It may be early days yet, but the signs are unmistakable, of a shift in the way India’s electorate judges its politicians. Where once voters exercised their franchise solely on the age-old lines of identity (mostly caste and religion, but also ethnicity and linguistic heritage), the issue of development — the efficient delivery of social and industrial infrastructure, jobs and much else — has been acquiring a larger space in the aam aadmi’s judgment. This may not be strikingly evident yet, and it will rarely be the sole factor. After all, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati’s influence in politics derives solely from the enormous power of her Dalit vote bank in Uttar Pradesh, the actor Chiranjeevi is leveraging his star power to fight for the rights of Kapus in Andhra Pradesh, while in Karnataka the fight is substantially between the Vokkaligas led by HD Deve Gowda and the BJP-leaning Lingayats. Still, it is telling that a growing number of politicians in these and other states realise that people do not necessarily vote their caste, and therefore have been peddling the success of their development agendas to the electorate.
This is strikingly noticeable in one of the least-developed of states, Bihar, where Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, Union Rural Development Minister and RJD’s parliamentary candidate from Vaishali, and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) are plying voters with alternative and competing “report cards” — Mr Singh has published four of them — detailing all that they have done for the state. Mr Singh’s slogan is “Vikaas ke waaste, Raghuvansh ke Raaste” (Raghuvansh’s roadmap is for the sake of development) and his lobbyists are pushing his initiatives under Bharat Nirman and the rural employment guarantee scheme to prove his superiority. Mr Kumar, meanwhile, is riding high on the strength of his having improved the quality of administration in the state, after 15 years of neglect under Lalu Prasad and his wife Rabri Devi; Mr Prasad is now fighting a desperate rear-guard battle. So caste is not enough, performance matters too.
This is a realisation that dawned some years ago with such politicians as the Telugu Desam’s Chandrababu Naidu, who set out to prove that development and good governance could win votes. More recently, Mr Naidu has turned as populist as anyone else, but in his earlier avatar he had for company Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh, who did some sterling work in improving the social infrastructure (scoring a dramatic improvement in indicators like literacy). Mr Singh lost his hold on power after a decade because he forgot that roads and electricity are also aspects of development. In Gujarat, the BJP’s Narendra Modi rarely refers to his state’s fractious religious politics and focuses entirely on what he has done to take his state forward on the social and economic parameters. Similarly, Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh and Raman Singh in Chattisgarh have put the BJP on a good footing in their respective states because of their performance, and the same can be said about Naveen Patnaik, whose Orissa has for the first time been doing better than the national average on select parameters.
The question is whether this trend, so evident at the state level, will manifest itself in voting behaviour when it comes to the Lok Sabha. The Congress has been peddling the development theme for all it is worth, talking about the rural employment guarantee programme, the rural health mission, and such, while the BJP has tried to debunk the UPA government’s record on economic management, though offering little in terms of developmental promises on its own part. The next few weeks will show how much voters have been influenced by the promise of development at the national level, and whether this has been a strong enough factor to reduce the importance of identity politics.