The provincial cycle

It’s been years since the Bofors eruption of the late eighties that the issue of corruption has lent firepower to India’s opposition parties. Like waves during high tide, scams have flooded the country’s political consciousness in the past five months. Suddenly, party strategists drafting their campaign literature are aware that they have a readymade national agenda though this is not a countrywide general election.Over the next two months, only four politically significant states are going to the polls.
Analysts agree that there is a whole basket of corruption issues to choose from. Congress has been at the receiving end of a relentless onslaught since last autumn. Even before the sheer magnitude of the Commonwealth Games scam had been absorbed, the Adarsh Housing scandal rocked the ruling party and the Maharashtra government.
It did not end there. The 2G scam arrived with a mind-boggling, CAG-approved figure of Rs 1,76,000 crore. It claimed a cabinet minister, chastened a nagging but influential ally like the DMK and pointed an accusing finger at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. An entire winter session of parliament had to be sacrificed because the Union government would not accede to the demand for a joint parliamentary committee probe.
The controversy surrounding the Devas-Antrix deal meant further humiliation for the government. The ruling dispensation had its back to the wall when a WikiLeaks cable exposed how MPs might have been bought in July 2008 to swing a confidence vote against the government on the nuclear agreement. Add spiralling prices to that rather long list and electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the four election-bound states ought to reflect popular opinion on the Centre’s performance.
That may not be the case. Not now. Perhaps never again. Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Mohammed Salim says politics is increasingly getting married to its geographic context. “It is difficult to import Adarsh from Mumbai and transplant it in a West Bengal where the coming election is mostly about change versus stability.”
From that perspective, even the CWG scam gets restricted to the host city—Delhi; the hullabaloo over 2G does not resonate outside Chennai and its suburbs and cash-for-votes is a hot topic of conversation only among the strongly opinionated who populate Twitter.
Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan emphasizes that “national issues don’t crystallize any longer”. He says that the last time the country experienced a national agenda-driven poll was in 1999 when the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan was still fresh in people’s minds. Visvanathan believes that a leadership vacuum in Delhi is responsible for the elections—campaigns and results—getting fragmented and regionalized.
Some say it’s worse than that. “Not just fragmented, the vote is getting increasingly municipalized,” says Sanjay Kumar, psephologist and fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. “The average voter is concerned with his personal well-being and doesn’t distinguish between the varying roles of the MLAs and the MPs. He expects all of them to implement development projects which would benefit him,” Kumar argues. In short, the Indian voter now casts a one-dimensional vote and he is the only dimension.
Whether it be acute selfishness or electoral fatigue resulting from three-tier voting (for local bodies, state assemblies and parliament), the EVM figures for the coming assembly polls would hardly be representative of the national mood. For example, Assam is discussing corruption but only of the many scams that dog the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government. Another controversy that finds its way into every Assam election is the fate of the Bangladeshi migrant.
Like Assam, Bengal too will tread a peculiar electoral path of its own. Salim of the CPM blames the regional media for failing adequately to highlight national issues. Undoubtedly, with Mamata Banerjee’s war-cry of “parivartan” or change, the CPM would have preferred to deflect the debate to all that is happening in Delhi and blame Mamata for “lending support to the scam-tainted UPA government”. Not so. Salim is regretful that it will not be possible to “concretize” these national issues in West Bengal.
In Tamil Nadu, with Karunanidhi, the veteran, and his son M K Stalin abandoning their Chennai constituencies, there are signs that the 2G spectrum scam is having some impact in urban areas. AIADMK leader V Maitreyan insists that corruption, price rise and politics revolving around a single family are key issues in this election. But it is noteworthy that other than the 2G scam, no national issue seems to have been able to capture the imagination of both leaders and the led.
In Kerala, the Congress campaign is expected to follow a provincial pattern. It will rely on a very regional political idiom though the CPM is desperate to contrast its “scam-free governance” with the “corrupt misrule” at the Centre. Even so, it’s easier—and more electorally profitable—to recall former Congress chief minister Oommen Chandy’s misrule in Thiruvananthapuram rather than underline Manmohan Singh “failures” in Delhi.
Elections in this country may not be about one-nation politics for years.