Current mood:

shocked

NPR and I definitely didn't see the Indian elections the same way
While I was in India, the elections were very much part of daily life -- the news covered it constantly, tv networks showed PSAs asking the (middle class, newswatching, and somewhat electorally disenfranchised*) populace to vote, and in villages and smaller towns, trucks with flowers and loudspeakers rolled around broadcasting party messages. Elections shaped decisions about travel since police often stopped cars traveling to smaller towns and villages to check for bribe money (I was in a car one day that was stopped 5 times). Election day is supposed to be a work holiday (though the firm I was at worked). And alcohol doesn't get sold the day before the election because the authorities want to prevent alcohol-facilitated electoral disruptions and violence. After all the build up I witnessed, I was anxious to know what happened.

I turned on NPR this morning on my way to Long Beach for a meeting with my advisor. I'd seen someone reading an NY times that had a picture of Sonia Gandhi and something about "landslide" election results in the bottom corner.

The election coverage was reduced to just a few minutes that didn't even name the party that won -- I'm assuming it was Congress, the Gandhi/Nehru party. The winning party was described only as the one supporting "economic reform" which is code for trade liberalization and loosening of regulations on global finance. The analyst quoted said that India is often criticized for being too slow to "reform" and that with "capital comes in knowledge" -- we're left to make the inference that this will all lead to goodness and apple pie (or rice for everyone ESPECIALLY the middle and upper classes, as the hope here might be).

I was shocked. Economic "reform" and liberalization certainly isn't what I experienced the election being battled on, at least overtly. Religious "communal" conflict was the most overt issue that charged the battle between Congress and the BJP, the two major parties. To grossly oversimplify, the people I was hanging around was seen as a Hindu nationalist party that worked to stoke the difficulties of the poor into electoral passion through veiled anti-Muslim speeches (BJP's Varun Gandhi said "we'll cut the throats of the muslims" during a village speech, getting himself thrown in jail). Modi, a wildly popular BJP candidate, was suspected by many to have turned a blind eye during the 2002 post-Godhra riots in which thousands of Muslims were killed. And the Congress jettisoned a several-term MP candidate Tytler because of ongoing insinuations (though he'd been officially cleared) that he'd helped lead anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination 20 years ago. Even among the globally laboring middle class, where I was situated during my 7 weeks there, secularism and government corruption were the things I heard worries about -- not more economic liberalization.

Given this, and the fact that India is 70% rural voter turnouts in cities are often lower, I was shocked to hear NPR basically summarize the election as a mandate for economic liberalization -- free trade, low taxes, open doors for global companies.

I was even more shocked to hear them summarize liberalization as foreign capital brings foreign knowledge brings goodness since liberalization and open capital borders in Africa during the 90s have been a spectacular failure, supporting the growth of corrupt governments who let oil and mineral companies set extractive shops that let them use foreign workers and technology to take the natural resources and run. (The most stable, democratic governments in Africa are the ones that did *not* open their doors to trade reform. Source: Gupta and Ferguson, "Global Shadows"))

And giving the whole thing a poetic conclusion was that during the newsbreak, I heard over the speaker "NPR is sponsored by Monsanto..." -- Monsanto being one of the companies whose nonrenewable seeds is partly causing the debt traps a rash of Indian farmers were escaping by suicide.

*the middle class seems somewhat disenfranchised as far as I can tell because I heard lots of people talking about how they felt that there were no good choices to vote for, that the politicians basically diverted resources to the poorer constituencies just before elections resulting in frequent power outages in more middle class areas, and by the fact that voter registration requirements made it seem very difficult for people who move their residences every few years to get registered. (Of those who had recently finished college, graduate school, or just changed jobs and cities, only the most diligent among them seemed to have managed to get registered to vote.)