(Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)
As Delhi goes to the polls tomorrow, it is hard not to think of the election campaign that has just ended in the nation's capital as intriguing evidence for the future direction of 21st century Indian politics.
For several years now, I have been arguing that the major secular trend in our contemporary politics is the shift from the politics of identity - exemplified by appeals based on religion, caste, language and sub-caste - to the politics of performance (roti, kapda aur makan at one time; today, bijli, sadak, paani; tomorrow, cheaper urban facilities and free wifi.) Narendra Modi's victorious Lok Sabha campaign, which expanded his party's traditional vote base by augmenting its traditional Hindutva message with calls for accelerated economic development, seemed to confirm my thesis.
Yet there have always been contradictions in our country's experience. If Chandrababu Naidu exemplified a hi-tech performance-based appeal, his neighbour Chandrasekhar Rao triumphed with narrow Telengana chauvinism. If Modi argued for "sab ka saath sab ka vikas," Amit Shah embarked on systematically polarizing the electorate along religious lines in the Hindi heartland. The contrasting emphases of Nitish Kumar and Laloo Yadav, and the continued caste strangleholds of Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav suggest that identity politics is still alive and kicking across much of northern India. In UP and Bihar, it's still true that for the most part, when you cast your vote, you vote your caste.
The transformation of Indian politics has thus proceeded in fits and starts, rather than in the predictable linear curves so beloved of social scientists. Where does Delhi fit in to the narrative?
An instructive place to start would be with the election manifestoes of the three leading contenders, which is where they reveal their beliefs about what matters to the electorate. Four items are common to the manifestoes of the BJP, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress: "zero tolerance towards corruption", reduction of electricity bills, women's security, and the installation of CCTV cameras in residential colonies and in buses. The BJP and AAP also promise reduction of water rates, AAP offering 20,000 litres of free water; the Congress, with fifteen years of government behind it, makes no such unrealistic commitments. (The Congress does, however, say that if returned to power, it won't charge for sewer connections.) Electricity is a common preoccupation: while AAP simply wants to slash power bills, the BJP and Congress talk of increasing the number of power distribution companies in order to give a larger number of options to the consumers. Both BJP and Congress also promise to regularize unauthorized colonies, in the hope of weaning away their residents from AAP, who promised this explicitly last time.
On other issues, AAP promises to pass a Delhi Jan Lokpal Bill within 15 days of coming to power, an old commitment that their numbers did not allow them to fulfil during their 49 days in power, and (in another signature tune) to empower Gram Sabhas to make decisions regarding Delhi's villages. AAP has also promised to make Delhi a free wi-fi zone, also an expensive proposition but a forward-looking one. Along with the Congress, AAP also speaks of increasing the number of schools and colleges in the capital; it similarly pledges an education loan guarantee scheme. Both AAP and Congress promise full-fledged statehood to Delhi; the BJP, which runs the central Government, is less keen on the idea. Instead, the BJP promises housing for all, cleaning up the Jamuna and scrapping the unpopular BRT system. Curiously enough, it is AAP and not the BJP which makes the Modi-like promise of turning Delhi into a manufacturing hub (think of what that will do to our already unbreathable air!)
But do manifestoes tell the whole story? In many cases they are a ritual, put together for the sake of having them and ignored after the election results are declared. The political tactics of campaigners are what really matter: often, they may often have little to do with the manifestoes. Here, Delhi scores high: many of the campaign speeches explicitly focus on the commitments made in the manifestoes, and surveys by journalists and pollsters suggest that it is in the hope of their fulfilment that many Delhiites will be casting their vote.
And yet, it is too early to celebrate. Because the Delhi elections show the rise of an interesting form of identity politics: not one based on the primordial identities of religion, caste, language and sub-caste, but on the relatively unfamiliar one of class.
While the BJP continues to appeal to Hindutva-minded voters and the Congress assures Purvanchali and Northeastern migrants that it is their best protector, these identity appeals are touching only small segments of the Delhi electorate. The broader appeal is the one the Communists have been trying in vain to promote in India's democratic politics: that of the "common man", exemplified by Arvind Kejriwal in his pants, sweater and muffler (far removed from the stereotypical image of the white-khaddar-clad politician), standing up against the bastions of privilege in the name of those who have little. It is no accident that Mamata Banerjee, of the cotton sari and rubber Hawaiian chotis, has endorsed AAP and called on her fans in Delhi to vote for him. One good populist recognizes another.
In this battle, the lines are drawn against both the BJP and the Congress as paragons of the old establishment, while AAP attracts the underclass with the message that it will reduce, if not eliminate, its vulnerabilities. Since in Delhi, as everywhere else in India, the less affluent are a majority of the electorate, such an appeal to class interest has undoubted political potential. Why hasn't it worked elsewhere in India? Partly because the leaders of the underclass have themselves been seduced by the persistence of other identity loyalties; and partly because the Congress has managed, for decades, to subsume class politics into its broad socialist appeal of extending welfare benefits to the poor. In Delhi, though, the identity politics of class has found a new home amongst people who have flung many of their traditional assumptions aside in the villages they have left, and who may well be looking for a champion of their class interests, which are not so much proletarian ones as lower-middle-class. This new majority is what the AAP campaign targets.
Whatever happens when votes are cast tomorrow - and as a Congressman, let me stress that I take the news of the poll predictions with lorry-loads of salt - it's clear that a new form of identity politics is on the rise. Class politics, thought to be dying with the eclipse of the Communists in Bengal and their slow fade in Kerala, is making a comeback in Delhi. It will only work, though, if it is also linked to performance: if those who speak for a class actually deliver it the benefits they promise. In that may lie the long-term hope for India's political transformation into a 21st century democracy.
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