Vote and Voting

New Delhi: The FanSpeak article of the week speaks about the political wrangles that led to the IPL moving out of India. In an article aptly titled The Indian Political League, the author Mahesh Sethuraman says "any talk of separating cricket from politics in India is living in denial of reality".
Politics and BCCI have never been far away. To move Jagmohan Dalmiya out, it required a man of Sharad Pawar's political Stature. Lalit Modi's nexus with ex-Rajasthan chief minister is too well known. And a lot of the state cricket associations' office bearers are affiliated to various political parties as well. So any talk of separating cricket from politics in India is living in denial of reality.

After weeks of ping ponging with the government, the BCCI has finally acted decisive or is it blackmail? Despite preparing nearly 50 possible schedules as alternatives to factor in almost all possible scenarios, IPL officials could not get the government to give a clear go ahead for the second edition of IPL.

Along the way Maharashtra government announced their support to hold IPL in Mumbai with modified schedule and withdrew soon, Political parties expressed his interest to utilise IPL slots for election campaign advertising until Lalit Modi said no to any political advertising in IPL and in the meanwhile Lalit Modi lost a none too irrelevant election in Rajasthan Cricket Association. No wonder that IPL venue for Rajasthan Royals was shifted even before election security issues cropped up.

So what's the real issue here? The rhetoric of "which is more important to the country – Elections or IPL?" hardly makes sense. Does the EPL stop when there are elections in England? No, so why should it be a problem here. But that's because EPL doesn't ask for paramilitary forces from the government to be able to conduct its tournament. So once the IPL has asked for it (sad after effects of Mumbai attack and more importantly the recent attack on Srilankan cricketers in Pakistan), they have no choice but to work around the government’s constraints (however real or unreal they maybe).

It all looks fine so far. So isn't taking IPL offshore the most sensible solution albeit all the compromises involved. But it's fine only if there is nothing more to it than what meets the eye. But that's hardly a convincing hypothesis. Surely there seems to be political power play at work. BCCI was either too ignorant or too arrogant to not figure out that the Pakistani attack had huge ramifications on IPL and that coupled with the announcement of election schedule should have ensured they were working with the government from the early stages to sort out the security arrangements. But they were busy assuring the media that India is a safe country and it'll go ahead as per schedule and presumed it's their birthright to ask for paramilitary forces for security support.

Voters distinguishing good from bad incumbency would be the best outcome.
The spectacle that is Indian democracy—that justly-mined source of India’s soft power—will be on full display in the next two months. And one question will be insistently asked: will the outcome lead to better policies, especially economic policies? Answers to this question will focus on the immediate future: on the fortunes of the Congress and BJP, the potential of the Third Front, possible coalitions, the drawing power of various politicians such as Mayawati, and so on.
But this election may turn out to be important less for these proximate outcomes than perhaps for what it signals about the democratic process itself. There is just a tiny sliver of possibility that this election—especially at the level of the states—may signal a turnaround in the deep failings of Indian democracy, raising hope for better economic policies in the future. How so?
For some time now, we have given up on the promise of democracy as a mechanism of ongoing accountability. But we still harbour hope in the promise of democracy as a mechanism of episodic accountability. That is, while society is unable to discipline the daily, deadly predation of politicians and related parasitic species, at least it can throw the rascals out once every five years.
The sustaining fiction or rather delusion in all this, of course, is that somehow the incentives created by this once-in-every-five-years exercise of people power will be strong and positive enough to deliver some of the benefits of ongoing accountability in the form of better public institutions: a less corrupt political process, a more effective and less tardy system of justice, a more responsive bureaucracy etc.
But the distinctively Indian phenomenon of anti-incumbency in politics raised doubts even for this objective of episodic accountability. After all, how can a system be considered as appropriately incentivised if the incumbents are thrown out routinely, regardless of their performance (leaving aside the important exception of the overthrow of Mrs Gandhi in 1977)? Indeed, anti-incumbency did not just de-incentivise politics, it actually created perverse incentives. If electoral failure is guaranteed, looting overwhelming dominates delivering essential services as a governing strategy.
In an insightful recent piece, Pratap Bhanu Mehta has drawn attention to the possibility that anti-incumbency may be losing its iron grip on Indian politics, and attenuating the disconnect between performance in office and subsequent performance in the polls (notable recent examples here include Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Sheila Dixit in Delhi and Naveen Patnaik in Orissa).
To some extent this ought to have been a corollary of economic decentralisation. Indeed, in a paper that I co-wrote (Chapter 2 of my recent book, India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation, and available at http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/subramanian2006.pdf), we found strong evidence that beginning in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, state-level economic growth was more strongly correlated with state-level institutions and policies in a way that was not true before the 1980s. The chart from that paper illustrates this strong correlation, where state-level institutions are proxied by the transmission and distribution losses of state electricity boards.
This correlation provided some basis for being optimistic about politics. Good policies deliver good economic outcomes, which provides an opening for opportunistic politicians. One political economy question was, of course, whether voters could trace the causation from good economic outcomes to the “policies” of, and hence give credit to, governments. Pratap Mehta’s new argument is that this attribution is easier for voters when the coinage of politics is “money,” and indeed the 2003-2008 boom in the revenues of state governments allowed good leaders to use this coinage to good effect. But the re-elections of Modi, Dixit and Patnaik suggested that voters could see and trace the benefits not just of fiscal spending but of good governance more broadly.
There is good news then for a politically decentralised India. It is not essential that there be such responsive politics all across India and all at the same time. It is sufficient that there are a few visibly successful experiments, allowing demonstration effects and the competition-between-states dynamic—which are the keys to India’s long-run development—to facilitate their spread throughout India.
Not just for broad governance but in relation to specific sectors too, there is promising experimentation going on. Take the case of the last and impregnable bastion of the licence raj: higher education. Reforms flowing down from Delhi seem unlikely. But enough states are creating enough of a policy framework to allow progress to be made in improving higher education. One promising prospect is the Vedanta-financed university that is in the works in Orissa which, if successful, could prove to be a model that elicits rapid emulation.
An important policy implication follows for the Thirteenth Finance Commission. Successive commissions have struggled to balance the competing objectives of equity (giving more fiscal resources to the poorer states) and efficiency (linking resources to performance to strengthen the incentives for good governance). If India’s long-run economic future is indeed going to be strengthened by the twin processes of political decentralisation and more responsive state politics, the Commission should, on balance, err on the side of greater fiscal devolution. This not only means favouring the efficiency objective over the equity objective at the margin when it comes to sharing the pooled fiscal resources. It also means ensuring that a greater share of resources is raised in the states themselves than at the centre so that there is less to redistribute.
As the election results start trickling in, the eyes of India and the world will be on who will occupy power in Delhi. But India’s long-run economic future may well hinge on what happens in the states. The greater the signs that voters renounce anti-incumbency and distinguish between good incumbency and bad incumbency, the more reasons to rejoice: not just for the well-conducted ritual, for the “sheer romance” of Indian democracy, but for its substantive future, and hitherto elusive promise.

In 2004, the CPI (M) fought the elections with twin goals: defeat the BJP and maximise Left presence in Parliament. The party was spectacularly successful in this. This time, the CPI (M) aims to strengthen the Left and democratic forces and form an alternative secular government.
The CPI (M)’s general secretary Prakash Karat has played a pivotal role in the formation of a Third Front. In an interaction with K.V. Prasad, he talks about the emerging political scenario.
This is the first time the CPI (M) is contesting a general election after you became the General Secretary. What is the new strategy to increase the CPI (M)’s presence in the Lok Sabha?

The election line of the party does not depend on who the General Secretary is. The Central Committee decides the party’s political approach and tactics for elections. As for strategy, the role the CPI (M) played in national politics in the last five years is going to be basis on which we will go to the people. We expect that people will recognise that we played an important role in defending national sovereignty and ensuring that certain pro-people commitments made in the Common Minimum Programme were implemented. We strived hard to see that polices that were harmful to people were not adopted.
Your overall political assessment in the country and that of the Left parties’ performance in particular.
The overall political situation in the country has been marked by the failure of the two major parties, with the Congress and the BJP unable to win increased support. The other factor is that both the alliances, the UPA and the NDA, are in the doldrums. The country is experiencing the adverse impact of global economic crisis, [with] growing economic difficulties of the people, whether it is loss of lakhs of jobs, rise in the prices of essential commodities or agrarian crisis. None of these are being effectively tackled by the Congress-led Government. At the same time, the BJP has proved incapable of rising above its sectarian and communal agenda. This has created a situation where the emergence of a Third Force has become credible and gathered momentum. The CPI (M) and the Left parties are working to build an effective non-Congress, non-BJP alternative.
The CPI (M) leadership was mandated to strive for a third alternative. How much of this task has been accomplished?

We had envisaged a third alternative based on policies opposed to that of the Congress and the BJP. Such an alternative needs to be built over a period but for this Lok Sabha election, we are striving for an electoral alternative. This platform will broadly cover four major areas: initiate pro-people economic policies as against neo-liberal policies; firm defence of secularism; strong federalism; and independent foreign policy. It is around such a platform that an alternative can be set up.
Has the CPI (M) given the Bahujan Samaj Party a greater l profile than the party had achieved so far?
The BSP had acquired a national profile after its victory in Uttar Pradesh assembly in 2007 and it is not the CPI (M), which has contributed. What we have done is to identify areas of cooperation between the Left and BSP during the trust vote in July 2008. You had mentioned that the effort this time would be to ensure that a non-Congress and non-BJP Government is not rocked by either party from the outside. How do you plan to do this?

We have the experience of having non-Congress secular governments in the country. In 1989-90, it was the National Front Government of V.P. Singh in 1996-98, it was the United Front Government. They were destabilised by the Congress or the BJP or together. Our effort in these elections is to muster enough strength for a non-Congress secular government to be able to run on its own. It is a difficult task but given the churning that is going on in Indian politics, it is not impossible.
Is the issue of whether the new national alternative should seek the support of the Congress settled? Or has it been left for the future?
As I said, we would like to see an alternative secular government, which will have the strength to run on its own steam. What will happen after the elections cannot be speculated now. It will have to take into account post-election situation. Realignment [of political forces] is bound to happen. We do not expect the UPA and the NDA to remain in the present form.

March 25 (Bloomberg) -- It took eight years for Anurag Kashyap to make “Gulaal.” Yet this tale of political intrigue on a campus in northwest India is timely, with general elections scheduled for April and May in the world’s largest democracy.

ENTERING the home of Maneka Gandhi in New Delhi some years back was a slightly nervous experience. About 15 dogs including large mastiffs lolled on the pathways and across the entrance, eyeing you like fresh meat.


As it turned out, none of them were on a meat diet, and Maneka was no friend to the butchers of the Indian capital. A strict vegan herself, she fed her pets on vegetarian substitutes, and at the time was busily galvanising a crackdown against the city's butchers for alleged cruelty to animals.

Her then-teenage son Varun, she proudly informed me, had been weaned on a formula made from ground lentils and water, rather than cow's milk.

In a country where, more than in most places, you are what you eat, the issue of diet easily morphs into a communal one. In India, the meat and skin trades are largely left to Muslims and the former Untouchables. Vegetarianism is often a mark of Hindu higher castes, and religions such as Jainism and Buddhism.

Not surprisingly, Maneka and Varun eventually transferred their political loyalties to the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. For Maneka, this is the latest in a series of political shifts. A journalist from a Delhi socialite background, she joined the Congress party's ruling dynasty with her marriage to Sanjay Gandhi, second son of the late prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Sanjay was the son his mother couldn't resist, and seen as her political heir-apparent. He flourished as a bully boy during her 1975-77 suspension of democracy, leading a campaign of compulsory sterilisation and garnering state funds for his pet car project.

When Sanjay was killed doing aerobatics in his light aircraft, his milder-mannered elder brother Rajiv was reluctantly drafted into politics and took over Congress leadership and the prime ministership on Indira's assassination in 1984. Maneka became estranged, and joined the leftist Janata Dal that pushed Rajiv out of power in 1989, becoming a minister for two years. In the 1990s she played her hand as an independent, aligning with BJP coalitions, before formally signing up to the BJP itself in 2004.