India’s bookies are still holding out on the Congress party scraping through a largely issueless election with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the firm favourite to retain his post. They have given L.K. Advani, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a 3-1 chance to win the top job.

But are the bookies, who operate below the radar, missing out on a possible late advance by BJP?

Shares rose 4 percent to their highest close on Tuesday on investor speculation that the BJP, seen as business-friendly, may have gained momentum in the final stages of a mammoth election.

Isn’t it a bit unusual that Dalal Street is betting on a BJP win while the bookmakers are sticking to the Congress?

Or is it just speculation in an election as muddled as this, with no real clear pattern?

The lack of any polls makes it even more difficult. Perhaps there will be some clarity once the exit polls begin rolling out after the final phase of voting ends on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not contesting elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower and popular house of parliament.

This is for reasons of health and also because the constitution permits the prime minister to be a member of either of the two houses of parliament.

Like Singh, we have had prime ministers from the Rajya Sabha earlier but they sought to get elected to the lower house and succeeded easily.

As the de facto head of the government, the prime minister is expected to earn people’s approval directly.

Mayawati recently took a dig at Singh over the issue.

“This Manmohan Singh has not contested any public election…he was brought back door in Rajya Sabha and made prime minister,” the Bahujan Samaj Party chief said at an election rally.

“If Manmohan can become PM, why can’t an educated Dalit woman.”

This is possibly the first instance in Indian politics where the sitting prime minister has decided to stay away from the race.

But should India’s prime minister be a member of the Lok Sabha?

The opposition, after initially trying to make it a poll issue, now seems to have lost the plot.

The question keeps popping up on internet discussion boards.

FOR

– Those who support the idea of a prime minister from the lower house say that a popular vote marks acceptability by the people as compared to someone nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

– Such a person having earned the people’s mandate is seen as less susceptible to manipulation.

– A person’s performance as an MP is seen as a necessary test of his competence and claim to the top job.

– Some even suggest that a prime ministerial candidate should seek election with a pre-announced team, something like the shadow cabinet system in Britain.

AGAINST

– The most convincing argument against the idea is that the constitution puts no such caveat.

– The upper house is seen as a talent pool where competent candidates are sent after consideration. This compensates for impulsive behavior of voters which can sometimes make “good” candidates unelectable. For example, Manmohan Singh lost the 1999 Lok Sabha election from the posh South Delhi constituency.

– It is also felt that any prime minister would work according to the party’s ideology, membership of a house being irrelevant to his policies and performance.

– Moreover, the prime minister is in any case indirectly elected (by the party MPs), so the argument of his having greater acceptance may not cut much ice.

– Some feel that if the person is a representative of the majority party and competent then nothing else should count. Others say the proposal calls into question the very rationale of having an upper house, and therefore, needs to be fleshed out.

One comment on the online forum points to the question being a moral rather than a legal one.

There are two facts to bear in mind.

In the Westminster system of democracy, a prime minister from the upper house would be an anachronism.

Secondly, the constitution review commission recognised the lower house’s pre-eminence in its recommendation that the prime minister be directly elected by the house in the event of a hung poll verdict.

As for the practical aspect, the Congress is contesting around 400 seats in these elections, and finding a safe seat for a politician like Manmohan Singh, the sitting prime minister, should have been easy.

In March, opposition leader L.K. Advani raised the issue at an election rally.

“Singh will be more acceptable to the people of India if he decides to fight the elections and go to the Lok Sabha,” he said.

Did Advani have a valid point?

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India’s general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

“Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony,” he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad’s campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: “The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place.”

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India’s powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory “hate speech” against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country’s home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP’s pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won’t necessarily help Kumar’s attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally’s pledge:

“The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda,” he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India’s economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

“In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar.”

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar’s ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

“It’s a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani,” Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad’s party, told me. “L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism.”

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

Indian political parties and leaders are courting young voters for the upcoming general elections and the age of political leaders like L.K. Advani and Rahul Gandhi is being made into an electoral issue.

After all nearly two-thirds of India is below 35 years of age, the cut-off for ‘youth’ according to the National Youth Policy.

But does the electorate care?

A number of surveys and studies seem to suggest otherwise.

One nation-wide survey reported in the ‘Mint’ newspaper shows voters may not quite prefer “fresh and young” candidates, with two-thirds of the 17,640 people sampled preferring experienced candidates.

A series of post-poll surveys carried out since 1996 by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows voter turnout is highest in the age group 46-55. The turnout in the age group 18-25 has been consistently lower.

However, a study by the Imagindia institute says parties that put up candidates in the age group 30-45 have an advantage. This is based on what the institute calls ‘Age-Voter pulse model’. It assumes that the ability of a candidate to connect with the pulse of voters depends upon the age difference with the electorate.

Being a layman I am in no position to argue with the maths of the model but another study by PRS Legislative Research caught my attention.

This says that ‘young’ MPs (those aged less than 40) participated the least in the 14th Lok Sabha proceedings. They accounted for 11 percent of seats but only around seven percent of debates.

MPs over the age of 70 accounted for 10 percent of seats and nine percent of total debates.

In other words, their contribution was greater even though they occupy marginally lesser seats than the younger MPs.

MPs aged between 55 and 70 years accounted for almost 22 percent of seats and around 43 percent of all debates.

The youthful voters don’t vote as much and even when they do, they don’t necessarily vote for the young. Besides, the older political leaders perform better and are more trusted by the electorate. Old stalwarts like Somnath Chatterjee and George Fernandes have an enviable record of winning elections and eyeballs in parliament.

And most of the young brigade — Rahul Gandhi, Jiten Prasada, Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Manvendra Singh, Kuldeep Bishnoi and Naveen Jindal are reaping a legacy sowed by parents.

So does a younger age profile matter when it comes to the ever so youthful electorate electing representatives?

Or is the Indian voter shrewder than that?

India’s 80-year-old opposition leader says he needs help on “money matters”.

Not only does his wife pay all the bills at home, but he asked business leaders on Tuesday for help in drawing up a new economic model which does not ape the West.

He also had some strong words for the Congress-led government, accusing it of failing to control inflation and failing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor.

When Advani’s own coalition government was in power, it followed pretty similar policies, except with more emphasis on privatisation of state-run companies. But it lost power partly for claiming that India was shining, when poverty was still rampant.

So it’s fair enough to look for economically sustainable ideas to help India’s poor, in fact it is probably essential to address widespread poverty more aggressively.

But is Advani being realistic to suggest there is an alternative to a “Western” development model in the modern world?

And is it right that a man who could be India’s next prime minister so blithely admits to not really understanding economics or money matters?