Almost all pundits anticipated a hung parliament with regional and caste-based parties holding the balance of power. Now that the United Progressive Alliance has achieved a clear victory, the same pundits are coming out with grand theories to explain it. Almost all these theories have holes, and are partial explanations at best.
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This is a vote for secularism. That would be nice if true, but is not the case. The BJP lost some ground, but not because of a Hindu fundamentalist platform. One can hardly claim that the voters of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Karnataka, and Bihar are communal, while those of Haryana, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh are secular. This election was not fought on the basis of Hindutva versus secularism
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The Congress Party is back on the road to its old political dominance under Rahul Gandhi. Well, hardly. The Congress won just 201 seats out of 543, and the Congress-led coalition won only 261 seats, short of a majority. This is a far cry from the days when the Congress Party won big majorities in Parliament and ruled most of the states. Congress’ vote share inched up by just two percentage points to 28.6%. Its numbers look good today only because of highly diminished expectations. Rahul Gandhi may seem a strong leader today, but he also led the party’s election campaign in the state elections in 2007, and fared very poorly. This time the party under Rahul certainly improved its seat tally in UP, yet its vote share was no more than 18.3%, far lower than Mayawati’s 27.4% or Samajwadi’s 23.3%. And in the Rajya Sabha the UPA is 29 seats short of a majority. So, Congress still needs all the help it can get from regional and caste-based parties. It may have pulled back from a long decline, but is nowhere near its old dominance, and is very much in need of allies.
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Voters are now tired of caste-based and regional parties, and are heading back toward national parties. Not so. The combined vote share of the Congress, BJP and Marxist parties has actually fallen by almost two percentage points compared with 2004, and their combined total of Parliamentary seats is almost unchanged at 346 against 344. Some will argue that neither the BJP nor Marxists are all-India parties. Maybe so. But the vote share of regional parties has held up quite well. Indeed, some regional chieftains like Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Navin Patnaik in Orissa, Chamling in Sikkim, and Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu, have registered stellar performances. Mere caste combinations unbacked by development—this description may apply to the SP, BSP, RJD and LJP—have fared poorly. But wherever regional or caste-based leaders have delivered good governance and development, they have been rewarded by handsomely by voters. This election simply cannot be called a vote against regionalism or casteism. But it can be called a vote for good governance and development.
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Going it alone was a fabulous innovation of Rahul Gandhi in North India, and helped revive the party’s fortunes. Alas, it was not Rahul but the Fourth front that chose to ditch Congress and go it alone in UP, Bihar and Jharkand. Going it alone may have been one of the ideas put forward by Rahul before the campaign, but ultimately it was a necessity thrust on him when the SP, RJD and LJP walked out of the UPA and formed a Fourth Front. Besides, going it alone was hardly a uniformly successful policy. It worked in Uttar Pradesh, but was a dismal failure in Bihar and Jharkand, where the party won only two seats and one seat respectively.
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The Congress gained greatly from populist schemes like the national Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and the farm loan waiver. This seems plausible, yet is not obvious. Why should the waiver have so totally failed to enthuse voters in Bihar, Orissa, Chattisgarh or Jharkand? The last big farm loan waiver was given by the VP Singh government in 1989, and it did not save the party from massive electoral defeat soon after. No doubt Chidambaram’s loan waiver must have gratified some farmers, but history suggests that this is at best a marginal vote getter. As for rural employment, such schemes have in one form of another been in force for three decades, in which incumbent governments have been trounced regularly. Back in 1994, Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister introduced an Employment Assurance Scheme assuring 200 days work to people in all backward districts. So, NREGS was essentially an updated version of the old Employment Assurance Scheme, the main difference being that people who did not get jobs could claim compensation from the state government. In practice, hardly anybody has managed to get such compensation. The Employment Assurance Scheme succeeded in raising person-days of work from 875 million in 1990-91 to 1,232 million 1995-96. Nevertheless the Congress was thrashed in the 1996 election. Voters did not see this as reform with a human face, or a remedy for poverty. So, let us not carried away by the possible impact of NREGS. In any case, it is difficult to judge whether voters attribute a well-functioning NREGS to the central or state government, given that it is implemented at the state or panchayat level. The state assembly victories of the BJP in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh in November 2008 were attributed by some analysts to well-run NREGS. Yet the scheme supposedly performed best in Rajasthan, where voters ousted the Vasundhara Raje government.
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Rural prosperity, boosted by five years of good monsoon and high prices, gave Congress a big boost. This is the thesis that I myself have put forward. Yet it is only a partial explanation. Seventy percent of voters are rural, but the Congress vote share rose only 2%, and this could be due to factors other than rural prosperity. The UPA swept virtually every seat in the four metros—Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. So, it actually fared better in the metros than in rural areas. The supposed Bharat-India divide is a reality for some purposes, but apparently not for elections.
