This Article is From Apr 26, 2014

The last truly national election was in 1984

(Patrick French is an award-winning historian and political commentator. His books include 'Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division', 'The World Is What It Is' and 'India: A Portrait'.)

Does India have a truly national politics? The independence movement was founded on the idea: namely that region, religion and language were transcended by an intrinsic sense of shared nationhood. Though Winston Churchill claimed India was "no more a single country than the Equator," and that independence would bring not liberation but dictatorship by what he called "the Hindoo priesthood," such statements are no more than a reminder that an eminent leader of one country can be profoundly and historically wrong about another. Much of the 1950s, 60s and 70s were spent with Congress securing that sense of national identity through political programs that were, if not always successful, grounded in an impression of national coherence and unity.

Today, regional and identity-based parties make India's national politics much more complex. Though Congress has been in power at the centre for ten years, it is no longer the default option for voters: the last truly national general election was in 1984, when after his mother's assassination Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister with more than 400 seats in the Lok Sabha. That sort of margin of victory is no longer conceivable, in an era when alliances and tie-ups are essential for success.

When Dr Jayaprakash Narayan founded the Lok Satta Party in 2006, it was with the aim of altering the working processes of politics. A senior IAS officer turned activist, his movement can be credited with successes including the compulsory declaration of assets and criminal records by aspiring candidates. But even as elections have become more diffuse and volatile, those elected to office remain disproportionately powerful.

"No country on earth has such an abject dependence on politicians," he told me recently at his home in Hyderabad. "A power outage, a water shortage, a death certificate, a place in hospital - you have to approach a politician, and that's the genesis of our money politics. We never created an accountable bureaucracy during colonial times, and then this whole socialist mumbo-jumbo created more centralization of power into the hands of leaders, not the people. That's why there's such a strong anti-establishment feeling in India. It's a myth that we have a national politics - it's all about the arithmetic of how you respond to your state government, and in reality most people vote the same way for their MLA as for their MP. I don't like to acknowledge that Delhi is important, but maybe it's wishful thinking."

Dr JP was both right and wrong. Most voters make their decision at the ballot box primarily on the basis of local or state-level factors. But Delhi remains crucially important, because of its unique control over key decisions. Take his own state of Andhra Pradesh: if the centre had not granted the creation of the new state of Telangana earlier this year, the electoral arithmetic in Andhra could be entirely different. Whether this central authority will endure for very long is questionable. The more power that is handed over to state leaders, the less influential Delhi becomes. At future general elections, the regional parties may have an influence that would not have been conceivable back in the early decades after independence. So even while India's national cohesion remains strong, its national politics are steadily dissolving.

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