Fractured Verdict 1998: India's New BJP Government

Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.

The University of Texas at Austin

India's parliament gave a narrow vote of confidence on March 28 to the country's fourth government in less than two years. The government, headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), embraces 13 parties, the core BJP and a dozen regional parties, but even with additional committed support from allied parties and independents, the coalition commands less than a majority of seats in parliament and is inherently unstable. Decisive leadership will be difficult, even within the framework the National Agenda hammered out by the coalition parties, and the government will remain hostage to extortive demands and threats to withdraw support. Inevitably, both by default and design, India's states will become increasingly important political actors.

The government is the fractured product of India's 12th parliamentary elections--the largest democratic elections ever held, with a turnout of some 375 million voters, 62 percent of the electorate. Polling for 539 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, took place on 6 days over a 20-day period, with four other seats yet to be decided. The elections were open and fair, with comparatively few instances of intimidation or fraud, but election violence took its toll in various places, with at least 150 people dead, including 62 killed in a series of bomb explosions in the South Indian city of Coimbatore. There were 600 parties and nearly 5,000 candidates, and the voters delivered their verdict in a pattern that reflected the fundamentally regional character of Indian politics.

In these elections, Vajpayee, for the BJP, and Sonia Gandhi, widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for the Congress party, were the only "national" figures--and Sonia was not even contesting a seat. Although the BJP vainly promised stable government if elected, and Sonia Gandhi projected Congress's commitment to a culturally plural--and secular--society and railed against the BJP's Hindu chauvinism, the issues that dominated the elections were shaped by state parties and politics, and the vote ran deeply along the lines of caste and religion.

In the national tally, the BJP emerged, as it had in the 1996 elections, as the largest single party, with 179 seats--an increase of 18 seats--and 25 percent of the vote, a 5 percent increase from two years earlier. The alliances the BJP secured with regional parties made a crucial difference in its expanded support, both in numbers and in reaching for the first time into the south and into a broadened base of social support. With the 73 seats won by 20 allied parties and scattered independents, the BJP commands 252 seats in the new parliament and 36 percent of the vote.
The Congress fared less well, with 142 seats, one seat more than it had in the last parliament, and though its 25.4 percent of the vote was a tad higher than that for the BJP, it represented a decline of 3.4 percent from 1996 and is the lowest portion of the vote ever secured by the Congress party. With its allies, the Congress controls 169 seats in the new parliament.

The third force in the elections was the United Front, an amalgam of caste-based and regional parties and their communist party allies. The Front, the ruling coalition for much of the previous two years, suffered major defeats, securing only 99 seats--a 75 seat loss from 1996, and an 8 percent decline to 21 percent of the votes.

Thus, as in each of the four elections since 1989, no party gained a majority of seats, and President K. R. Narayanan consulted with various party leaders to determine whether any might claim the requisite majority support in parliament to form a government. The BJP was the largest party and with its allies had the first claim--but it had only 252 seats, short of the 270 majority of the 539 elected seats. The Congress and its allies together with the United Front held 268 seats, but elements within the UF were unwilling to join a Congress-led coalition under any circumstances. The balance of 19 seats lay with various uncommitted regional parties and independents.

After two weeks of uncertainty--with a brief period in which the BJP's AIADMK ally in Tamil Nadu withheld support as its leader, Jayalalitha, pressed her demands--Vajpayee submitted a list of 264 members of parliament pledged to support a BJP-led coalition on a vote of confidence. Still short of a majority of seats, the BJP would win its vote of confidence among those "present and voting" by the willingness of the Telegu Desam Party, with 12 seats, to abstain--a decision that anticipated the party's subsequent break with the United Front. The deciding factor was that the Telegu Desam's main enemy in its home state of Andhra was the Congress party. Thus, the President invited Vajpayee to form a government and gave him ten days to prove his majority in parliament.

Vajpayee was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 19, and nine days later, after two days of sharp debate in parliament, the coalition won is vote of confidence by a margin of 13 votes. Among the 537 members of the Lok Saha present, 274 voted for the government, 261 against. The Telegu Desam's 12 MPs, previously commited to abstain, voted for the government; the National Conference of Jammu and Kashmir, with 2 members of parliament, abstained.
This is Vajpayee's second round of leadership: Twenty-two months earlier, in May 1996, Vajpayee served as Prime Minister for 13-days--resigning before the vote of no-confidence in parliament that would have forced the government down. Then, Vajpayee headed a minority BJP coalition government--a minority government in the sense that the parties in the coalition did not control a majority of seats in parliament. Again, Vajpayee forms a minority BJP government--this time with 13 disparate allied parties and perhaps others yet to join the coalition.

Among possible entries into the coalition is the Telegu Desam. Only a few days before the vote of confidence, the Telegu Desam broke from the United Front and secured the commitment from the BJP and its allies to elect a Telegu Desam candidate as Speaker of the Lok Sabha. The "coup" in Speaker election provoked bitter protest from the Congress and the United Front and threw the House into uproar, a promise of political turmoil yet to come.

In splitting from the United Front, the Telegu Desam was joined by two other regional parties--the National Conference and the Asom Gana Parishad (unrepresented in parliament)--to form the National Front. The three partners initially indicated a willingness to extend issue-based support to the BJP-led government--but the Telegu Desam's vote for the government suggests its likely entry into the coalition.

All of this, while immediately to the advantange of the BJP, underscores the fluidity of the situation and the vulnerability of the coalition to losses of support.
For the past decade, Indian politics at the national level has been dominated by three basic groupings: The BJP on the right; the United Front and its communist allies on the left; and the Congress in the center. But this ideological spectrum should not be taken too seriously, for most parties are pragmatic and personality-driven, with ideological purity reserved, if at all, to the extremes of the most ardent Hindu nationalists within the BJP and, on the left, to the few remaining unreconstructed socialists and old-line communists.

The Congress party is heir to the nationalist movement that brought India to independence in 1947. It is the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and it has ruled for nearly 45 of India's 50 years since independence. The party is ideologically pragmatic and secular. Under Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, it was committed to a socialist pattern of society, but in 1991, under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, the Congress ushered in the liberal economic reforms that have fundamentally charged the character of Indian economic policy.

The Congress, once the dominant party in India, continues to command support throughout the country and from all classes and groups, but it has suffered serious losses of support over the past decade, especially in the erosion of support it had traditionally received from Muslims and untouchables. The party has been burdened by corruption, and former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao faces charges that could send him to prison. And organizationally, the party is in shambles. The 1998 elections brought the Congress its lowest level of support, and it failed to win a single seat in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state and the political home of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
The dynasty is the overpowering presence within Congress. Two years after the death of Nehru in 1964, his daughter Indira Gandhi--no relation to the Mahatma --became Prime Minister and dominated Indian politics at the Center for much of the next 18 years. In 1984, Indira was killed by two Sikh members of her own body guard in retaliation for the Indian Army's entry into the Golden Temple in Amritsar where Sikh terrorists had established their base. She was succeeded by her son Rajiv, who, turned from office in 1989, was murdered by Sri Lankan Tamil terrorists in 1991 as he campaigned for Congress's return to power.

The party turned to Rajiv's widow, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, to assume party leadership, but long hostile to politics, she refused. In December 1997, however, never having given a press conference or addressed a public meeting for more than 5 minutes, Sonia entered the campaign to restore Congress to power. Though she did not contest a parliamentary seat, she made 138 appearances over 34 days and is credited with having stemmed a tide of defections from the Congress and saved the party from debacle--though whether she really made much difference in actual results may be long debated. In the wake of the election, the party high command ousted lackluster Congress president Sitaram Kesri, 82, who, in ambition to become Prime Minister, had forced the election by withdrawing Congress support for the United Front government. Sonia Gandhi was then elected party president, and two days later, in a move no one predicted, she agreed to head the Congress party in Parliament, placing her in position potentially to become Prime Minister if the BJP coalition cannot sustain the confidence of a majority in parliament. She seeks to revive the Congress organization, restore the party's integrity and base of support, and, presumably, return the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to power.

The United Front-Left Front combine embraces various "national parties" that are, in fact, regionally-concentrated and that are based on support from the so-called "backward" peasant castes; state parties; and the left parties--notably the Communist Party (Marxist), the ruling party of West Bengal and, with 32 seats in the new parliament, the Front's most powerful constituent.
The United Front is ideologically eclectic, but left of center and strongly secular. It came to power in 1989 and lasted less than two years before internal dissension brought its collapse. It returned to power in June 1996 as a minority 14-party coalition dependent on Congress support. Its first Prime Minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, lasted only 11 months before Congress flexed its muscle in hope of taking the office for itself. Failing to secure the support to do so, Congress extended support to the United Front's I. K. Gujral, only to bring him down on frivalous grounds 8 months later.

The United Front parties--with the notable exception of the CPM--suffered major defeats in the 1998 elections, and it remains fractiously divided, its unity broken by the defection of the Telegu Desam, the National Conference, and the Asom Gana Parishad.

The third force is that of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies. The BJP's roots are in the Hindu nationalist movement and the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that advances a philosophy of Hindutva ("Hinduness") directed to the cultural regeneration and assertion of the Hindu nation, a view embodied in the BJP's vision of "one nation, one people, one culture"--a contrast to the reality of India's cultural pluralism, even among its Hindus. But with Hindus accounting for 82 percent of India's population, this is, not surprisingly, a source of unease among India's minorities, notably Muslims, who number some 120 million. And their anxieties are symbolized by the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth century mosque built on the site at Ayodhya claimed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the god Rama. In 1992, Hindu zealots destroyed the mosque, setting off a wave of Hindu-Muslim rioting that left 2,000 people dead.

The BJP, though highly disciplined as a party, is not monolithic. There is a strong Hindutva wing, whose main political goals are the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya; the creation of a Uniform Civil Code, ending special provisions for Muslim personal law; and the abolition of special status for the state of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution, a provision that formally accords to India's only Muslim-majority state a high degree of autonomy, an autonomy that, in fact, has been largely whittled away. This wing of the party, with close ties to the RSS, is also committed to economic nationalism in the form of "swadeshi," protectionist self-reliance. The moderates, led by Vajpayee, the new Prime Minister, represent the other major force within the BJP, and the two wings are linked by a pragmatic, though essentially hardline, element associated with L. K. Advani, Home Minister in the new BJP government.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, age 71, is often described as "the right man in the wrong party." In public opinion polls, he has long been the most popular candidate for Prime Minister, even by those who have no use for the BJP. Vajpayee is moderate, able, and respected; he opposed the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya; and in economic policy, he is counted as an advocate of market reform and India's opening to foreign investment and global competition.

Vajpayee, as Prime Minister, must contend not only with resistant elements in his own party, but must accommodate the diverse, often incompatible demands of the BJP's partners in the minority government coalition. And simply dealing with the volatile personalities involved will be a daunting challenge. The first tasks involved adopting a "National Agenda" for the new government and allocating portfolios among the claimants for ministerial posts.

The National Agenda, described as a mixture of moderation and generalities, involves no major shift in existing government policies, but there are significant changes in emphasis, most importantly in economic reform. In deference to coalition partners, the BJP dropped its core Hindutva provisions--construction of the Ayodhya temple, abolition of Article 370 on Kashmir, and the Uniform Civil Code--and, reflecting Vajpayee's own approach, the Agenda commits the government to a concept of secularism consistent with the Indian tradition of '"equal respect for all faiths."

Virtually straight from the BJP platform, the Agenda states that "to ensure the security, territorial integrity and unity of India we will take all necessary steps and exercise all available options. Toward that end we will re-evaluate the nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons." Almost immediately, Vajpyaee sought to clarify the government's position by inserting "if need be" to the exercise of the nuclear option. The practical consequence is that India is unlikely to change from its position of "nonweaponized deterrence." It retains the option to "go nuclear," and the ambiguity of its non-declared nuclear weapons capability will only now be less ambigious.
Reflecting a general consensus on economic policy within the coalition, the Agenda commits the government to the reform process initiated in 1991, but with "a strong Swadeshi thrust to ensure that the national economy grows on the principle that 'India shall be built by Indians.'" The theme is "reform of the reforms," and it is directed toward securing the "level playing field" sought by many Indian businesses--protection from foreign competition for an 8 to 10 year period. BJP leaders have sought to distance themselves from the strident calls by allied Samata Party leader and "firebrand socialist" George Fernandes to throw multinationals out of India--as Fernandes succeeded in doing in 1979 as Industries Minister in the Janata Government, when IBM and Coca Cola left India. The new government wants foreign investment, but in areas of infrastructure, especially in the energy sector, and high technology--not in consumer products. It wants, in the words of its campaign slogan, "computer chips, not potato chips."

The strategy of the BJP will be to liberalize the domestic economy through accelerated deregulation before opening India more widely to global competition. As a part of internal liberalization, Prime Minister Vajpayee announced that his government, pursuant to the recommendations of the 1988 Sarkaria Commission Report, will focus on "restructuring Center-state relations and on decentralising financial and administrative powers to states." This continues and formalizes the process of economic decentralization begun in 1991 as a byproduct of liberal reforms.

India is a federal system of 25 states, constitutionally tilted toward the Center and highly centralized under Indira Gandhi. Economic reform, through deregulation, has increasingly shifted action to the states. Although with great variation, states, in competition with each other for investment, have become engines of growth and reform--even as some remain backwaters of social oppression, political corruption, and economic stagnation. The importance of the states was enhanced during the period of the United Front government, for it was essentially a creature of state parties. The new BJP coalition is similarly beholden to regional parties, and, to the degree that the government becomes a prisoner unto itself, weakness at the Center will provide states greater opportunity--albeit with highly variable results. A redress of the imbalance in the federal relationship will give an increasingly important role to states in a devolution of power both by default and by design.

Greater power for the states, already evident in the formation of the government, agreement on the National Agenda, and allocation of ministerial appointments, poses potentially serious problems for a government at the Center dependent on state parties, for interstate conflicts, such as that between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over water, are difficult to resolve--and each state may perceive the issue in the zero-sum terms that could break a government compelled to satisfy both parties to the dispute.

As Prime Minister, heading the BJP-led minority coalition, Vajpayee faces a perilous political environment. Demands by allies for compromise will rein in the BJP's extreme Hindu chauvinist element and strengthen Vajpayee as a moderate--but the coalition will be hostage to pressures and extortive demands: Even the loss of a few votes could bring down the government--and Congress waits in the wings.

March 31, 1998

Robert Hardgrave's last posted article on this subject: Indian Election 1996: What happened? What next?
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