India: The world's most remarkable election

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-the-worlds-most-remarkable-election-1667541.html

India: The world's most remarkable election

As the largest democracy on the planet prepares to elect a new government,
Andrew Buncombe reports on the choices facing the 714 million voters

Sunday, 12 April 2009

From the mountain heights of Kashmir to the palm-fringed beaches of Kerala,
from Nagaland in the remote north-east to the Maharashtra heartland, India
will this week throw itself headlong into the world's largest and most
extraordinary election.

Here, in the planet's biggest, if imperfect, democracy, candidates from
1,055 parties will be seeking the support of more than 714 million
registered voters – a number that has jumped by 40 million since the last
election in 2004. Across India's 35 states and "union territories" there
will be 800,000 polling stations ready to receive voters, while six million
police will be on duty to try to maintain order. Such is the sheer scale of
this enterprise that the voting is to be staggered over a month with five
separate polling days. The result will be announced in mid-May.

Among some of the leading players in this political carnival are a movie
star turned politician, whose rallies lure countless thousands of the poor,
desperate for him to transform his on-screen Robin Hood heroism into
real-life action; a "Dalit Queen", whose support among so-called
Untouchables could carry her to the prime minister's official residence; a
chief minister whose state saw a massacre of Muslims yet who has risen to
become a potential leader of his party; and an elegant, Italian-born widow
who holds the position as India's chief power broker. There are wealthy and
poor, old and young, high-caste and low, nationalists and those who want to
separate from India. There are those who preach peace, and those who promise
violence. There are dozens of languages and many different scripts.

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But if an Indian election provides a window in the extraordinary diversity
of the subcontinent, it should not distract from the fundamental point that
this is a contest for power. The centrist Congress Party, which heads the
current ruling coalition, is battling to fight off a challenge not just from
the main opposition, the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), but also from a third front of communist and left parties and even a
fourth front that includes disgruntled former allies. Some analysts believe
this election – the 15th since the country won independence in 1947 – is the
most open in recent years.

What is clear is that the election is taking place against a backdrop of
uncertainty and anxiety for India. While this emerging nation with its
middle vision fixed on superpower status has not suffered the same sort of
economic downturn as the West, many middle-class professions in the IT and
software industry have for the first time faced redundancies and layoffs.

At the same time there is mounting concern about the threat of terrorism.
Last year's Mumbai attacks saw more than 160 people killed by militants from
Pakistan, and the issue of how to avoid a repeat of such incidents has
dominated much public debate. India's relationship with Pakistan, which has
never been warm, but which in recent years had been enjoying something of a
thaw, has effectively now reverted to a stand-off. Meanwhile, the bodies of
nine of the militants who carried out the attack – another man was captured
alive – remain in a Mumbai mortuary waiting to be claimed.

"I will be voting BJP. The risk of terrorism is high and the Congress does
not support a strict law against terrorism," said Praveen Rana, an Indian
air force officer. "The problem for India is that 60 per cent of the
population is poor and they vote in their own interests. The middle classes
don't care about politics. That is why we only have bad politicians."

This criticism of politicians, particularly their alleged corruption, is a
constant among supporters of all parties. In a country where bribery is
embedded in everyday interactions – from getting a job or a canister of
cooking gas to paying off a policeman – ordinary voters are disappointed but
not surprised at reports of corruption. Indeed, Indian newspapers have been
full of such stories. Just this week, police in the southern state of Andhra
Pradesh, parts of which go to the polls on Thursday, uncovered wads of cash
worth about £3m in a supposed "votes for notes" scandal. One regional
watchdog claims £137m will be spent in the last few days of campaigning to
pay for inducements. Many ordinary people believe instinctively that
politicians are only interested in themselves.

"Nobody will help the poor. I have

to work for my survival," said Krishaiah, a wizened flower-seller from the
southern city of Hyderabad, touting strings of blooms alongside a noisy,
traffic-filled road. "Neither the Congress nor anybody else can help."

That people have such distrust of politicians ought not to be a surprise. Of
the 543 MPs returned to the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament, in
2004, a total of 128 had outstanding criminal charges against them. Of those
alleged offences, 84 were for murder while other allegations included
kidnapping, extortion and robbery. "[To be prevented from standing] the law
requires a person to be convicted but a lot of these cases just drag on and
on," said Anil Bairwal, coordinator of the Association for Democratic
Reforms, a watchdog group that has collected these statistics. "By the time
it comes to court, the person may have retired or passed on."

Leading the Congress's re-election campaign is party chairman Sonia Gandhi,
the autocratic widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and
prime minister Manmohan Singh, a quiet, uncharismatic economist credited
with kick-starting India's development but who has taken the country into a
closer alignment with the US. Mrs Gandhi's quietly spoken 38-year-old son,
Rahul, a great-grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
is already a major presence in the party and is widely tipped as a future
prime minister. The Congress, which bought the rights to the Slumdog
Millionaire hit "Jai Ho" (Let There Be Victory) to use as its theme song,
has sought to highlight the country's progress over the past five years.

Leading the BJP is the octogenarian L K Advani, a man who despite, or
perhaps because of, his age has pitched himself as a politician of vitality
and new ideas. He has even started blogging. Despite the ascension within
the party's hierarchy of figures such Narendra Modi, a right-wing ideologue
and chief minister of Gujarat, which in 2002 saw a massacre of Muslims, the
BJP has tried to position itself towards the centre, arguing that it has
moved away from its nationalist past.

But its dilemma of whether or not to give up the so-called Hindutva vote was
underlined by the recent antics of Varun Gandhi, also a great-grandson of
Nehru but the black sheep of the dynasty. Campaigning for the BJP in India's
largest state, Uttar Pradesh, Mr Gandhi, who falsely claimed he had earned
two degrees in London, vowed to cut off the heads of Muslims – an election
promise that might have pleased Hindu extremists but which saw him thrown in
jail and held under anti-terrorism laws.

Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs, was once a Congress stronghold but has
since been controlled by two caste-based parties. The current chief
minister, Mayawati, draws her support from Dalits and has gradually built
her support elsewhere in the country. Brimming with ambition and with a
penchant for commissioning super-sized statues of herself, the diminutive
Mayawati has been tipped as a possible premier if she takes her Bahujan
Samaj Party into an alliance with left parties in a third front.

In recent weeks, a fourth front has also emerged, made up of regional
parties such as the Samajwadi Party, another caste-based party from Uttar
Pradesh, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal from impoverished Bihar. While this
grouping is unlikely to be able to form a government by itself, its fortunes
have been boosted by the support of Konidela Shiva Shankara Vara Prasad,
better known as Chiranjeevi, a popular Telugu-language movie star, who last
year formed his own party in Andhra Pradesh. The larger-than-life actor has
drawn huge crowds as his campaign tours the state. "Reforms need to take
place," he said. "Rural areas have been neglected."

Pundits predict that whichever single party emerges with the most votes, it
will be forced to make a coalition to form a government. This time around,
there have been few pre-poll alliances with most parties opting to see how
they stand in a month's time. "The real election will start on 16 May," said
the veteran journalist and political analyst M J Akbar. "[The coalitions]
are all marriages of convenience. There are no clear ideologies."

In a region where democracy has often struggled, it is perhaps a compliment
to India's enduring civilian rule that few see radical changes, regardless
of whichever of the major parties forms the next government. What the
election does promise is terrific political theatre. Pull up a chair.

The India election in numbers

States

West Bengal: Bengal has been under Communist rule since gaining
independence, and hammer and sickle flags jostle for space with images of
Bollywood stars.

Kashmir: The most densely militarised place on Earth and still at the centre
of South Asian tension.

Uttar Pradesh: India's largest and most important state, with a population
of over 190 million. It is the electoral base of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty,
with Rahul and Sonia Gandhi both having constituencies here.

Gujarat: Fast becoming India's business hub, Gujarat is responsible for the
production of about 90 per cent of India's required Soda Ash. It also
provides about 66 per cent of all the salt used in India.

Kerala: A survey in 2005 ranked Kerala as the least corrupt state in the
country. At 91 per cent, it also has the highest literacy rate in India.

Bihar: Nearly 85 per cent of Bihar's population is rural.

Haryana: At 29,887 rupees (£410), the state of Haryana has the third highest
per capita income in India. It also has the largest number of rural
crorepatis (similar to millionaires when taking into account the cost of
living) in India.

Himachal Pradesh: In a 1981 census it was found that Hindus made up 95 per
cent of the state population.

Maharashtra: Contributing to 15 per cent of India's industrial output and
13.2 per cent of its GDP in 2005-06, Maharashtra is the richest state in
India.

Punjab: With just 6.16 per cent of the population living in poverty, Punjab
is considered the least impoverished of India's states.

Nagaland: Over 85 per cent of the population of Nagaland are directly
dependant on agriculture.

Orissa: Nearly half of the 38 million people living in Orissa are classed as
living below the poverty line.

Tamil Nadu: More than 10 per cent of India's businesses are based in Tamil
Nadu – the largest number for any state.

Sikkim: With only 540,000 inhabitants, Sikkim is India's least populous
state. At 76 people per square kilometre, it also one of the least densely
populated.

Mizoram: Christians make up 87 per cent of Mizoram's population – one of
only three Indian states with a Christian majority.

Karnataka: With GDP growth of 56.2 per cent and per capita GDP growth of
43.9 per cent, Karnataka has been the fastest growing state over the past
decade.

Arunachal Pradesh: The one million-strong population of Arunachal Pradesh is
grouped into more than a hundred tribes and sub-tribes.

Manipur: A politically sensitive area, foreigners wishing to visit must get
a permit which lasts up to ten days. Visitors are required to travel in
groups of four on arranged tours with authorised agents only.

Chhattisgarh: Known as "the rice bowl of India", Chhattisgarh is one of the
largest producers of rice in India – around 1.6 tonnes per hectare.

Assam: Separatist rebels and ethnic tension make this an unstable region,
with attacks on migrants and 605 bomb blasts in the past eight years.

Madhya Pradesh: Sixty per cent of children aged under five are malnourished,
leading to a mortality rate of one in 10 – among the world's worst areas for
malnutrition.

Jharkhand: With a rapidly advancing economy, poverty declined by 2 per cent
per year between 1994 and 2002.

Goa: Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock here each year attracted by
Goa's beaches and world heritage architecture.

Rajasthan: The largest state in India, Rajasthan has an area of 342,269km2,
around 100,000km2 more than the UK.

Andhra Pradesh: At 972km, Andhra Pradesh has the second largest coastline in
India.

Meghalaya: The population is mostly composed of tribespeople, 70 per cent of
them Christian owing to the work of early missionaries.

Tripura: A state ruled by members of the Left Front, including the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

Uttarakhand: The capital, Dehradun, is sometimes known as "the Oxford of
India" for its wide array of boarding schools.

Union territories

Chandigarh: The city of Chandigarh has the highest per capita income in the
country at 99,262 rupees (£1,350). It is also a union territory.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands: The islands were struck by the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami; 2,500 people were killed and 5,000 pronounced missing.

Lakshadweep: India's smallest union territory with a population of just
60,650.

Delhi: Current estimates put the municipal population at 17 million, making
Delhi the sixth most populous city in the world.

Puducherry: With colleges for engineering, the arts, sciences, medicine and
technology, Puducherry is considered an educational centre for southern
India.

Dadra and Nagar Haveli: These Portuguese colonies were liberated in July
1954, and an agreement signed in 1961 to merge them with the rest of India.

Daman and Diu: With a population of just 158,204 , this is India's second
least populous area.

General election facts

There are 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the directly elected lower house which
is also known as the House of the People. Elections take place every five
years.

There are 730 million registered voters in India, an increase of 40 million
since 2004.

Voting will be conducted at 800,000 polling booths and 1,368,430 electronic
voting machines.

More than two million security personnel will be on hand to ensure the
elections run without a hitch.

Of the candidates announced so far, at least 70 have criminal cases pending
against them. The charges include murder, rape, kidnapping, extortion and
assault.

Voting takes place over five phases between 16 April and 13 May.

India's biggest political party, the Indian National Congress, is part of
the United Progressive Alliance which brings together parties willing to
support a Congress-led national government.

The main opposition, the Bharatiya Jarata Party (BJP), is part of the
National Democratic Alliance. This coalition was the first to be forged
between a major national party and a range of regional players.

The Third Front, a leftist grouping, re-named itself the United National
Progressive Alliance last month. The UNPA lists the Communist Party of
India, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party among its 10
members.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.