NEW DELHI: The 2009 parliamentary election has finally gained momentum after the first phase of polling which was held on April 16.
Until then, it showed no signs of the heat and dust of an electoral battlefield. Now at last it seems it is sputtering into life. There are four more phases to go. The second is due on April 23.
The parties and leaders are attacking each other much more sharply. The centrist Congress party and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are sharpening their knives.
Last week, the Congress had issued a barrage of questions addressed to the BJP, especially to its prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani. The Congress is trying to pinpoint the many lapses in security when Advani’s party was heading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government from 1998 to 2004.
The main focus is on the 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines — the government-owned domestic carrier — to Kandahar in Afghanistan, which was then ruled by the Taleban. The government of the day had to release Muslim extremists to save the lives of the passengers.
The Congress is arguing that it was BJP which had to climb down from its tough talk on anti-terrorism measure. This is in response to the BJP’s sharp attack against the Congress that it (the Congress) is soft on terror because it is pandering to the sentiments of the minority Muslims, who form around 15 percent of the population. Congress denies the charge.
The BJP is also challenging the Congress on the issue of the “black money” stashed away in secret bank accounts in countries like Switzerland. They are challenging the Congress as to why it has not done enough to unlock information about Indian money stashed away in tax havens across the world.
The Congress is quite vulnerable on the corruption issue, especially after the Bofors scandal where the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was allegedly involved in accepting bribes. The case has not ended and no convictions have taken place. But the BJP is doing its best to drive home the point that Congress is not showing enough verve in unearthing the illicit money because it has too many skeletons in its cupboard.
The Congress and the BJP, however, are not any more the key players. Both the major parties are in trouble because most of their allies had abandoned them, and it is not certain that the few who still remain with them would not change sides after the elections. It is the smaller regional parties which are posing a serious challenge to the Congress and the BJP.
The most formidable of them all is Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and who belongs to the Dalit caste, the most oppressed group in the traditional Hindu society.
Hindus form the majority in the country, accounting for 80 percent of the population. But the Hindus are hopelessly divided into hundreds and thousands of caste groups. It is the parties representing the oppressed castes like that of the Dalits which are now asserting their democratic rights and seeking to overturn millennia-old hierarchies.
Mayawati openly declares her desire to be the prime minister. The Communist parties — there are two in India after they split in 1964 over the Sino-Soviet conflict — are backing Mayawati’s claims to be the prime minister, and they are actively trying to bring as many of the smaller parties into a new alliance, tentatively known as the Third Front. There are still doubts about the viability of this group, but it makes the contest so much hard for both Congress and the BJP.
Many of the opinion polls which have been done so far — they are famous for being wrong rather than right in their projections — show the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) winning with Manmohan Singh as the prime minister. The Communist parties want to do all they can to prevent this because they feel Manmohan’s pro-market and pro-US policies have done the country more harm than good.
Though India is relatively insulated from the raging global economic meltdown, jobs are being lost in their thousands and there is a palpable sense of anxiety in the domestic market. But as the country moves into the next phases of the election, the economy might become the issue on which the election result will tilt. But all the parties are working harder than ever to attack the others.
Sulfuric bitterness is slowly filling the air, and there is the sense that a battle — the poll battle, of course — is on.
