Indian Elections 2014

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was formed in Dec 1980 by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. The current president of the party is Rajnath Singh. Other important leaders of the party are 2014 prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, former premier Vajpayee and Advani.

The BJP has its roots in the Bhartiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organisation formed in 1943. The BJS has served as a training arena for a number of current senior leaders of the party such as Vajpayee and Advani.

The party subscribes to the philosophy of what it calls integral humanism. It also commits itself to nationalist principles and professes a deep connection with India’s cultural roots.

Since its inception, the BJP, which has had a hardline posture, has had to tone down its rhetoric and approach on various issues so as not to appear thoroughly antagonistic towards minorities, particularly Indian Muslims. It is also said that the party’s posture was of a hardline nature mainly in order to appease other parties to convince them to form political alliances with the BJP.

The BJP’s previous governments in the centre and in Gujarat have seen two of the biggest communal riots of post-Partition era. One of these riots occurred in the wake of the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992. A second riot occurred after the Godhra incident in Gujarat in 2002. Many thousands of people were killed and displaced in these riots and there was large-scale destruction in affected regions.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, like its fellow contending parties, the BJP is campaigning on issues that are currently of immense interest to the Indian public, such as corruption, the economy as well as sexual harassment which is seen to be on the rise in the world’s biggest democracy.

In its recently-released election manifesto, the BJP plans to revise the national nuclear policy, with the stated objective of making the existing policy “more relevant” to India’s present-day challenges. Modernisation of the armed forces and strengthening of the country’s borders are other features of BJP’s defence policies. Their manifesto also states that the party would firmly deal with the issue of cross-border terrorism

The party also aims at reforming the country’s economy which is mired with issues relating to ever-increasing inflation as well as corruption scandals tainting India’s image in markets the world over. In order to jumpstart sluggish economic growth and counter inflation, the BJP plans on welcoming direct foreign investment by all companies with some exceptions. The aim that the party is looking at with these measures is to create jobs for ordinary Indians.

The party has also proposed to simplify the country’s tax regime, review labour laws, improve infrastructure such as the construction of high-speed railways and building low-cost housing.

It has also reiterated in its manifesto the demand for the Ram temple in Ayodhya on the site where the Babri mosque stood before demolition which led to countrywide riots. Inclusion of this demand in the BJP manifesto has been termed as “culturally important” by senior party leader Murli Manohar Joshi who emphasised that the demand should not be viewed as part of a Hindu nationalist agenda.

The BJP has also vowed to end the slaughter of cows, which are considered sacred by the Hindus, and also repeal Article 370 of the Constitution that grants special autonomous rights to Jammu and Kashmir.

The party moreover intends to draft a uniform civil code for all Indians, a controversial issue that has proved to be divisive along religious lines. At present, the Indian constitution allows citizens to be governed by their own religious laws, a clause that particularly benefits Christians and Muslims, the country’s major religious minorities.

— Research and text by Soonha Abro

With its strong roots in the Indian Independence Movement, the Indian National Congress (INC) commonly referred to as the Congress is one of the two main political parties in India. It also holds the distinction of being one of the biggest and oldest democratically-functioning parties in the world.

The party is generally conceived as leftist in nature in contrast to the right-wing Hindu nationalist and currently India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Formed in 1885 by members of the occultist association Theosophical Society, including Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Allan Octavian Hume, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Womesh Chandra Bonerjee and William Wedderburn, INC spearheaded the Indian Independence Movement with more than 15 million members and over 70 million participants to revolt against British colonial rule in India.

In 1907, the Congress had been divided into two factions: a moderate group, headed by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who wanted to achieve a dominion status for India and a militant outfit which was under the rule of nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak who embraced the idea of self-rule and demanded it for the nation.

During the year of 1920, the Congress campaigned for passive resistance, under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi against sanctions imposed on political activism and press.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Congress claimed to represent all Indians, Muslims, who were intimidated by the overwhelming Hindu majority, began to withdraw from the party.

Following independence in 1947, INC emerged as the country’s chief political party and has subsequently been ruled by the Nehru-Gandhi family for most of its post-independence history.

After partition, the party was led by Jawaharlal Nehru and it won most of the seats in the next election and continued to garner similar backing into the 1960s. In the wake of Nehru’s death, the party’s support began to dwindle.

Nehru was succeeded by his daughter Indira Gandhi who became the Indian premier in 1966. Her leadership was, however, challenged by another right-wing faction within the Congress which led to the division of the party in 1969 into two groups: one led by Morarji Desai and the other known as the New Congress led by Indira.

Indira’s faction won landslide victories in the 1971 national elections and the 1972 state elections but she was defeated in the election of 1977 in a major turn of events. She reclaimed the title as prime minister of India in 1980.

Following Indira’s assassination in 1984, her son Rajiv Gandhi succeeded her as the head of state. Despite leading the Congress to re-election in 1984, the party suffered a defeat in 1989 due to scandals and became the country’s main opposition party.

After Rajiv was slain in 1991, P.V. Narasimha Rao took over as the party’s chief and later that year as the country’s premier after the Congress won majority of the seats in the parliament. However, the party was again plagued by scandal in 1966 which propelled voters to reject it at the polls, but Rao continued to head the Congress.

The party reigns went on to Sitaram Kesri until 1998 when Rajiv Gandhi’s widowed Italian-born wife Sonia Gandhi was appointed the leader and had moderate success in securing the support of the Congress among the country’s Muslims and impoverished Indians. Nonetheless, Congress’s performance in the 1999 election was markedly poor.

It was voted back to power in 2004 but Sonia rejected the invitation to lead the coalition government and former finance minister Manmohan Singh became the premier. The party remained in power after the 2009 elections which it had won with a stronger mandate.

Singh, who holds the premier’s office at present, has been criticised for several corruption scandals and a declining economy during his tenure. These issues have tainted the image of the Congress and it’s highly unlikely to secure any significant wins in the 2014 general election.

The political symbol of the party is the hand.

— Research and text by Fatema Imani

The word ‘Aam Aadmi’ means common man and the phenomena associated with the name primarily calls for facilitating the life of members of the public by making the democratic processes accessible to them.

Propagating eradication of corruption of all sorts, the Aam Aadmi Party is no vigilante group; it has a manifesto which clearly begins with a single word rule of ‘swaraj’, meaning rule of the people.

The origins of the AAP and Jan Lokpal Bill which came to be its campaign slogan can be traced back to the 2011 campaign of India Against Corruption (IAC), a movement that had demanded strong anti-corruption laws and had called for the setting up of a monitoring body to keep a check and probe suspected corruption.

The party came into the limelight in the latter half of 2012, with former civil servant Arvind Kejriwal and core supporter of the IAC campaign as its chief. The party rose on to win the state government of Delhi with Kejriwal becoming chief minister in Dec 2013, a post from which he resigned over the Jan Lokpal bill.

The party managed to attract much attention in its early days but the fascination associated with the AAP still persists within India as well as among other observers. The party’s manifesto focuses primarily around corrections of ills within the Indian social and political spheres and calls for solutions to corrupt practices, decentralisation of power and bringing the members of the public at the helm of national political affairs. And much in line with the AAP’s public-friendly, anti-corruption ethos, its political and election symbol is the broom.

Not only that, the party has also brought gender associated issues to the fore by maintaining that after coming to power, the AAP’s elected representatives would work tirelessly to eliminate the factors that have tangled the lives of Indian women in a web of insecurity and ensure speedy justice. Cheaper electricity and water bills are also a priority of the party in order to make the public’s life easier; this comes along with reforming the police force by rendering it more efficient.

Moreover, the party’s economic policy calls for rooting out corruption, ensure accountability on part of institutions and work towards a globally competitive, business-friendly financial model.

Political analysts observe that the AAP has extensively streamlined local issues due to their constituency-based agendas and there seems to be a dearth of incentives for a broader or national agenda — apart from doing away with corruption — as the party is fighting to make gains in the ongoing election. However, another way of looking at the party’s aims is that it brings forth an agenda incorporating solutions for poverty, sanitation problems, illiteracy and education – issues that plague ordinary Indians.

— Research and text by Nida Mujahid Hussain

Currently the sixth largest party in the Lokh Sabha, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) is a regional political party in West Bengal, founded and chaired by Mamata Banerjee.

Banerjee, who also the Chief Minister of West Bengal, was originally a member of India’s largest and most powerful political party Indian National Congress but parted ways with it in 1998 and formed the TMC.

An anti-Marxist party, TMC allied with the present main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition in 1999.

Banerjee secured the Ministry of Railways portfolio during the NDA regime but tendered her resignation shortly after splitting with the NDA.

During the 2009 general elections in India, TMC entered into an alliance with the Congress in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition, but it withdrew as its partner in Sept 2012 after a series of economic reforms, including allowing of foreign supermarkets and foreign airlines, introduced by the government.

At present, TMC holds 19 seats in the Lok Sabha and commands a strong presence not only in West Bengal but also in Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura, having several MLAs in the Vidhan Sabha of these northeastern states.

The political symbol of the TMC is the “twin flowers in grass”.

— Research and text by Fatema Imani

An off-shoot of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) is one of the two main regional political parties in the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

Headquartered in Chennai, it is currently the ruling party in Tamil Nadu with its party chief Jayalalithaa Jayaram also serving as head of one of India’s most developed states. The late film star M.G Ramachandran had founded the party in 1972 after breaking away from the DMK.

It was the ruling party in Tamil Nadu from 1977 to 1987 during which Ramachandran was also the chief minister of the state. Following his ill-health and subsequent demise in 1987, the party’s leadership went to his close companion and former movie star Jayalalithaa. However, two factions of the party also emerged – one led by Jayalalithaa and the other ruled by Ramachandran’s wife Janaki.

Jayalalithaa eventually gained control of the party and under her leadership, it was voted to power in 1991 and the former actress also became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. She completed her term despite her tenure being tainted with corruption allegations.

The party lost to the rival DMK in the legislative assembly elections in 1996.

In the 2001 Assembly elections, the party forged a mega alliance with the Indian National Congress, the Tamil Maanila Congress, the Pattali Makkal Katchi and the Left Front and assumed power in Tamil Nadu.

Jayalaithaa was, however, barred from holding office due to proceedings in a disproportionate wealth case which had taken place in her earlier spell as head of the state. She was sworn-in in 2002 after the Supreme Court absolved her of some of the charges.

After losing the 13th Assembly elections in 2006, it was swept to power in 2011 and Jayalalithaa took the chief minister’s oath.

— Research and text by Fatema Imani