Great Expectations
The BJP got voted out of power not because its reforms left the poor behind--they did not--but because the success of the reforms in raising the incomes of all including the poor gave rise to a revolution of rising expectations.
24 May 2004
In India's favorite sport of cricket, fortunes change with startling speed. Indian elections, too, can be mercurial affairs. The confident Indira Gandhi, seeking to end her controversial Emergency rule and regain democratic legitimacy, was roundly defeated in 1977 by a motley crew of opposition parties. The diffident Sonia Gandhi, the leader of a seemingly lackluster Congress Party, triumphed over a Bharatiya Janata Party which believed itself to be formidable -- so formidable, in fact, that its leader called for elections earlier than he needed to, in the belief that his party's reward for domestic economic prosperity and international political success would be another term in office.
What the two election surprises -- in 1977 and 2004 -- have in common is the fierce aspiration of India's masses: political in Indira Gandhi's defeat, and economic in the victory of her daughter-in-law. If we may hazard a categorical explanation, Mrs. Gandhi was turned out by the people in 1977 principally because she had invaded their personal autonomy through the abusive vasectomy programs that her son, Sanjay, had bamboozled her into promoting. In the 2004 election, the people at the lower end of the income scale were, instead, pushing principally for an acceleration in the rate of improvement in their economic conditions.
Democracy is cherished by the poor in India. Whereas economic prosperity reaches them only slowly -- no matter which policies are put into place -- the political right to vote has an immediate, even electrifying, effect. Voting empowers the poor: The election day is their day, when they can vote out those above them, and richer than them. India's leading political scientist, Yogendra Yadav, has shown that, indeed, the poor vote massively.
But the 2004 election turned not on political rights but on the economic aspirations of the masses. And it is important to understand the texture of these aspirations, since it bears critically on which way the government of Manmohan Singh, the great architect of India's earliest economic reforms in 1991, should turn.