There are 714 million votes potentially in play as Indians go to the polls this week -- the first phase in a staggered, month-long national election -- and the outcome is less certain that at any other point in this country's storied electoral history.
Neither of India's two largest parties will come close to having a majority, and the coalitions they have led in the past are in disarray. A profusion of new parties -- regional and caste- or issue-based -- has sprung up, and they are feverishly forming and dissolving alliances. As a consequence, analysts across the political spectrum have deemed this vote too chaotic to call.
Despite having presided over five years of comparatively stable government and economic growth that averaged 9 percent a year, the governing United Progressive Alliance, a coalition led by the Congress Party and including many left-wing parties, is looking lackluster and has lost some of its key allies. The Bharatiya Janata Party, meanwhile, has not managed to broaden its core base of Hindu nationalist supporters and has also lost regional allies.
The leftist parties, including the influential Communist Party of India (Marxist), have banded with some regional parties and small caste- and issues-based parties to form a Third Front -- although it already has trouble keeping its members together. Where in the past the small parties looked to prop up either Congress or the BJP in a coalition, their numbers are such this time around that many observers are predicting they may try to form the government without either of the two historic governing parties.
The vote is an awesome spectacle, beginning Thursday and ending May 13 with the votes from more than 800,000 polling stations. The action at the polls seems certain to be dwarfed by the drama that will follow the vote count on May 16.
"The outcome of the 2009 election will be determined by the 'sixth phase' of polling after May 16," Yogendra Yadav said, speaking of the inevitable post-election haggling to form a government. Yadav is the director of Lokniti: Program for Comparative Democracy, a think tank in the capital.
"The problem with post-poll alliances is that they leave the people out. Pre-poll alliances give voters a chance to reject or endorse them."
If leaders of either Congress or the BJP think they may be able to cobble together a coalition, they will have to make deals in which they parcel off the high-value ministries to small allies.
"India is doomed to have weak, multiparty coalitions, marked by instability and placating of different constituents ... with very little policy reform or governance," predicted Ramachandra Guha, a Bangalore-based political analyst and author of "India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy."
"If Indian economic growth is to be made more inclusive and sustainable, three areas of policy have to be addressed -- health, education and the environment -- and you can be sure that they're not going to get attention. A fourth is foreign policy: India is in an increasingly fragile neighborhood, but no one's talking about sensible foreign policy. Everywhere it will be local factors, peculiar to that region or state."
And yet, he noted, the profusion of new parties is not entirely a negative development. "The breakdown of major parties and emergence of smaller ones can be seen as the deepening of Indian democracy, with the rise to power of regional and caste groups who were not previously included," he said.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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