Hope for A New India

In the several months since India marked the 50th anniversary of its independence, a celebratory slew of printed matter has materialized assessing, among other facets of the Subcontinent, the state of the Indian state. Tomorrow's announcement of the results of the country's three-week-long general elections will provide ever more grist for the mill. At issue is how a nation of mind-boggling diversities will pursue its national project and how that national project should be defined.

It is widely predicted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the "Enlightened Hindu Nationalist" party, will gain the most seats of any single party, but not enough to form its own government. The conglomerate of left-leaning parties called the United Front--which headed the latest government under the ambivalent auspices of the India National Congress Party, the party that has ruled the government for all but five of the past 50 years--is expected to get about half the number of seats as the BJP, or about 20 percent. Congress will garner enough seats to control an unstable, anti-BJP coalition. This coalition will, if the past is any indication, fall in a year or two, if not before.

Instability is the tired theme that has droned across India's political landscape since the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and Indian voters are becoming apathetic. Since 1989, not a single prime minister has managed to hold onto parliamentary support for a full five-year term. India's voting participation rates--which were once praised as an indicator of a robust democracy--have dropped by nearly 10 percent.

Pervasive government corruption and even criminalization is a factor in voter disenchantment (according to the Election Commission, 1,500 of 13,952 candidates in the 1996 elections had criminal records, including murder, rape and kidnapping), but the overwhelming cause of voter apathy has been the inability of one single party to gain enough support to enact positive programs. The main force that allied Congress and the United Front was not common ideology or common programs, but the singular desire to keep the BJP from power. An alliance founded on hatred of a common enemy is uneasy at best, and when the alliance is forged by corrupt, power-hungry politicians, it's doomed to farce and failure.

Yet the emergence of Sonia Gandhi as spokesperson of the Congress party has created more profound dilemmas. The widow of Rajiv Gandhi and heir apparent to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has ruled India for nearly 40 of the past 50 years, Sonia Gandhi is an Italian-born Roman Catholic who became an Indian Citizen only 12 years ago. Her cross-country campaign for Congress has sparked debates over the question "Who is an Indian?"

The BJP grounds its answer in "Hindutva," a Hindu cultural nationalism that reeks of exclusion and oppression of India's myriad religious minorities. Muslims constitute 11 percent of the Indian population, Christians 3 percent and Sikhs 2 percent. The BJP's ideology was indelibly inscribed onto the Indian landscape in 1992, when Hindu nationalists demolished a mosque that stood upon the mythological birthplace of a Hindu god. The act was a symbolic repudiation of the syncretistic history of Indian culture.

Moreover, the BJP presents a monolithic picture of Hinduism, when in reality Hinduism is intensely variegated across regions, castes and classes. The BJP's conception of Hinduism not only obscures the religion's tolerant beauty, but also has dire political consequences: by ignoring caste inequalities in deference to a larger Hindu-ness, "Hindutva" potentially legitimizes those inequalities, rather than attempting to mitigate them through social policies.

Perhaps the most delicious irony of the elections is that the battle against the BJP's conception of Indianness has been fought by a white-skinned Roman Catholic. Much to the surprise of pundits and the chagrin of BJP hard-liners, Sonia Gandhi's rallies have been enormously well-received. Record-breaking crowds of 250,000 gather in support of her and her family's secular legacy.

The invective of prominent nationalist leader, Bal Thackeray, against Sonia Gandhi reveals BJP unease at her appeal. "I will not allow any white-skin to rule this country," Thackeray was reported as saying in a Reuters release. "This Italian woman can never become our prime minister. Have we lost our masculinity? Did we throw out the British to invite this foreigner?"

For most Indians, though, Sonia Gandhi's skin-color is a non-issue. Her reception makes a resounding statement about the potential of India to incorporate many ethnicities and religions under the definition of "Indian" without destroying their particularities. It offers evidence of a popular rejection of the BJP's homogenizing ideology. In some ways, Sonia Gandhi is the poster-girl for an Indian nationalism that has religious diversity, cultural hybridity and ethnic interaction at its heart.

Even though Sonia Gandhi will probably not become India's next Prime Minister, her presence and reception in this round of elections indicates that there is potential for India to withstand the demands of its fragmented cultural composition. Hopefully, a new leadership will institute a vision of India that appreciates, rather than ignores, the benefits of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious society.

Pooja A. Bhatia '98, a Crimson editor, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. She spent the fall semester studying in India.