue or scandal, and the capital elite will assume therefore that the whole country is talking about the same issues and scandals. Only when we get into the towns and cities of a state like UP, we find that voters are talking about their own local concerns, paying little heed to Delhi and its worries. Local issues trump national issues in most states most of the time. And as always, it was easy for a challenger like Akhilesh to tar the incumbent chief minister as corrupt, because voters expect politicians in office to be stealing from the till, often for their own use.
Akhilesh promised the crowd a brighter future, with free higher education for girls and discounted bicycles to help them get to school. He promised free laptops and tablet computers for all students, with keyboards that type in both Hindi and Urdu. In the past he had vowed to bulldoze the statues of Mayawati, but in side conversations with us he moderated that stand, saying the money for demolition would be better spent on funding his promises to students and a new medical college in Ambedkar Park.
By this time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had become an international celebrity, feted as the architect of the national economic renaissance, a symbol of modern India. In Uttar Pradesh, however, he drew a crowd of barely 1000 to a rally in the city of Kanpur, a fraction of the tens of thousands who roll out for either Akhilesh or Mulayam Singh Yadav, for Mayawati, or for the Gandhis.
It was striking to me that the foreigners who celebrated Singh had no idea how little star power he had in India. This is often true for national leaders who understand the details of reform but lack the charisma to sell it: their main base is the technocratic global elite.
The day after Singh’s rally, we saw his party chairperson Sonia Gandhi address a crowd of more than 30,000 in Jhansi. Her warm-up acts sang the praises of the Rani of Jhansi, a warrior princess and hero of the 1857 rebellion against British rule, for throwing out the foreigners. The message seemed a bit ironic given Sonia’s roots, but it also seemed to suggest that Congress supporters no longer worried about rivals using Sonia’s foreignness against her.
One of Sonia’s secrets was readily apparent when she met us after the rally—as uncomfortable meeting journalists as ever, yet looking resplendent, surrounded as usual by the spectacle of big-time Congress politicians hovering around her like so many schoolboys, desperate to impress the teacher. Many in our group came away openly marvelling over how well Sonia had weathered public life, and we were struck anew by the simple fact that she was succeeding in Indian politics in part because she so looks and acts the part of Gandhi royalty.
During this trip we also went to a rally featuring her daughter Priyanka, who was limiting her campaign to the family strongholds in Amethi and Rae Bareli, yet drew huge crowds and blanket coverage in the national media. As striking as her mother but more charismatic, she seemed to enjoy politics in a way her brother Rahul did not.
As a college friend and later press aide to their father Rajiv, Suman was there when Rajiv was assassinated and had escorted the body back to Delhi. Priyanka trusted him as an old family friend and called him after the rally to find out what we had thought of her performance. We passed on what voters in Amethi were saying: that with her strong features, hand-loomed saris and pinned-back hair, Priyanka reminded them of Indira. Despite Indira’s fall in the Emergency, polls ranked her the most popular Indian prime minister ever, beloved as a strong woman who fought for the poor and died serving her country. And a Congress party slogan was evoking her memory this way: ‘Priyanka nahin aandhi hain, doosri Indira Gandhi hai.’ Priyanka is like a storm, she is the second Indira Gandhi.
