The greatest show on Earth
India's general elections are often billed as the biggest democratic show on the planet, and with good reason. This time, some 350 million voters went to the polls, and one million electronic voting machines - some of which had to be transported on elephant-back - were pressed into service across the length and breadth of the subcontinent.
The tussle that ended late on Thursday threw up one of the biggest surprises in recent world politics. Pre-poll estimates suggested that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government, with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at the helm since early 1998, would be returned to power. Their theme was 'India Shining', and a 10.4 per cent growth rate in the last quarter of 2003 drove the point home.
Voters, however, returned a very different verdict. The 119-year-old Indian National Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, widow of former prime minister Rajiv, won a resounding victory, forcing Mr Vajpayee to resign.
A new government led by Mrs Gandhi is expected to be announced over the weekend. Congress and its allies won 216 seats in the 543-member lower house, the BJP camp 188 seats, and the Indian left emerged as the third-largest single party with 62 seats - its best showing since 1947. The anxiety about a hung parliament has been dispelled, as demonstrated by an immediate rally in the stock markets.
What will a Congress-led government mean for India's security and foreign policy, particularly with respect to the United States, China and Pakistan? On the basis of a pre-poll Congress manifesto, it is safe to assume there will be a fundamental continuity. Currently, Indian-US ties are poised for further growth, and this determination to improve relations with Washington will prevail - although there may be a change in nuance and emphasis.
In like fashion, the dialogue with Pakistan agreed in January in the joint statement from Mr Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf will proceed as scheduled. The next phase will be a meeting in Delhi on May 25 and 26 to discuss nuclear and missile-related issues.
Similarly, the new government will nurture the positive tenor of the Sino-Indian relationship which developed on the heels of Mr Vajpayee and Defence Minister George Fernandes' visits to China last year. Relations will be increasingly defined by trade, commerce and technology links. The fact that China's global trade has just crossed the US$1 trillion mark stokes India's aspirations as much as its anxieties.
However, the nature of Indian elections, in which voters who live on less than US$1 a day can change the country's government, has obvious significance for Beijing. India and China must equitably transform the inevitable effects of globalisation and economic liberalisation so the hundreds of millions of poor in both countries can also benefit from those processes. China's lack of democracy and India's uneven progress in poverty alleviation are areas where the two Asian giants have much to learn from each other.
Economic liberalisation in India was begun by a Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s, and the process was carried forward by the Vajpayee administration. Still, the new government, as newly empowered leaders usually do, may review the present economic course. Coalition politics in parliamentary democracies are inevitably tangled and contentious. But this, too, is the essence of the Indian democratic system and the core incandescence that gives India its perennial shine.
Uday Bhaskar is deputy director of India's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
