Electoral fightback
In the past India has shown a great capacity for reinvention. The 2004 election showed that politics are alive and kicking, particularly at a grass roots level. Believing their own propaganda, the NDA aimed their campaign squarely at the middle class, imagining that the dreams of the affluent minority would prove sufficiently alluring to the poor majority to carry the election. This was not to be the case. The BJP saw its vote plummet, losing 44 seats, while Congress (the largest party) went up from 114 to 145. Perhaps even more telling were the gains for the left-wing, with the two communist parties (CPI and CPI(M)) winning in 53 seats (up from 37 in 1999), and the overwhelming defeat of the arch-liberaliser Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP (Tclugu Desam Party) in Andhra Pradesh, which went down from 29 to five seats.
Social attitudes
As with so much else in contemporary India, people’s attitudes towards everything from religion, to clothes, to sex are multifarious and complex. To take one example, it is generally true that the position of women in society has improved over the past 50 years. After all, India had a female prime minister years before the UK, and it is not uncommon to see women in the workplace. On the streets of central New Delhi you can now see young women wearing miniskirts, unthinkable 10 years ago; though it is true that this is still an exception, the norm being either jeans and a T-shirt or salwar kamiz.
However, these advances are not universal. In many areas women are still restricted to the domestic sphere or, if they are poor, undertake gruelling physical work for little reward. Female infanticide (now gone illicitly hi-tech through foetal screening) is still a huge problem, and astonishing levels of rape and abuse are under-reported.
As with many things, middle-class women, with their access to education and health care, have seen their prospects and freedoms open up, while their poorer sisters concern themselves with the struggle for survival.
In moving away from traditional roles and becoming a target in the marketplace, women find themselves facing new challenges. Body image has become a major concern. Women are now bombarded with advertisements for creams, shampoos and beauty treatments, promoted by sylph-like creatures with fair skins. “Fair and Lovely”, a skin-lightening cream, is the best-selling beauty product in the country, highlighting the implicit racism in the widely promoted ideal image. Anorexia, unheard of in India a few years ago (going without food was not fashionable in a country where so many people are malnourished), has now reared its ugly head as movie stars and models parade their skinny bodies across the television and cinema screens.
Indians are caught between competing discourses: liberalization or the Nehru-Gandhi legacy; frugality and saving or consumption and spending; religious orthodoxy or newly acquired social freedoms. In the past they have proved themselves humane and inventive, giving us hope for the future.
