The ruling Congress party-led alliance has won state polls in Maharashtra and Arunachal Pradesh and is set to form the government in Haryana.

Elections were held in the three states this month in polls seen as a major test for the Congress coalition after a strong victory in general elections in May.

The state poll results come at a time when a resurgent Congress, fresh from a victory at the centre, has begun to find footing as the single largest party.

However, analysts debating the outcome reflect more on the decline of the right-wing Hindu ideologue and a fractured opposition than a clear victory for the Congress.

The BJP has been struggling for some time to find an identity that would directly translate into votes. The BJP-Shiv Sena combine in Maharashtra failed to take advantage of the anti-incumbency factor.

Political pundits say it’s another example of the party’s failure to introspect post the Lok Sabha election.

Time alone will tell whether the ‘Marathi pride’ poll plank of Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena will help it strengthen as a mainstream party.

For now, the Congress-NCP coalition is set to come back on a promise of reforms and loan waivers for farmers.

Ashok Chavan is credited in his short time as chief minister with bringing back the party to power despite serious setbacks like the Mumbai attacks and a spate of farmer suicides plaguing the state.

In Haryana, the Congress fell short of the halfway mark, winning only 40 of 90 seats.

The results in the northern state have to some extent dampened celebrations for the Congress, which swept the polls in Arunachal Pradesh.

Poll experts say election results have put the Congress in a better place to implement reforms.

At the same time, this is also a clear call for the opposition to unite and find common ground in the months to come if they hope to stay in the running.

At a recent family gathering, a cousin of mine expressed her desire to be a doctor. Not surprising, considering her parents are both in the same profession, and run a prominent hospital. It seems only natural that she will take the baton forward.

However, to get there, she will still have to go through the grind. Study for at least six years, serve in a rural posting, burn the midnight oil and gain some experience before she can fulfil her dream.

Rajendra Shekhawat has a similar story. He also wants to take up his mother’s profession and take on the baton, so to speak. The difference is that he may not necessarily have to go through the grind. His mother, Pratibha Patil, after all, is the President of India and Shekhawat has been given a ticket by the Congress party to fight the assembly elections from Amravati in northern Maharashtra, one of India’s biggest states.

“My family has been in the Congress for 40 years. My mother has worked for this party. My father has held several posts for the party”, Shekhawat was quoted as saying by the CNN-IBN news channel.

He isn’t the only one. Reports say many more leaders are gunning for tickets for their children or siblings in the forthcoming elections for the Maharashtra assembly. Poonam Mahajan, daughter of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, is contesting elections from the Ghatkopar assembly seat.

Dynastic politics isn’t a new phenomenon in Indian politics, but it has become an increasingly wide-reaching one in recent times. Almost every political party has leaders whose sons and daughters have entered politics, most of them without much political experience.

Rahul Gandhi, of course leads the pack, but there are several more, all of them cutting across party lines. And while every party criticises “dynastic politics” in their manifesto, they turn around and practice the same credo when it comes to their own sons and daughters. Of course that isn’t to say that these sons and daughters may not do well in politics, but aren’t they getting an unfair advantage over other political hopefuls?

What do you think? Should you get a ticket just because your parents have worked for a particular party?

Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee rolls on with a bagful of bounty for one and all in West Bengal, even as the state’s corporate big wheels close ranks with her.

Her eyes all set on the 2011 assembly elections, Banerjee shed the image of an anti-industry politician, using to the hilt the resources the world’s largest employer (Indian Railways) could offer.

The industry-basher epithet stuck thick on Mamata after Tata Motors made an angry exit from Singur last year, bowing before a wave of protests over 400 acres of farmland acquired forcibly by the communist state government for the Nano plant.

Just when a section of people and political pundits had written her off, Mamata’s gamble with the land movement and the state’s poor human rights record paid off.

Now in a hurry to catch the 2011 train, Mamata (referred to in local media as chief minister-in-waiting) has impressed industrialists with her impatience to fast-track projects in West Bengal.

She is now offering land to set up factories, emphasizing on setting up Public Private Partnership (PPP) models to develop the infrastructure of railway and industry.

“Mamata means business” wrote The Telegraph after her August 21 meeting with industrialists. The largest circulated English daily from eastern India had less than a year ago written against the Trinamool Congress chief for driving out the Tatas from Singur.

Mamata’s meeting was a durbar of sorts as she addressed members of the country’s three leading chambers of commerce and urged industrialists to set up shop on available railway land.

“I urge you all to take the opportunity and use the land available to set up industry,” she told industrialists, chanting her slogan of Ma, Mati and Manush (Mother, Soil and People).

Mamata said the railways had already prepared a land bank and about 112,000 acres are available.

With her popular railway budget and various initiatives, the ghosts of Singur seemed to have been exorcised. Mamata said land disputes can be avoided with proper planning and human approach.

The meeting, which has been organised by the Railways, cleared any doubts about her anti-industry posturing in the past.

For now it is brand Mamata that rules Bengal as excitement builds up in the run-up to her big show in 2011.

India and Pakistan, with their competitive strategic interest in Afghanistan, are keenly watching the war-battered nation’s election this week, the second since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.

The front-runner of that vote is incumbent President Hamid Karzai who is facing a stiff challenge from his former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani. There are more than two dozen other candidates.

While a successful vote could mean a step toward achieving basic political and military stability in Afghanistan, its outcome holds crucial geopolitical significance for India and Pakistan.

Conventional wisdom is that a victory for Karzai will help India. Karzai has lived and studied in India, cultivated a strong relationship with New Delhi and spoken out angrily against Pakistan, especially during the years it was ruled by Pervez Musharraf.

Abdullah and Ghani too have India connections — while the former lived there, Ghani was once posted in New Delhi with the World Bank.

So in that sense, Pakistan should have no serious good option, and the various candidates who offer any potential to project its influence in Afghanistan, Islamabad should be more or less a supporter of them, says Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Markey says Pakistan may tend to prefer Karzai simply because he is “known quantity” and his relations with the civilian government in Islamabad are better than before.

But former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar argues Pakistani intelligence disfavours Karzai’s victory as it has scores to settle with almost all the warlords who rally behind Karzai — Mohammed Fahim, Karim Khalili, Mohammed Mohaqiq, Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan — and they happen to be in the rogues’ gallery in the Western world, too.

But a Hamid Karzai victory may not be without complications for India.

New Delhi, which is seeding Afghanistan with projects spanning sanitation to roads and power, is worried at Karzai’s election promise to intensify peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgent groups such as Hezb-i-Islami.

Last month Karzai’s government announced it had reached a truce with local Taliban fighters in Badghis, a province in the north. Some Taliban leaders later denied there was such a truce.

Karzai’s government has enlisted the help of former Taliban officials in recent months to act as go-betweens in an effort to reach out to fighters. Saudi Arabia has also indicated its
willingness to help in mediation efforts.

Such moves have worried Indian officials who say they fear a U.S.-British-Saudi-Pakistani plan to co-opt the Taliban into the Afghan power structure as part of the NATO’s Afghan exit plan.

If that happens, Indians suspect, wouldn’t it then just be a matter of time before the Taliban start going after their enemies?

It may not, however, be as simplistic but India does seem to have a job of dissuading Karzai from pushing for a rapprochement with the Taliban.

Sri Lanka’s bloody 25-year conflict with the Tamil Tigers ended in May but commentators reflecting on the country’s first post-war elections last weekend expressed little optimism about a peaceful future for the Indian Ocean island.

The ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance swept to victory in Sinhalese-dominated Uva province and scraped a win in Jaffna, while the Tamil National Alliance — political allies of the defeated rebels — won control of Vavuniya. Both Jaffna and Vavuniya are just outside the shadow state which the Tigers controlled for decades.

“The victory in Jaffna, the heartland of the country’s ethnic minority Tamils and birthplace of militancy, will give the government a chance to claim it as an endorsement of its handling of ethnic relations, postwar rehabilitation and a rejection of separatism,” Krishan Francis of the Associated Press wrote in the Washington Post.

But the results do not fully reflect public opinion in these war-battered regions, with more than 77 percent of the Jaffna voters staying away and only half of the Vavuniya voters casting ballots.

The London-based Financial Times pointed out that it was hard to know what really happened in the elections - foreign journalists were banned from the north, just as all journalists were during the final stages of the war.

“But the real purpose of the poll seems to have been to test the popularity of President Mahinda Rajapaksa before he calls an early general election to secure a second six-year term, in the afterglow of military victory,” the Financial Times wrote in an editorial.

The newspaper added that the notion of devolution to deal with Tamil grievances had been taken off the table and the government no longer wishes to discuss minority rights, only individual rights within the new national identity it intends to forge.

US and British officials fear this may involve the forced dispersal of Tamils across the island so they can no longer cluster, said the broadsheet.

“Put simply, while the conflict has ended, Sri Lanka is careering back to where it was when the conflict began. Its precarious identity as a mix of ethnic and linguistic, cultural and religious influences is in danger of being swept away by a triumphalist wave of Sinhalese chauvinism,” the FT said.

ELECTIONS HELD TOO SOON

According to the Christian Science Monitor some analysts believe the elections were held too soon after the end of the war for people to vote and for democracy to be truly tested.

“Certainly, normalcy in the battle-scarred north is a long way off: Nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians are being forcibly held by the government in camps near Jaffna and Vavuniya,” wrote Mian Ridge. “Both towns are still surrounded by government checkpoints, and are largely inaccessible to non-residents. Even residents can’t leave without permission.”

Ridge added that foreign - and many Sri Lankan - journalists were not allowed to cover the elections and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that the decision to bar the media “dashes any hope of a transparent election.”

Sudha Ramachandran from the Asia Times said the Jaffna and Vavuniya elections were seen as an important indicator of the mood among the Tamil people in the north.

“Some have interpreted the ruling party’s strong showing in Jaffna as a sign that the Tamils are endorsing Rajapakse’s approach to the conflict in Sri Lanka,” said Ramachandran. But she pointed out that this interpretation amounts to little given the poor voter turnout, especially in Jaffna.

Charles Haviland from the BBC added that poor turnout was not just down to apathy amongst Tamils, but because much of the area is depopulated with about 300,000 Tamils detained in nearby government camps after the war, and others either dead or displaced to other parts of the island.

[Nita Bhalla covers South Asia for AlertNet. She is based in New Delhi.]

[Photo - A boy cycles past a soldier on a street in Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka May 10, 2008. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi]

With the wrangling for allies in earnest ahead of election results due Saturday, women leaders hold an inordinate amount of power in deciding who will form the new Indian government.

Women leaders have always had a role in the rough and tumble of Indian politics, from Sarojini Naidu and Annie Besant in the independence struggle to Indira Gandhi, the second woman in the world to become prime minister.

Women leaders are perhaps at the peak of their influence now, with Gandhi’s political heir regarded the most powerful of them all — indeed, the most powerful political leader in the country.

Congress chief Sonia Gandhi is credited with energising the party and leading it to a surprising victory in the 2004 election, and she looks to have the lead this time around too, according to exit polls.

Gandhi, once voted the world’s sixth most powerful woman by Forbes, walked away from the prime minister’s job in 2004, but her influence over party allies and even with the on-again off-again left is unquestionable.

Her influence though, doesn’t extend to Mayawati, the feisty and controversial leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party and chief minister of the potentially swing state of Uttar Pradesh, which sends a whopping 80 seats to the lower house.

Mayawati, hailed as queen of the lower-caste Dalits, is part of the Third Front, and a prime ministerial aspirant whose ambition mirrors her party’s elephant symbol.

Known for her lavish birthday celebrations and love for giant statues of herself, Mayawati’s massive following among lower caste Hindus, tribes and other backward classes is not to be trifled with.

At the other end of the spectrum is J. Jayalalithaa, a convent school-educated high-caste Hindu and leader of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in the potentially swing state of Tamil Nadu.

The former film star, a part of the Third Front, has allied in the past with both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, and could be a kingmaker this time. A win for AIADMK would boost the prospects of the Third Front, and Jayalalithaa, who was once jailed on corruption charges, will be a vital pawnbroker.

As will Mamata Banerjee, leader of Trinamool Congress in left-ruled West Bengal state. With exit polls pointing to an erosion of support for the left, Banerjee — who drove Tata Motors’ Nano car project out of the state — is on a good wicket.

“The outcome of this endgame is linked to women,” political analyst Yogendra Yadav wrote in The Hindu newspaper.

Perhaps their examples will inspire more women to take the plunge into politics; there were only about 550 women candidates against more than 7,500 men candidates. Or are they not quite the role models we seek?

With 8071 candidates contesting 543 seats – that’s an average of 15 candidates for each seat — the 400 million Indian voters who chose to vote sure looked spoilt for choice.

But were they?

Though democracy means choosing who our rulers are going to be, many say there is a crucial missing link in Indian democracy — the lack of inner-party democracy.

This results in the lack of people’s participation especially in choosing candidates, unlike the U.S. where primaries are held by political parties to elect candidates.

Rahul Gandhi says he is trying to make reforms.

At a recent press conference, commenting on his position within the ruling Congress party he said, “It is undemocratic and it is a reality.”

“The Indian political system tends to be related to who you know, who your brother is, who your sister is, and it’s in every single party, in the BJP it exists, in the Congress it exists, that’s a fact of life, that’s the reflection of a closed system.”

Policies are rarely formed after debates involving the party cadres and tested through their votes.

Guessing and second guessing why people booted out a candidate or rooted for another remains the default option for making sense of electoral verdicts.

Political scientist Ashutosh Varshney writes that the lack of internal party democracy leads to a fractured polity, as no leader of a new group can hope to capture an existing party in an open contest.

The weekly ‘Tehelka’ reported 10 billion dollars being secretly spent by politicians to woo voters.

In the absence of a culture of volunteerism, which cannot take off until people are involved in electoral campaigns as in the United States, some say the importance of money bags and black money can only go up.

Critics say all of these tendencies — fractured polity, unstable coalitions, promiscuous alliance hopping, muddy electoral verdict, horse trading of legislators — will most probably be on show in the next few days as the process of government formation gathers steam.

Voters generally get to choose from a field of candidates who are selected by the party bosses.

Pending this crucial democratic reform, did the election process represent a real choice by the voters? Or was it an expensive illusion?

The countdown has begun in India. As political pundits peer into their tea leaves before the results of another marathon election, the question on everybody’s lips is: will the Gandhi magic work again?

Exit polls show the coalition led by Sonia Gandhi will fall short of an outright majority, but her Congress party has a slight edge over its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But then exit polls in India have been way off the mark in the past. Like the last election.

In the 2004 election, the Congress scored a shock victory over the BJP, which many said was a result of Sonia Gandhi’s tireless campaigning and, more importantly, the magic of the Gandhi name. Nobody, just about nobody, had expected the BJP to lose? Or the Congress to win. Not even the Congress itself.

But will Sonia Gandhi do it again this time? Will the Gandhi name work like a charm again? Nobody is willing to hazard a guess this time. Indian voters are known to throw up enormous surprises.

One of the biggest upsets in the history of post-colonial India was Indira Gandhi’s massive defeat in the 1977 election. Mrs Gandhi was considered so invincible that a slogan coined by one of her partymen — Indira is India, India is Indira — had become a household buzzword. She was almost like a Mother Goddess at the time.

And so not even the sharpest of political observers could have predicted 1977. Not even Mrs Gandhi herself.

Defying all expectations, angry Indian voters threw out Mrs Gandhi after she imposed a state of emergency when she clamped down on dissent and launched a sterilisation programme as a solution to the country’s population problem. It was the first time the Congress had tasted defeat in national elections since it began ruling the country after India’s independence from Britain in 1947.

But it wasn’t the last. Indira’s son, Rajiv, who came to power on a massive sympathy wave after her assassination in 1984, didn’t lead the Congress to a majority win in 1989. The Gandhi magic, it seems, had lost its sheen.

Five years ago, when India went to the polls everybody had written off the Congress as a spent force. Newspaper headlines screamed the party was over.

But Sonia Gandhi took the party and the campaign into her hands. Rajiv Gandhi’s widow travelled across the country relentlessly, reaching out to voters in her heavily-accented but fluent Hindi, peppering her speeches with emotional references to her family, especially her husband who was killed by a suicide bomber in 1991.

Her children, Rahul and Priyanka, also joined the fray, campaigning for their mother in Uttar Pradesh where they always got rapturous receptions.

And it paid off.

The party won a stunning victory and for a brief moment, it even seemed like a Gandhi would get the prime minister’s job again. Sonia Gandhi eventually turned down the prime minister’s post, but the country’s first family has remained firmly in the political spotlight since.

As the elections rolled around this time, Sonia and her son, Rahul, hit the campaign trail again with emotional references to the sacrifices made by the Nehru-Gandhi family, particularly Indira and Rajiv, who were both assassinated.

And again, both drew enormous crowds as they campaigned in the heat and dust of various parts of the country, with people walking or cycling for kilometres just to see them.

But will the Gandhi name work again this time? Or will India’s voters look beyond dynastic politics at other more basic issues such as water, electricity, food prices and housing?

If India’s faceless bookmakers are any guide, the ruling Congress party will probably scrape through the current election with Manmohan Singh the firm favourite to retain the prime ministership.

But then again…

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?