Social strife colors Indian polls

By S.P. Seth

SYDNEY (JP): India, the world's largest democracy, will go to polls on April 27, May 2, May 7 and May 21. The polls will be staggered, largely because of the need to deploy adequate security forces in different regions to ensure peaceful and fair elections. Which suggests that the holding of peaceful and fair elections all over the country is increasingly becoming a difficult exercise. But why? There are several reasons for this reflecting on India's contemporary social reality.

First and foremost, India's social fabric is unraveling fast. Its predominantly Hindu society is a cluster of caste groups organized in a hierarchical structure. All these groups and subgroups knew their exact place in the hierarchy and rarely challenged the divinely-ordained social order. It was divinely ordained because its members attributed and accepted their respective social gradation based on their past karma (deeds). Which meant that those in the lower order could not conceive of a change in their social situation through their personal or collective efforts -- not in their present life anyway.

Since independence in 1947, and more so in the last six years, India's old social order has crumbled. Largely because of electoral compulsions, lower and intermediate castes (constituting a substantial majority of the Hindu society) are now the beneficiary of positive discrimination in the public service, for jobs, and for higher education. This has created severe social tensions between higher and lower castes, and has caused violent conflict now and then.

Even though India's higher castes are a minority, they still own much of the country's wealth. Their hold on political power is loosening, gradually shifting in favor of the lower and intermediate castes. For instance, the chief minister of India's second largest province, Bihar, belongs to one of India's intermediate castes. Not long back, the chief minister of India's largest province, Uttar Pradesh, was also drawn from the same intermediate Yadav caste. For a short period, Uttar Pradesh even had as chief minister a woman belonging to India's lowest caste hierarchy -- the first time in India's contemporary history.

The redistribution of economic power (which tends to change social equations) is not proving that easy. While there has been a perceptible economic improvement in the economic situation of some of the intermediate castes (who have benefited from the abolition of absentee landlordism in rural areas and land ceiling legislation) the lot of the lower castes (about a quarter of India's population of 900 million people) hasn't improved much. They still constitute bulk of India's landless rural labor force subject to economic and social exploitation both by the upper and intermediate castes.

India's social landscape is now very much a moonscape. There are tensions and conflicts not only between upper and lower or intermediate castes but also between the latter and among their social subgroups. Therefore all attempts to create caste coalitions based on perceived common interests, prove short- lived, tending only to further muddy the social and political landscape.

The fragmentation of India's majority Hindu community has created other headaches. It has galvanized the revivalist Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliates to create conformist Hindu nationalism, called Hindutva. This was supposed to unify a divided Hindu society on the basis of an overarching politico-religious and cultural ideology. It needed some immediate stimuli, which came in the form of the Hindu-Moslem divide and the festering Babri mosque issue.

The mosque in question, according to Hindu revivalists, had been built during the reign of Babar (who founded the Mughal empire in India several centuries ago) by demolishing a Hindu temple of Lord Rama over his supposed birthplace in Ayodhya, a small town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. This historical injustice was sought to be avenged by demolishing the Babri mosque and rebuilding the Rama temple in its place. The demolition of the mosque in December 1992 by Hindu hooligans, plunged India into its ugliest communal violence (between Hindus and Moslems) since India's partition in 1947.

The demolition of the Babri mosque lost BJP its political card with which to fan Hindu revivalism. The party has still not been able to recover it despite efforts to rake up other similar issues. In the meantime, the destruction of the mosque has profoundly affected Indian Moslems. First, they have deserted the Congress Party of Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, whom they blame for not doing enough (or worst, conniving with the BJP) to prevent the demolition of the Babri mosque.

Second, it has encouraged them to align with political formations and leaders of lower and intermediate Hindu castes. In other words, they are becoming active agents of social fragmentation of the majority Hindu society. Being India's largest religious minority (they constitute over 10 percent of India's population) they have great political clout, especially if Hindu society were turning on itself.

Third, Indian Moslems no longer regard themselves as helpless victims. Having hit back against Hindu violence by engineering bomb blasts in India's commercial capital of Bombay during early 1993. Indian Moslems have brought home to the larger Indian society the risks of a civil war if they were pushed into a corner.

There are of course regional and linguistic variations of India's great social divide, all of which have bred crime and violence. In the midst of such social fluidity, the nexus between crime politics and money has grown. So much so that it is now the talk of the town, encapsulated in the Indian word, hawala. Loosely translated to mean corruption in high places, it has, in fact, come to mean the culture of corruption among India's high and mighty. Because nothing stays forever, they now face corruption charges of accepting large sums of money from a family of businessmen involved in all sorts of shady deals. Even Prime Minister Narasimha Rao has some explaining to do.

It is in this murky atmosphere of social discord, criminal politics and moral turpitude that Indians are going into another election. The polls will most likely reflect India's fragmented polity. It looks like there will be a hung parliament with no single party able to form government on its own.

There will be, however, coalitions of convenience to carry on (however haltingly) the business of governing because not many newly-elected parliamentarians will want to face the electorate too soon. India's economic liberalization is likely to continue, but at its own, measured pace.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Sydney.