Long-time World Policy Journal editorial board member Shashi Tharoor has been elected to India’s parliament in the country’s fifteenth general election. Running from his home town of Thiruvananthapuram, Tharoor garnered a historic margin of victory of more than 100,000 votes. “I am truly humbled by the extraordinary level of trust the voters of Thiruvananthapuram have placed in me, and I am conscious that now is when the real work begins,” wrote Tharoor, a man on the move, from his Blackberry.
Tharoor’s success helped the Congress Party, on whose ticket he ran, win a landslide victory. Trouncing predictions of a fractured and fragile coalition as the most likely outcome of an election in which more than 400 million of India’s 700 million-plus eligible voters cast ballots in five phases over one month, India’s grand, old Congress Party won outright 262 of the 272-seat majority required to form a government. The stunning victory by the party that came to power with the birth of the Republic of India more than 60 years ago has left both India’s Left and Right in tatters.
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Such a clear mandate by a party that has positioned itself as a force for religious tolerance and economic growth tempered by concern for India’s very poor majority has been hailed by business leaders around the world as a welcome outcome. India’s stock exchanges shot up on the news.
But as Tharoor points out, Congress has little time to waste on celebration. India is facing a gauntlet of serious challenges, and the ability of the new government to chart a course through a widening wealth gap, a deteriorating environment, a growing water and agricultural crisis, and hemorrhaging cities—while dealing with a region fraught with conflict and insecurity—is not made easier by the current global economic and climate crises.
During the five-year term that ended with this election, the Congress Party was able to blame a lack of sufficient progress on a fractured, and at times contentious, coalition government. With India’s communist parties reduced to a mere 24 seats from the 60 they held previously, and the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party down to 160 seats—more than one hundred fewer than the Congress Party—the excuse of an insufficient hold on the reins of power has evaporated. The onus is now on the Congress Party to make good, finally, on the promises it made to the people of India more than six decades ago to eliminate poverty and create a just and equal society.
Given the Congress Party’s current policies, the world’s business and financial elite, as well as India’s aspiring middle class, is betting that a lot of wealth will be created in India during the new government’s five-year mandate. But India’s poor, despite the implementation of massive social programs, such as the fairly successful National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, are increasingly marginalized by these same policies. Accelerated liberalization of India’s economy, on which the private sector is literally banking, will be devastating both to the poorest, who have become more impoverished even as the country posted impressive economic growth numbers, and to India’s environment, on which precisely those sectors have fueled India’s economic growth that has had the most negative impact.
India’s once-again Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged that growth will be both sustainable (by which, alas, he does not mean environmentally sustainable but merely able to sustain a certain momentum) and inclusive. That it must be.
However, his previous administration, committed to making India a major power and to protecting its interests in a region fraught with conflict, also acted to ramp up India’s military capability, signing the nuclear deal with the United States as well as a series of lucrative defense contracts with the United States and Israel. Members of the Bush administration with which Singh’s government advanced a strategic partnership on many fronts, including industrial agriculture, are particularly cheered by the Congress Party’s victory and the humiliating defeat suffered by the communist parties that vowed to undo both the Indo-U.S. Civil Nuclear Agreement and the U.S.-India Agricultural Knowledge Agreement.
With India’s Left firmly out of the picture, the relationship between the corporate powerhouses of India and the United States, particularly in defense-related areas and in agriculture, where the agreement favors the expansion of genetically engineered crops and on whose board sit Monsanto, Archers Daniels Midland, and Wal-Mart, will now know virtually no bounds.
I for one do not believe that this is good news for India’s peasant farmers, environment, or urban consumers despite arguments from big agribusiness that handing agriculture over their tender mercies is the only way India will meet its growing food needs in a world slammed by global warming. There is simply too much evidence to the contrary, beginning with the alarming report by 400 scientists working under the auspices of the World Bank and United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology stating that “business as usual is not an option” anymore when it comes to agriculture.
Whether Congress can deliver both the profit-making opportunities transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex want and the environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economy India’s people need, and the planet now requires, is the question. The next five years will provide the answer.
Given the stakes, it is a comfort to know that someone as committed, as informed, as intelligent, and as honest as Shashi Tharoor will play a role in India’s new government. Few expect him to remain focused primarily on the good people of Thiruvananthapuram for long. India’s daunting challenges require people of his talent in Delhi, working on a national level, and India’s parliamentary system allows elected representatives to assume cabinet-level responsibilities whenever they are invited. At the World Policy Journal, we’ll be observing Tharoor’s and the rest of the Congress Party’s progress in shaping India’s future, a future in whose outcome we will all share, one way or another.
Mira Kamdar is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World (Scribner, 2008).