Meaning of a poll verdict

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s stunning landslide victory in the Hindu heartland state of Uttar Pradesh has boosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image, raising high hopes in the Hindutva camp and deep despair in its foes.

The BJP’s return to power in the state, home of one-sixth of all Indians, after a 15-year gap, confirms its status as the country’s largest party and sets it ahead of rivals in the run-up for the national elections due in 2019.

The BJP’s tally of 312 (not counting 13 seats won by its two small allies) in the new 403-member assembly marks electoral triumph of a magnitude witnessed only rarely – as when the Congress won 388 out of 430 seats in the first assembly elections of 1951-52 and when the people gave 352 out of 425 seats to the Janata Party in 1977 after the end of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime.

The UP verdict breaks the spell of electoral drought Modi and the BJP experienced after the sensational 2014 Lok Sabha victory. Delhi state had rebuffed them in 2015 and Bihar, the second largest heartland state, in 2016.

The hopes and fears aroused by it must be moderated with the outcome of the elections in four other states which too went to the polls. Of them, only Uttarakhand, which was part of UP until 2000, gave the BJP a resounding victory.

In Punjab, where the BJP is a junior partner of the Sikh party Akali Dal, the ruling pair lost ignominiously to the Congress, which returned to power after a decade, with 77 of the 117 assembly seats. The Akali Dal’s strength fell from 56 in the last house to 15 and the BJP’s from 12 to three.

The BJP, which was in power in Goa, suffered a setback, its strength in the 40-member assembly falling from 21 to 13. The Congress nearly doubled its strength to 17 and emerged as the largest party.

In the northeastern state of Manipur, the Congress lost power but remained the largest party in the 60-member assembly with 27 seats, against the BJP’s 22.

Acting fast, the BJP managers secured enough support from small parties and independents in both Goa and Manipur to beat the Congress in the race to power.

A conclusion that can be drawn from the electoral verdict is that the people voted against the ruling dispensation in all the states. The BJP’s big win in UP and Uttarakhand is attributable to the communal polarisation promoted by Sangh Parivar associates and Modi’s uncanny ability to derive electoral profit from it, using binaries like graveyard-cremation and Eid-Holi.

There was not even one Muslim among the 403 candidates of the BJP and its allies although the community accounts for one-fifth of UP’s population and BJP vice-president and minority poster boy Mukthar Abbas Naqvi hails from the state. The BJP nominees included Somnath Som, a hate-speech case accused, and Suchi Chaudhury, wife of a riot case accused.

The Samajwadi Party, which draws support primarily from the backward Yadav community, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the standard bearer of the Dalits, had alternated in power in UP in the last 15 years. This time the SP fought in alliance with the Congress but a rift between party chief Mulayam Singh and his son and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav botched its chances.

The decline of the SP and the BSP suggests that identity politics is losing its edge.

BSP chief Mayawati has alleged that the BJP engineered the UP victory by tampering with the electronic voting machines. The possibility of hacking of EVMs was first suggested by BJP veteran LK Advani in 2009 and a technician demonstrated how it could be done. A year later University of Michigan researchers claimed they were able to change the results on an Indian EVM by sending messages from a mobile phone.

Many countries have abandoned electronic voting in view of the potential for mischief. Given the Hindutva camp’s poor record as a respecter of laws, Mayawati’s allegation cannot be rejected outright. While not endorsing her charge, the Congress has urged the Election Commission to look into it and dispel misgivings.

Having improved its position in three of the five states which went to the polls, the BJP can now raise its strength in the Rajya Sabha by increasing its representation from these states in the next biennial elections to the house. It can also try to get one from the Sangh Parivar elected as India’s next President. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, March 14, 2017

Regrouping to face Modi

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Early intimations of a grand alliance at the national level to check the advancing Hindutva forces, which pose a threat to secularism and democracy, were visible when leaders of political parties of varying hues gathered in Bihar’s capital, Patna, last week for the swearing-in of Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister.

Nitish Kumar had taken oath as the Chief Minister four times previously – twice as leader of the Samata Party and twice as leader of the Janata Dal (United). But this was the first time that leaders of many national and regional parties and chief ministers of many states were at hand to greet him.

In the recent Assembly elections, Nitish Kumar had led a grand alliance, comprising his JD(U) and his long-time rival Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal as equal partners and the Congress party as an add-on, to a sensational victory, dashing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to bring the state under the Bharatiya Janata Party.

That gave Nitish Kumar a national stature high enough to make him a possible future Prime Minister. Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, who was in Patna, said, “Nitishji should now get ready to move to Delhi as the next Prime Minister.”

The Congress was represented at the swearing-in ceremony by President Sonia Gandhi and Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. The party also ensured the presence of all its Chief Ministers to underscore the importance it attaches to the coalition experiment in Bihar.

Other Chief Ministers present included Delhi’s Arvind Kejriwal, whose Aam Aadmi Party had inflicted a crushing defeat on the BJP in this year’s Assembly elections, and West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress brought to an end more than three decades of Left rule in her state.

Other present included former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda (Janata Dal-Secular), former Union Minister Sharad Pawar (National Congress Party), former Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister MK Stalin (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

To avoid the impression that the swearing-in had been turned into an anti-BJP jamboree, Nitish Kumar extended an invitation to Narendra Modi too. Since he was leaving on a scheduled foreign tour, Modi deputed two of his Cabinet colleagues to attend the ceremony.

The way Modi stormed into Delhi last year, pulverising the Congress party and the corruption-hit United Progressive Alliance government it headed, the popular impression was that he and the BJP were well set for a long innings. That impression was strengthened when, in state after state, Modi personally led the BJP’s campaign and led it to victory.

Arvind Kejriwal, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav having blown up the myth of Modi’s invincibility, the opposition, as a whole, has regained self-confidence and is getting ready to offer a stiff challenge to the BJP at both national and state levels.

But there are many hurdles to cross before a grand alliance at the national level can emerge. The two tallest leaders of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest state, Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose Samajwadi Party is in power in the state, and former Chief Minister Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, were conspicuously absent at the Patna event.

Assembly elections in West Bengal and Assam in the east and Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south are due next year. The BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), are already busy evolving suitable strategies to enlarge the party’s presence in these states where Hindutva elements are weak.

In Assam, the BJP did well in the Lok Sabha election, campaigning on the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh. It can be expected to milk the issue again in the Assembly elections.

In West Bengal and Kerala, the BJP is pinning its hopes on sections disillusioned with the Left parties. There are indications that some of their “upper caste” supporters may be willing to switch allegiance to the BJP. The political traditions of the two states rule out the possibility of a secular front to stop the BJP’s advance.

In the recent local body elections in Kerala, the BJP made big advances, especially in the urban areas, raising hopes in its ranks that it may be able to establish its presence in the Assembly in the next elections. RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat was in the state recently to energise cadres.

Politics in Tamil Nadu revolves round two Dravidian parties. The BJP may not find it easy to work out a respectable deal with either of them but smaller regional parties will be happy to do business with it.

To get a fair idea of the line-up ahead of the 2019 parliamentary elections we have to await the outcome of the UP Assembly elections of 2017 which will witness a confrontation between the BJP and the non-BJP parties. - Gulf Today, November 24, 2015

Coping with rape crisis

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The shame of rape is weighing India down again. Barely 18 months after the gangrape and murder of a young woman in New Delhi provoked street protests and made headlines the world over, the country is coping with the fallout of another case involving sexual assault and killing of two teenaged girls in an Uttar Pradesh village. 

Pictures of bodies of the girls hanging from a tree sent shock waves across the globe. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed horror over the incident. So did a US State Department spokesperson.

The US had no reason to be horrified. According to a UN report published last year, that country has an annual rape rate of 28.6 per 100,000 people. The Indian rape rate is 4.3. Even after allowing for varying rates of under-reporting in the two countries, the situation in India does not appear to call for a response of that kind from the US administration.

However, India has cause for concern. The rash of rape cases being reported daily points to a critical situation. Clearly the vociferous protests of 2012 and the subsequent toughening of the law to the extent providing for the death penalty have not made any appreciable difference to the situation.

Uttar Pradesh, where the recent incident occurred, is India’s largest state. If it were an independent country it would be the world’s fifth most populous, after China, residuary India, the US and Indonesia. In 2012, the last year for which official data are available, close to 24,000 cases of crimes against women were registered in the state. This was about 10 per cent of all such cases registered countrywide.

Until 2012 UP was ruled by the Bahujan Samaj Party and its leader, Mayawati, a Dalit woman, was the chief minister. In that year’s election the Samajwadi Party, whose support base consists primarily of the backward Yadav caste, came to power and its supremo, Mulayam Singh, installed his son, Akhilesh Yadav, as the chief minister. In this year’s parliamentary election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally, Apna Dal, bagged 73 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, stunning both the BSP and the SP.

The rape incident inevitably got entangled in political warfare. Mayawati said the law and order machinery had broken down and asked the Centre to dismiss the Yadav government. Uma Bharati, a member of Modi’s cabinet, indicated readiness to consider the suggestion but Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh only said steps would be taken to improve the situation in the state.

Both Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav accused the media of targeting the state, overlooking the fact that rape was more common in some other states. The neighbouring BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh was mentioned in this connection but there were fewer than 17,000 cases in that state in 2012. The state that topped in crimes against women that year was West Bengal, with more than 30,000 cases.

Since the states vary in population, comparison of absolute numbers can give a distorted picture. Ironically, when the population figures are factored in, backward states like UP and MP appear to be safer for women than supposedly progressive states like West Bengal and Kerala.

UP, with 16.5 per cent of the country’s population, accounts for only 9.65 per cent of the crimes against women and MP, with 9.3 per cent of the population, for 6.89 per cent. West Bengal, with 7.5 per cent of the population, recorded 12.7 per cent of the crimes against women and Kerala, with 2.8 per cent of the population, accounted for 4.47 per cent of the crimes.

Rape has long been a caste war tool, and dominant castes have used it to assert their social authority. First reports had identified the attackers as Yadavs and the victims as Dalits. Official sources later said the girls belonged to the backward Maurya Shakya caste. Almost all the police personnel of the area were said to be Yadavs.

Mulayam Singh belongs to a breed of politicians who have been seeking to reinforce patriarchy. He had once talked about rape as a mistake for which a boy cannot be hanged. Along with Lalu Prasad, Yadav leader of Bihar, he played a major role in scuttling the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s attempts to introduce reservation for women in Parliament and the state legislatures.

Since the political leadership remains insensitive to gender issues, the fight against rape is bound to be a long drawn one.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 10, 2014.

Crunching poverty figures

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

No loud cheers greeted the Planning Commission’s announcement last week that the number of Indians below the poverty line fell significantly from 37.2 per cent in 2004-05 to 21.9 per cent in 2011-12. Instead, there were cries of foul play, with politicians, including some belonging to the ruling Congress party, and civil society activists deploring the unscientific methodology the government follows to determine poverty levels.

The methodology now employed was proposed by a committee, headed by Suresh Tendulkar, an economist, in 2009. Based on it, the Commission calculated that a per capita monthly income of Rs816 in villages and Rs1,000 in cities was all that was needed to ward off poverty. Accordingly, it reckoned that a family of five can meet its consumption expenditure with as ridiculously low a monthly income as Rs4,080 in rural areas and Rs5,000 in urban areas.

Following widespread criticism of the Tendulkar methodology the government had appointed another committee headed by C Rangarajan, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, to draw up fresh norms. Its report is not expected until next year. 

Brushing aside criticism, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said, “Whatever method you apply and wherever you keep the poverty line, poverty has indeed declined.”

Poverty may be declining but when we move from percentages to actual numbers we get an alarming picture of the ground situation. A poverty incidence of 21.9 per cent means as many as 270 million Indians are poor. This is much more than the total population of Indonesia (which was 237,641,326 in 2010), the world’s fourth largest country after China, India and the United States.

India and Indonesia both emerged from colonialism around the same time. India began its path as an independent nation with the British-built administrative apparatus intact and a fair body of educated personnel to run it. When Ahmed Soekarno took over the administration of war-ravaged Indonesia, it had only a dozen people with modern education. He asked every literate person to teach one, and in a matter of decades, Indonesia raced ahead of India in literacy.

India recently overtook Japan as the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. However the country is unable to pull its weight in the global scheme of things because it is bogged down by the huge backlog of poverty.

Pulapre Balakrishnan, an economist, writing in The Hindu, last week suggested that India is out of line with one central aspect of the Asian development model which is the wide-spreading of the fruits of growth. An official assessment made on the completion of India’s first five-year plan (1951-56) revealed that the benefits of development are not reaching the intended beneficiaries. Several subsequent studies have shown that substantial portions of funds earmarked for poverty alleviation are siphoned off by intermediaries and do not reach the needy.

Various measures devised to plug leakages have not yielded results, primarily because the intermediaries are men with political clout who can manipulate the system. While the poor figure prominently in political rhetoric at the time of policy formulation, they are often sidelined at the time of policy implementation. The long tradition of social exclusion appears to be the main reason why, unlike, say Japan or Indonesia, India lags in the empowerment of the weak.

The big states of the north, west and east top the list of the poor. Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of poor people — nearly 60 million (29.4 per cent of the state total), followed by Bihar with about 36 million (33.7 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh with 23.4 million (31.6 per cent). They are followed by Maharashtra with about 20 million poor (17.3 per cent) and West Bengal 18.5 million (19.9 per cent).

The government’s own figures show that about 48 per cent of the rural population is below the poverty line. This shows that while the urban economy boomed in the early phase of liberalisation, the rural areas lagged behind. Several of the new policies now mooted to boost the economic growth rate are likely to impact the rural areas adversely.

In Odisha, the government-fixed minimum daily wage for an unskilled worker is Rs150. In Kerala, his counterpart can command a wage of up to Rs550. The evolution of a simple formula to determine the poverty line in a country with so much variety is no easy task. Regional variations have to be factored in.  --Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 30, 2013.

Flawed bid to clean up politics

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The judiciary, in two landmark judgements delivered last week, severely restricted the right of criminal elements to enter electoral politics.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court, while disposing of two public interest petitions, took away the privilege of retaining their elective posts which convicted members of Parliament and state legislatures had enjoyed all along, holding it unconstitutional.

Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act lays down that a person convicted and sentenced to imprisonment shall be disqualified from holding an elective office for six years from the date of conviction. It, however, permits a sitting MP or MLA who files an appeal against his conviction to retain the elective post until the legal process is exhausted. The court ruled that different standards could not be applied to those who hold elective posts and those who do not.

On Thursday, the court, rejecting an appeal filed by the Election Commission, upheld a Patna high court ruling that a person in lawful custody, whether convicted of a crime or not, cannot contest elections as he does not have the right to vote while in prison and has, therefore, ceased to be an elector.

“The Law temporarily takes away the power of such persons to go anywhere near the election scene,” the apex court said.

Both the judgements were delivered by a two-member bench comprising AK Patnaik and SJ Mukhopadhyaya. Both involve interpretation of provisions of the Representation of the People Act, passed in 1951, ahead of the first general elections to Parliament and state legislatures, held during 1951-52, in terms of the Constitution which came into force in 1950.

Political parties which cautiously welcomed the first judgement as a step towards checking presence of criminals in elective bodies were forced to rethink their position when the second judgement brought home the wide sweep of the cleansing process they have set in.

The judgements have put a question mark over the political future of thousands of politicians who are facing prosecution in criminal cases or awaiting decision on appeals against their conviction. The court has made it clear that the new ruling will only apply prospectively. Convicted MPs and MLAs holding on to their seats on the strength of bail granted by courts are, therefore, safe for the present.

Thanks to an earlier Supreme Court judgement, it is now mandatory for candidates seeking election to Parliament or to state legislatures to file two affidavits, one listing their assets and liabilities and the other disclosing involvement in criminal cases, if any. The Election Commission puts the documents on the web, and print and electronic media report their highlights.

Accordingly, voters have access to information about the antecedents of the candidates but their criminal records do not appear to adversely affect their choice. In the absence of any reliable studies, it is difficult to conclude whether the voters feel intimidated or favour those with criminal backgrounds on the basis of narrow loyalties based on factors such as caste and religion.

According to the National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms, civil society bodies actively pursuing the goal of cleansing politics of criminal elements, 1,460 persons currently functioning as MPs and MLAs have admitted in their affidavits to being involved in criminal cases. This constitutes a little over 30 per cent of the total of 4,807 elected representatives whose affidavits were analysed. The criminal charges against 688 of them (14 per cent of the total) are of a serious nature.

As many as 305 MPs and MLAs of the Congress party (21 per cent of the party’s total) and 313 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (11 per cent of the total) are involved in criminal cases.

Seventy-four per cent of the MLAs of Jharkhand state, 58 per cent of those of Bihar and 47 per cent of those of Uttar Pradesh have criminal records. The small northeastern state of Manipur is the only one with no tainted legislator.

While the Supreme Court may have acted with the best of intentions, it has unwittingly provided unscrupulous politicians belonging to more than a dozen parties which wield power in the different states a means to subvert the democratic process. They can keep inconvenient rivals out of the poll arena by arresting them on trumped-up charges. This was, in fact, what the Jammu and Kashmir administration did from 1953 to 1975 to prevent estranged former Chief Minister Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah and his supporters from making a bid for power. -- Gulf Today, July 16, 2013.