India File: Two hung elections - United Press International

By Mani Shankar Aiyar
From the International Desk

NEW DELHI, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Two key elections in the South Asian subcontinent last week have thrown up two finishes quite as nail biting as the last U.S. presidential election.

It is not the shards that are being counted but the seats won by different parties in a parliamentary -- as distinct from a presidential -- system where the winner is the majority coalition if a single party fails to get a majority on its own.

Neither in the state assembly of Jammu and Kashmir nor in the National Assembly of Pakistan does any single party command an absolute majority. A convoluted process of negotiations is, therefore, on in both legislatures to determine who the winner is.

Of course, the real winner in Jammu and Kashmir, irrespective of who forms the government, is the Goddess of Democracy. Braving the guns of the terrorists, almost as high a percentage of the electorate came out to vote as in an American presidential election.

Indians, generally, are much more enthusiastic about casting their vote than Americans are. So, the poll in Jammu and Kashmir has been somewhat lower than the average in other states of the Indian Union, but compared to the dismal showing in the last elections, held under the shadow of terrorism in 1996, the turnout has been most heartening.

Moreover, the outcome clearly establishes that while rigging and manipulation by the ruling establishment were not entirely absent, the election has been astonishingly free and fair. Indeed, so free and fair that the diversity of political opinion has robbed the state of a definitive opinion on who should form the government.

The former ruling party, the National Conference, has lost half the seats it held in the previous assembly and been reduced to 28 in a House of 87. The Indian National Congress has come up from behind, shooting up from six seats in the last assembly to 20 in this one. It lost nearly 20 more seats by margins of 100-1,000 votes; hence its refusal to entirely exculpate the previous ruling party of the charge of rigging.

And a breakaway from the Congress, the People's Democratic Party has stunned the Kashmir valley with a tally of 16. The party did not even exist in the last election.

The remaining 18 seats have been taken by Independents and a gallimaufry of smaller parties. It is thus easy to identify who has been beaten -- the National Conference -- but less easy to determine how the next government will be formed.

Fevered negotiations between the Congress and the PDP over the last week and into the present have so far failed to produce a stable consensus. Both together fall short of a majority and, therefore, the opinion of the Independents and smaller parties ready to make common cause with them also matters.

The sticking point is the chief ministership. It is easy to parody this as a vulgar race for power at the expense of the Kashmiri people who have voted for change but have not been given a new government despite the passage of several days since the surprise verdict came in.

The fact, however, is the question goes far beyond who will preside at Cabinet meetings. The Congress stakes its claim not only on the arithmetic of having a larger number of seats and the fact of having representatives from all three regions of the state --- Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh --- but primarily on the greater influence it commands in New Delhi as the leader of the Opposition in Parliament.

The PDP stakes its claim on the not inconsiderable argument that it has the larger presence in the Kashmir valley, which is where the problem is, rather than in the state as a whole. The less palatable argument advanced by the PDP is that its leader became chief minister because he is from the valley, while the leader of the Congress is from Jammu. Both candidates are Kashmiri-speaking Muslims and prioritizing one region over the others in this manner is asking for trouble in governance later.

Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill has spread himself all over the media certifying the outcome of the election. The fact that he gives us a good chit hardly compensates for the impropriety of a foreign envoy arrogating to himself the right to pat us on the head as if we are somewhat naughty little boys being congratulated on having, for once, been well behaved. Would any self-respecting American have accepted the Indian ambassador in Washington commenting on the counting of the shards, which brought President George W. Bush to power? Then why a different law for the lesser breed?

In any case, Blackwill and the entire White House-Foggy Bottom lot have made a laughing stock of themselves by praising the democratic process in India while not damning its abuse in neighboring Pakistan.

There, a military general, in office by virtue of a coup, organized a farcical circus from which the two main contenders, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, were simply banned from participating -- and threatened with immediate arrest and imprisonment if they even stepped on the soil of Pakistan to campaign for their candidates. It was a bit like holding the last U.S. Presidential election by banning both Al Gore and George W. Bush from running!

Blackwill has escaped from being compelled to make odious comparisons by hiding behind the technicality that as ambassador to New Delhi he cannot comment on what happens outside his jurisdiction.

Spokesmen from the White House and the State Department are not so lucky. They have been tying themselves in knots explaining how Bush's favorite dictator is, in fact, a kind of 21st century Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson rolled into one.

These double standards to accommodate American preferences has, however, received the perfect comeuppance from the Pakistani people themselves. All along the entire 1,000-mile belt from the northern reaches of the Northwest Frontier Province to the tip of Baluchistan, which marks the border with Iran, the two most strategically critical provinces for the containment of Afghanistan have massively voted "No" to Bush and his surrogate, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, derisively known all over Pakistan as Busharraf.

Ethnically, the people of the NWFP are the same as many Afghans -- the Pashtuns. They speak the same language, have the same customs and were not only the staging post for the assault on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but also the refuge for millions of Afghans fleeing the war and, now, Osama bin Laden!

So with Baluchistan, which for the most part is an inhospitable wilderness but most populated -- by Pashtuns more than Baloch -- in the belt that borders Afghanistan. A religion-based political alliance, whose approach to life and politics parallels that of the Taliban, if not al Qaida, has overwhelmingly won in both provinces.

Given that even in Islamic Pakistan no Islamic party has ever won more than 5 percent of the vote in the 55 years since the country came into being, last week's elections in the NWFP and Baluchistan constitute the harshest rebuff to the American occupation of Afghanistan -- and its creeping occupation of our subcontinent, beginning with Pakistan.

There could be no more telling commentary on how the Afghan people actually view what is being done in their name. It is a lesson that I am certain will NOT be learned by the Bush administration. But the American people might wish to recall that their past Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard M. Nixon made the same mistake in Vietnam.

(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a member of the Indian Parliament representing the Congress Party. His column is published weekly.)
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