What Saves India - and Holds It Back

NEW DELHI - The Election Commission of India is a very serious body that does not believe the world will end this Friday, a workday. The commission is instead preparing for a more certain event in 2014: the general elections that will place a new government in Delhi, an event that has the potential to be cataclysmic to some. Recently, I heard a financial adviser who was recording a group of children singing Christmas carols in a beautiful garden warn an insurance executive: “The stock market will collapse.”

His is a common view. With the reputation of every major political party battered in the public imagination following a string of corruption scandals, he predicted that the next government would be an unstable coalition assembled by too many political parties, with nearly everyone having a say.

There are more political parties in India than there are models of automobiles, which is a reason why the job requirements of a political journalist here do not include an ability to name all the parties. The 2009 general elections were contested by more than 364 parties. It would seem that such a situation is a problem, and it is. Yet it answers, to some extent, the frequent questions of the urban elite: What saves India? Why is there no violent revolution on the streets with angry young men cutting down the rich and burning the silver sedans? Considering the oceanic gap between the middle class and the poor that makes even the act of eating a burger in public somewhat embarrassing, how is it that the elite have never been separated from their heads?

Could it be that what saves India is politics? Can this be true even though every incident of large-scale violence in the country has been politically ordained? The nation gives its citizens plenty of reasons to take to the streets and disrupt what the wealthy regard as normal life. But the fact that most Indians have political representation has denied them the critical mass of excuses to release their rage through sustained violence. The nation's politicians are the inadvertent but effective shock absorbers of Indian society.

All political parties claim to represent the poor, and they really do, because the poor are the most enthusiastic voters. But the poor are not a monolithic group. There are groups, grouses, castes and rivalries within them, and they are each represented in Indian politics in very specific ways.

The Dalits, who were once considered the untouchable caste and are now called “scheduled castes and tribes,” are represented by several parties. The most influential in northern India is headed by a woman who squandered her extraordinary popularity by amassing unexplained wealth and through a penchant for commissioning statues of herself. Her archrival is a party that represents the rural and semi-urban upper castes. And then there are parties for socialists who are afraid of foreign companies, communists who are Marxists, communists who are not Marxists and communists who don't want “communist” in their party's name.

Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all have their parties. Affluent farmers in the western state of Maharashtra also are represented. So are, even more specifically, sugar-cane farmers. Young people of Maharashtra who think migrants in the state capital, Mumbai, should be thrashed occasionally to keep them in their place have representation in a new political outfit. Their parents who agree vote for an older party.

A few decades ago in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a party was formed for atheists, which naturally could not remain purely atheistic as it grew in numbers. Then a popular film actor broke away and started a party, ostensibly for the poor, that governed the state for many years. Then another film actor started a party, also for the poor. The interests of eunuchs in Tamil Nadu are represented by several parties.

A man in the same state has started a party for “lovers,” since they face harassment from conservative society, especially when they try to fondle behind catamarans on the beach. But he has yet to contest an election.

There is, of course, a powerful right-wing party for the Hindu business community and patriotic urban middle class, who have long wished for a “benign dictator” who will make the trains run on time, which they do anyway these days.

If none of these parties serves, there is of course the grand old Indian National Congress, which stands for everything and nothing. If the Congress isn't good enough, either, there is a new organization that has risen from the rage of the educated middle class against political corruption.

But in this entire assembly of parties, none represents the interests of women, who constitute more than half the population in a country where an unknown number of girls are killed in the womb and men deal with their loss of social power by committing violence against women. Substantial gender reforms cannot be enacted in India without antagonizing Indian men, and female politicians in major parties are reluctant to take that professional risk. Only a party willing to bet everything on women and uninterested in appeasing the men might stir the nation. Even some fathers of daughters might vote for it.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”

A version of this article appeared in print on December 20, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.