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05.10.2000

Development and Politics: Kerala's Electoral Puzzle

Elections to the institutions of local self-government in Kerala - the corporations, municipalities, district panchayats, block panchayats, and village panchayats - have yielded an almost evenly balanced result. If we ignore the significant number of independents who have won seats and may owe informal allegiance to one of the two major fronts, both the LDF and UDF seem to have walked away with the honours, depending on the region of the state or level of governance that is examined. In the rural areas, at the lowest grama panchayat level, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) was only marginally ahead of the CPI(M)-led left democratic front (LDF), winning 42.7 per cent of the seats as compared with 40.2 per cent in the case of the latter. It had however garnered a wider lead at the block panchayat level, by winning close to 50 per cent of the seats (as compared with the LDF's 43.5 per cent). On th other hand, at the district panchayat level the LDF was way ahead of the UDF with 53 per cent of successful candidates as compared with the latter's 40 per cent. Similarly in the urban areas while the UDF dominated the list of successful candidates in the municipalities, the LDF was substantially ahead in terms of seats won in elections to the corporations.
 
 This polarised and closely balanced structure of the result would in other circumstances have been considered normal. Historically, the two major fronts in Kerala have each garnered a relatively large share of the vote, and the result in terms of seats won and governments formed has been determined by marginal differences in these vote shares, with power shifting almost cyclically between one formation and the other. Yet the results of the recent elections have taken both the LDF, which rules the state, and the UDF, which sits in the opposition, by surprise.
 
 Two factors account for this element of surprise. First, though the current results seem to follow the familiar "Kerala model" at the political level, it constitutes a significant setback for the LDF when viewed relative to its performance in the previous local elections in 1995. In what was seen as a major swing in favour of the LDF, that election yielded a substantially strong LDF presence at the village, block and district panchayats, suggesting that trends operative at the state level need not prevail at lower levels of governance.
 
 Second, this setback comes in the wake of what by all accounts was a bold, innovative and successful decentralised planning effort. A number of features distinguish the Kerala experiment with decentralised planning from similar, concerted efforts in a few other states. To start with, it was launched with a bold decision to earmark 35-40 per cent of plan funds for projects and programmes prepared by the local institutions. Further, this devolution was not predicated on the existence of the capacity to plan and utilise these funds at the lower levels or their "absorptive capacity" Making this a prerequisite tends to indefinitely postpone actual devolution. Rather, the experiment chose to build that capacity in the "act of doing" or in the course of putting to use the funds devolved. And, finally, to ensure that that the lack of capacity did not result in large-scale waste and leakage, the experiment sought to build that capacity through a campaign of mass-mobilisation, which ensured transparency and accountability in the use of funds as well as exploited the dispersed expertise available with Kerala's middle-class intelligentsia. In the event, the People's Planning Campaign galvanised the people in substantial parts of the State, made major advances in innovative local level planning and reached substantial benefits in the form of housing and basic services to the poorest sections of the urban and rural population.
 
 The enthusiasm that the campaign aroused and the achievements it notched up on the development front were widely expected influence the voting behaviour of the population at the local level, strengthening the observed divergence between state and local level electoral trends. In fact, this expectation pervaded the opposition front as well, though in public UDF leaders attributed the likely success of the LDF to a misuse of Plan funds for partisan purposes.
 
 The fact that the results belied all expectations is therefore a puzzle. The shortfall is all the more puzzling because it is to be expected that the election of those who would represent the interests of a much smaller unit of political organisation such as the village, block or district would be far more influenced by local issues and by the credentials of individual candidates. The reputation of the candidates is expected to matter more at the local level because voter perception on this count would be better formed given their closeness to the candidates fielded. These features of elections to local bodies and the fact that in recent years the People's Campaign has dominated local political mobilisation, were expected to make voter assessment of the results of the campaign and the contribution of the candidates fielded to its successful implementation major influences on voter behaviour. As a  consequence a consolidation of the LDF's position was seen as most likely.
 
 It is this background that renders the local body election results puzzling to all, independent of their political persuasion. In response to this upset, the divergence between the expected and the actual result, or the inability of the LDF to encash in the form of votes the goodwill generated by the People's Campaign, is being interpreted in three different ways. The first is to dismiss the claims of the People's Campaign itself regarding its achievements. In actual fact, it is argued by some, the campaign did not deliver any major advances on the economic front but merely changed the means and institutional mechanisms through which plan funds leaked their way into a few hands and away from the beneficiaries they were ostensibly targeted at. It hardly bears stating that more direct evidence, garnered not just by independent national and international social scientists and observers, but also by officials from a not-too-friendly national government, refutes any such argument. The physical achievements recorded in the first two years of implementation of the campaign (1997-98 and 1998-99) are not just impressive in themselves but way beyond the historical record: 7,947 kilometres of roads were laid, 98,494 houses were built, 240,307 sanitary latrines were constructed, 50,162 wells were dug, 17,489 public taps were installed and 15,563 ponds were cleaned. Given this evidence, only the most cynical can yield to such a conclusion in the face of the puzzling result.
 
 The second tendency has been to argue that in the current context in Kerala the voting behaviour of the people is not influenced by efforts at innovative State intervention or improved economic well-being. There could be two kinds of reasons advanced as to why such a dissociation of politics from economics could occur, leaving the former to be driven and determined by a logic of its own. It could be held that backward social mores including caste and community influences could be so strong as to result in the formation of vote banks that are not easily broken by economic developments.  However, this position does not explain why the results in the 1995 elections were so heavily in favour of the LDF whereas those in 2000 were not, since no major shift in caste and community influences seem to have occurred during those years. Nor does it tally with the fact that literacy and educational achievement in Kerala are so high, resulting in a far greater degree of political and social awareness than elsewhere that serves as a counterweight to pure caste and communal mobilisation. The restriction of the BJP to a few wins in selected pockets in the State, despite large expenditures and an unusually large number of seats contested, is one among many indicators corroborating that judgement.
 
 A more persuasive explanation for any perceived dissociation between economics and politics could be the dominance for historical reasons of a middle class. Combined with the enriching influence of remittances from abroad accruing to a large number of households, this structure of the population could make local level efforts targeted at the poor less of an influence on the voting behaviour of a substantial section of the population. Here again, the argument is weakened by the fact that the People's Planning Campaign has, according to many commentators, drawn substantial sections of the middle classes into its fold as experts, trainers and volunteers. The enthusiasm generated by the campaign has touched not just its most obvious beneficiaries, but even the better-endowed sections of the community.
 
 All of this suggests that any attempt to understand the LDF's shortfall in performance relative to expectations or its inability to translate the goodwill generated by the People's Planning experiment into votes at the polls should focus on factors that may have neutralised the political advantages yielded by the People's Planning Campaign. There are, no doubt, many state-level political and social developments that could have influenced voter behaviour. One such influence, for example, could have been the controversy, legal tangle and the confusion created by the transition to the plus-two system in the educational sphere. While the well-meaning search for correspondence with the national pattern may have influenced the decision, the controversies surrounding its implementation and the fact that it forced many entrants into the plus-two stage  to choose less well-endowed and less prestigious institutions could not but have been a source of resentment. And given the importance attached to education in a highly literate state like Kerala, the effect of this development may have been negative for the LDF which rules the state. Many other such state-level decisions or developments could have influenced the result and are likely to be brought up in the ongoing post-mortem.
 
 But this may not provide a full explanation given the important role of local issues and perceptions in what were local elections. Post-election analyses can only speculate as to what those local factors were and how their effects were mediated. Needless to say, the People's Campaign was not a purely LDF affair, even if the decentralised planning experiment was launched by the LDF government in the state. It had drawn into its fold individuals of all persuasions and political affiliation, who came together on a common developmental agenda. In fact, many individuals who contributed to the campaign's success in particular localities owed allegiance to parties belonging to the UDF. It is quite possible that they reaped the benefits of that success, and rightly so. This would only speak for the fairness and transparency of the campaign.
 
 To boot, the LDF's electoral strategy may have undermined its ability to encash in similar fashion the success of the campaign, despite the fact that a majority of elected local representatives involved in implementing the campaign owed allegiance to it. The People's Planning Campaign we must recognise has generated a situation where the actual power and prestige of the local institutions has increased tremendously. This has rendered positions in local bodies more important from the point of view of both political parties and individuals. As a result, independent of the success of incumbent representatives in carrying forward the campaign, they have it appears been replaced by almost all parties by candidates chosen by the party machinery. The extent to which this has happened is not clear. But, for example, when questioned in a television debate about the substitution of incumbent representatives by new candidates by the LDF, Thomas Isaac, one of the architects of the campaign, admitted that only about a fifth of the incumbents had been given an opportunity to run for a second term in these elections. Even incumbents in some of the highly successful "model panchayats" had been substituted by new faces. This could have influenced voters who were looking to the abilities of the contestants as individuals to carry forward the campaign, rather than to whether they were affiliated to the front that instituted the campaign in the first instance. Interestingly, according to reports, around 85 per cent of incumbent LDF representatives who contested again in these elections have been returned. This suggests that the choice of candidates could have had an important role to play in explaining the electoral outcome.
 
 All such evidence and arguments would no doubt be closely examined in the search for explanations for the surprising result yielded by the elections. They have been raised here not as clinching arguments but only to lend support to the view that the electoral outcome in Kerala should not be seen either as public apathy towards or indictment of a path-breaking experiment. Nor should it be seen as indicating that people-centred economic policies and strategies have little political relevance. To do so would be to denude democratic politics of all substance and to subvert the search for development alternatives for the new millennium.