Hopes for change in India

The greatest show on earth is about to begin. One of the miracles of the modern age, Indian democracy, will next month pen its latest chapter when 714 million voters, more than 10 times the 69.5 million who turned out for Barack Obama, set off on a five-stage election marathon from April 16 to May 13. Bookmakers have declared the election as hard to read as Finnegans Wake, with no fewer than seven candidates from nearly 100 competing parties said to have a realistic shot at becoming prime minister.

Many non-Indians will be tempted to see the election as pitting against each other two leaders with distinct national visions. In this case, the incumbent Congress party, led by Manmohan Singh, prime minister, will do battle with L. K. Advani's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which mislaid power five years ago. But many Indians won't see it that way. For them, elections are less about national politics and more about which of a jostling frenzy of smaller parties - many with strictly local, caste-based or religious agendas - is worthy of their attention.

It wasn't always this way. As recently as 1984, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress won a decisive 49 per cent of the vote, giving his party no fewer than 404 of the 543 parliamentary seats. By 1999, the year Atal Bihari Vajpayee marched the BJP to victory, Congress' share had fallen to a paltry 114 seats. The BJP took 182. The minority parties did best of all, grabbing 48 per cent of votes and 247 seats. By 2004, smaller parties had won 260 seats, nearly double the score of the 'victorious' Congress.

Indians are also now less likely to dismiss the incumbent, reversing a longstanding practice, born of perennial disappointment, of 'kicking the bums out'. In the past year, according to Morgan Stanley, six out of 11 incumbents have been returned to office.

In December, when Congress was reeling from economic downturn and the Mumbai attacks, it defied predictions by winning three out of five state elections.

The real business of who runs India will be determined after the election is over, in the backroom dealing and front-of-house horse-trading that will follow. "Cobbling an alliance together is the art and science of politics," is how Prakash Javadekar, the BJP's senior spokesman, puts it.

Given the local flavour of elections, one might wonder whether national politicians carry any weight at all. The answer is: not as much as could be hoped. In such a vast country, matters of everyday importance, including economic growth, water, sanitation and health care vary wildly from state to state.

India's stratified society has always been easier to govern than to change. But there have been exceptions. In 1991, Singh, then finance minister, unleashed a more-or-less-national growth spurt by dismantling some of the obstacles to development. By removing bureaucracy - read patronage and corruption - from the scene, India's bottled-up growth potential was uncorked. Some more of that needs to be done.

The government is still involved in areas where it should not be, stretching its finances by providing often pointless or wasteful subsidies. But in some areas - including the provision of sewers, hospitals, schools and electricity, not to mention transparent rules for doing business - the state needs to play a far more active role.

If politics is failing India so badly, how has the country been progressing so fast? In the past five years, the Congress-led government has overseen growth of roughly nine per cent a year.

Even pessimists say the economy should grow 4.5 per cent next year in what would be one of the world's best performances. Gurcharan Das, author and business consultant, explains the anomaly thus: "Our economy grows at night when the government is asleep."

Yet investors and Indian business leaders want clarity from these elections, a clear winner with a mandate for change. That is the one result they are most unlikely to get. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that democracy is failing India, even though some politicians clearly are.

Indian democracy, as the strong performance of some of its better-run states demonstrates, is perfectly compatible with good governance and fast growth.

The hope for next month's elections is that these qualities can somehow emerge victorious at a national level, however clamorous and baffling the process.

- Financial Times