The BBC’s Robin Lustig agrees with Lord Desai’s article in Prospect on the impact of the Indian election.

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Power’s world: Now is the time for a deal on Kashmir

With the election behind it, it shouldn’t be back to square one for India in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three wars and once brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war.

India missed its great opportunity to settle the burning dispute while the military president, Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until his overthrow last year, was in power.

According to diplomats I talked to eighteen months ago, both British and American, in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalisingly close. One British ambassador told me that the main barrier to a deal was “psychological” and that India had to make very few concessions to make a final deal.

If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But India, despite the seemingly friendly diplomacy of the Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the unwarlike prime minister, Manmohan Singh and, in the background, another unwarlike figure, the chairwoman of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, couldn’t bring itself to go the extra mile.

Observers had different explanations for  Indian intransigence- that Musharraff was trying to force the pace; that the Indian army, the intelligence services and senior bureaucrats in the foreign ministry were resisting an accord; that the leadership had not made an effort to educate the electorate as Pakistan’s had done; that the prime minister was weak and over preoccupied with the economy; that his (successful )attempt to lower the grinding poverty in the rural areas was also a preoccupation;  that the time consuming nuclear deal with the U.S was critically important; and that India rather liked the status quo, since stubbornness fitted in with its self-image of being the sub continent’s super power. There was also the failure of the Bush Administration that was, in Singh words, “loved” by India for pushing a deal through Congress that lifts the long standing embargo on selling nuclear materials and reactors to India.  America could have used the muscle that the nuclear deal gave it to help push India to sign on to Musharraf’s magnanimous offer. Read more »

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Power’s world: an audience with Sonia Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi, leader of India's victorious Congress party

The Indian electorate has handed the centre-left Congress party an overwhelming mandate to govern—the alliance it leads won 262 out of the 543 seats in the national parliament. Here, Jonathan Power recalls his meeting back in 2005 with Sonia Gandhi, the party’s leader and head of one of India’s oldest political dynasties.

I walk up Sonia Gandhi’s driveway, past guards with Uzi machine guns, and can’t help thinking that when I came to interview Mrs Indira Gandhi (Sonia’s mother-in-law) on the eve of her great comeback and massive electoral win, I walked up to her front door and knocked. There were no guards and only one servant to let me in.

I am ushered into Sonia G’s office. She barely acknowledges my presence. “Buon giorno”, I say. There is no reply. I have been warned that she’s cold and she doesn’t offer me a hand. She walks over to me and asks me to sit down.

I look her in the eye and ask my first question to the Italian widow of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

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Mayawati, as yet untouched by the highest office

India's election: last laugh for the voters

In the end the Indian voter had the last laugh. In the last edition of Prospect I wrote an essay about the chances of Mayawati, a regional dalit politican in northern India, surprising everyone to become India’s next prime minister. Along with many other commentators, and all the self appointed experts, I had thought we were heading for a repeat of the fragmented results of 1998, 1999 and 2004, if only worse. The spectre of the Third Front in power—a ragtag alliance of small parties with only the idea of anti-Congress, anti-BJP coalition to unite it—alarmed the financial markets. But in the event they, along with the rest of us, need not have worried. And it was certainly a stunning result.

India voted back the ruling UPA coalition, lead by the centrist Congress party, with big plurality—260 seats out of 543—only 12 short of an absolute majority. As a result Manmohan Singh is back as PM for five years, though his health may not permit a full term. It is certainly a triumph for Sonia Gandhi, who has steered Congress from its virtual decimation in late 1990s to a level which has not been reached for 25 years. Congress’s tally of 206 seats on its own is the highest since 1984. The oldest party in India is now confirmed in its central status. Rahul Gandhi, the heir apparent, has proved his mettle in this election too. Formerly shy, tongue-tied and harnessed to the job which was his whether he liked it or not, he campaigned well this time. He has developed into a good speaker and traveled round the country to see for himself what life was like at the grassroots. It paid off. Read more »

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