The campaign for Indian Independence was a long drawn out affair in which patience and democracy won in the end, although the costs cannot be ignored. Similarly the election of the Lok Sahba has begun and will proceed in stages.
The Hindu reports:
The first phase of the country’s 15th Lok Sabha elections ended on Thursday with millions queuing up in 17 States and union territories to vote in a new government amid Maoist violence that marred the democratic exercise in several places and left at least 17 dead.
The world’s largest democratic exercise began early at 7 a.m. and ended at most places at 5 p.m. A majority of the States reported moderate turnout despite the Maoist attacks on polling centres and security personnel.
Indians voted in 124 constituencies to pick a new 545-seat Lok Sabha in the first step of a five-phased exercise. The Maoist violence affected a dozen constituencies.
About 143 million of India’s 714 million voters were eligible to exercise their franchise in the first of five rounds in 185,552 polling centres. A total of 1,715 candidates were in the fray, with over 300,000 electronic voting machines used.
Tens of thousands of election staff and security personnel kept vigil as people voted in all the constituencies of Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Chhattisgarh, Andaman and Nicobar Island and Lakshwadeep. Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra, Manipur, Orissa and Jharkhand saw partial voting.
But it was a bloody start to the ambitious exercise with Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Maharashtra seeing violence and intimidation as Maoist guerrillas tried to implement their election boycott through the barrel of the gun.
At least 17 people were killed as cadres of the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist, targeted polling officials and security personnel across the insurgency hit States.
In the first phase of the election, turnout varied from about 40% to 70% depending in part on the presence of overt violence according to this report. This, one gathers, is taken as evidence of success for the election. I am wondering whether the needs of the poor will be recognized in the process.
Al Jazeera reports on the big picture, the final state of the Lok Shaba which should become clear after the end of voting on 16 May:
With a myriad of parties expected to take up to 50 per cent of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the final result will kick off an intense period of political horse-trading as the major players rush to form a coalition. Reporting on Thursday from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, Al Jazeera’s Matt McClure said:
“India’s parliament is likely to look very different from the current one. “The Congress party here is facing a stiff challenge from the Hindu nationalist BJP, but it is also being challenged by two smaller, regional, caste-based parties – the Samajwadi party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, who many people here have said they are considering voting for.”
[Prime Minister] Singh said on Wednesday that he would be open to renewing an alliance with communist parties after the election despite an angry split last year over a civilian nuclear deal signed with the US. The prospect of a shaky coalition of disparate allies is a turn-off for most Indian voters, with any new government likely to face national security concerns and a sharp economic slowdown after years of soaring growth.
The only viable alternative to a Congress- or BJP-led coalition is provided by a loose alliance of left-leaning and regional parties called the Third Front, which is led by the communists. Reporting from the south Indian state of Kerala, Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips said: “Certainly as far as Congress is concerned, the left are saying, no, they will not work with them. “Having said that, politics is politics … The left itself is very fractured and I’ve no doubt that there will be some people within it who would be tempted by a return to power if that were on offer.”
Many of India’s voters are expected to make their choices along religious and caste lines or on the basis of a strictly regional issue. Congress, ending a five-year period in power, has seen its main achievement – economic growth averaging more than eight per cent in recent years – hit by the global economic crisis. In Amethi, a rural constituency, voters lamented the lack of basic facilities such as electricity, water and roads. Amethi is represented by Rahul Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party chief.
In contrast, the glittering shopping malls in India’s bustling cities show that those who have benefited most from India’s economic development are a growing urban middle class, while millions of poor are being left behind.
Local politics are the same everywhere it seems. The “developers” have the ear of big government and often are blind to the views of the local people. Barnaby Phillips in Maharashtra, western India reporting for Al Jazeera writes:
Underneath the blazing midday sun, Kusum Thakur stands on her small patch of land and points her finger angrily down toward the earth.
“This land is like my mother, I can’t sell it, what else would I do? I’ve worked on it day and night, it’s my life and soul.”
She is a formidable woman, passionate and loud. Her family has grown rice here for generations but now she is being offered money by the government to sell the land for a proposed industrial scheme.
The area her land is on, in Maharashtra state in western India, has been earmarked by the government for inclusion in one of the Special Economic Zones, where companies are given financial incentives to build factories and other infrastructure.
The government argues that this will create jobs and generate income in areas which lie beyond the cities, but Thakur sees it differently.
She says that other farmers have sold their land, sometimes under pressure, only to spend the money on alcohol or a car, which subsequently breaks down.
“So how do they survive now?” she asks.
The people are more often defeated than not, but somehow they keep struggling and the vision of a decent life for all alive. How smart was it to develop a “civilization” that poisons the Atmosphere, literally and figuratively?
You need, as a precondition, time for patience, and time like all the other economic goods is now in short supply. Or, is it simply political inertia and inaction?