Sonia Gandhi won with support of poor and rural communities
Mumbai (AsiaNews) Once again India has surprised everyone and proved that it is the world's largest democracy.
All predictions about election results were for an easy victory for the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP), a party which had been in power for the last 5 years in parliament. Encouraged by their victory last fall, when BJP took 3 of 20 state house elections (formerly held by the Congress party), party headsthought that they would come away with a sure victory in the spring general elections.
All party members were excited and transformed their sentiments of "Feeling Good" into a campaign slogan along with its "Shining India" elections pitch.
Surely after the fall of the Soviet "iron curtain", the USSR being India's main ally, India remained isolated to western democracy during the Congress party's 40-year tenure in government. Following the collapse communism, then, India fell of its top position among Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations, a political front which no longer made sense in unipolar world.
The Congress party has now turne the tables while the BJP-led opposition parties tried to exploite the situation. Taking advantage of a climate of fear and distrust toward the Islamic world since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, the BJP party played on the country's widespread disdain for Pakistan (due to the Kashmir conflict) and joined the front lines along with the United States in the international fight against terrorism.
BJP's internal policy led to maximum push for the privatization of industry begun under the Rajiv Gandhi administration, which benefitted the urban middle class, shop owners and industrialists greatly. Automobiles and home appliances are now found everywhere in cites.
BJP's election campaign was kicked off by promising to link India's 4 major cites with a highway system and continuous electrical power supply for AC units and other energy-needy appliances in urban centers while blackouts persist all across India.
However the Congress party, since the times of Mahatma Gandhi, has held onto a stronghold of power in rural communities. Hence, Sonia Gandhi, like her mother-in-law, Indira, turned to the rural population and the inhabitants of 500,000 villages who felt ignored by BJP.
The case of all cases is Taloja, a village 50 km from the centre of Mumbai, but only 1 km outside the metropolitan city limits: here every Friday the electricity is shut off for 8 consecutive hours. Meanwhile everyday, early in the morning and evening (who usage peaks in cities) hours, power is cut off for 2 hours in other small villages. Quite often one of the three power supplies needed to make irrigation pumps work does not arrive. What's more, public transit used to travel to villages is still nationalized and therefore such services are minimal and irregular.
Sonia Gandhi understood why it was important to bank on support from India's village and rural population. In the same way, Y.S. Rajasekhara brought the Congress to power in the state of Andhra Pradesh, after 9 years of domination by Chandrababu Naidu and his regionalist Telugu Desam party. Naidu had launched his party to victory having promised free electric power to farming communities.
It was in the villages where Sonia Gandhi was first able to become accepted as an "Indian", one who could actually defeat the BJP battle horse, when a billion Indian citizens would never want to be governed by an "outsider".
"When I am with women, especially in rural areas, I don't feel at all like an outsider and they don't consider me as such," Gandhi said. Simple people have appreciated the fact that she, like any married Indian girl, went stay in her mother-in-law's home.
One can hope now that Congress party has returned to power that it will renew its advocacy of a secular State and return to having confidence in Muslim, Christian, Dalit and tribal minority populations.
The BJP party had led its radical faction run wild, in campaigning for a solely Hindu state. And we cannot forget that the first 3 states to pass laws against conversions of religion (Orissa, Arunachala Pradesh and Madhya Padesh) were those where Congress had reigned for 40 years. It was precisely Rajiv Gandhi who opened the gates of the hotly debated temple-mosque in Ayodhya. Evidently, the Hindu majority cannot be ignored or left out. Liberty and justice must be guaranteed from one and all.
At any rate, it is right to rejoice in the wisdom and maturity of the Indian population which knows how to change out its rulers by democratic processes.
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07/02/2019 17:28
