Rallying India's Masses

The political education of Sonia Gandhi is almost complete. Last week, the Italian-born figurehead of India's leading political family broke out from her security cocoon and joined the heaving mass of India's poor who wanted just to be close to her. The charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has given India three prime ministers and two martyrs was working its magic once more.

Fighting an election for the first time, Sonia, widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, entered the race to rule India as a rank outsider. She faces an incumbent Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who emerged triumphant after the country's armed forces defeated Pakistan in the mountains of Kashmir in the summer. Opinion polls, bookies and soothsayers are predicting a Vajpayee win that will put his pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its 22 coalition partners in power in October. Voting began over the weekend and will last a month.
Instead of issues, the campaign has focused on the clash between two personalities: Sonia, the political novice and leader of India's venerable but declining Congress Party, versus Vajpayee, a veteran politician and skilled orator, who last year became Prime Minister atop a ramshackle coalition that lasted 13 months. The government fell in April when the Congress Party, on Gandhi's orders, lured away a key partner in Vajpayee's coalition in a failed attempt to establish a new administration. It would have been India's eighth government in 10 years.

Despite widespread disillusionment with politics and politicians among India's educated and its growing middle classes, elections have an undiminished appeal for India's poor and underprivileged. That's the only time we feel we have some power, says Hafiza Bi, a peasant woman from southern Andhra Pradesh state. It is to voters such as her that the issue of Sonia Gandhi's foreign birth, her right to be India's prime minister and her inexperience in government and parliament are directed.

The Congress Party thinks the Gandhi name is a vote winner. Its opponents think so, too, hence the attempt to spotlight Sonia's shortcomings with a highly personalized assault. What was her contribution to India, asked Defense Minister George Fernandes. Yes, the two children she gave birth to. She has contributed two people to the 1 billion population of our country, he said mockingly at an election rally at Bellary in south India.

A poor district of laborers and farmers, Muslim and Hindu, Bellary has become a signpost for the elections, attracting India's leading political figures. It was one of two constituencies--the other in north India--in which Sonia chose to stand for election. Situated in Karnataka state, Bellary has long been taken for granted by political grandees from faraway New Delhi as a pocket borough of the Congress Party.

In contesting the seat, Sonia was following the example of her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi, who also looked for a safe constituency in south India when she was in political trouble in 1977--the year she decisively lost in the general election. A year later, she won a by-election to represent Chikmagalur, also in Karnataka. Sonia chose Bellary because her political minders were not convinced she would win her late husband's north Indian constituency of Amethi, where she is also a candidate. India's politicians may contest for two constituencies; sometimes, popular leaders do so to show off the spread of their personal support, but more often it is to hedge their bets. If they win in both, they must pick one to represent and throw the other open for by-election.

From the moment Sonia settled on Bellary, its voters were assured of high drama. They didn't have to wait long. To prevent her opponents from nominating a strong rival, she filed her papers with local magistrates at the last minute. The BJP rushed political heavyweight Sushma Swaraj--a former government minister and party spokesperson--to take up the challenge. I am here to fight the election from Bellary because Sonia Gandhi thought she could snake in through the back door, says Swaraj. How can we trust a woman who has started her campaign based on lies and cheating?

The people of Bellary have found themselves at the heart of a national soap opera featuring two female leads--Swaraj, who calls herself the Daughter of India; and Sonia, who claims political legitimacy on the strength of her surname. For the rest of the country the clash has provided welcome entertainment in an otherwise subdued election campaign.

There have been plenty of verbal fireworks. Sonia, as a daughter-in-law of this country we will respect you, even protect you, Swaraj shouted at a political rally. But if you want to be prime minister of this country, we will have to say: No, No, No. The issue of whether a foreign-born person should be prime minister of India is the crux of the BJP's campaign against Sonia. The party wants to change the constitution to prevent this. In any other constitution citizens who are not naturally born are barred from holding high office, says L.K. Advani, Home Affairs minister and political ideologue of the BJP. Indians have mixed feelings. In Bellary, some see her as an outsider. She can't even speak Hindi, one disgruntled voter comments as he waits for Sonia to arrive at a rally. Others don't seem to care where she was born. She was married to an Indian and that makes her an Indian, says Abdul Hamid, an ice-factory worker. That is the rule in our culture.

Wherever Sonia has campaigned she has played the dynasty card. Mother and son--Indira and Rajiv--gave their lives for India. She says she's prepared to do the same. My destiny is now tied forever with this country, she told Bellary's voters on her first campaign visit. I am ready to make any sacrifice. I will die here in India and be buried here. The pledge appeals strongly to the emotions of the poor and low-caste voters who have been the Congress' traditional supporters.

Sonia is not a natural campaigner. She delivers her speeches in Hindi from a written text, looking stiff and uncomfortable. She is distant, aloof, cold, cautious--in complete contrast to her daughter Priyanka who can work a crowd like a professional. Relaxed, speaking an occasional phrase in the local dialect, familiar with local customs, Priyanka has had the crowds in Bellary at her fingertips. Today I have brought my mother to you. She is yours. Will you love her and elect her? she asked at her mother's first rally. Yes, the masses roared back. It took more than a week before Sonia followed her daughter's example, slipped away from her security guards and plunged into the crowds, driving through the town in an open jeep. The people loved it. (Bellary voted on Sunday, but the result won't be known until October.)

Behind the hype of the Bellary campaign lies a political vacuum caused by the collapse of the all-India parties. Power is moving inexorably away from the center in New Delhi to the states, where political bosses control large communal and caste groups. According to nationalist poet Sunil Gangopadhayay, this is nothing to fear. The real India lives in the regions, he says, so it is natural that the regions will assert themselves in a democracy.

The transition has given those among India's poorest and backward castes--the laborers and workers--a strong voice for the first time. In the past they were dominated by the superior caste of Brahmins and were largely outside the political system. Today their support empowers regional and caste-based parties to make or break governments in New Delhi, where national parties such as the Congress and the BJP cannot win an overall majority. It has also created what Indians call a coalition culture, a euphemism for wheeling and dealing unseen in the days when the Congress Party distributed patronage behind closed doors. There were 42 political parties in the last Indian parliament, including 17 that had just one representative each. Everybody now thinks they can start a political party and become prime minister, says Subramaniam Swamy, a leader of one of the so-called third-force parties outside the two main coalitions.

But Bellary bucked the nationwide trend. Candidates from the regional parties didn't get a look in. The voters had their sights firmly on Sonia. It was an old-style political clash of a kind that may be disappearing in India for good.

With reporting by Subir Bhaumik/Calcutta, Meenakshi Ganguly/Bellary, Maseeh Rahman/Mahbubnagar and R. Bhagwan Singh/Madras