Today’s official announcement about Singh came after the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister who was assassinated in 1991, announced that she would “humbly decline” the post of prime minister–just a day after she had indicated she was likely to take the position. Her decision prompted some of her distraught supporters to threaten suicide. But Sonia Gandhi, a deeply polarizing figure because of her foreign birth, has always said that she entered politics reluctantly after the death of her husband. She said that she sought to salvage the family name, which had been tainted by charges of corruption, and to stave the growing strength of Hindu nationalists.
Philip Oldenburg, associate director of Columbia University’s Southern Asian Institute, says that Gandhi was bullied into politics. He recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about the phenomena that led to her election, her decision to reject the post and what this means for the future of India. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Who is Sonia Gandhi?
Philip Oldenburg: The two questions are: what’s a foreigner doing being the prime minister of India? And the second question is: is she competent? People say “it’s just dynastic politics; people will vote for a lamppost as long as their name was Nehru [India’s first postcolonial prime minister] or Gandhi.” I don’t think that’s true. I think that she has demonstrated a lot of capacity to connect with audiences. I think something that is not understood is that for the last four or five years she’s been leader of the opposition in parliament. And in a parliamentary system, you’ve got to be on your feet, you’ve got to debate in a way that we don’t do in our legislative system. She’s been capable of that. And she’s been doing very well in terms of keeping the Congress Party together. She has, after all run for president and she has been chosen by an intelligent electorate.
And she won by a comfortable margin.
Well, it was not easy. She initially revived the fortunes of the Congress Party when she first took it over. It was not an expected victory, of course. I think she deserves a lot of credit. We still don’t know exactly why people voted out the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]. It was a comfortable margin in seats, but remember it’s a first-past-the-post [plurality voting] system. So the vote swing was actually very negligible. [The] Congress [Party] did better this time because it had some allies and the BJP-led alliance retained its vote share. But because of the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post system, it worked out that that shift in votes, very slight, translates into a totally different seat total.
A lot of analysts have said that the Indian electorate feels like its been left out of the economic boom. That sounds a little simplistic in light of the analysis you just gave.
The trouble is, everyone is making stuff up. As far as I can tell, none of them actually bothered to talk to the Indian voter. What the opinion survey has typically done, they don’t ask why you voted the way you did because that would involve giving them an open ended [question]. You can’t run an opinion poll that way. They do the usual correlations with education and gender, caste and class or whatever it may be. They assert that certain categories have voted a certain way and therefore it must be the poor voted for the Congress, therefore it must be that they’re dissatisfied by economic progress under the BJP.
Is there merit to that analysis?
There may be merit. I’m not going to go out on that same limb and say that’s why it happened. Sanjay Baru [editor of India’s Financial Express newspaper] said before this [BJP] defeat that it’s not that people haven’t done better, it’s that they expect to do even better than they have done. That is a much more plausible explanation. Speaking as someone who spent 2002 and 2003 in India and every summer before that, in the last five years, there has been change in the countryside for the better. It may well be that had the BJP done twice as good as it had, it still wouldn’t have been enough. Let’s say a farmer gets four hours of electricity to irrigate his fields a day. Supposing the BJP doubles the electricity supply, that’s fine, but that’s not enough. He’ll say, “I need 12 or 24.”
Do you have a sense of why Sonia Gandhi dropped out after making the effort to run. Is it fear for personal safety in the light of the murders of her husband and mother-in-law [former prime minister Indira Gandhi]?
She loved her mother-in-law and thought she was a wonderful grandmother, but she did not want her husband to get into politics. She herself did not want to get into politics. Then he was assassinated and she was bullied and pushed, and bullied and pushed until she decided to do it. So there’s an underlying reluctance. I also think she believes that her husband was not guilty of corruption, and she wanted to do everything to get his name cleared that she could. If that involved going into politics, then so be it. She was competent as leader of the opposition, but I never got the impression that she enjoyed it. And she certainly never gave the impression she enjoyed being on the campaign trail.
What about Manmohan Singh, the finance minister who will apparently be the next prime minister?
Well, he’s a very interesting guy. He started out as an economist, a good economist. He’s had a lot of international financial-institution experience. That’s why he was brought in. But he’s a technocrat. He was brought in in 1991 to do the economic reform. He did a brilliant job of that. But that was in 1991. Even though he was defeated in the election for Parliament, he now sits in the upper house, which is a different kind of election. He could have walked away. He could have gotten terrific consulting jobs–six-figure salaries without batting an eyelid. I suspect he got a taste for being in politics. He’s not much of a campaigner, but I think he liked the backroom bargaining.
Is India at a crossroads?
No. One of the striking things about India is its remarkable continuity. Governments change. It may not be helped by the rhetoric of the participants who talk about apocalyptic changes. But it’s very much like American politics. There are major differences between a BJP-led government and a Congress-led government on some very important things, particularly on the cultural side. But there’s an enormous amount of overlap on economic policy, on foreign policy.
How does this election affect relations with the United States?
The one thing in foreign policy is that there has been a change from–particularly in relation to the United States–someone who would like to be [an ally like] Britain to someone who would like to be [like] France. The Congress has–and it’s not just because Sonia is Italian–particularly in Indira Gandhi’s time onward, looked to Europe as the model for international relations.
So could this election be seen at all as a referendum on the war or U.S. policy?
No, there was no issue about that. India declined to participate [in] peacekeeping forces without a U.N. mandate. With a U.N. mandate, I am sure they would have contributed troops. That was the BJP government; the Congress government would have been even more reluctant. But the parliament passed a resolution against it, so I think there’s a commonality there. Certainly the BJP tried to say “Both the U.S. and we are victims of terrorists, therefore we have this natural alliance.” The U.S. said “No, we have to go with Pakistan.”
How will India-Pakistan relations be affected, if at all?
I frankly don’t believe there will be that much change in India and Pakistan relations. There is, of course, the Nixon-and-China factor. If anybody’s going to make peace with Pakistan, it would be better if it were the BJP to do because they have been the most virulently anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistani [party]. If they make it happen, it will stick. In terms of what might be negotiated, I don’t think you’ll see any difference.
