Images of debt-collecting eunuchs, exotic fakirs and widows on funeral pyres unfortunately still excite many an otherwise well-informed mind. A more subtle variant are the cliches that surround India’s electoral process.
One could almost write it blindfold: "As India’s 675 million voters go to the polls...this teeming, vibrant, colourful democracy...the largest electoral exercise in history...India’s 6,00,000 villages cherish their hard-won right to...often only by recognising the party’s symbol can the illiterate...." And so on.
All of the above may well be true. But as George Orwell never tired of pointing out, when a writer resorts to cliches it is a sure sign he hasn’t given the subject much thought. India is indeed going to the polls in what is indeed a daunting but evidently achievable logistical feat.
The problem is how to cover it. Most foreign newspapers have only one correspondent, occasionally two. Even if you possessed preternatural energy and a million air miles, there would not be sufficient days in the campaign to visit even half of India’s states—and even then only for a short while.
Nor can one so easily deploy the time-honoured but perfectly respectable device of alighting on a small belt of the country to illustrate a broader national theme. As Yogendra Yadav, NDTV’s ubiquitous psephologist (and required nightly viewing for Indian and foreign journalists alike) points out, India’s democracy rarely experiences national waves. It can more accurately be seen as an agglomeration of 28 separate state polls.
In the UK, it would be a relatively simple matter—drop in for a quick pint and ask the pub regulars whether sterling should be abolished (but remember to bring a pair of boxing gloves). Even in the US it isn’t rocket science: visit a suburb where a call centre has recently closed down and ask whether Kerry’s message is resonating.
But in India it doesn’t really work as well. I doubt very much the voters of Tamil Nadu are swayed one way or another by the NDA’s peace process with Pakistan. How many people of the Northeast would care about whether or not a temple will be constructed in Ayodhya? Will the villagers of Bihar be weighing the same issues as the telecom executives of Bangalore?
Of course, two of India’s 40 or so electable parties are conducting national campaigns. But the BJP’s India Shining campaign—I’m still not sure what it was renamed when the party started paying for it out of its own pocket—is evidently customised for different audiences.
If proof of this were required, then go back over what Advani said to audiences on the various stages of his Bharat Uday Yatra. At some stops, India’s deputy prime minister was full of shining. At others he talked of Hindu-Muslim amity. Then at the next one his ambition to build a "magnificent" Ram temple suddenly appeared again.
Congress is little better (actually it is noticeably less professional than the BJP in its media management). One day India is definitely not shining anywhere. The following day India is in fact shining in some pockets but only because of Manmohan Singh. On Sunday dynasty is irrelevant. On Monday morning its leader talks of her pride of being a mother when her son files his nomination for the family constituency.
Then there are the regional and caste parties. Do we take the DMK at face value when it says it is part of a secular front to defeat Hindutva? Mightn’t it change its mind again if the NDA comes back to power? Then there are the Samajwadis and the BSPs whose shifting affiliations make Bill Clinton look like a paragon of marital fidelity.
And, of course, there is Sharad Pawar whose unshakeable opposition to lineal descent has suddenly gone all lateral. Nor should one overlook the CPI(M) whose ideological distaste for Mr Shourie’s disinvestment programme in New Delhi is matched only by its enthusiastic privatisation drive in Calcutta.
India is at times a confusing place. But complexity should never be the enemy of clarity. As an outsider, the foreign correspondent has the perfect excuse to take a bird’s eye view every now and then.
Here is mine, for what it is worth: Nobody owns economic reform—when in power everyone embraces it, even Mulayam does so nowadays. So whoever comes to power, India’s economy will or will not continue to shine, depending on your perspective.
The same cannot be said of India’s history of liberalism and tolerance, which shines—or should shine—out of every school textbook in this country (it should also be part of the curriculum in Britain, my own country, which was morally humiliated by India’s inspiring freedom struggle).
I am married to an Indian and I am proud of her political heritage. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this legacy is being challenged and that all those who cherish it will see this election as an important moment in India’s political odyssey. When I was asked to write this piece, my instructions were to keep it light-hearted and to write it from a foreigner’s perspective. I’m afraid the first proved too hard.
(Edward Luce is the New Delhi-based South Asia bureau chief of the Financial Times.)
