16.05.1996

Communalism versus communism

Elections in India

India, with over 900 million people, is the most populous bourgeois democracy in the world. It has been in the grip of a long election campaign, followed by not one polling day but several. The results trickled in relatively slowly, since India is big in size as well as in population. The traditional ruling party of post-colonial India, the Congress Party, met a resounding defeat.

This has not been the first Indian election in which conflict between social castes, poverty and strife between religious and ethnic groups have surfaced, even though this election has been unusually peaceful compared to some in the past. There were few reported cases of ballot-rigging or what Indians call “vote-capturing”, when supporters of a particular party or candidate seize a polling station and steal the ballot boxes. Sometimes the boxes simply disappear; at other times the votes in them are subtly transformed by the people who steal them.

This relatively clean election produced a less clean result. The largest party in the Indian parliament by far is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), though its seats fall short of an overall majority. This is a rightwing hindu party. It has been a major factor in Indian politics for some time, and its successes are a source of serious concern to non-hindus, especially the more than 100 million Indian muslims. Some of the BJP’s friends are even more sinister - Shiv Sena, in Maharashtra state, is about as close to Indian fascism as any group can get. In the past it wanted all non-hindus to leave the state, as well as everyone not belonging to the Marathi ethnic group.

Indian politics are extremely fragmented, but apart from the BJP and the mauled remnants of the Congress Party, it is possible to discern a third force. This is the National Front-Left Front (NF-LF). This won 117 seats in the 545-seat parliament. A major component in it is the CPI(M) - the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Its longtime leader in West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, was a contender for prime minister in the immediate post-election horse-trading made inevitable by the lack of an overall majority. Unusually among senior Indian politicians, Basu has a reputation for honesty, and he was thought to have a good chance of putting together a coalition to work against the communal politics of the BJP. The BJP hailed the decision by the CPI(M) not to put Basu forward as prime minister, which suggests that they did see him as a threat to their plans.

The CPI(M) withdrew Basu because it feared it would not have enough weight within the NF-LF. Instead, Deve Gowda of the Janata party became the NF-LF’s contender for the prime ministerial post on May 14, when the composition of India’s next government still remained unresolved.

The CPI(M) is one of the livelier remnants of official communism. Its election manifesto stressed the party’s opposition to communalism, especially as represented by the BJP. It laid stress on Indian patriotism as opposed to the many ethnic and religious divisions that have the potential to break India up. The party’s administration in West Bengal state has advanced privatisation further than most non-communist administrations have done in India, stirring up some working class opposition (see The Guardian of April 9), though the elections did not loosen the party’s grip on the state.

Andrew MacKay