India: Election time in the world’s biggest democracy

India’s elections are as massive and sprawling as the country itself, said Indian journalist Aakar Patel in Pakistan’s The News. The country has three-quarters of a billion voters, and they go to the polls at different times in all 28 states, so the entire parliamentary vote takes a month to complete. Right now, we’re halfway through this year’s parliamentary elections, yet there’s still no national campaign. Because Indians “vote for identity, not issues,” and the caste makeup differs from state to state, each party must tailor its campaigning to each state. Issues unrelated to identity are unimportant, so parties rarely even mention their platforms—if they have a platform at all. This is true even in the south, which is “more literate, less violent, and more sensible than the north.” Of course, the two biggest parties, Congress and the BJP, do have platforms, but “a lot of it is outright lying.”

Identity politics makes for a chaotic legislature, said Bhaskar Dutta in India’s The Telegraph. “Caste, religion, and ethnic divisions have all assumed greater significance” in recent years, and there’s at least one niche party for each group. In the last election, in 2004, fully 37 parties were represented in the 545-seat legislature. “Not surprisingly, many of these parties were very small,” with fewer than five seated members. The proliferation of tiny parties ensures that no single Indian party gets an outright majority. Instead, whichever big party gets a plurality has to cobble together a “large and unwieldy coalition” made up of “ideologically disparate members.” That’s a recipe for stagnation. Indian governments rarely undertake major policy initiatives, because some members of the coalition are bound to disagree with any given idea.

Many of these small parties are downright kooky, said Amulya Ganguli in India’s The Statesman. The Samajwadi Party, for instance, which has a “retrogressive mind-set totally out of sync with the modern world,” campaigned this year on promises to stop the spread of computers and ban the teaching of English. In many parts of the country, where “caste-ism is the driving force,” parties compete to promise the intermediate castes the kind of affirmative-action benefits given to the lower castes. “What is odd is that none of these parties try to break out of their confines and acquire the status and outlook of a national party.” They seem perfectly happy in their little niches. This may be because they tend to be “one-leader parties,” whose guiding principles are simply the personal quirks of the founder rather than an overarching philosophy.

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No wonder many Indians don’t bother to vote, said Santosh Desai in India’s Tehelka.com. Politicians spend the entire campaign bickering on television talk shows. “By now, we’re past caring who likes whom and who doesn’t. In any case, the relationships between parties seem more fickle than Paris Hilton’s love life.” Turnout has been lower than expected so far this year. Even in Mumbai, where pundits had predicted a large showing on the assumption that last year’s terrorist bombings in that city had mobilized the population to take an interest in politics, turnout was less than 50 percent. Indians are tired of narrow-minded leaders and broken promises. They are increasingly convinced that “voting is a mug’s game.”