NY Times, May 15, 2004
What India's Upset Vote Reveals: The High Tech Is Skin Deep
by AMY WALDMAN
NEW DELHI, May 14 - As India prepared to vote this spring, strategists from its ruling party mapped the country's first modern electoral campaign.
They boasted of sending four million e-mail messages to voters and transmitting an automated voice greeting from the popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to 10 million land and mobile phones
But the hype over the high-tech campaign obscured these statistics: In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India's 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 a day, only an estimated 659,000 households have computers.
The message that the Hindu-nationalist-led government had delivered the country to a new era of prosperity was belied by the limited reach of the media to deliver it.
That gap - the coexistence of a growing middle class with the growing frustration of those excluded from it - helps explain why Mr. Vajpayee's government has been turned out of office in the biggest upset since 1977, when Indira Gandhi lost after imposing a state of emergency.
"It was a huge popular rebellion," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst.
In election results announced Thursday, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's coalition failed to win anywhere near enough seats to form a government. The B.J.P. itself, which a short while ago had been expected to coast to victory partly on the strength of an economic boom, emerged as only the second largest party.
The Indian National Congress will form the government with smaller parties, including Communist ones. The Congress leader, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, now appears likely to become prime minister herself.
To attribute the election results only to economic factors would be an oversimplification. Caste, communalism, alliances with smaller parties, anti-incumbency, and local issues and personalities all played a role. But it also would be a mistake, analysts said Friday, to underestimate the role of economic discontent.
"It is a big warning for everybody," said Sudheendra Kulkarni, a senior aide to Mr. Vajpayee.
Mr. Rangarajan called it a "victory of the common man and woman."
The notion of a class-based backlash may surprise Americans lately inundated with news of jobs migrating to India and a growth rate expected to reach 8 percent this year.
This still developing nation is indeed being transformed in many ways, but the transformation has yet to reach most of the population. The entire information technology industry here still employs fewer than one million people, compared with 40 million registered unemployed.
Growth in the preceding five years has averaged only about 5 percent, nowhere near enough to lift hundreds of millions from poverty. And the policy reforms, like privatizing state-owned industries or allowing more foreign investment, that have helped unleash the economy have yet to help an increasingly struggling agricultural sector, which supports some two-thirds of the population.
The B.J.P. and its allies fared poorly in all of the major metropolises, winning a total of only three seats in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta. But heavily rural states were their undoing, particularly in the south, which has decided the national government for the past 14 years.
N. Ram, editor in chief of The Hindu newspaper, said voters "turned on those who were callous to it or perceived to be pro-rich or didn't do enough in a drought."
Not only the B.J.P. suffered for this: in Karnataka, home to Bangalore, the center of India's tech industry, voters turned out the Congress-run state government.
They did the same in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, a B.J.P. ally, had turned Hyderabad, the state capital, into "Cyderabad" by luring Bill Gates and others and trumpeting the ability of reforms and technology to transform the state.
But because of drought and his own failure to invest more in irrigation or other infrastructure that could have eased it, Mr. Naidu's government lost this week as farmers turned on him en masse.
That defeat was not hard to predict on a recent trip to the state, and in particular the rural district of Warangal, about two and a half hours from Hyderabad. Close to 300 indebted farmers have committed suicide since 1997, according to government officials. Statewide, nearly 3,000 farmers have killed themselves.
Hundreds more have taken their lives in other drought-afflicted southern states like Karnataka and Kerala. The suicides have become a potent national symbol of economic angst, and in some states, including Andhra Pradesh, they became an election issue as well.
With less than 40 percent of the state irrigated, and with an erratic power supply only 10 hours a day, farmers had no bulwark against the drought that devastated the state over much of the past decade.
The suicides have not been the only symptom of economic distress. The district also has been at the heart of a Marxist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is active in 15 or 16 Indian states. Drought, poverty and unemployment have fed young people's turn to extremism, officials said.
Now those same factors appear to have fed the defeat of Mr. Naidu and the B.J.P. and its allies as well.
Mrs. Gandhi and other Congress campaigners harped ceaselessly on both the lack of jobs and the struggles of farmers. In its manifesto, the Congress Party has promised to address both problems.
But Mr. Kulkarni, the Vajpayee aide, challenged Congress's ability to fulfill those promises. Congress had ruled for most of the past 50 years, he noted.
"They cannot pretend there was no poverty in those 50 years and it was all the creation of the last five years," he said.
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