Surjit S Bhalla: Mandate? What mandate?

Politicians seek mandates and add a spin to the result. If policies are to be based on the "mandate", then we need to know what the people demanded in Election 2004.

This should be useful in drafting guidelines, for instance, for the Common Minimum Programme, and later on, for actual policies such as the Budget.

The popular opinion is that democracy is about vote-shares. That it is, but in highly heterogeneous India, it gets mediated in strange and mysterious ways. Mostly by coalition politics. That is what has happened in all the elections since 1984, possibly barring 1989.

First, however, the popular perception about the meaning of this election, the meaning as articulated by the politicians, and other intellectual "experts".

Among the latter, Salman Rushdie writes: "The dispossessed of India have dealt a mighty blow to the assumptions of the country's political and economic chieftains, and the lesson should be learned by all parties: Ignore the well-being of the masses at your peril."

Prem Shankar Jha concurs: "Life [under the NDA] had become extremely insecure, income differentials had widened sharply." The articulate, youngish-looking and with a graduate-student-in-a-coffee-shop demeanour CPI (M) leader, Sitaram Yechury, believes that the people voted against the NDA because of its anti-poor economic policies.

Rushdie always writes good fiction, whether about midnight's children or other streams of consciousness; he is paid to do so.

The others are paid to know reality, and to fail at it is to.... Three of the poorest states in the country "" Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan "" voted for the NDA "" the party whose development model ostensibly was not for the poor.

The two richest cities in India, Mumbai and Delhi, voted for the alliance whose development model is anti-urban and anti-rich!

Some other facts for the "in the name of the poor" experts. Most vote facts underline the irrelevance of performance, economic reforms, and much else, in Election 2004.

Nationally, the BJP had a swing against it of 2.02 per cent, the Congress a higher negative swing of 2.08 per cent; but the Congress gained 31 seats and the BJP lost 45 seats!

Congress+ got 35.01 per cent of the votes, the BJP+ a marginally higher share of 35.3 per cent; but Congress+ gained 66 seats, and BJP+ lost 90 seats! The great hope of the poor, Laloo Yadav's RJD, obtained a little more than a quarter of the votes in Bihar "" and 6.2 percentage points less votes than in 1999!

The simple point is that this election was not about a mandate and most emphatically not about the economic reform policies pursued by the NDA (and pursued by every government since the Congress "" and the likely new prime minister "" initiated reform policies in 1991). If the Left can recognise these differences, it should educate us all about its "new" economic model.

If not reforms, nor Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin, nor the BJP's performance, then what was this election all about? It was about a doomed alliance in Tamil Nadu, stupid. Period. For the icing, doomed anti-incumbency in Andhra Pradesh (AP) "" doomed because no one gets elected to a third term, except perhaps if you so mis-govern as in Bihar.

The swing in favour of Congress+ in these two states: 60 seats, the gains evenly divided (31 in Tamil Nadu and 29 in AP). In AP, the TDP and the BJP gained 41.52 per cent of the votes "" the Congress gained only 0.04 per cent more at 41.56 per cent, down marginally from 42.8 per cent in 1999. The TRS made all the difference with its small 6.8 per cent of the votes.

Is it fair to either intellectual honesty or political reality to derive grandiose, self-serving ideological interpretations for India from what happened in two southern states "" and happened according to narrow, local considerations and/or coalition math?

In 1999, when the NDA was elected, most analysts rightly said that the mandate was not for swadeshi and Hindutva. (Interestingly, the former is not even mentioned anymore.

The latter, not having much meaning to begin with, has even less meaning today. And this reality is within the BJP!) Analogously, this mandate is not for new anti-reform policies, or even for old, in-the-name-of-the-poor policies.

Free power for all helps the rich industrialists a lot more than poor farmers. The NDA won because of electoral math in 1999 "" the Congress won because of electoral math in 2004. Atal Bihari Vajpayee ran a successful coalition government "" it remains to be seen whether the Congress can match, and Manmohan Singh can better, Vajpayee's superlative performance.

What this election seems to be about (and what every election in India, barring 1991, has been about) is the emergence, nay dominance, of election math. Indian elections are about coalition politics.

Such politics can only help get a coalition elected "" to make it run successfully might require genius and leadership. Take a look at the figures in the table.

It documents the vote-shares and seats of the two coalition pillars "" the BJP (lotus only) and the Congress (hand only). Five important trends are revealed. First, that the Congress has been in a deep decline since 1989 "" from 40 to 25 per cent of the national vote.

Second, that the BJP has more than doubled its "initial" 1989 vote share of 11.4 per cent. Third, that the joint vote-share has stayed solidly constant at 50 per cent, plus-minus 2 per cent; and that 2004 witnessed the low end of the range.

Fourth, that the vote-share of both parties has stabilised around 25 per cent individually and their seats at 150; each party, therefore, requires large coalitions, at least a quarter of all MPs, or 123 seats. Fifth, these individual vote-shares are not in any sense of the term a mandate, a vote by the people.

In 1991, the BJP polled 20 per cent votes and garnered 120 seats. In 1998, it gained the same number of votes, but a third more seats "" 161. The Congress got 28 per cent of the popular vote in 1999 and only 114 seats. Today, it has gained 2 per cent fewer votes and 41 more seats!

These numbers confirm the reality of the new India "" or India almost 20 years old. The two major parties have half "" regional parties have the other half "" of the national vote.

Dynasty does not matter, nor does foreign origin "" even if they did, their importance gets swamped by what happens between bedfellows. Governance does not matter, nor does ideology. What matters is coalition politics, and what side of the anti-incumbency the major party finds itself.

If the 1999 election was correctly not about swadeshi, this election is most manifestly not about economic policies. What the NDA did was to continue with the reforms initiated by the Congress a decade earlier, and followed by the United Front in 1996. Vajpayee stayed for six years with 23 parties, the United Front stayed for two years with considerably fewer.

The lesson for politicians is clear. Unless the Congress+ accelerates economic reforms and delivers accelerating growth via accelerating reforms, the coalition might be in trouble. That is the importance of the necessary condition of survival "" economic reforms "" and the sufficient condition of power "" electoral math.