Elections under international glare
HOW much foreign presence or involvement is too much in India’s elections? Answering a question from the audience following a lecture shortly after being appointed External Affairs Minister in 2019, S Jaishankar said: “My reputation is not made by a newspaper in New York.” The question was about criticism by The New York Times over ‘democratic backsliding’ by the Modi government, abrogation of Article 370 in J&K and India’s new, muscular foreign policy. Taking a cue from the minister, Indian ambassadors have become confrontational and provocative in their dealings with host media in the countries where they are posted. Perhaps, because it is the election season, a controversy last week about the Ambassador in Dublin (Ireland) defending Modi against local newspaper criticism made front-page news and dominated television headlines. As policy, for a country which has a colonial history and has been a hapless whipping boy for the so-called free media in the West frequently, this approach has definite merits.
It is moot if global participation without reputed civil society institutions watching the polls is worse than having no observers from abroad at all.
Contrast such headstrong public diplomacy by the Modi government to the BJP Foreign Affairs Department’s decision to invite around 20 political parties from foreign countries to witness India’s elections. The selective invitations reflect a craving in the ruling party for global approval, yet not knowing how to go about it. Its decision to bypass political parties from the world’s oldest democracy — the US — is an acknowledgement that the hosts do not want to take chances. The BJP is risk-averse to foreign criticism on issues such as the arrests of Opposition CMs like Arvind Kejriwal and charges that Central investigative agencies — the Enforcement Directorate, in particular — are being selectively used against Opposition leaders. The convenient excuse for not inviting Republican and Democratic party representatives is that the US is in the middle of its own elections. But that poll is only in November and Americans would not have missed an opportunity to preach democracy to Indians. That precisely was the problem. The BJP’s external interlocutors welcome approval but reject censure by foreigners.
The grapevine in New Delhi is replete with tittle-tattle about European political parties having spurned the ruling party’s invitations to experience and understand the biggest electoral exercise in human history. Elections at various levels in several European nations are being used as a pretext to justify the tepid or no response to the invitations. Observing elections, especially in countries perceived as only partly democratic or as ‘evolving’ democracies, is big business in Western civil society. But credible observers visit poll-bound countries only on their terms, not at their hosts’ beck and call. So, the BJP’s department is left with enthusiastic acceptances — from Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Nepal, Bangladesh’s pro-India ruling dispensation and the ever-obliging Mauritius — to name some. Seventeen overseas political parties are expected to tour BJP-ruled states in the second week of May. Their numbers may increase to include usual suspects like Sri Lanka. It is moot if such international participation without reputed global election-watching civil society institutions is worse than having no observers from abroad at all.
Modi was a pioneer in securing external involvement in elections in Gujarat, and in deploying technology then unavailable in India into the campaign for the 1995 Assembly polls. As state general secretary of the BJP, he asked some pro-RSS doctors from the UK — all NRIs — to fly to Ahmedabad in the campaign season and bring with them the latest video cameras. India’s customs rules did not allow such luxury items into the country then, but they could be brought in under Transfer Baggage Re-export rules. That meant the details of these video cameras would be entered into the passports of the passengers, who would have to re-export them at departure. As a reporter who covered the historic BJP victory in that Assembly election, I watched how those cameras expertly wielded by the NRIs made the Congress campaign lacklustre and appear backward. The BJP has won every election in Gujarat since 1995.
In the ongoing elections, one constituency where a large number of NRIs are expected to cast their votes is Thiruvananthapuram, where India’s best-known ‘global citizen’, Shashi Tharoor, is the Congress candidate for an unprecedented fourth term as the MP of Kerala’s capital. The NRIs who have not acquired foreign citizenship and have a permanent residence in India mentioned in their passports can now vote in Indian elections. Many Gulf Indians consider Tharoor as one of them because his presence among them is ubiquitous —launching books, speaking at conferences, even acquiring the chairmanship of a Dubai-headquartered company soon after he left the service of the United Nations. This company, Afras, set up an innovative Academy for Business Communications in Kerala’s Technopark, which was to be the launch pad for Tharoor’s political career in India.
Many rich Malayalis in the Gulf aspire to be politicians back home. A few have succeeded. They are attracted to the All India Professionals’ Congress, which Tharoor founded in 2017 and was its chairperson until last year. When he first contested in 2009, it was not unusual to hear entire conversations on his campaign trail in French, one of the UN’s six official languages. Tharoor made extempore speeches in French when he was a long-time UN civil servant. Many of his campaigners in 2009, who came from New York, Geneva and Liberia, were more comfortable speaking French than English. A fascinating account of that campaign was published on May 22, 2009, in The Wall Street Journal, written by Keerthik Sasidharan, an investment banker who had travelled from New York to Thiruvananthapuram to join Tharoor’s campaign. He wrote about the propensity of religious and social leaders in the state to talk to outsiders about everything, from Gaza to the Black history of the US, but evade the core issue — support by their congregations for Tharoor.
His BJP challenger now, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, must tap into the Malayali fascination for pravasi life. Chandrasekhar does not have much time left before polling on April 26.
