Aparita

Toronto Star

Voters felt excluded from `Laptop politics.’ Technology policy decisive in election

APARITA BHANDARI

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Hindsight is always 20-20. Unfortunately, Indian cyber minister Chandrababu Naidu’s Vision 2020 - of his state becoming an information-technology superpower by the year 2020 - didn’t have enough foresight.

While the Congress party’s former-economist-turned-politician Manmohan Singh swore in as India’s first Sikh prime minister last week, analysts were still debating what went wrong for Naidu.

He was acknowledged as one the next generation crop of Indian politicians, a man who was known for his laptop politics. For 10 years he was the chief minister of the south-eastern coastal state Andhra Pradesh. He brought an IT revolution to his state, turning Hyderabad, the capital, into Cyberabad.
However, Naidu’s spectacular defeat two weeks ago marked a dramatic conclusion to the Indian elections.

Losing three quarters of the seats in the assembly elections, Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) was ousted by the Congress party. And the defeat of the TDP rocked the boat of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that was in power at the centre.

The TDP was the second-largest member of the coalition in the centre.

Naidu’s rout rocked another boat - the Sensex stock index in Mumbai fell by over 4 per cent the day his defeat was announced, as overseas investors sold $135 million (U.S.) of Indian stocks.
The eventual 17 per cent drop, when the NDA’s defeat became certain, was the biggest Sensex slump ever.

It’s always hard to analyze the vagaries of Indian politics. But there are two main theories floating around, explaining what went wrong for Naidu.

The popular rebellion of those untouched by the India Shining campaign in Andhra Pradesh is one explanation.

The India Shining campaign had been run by the NDA in the run-up to the elections held from April 20 to May 10. The campaign highlighted the country’s progress under the NDA rule - a booming economy, large foreign exchange reserves largely to an ever-growing IT industry.

However, the campaign didn’t address the poor population of India. In Andhra Pradesh, while Naidu was busy inviting the likes of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to the Hyderabad, he forgot the rice farmers of his state.

Naidu’s defeat isn’t much of a surprise, says Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, a political science professor at York University.

“Andhra Pradesh is known for its IT industry, but it’s also known as the state where there were a lot of farmer suicides,” she says. “In a sense it reflects what happened in the rest of India with the India Shining campaign. It was a very narrow, urban, highly skilled middle class - which defines the IT sector - who felt the shine.

“If (Naidu) had paid attention to the degree to which the rural economy was suffering, it might’ve been different. That was a basic miscalculation.”

A completely unbalanced economic policy was largely at fault.

“In India, for the last 50 years, we have this classical theory of economic development,” explains Mukherjee-Reed.

“That if you develop a very advanced, modern corporate core, the rest of the economy in the periphery will be pulled by the core into its orbit. It’s the very famous trickle down theory.

“But the trickle down theory doesn’t work until you have very strong redistributive policies.”

The election result was the Andhra Pradesh voters’ revolt, says Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst and visiting professor at Cornell University.

“They blamed him for whatever went wrong,” says Rangarajan in a telephone interview from New Delhi. “The TDP was a government presiding over a largely agrarian economy, with the largest number of landless labourers in India. There was a very severe drought for the last two-three years in several parts of the state. In one district alone called Anantapur, at least 2,400 farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2004. And that’s a conservative government estimate.

“Yes, Naidu had a Vision 2020. But it was never backed by substance. If you take IT, the software exports of Andhra Pradesh are far behind (the states of) Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, or the city of Mumbai, or the township of Noida in Uttar Pradesh.”

The direction of Naidu’s Vision 2020 was wrong, says Rangarajan. “To take advantage of information technology and modernize, a country has to have a wider base of educated people,” he says. “Of the four southern states, Andhra Pradesh continues to be the lowest in terms of life expectancy, literacy, spending on health and education.

“Take the example of China. For its economic reforms, it reformed agriculture. The Chinese farmers got more money. You don’t build a pyramid from the top down; you have to build a strong base first. Mr. Naidu, perhaps, was looking at pyramid upside down.”

Although Naidu enhanced the connectivity of his state - setting up e-bazaars and models of e-governance - he can’t foist the Malaysian model on Andhra Pradesh.

“Malaysia’s per capita income is two-three times higher than India,” says Rangarajan. “In India 47 per cent of children are malnourished. One out of three women is anemic.

In Andhra Pradesh, they have computers in schools where they don’t have electricity. The people are waiting for the electricity to come, so that they can send an e-mail to the chief minister to tell him they have no power.

“IT is great. But we have to recognize its limitations. NASSCOM (the IT and software industry watchdog) says that by 2008 we will have 800,000 people employed by IT. By 2008, we will also have 669 million people not in IT. Now 1 million might be the pride of India, but they’re a very small part of India.”

The flip side of explaining Naidu’s defeat in the elections has nothing to do with IT. It was a strong coalition against the TDP and the rising expectations of the voters that proved to be Naidu’s nemesis, says political analyst Sanjaya Baru.

“I’ve travelled through Andhra Pradesh and you can’t say that the rural people are any worse off than they were five years ago,” says Baru.

“You can’t exaggerate (the suicide villages). The suicides were committed by farmers who had heavily borrowed and couldn’t pay back their loans. India is a free market economy, and agriculture is a free market sector. People make investment decisions and burn their fingers. Just because a group of farmers found themselves bankrupt, that’s not evidence of widespread rural unhappiness.

“Naidu had effective programs for women, children, health and building roads. The problem was that his image focused on IT. And maybe he didn’t do enough in terms of what people expected of him, but you can’t suggest that he hasn’t done anything at all.”

Trying to understand what happened in Andhra Pradesh in terms of IT is a flawed approach, adds Baru.

“I don’t think one should build too many theories in terms of IT in Indian politics,” he says. “Indian politics have lots of factors - caste coalitions, water, which becomes a major issue during summer elections. This obsession of what happened in Andhra Pradesh in terms of IT is utterly politically ill-informed journalism.”

However, both parties of the analytical spectrum do agree that IT will continue to be an integral part of policy making in India.

“The Congress has committed itself to offer a Naidu plus and not Naidu minus,” says Baru. “That is, the good work done in IT, in bio-tech, in institution building, in urban development, plus focus on areas he had neglected like irrigation, agricultural credit and rural infrastructure. It’ll be business as usual. With a more balanced economic policy.”

There’s no reason for the Congress to backtrack, agrees Mukherjee-Reed.

“It’s in nobody’s interest to turn back,” she says. “The hysteria about what will happen to the economic reforms, and IT is a bit overdone. In terms of IT, India has established a global presence. “So it’s in no one’s interest to harm that. And remember that the rural population may be able to turn the vote, but in terms of day to day policy making, it’s the corporate IT sector that can call up the (chief minister) at will.

Technorati Tags: ChandrababuNaidu, Cyberabad, Politics