Voters rejected the politics of retribution - By T. N. Ninan 

The month-long Indian elections have confirmed the Congress party as the country's driving political force. Voters turned out in droves and Rahul Gandhi is a rising political star. Yet the greatest challenges facing the world's largest democracy lie beyond its borders.

The parliamentary elections in India have set the country on a new road. The coalition led by the Congress party has been swept back to power and, significantly, it no longer depends on either the Communists or a bunch of caste-based parties for a majority in parliament, as it has for the past five years.

Congress increased its strength from 145 seats to 206 - its highest tally in two decades (272 are required for a majority and the gap is made up by partners in the United Progressive Alliance). What this promises for the country is a more stable and cohesive government than it has had for the past five years.

But the real significance of the 2009 election is that over 700 million voters over the age of 18 (of whom 60 percent, or about 430 million, actually voted) have spoken clearly on one issue: They have rejected political parties that have built their constituencies by exploiting India's religious and caste fault lines in the name of righting alleged historical wrongs.

This is the pattern that has dominated national politics for two decades. But in the recent elections, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw its tally shrink to 116 - the lowest since the late 1980s. And a bunch of caste-based parties in the Ganges plains of the northern states, which represented a new assertiveness on the part of backward and depressed castes, have all bitten the dust.

The daily Indian Express summed up the results as a rejection of the politics of grievance and a rise of the politics of aspiration.

The winner in the process has been the Congress, which has traditionally occupied the center of Indian politics and which under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi in recent years has emphasized two catchwords: inclusiveness (translated to mean the Muslim and Christian minorities who feel threatened by the BJP's Hindu assertiveness), and "aam aadmi," the Hindi equivalent of the common man.

Decoded in the Indian context, this Hindi phrase underlines Congress' belief that the rapid economic growth of recent years has not benefited the poor and that specific policies have to be designed to help the deprived majority that lives on less than $2 a day.

In the last session of parliament, the Congress government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a few programs designed to address these specific issues.

The flagship program guaranteed employment to poor rural families for up to 100 days a year. As many as 36 million families signed up for the program and another 35 million farmer families benefited from a program to write off bank loans and to ease farmer debt.

Yet other programs gave new land rights to tribal families and announced special benefits for minorities.

Taken together, these programs directly touched the lives of about a half of the country's 220 million families, while the benefits of rapid economic growth (8.8 percent annually during the government's 2004 to 2009 term) went primarily to the 40 percent of the country that qualifies under a loose definition of "middle class."

The cumulative impact was that the vast majority of the country believed that their living conditions had improved over the past five years.

Dwelling on these and other benefits, and promising more of the same in the future (like highly subsidized rice to the poor), was a credible platform for a Congress government. Also, it is under the leadership of a prime minister who is a distinguished economist and who was the architect of the economic reforms that were started in 1991.

Neither the BJP and its allies nor the Communists were able to offer anything remotely comparable.

Congress' recent electoral success has begun to be viewed, on the airwaves and in editorial columns, as a watershed. This sense flows particularly from the realization that the Congress has finally begun to find its way out of the morass of fragmented, conflict-ridden politics of the past two decades.

In the process, political analysts see that the Congress may also have begun to recover lost ground among Muslims and the lower castes, both of which broke away after the 1980s, by focusing on common concerns.

The culmination of this process could mean the establishment of single-party rule once again and an end to two decades of messy, compromise-ridden coalition politics.

If that denouement were to come about, the architect of the transformation would be Rahul Gandhi, 38, Sonia's son and the fifth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has so far produced three prime ministers in democratic India - Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

Rahul, educated at Harvard and armed with a philosophy degree from Cambridge, worked briefly with a management consultancy in London before somewhat gingerly stepping into the turbulent world of Indian politics five years ago, when he ran to represent the parliamentary constituency of Uttar Pradesh called Amethi that had been held by his father and uncle before him.

Still a bachelor, Rahul has refused to be seduced by power and has declined government office so far, though the pressure on him to join the new government has been immense.

Instead, he has set his sights on the long-term project of rebuilding from the ground up what he sees as a moribund, faction-ridden, dynasty-worshipping party. He has used his relatively young age to build a youth platform and the beginnings of a grassroots organization.

His initial efforts in India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress had lost much ground in recent years, were less than successful. Elections to local government bodies saw the Congress performing poorly.

When elections to the state assembly followed, the Congress did so badly that it came in fourth out of four main contenders. The result was a great deal of skepticism about what Rahul was attempting. Nevertheless, he kept working on identifying promising new faces in different states and experimenting with a variety of developmental initiatives.

Later, when the parliamentary elections came round, Rahul managed to get quite a few of his new lieutenants to become party candidates - and they have done uniformly well. Even more impressively, he has doubled his party's tally in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.

Suddenly, the party, the media and the country as a whole have woken up to the fact that a new political star has risen.

Meanwhile, there is an enormous sense of expectation that the second Singh government will differ significantly from the first - which was hobbled by its dependence on support from the Communists, who blocked all reform measures and brought about a virtual policy paralysis in key areas.

Free of the need for Communist support and with greater dominance within the ruling coalition, the expectation is that the country will get a more reform-minded, purposeful government.

Singh told aides as the election results streamed in that now the country would not accept any excuses for failure. Indian stocks posted a record surge after the results were in.

Meanwhile, businessmen across the country expressed the hope that the economy would benefit from a government in which Singh had a fairly free hand. At a time when the economy has slowed from 9 percent annual GDP growth to no more than 5.3 percent in the last quarter, and with exports dropping by 33 percent in the past two months, Singh will need to use his mastery of economic management to make a difference in a very difficult situation.

Beyond short-term crisis management, there lie the longer-term challenges of improving the country's poor physical infrastructure (power supply and transport facilities and systems); investing in human resources by improving the education and health care services; and in general improving the quality of governance across the country.

But the economy may not be the most serious, or even the most urgent, problem that the new government confronts. The primary challenge may turn out to be national security.

Across the western border, Pakistan is engaged in what virtually amounts to a civil war, as the army fights Islamist militants in a battle for the heart and soul of Pakistan.

The prospect of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the militants, unthinkable until two months ago, is no longer a possibility that can be lightly dismissed. This raises national security to the level of the government's highest priority, even as daring attacks like the one on Mumbai in November present the challenge of ensuring that there is no repeat episode.

India's geopolitical neighborhood is troubled in other ways as well. To the south, Sri Lanka has finally crushed the Tamil Tigers - with a good deal of sympathy for that country's Tamil civilians in India's own southern state of Tamil Nadu.

To the north, Nepal has plunged into crisis as the Maoist head of government has resigned, reviving the prospect of civil war between the Maoists and the others, a war that will have spillover effects on the Indian side of the border.

And to the east, Myanmar represents multiple challenges of internal democracy and smuggling across a porous border.

Beyond these neighbors, there lurks the long-term danger of a resurgent China continuing to pursue its goal of "encircling" India - not only by stoking anti-Indian fires in neighboring countries but also by moving its rapidly expanding navy into the Indian Ocean with nuclear submarines and under-construction aircraft carriers.

Internationally, while India has gained a say in the councils of the world (like the G-20), it faces pressure to make concessions in the extended parleys on global warming and the Doha Round of trade talks, among others.

But through it all, in even the most trying times, it has been hard to be not optimistic about India and its future. With a very positive election result, a distinguished prime minister and a rejuvenated Congress as the sheet anchor of a cohesive government, India's future looks bright indeed.

- T. N. Ninan is editor of the Business Standard New Delhi. This article also appears in Inside Asia Pacific, a publication of the German Asia-Pacific Business Association.