Delhi is not India

Why force national issues into local elections?

Billboards across the Delhi skyline exhort voters to “be Dabangg, be a voter”. The odd spelling of the Hindustani word for “powerful” clearly indicates the appeal’s connection to the successful 2011 movie starring Salman Khan. By voting, the Election Commission wishes to imply, the capital’s citizens can seize control of their city’s political landscape in a suitably Salman-esque manner. The EC has argued that its publicity campaign was responsible for the record numbers of voters who turned out to vote in the recent round of state Assembly elections, and clearly intends to try for a repeat. Unfortunately, it is not exactly being assisted in this noble endeavour by the political parties contesting in Sunday’s election to Delhi’s three new municipal corporations. The outgoing corporation, headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is understandably trying to replicate the success of the incumbent BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the equivalent elections in Mumbai in February. There, in spite of a noticeably below-par performance in office, the alliance was voted back in — and the BJP’s national leadership promptly seized upon this as evidence of a national anti-Congress mood. The party’s campaign in Delhi, thus, has been a mish-mash of slogans and allegations against the United Progressive Alliance’s corruption and incompetence. The Congress, meanwhile, has not been able to keep itself from replying in kind; Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, while campaigning recently, spoke at length of the dangers of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi — who is not, at last report, on the ballot in any ward.

During local elections, politics can be seen to be at its most visceral, its most personal, and its most grounded. The direct link between community service and a corporator’s accountability is supposed to ensure that. And it cannot be said that, in either Mumbai or Delhi, incumbent corporators are doing their job. Large parts of both India’s largest cities are forced to manage without basic infrastructure, and with civic services that are in a severe state of decay. However, both major political parties have shown a regrettably top-down approach. Rather than allowing this exercise in grassroots democracy to inform their policies, they have forced a national conversation based around wispy trend-seeking into what should have been a robust exercise in accountability. In this, they repeat the errors that were made in Mumbai, where the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, for example, made a slogan out of a “clean Mumbai” — which did not, apparently, mean better garbage collection, but a city “cleansed” of alien North Indian influences.

Much has been written and said about the political apathy and alienation displayed by relatively well-off urban Indians. Mumbai’s low turnout — it was around 45 per cent — was seen as reinforcing this trend. Perhaps, as usual, the people are smarter than the pundits. Even in the Valley of Kashmir, voters turn out for local government elections, however alienated they may feel from the Central government — as long as those elections focus on issues like drains, water and roads. By forcing a national narrative onto the only real avenue for democratic local empowerment, Delhi’s political parties have discovered the perfect way to ensure that urban India’s political apathy continues unabated.