Passion against coalition politics and corruption scandals

AS THE final results of the 2014 General Election in India poured in, the next Prime Minister of India, its 14th, Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi, tweeted: “India has won!” Afterward, he further tweeted “In a democracy there are political rivals but no enemies. People’s mandate is important and together we have to work for welfare of the people.”
India just concluded its 2014, 6-week General Election of the Lok Sabha that ran from April 7 through May 12, with 814 million people as eligible voters and 930,000 polling booths, with a voter turnout of 66.4%.
Over 20 years, India’s governments were dominated by coalition politics where one party failed to gain a majority. This time around, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), possibly with support from about 163 million first-time voters and about 100 million young voters, ravenous for change and passionately opposed to the abundant corruption scandals in government, stormed to victory capturing this landslide majority.
Something must be said for the strength of people’s actions, which could be especially glaring in democratic elections. For the second time in India’s post-independence history, the Indian National Congress (INC) party, which was the party of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, lost power to the BJP. The INC party won a mere 44 seats.
The first time the INC lost was in 1998 when the BJP, under Prime Minister, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, formed a government with a coalition. This time in 2014, the BJP, with 283 seats leading a coalition of parties under the banner of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with a total of 336 seats, won a clear majority and now is in a position to form a government on its own, with the people rejecting coalition politics for putting together a government.
But the people seem to accept coalition politics for forming the main opposition in the Lok Sabha. The bottom line is that the official opposition party must carry 1/10 of the seats to become the main opposition party in the Lok Sabha. In this 2014 General Election, no one party among the opposition parties has that 1/10, so there will have to be a coalition among them to create the main opposition party; and together, the opposition coalition will still be way behind the government’s NDA which has 336 seats.
Modi becomes India’s 14th Prime Minister during the era when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of the U.S. perceives India as an emergent world leader, and noted that ‘in keeping with its status as an emerging world power, the government of India exerts strong leadership in global and regional, for and in important bilateral relationships.’ Undoubtedly, then, Modi has a lot on his hands to sustain India’s status as an emerging world power, not only in the area of intelligence and security, but also on the socio-economic front.
And in a recent article ‘Brics& India’ in Modern Diplomacy, with India as an emerging world leader, this author noted that: “On the basis of these selected data, India continues to be the weakling among the BRICS countries on average growth rate, consumer prices, and balance on current account. And its faltering growth rate may be gradually regressing toward the average GDP growth of 6% it had between 2000 and 2005. A high growth rate is necessary for a growing population and a growing workforce, and also a critical economic indicator to maintain its status within BRICS.”
But Modi has been the Chief Minister of State of Gujarat since 2001 and has presented and possibly transformed Gujarat as the global business hub. In the previous five years, Gujarat has had an average annual growth rate of 10.4%, higher than the growth rate of the ‘Asian Tigers’; Gujarat makes available 16% of the nation’s industrial production; and provides 12.7%, the largest share of investments to the nation (http://www.vibrantgujarat.com/strong-economic-credentials.htm, accessed May 17, 2014). And so, if these accomplishments in Gujarat are to have any significance, then India has placed its trust in good hands by handing Modi a landslide.
During the 2014 General Election campaign, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) and Rahul Gandhi of the INC heaped scathing criticisms on Modi’s Gujarat model of development, inferring that it favours the corporate world. Dalrymple, in the New Statesman (2014), pointed out that “…after all, under his stewardship, the economy of the state of Gujarat, for which he has been chief minister since 2001, has nearly tripled in size. He also has a reputation for decisiveness, getting things done, rooting out corruption, stimulating investment and slashing through the bureaucratic red tape and outdated, cumbersome regulations.” The reality is that Gujarat has thrived economically more than most States in India using this model of development.
And within hours of Shri Narendra Modi becoming the new Prime Minister of India, both Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama issued him with invitations to visit their countries. What is interesting is that their invitations came even before Modi takes the oath of office. And perhaps, Obama and Cameron should be the ones visiting the Prime Minister-designate in India as a token of their goodwill on Modi’s elevation to the highest civilian position in the land.
In addition, it may be useful to note that it was the same U.S., under the George W. Bush Administration in 2005, that denied Modi a U.S. visa because of his alleged implication in the anti-Muslim riot in 2002, of which he was absolved. However, visiting the U.S. and Great Britain would hardly be a priority for Modi at this time.
Note, too, that India still is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, something that the U.S. and the Western world want. India and Modi, therefore, are important players on the world scene, so interactions between Modi and the Western world have to be reciprocally beneficial, creating a win-win scenario.

(By Dr. Prem Misir)