Challenging dominant parties issue ownership a study of the religious parties the BJP and the PAS 1

Chapter 1 Introduction Research Question In this thesis I explore the following question – why do some religious political parties emerge to form democratically elected governments in some democracies, while others fail to do so? This is an important question because in recent decades, religion has undergone a form of revivalism or renaissance which has seen it figure rather prominently in various guises in the politics of many states. The so-called return of religion to the public domain is exemplified by momentous events like the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the prominent role of Pope John Paul II in bringing down the ‘Iron Curtain’ across Europe, amongst others things. Religion has undergone a renaissance because secular nationalism in the postcolonial era has simply failed to make good on its promises of economic modernisation, material well-being and social justice for all. At the same time, secular nationalism has been blamed as the cause of moral decadence and the widespread rise of social ‘evils’ at the societal level.1 Religious activists and leaders have therefore aggressively promoted religion as the panacea for the apparent failures of secular nationalism. Religion can hold great appeal across a wide section of society because the ends that it pursues are transcendent and all-encompassing, and religion is considered the guarantor of 1 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 21-23. 1 orderliness in a world that has already experienced great dislocation and chaos resulting from the excesses of the modernisation project.2 Religious ideals and precepts of various guises and forms have therefore permeated politics at the governmental level, in civil society, and even at the inter-state level. This thesis focuses on religious political parties – entities that are clear and tangible manifestations of how religion has become very much part of the political landscape in many states. But even as religion has conspicuously stamped its mark in the politics of many states worldwide, religious political parties per se have not made much headway in elections on the whole. Only very few have actually won them, and amongst these not all have formed the government. Examples of religious political parties that have come to power democratically through elections in recent years include the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) in Turkey, and the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP) in India. The Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS) won the 1991 elections in Algeria, but the results were invalidated and the FIS was outlawed by the army, plunging Algeria into years of civil war thereafter. In the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Arab world, several Islamist parties have also come to power as well, like the Ennahda in Tunisia and the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt. On the other hand, many others have floundered or have not achieved similar levels of success. This thesis focuses specifically on non-anti-systemic religious political parties that operate in political systems where a dominant political party is experiencing a crisis or a 2 Ibid., 24; 32 2 decline in its dominance. The time periods in which a dominant political party that is clearly identified with secular nationalism and the modernisation project is experiencing an erosion of its dominance provide us with the ideal political and social milieu that religious political parties can take advantage of. And yet, in spite of the dominant party’s decline, there is marked variation in how successful religious parties have been in taking advantage of such favourable circumstances. Why has this been so? Main Argument To explain this puzzle, I draw my explanation from the literature on issue ownership. I begin with the basic premise that forming the government is the undeniable and intrinsic aim of all religious political parties. Therefore, they must present themselves as a credible party that is ready to take up the mantle of governance and leadership. Since elections are the only legitimate means of coming to power in democracies, it is in the electoral arena where the religious party’s display of credibility as a governing alternative should be witnessed. The party’s strategies and tactics during the electoral campaigning period is therefore extremely crucial in influencing its chances of winning the elections to place it in a good stead to form the government. I argue that religious parties must successfully display credible issue ownership over what I label as ‘national-temporal’ issues in elections. This is crucial for two simple reasons. Firstly, emphasising religious issues that are typically within the domain of the religious parties will not increase their electoral chances. Religious issues only resonate with the party’s constituents, who most likely comprise a small segment of the electorate. Without winning the support of a larger segment of the electorate, the party 3 cannot claim to be representative of a wider section of society. In some cases, emphasising religious issues might even backfire as an electoral tactic. Secondly, it is precisely the ownership of these national-temporal issues that have enabled the dominant party to have formed the government in the first place. Even if the dominant party did not depend on the ownership of such issues to come to power in the first place, at the very least it is its ownership over these issues that has helped the party to prolong and entrench its dominance. It follows that if the religious party then wants to contest for governmental power by displaying itself as a credible governing alternative, it has to wrest away or ‘steal’ the ownership of such issues from the dominant party. In the following chapter I lay out the explanatory framework in further detail to illustrate how religious parties can hijack the ownership over these ‘national-temporal’ issues. At this juncture I would like to distinguish between emphasising and aiming to own national-temporal issues, and the concept of party moderation or the inclusionmoderation hypothesis. Political party moderation involves the rejection of radicalism and the pacification of strategies by adopting measures that are conciliatory, cooperative and less confrontational. A party can either go through behavioural or ideological moderation, or even both.3 The inclusion-moderation hypothesis, which refers more to Islamist political parties, describes ‘the idea that political groups and individuals may become more moderate as a result of their inclusion in pluralist political 3 See Günes Murat Tezcür, “The Moderation Theory Revisited: The Case of Islamic Political Actors,” Party Politics 16, no. 1 (2010): 69-88. 4 processes.’4 Discarding religious issues and trumpeting national-temporal issues might be akin to going through party moderation, conditioned by its inclusion in the democratic processes of contestation for political power. However, in the process of elaborating my theoretical framework by no means do I suggest that religious political parties indeed go through a process of moderation. A party might still be considered ‘radical’ in the sense that it might still hold dear to its agenda of wanting to enforce a moral order upon society, but at the same time it might consciously project a ‘moderate’ image during elections by highlighting and campaigning on issues that are irreligious in nature. How does one reconcile those two seemingly contradictory ‘faces’ of a religious political party? In this paper I avoid discussing and making claims about the ‘moderateness’ or ‘radicalness’ of a religious party at any point in time. This subject matter is not the central concern of this thesis. I also want to underline that issue ownership is not the only factor that influences the chances of a religious party in making a successful claim for governmental power. There are many other factors at play as well, which include successful coalition-building strategies, the strength of party organisation, the party’s ability to mobilise effectively, the financial strength of the parties, its links with civil society actors, and many others. Without dismissing the importance and relevance of these key factors, this thesis aims to highlight a largely underspecified and under-researched yet vital aspect of electoral politics that concerns the nature of the political and strategic ‘talk’ employed by religious 4 Jillian Schwedler, “Can Islamists Become Moderates? Rethinking the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis,” World Politics 63, no. 2 (2011): 348; see also Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 205-228; Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-34. 5 parties in electoral campaigns. I argue that this is an underrated yet critical factor that influences the chances of success at the ballot box for a religious party, and this thesis aims at advancing this aspect of electoral politics in a theoretical and systematic fashion. Both the theoretical and analytical components presented in this thesis are restricted only to the point where religious political parties can defeat the dominant party in elections and become the party of government. How they will deal with the commitment problem of actually implementing any of their policies or even their religious agenda once they come to power is beyond the scope of this paper. 5 Since I am only interested in how the religious party competes against the dominant party from the perspective of issue ownership, the focus of this thesis will only be limited to the paths and strategies adopted during the period of electoral campaigning as part of their aim in winning elections and governmental power, and no further than that. Case Selection I concentrate on cases where a religious party is contesting an election in which the dominant party is either in decline or facing an extended period of crisis. The dominant party is therefore not as dominant as before, and so this provides a window of opportunity for the religious party to stake a credible claim for governmental power. I select two cases (n=2) based on the paired comparison approach6 to demonstrate my 5 See Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Religious Parties,” Comparative Politics 32, no. 4 (2000): 379-398. 6 Sidney Tarrow, “The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 2 (2010): 230-259. 6 theoretical framework. I choose to focus on two cases instead of only one because a paired comparison approach allows the researcher to match the known confounding variables between the two cases, although admittedly the limited number of cases makes it difficult to control for a larger number of such variables.7 Analysing two cases also ‘reduces the possibility that a supposed determining variable is as critical as it might seem from a single-case study alone.’8 I also do not go beyond two cases as the paired comparison approach ‘offers a balanced combination of descriptive depth and analytical challenge that progressively declines as more cases are added’ and ‘as we increase the number of cases… the leverage afforded by paired comparison becomes weaker, because the number of unmeasured variables increases.’9 Of course, the paired comparison approach is not without its own shortcomings and limitations. However, for the purposes of outlining the causal process involved in the theoretical framework of this thesis, adopting a paired comparison approach is sufficient to that end. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India constitutes the first and the ‘success’ case for this thesis. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist party that was established in 1980, but the party traces its roots to its predecessor party, the Indian People’s Organisation (Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or BJS), founded in 1951. As with the BJP today, the BJS was regarded as the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organisation, or RSS), which is essentially a paramilitary organisation established in 7 Ibid., 244. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 246. 7 1925 whose ideology revolves around Hindu nationalism.10 For the 1977 general elections, the BJS, together with other opposition parties, merged to form the Janata Party as part of a concerted effort to unite against the Indira Gandhi-led Indian National Congress (the Congress Party, or simply the Congress) in the aftermath of Emergency Rule in India (1975-1977). The Janata Party managed to defeat the Congress Party in the 1977 elections, but party factionalism precipitated its eventual downfall in 1980. 11 In the wake of the electoral humiliation that the Janata Party suffered in 1980, the BJS faction left the party to found the BJP. Since then, the BJP has continually contested subsequent elections, finally winning for the first time in 1996. In that year the BJP won 161 seats to emerge as the largest party in parliament. However, the BJP government resigned after only thirteen days in power because its leadership knew it would not survive an impending vote of confidence due to a lack of support from other political parties. In 1998 there was a snap election which the party again won, but this time round it managed to form a government that survived a vote of confidence even though it eventually lasted a little over a year. This precipitated the 1999 elections which the BJP won yet again, and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government managed to last its full term through to 2004 before it lost in the elections that year. Technically speaking, the BJP was therefore in power for six years between 1998 and 2004. In this thesis I focus on the BJP’s electoral campaign in the 1998 General 10 Manjeet S. Pardesi and Jennifer L. Oetken, “Secularism, Democracy, and Hindu Nationalism in India,” Asian Security 4, no. 1 (2008): 25-26. 11 For details on the Janata Party interregnum between 1977 and 1980, see Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 159-177. 8 Elections as that year marks the start of the six years that the party was in power. I argue that in 1998 the BJP was successful in wresting away ownership over the issue of economic reforms from the erstwhile dominant Congress Party. In contrast, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS) of Malaysia constitutes the second and the ‘failure’ case for this thesis. The PAS was established in 1951, the same year of founding as the BJS. In fact, it first grew as an offshoot of the dominant party in Malaysia today, the United Malays National Organisation (Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu, or UMNO).12 For much of the 1960s the PAS was identified with an ideology that blended Islam and postcolonial precepts, while the 1970s saw the PAS project itself more as a Malay-nationalist party. It is only from the year 1982 onwards that we see the evident emergence of the PAS as an Islamist political party. Under the tutelage of Yusof Rawa as party president, the party refashioned its institutions and ideology. Islamic scholars, or ulama, were parachuted into positions of leadership in the party, and the party underwent an ‘Arabisation’ and radicalisation of its political discourse. Future UMNO-PAS battle lines were now being waged along the lines of religion (Islam) rather than ethnicity (Malay or Malay nationalism).13 In this thesis I focus on the PAS’s electoral campaign in the landmark 2008 Malaysian General Elections. This election is considered a landmark election because it was the first election in decades whereby the opposition stood a very good chance of making a huge dent in the electoral prospects of the UMNO-led 12 N. J. Funston, “The Origins of Parti Islam Se Malaysia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7, no. 1 (1976): 69. 13 Farish A. Noor, Islamic Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS: 19512003 Volume 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2004), 349-371. 9 coalition of parties. Eventually the combined total of seats won by the three major opposition parties in Malaysia, including the PAS, successfully denied the government parties its traditional two-thirds majority for the first time since 1969, but this was not enough for any of the three to form the government. For the PAS in 2008, I argue that it largely failed to wrest away the ownership over the issue of the economy from the UMNO, which heads the dominant ruling coalition called the National Front (Barisan Nasional, or BN). The selection of the BJP and the PAS is appropriate for this thesis as India and Malaysia provide us with comparable units of study of two not too dissimilar polities. Both are former British colonies that endured a combination of both direct and indirect British rule.14 The similarities in the institutional and political make up of both states strongly bear the imprints of British imperialism, seeing that they both have parliamentary systems of government with first-past-the-post single member plurality electoral systems. Both are also federal states, and therefore both central governments share power with the respective state governments. Elections are thus held at both the state and the federal levels.15 In terms of pure numbers, India’s population far outpaces Malaysia’s (1.2 billion versus just 30 million) but more importantly, in terms of the level of ethnic fractionalisation, they are rather comparable. India’s ethnic and cultural fractionalisation indices are 0.811 and 0.667 respectively, while Malaysia’s are 0.596 14 Matthew Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5. 15 In this thesis I focus largely on elections at the federal level, since I am analysing the religious party’s success at the national level. 10 and 0.564.16 India and Malaysia are in fact highly heterogeneous and compose of fractured societies, which makes the BJP’s success all the more stellar considering how abnormally large and fractured India’s electorate is. Also, as stated earlier, both states have a history of dominant governing parties. The Congress has governed India for much of its independence since 1947, while the UMNO-led coalitions (first, the Alliance, and from 1974 onwards, the BN) have governed Malaysia since its independence in 1957. The last point that I want to clarify in this section is the issue of regime type comparability. While India is generally regarded as a democracy, Malaysia is usually classified as an authoritarian state. But even this distinction is a moot point. Malaysia and India have both been classified as democracies by some scholars.17 India, for one, has also been classified as quasi-democratic.18 In fact, Ayesha Jalal has gone on to argue that even under India’s first and most prominent Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru the Congress Party had an institutionalised brand of authoritarianism that was covert. 19 Malaysia, on the other hand, is at best a ‘hybrid regime’, or more specifically, a type of 16 James D. Fearon, “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country,” Journal of Economic Growth 8, no. 2 (2003): 215219. 17 Edward Friedman and Joseph Wong, “Learning to Lose: Dominant Parties, Dominant Party Systems, and Their Transitions,” in Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, eds. Edward Friedman and Joseph Wong (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3. 18 Marco Rimanelli, “Introduction: Peaceful Democratization Trends in Single-Party-Dominant Countries,” in Comparative Democratization and Peaceful Change in Single-Party-Dominant Countries, ed. Marco Rimanelli (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 14. 19 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38-48. 11 hybrid regime termed as ‘competitive authoritarianism.’20 It has also been described as ‘semi-democratic’.21 The terminological morass might befuddle the interested reader, but what is more important is that in both cases the conduct of elections ensures that they remain competitive and meaningful. Since elections remain the primary means for religious parties to contest for power, it is paramount that the conditions under which regular elections are held are both meaningful and competitive. Kenneth Greene makes a clear distinction between dominant parties in democratic and authoritarian systems (dominant party democratic regimes, DPDRs, and dominant party authoritarian regimes, DPARs), but he concedes that in both types of regimes elections are meaningful and feature a large element of uncertainty in its results.22 Elections under so-called competitive authoritarian regimes like Malaysia are considered legitimate, meaningful and competitively contested under relatively free and fair conditions.23 Even if the claim can be made that the ostensibly authoritarian regime in Malaysia has the means of ensuring favourable electoral results at its disposal, the opposition parties in India have likewise been disadvantaged to the point that elections can grossly favour the Congress Party.24 20 Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 52. 21 William Case, “UMNO Paramountcy: A Report on Single-Party Dominance in Malaysia,” Party Politics 2, no. 1 (1996): 115-127. 22 Kenneth F. Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 258-259. 23 Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” 54-55. 24 Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose, 259. 12 What is of the greatest concern here is not the regime type classification, but at least the fact that elections in both India and Malaysia are competitively held and its results do not always guarantee a win for the dominant party. Data compiled in the Polity IV Project also lends credibility to the comparability of the regime types of both India and Malaysia.25 India was coded as ‘9’ in 1998, which firmly establishes it as a democracy. In 2008 Malaysia was coded as ‘6’, up from ‘3’ which was its score for much of the late 1990s and 2000s. This effectively places Malaysia within the bracket of ‘democratic countries’ as well. Therefore, selecting the cases of the BJP in 1998 and the PAS in 2008 should not pose any serious issues of incomparability of cases for the purposes of this thesis. Methods I rely extensively on a reading of local newspaper reports from India and Malaysia to explicate my argument. Newspapers remain an important medium through which information and coverage on political parties are disseminated to the electorate, and they are a readily accessible source of data for a study on elections and electoral campaigning. Since the focus of this thesis is the electoral campaigning period of each party, as a general rule I mostly take into consideration newspaper articles featured from the point when the respective parliaments were dissolved up to the day of the elections itself.26 For the Indian case study, I am only limited to an analysis of the major 25 Monty G. Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr, “Polity IV Dataset,” Centre for Systemic Peace. Accessed January 19, 2013, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm. 26 There were instances where I included in my analysis newspaper articles that were published outside of the time frame I had set, but I deemed them important and relevant enough not to be ignored. 13 English dailies and weeklies as I do not know any Indian languages.27 However this should not constitute a major problem, since English language dailies and weeklies in India are the more prominent newspapers as they are more widely circulated than the local language newspapers.28 As a native speaker of the Malay language I am able to analyse both the major English language and Malay language newspapers in Malaysia.29 However, in Malaysia, the media companies are only privately-owned in name. Many of the major stakeholders of the media companies that own these newspapers have links to the ruling UMNO, and so there is a reporting bias evident in the newspapers. Jason Abbott’s analysis of two major Malay language newspapers, Berita Harian and Utusan Malaysia, clearly showed that even though the opposition parties received substantial news coverage during the 2008 elections, pro-government reporting bias was greatly evident.30 However, on the whole both the English language and Malay language newspapers gave substantial media coverage to the opposition parties, and certainly much more so relative to previous election years. In 2008 it was also an open secret that much of the campaigning by the opposition parties were carried out through the new media as a 27 The dailies include The Hindu, Business Line, The Times of India, The Economic Times, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and India Today. The only weekly analysed in this thesis was Outlook India. 28 In the rare instances I had also included foreign English newspaper articles which were relevant, both in the Indian and Malaysian case studies. 29 The English language newspapers include The New Straits Times, The Malay Mail, and The Sun Daily. The Malay language newspapers include Berita Harian, Harian Metro, and Utusan Malaysia. I translated the Malay-language newspaper reports that I had selected for analysis into English myself. 30 Jason P. Abbott, “Electoral Authoritarianism and the Print Media in Malaysia: Measuring Political Bias and Analyzing Its Cause,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 38, no. 1 (2011): 1-38. 14 means to circumvent the pro-government bias of the major newspapers. However, the impact of the new media in 2008 has been exaggerated to some degree, and thus its role as a tool for political change and generating alternative discourses and narratives in Malaysia is still questionable.31 Furthermore, a post-electoral survey conducted by Merdeka Centre found that an overwhelming majority of respondents from peninsular Malaysia at least still heavily relied on the traditional print media, especially newspapers, as a source of information for the 2008 elections.32 With limited data at hand I am only able to work with newspaper reports, which remain an important source of information for the public and one that is more easily accessible for research purposes. At the same time I bear in mind the general pro-government biasedness of the more prominent Malaysian newspapers in the conduct of my research and analysis. As far as possible I also try to only include and examine direct quotations where the politician’s words were recorded verbatim in the newspaper reports that I analysed for both case studies. Organisation of the Thesis The organisation of this thesis is as follows. The following chapter will address the literature on religious political parties, opposition party strategies in dominant party 31 Joseph Chinyong Liow, “Malaysia’s March 2008 General Election: Understanding the New Media Factor,” The Pacific Review 25, no. 3 (2012): 293-315. 32 Respondents were asked to state their top three sources of information for the elections. As first choice, 55% of respondents stated ‘Newspapers’, 36.7% stated ‘TV’, and only 3.8% stated ‘Internet/Political Party Websites/Blogs/Emails’. For their second choice, the figures for the three options were 26.8%, 50.7% and 2.7% respectively. In another question, respondents were asked the top 3 Internet sources they had referred to – at least 87% of respondents stated that they did not refer to the Internet as a source of news. See “Peninsula Malaysia Voter Opinion Poll: Perspective on Issues, the Economy, Leadership and Voting Intentions, 14th – 21st March 2008,” Merdeka Centre, accessed January 28 2013, http://www.merdeka.org/pages/02_research.html. 15 systems, dominant political parties, and party issue ownership in elections. It will also then elaborate on how religious parties attempt to wrest ownership over issues from the dominant political party. Chapters 3 and 4 will discuss the case studies of the BJP and the PAS respectively. Chapter 5 will conclude the findings of this thesis and its implications for future research. 16 Chapter 2 Literature Review and Theoretical Framework Religious Political Parties I begin with a seemingly straightforward question – what exactly is a religious political party? In other words, what makes a political party ‘religious’, as opposed to being ‘socialist’, or ‘conservative’, or even ‘secular’? Yet even the term ‘political party’ is difficult to define. Giovanni Sartori argues that political parties are organisations that embody both an ‘expressive function’, in that they ‘transmit demands backed by pressure’, as well as a manipulative function, where parties shape public opinion. 33 According to Alan Ware, a political party ‘is an institution that (a) seeks influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and (b) usually consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to ‘aggregate interests.’’34 The first part of Ware’s definition highlights the point that parties, to varying degrees, ultimately aim at influencing state policies, and the most direct way to do so is by occupying governmental positions. The second part of his definition reconfigures Sartori’s point that parties are organisations that both express and manipulate opinions. From the perspective of rational choice, John Aldrich argues that the political party is an endogenous institution created and ultimately subject to the whims and fancies of 33 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 28. 34 Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5. 17 political actors, who include the politicians, party activists and office-seekers and officeholders. The political party is a vehicle for them to achieve political ends, and so the party is maintained or disregarded depending on when it becomes advantageous towards achieving the required political ends.35 In an attempt to introduce a new typology of political parties in the world today, Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond provide a conceptual framework that consists of fifteen ideal-types of political parties based on three broad criteria – the type of party organisation, the party’s programmatic orientation and whether the party is prodemocracy or anti-systemic.36 Religion, according to Gunther and Diamond, is one of three programmatic appeals for mass-based parties, the other two being nationalism and socialism. Mass-based religious parties consist of two types – the denominational mass-party, which is a term that they adopted from Otto Kirchheimer, and the protohegemonic religious party, also known as the religious fundamentalist party. Denominational mass-based parties first emerged in Europe, and examples of these are Christian democratic parties. The core beliefs of these parties are religiously informed, decided and interpreted by clerics or even a religious institution like the Catholic Church itself. The religious fundamentalist party, on the other hand, relies on a strict and parochial interpretation of religious traditions and texts as the fundamentals of the party’s agenda which it then seeks to impose upon the body politic. The authors argue 35 John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 4-24. 36 See Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond, “Types and Functions of Parties,” in Political Parties and Democracy, eds. Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3-39; Gunther and Diamond, “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology,” Party Politics 9, no. 2 (2003): 167-199. 18 that ‘[t]he principal difference between this and the denominational-mass party is that the fundamentalist party seeks to reorganize state and society around a strict reading of religious doctrinal principles, while denominational-mass parties are pluralist and incremental in their agenda.’37 Manfred Brocker and Mirjam Künkler suggest a looser definition of religious political parties. For them, religious political parties are ‘parties that hold an ideology or a worldview based on religion (having, thus, a cross-class appeal), and mobilize support on the basis of the citizens’ religious identity.’38 While any other party can appropriate religious symbols and terminologies as part of their programmatic appeal, the difference between them and religious parties is that these symbols and terminologies are so central and fundamental to the religious parties.39 At various points in time religious parties might aggregate and promote non-religious issues in elections, but as both Gunther and Diamond, and Brocker and Künkler point out, at the very core of what defines the identity of such parties is religion and its principles, either as a way to maintain a semblance of ideological purity or even as a means of ‘product differentiation’40 vis-à-vis other competing parties. I posit that the other defining feature of a religious political party is the paramountcy of governmental capture as an overriding party objective. Although Ware’s 37 Gunther and Diamond, “Species of Political Parties,” 182. 38 Manfred Brocker and Mirjam Künkler, “Religious Parties: Revisiting the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis – Introduction,” Party Politics 19, no. 2 (2013): 175. 39 Ibid., 176. 40 Herbert Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 118. 19 definition of political parties implicitly assumes that most parties eventually aim to occupy governmental positions at least in the longer term, for the religious party this objective is imperative. Religious parties are driven by their self-professed aim that a religiously-inspired moral order (but not a religious order per se) needs to be established in a polity, and that they are the agents and facilitators of such a change. They therefore need to become the government. In polities where elections serve as the only legitimate means of governmental capture, religious parties simply must perform well in elections. However, if the religious party becomes part of a coalition government but not its dominant or leading party, it might find it difficult to get the backing of other non-religious parties in the coalition to lend support for the enforcement of the party’s moral governing order. Winning elections and then being able to form a majority government on their own is therefore the ideal objective of all religious parties. This contrasts with other types of political parties, especially those that at most only aim to influence the policy agendas of governments, and are thus content to do so from the margins of power. Religious parties can be considered as office-seeking parties, but not of the strictly rationalist vein, where the pursuit and control of political office to derive material benefits is the party’s end goal.41 Religious parties pursue office as a stepping stone in the hope that they can enforce their moral order upon society. 41 For Kaare Strøm, office-seeking parties aim to ‘maximise… their control over political office’, so that they can attain the ‘private goods bestowed on recipients of politically discretionary governmental and subgovernmental appointment.’ See Kaare Strøm, “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties,” American Journal of Political Science 34, no. 2 (1990): 567; see also Steven B. Woelinetz, “Beyond the Catch-All Party: Approaches to the Study of Parties and Party Organization in Contemporary Democracies,” in Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, eds. Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montéro, and Juan J. Linz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 152-153. 20 Opposition Political Parties and Dominant Political Parties As do most opposition parties many religious parties begin from the margins of power, outside of the governmental fold. Starting out as peripheral parties as part of the opposition camp, the aim of governmental capture for many religious political parties is made difficult by the very fact of the incumbency of the parties in government. This task is made even more onerous when the party in power is of the dominant type. The literature on dominant political parties is replete with a myriad of definitions of a ‘dominant political party’, and also the ways in which a party becomes and maintains its dominance. Maurice Duverger postulates that ‘a party is dominant when it is identified with an epoch; when its doctrines, ideas, methods, its style, so to speak, coincide with those of the epoch.’42 Dominance is ultimately a function of both influence and belief – a party is said to be dominant when the public essentially holds a party to be dominant. 43 Giovanni Sartori cautions the reader on confusing ‘dominant parties’ and ‘dominant party systems’, or what he terms as ‘predominant party systems.’44 Predominant party systems are those where the major party consistently wins an absolute majority of the legislative seats for at least four consecutive elections, as a direct consequence of winning a majority of the electoral votes.45 T.J. Pempel suggests a four-dimensional 42 Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara North and Robert North (New York: Wiley, 1954), 308. 43 Ibid. 44 Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 192-195. 45 Ibid., 196. 21 definition of dominance of parties in democracies. To be considered as ‘dominant’ a party must be numerically dominant (larger number of seats vis-à-vis its opponents), be in a dominant bargaining position (by holding a position within the party system that allows it to bargain effectively with other smaller parties in coalition-building efforts, especially when it cannot win outright majorities), be chronologically dominant (in power for a substantial period of time), and governmentally dominant (by carrying out a ‘historical project’, which involves mutually-supportive policies that shape a national agenda as a legacy of the dominant party).46 Marco Rimanelli describes single-party-dominant polities as the ‘systemic monopolisation of domestic political power, all national structures, and the decisionmaking process, by an entrenched, single party over a long period of time.’47 Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins accept T.J. Pempel’s definition of one-party dominance, but unlike him they argue that it is very difficult to distinguish between dominant parties in ‘full’ democracies, which are mostly industrialised countries, and in dominant oneparty regimes in industrialising countries. They conceive the dominant party as a separate regime type with its own unique features, where at least some democratic procedures are upheld.48 Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek emphasise the structural effects of the political systems and the strategic effects of choices by parties in electoral competition as a response to the prevailing structures that enable parties to 46 T. J. Pempel, “Introduction,” in Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes, ed. T.J. Pempel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3-4. 47 Rimanelli, “Introduction,” 14. 48 Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins, “Introduction,’ in The Awkward Embrace: One-Party Domination and Democracy, eds. Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), xv-xviii. 22 become dominant.49 Patrick Dunleavy offers a method of identifying ‘dominance’ independent of the party’s tenure in office, which means that we can potentially move away from a post hoc determination of a party’s dominance. He links dominance to a party’s level of efficacy – a party is said to be dominant when it is accepted by voters to be ‘exceptionally effective.’50 Jean-François Caulier and Patrick Dumont propose a mathematical method of measuring party dominance, which they understand to be ‘the access to government or the ability to control majority decision-making in parliament.’51 They propose employing voting power indices which reflect the extent of dominance that the largest party in a parliament holds vis-à-vis other parties in controlling the decision-making and voting processes in parliament, arguing that this is a better measurement of party dominance than the traditional effective number of parties (ENP) index proposed earlier by Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera.52 What are the means through which parties become, and remain, dominant? The answers to this question simultaneously address why attempts by various opposition political parties, including religious parties, to defeat the dominant parties in elections repeatedly fail. The list of reasons include the entrenchment of resource asymmetries 49 Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek, “Introduction: Setting a New Agenda for Research,” in Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 7-8. 50 Patrick Dunleavy, “Rethinking Dominant Party Systems,” in Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2344. 51 Jean-François Caulier and Patrick Dumont, “Measuring One-Party Dominance with Voting Power Indices,” in Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, eds. Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek (New York: Routledge, 2010), 45. 52 Ibid., 46-57. 23 that favour dominant parties,53 the practice of clientelism by the dominant party with added protection for the beneficiaries of such a system,54 the failure of opposition parties to co-operate on electoral strategies,55 the near-monopoly of the media, the press and means of advertising by the dominant party,56 and/or the co-optation of antiregime or anti-dominant party elites.57 Dominant parties also aim at ensuring that they attain an overriding monopoly of the vote in elections. In that way, they send out signals to any potential challengers that the party is too strong to be challenged. Therefore any potential within-party challengers or even opposition candidates will have to think very carefully about rebelling against the dominant party. This means that it pays off for all parties involved to stick to the status quo, thus ensuring elite unity in the dominant party and the preference for the opposition camp to remain as the ‘loyal opposition’. Voters also see no reason to change the status quo by voting against the dominant party, since they benefit materially from doing so. Unless this balance is upset, one would expect this intricate 53 Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose, 1-70. 54 Ethan Scheiner, Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-30. 55 Ray Christensen, Ending the LDP Hegemony: Party Cooperation in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 1-8. 56 James J. Zaffiro, “The Press and Political Opposition in an African Democracy: The Case of Botswana,” The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 27, no. 1 (1989): 51-73. 57 Carlene J. Edie, “Democracy in the Gambia: Past, Present and Prospects for the Future,” Africa Development 25, no. 3&4 (2000): 161-198; David White, “Dominant Party Systems: A Framework for Conceptualizing Opposition Strategies in Russia,” Democratization 18, no. 3 (2011): 655-681. 24 order to perpetuate.58 Attempts at opposition coalition building can also repeatedly fail because some component parties suffer from an ‘organisational crisis’. To build coalitions, component parties have to give up some of their party aims and goals to come to a compromise with other component parties. However, for parties whose only differentiation factor and incentive for attracting party membership solely rely upon the purity of party ideology and identity, the compromise of such ideals for the sake of coalition-building leads its disillusioned members to believe that the party leadership has ‘sold out’ the party. The decline in intra-party cohesion ensues, which greatly destabilises the party and as a result inter-party coalitions become short-lived.59 While much has been theorised about the emergence of party dominance and its perpetuation, dominant party decline is another matter altogether. This describes the period whereby a dominant party might still be in power, but aspects of its dominance are being threatened greatly. The dominant party is muddling through, but it is still hanging on. However, much scholarship is devoted only towards discussing the demise of the dominant party as part of the larger process of democratisation, or only concentrate on specific time periods where the dominant party is already faced with the prospect of losing in elections. Bogaards and Boucek claim to ‘explain why dominant parties endure, decline and break down’,60 but they do not actually provide any overarching theory to explain the decline of dominant parties. From the perspective of 58 Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-43. 59 Stephen Johnson, Opposition Politics in Japan: Strategies under a One-Party Dominant Regime (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57-61. 60 Bogaards and Boucek ”Introduction,” 2. 25 political economy Kenneth Greene argues that a party’s dominance is sustained by the incumbent’s access to resources that advantages it and makes it an uneven playing field for opposition parties. Thus, when the ability to tap on such resources become greatly constrained, either through privatisation drives or the fallout from economic crises, the incumbency and dominance of the party is in jeopardy. 61 Alternatively, based on Pempel’s four-dimensional concept it can be argued that when any of these dimensions are at great risk it should signal the decline of a dominant party. Of the four dimensions described, a party’s dominance would be most seriously threatened when the party struggles to maintain its governmental dominance (the fourth dimension), especially when its ‘historical project’ is no longer deemed as all-important or as relevant as it once used to be by the electorate. Even if we can identify when a dominant party is in decline and that the playing field is now becoming more advantageous for opposition parties (in the case of this thesis, the religious political party), what should the response of opposition parties be? Here it is pertinent to emphasise that dominant party decline is just one side of the equation. Decline in party dominance does not directly translate to the coming to power of opposition parties; what matters more is whether opposition parties are ready and in pole position to defeat the incumbent dominant party in elections.62 Adroit strategies and tactics that are well-planned out and well-executed by opposition parties greatly 61 Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose, 5-6. 62 Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik, “Defeating Dictators: Electoral Change and Stability in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes,” World Politics 62, no. 1 (2010): 47. 26 increase the chances of them coming to power.63 In polities where elections are the primary means of contestation for power, and where elections are relatively free, fair, competitive and meaningful, it is crucial then for the religious party to work on an electoral strategy that will greatly enhance the likelihood of winning elections as well as governmental capture. It used to be the case that until the recent past, elections worldwide were contested along the lines of social cleavages.64 But changes in the social structure of societies, especially in Europe, have led to the decline in cleavages-based voting in favour of issue-based voting.65 As elections are increasingly fought along issues and issue opinions, I consider it pertinent that any theory on winning elections and governmental capture must centre upon theories and concepts related to the ‘owning’ of such issues. Dominant parties continue to be dominant because they consistently portray themselves as credible owners of important electoral issues from election to election, a fact that is largely under-theorised in the scholarship on dominant parties. Even if their initial rise to dominance was not as a result of the ownership of such issues, the maintenance of their dominance results from the continued ownership of such governmental issues. However, this is not the central concern of this thesis. What 63 Ibid., 73; see also Larry Diamond, “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 24. 64 Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, eds. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 1-64; Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability: The Stabilisation of European Electorates 1885-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 212-249. 65 Russell J. Dalton, “Political Cleavages, Issues, and Electoral Change,” in Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting, eds. Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 201-204. 27 is more relevant here is that in order for the religious party to project itself as a credible governing alternative, it must then seek to wrest away the dominant party’s ownership over important issues of the day. But there must be an understanding of the concept of issue ownership itself, before one can elaborate on how issue ownership can be contested and then wrested away. Political Parties and Issues ‘Issue competition’ is an umbrella term that includes spatial theory, directional theory, issue salience theory and issue ownership theory. They are all related theories that try to explain a particular phenomenon – how parties convince voters that they are ‘in charge’ of a particular issue, and that voters should vote for a particular party because of that. Different parties have different ‘reputations’, and so voters respond accordingly to which party they have an affinity with based on issues that are important to them. These inter-related theories diverge on how they try to explain the sources of this ‘reputation’, and how they also try to explain the incentives for a rational voter to side with a particular party in elections.66 In this thesis I focus more specifically on issue ownership theory. But firstly we need to begin by defining the term ‘issue’. Here I adopt Ian Budge’s definition, which takes issues to be ‘topics raised by one or more party leaderships and/or important among electors.’67 Donald Stokes makes a distinction between 66 John R. Petrocik, William L. Benoit, and Glenn J. Hansen, “Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning, 19522000,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (2003): 600. 67 Ian Budge, “Issues, Dimensions, and Agenda Change in Postwar Democracies: Longterm Trends in Party Election Programs and Newspaper Reports in Twenty-Three Democracies,” in Agenda Formation, ed. William H. Riker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993): 43. 28 ‘position issues’ and ‘valence issues’. Position issues are ‘those that involve advocacy of government actions from a set of alternatives over which a distribution of voter preferences is defined’, whereas valence issues ‘are those that merely involve the linking of the parties with some condition that is positively or negatively valued by the candidate.’68 Stokes had advocated an understanding of the existence of valence issues alongside position issues as a response and critique to Anthony Downs, who had argued that issue preferences take a scalar form, in that they can be ranked in terms of values ranging from 0 to 100, for example. For Downs, proximity matters – voters would prefer to vote for a party whose issue position is the closest to them along that scale.69 Therefore valence issues clearly do not fit the Downsian spatial model, because certain issues simply cannot be quantified as a matter of degree. For example, the issue of abortion would only consist of two alternatives – either being pro-abortion or antiabortion. Classifying abortion as a Downsian-style position issue simply does not make sense. Valence issues involve achieving a certain ideal or desired aim and therefore do not involve an ordering of alternatives as per the Downsian spatial model. Rather, ‘when parties manoeuvre in terms of valence-issues, they choose one or more issues from a set of distinct issue domains.’70 68 Donald E. Stokes, “Spatial Models of Party Competition,” The American Political Science Review 57, no. 2 (1963): 373. 69 Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 115-116; see also James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8-14. 70 Stokes, “Spatial Models of Party Competition”, 374. 29 Returning to Budge’s definition of issue, it also gives us a clue as to the origins of issues, or more specifically, the sources of issue competition. The sources of issue competition include (1) the promotion of particular issues by strategic politicians as effective leverage in the struggle for power, (2) issues moved to the centre of public discourse when highlighted by external disruptions to the established order, (3) new issue species that are old issues transformed by isolation and specialisation in a new context to something quite different than their origins, and (4) cybernetic issues selected for importance because internal contradictions and imbalances in the political system generate corrective needs.71 Issues therefore do not emerge in a vacuum, and neither do they just arise naturally. It is clear that in some cases politicians intentionally make salient issues as part of a strategic choice, while in other cases issues emerge and become predominant because of external conditions that are beyond the control of the government, parties and politicians alike. For the religious party that wants to challenge the dominant party over the ownership of issues, the range of contestable issues under consideration must comprise the ‘national-level’ types, like economic and security issues, inter alia, which are so critical because they matter greatly to a rather large segment of the electorate.72 Therefore religious political parties must transform themselves into truly national-level 71 Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, “On the Evolution of Political Issues,” in Agenda Formation, ed. William H. Riker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993): 153-156. 72 For a broad classification of electoral issues, see Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections: Issue Effects and Party Strategies in Twenty-Three Democracies (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 28-30. 30 parties, especially if they want to display real credibility and ability in the ‘handling’ of national-level issues.73 At the same time, the religious party cannot emphasise religious issues anymore, much less make it the cornerstone of their electoral campaigns. In most cases religion as an issue is not critical enough to enthrall the electorate. While it might capture some attention, in most cases the mass of attention and publicity garnered cannot be sustained for a long time to constitute a stable issue in the polity. Focusing on an issue that is as parochial as a religious issue also conveys to the voters that the religious party is still only enamoured with marginal issues that do not concern the larger segment of the electorate. I also stress that religious parties should not only engage issues that are ‘national’, but also ‘temporal’ in nature. By ‘temporal’ I mean matters that concern the secular and the material world, rather than the religious and the transcendental world. The emphases on ‘national-temporal’ issues by the religious party signal to the electorate its credibility and readiness to be considered a worthy option or alternative for government candidacy, especially when a window of opportunity arises in favour of the religious party. It is undoubtedly a great irony that a religious party should come to power not because of its religious credentials but because it has focused on ‘nationaltemporal’ issues. The next step is to consider how religious political parties and its leaders then grapple with the national-temporal issues at hand. They must try to ‘work’ the issues in such a manner that it will be to their greatest advantage in order to grant 73 Éric Bélanger, “Issue Ownership by Canadian Political Parties 1953-2001,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 36, no. 3 (2003): 555. 31 them the much-needed leverage vis-à-vis the dominant party. Issue ownership theory lends much insight towards how they can ‘work’ these issues in their favour. Issue Salience and Directional Theory Issue ownership theory really developed from saliency theory, first properly formulated by Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie. Based on the concept of selective emphasis, they argue that political parties will only make salient issues that present the parties themselves in a more favourable light, rather than raising issues that are clearly identified with other opposing parties. Parties then try to make as prominent as possible the issues that they raise, and to that effect increase the profile of the party in the hope of garnering more votes.74 The stakes involved in mentioning unfavourable issues that play into the hands of other rival parties are pretty high – ‘mentioning them at all.... runs the risk of rendering an unfavourable issue salient and helping to push voters into another party.’75 The Dominance Principle and Dispersion Principle postulated by William Riker are also similar to saliency theory, although Riker does not mention issue salience explicitly.76 Therefore, even if a party in the Downsian sense adopts a position on all the contestable issues in an election, it would be more rational not to make salient any issue(s) which would prove detrimental to their vote garnering efforts. 74 Budge and Farlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections, 23-25. 75 Ian Budge, “Electoral Volatility: Issue Effects and Basic Change in 23 Post-War Democracies,” Electoral Studies 1, no. 2 (1982): 149. 76 See William H. Riker, “Rhetorical Interaction in the Ratification Campaign,” in Agenda Formation, ed. William H. Riker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993): 81-123; see also William H. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996): 99-125. 32 As an alternative theory in understanding party issue competition, George Rabinowitz and Stuart Elaine MacDonald propose a directional theory of issue voting based on the concept of symbolic politics. Instead of issue positioning, they argue that a voter grasps an issue in terms of direction – whether he takes a favourable or an opposing stand on it. In other words, issues are represented as a dichotomy and not as ordered dimensions on a scale. The second component of the theory involves intensity; that is, the strength of emotions and feelings evoked about a particular issue for the voter, and the magnitude of effort put in by the candidate to rally voters around that issue.77 The authors argue that a party’s candidates should then take clear and strong stands to persuade voters that it wants to be closely identified with a particular issue. Simultaneously ‘candidates who can successfully evade an issue are able to make that issue far less relevant for judgement about themselves.’78 In fact, in multi-issue settings ‘candidates are likely to be intense on issues that benefit them and silent on issues that are potentially damaging.’79 Therefore Rabinowitz and MacDonald are effectively describing issue salience. Directional theory diverges from the Downsian spatial model not only with regards to the dichotomous nature of issues, but also by incorporating the issue salience dimension. 77 George Rabinowitz and Stuart Elaine MacDonald, “A Directional Theory of Issue Voting,” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 1 (1989): 93-121; see also Stuart Elaine MacDonald, Ola Listhaug, and George Rabinowitz, “Issues and Party Support in Multiparty Systems,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 4 (1991): 11071131. 78 Rabinowitz and MacDonald, “A Directional Theory of Issue Voting,” 98. 79 Ibid., 99. 33 Even though Budge and Farlie, and Rabinowitz and MacDonald, offer similar conceptions of issue salience, both fail to take into account that issue ownership should be, at least theoretically, regarded as a separate and distinct component of issue competition. For example, Budge explicitly states that when voters are ‘convinced of its saliency, they will vote for the party which ‘owns’ the issue area.’80 But he does not go on to theorise the ownership aspect of issue competition. It is assumed implicitly that ownership can naturally follow from salience, which is not necessarily always the case. Making an issue salient and pressing claims of ‘owning’ an issue are two distinct matters. Rabinowitz and MacDonald, on the other hand, present their claims using a spatial model that includes a ‘region of acceptability’ – a party will be penalised if it finds itself out of this region as it is perceived to be so extremely intense. 81 The most dominant position for any party would then be ‘the most extreme position in the direction of that preference still lying within the region of acceptability.’ 82 Yet if this was the party strategy for two parties who claim to have similar directional preferences and similar levels of intensity on an issue, what would then differentiate them in the eyes of the voter? There is nothing to stop these two parties from adopting such a strategy, since any points within that region are equally advantageous anyway. 83 80 Budge, “Electoral Volatility,” 149. 81 Rabinowitz and MacDonald, “A Directional Theory of Issue Voting,” 108. 82 Ibid., 109. 83 Ibid., 108. 34 Issue Ownership Theory There is a case to be made then that issue ownership should be made distinct as an analytical concept in its own right. John Petrocik, in developing his issue ownership theory, pays homage to Budge and Farlie and Rabinowitz and MacDonald by alluding to the similarities between his theory, and issue saliency theory and directional theory.84 Nevertheless, issue ownership theory goes beyond both these theories since it is evident that issue ownership is more than just about identifying one’s own party or one’s self with an issue and highlighting it because it is to their advantage and strengths. Petrocik states that a candidate is said to have acquired issue ownership when he ‘successfully frames the vote choice as a decision to be made in terms of problems facing the country that he is better able to “handle” than his opponent.’85 Issue ownership has two sources – incumbency record and party constituencies. Incumbent candidates or parties can gain ownership over issues through the level of competency that they have shown or proven during their time in office. Challenger parties or candidates additionally acquire an advantage in the form of ‘performance-based ownership’, when they can successfully convince voters that the incumbent party or candidate has failed to ‘handle’ issues and problems while in office. Party constituency sources, however, are much more long-term in nature, and they depend on the 84 John R. Petrocik, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (1996): 826. 85 Ibid. 35 politicisation of group cleavages that the party or candidate has chosen to exploit over the years.86 For Petrocik, issues are not merely ‘topics’ to be raised during elections, but are in fact problems that require solutions. Issue ownership requires the party or candidate to signal to and convince the voters that a certain issue is a ‘problem’ that they can actually ‘fix’ if given a chance to do so. The differentiating factor between parties is any party’s capacity to ‘handle’ an issue, which is gauged by its perceived competency level to solve problems.87 However, the competence dimension of issue ownership tells only part of the story. According to Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevre and Anke Tresch, issue ownership theory consists of another element – what they refer to as the ‘associative’ dimension. This dimension describes ‘the spontaneous identification of parties with issues in the minds of voters, regardless of whether voters consider the party to be the most competent to deal with these issues; it is rather the consequence of long-term party attention to the issue.’88 They argue that scholars have tended to fuse the associative and competence dimensions together and have given due deference to the competence dimension, whereas both these elements are analytically distinguishable. 89 However, it is very difficult to find evidence on the competence dimension of issue ownership, more often than not due to a lack of substantial and relevant data. For the 86 Ibid., 827-828. 87 Ibid., 830. 88 Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevre, and Anke Tresch, “The Associative Dimension of Issue Ownership,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2012): 772. 89 Ibid. 36 purposes of this thesis I therefore focus only on the associative dimension of issue ownership rather than the competence dimension. The association of a party with an issue or a set of issues naturally requires a party to actually talk about them rather extensively. Indeed, the ‘mere association’ of a party with an issue ‘is an indicator of an ability to implement superior policies and programs for dealing with the problems owned by the party.’ 90 But mere ‘talking’ or making the issue(s) salient, to follow Budge’s and Farlie’s parlance, is surely insufficient. Furthermore, the associative dimension of issue ownership describes the historical aspect of issue ownership – that ownership is derived from the party’s record over a considerably long period of time to have repeatedly ‘talked’ about an issue or a set of issues. Issue ownership delineates a certain sense of stability and a lack of change over an issue’s ‘owner’. For the dominant political party, this is what that helps to buttress its dominance. The advantages of having claimed issue ownership over national-temporal issues therefore lie firmly within the dominant party. Its longtime record of governance is both the cause and effect of its ability to ‘handle’ problems (competence) and to repeatedly ‘talk’ about such issues (association). Issue ownership and governmental stability reinforce each other, and this makes it extremely difficult for the religious party to challenge the dominant party during elections when important issues of the day are clearly ‘owned’ by the dominant party. Issue Trespassing and the ‘Stealing’ of Issue Ownership However, there can be instances where issue ownership can change hands. Cases of issue trespassing can occur, whereby a party talks about issues that are 90 Petrocik, Benoit, and Hansen, “Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning,” 601. 37 already owned by other parties.91 Given the stack of evidence to show that talking about other parties’ issues might backfire on the party, why and when would a party still engage in issue trespassing anyway? David Damore suggests that factors related to the political environment and the campaign process itself can entice a party to engage in issue trespassing. When the ‘mood of the country’ does not allow for the parties to emphasise certain sensitive issues, parties then have no choice but to talk about other parties’ issues to suit the ‘mood’ and the whims of the voters. There are also certain issues that voters hold as very important, regardless of which party owns them. Therefore, parties are left with little choice but to have to talk about these issues anyway, even if other parties already own them. From the electoral campaign point of view, party candidates might engage in issue trespassing if they feel that they are lagging behind their opponents in terms of voter support during the campaigning period. If the issues raised by their opponents resonate well with the voters and are the reasons for their popularity, there is nothing to lose in engaging in issue trespassing for the trailing candidate. Whenever possible and justified, candidates can also highlight the opponents’ perceived weaknesses over the party’s issue ownership while at the same time touting their own credibility. It might be better for the candidate to trespass positively by emphasising their own credibility, instead of resorting to negative appeals that cast the opposition in a bad light as such tactics might backfire.92 91 David F. Damore, “The Dynamics of Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections,” Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 391-397. 92 Ibid. 38 We know then when and why candidates or parties might engage in issue trespassing. But issue trespassing does not in any way suggest strongly the possibility of change in the ownership of an issue or set of issues from one party to another. It only goes as far as to suggest that a party can actually ‘talk’ about other parties’ issues when the windows of opportunity present themselves. It fails to theorise how this ‘talk’ will be seen as credible, so much so that a party’s ownership over an issue or a range of issues is severely threatened and can be wrested away by its opponents. David Holian’s explanatory framework plugs the gap that Damore’s theory did not address. He argues that parties can actually attempt to ‘steal’ or even neutralise other parties’ issue ownership. Given the correct rhetorical ‘spin’ when talking about an issue, parties can actually present themselves as credible issue owners.93 This ‘spin’ is most effective when an opponent is faced with what William Riker termed as a ‘heresthetical dilemma’, which ‘structure[s] the decision-making situation to the speaker’s advantage and the respondent’s disadvantage.’94 Heresthetics, according to Riker, entails ‘the art of setting up situations… in such a way that even those who do not wish to do so are compelled by the structure of the situation to support the heresthetician’s purpose.’ 95 Simply put, it is about ‘structuring the world so you can win.’96 From the perspective of issue ownership, it is thus insufficient to merely ‘talk’ about an issue owned by another 93 David B. Holian, “He’s Stealing My Issues! Clinton’s Crime Rhetoric and the Dynamic of Issue Ownership,” Political Behavior 26, no. 2 (2004): 99. 94 William H. Riker, The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 8. 95 William H. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 9. 96 Ibid. 39 party. This ‘talk’ must be configured in such a manner that denies the ownership of an issue to the party that originally owned it while simultaneously stealing its ownership. Giving the right ‘spin’ on an issue structures the decision-making process so that it can compel voters to vote for the party that has engaged in heresthetics. Giving the correct ‘spin’ to an issue would also suffice in at least claiming short-term ownership or having an issue ‘on lease’, especially over the period of only one election. 97 Therefore, issue ownership is thus not as stable as it is made out to be since it can be contested from election to election. Parties will be more inclined to discuss issues that resonate greatly with the electorate regardless of ownership, and they will also be emboldened to ‘talk’ their way out of their weaknesses in order to portray themselves from a position of strength instead.98 Holian lists three criteria for the successful neutralisation of an opponent’s ownership of an issue. Firstly, public opinion must change to become less biased towards the party that owns the issue. Accordingly, this might arise as a result of factors not related at all to the campaigning process itself, like the state of the economy for example. Secondly, the challenger party must frame the issue in such a way that is different from how the original owners had claimed issue ownership. In other words, the dimension and the parameters of the debate over an issue must be changed by the challenger party. Thirdly, the media must also take up this new issue dimension and 97 Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevre, and Michiel Nuytemens, “Issue Ownership Stability and Change: How Political Parties Claim and Maintain Issues Through Media Appearances,” Political Communication 26, no. 2 (2009): 155. 98 Holian, “He’s Stealing My Issues,” 99. 40 convey it to the electorate.99 Holian used the example of Bill Clinton’s tactics in wresting away the Republican Party’s traditional ownership over the issue of crime in his 1992 and 1996 American presidential campaigns to demonstrate his theory. Using both descriptive and statistical evidence, he demonstrated how Clinton managed to neutralise and then steal ownership over the issue of crime, turning the issue that historically has always been the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel into one that became a landmark issue for Clinton’s campaign. Clinton’s approach first involved agreeing with the Republican standpoint on the necessity of capital punishment. By doing so, Clinton was able to enter the public debate on crime punishment on credible and equal terms with the original issue owners, the Republican Party. He then manoeuvred to change the dimensions of the debate – from one that emphasised punishment to one that emphasised prevention and deterrence. Basically, Clinton’s strategy to combat the Republican Party was a ‘’Yes, but’’ strategy, telling Republicans that, yes, his administration agreed on the death penalty, but the way to fight crime more effectively was to put more police on the streets — using federal dollars — and to get guns off them — using federal laws.100 Throughout his presidency Clinton kept reminding the public of his unwavering support for the death penalty institution, while at the same time also heavily emphasising crime prevention initiatives, like mentioning gun control laws or the deployment of more law enforcement officers. The Republican response on crime prevention was non-existent in 99 Ibid., 100. 100 Ibid., 101. 41 most cases, and tepid at best. Therefore, Clinton’s strategic ‘talk’ allowed him to successfully steal the ownership of the crime issue from the Republicans – ‘[h]is prodeath penalty stance both inoculated him against Republican charges of weakness and allowed him the credibility to talk about the crime issue in a new way.’101 For this thesis I base my explanatory framework on Holian’s framework to explicate how issue ownership over national-temporal issues can be wrested away from the dominant party. Following Holian, I argue that the success of the religious party in stealing issues owned by the dominant party relies largely on whether the religious party can engage the terms of the debate on the same plane as the dominant party, and then go on to reframe the dimensions of the debate so that it advantages the religious party. If the religious party can engage in a heresthetical exercise by structuring the dimensions of the debate which would favour itself more, voters will find it more compelling to vote for it instead. Essentially, the religious party should adopt Clinton’s ‘yes, but’ approach when engaging the terms of the debate over issues that have historically been owned by the dominant party. Successfully outwitting the dominant party on its own terms over national-temporal issues can transform voters’ perception of the religious party towards one in which it can be seen as a credible option as a governing party. In the following chapter I use the case study of the BJP in 1998 to demonstrate how the party successfully managed to recast the dimensions over the debate on economic reforms in India to favour the party itself. 101 Ibid., 106. 42 Chapter 3 The BJP in the 1998 Indian General Elections The BJP in 1998 serves as my first case study. For my explanatory framework to be validated in this case, the following will have had to happen: - The BJP would have had to make it explicit that the party would drop all religious issues in its electoral campaign. - The BJP would have had to engage the national-temporal issue(s) owned by the Congress Party. - The BJP would have had to recast the debate over the issue(s) in such a manner that it favours the party itself in order to wrest issue ownership away from the Congress Party successfully. - The BJP’s framing of the debate over the issue(s) would have had to resonate with a rather substantial segment of the electorate. This list of expected behaviour of the BJP will necessarily occur simultaneously in certain instances, and so I will try to disentangle them as best as possible. The Congress Party of India and Its Decline The Congress Party of India was founded back in 1885 when both India and Pakistan were still under British colonial rule. The party soon became the primary vehicle for advocating independence from British rule. The most famous political figure 43 associated with the Congress during this period was Mahatma Gandhi, the preeminent public figure of the Indian independence movement. India was eventually granted independence from Britain in 1947. For the thirty years that followed independence the Congress Party ruled as the dominant party in power, but its reign at least up to 1977 can be separated into two phases. The first phase covers the period 1947 to 1967, and the second phase lasted from 1967 to 1977, when it finally lost power for the first time. The Indian party system in the first two decades pretty much revolved around the Congress Party – so much so that the party system, which was essentially a predominant party system,102 had been termed as the ‘Congress system’.103 This highly competitive system consists of a party of consensus and parties of pressure. The latter function on the margin and, indeed, the concept of a margin of pressure is of great importance in this system. Inside the margin are various factions within the party of consensus. Outside the margin are several opposition groups and parties, dissident groups from the ruling party, and other interest groups and important individuals. These groups outside the margin do not constitute alternatives to the ruling party. Their role is to constantly pressurize, criticize, censure and influence it by influencing opinion and interests inside the margin and, above all, exert a latent threat that if the ruling group strays away too far from the balance of effective public opinion, and if the factional system within it is not mobilized to restore the balance, it will be displaced from power by the opposition groups.104 102 Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 195-197. 103 Rajni Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” Asian Survey 4, no. 12 (1964): 1168. 104 Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” 1162. 44 As the party of consensus the Congress had to strike a balance between the various contending factions under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru, who proved to be an effective unifying figure for the party as India’s first Prime Minister. Nehru passed away in 1964, and the Congress managed the succession issue well by handing the reins over to Lal Bahadur Shastri. However, his sudden and untimely death in 1966 marked the beginning of a power struggle in the Congress which led to the eventual unravelling of the Congress system beginning in the 1967 elections. The third decade of the Congress Party’s stay in power witnessed the beginnings of the eventual decline of the party from its erstwhile dominant position. From 1971 till her assassination in 1984, the Congress effectively revolved around one figure – Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s only daughter. Punctuated only by opposition rule between 1977 and 1980, her reign was marked by highly centralized, personalistic rule from New Delhi and the decay of political institutions – both the formal institutions of the state and the informal institutions of the Congress Party organization. This decay resulted in part from the stagnation and ossification to which institutions everywhere are subject. But it came about primarily through the conscious efforts of Mrs. Gandhi to undermine the substance and autonomy of institutions in order to achieve personal dominance within the political system.105 As Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s personalisation of power subjugated the Congress to her whims and caprices, it also destroyed the party institutions that had 105 James Manor, “India after the Dynasty,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 3 (1990): 105. 45 been built up over the years.106 Her iron-fisted rule tolerated no dissent and she only favoured those who she deemed were loyal to her. Between 1975 and 1977 Indira had even imposed Emergency Rule in India, effectively governing India as an autocrat. The defeat of the Congress Party in the 1977 elections signalled the voters’ widespread displeasure over Indira’s excesses during Emergency Rule. The opposition experiment was, however, short-lived; the Janata government fell in 1980, and the Congress managed to win the ensuing elections in the same year. In the wake of Indira’s assassination in 1984 her eldest son Rajiv Gandhi took over the reins of the party and the premiership as well. Rajiv began his tenure with much promise, but soon resorted to the same style of rule and governance that his late mother had adopted. Undone by corruption scandals that had implicated Rajiv and many other party members, the Congress Party was defeated in the 1989 elections. In the 1991 elections two years later, the Congress triumphantly became the government again – but it was marred by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in between the first and second scheduled days of voting. The Congress Party had been faring poorly in the first round, but after his assassination votes for the party increased significantly. Whether this was due to sympathy,107 or that his death resulted in the party ‘being freed from dynasty inspired anti-Congressionism’,108 the point is that the 106 Yogendra K. Malik, “Indira Gandhi: Personality, Political Power and Party Politics,” in India: The Years of Indira Gandhi, eds. Yogendra K. Malik and Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), 19. 107 Walter K. Andersen, “India’s 1991 Elections: The Uncertain Verdict,” Asian Survey 31, no. 10 (1991): 976-989. 108 Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Why Rajiv Gandhi’s Death Saved the Congress: How an Event Affected the Outcome of the 1991 Election in India,” in India Votes: Alliance Politics and Minority Governments in the Ninth and Tenth General Elections, eds. Harold A. Gould and Sumit Ganguly (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 439. 46 Congress was again back in power. However, with Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister between 1991 and 1996 the party was no longer the dominant force that it had been under Nehru. Institutionally weak, shorn of any modicum of legitimacy that could have been provided for by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and rocked by repeated corruption scandals, the Congress under Rao’s premiership continued to traverse the path towards decline.109 The 1996 General Elections After five years Rao’s government had come to the end of its tenure, and so fresh elections had to be called for in 1996. Nearing the end of its term, however, the party was bogged down with inter-factional fighting and several party members were allegedly involved in massive corruption. Poor electoral performances in several state assembly elections prior to 1996 also lent doubts to Narasimha Rao’s ability to lead the Congress into the polls. Rao went as far as to expel Narayan Dutt Tiwari, who had been a major rival of Rao, from the party. Tiwari and Arjun Singh, another senior member of the Congress, eventually led a group of party dissidents out of the Congress to set up the All India Indira Congress party. While the upshot of Tiwari’s actions hardly caused much concern, it signified the potential problems that factional disputes could cause.110 Allegations of corruption tarnished the reputations of not only many Congress Party members, but also of the party itself. With top cabinet ministers from the Congress Party being implicated in the hawala (illegal foreign exchange) scandal, it served to 109 Ramesh Thakur, “A Changing of the Guard in India,” Asian Survey 38, no. 6 (1998): 604-608. 110 For details, see Walter Andersen, “India in 1995: Year of the Long Campaign,” Asian Survey 36, no. 2 (1996): 169-170. 47 brand the Congress as a party that had institutionalised corruption and continuously failed to weed it out from its ranks.111 It is believed that Rao instigated such investigations into matters of corruption in order to sideline potential opponents for the presidential post of the Congress Party. However, in the months that followed the 1996 elections Rao himself was implicated in several scandals which eventually forced him to tender his resignation from the post of president of the Congress Party.112 Essentially the Congress entered the 1996 elections on the wrong footing – wrought with internal disputes and bereft of any moral high ground in light of the party’s corruption scandals. This gave the upper hand to the other two major political formations – one led by the BJP, and the other comprising regional parties under the new National Front coalition. The new National Front aimed at reviving the spirit of the old National Front coalition government that was in power between 1989 and 1991, led then by the Janata Dal (JD) party. However, this disparate group of parties could not get their act together successfully. The parties banded together, but problems related to inter-party ideological differences, the failure to institute a ‘common minimum programme’ to further congeal the alliance, and the absence of an able and willing leader to provide the much-needed thrust and direction all served to reduce the overall effectiveness of the alliance. Rather than forming an alliance for its own sake, the National Front’s raison d'être was merely to counter the BJP and the Congress.113 111 See Gurharpal Singh, “Understanding Political Corruption in Contemporary Indian Politics,” Political Studies 45, no. 3 (1997): 626-638. 112 For details, see Sumit Ganguly, “India in 1996: A Year of Upheaval,” Asian Survey 37, no. 2 (1997): 127-128. 113 Sudha Pai, “Transformation of the Indian Party System: The 1996 Lok Sabha Elections,” Asian Survey 36, no. 12 (1996): 1178. 48 The BJP’s performance in the 1996 elections was, by all means, pretty impressive. While the party trailed the Congress in terms of popular vote share, in terms of the number of seats won it came in first with 161 seats. The Congress came in second with 140 seats, but more significantly it registered the worst ever vote share in the party’s history up till then, at 28.8%. The BJP garnered 20.3% of the popular vote share. The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was then sworn in as Prime Minister on 15 May. However, even with the support of allied parties in government, the BJP-led coalition could only guarantee the support of 195 Members of Parliament for an impending vote of confidence on the government, far below the number required to form a majority government (273 seats). Vajpayee resigned as Prime Minister only thirteen days after being sworn in and before the vote of confidence was to be taken on his government, in full awareness that the BJP government would lose the vote of confidence.114 With outside support from the Congress, the National Front parties managed to cobble together a minority coalition government, now renamed as the United Front (UF), to replace the short-lived BJP government. The 1998 General Elections However the BJP did not have to wait long for its next shot at governmental capture. H. D. Deve Gowda replaced Vajpayee as Prime Minister, but he lasted just under a year as the Congress withdrew its support from his government. Inder Kumar Gujral succeeded him, but his government eventually fell in November 1997, again because of the Congress Party’s withdrawal of support. In the Gujral case the Congress 114 Joyotpaul Chaudhuri, “Coalition, Change and Continuity: The Mid‐1996 General Elections in India,” Asian Journal of Political Science 4, no. 2 (1996): 5. 49 Party members were appalled at the United Front government for refusing to dismiss the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progress Federation, or DMK) party from the government after it was found to be implicated in the plot to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi back in 1991.115 The President of India, K. R. Narayanan, was left with little choice but to dissolve the Lok Sabha on 4 December 1997 and call for snap elections the following year, just two years after India’s last elections.116 The polls were held in four phases on four separate dates – 16, 22, and 28 February, and 7 March.117 The BJP actually got what it had wished for – another election not too long after 1996, in order to quickly improve on its electoral performance. While the Congress Party had not been the incumbent when parliament was dissolved in December 1997, it remained the party to beat in elections. It must be recalled that the United Front government that governed between 1996 and 1998 was a minority government that was highly dependent on outside support from the Congress Party to survive, and in terms of vote and seat share in 1996 the United Front parties altogether trailed both the BJP and the Congress Party. The prime contenders for governmental power in 1998 remained the BJP and the Congress Party. 115 M. P. Singh, “India’s National Front and United Front Coalition Governments: A Phase in Federalized Governance,” Asian Survey 41, no. 2 (2001): 346-348. 116 “Indian president dissolves parliament, calls for polls,” Agence France-Presse, December 4, 1997. 117 Nirmala George, “Election ’98 in Four Phases,” Indian Express, January 2, 1998. 50 Table 1 Results of the 1998 General Elections No. of Seats Contested No. of Seats Won Vote Share Bharatiya Janata Party 388 182 25.59 Bahujan Samaj Party 251 5 4.67 Communist Party of India 58 9 1.75 Communist Party of India (Marxist) 71 32 5.16 Congress Party of India 477 141 25.82 Janata Dal 191 6 3.24 Samata Party 57 12 1.76 Other State Parties 471 101 18.79 Registered (Unrecognised) Parties 871 49 10.87 Independents 1915 6 2.3 Total 4750 543 100 Party Source: Statistical Report on General Elections, 1998 to the 12th Lok Sabha. Available from http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/statisticalreports/LS_1998/Vol_I_LS_98.pdf Table 2 Breakdown of the Number of Seats Won by the BJP and the Congress Party in 1991, 1996, and 1998 Election Year 1991 1996 1998 Parties BJP INC BJP INC BJP INC No. of Seats Contested 468 487 471 529 388 477 No. of Seats Won 120 232 161 140 182 141 20.11 36.26 20.29 28.8 25.59 25.82 Vote Share Percentage Source: Statistical Report on General Elections, 1998 to the 12th Lok Sabha. Available from http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/statisticalreports/LS_1998/Vol_I_LS_98.pd 51 Table 3 Breakdown of the Number of Seats Won by the BJP and the Congress Party at the State and Territory Level in 1998 State BJP INC Total No. of Seats Andhra Pradesh 4 22 42 Arunachal Pradesh 0 0 2 Assam 1 10 14 Bihar 20 5 54 Goa 0 2 2 Gujarat 19 7 26 Haryana 1 3 10 Himachal Pradesh 3 1 4 Jammu & Kashmir 2 1 6 Karnataka 13 9 28 Kerala 0 8 20 Madhya Pradesh 30 10 40 Maharashtra 4 33 48 Manipur 0 0 2 Megalaya 0 2 2 Mizoram 0 0 1 Nagaland 0 1 1 Orissa 7 5 21 Punjab 3 0 13 Rajasthan 5 18 25 Sikkim 0 0 1 Tamil Nadu 3 0 39 Tripura 0 0 2 Uttar Pradesh 57 0 85 West Bengal 1 1 42 Andaman & Nicobar Islands 0 1 1 Chandigarh 1 0 1 Dadra & Nagar Haveli 1 0 1 Daman & Diu 1 0 1 National Capital Territory of Delhi 6 1 7 Lakshadweep 0 1 1 Pondicherry 0 0 1 182 141 543 Union Territory Total Source: Statistical Report on General Elections, 1998 to the 12th Lok Sabha. Available from http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/statisticalreports/LS_1998/Vol_I_LS_98.pdf 52 A cursory look at the results of the election reveals that as was the case in 1996, the BJP was the winner again, this time with 182 seats won. In terms of vote share, the Congress (25.82%) pipped the BJP (25.59%) by a mere 0.23 percentage points. Therefore there was near parity in terms of the percentage of popular vote for both parties. Comparing across the 1991, 1996, and 1998 general elections however, it is apparent that between 1991 and 1996 the BJP’s vote share hardly increased, but in 1998 there was a marked increase. The 1996 elections had confirmed what was already known by 1991 – that the party’s strongholds were in northern and western India. Except for the state of Karnataka, the BJP did not win a single seat in the states in southern and eastern India.118 However, in 1998 the BJP increased its popular vote share by more than five percentage points, while the Congress Party’s vote share continued to decline, from 28.8% down to 25.82%. In terms of seats won, the BJP made much headway in southern and eastern India. In Karnataka, the BJP won thirteen, up from six in 1996. In Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, it won three and four seats respectively, up from zero in both in 1996. In 1996 the BJP failed to win any seats in Orissa – in 1998, it won seven.119 Without doubt there were several factors that contributed to the BJP’s success in 1998. In that year the BJP had seat allocation agreements with a larger number of preelectoral allies than it had in 1996, which decreased the number of multi-cornered 118 Pai, “Transformation of the Indian Party System,” 1180. 119 See M. P. Singh and Rekha Saxena, India at the Polls: Parliamentary Elections in the Federal Phase (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003), 171-173. 53 contests.120 In southern India the BJP even willingly played the status of a junior partner in the states there, allowing the state-based parties to continue remain dominant in their own state parliaments, in exchange for their support by dovetailing with the BJP at the federal level.121 Another factor was the declining viability of the Congress Party as a responsible governmental party in the eyes of the voters. Even bearing these other factors in mind, I argue that the BJP’s strategic ‘talk’ to counter the Congress Party was also another important yet under-theorised factor that explains why the BJP was seen in more favourable light as a viable contender for governmental power, even in southern and eastern India, where the BJP had been a persona non grata for championing politico-religious issues that did not resonate at all with the voters there. By not laying out the causal process that explicates how the BJP managed to outdebate the Congress Party on the issue of economic reforms in 1998, it deprives us of an important explanatory factor of the party’s success at the polls. Discarding Contentious Religious Issues Beginning in 1996, the BJP started to distance itself from ethno-religious issues that the party had been famous for. The party’s most politicised religious issue beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the Ayodhya/Ramjanmabhoomi 120 The BJP allied with at least twelve parties in 1998. See Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Shankar Raghuraman, Divided We Stand: India in a Time of Coalitions (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007), 205. 121 See Oliver Heath, “Anatomy of BJP's Rise to Power: Social, Regional and Political Expansion in 1990s,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 34/35 (1999): 2511- 2517; Eswaran Sridharan, “Coalitions and Party Strategies in India's Parliamentary Federation,” Publius 33, no. 4 (2003): 135-152. 54 issue.122 In the aftermath of the 1991 elections, emboldened by the party’s gains in the elections, the BJP’s sister organisations in the Sangh Parivar,123 the RSS and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, or VHP), had agitated for the destruction of the Babri Mosque, or the Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya and the construction of a mandir (temple) dedicated to the Hindu god Ram in its place. The location of the Babri Masjid was believed to be the exact birthplace of Ram, and so the Sangh Parivar organisations were seeking redress for what they professed to be an injustice. As the BJP now headed the state government in Uttar Pradesh where Ayodhya is located, the RSS and the VHP became more impudent and audacious in their attempts to pressure the state government to support their cause unquestioningly. For much of 1992 the RSS and the VHP, probably with tacit approval from the BJP leadership, carried out various initiatives related to the Ramjanmabhoomi cause with the intention to attract nation-wide attention and support for the Babri Masjid’s demolition and the construction of a Ram mandir.124 It all culminated in the unfortunate tragedy on 6 December 1992, when rabid and overzealous kar sevaks (religious volunteers) stormed the grounds of the Babri Masjid and razed the structure to the ground, and then built a temporary mandir in its place 122 For a detailed elaboration on the Ayodhya/Ramjanmabhoomi issue and its significance in the Hindutva ideology of the BJP and related Hindu nationalist organisations, see Sudha Ratan, “Hindutva: The Shaping of a New “Hindu” Identity,” Southeastern Political Review 26, no. 1 (1998): 201-217. 123 The Sangh Parivar, or Family of Associations, is a grouping of Hindu nationalist organisations in India. The RSS is its most preeminent member, while the BJP and the VHP are the other two more prominent members of this grouping. 124 For a more detailed elaboration, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 449-455. 55 within the same day.125 Internecine riots broke out almost immediately across India as a direct result of the Babri Masjid’s demolition, which stretched well into January the following year. In March 1993 terror attacks occurred in Bombay, the state capital of Maharashtra. The Bombay bombings were linked to the catastrophic events of December 1992, and it signalled how the whole situation had spiralled out of control, far beyond what the BJP could have grasped. While the BJP might claim that it did not have a direct hand in the demolition of the Babri Masjid itself, its umbilical links to its sister organisations in the Sangh Parivar that facilitated, planned and participated in these acts were becoming more of a political liability than an asset. Beginning in the 1996 elections the party began to distance itself from such potentially divisive and explosive religious issues, and this stance was carried well into the 1998 elections. What is most telling about this strategic manoeuvre was that the party leaders came out very early on to insist and reiterate the stand that controversial issues would be dropped from the party’s electoral agenda. In the days that followed the dissolution of parliament in early December 1997, Vajpayee, BJP President Lal Krishna Advani, and several other senior party leaders wasted little time to clarify that the BJP would not pursue any religious issues for the 1998 elections. The most contentious of such issues, Ayodhya, was readily discarded.126 There is no doubt 125 Manju Parikh, “The Debacle at Ayodhya: Why Militant Hinduism Met with a Weak Response,” Asian Survey 33, no. 7 (1993): 673; Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, 455. 126 See Bhaskar Roy, “Bharatiya Janata Party,” The Times of India, December 7, 1997; ”Atal Confident People's Verdict Will Favour BJP,” The Economic Times, December 8, 1997; “BJP Firmly Stands Behind Vajpayee,” The Indian Express, December 8, 1997; “Atal – Ayodhya Won’t be BJP’s Poll Plank,” Hindustan Times, December 14, 1997; Bhaskar Roy, “BJP Shelves Temple for Stability Plank,” The Times of India, December 21, 1997; Bhaskar Roy, “To Widen Acceptability, BJP Will Avoid All Contentious Issues,” The Times of India, December 22, 1997; “Rallying 56 that the party came out very strongly early on to recast its image as a responsible party that did not want to pursue polarising and sensitive religious issues anymore. 1998 – All about the Economy The 1998 elections was a snap election, since India was not due for elections till 2001 at the latest. Within the span of the nine years between 1989 and 1998 India had already undergone four general elections. Electoral fatigue aside, even the range of contestable issues was becoming rather stale. The 1998 elections was even ridiculed as an ‘issueless’ election: ‘The amusing feature of the General Elections 1998, as they get under way, is the absence of any issue for the politicians to diddle the electorate.127 However, the same newspaper report then suggested that ‘[t]hat leaves economic reforms as the main item on the political agenda and it is well that public perception is finally tested.’128 Indeed, from my quick reading of election-related newspaper articles in December 1997 and the first few months of 1998, issues related to the economy seemed to have dominated the electoral agenda of the competing political parties.129 By 1998 it seemed appropriate to do a stocktaking of the economic liberalisation path that India had adopted seven years before. Beginning in 1991 India embarked on a radical process of economic and trade liberalisation under the then newly-elected Round BJP,” The Times of India, December 24, 1997; “BJP Likely to Keep Article 370, Ayodhya Out of Its Agenda,” The Times of India, February 1, 1998. 127 “Reforms and the Vote,” Business Line, December 14, 1997; see also “An Issueless General Election,” Business Standard, December 25, 1997; “Issueless Campaign,” Hindustan Times, February 11, 1998. 128 “Reforms and the Vote,” Business Line. 129 A reporter had also commented: ‘Perhaps this is the first time that economic issues have dominated the manifestos of all political parties.’ See L Lakshman, “Making Sense of Party Promises,” The Economic Times, February 10, 1998. 57 Congress government. Both Narasimha Rao and the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh were the most prominent figures involved in the increased integration of India into the global market and the international financial system. By 1991 India’s economy was in crisis. It was facing a severe balance of payments problem, a fiscal debt crisis, and a financial sector crisis.130 Inflation was also soaring rapidly as a result. The Congress government then took out loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stave off the fiscal crisis in the short term.131 However, what was more groundbreaking and rather unprecedented was the decision to implement economic restructuring policies as well, which greatly liberalised the erstwhile closed economic sector. In the context of India, this was radical in itself. While the fiscal crisis was resolved in the short term, there was a pervasive belief amongst members of the economic reform team in the Congress government that economic restructuring was an integral component of the overall reform agenda as well.132 A spate of major changes like the privatisation of many public sector enterprises, industrial deregulation, external trade liberalisation, exchange-rate system reforms, promotion of tie-ups between state-owned enterprises and local and foreign 130 See Chanchal Kumar Sharma, “A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India,” India Review 10, no. 2 (2011): 157; Zoya Hasan, Congress after Indira: Policy, Power, and Political Change (1984-2009) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51-55. 131 See Baldev Raj Nayar, Globalization and Nationalism: The Changing Balance in India’s Economic Policy, 19502000 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), 132-142. 132 Ibid., 144. 58 private corporations were carried out.133 In comparison to the processes of liberalisation adopted in many other countries in the post-Cold War era however, India’s reforms paled in comparison. Both Rao and Singh instigated reforms in a gradual and cautious manner, in the hope of not upsetting the apple-cart too much. Therefore the changes and the gains made in the years after 1991 were, in most senses, pretty modest.134 In the first half of the 1990s, India’s economy witnessed growth and expansion largely attributed to the set of reforms implemented by the Congress government. By the start of the second half of the 1990s, however, the rate of growth began to slow down, especially in the industrial, manufacturing, services and agricultural sectors. The rate of private investment had also diminished greatly by the second half of 1990s. 135 By the end of 1997, just as India’s parliament was being dissolved for elections, the fallout from the Asian Financial Crisis was also beginning to affect India adversely. In spite of the radical nature of economic reforms implemented in 1991, India again plunged into an economic crisis of sorts by the end of 1997 and the start of 1998. India’s fiscal deficit was growing steeply, prodding the government to take on large loans, which then swelled its debt levels. Inflation was on the rise, and Indian exports were declining. 136 133 Matthew McCartney, India – The Political Economy of Growth, Stagnation and the State, 1951-2007 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 214-215; see also V. Bijukumar, Reinventing the Congress: Economic Policies and Strategies since 1991 (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2006), 105-118 134 See James Manor and Gerald Segal, “Taking India Seriously,” Survival 40, no. 2 (1998): 54-59; James Manor, “The Congress Party and the ‘Great Transformation’,” in Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation?, eds. Sanjay Ruparelia, Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss, and Stuart Corbridge (New York: Routledge, 2011), 205-208. 135 McCartney, The Political Economy of Growth, 49-53; 200-206. 136 Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “India in 1998: The Travails of Political Fragmentation,” Asian Survey 39, no. 1 (1999): 168-169. 59 But this time round there was no doubt at all that a return to the pre-1990s socialist-style planned economy was not the panacea. By the mid-1990s the dominant social discourse in India had shifted from one that advocated a socialist-style approach to the economy towards embracing a liberal and laissez-faire approach. The change towards discursive conditions that favoured a free market economy legitimised the viability and sustainability of the economic reforms, even when the immediate economic crisis of the early 1990s had abated.137 Without doubt the Congress government had a direct role in this discursive shift. Narasimha Rao had ‘intended to re-focus political debates and popular preoccupations on economic issues – on growth, but more crucially on development’, and also aimed to ‘de-dramatize politics, which in his view had become too inflamed for the good of the country and of his party.’138 The rise of a new and assertive middle class in the late 1980s and early 1990s had also warmed up to the discourse on a liberal market economy and economic reforms, and slowly the belief in the virtues of socialism began to wane.139 There is also evidence to suggest that even Indian voters who had supposedly been worst hit by the economic reforms did not simply vote against the incumbents, but in fact increased support for the party that had initiated those reforms.140 This suggests that Indian voters have no general reservations against the economic reforms. In fact, it has also been argued that the discursive shift towards 137 Sharma, “A Discursive Dominance Theory,” 126-184. 138 Manor, “The ‘Great Transformation’,” 206. 139 Sharma, “A Discursive Dominance Theory,” 158-159; Hasan, Congress after Indira, 62. 140 See Sharad Tandon, “Economic Reform, Voting, and Local Political Intervention: Evidence from India,” Journal of Development Economics 97, no. 2 (2012): 221-231. 60 liberalisation and an open market economy began not with Rao and Singh, but rather Rajiv Gandhi, who had attempted to institutionalise reforms between 1984 and 1989. 141 However, while the pace and nature of Rajiv’s reforms were rather limited, what greatly changed was the emergence of unprecedented discursive conditions that allowed neoliberal discourses to take a foothold in India for the first time. Subsequently, the issue of ‘’’reforms or no reforms’’ is no longer at the centre of the debate’, but what is worth contesting is the ‘scope, coverage, and pace of reforms, and… about how to make the growth generated by economic reforms more inclusive.’ 142 This was precisely what the 1998 elections was all about – how to make sense of the impact of the economic reforms that began in 1991, and how to carry on from there. The Congress Party’s Campaign in 1998 David Holian argued that for the necessary counteracting of an issue by an opposition party, public opinion must shift towards at least a semblance of parity between the contending parties’ ability to own an issue. The reasons for this parity could vary, but they could be a result of the weakness of an opponent’s campaign. 143 While the Congress had been quick to withdraw support from the UF coalition government and causing it to fold, it was not ready at all to mobilise for the ensuing elections. After the Congress was defeated in the 1996 elections, Sitaram Kesri replaced Narasimha Rao as party president. As dull and as uninspiring as Rao the politician had been, Kesri was 141 See Vanita Shashtri, “The Politics of Economic Liberalization in India,” Contemporary South Asia 6, no. 1 (1997): 27-56. 142 Sharma, “A Discursive Dominance Theory,” 154; see also “United We Stand on Irreversibility of Reforms,” The Economic Times, January 10, 1998. 143 Holian, “He’s Stealing My Issues,” 100. 61 even worse. Kesri and the Congress Party might have been scheming all along, waiting for the opportune moment to withdraw support from the UF government. However, in a plenary session in August 1997, months before the Congress eventually withdrew its support, the party had failed to conceive a proper strategy to contest any future elections should the government fall.144 Thus the party’s decision to pull the plug on the UF seemed a poorly thought out strategy. In Sitaram Kesri the Congress Party had a weak and uncharismatic party president who enjoyed little support within the party. His weakness was so apparent to the point that ‘the party under Kesri is devoid of a single convincing issue.’ 145 Bereft of charismatic leadership and a coherent campaign agenda, the Congress Party members, with Kesri’s reluctant and tacit approval, spent much of December doggedly trying to coax Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia to help campaign on behalf of the party. Many party members reckoned that fronting Kesri as the party candidate for Prime Minister would be a major political faux pas. This was a desperate manoeuvre by the party to salvage its directionless campaign by banking its hopes on Sonia Gandhi, a political novice whose star power only came from the fact that she was a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Even after Sonia finally relented, the Congress did not announce who the party’s prime ministerial designate was going to be. It was comical enough that ‘the Congress party would have us believe in its make believe world of [a] party without a leader; or a party which is going into elections without its President contesting for any 144 Binoy Sharma, “In the Age of Realpolitik,” The Economic Times, December 28, 1997. 145 Sumit Mitra, “Question Marks of 1998,” India Today, December 15, 1997. 62 Lok Sabha seat.’146 The Congress announced that the Prime Minister would be selected only after the elections were over, should the Congress form the government. Sonia’s entry revitalised the party organisation, but it also undermined Kesri’s already delicate position, leading to tensions between the two figures spilling out into the open. 147 Even after Sonia had relented to calls for her political involvement, there was also hardly any effort geared towards reconciling or integrating Sonia’s perceived appeal and any of the Congress’s electoral platforms or policies.148 With regards to campaign issues, a writer derided the party by bluntly stating that ‘its leaders have no agenda.’149 Days after the Lok Sabha was dissolved, when asked on the economic platform that the Congress would adopt, Manmohan Singh bluntly replied: ‘We have still not decided the economic agenda.’150 Congress bungled even when it had started to get its act together. Apparently Kesri had first announced that the party would campaign on a platform of secularism, but just a few days later he left the decision of selecting electoral issues to the party’s Manifesto Committee.151 The crux of the party’s problems lay in ‘its inability to forge a core set of political ideas.’152 It took a 146 “Has the Congress Lost Its Head?” The Economic Times, January 6, 1998. 147 See Yubaraj Ghimire, “The Lost Leader: As Kesri Guards His Territory, Pressure on Sonia to Assume Leadership Mounts,” Outlook, January 5, 1998; “Hit by Sonia Mania, Kesri Blows Hot,” Indian Express, January 6, 1998. 148 Yubaraj Ghimire, “Charisma to the Test: Sonia’s Standing is as Much at Stake as the Party’s Poll Prospects,” Outlook, January 19, 1998. 149 Siddharth Varadarajan, “Ayodhya and After a Legacy Which Cannot be Lived Down,” The Times of India, December 6, 1997. 150 “Some Logic,” The Economic Times, December 8, 1997. 151 Swapan Dasgupta and Sumit Mitra, “Congress: In Search of a Leader,” India Today, December 22, 1997. 152 “Issues Galore in Search of a Platform,” Business Line, January 3, 1998. 63 while before a coherent party platform was formulated, and only towards the end of January did the party launch its electoral manifesto. Only then its electoral platform, especially on the economy, became evident. In 1996 the party strangely did not laud its own economic achievements in its manifesto even as Rao and Singh had achieved some measure of success through the spate of radical economic reforms introduced.153 This time round, however, the party had no qualms about going all out on the economic front. The Congress was thus ‘no longer apologetic about its five-year rule from 1991 to 1996’, with a party leader stating: ‘Our performance was excellent, we lost only because of corruption.’154 As the party that introduced the groundbreaking reforms in 1991, the Congress Party’s stand in its manifesto was emphatic – ‘full steam ahead with reforms.’155 ‘Growth and more growth’156 was the unabashed message of the party’s manifesto as ‘the Congress has packaged itself as an uncompromising champion of the free market.’ 157 Manmohan Singh himself noted that ‘there is [a] need to speed up reforms and we will do that if voted to power this time.’158 153 S. L. Rao, “A Common Economic Manifesto,” The Economic Times, December 22, 1997; Neerja Pahwa Jetley and Arindam Mukherjee, “Selling Reforms, Not Guilt: The Congress is No Longer on the Defensive about the Reforms and Says It Sticks by What It Started,” Outlook, February 2, 1998. 154 Bharati Sinha, “Buoyant Congress to Update Manifesto,” Business Standard, January 16, 1998. 155 Jetley and Mukherjee, “Selling Reforms, Not Guilt,” Outlook; “United We Stand on Irreversibility of Reforms – UF, BJP and Congress,” The Economic Times, January 10, 1998; “Congress Promises Bold Reforms Laced with Caution,” Indian Express, January 25, 1998. 156 Arun Ghosh, “Myth of Consensus on Economic Reforms,” The Times of India, February 13, 1998. 157 “Negotiable Instrument the Congress Manifesto Reads Like a Post-Election Invitation Card,” India Today, February 2, 1998. 158 “They Justified the Ends but Not the Means,” The Economic Times, February 10, 1998. 64 A major thrust of the Congress’s economic reform agenda for 1998 was to include the rural and agricultural sector as part of its economic liberalisation agenda. The party aimed to build up a rural credit system and invest in rural infrastructure to promote growth. The party also pledged to privatise and liberalise the insurance sector, allow foreign companies to have joint-ventures with local companies, and further delicense more industries.159 Given the prevailing discursive conditions, there was hardly any other alternative that the party could consider anyway. Taking a dig at the BJP, Manmohan Singh argued that the Congress would provide a ‘strong government which knows how to handle the economy and can run the administration.’160 The BJP’s Economic ‘Talk’ To gain credibility on the economic reforms issue, the BJP had to first enter the debate within the parameters already set on this issue. As stated earlier, the prevailing discursive conditions mandated that nothing else other than liberal economic reforms being the way forward for India. For the BJP, this did not pose such a big problem. The BJP accepted the premises of a liberal and open market economy as central to its economic agenda. The BJP wanted a modern economy and rapid economic development. But central to its thinking was that India’s economy should be Indiacentred, prioritising above all else its own national interests, so it greatly advocated the 159 See “Congress Promises,” Indian Express; Jetley and Mukherjee, “Selling Reforms, Not Guilt,” Outlook; see also Congress Electoral Manifesto, available at http://aicc.org.in/index.php/manifestos/detail/1998#.Uf0J6ZJmhsI. 160 “BJP Has Lost Initiative – Manmohan,” The Times of India, February 22, 1998; see also “Congress alone can Manage Economy, says Manmohan,” The Times of India, February 26, 1998. 65 leading role of local capital in engineering India’s economic take off.161 This overriding principle was known as swadeshi. The party’s 1998 Election Manifesto stated that ‘[t]he broad agenda of the BJP will be guided by swadeshi or economic nationalism.’162 More specifically, swadeshi referred to ‘the pursuit of economic growth primarily through reliance on internal capital and human resources.’163 As explained in the manifesto: Swadeshi simply means “India First”… The fundamental approach of the BJP is that it is imperative to develop a collective national will and confidence that “India shall be built by Indians”. National development will largely depend upon national effort and national capital and savings.164 A swadeshi programme could potentially benefit local industries and businessmen and would serve the purpose of building up a strong and infallible domestic internal market that could serve as a bulwark against the baleful effects of globalisation. Swadeshi would also help to address questions related to the infringement of sovereignty and Indian-ness resulting from globalisation by means of cultural imperialism in a postcolonial world.165 The BJP wanted modernity and 161 See Baldev Raj Nayar, “The Limits of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Reforms under the BJP-Led Government, 1998-1999,” Asian Survey 40, no. 5 (2000): 798-800; Nayar, Globalization and Nationalism, 223-238. 162 Bharatiya Janata Party 1998 Electoral Manifesto, Chapter 4, “Our Swadeshi Approach,” available at http://www.bjp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:national-democratic-alliancemanifesto-1999&catid=50:election-manifestos&Itemid=446 163 Salim Lakha, “From Swadeshi to Globalisation: The Bharatiya Janata Party's Shifting Economic Agenda,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 85. 164 BJP Electoral Manifesto, Chapter 4. 165 See Shampa Biswas, “To Be Modern, but in the “Indian” Way: Hindu Nationalism,” in Gods, Guns, and Globalization: Religious Radicalism and International Political Economy, eds. Mary Ann Tétreault and Robert A. Denemark (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 128-129. 66 technology, but not at any cost whatsoever. It wanted ‘full liberalisation and calibrated globalisation.’166 The BJP argued that India must move carefully and gradually towards integration with the global economy and even as it so does, it must act in a manner that suits its national interest. This strategy recognizes that Indian industry needs a period of transition before it can compete with global players. All policies of tariff reduction and lifting of quantitative restrictions will be formulated taking the above facts into account, but the objective will be to protect the national economy and national interest like all nations do and not to indulge in economic isolationism.167 The BJP’s economic agenda therefore made a big deal of distinguishing ‘between internal liberalisation (reforms) and external liberalisation (globalisation).’168 While the party wanted economic liberalisation as a whole, it acknowledged that the domestic market was simply not ready to be a competitive force in the global market. It was highly suspicious of the deleterious effects of external liberalisation and integration into the global economy. Because of its India-centric economic agenda, the party believed that internal liberalisation should antecede external liberalisation.169 Therefore the BJP was reluctant to allow the unbridled entry of foreign multi-national corporations (MNCs) and foreign investment into the Indian domestic market. It was this peculiar manner of conceiving liberalisation as having two facets and then favouring the internal over the external aspect that branded the BJP as a party of ‘economic nationalists’. This 166 BJP Electoral Manifesto, Chapter 4. 167 Ibid. 168 Biswas, “To Be Modern,” 124. 169 Nayar, “The Limits of Economic Nationalism in India,” 799. 67 shorthand label, used by the party itself as a means of differentiating its economic platform from those of other parties, ignored the complexities of its own economic philosophy. However, it did serve the purpose of allowing the party to have a foot in the prevailing economic discourse, while at the same time allowing it to shape the economic debate in its favour. The party said ‘yes’ to economic reforms and liberalisation as per the Congress Party, but it believed the best approach involved the strengthening of the domestic economic sector first via internal liberalisation and a careful management of external liberalisation or globalisation to prevent India from suffering from its pernicious effects. The party managed to shape the debate in such a manner that while economic reforms and liberalisation were the way forward, going the whole hog was not an appropriate measure. Reforms were good, but they had to be managed carefully and be directed towards suitable local economic sectors and industries. Recasting the Economic Debate and Stealing Issue Ownership In contrast to the lethargic start to the Congress Party’s campaign, the BJP went out all guns blazing in touting its swadeshi economic platform. Several phrases related to this swadeshi platform were repeatedly bandied around to further drive home their stand. Such phrases could be found in the party’s electoral manifesto. They include fighting for ‘liberalisation with a human face’, the party’s aim of ‘reforming the reforms’, and ‘calibrated globalisation’, inter alia. In a classic statement by Vajpayee at the ‘Meet the Press’ session organised by the Press Club of India that included two of such phrases, he said the following: ‘We stand for economic reforms but we will also reform 68 the reform process giving it a human face and thrust.’ 170 In a statement by Vajpayee reported only a few days after the Lok Sabha was dissolved, he said: We support liberalisation but it must have a human face. If liberalisation leads to unemployment, there is something wrong with it.171 This was typical of the ‘yes, but’ strategy employed by the BJP throughout the weeks and months leading up to the 1998 elections. For Vajpayee, this ‘human face’ alluded to the need to have a calibrated form of liberalisation so that it would not hurt Indians too much. ‘Reforming the reforms’ suggests that the BJP agreed with the end goals of reforms, but the means to that end required modifications. At the end of the party’s three-day National Executive meeting to finalise the party’s campaign strategy, Vajpayee was asked to define what ‘liberalisation with a human face’ meant. He said it meant that ‘reforms should not mean a free for all’. Building on his point, he remarked that [e]ven bigger units need protection if they are facing unhealthy competition from multinationals. Economic reforms will continue in the sense that free competition is encouraged. But this should not mean that smaller units suffer. Small scale units are suffering a lot now.172 In a personal interview, when asked about the range of changes the BJP would introduce should it come to power, Vajpayee’s reply basically summed up the ‘yes, but’ approach. He observed that 170 “Vajpayee Rules Out Changes in Manifesto,” The Times of India, January 11, 1998. 171 “Atal Confident People’s Verdict Will Favour BJP,” The Economic Times, December 8, 1997. 172 Angana Parekh, “Vajpayee Plays “Level” on Political Morality,” Indian Express, December 22, 1997. 69 [w]hile the BJP is committed to a regimen of deregulation and decontrol, we would like to be very cautious with regard to economic reforms or what is called liberalisation measures. What has liberalisation done so far to this country? Both industrial growth, agricultural production have slackened. Liberalisation cannot be at the cost of our own industries. What has happened to [the] Asian tigers? That should teach us a lesson. We would not like to imitate without examining the full implications of remedies we decide upon to tone up the economy.173 In another personal interview, Vajpayee elaborated on how swadeshi should be understood – as the prioritisation of India’s needs, not restrictions in reform. He explained that the concept of Swadeshi must be understood. It's nobody's case that India should be an island by itself. To my mind, Swadeshi indicates self-confidence. In a nutshell, Swadeshi means [India] can do it and India will do it. The question is not of putting restrictions but of prioritising your needs. Ad hoc decisions in individual cases will have to be replaced with clear policies. Our idea is to promote investment in infrastructure, high technology areas and export-oriented units. Governments world over seek to encourage the type of foreign industrial participation which they feel is suitable to their needs.174 Press statements by other senior BJP functionaries reiterated Vajpayee’s stand. Murli Manohar Joshi, the former BJP President, stated that swadeshi should not be misinterpreted as being anti-globalisation or anti-MNCs. He remarked: We are not afraid of competition. We are only against one-sided competition that has been encouraged in the country over the last few years so as to favour the multinationals. A BJP government will help the 173 “’No One Challenges Our Secular Credentials Anymore’,” The Times of India, January 7, 1998. 174 “It’s Prioritisation, Not Restriction,” The Economic Times, January 26, 1998. 70 Indian industries to compete successfully against the multinationals. Otherwise, liberalisation will lead to India's deindustrialization.175 At the start of the three-day BJP National Executive meeting Venkaiah Naidu, the party’s General-Secretary, also remarked that the economic policy should have a human face by addressing itself to the basic needs of the poor and the unemployed. And any kind of globalisation which will affect these sectors will have no place. In other words, we are for selective globalisation and fully internal liberalisation.176 Likewise, Lal Krishna Advani also reiterated Naidu’s and the party’s stance that it favoured internal liberalisation, but wanted a guarded approach towards globalisation: ‘The country’s industrial base should not be undermined or overwhelmed by foreign multinationals.’177 In another press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club, Advani rejected claims that the BJP would retract economic reforms already put in place. Echoing the redoubtable Vajpayee, he argued that the BJP was merely ‘prioritising’ India’s needs, and therefore foreign investment was subject to where the party felt it could give value-added input to the economy. Re-emphasising the need to back domestic industries in a move seen as ‘protectionist’, Advani added that economic liberalisation makes sense to us only when Indian industries also have a fair chance to become global players. The process of economic transformation is a delicately balanced one and entails exposing our firms to foreign competition in a calibrated manner and by allowing them to gain a counterbalancing competitive advantage derived from having economies of scale. Globalisation makes sense 175 Prakash Nanda, “BJP – Swadeshi is Liberalisation with a Human Face,” The Times of India, January 31, 1998. 176 Amit Mitra, “BJP Meet Begins to Finalise Strategy,” Business Line, December 19, 1997. 177 “BJP Flogging Indira's Campaign Horse to See It to the Finish,” Indian Express, December 12, 1997. 71 when it is a two way process and not when only Indian markets are to be dominated by global corporates.178 In essence, the BJP’s rhetoric accepted the merits of economic reforms and liberalisation, but by taking an ‘India first’ or swadeshi approach the party advocated full internal liberalisation but a cautious approach towards external liberalisation. It said ‘yes’ to reforms, but the content of the reform process had to be reworked and its intended targets had to be sieved out and prioritised accordingly. This was the way that the party intended to ‘reform the reforms’. The BJP’s swadeshi plank served as a major critique of the cavalier and irresponsible ‘full steam ahead’ approach of the Congress Party which had led to what the BJP had termed as ‘phony liberalisation’, 179 where domestic sectors and constituents were exposed to unfettered globalisation and suffered greatly at the expense of foreign companies and MNCs. The Congress Party’s riposte to swadeshi was a generally tepid attempt at trying to undermine the BJP. The most farcical volley of criticism of the BJP was doled out by Sitaram Kesri. At a political rally, a reporter noted that Kesri seemed to be running short of issues with which to criticise his opponents. The BJP, he said, was an offshoot of the RSS which had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.180 In no way did Kesri mention swadeshi in his critique of the BJP, preferring to focus on an issue that was passé and completely irrelevant to the elections. Sonia Gandhi also repeatedly labelled the BJP as a disruptive party that was still dabbling in contentious 178 “Reforms Here to Stay, We’ll Only Change Its Way,” The Economic Times, February 10, 1998. 179 BJP Electoral Manifesto. 180 “Congress will Go It Alone If Needed,” The Times of India, December 20, 1997. 72 religious issues instead of counter-attacking the party on the issue of economic reforms.181 Another newspaper article reported that the Congress Party’s General Secretary Madhavrao Scindia charged the BJP with the ‘hijacking’ of issues that the Congress Party had owned in the past, including swadeshi, which was originally associated with Mahatma Gandhi.182 Scindia’s accusation was damning for the Congress Party. By crying foul he implicitly acknowledged that the BJP was indeed hijacking Congress-owned issues, suggesting also that the Congress itself believed that it had already conceded ownership of economic issues to the BJP. The most prominent Congress Party member who actually attacked the swadeshi plank was Manmohan Singh. Singh’s criticism revolved around what he believed to be inconsistencies in the economic ‘talk’ of the BJP leaders. He stated that different BJP leaders had different versions of the party’s economic platform, which were also altogether different from what was contained in the BJP’s manifesto. 183 In an interview, Singh had this to say about the BJP: Some of them say they want internal liberalisation, and not external liberalisation. In this context, they should tell us how they would deal with India's contractual obligations under the WTO. Will they roll back the reduction of import duties and liberalisation of import controls? How will they face the situation if such action on our part invites retaliation against our exports? Have they worked out the cost to the Indian economy of such a confrontation? Will they throw out all the investors who have come 181 “BJP Destroyed Polity in the Name of Religion,” The Times of India, February 5, 1998; “India Will Break if BJP Comes to Power,” Hindustan Times, February 18, 1998. 182 “BJP’s Stability Claim Hollow,” Hindustan Times, January 7, 1998. 183 See “Lotus leaves sport different hues on policies – Manmohan,” The Economic Times, February 25, 1998; “Congress Alone Can Manage the Economy, Says Manmohan,” The Times of India, February 26, 1998. 73 into consumer goods? Have they worked out the harmful effects of such action on income and employment? The BJP uses the emotive word "Swadeshi" to characterise its strategy, but, it has failed to clarify what it means by it. Does it mean the pursuit of autarky? The BJP is perhaps unaware of the total impracticability of this approach.184 In all fairness, it is true that many of the BJP’s suggested economic policies, when analysed properly, suffer from shortcomings in terms of practicality and implementation. The Congress Party, as the original owner of the issue of economic reforms, had every right to question the challenger party. But Singh’s counter-attack on swadeshi focused on its actual content rather than trying to halt the debate over the economic reforms from being reframed by the BJP. In fact, another prominent BJP leader, Yashwant Sinha, counterattacked Singh by levelling the charge that it was other Congress leaders instead who ‘were talking in different voices on the economy,’ 185 and thus their views as well differed from one another and Singh himself. The Public Reaction to Swadeshi How did the public react to the BJP’s overtures on swadeshi and calibrated liberalisation? Unfortunately I do not have much data at hand to show the level of public receptivity to the BJP’s ‘talk’ on economic reforms. But based on some anecdotal evidence, we can conclude that the BJP’s ‘talk’ did have a pronounced effect on quite a substantial portion of the voting population. It was reported that in a summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), an all-industry association in India, the BJP’s economic agenda found favour with many participants in the summit. The report 184 “Sonia Gandhi Will Have a Strong Impact,” The Times of India, January 17, 1998. 185 “Congress Alone Can Manage the Economy,” The Times of India. 74 mentioned that ‘business confidence [was] on the upswing’ because businessmen anticipated that the BJP would form the government after the elections. In particular, the party’s economic ‘talk’ found support amongst the businessmen who stood to lose out or had already lost out from unmitigated foreign competition. One participant remarked that ‘a section of the Indian business community has developed cold feet with regard to the unchecked entry of MNCs. The BJP’s swadeshi slogan appeals to this group.’186 The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), another large and important grouping of major industrialists and businessmen, publicly lauded the BJP’s economic agenda, saying that domestic industries would stand to benefit greatly from the party’s economic agenda if implemented prudently. 187 In other words, vis-à-vis the agendas of other competing parties the BJP’s agenda found much support within at least large sections of the business community. The BJP’s swadeshi stand seemed to have had a strong influence on the preferences of the electorate as well. A post-electoral poll was conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) across the country. 188 In a particular question, respondents had to agree or disagree on the notion of whether ‘foreign companies should be allowed free trade in India’. We can assume that this question is borne out of the electoral debate on the issue of economic reforms, and if a respondent disagrees with the aforementioned statement means he or she agrees with the BJP’s 186 Mayank Mishra, “Industry Sways to BJP’s Mantra,” Business Standard, January 15, 1998. 187 ”Chambers Welcome BJP's Manifesto, But Can It be Implemented?” The Times of India, February 5, 1998. 188 “National Elections Studies: 1998 Post Poll Survey,” Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, accessed 24 January 2013, http://www.lokniti.org/nes%20data%20lokniti%20csds/index.htm. 75 swadeshi platform. The results showed that out of 8133 respondents, 2963 people (36.4%) disagreed with that statement, whereas 1618 people (19.9%) agreed. 3552 people (43.7%) however, either professed no opinion on the matter or did not know which option was more preferable. Almost twice as many respondents felt that foreign companies should not be allowed a free rein in the Indian domestic market as those who felt that they should. This lends credence to the argument that swadeshi did resonate substantially within the voting population. It also shows that more than half of the sample (56.3%) felt strongly about issues related to the economy, which means that economic issues were highly regarded by a majority of voters in 1998. In another question, voters were asked: ‘After this election, which party or front would you like to form the government at the Centre?’ 32.1% of respondents voted for a BJP or a BJP-led coalition government, whereas 28.6% voted for a Congress or a Congress-led coalition government. The UF polled in at 12.9%. If anything, this signalled the BJP’s increased credibility as a potential party of government. Concluding Assessment I have argued that the BJP’s success in the 1998 elections can be explained by the party’s ability to recast the debate over the issue of economic reforms in India to favour itself. The party acknowledged that contentious religious issues held limited traction and could not be made salient if it wanted to portray itself as a serious contender for governmental power. Therefore the party made a conscious decision to discard such issues, especially the Ayodhya issue, from its electoral agenda. It then took up the issue of the economic reforms. The BJP acknowledged explicitly that 76 economic reforms were here to stay, thereby allowing the party to enter the debate with the issue’s owner, the Congress Party. Armed with the swadeshi catchphrase, it then proceeded to hijack the ownership over the issue by recasting the dimensions of the debate over economic reforms. Adopting the ‘yes, but’ strategy, the BJP leaders argued that while economic reforms had to be sustained, it would be detrimental to go the whole hog and pursue the reforms at breakneck speed and intensity to the point where India and Indians themselves would suffer, as they already were. There needed to be a reformulation of the nature and direction of the reforms, i.e. ‘reforming the reforms’. There also needed to be a prioritisation of what India really required for its continued growth and progress. Internal liberalisation was greatly advocated but globalisation needed to be managed carefully so that the economy would not falter and its people would not suffer. The BJP’s swadeshi resonated widely to substantial extent, with big businesses and the everyday voter being bought over by the party’s economic ‘talk’. While I do not make the case that this is the reason why the BJP was successful in 1998, I argue that this is an important reason to that end, but one that had been underspecified and not elucidated well enough previously. In the following chapter, I explain in detail why the PAS was unable to replicate the BJP’s heresthetical strategy in the landmark 2008 elections in Malaysia. 77 78 Chapter 4 The PAS in the 2008 Malaysian General Elections The case of the PAS in 2008 serves as my second case study. In contrast to the BJP, this case is used as the ‘failure’ case. Therefore, based on my explanatory framework, at least one of the following should have happened: - The PAS failed to make it explicit that the party would drop all religious issues in its electoral campaign. - The PAS failed to engage the national-temporal issue(s) owned by the BN/UMNO. - The PAS failed to recast the debate over the issue(s) in such a manner that it favoured the party itself in order to wrest issue ownership away from the BN/UMNO successfully. - The PAS’s framing of the debate over the issue(s) failed to resonate with a rather substantial segment of the electorate. As with the case study on the BJP, I will try to untwine the different aspects of the PAS’s set of expected behaviour since they might all overlap in one way or another. The United Malays National Organisation and Its Decline The UMNO was founded in 1946, a year after the end of World War II. Together with the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC), 79 it formed the Alliance (Perikatan) in 1951. The Alliance had a central role to play in the decolonisation process of Malaya and continued to remain central to Malaysian politics well after Malaya’s independence in 1957. In this loose coalitional arrangement, as primus inter pares the UMNO was not the coalition’s dominant partner, contrary to widespread belief.189 In the wake of the May 1969 ethnic riots sparked by the economic and political marginalisation of the Malays, the UMNO then became a more assertive party. In the early 1970s under the new Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, changes began to be implemented – a new national ideology, ‘enhancements’ to repressive laws and laws that covered ‘sensitive’ issues, and a New Economic Policy (Dasar Ekonomi Baru, or NEP) aimed at improving the socio-economic position of the Malays, amongst other things. These changes served to entrench the UMNO’s dominance to a level of hegemonic control never witnessed before.190 The NEP officially ended in 1990, but the subsequent National Development Policy of the 1990s and the National Vision Policy between 2001 and 2010 largely included the basic principle of affirmative action that had been enshrined in the NEP.191 Although the UMNO-led coalition governments have ensured that the Malaysian economy has consistently experienced overall growth and 189 N. J. Funston, Malay Politics in Malaysia: A Study of the United Malays National Organisation and Party Islam (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 11-20. 190 Hwang In-Won, Personalized Politics: The Malaysian State under Mahathir (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), 91-135. 191 Edmund Terence Gomez, Johan Saravanamuttu, and Maznah Mohamad, “Malaysia’s New Economic Policy: Resolving Horizontal Inequalities, Creating Inequities?” in The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative Action, Ethnic Inequalities and Social Justice, eds. Edmund Terence Gomez and Johan Saravanamuttu (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013), 1. 80 development since the 1970s till today, it is the NEP that has come to define the ruling coalition’s, and more specifically the UMNO’s, economic legacy. In 1974 the Alliance evolved into the National Front (BN), which the UMNO came to dominate. As a large political vehicle the BN served to bring in as many opposition parties as possible within the UMNO’s ambit as a means of co-opting the opposition for governing purposes, and also as a means of conflict management to prevent any future outbreak of ethnic riots.192 Under Mahathir Mohamad, who was Prime Minister between 1981 and 2003, the UMNO’s dominance in Malaysian politics was further entrenched – not only at an institutional but also at the personal level. Unlike the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi’s personalised rule, Mahathir’s brand of ‘personalised authoritarian rule’ did not debilitate the UMNO’s institutional penetrative networks into society – on the contrary, it was further strengthened, albeit as a wherewithal for consolidating Mahathir’s rule.193 However, beginning in 1998 Mahathir undoubtedly faced his biggest political crisis as Prime Minister. By 1998 the Asian Financial Crisis was in full swing, causing general displeasure amongst Malaysians. Of all the countries hardest hit by the financial crisis, which included Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand, Malaysia did not experience a governmental change.194 But a political crisis still ensued, precipitated by 192 Harold Crouch, Government and Society in Malaysia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 33-34. 193 Dan Slater, “Iron Cage in an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the Personalization of Power in Malaysia,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 1 (2003): 81-101. 194 For details, see Stephen Haggard, The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 2000), 87-138. 81 Mahathir’s sacking of the popular Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on 2 September 1998. Anwar’s meteoric rise in politics had put him in pole position to eventually succeed Mahathir as Prime Minister. However relations between both of them began to deteriorate, and this falling out was a rather complex affair.195 The main trigger of this split was the difference in policy approach both wanted to adopt to address the financial crisis.196 Mahathir repeatedly claimed that Anwar’s sacking was not a political issue, but a moral one. Based on affidavits released by the police on 3 September, Anwar allegedly led a highly promiscuous homosexual lifestyle.197 Denying all charges and branding them as a political move to sideline him, Anwar took to the streets and instigated a nationwide reformasi (reform) movement against the egregious abuse of power by Mahathir. Nationwide protests rocked Malaysia and carried on in full swing even after Anwar’s detention under the infamous Internal Security Act on 20 September. Mahathir called for elections in November the following year. While the BN still won and formed a majority government, it experienced a massive plunge in vote share as a direct result of both the Asian Financial Crisis and the uproar over the Anwar Ibrahim affair. Dominic Berger and Michael O’Shannassy both argue that 1999 marked the beginning of the decline of the UMNO. Over the span of a decade between 1999 and 2008, the socio-political make up of Malaysia was undergoing structural changes 195 For detailed accounts of the Anwar Ibrahim affair, see John Funston, “Malaysia: A Fateful September,” Southeast Asian Affairs (1999): 165-184; Jason Abbott, “Vanquishing Banquo's Ghost: The Anwar Ibrahim Affair and Its Impact on Malaysian Politics,” Asian Studies Review 25, no. 3 (2001): 285-308; John Hilley, Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition (New York: Zed Books, 2001), 151-269. 196 Abbott, “Vanquishing Banquo's Ghost,” 295. 197 Greg Felker, “Malaysia in 1998: A Cornered Tiger Bares Its Claws,” Asian Survey 39, no. 1 (1999): 45. 82 that had begun with the Asian Financial Crisis and the ensuing reformasi movement. For Berger the 2004 elections, in which the BN and the UMNO had won with an overwhelmingly large majority, was an ‘accident’198 that merely papered over a major paradigm shift that had begun in 1999. Employing a Gramscian framework, O’Shannassy argued that 1999 definitely marked the start of an ‘organic crisis’ for the UMNO, and the 2004 elections was only an ‘aberration’.199 He suggests that the 2008 elections could also constitute an organic crisis.200 In other words, Malaysia’s organic crisis had stretched for a decade, and the 2004 elections had not necessarily ‘fixed’ it. The 2004 General Elections After 22 years as Prime Minister, Mahathir finally relinquished his position to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in 2003. After over two decades of almost iron-fisted rule under Mahathir, Abdullah sought to cast himself as a liberal reformer to distance himself from his predecessor’s style of governance. He contested his first elections as Prime Minister in March 2004. The UMNO eventually performed tremendously well, as did the BN on the whole. The BN’s popular vote share increased from 56% in 1999 to 64%, its highest ever vote share in the history of Malaysian elections. It also increased its parliamentary seat tally from 148 out of 193 seats in 1999 to 198 seats out of 219 seats in 2004. 198 Dominic Berger, “The 2008 Malaysian General Election: Killing the Ghost of 1969?” Flinders Asia Centre Occasional Paper 2, Flinders Asia Centre, Flinders University (2010), 27. Available from http://www.flinders.edu.au/sabs/asianstudies-files/asiaonline/AsiaOnline-02.pdf 199 Michael O’Shannassy, “Beyond the Barisan Nasional? A Gramscian Perspective of the 2008 Malaysian General Election,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 31, no. 1 (2009): 97. 200 Ibid., 97-104. 83 Amongst the opposition parties, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) performed the best, increasing its seat tally from 10 in 1999 to 12 in 2004. The People’s Justice Party (Parti Keadilan Rakyat, or PKR), formed by Anwar Ibrahim’s wife in 1999 as a platform to contest the injustices against Anwar, dropped from five in 1999 to a single seat in 2004. The biggest loser in 2004, however, was the PAS. From a historical high of 27 in 1999, its parliamentary seat tally dropped to a paltry seven. The biggest direct beneficiary of the PAS’s abysmal performance was the UMNO, who wrested back the state of Terengganu that the PAS had won in 1999 and managed to banish the party back to its peripheral stronghold of Kelantan in northern peninsular Malaysia. The Continued Decline of Abdullah and the UMNO In 2004 Abdullah had ran on a platform of reform and Islam Hadhari. Islam Hadhari, loosely translated as progressive Islam, was meant to serve as the defining theme for his administration. Abdullah’s Islam Hadhari depict[s] not only the historical role of Islam as a civilised ideology but, more importantly, on the modern role of creating harmony and peace with others in the face of very real challenges at the global level. As such he made it a key point to assert the civilising function of religion...201 Gerhard Hoffstaedter argues that Islam Hadhari ‘presented the possibility of a new form of multiculturalism and a means of representing Malaysia as both a progressive and deeply Islamic country.’202 201 Zainal Kling, “UMNO and BN in the 2004 Elections: The Political Culture of Complex Identities,” in Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, eds. Saw Swee Hock and K. Kesavapany (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 179-180. 84 As part of his reformist agenda, Abdullah seemed most keen to address the issue of institutionalised graft that had been a hallmark of the Mahathir administration. The government’s anti-corruption agenda revolved around the National Integrity Plan (NIP), which laid down the aims of fighting corruption and instilling a sense and culture of integrity across all levels of society. The Malaysian Institute of Integrity (MII) was also set up to supervise the NIP’s implementation, and later on Abdullah’s administration also established the Anti-Corruption Academy.203 In the first few months of Abdullah’s tenure several prominent politicians and businessmen were arrested for corruption charges.204 Public euphoria and hope in Abdullah, however, soon turned to disillusionment. For Abdullah, 2004 proved to be a ‘mixed year that started with a bang and then seemed to taper off.’205 His anti-corruption agenda ran out of steam by the second half of the year, as the UMNO was due for party elections in September and Abdullah had to put the brakes on his anti-corruption drive to prevent further agitation among party 202 Gerhard Hoffstaedter, “Islam Hadhari: A Malaysian Islamic Multiculturalism or Another Blank Banner?” Contemporary Islam 3, no. 2 (2009): 125-126. 203 See Noore Alam Siddiquee, “Combating Corruption and Managing Integrity in Malaysia: A Critical Overview of Recent Strategies and Initiatives,” Public Organization Review 10, no. 2 (2010): 160-161. 204 See Edmund Terence Gomez, “The 2004 Malaysian General Elections: Economic Development, Electoral Trends, and the Decline of the Opposition,” in Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, eds. Saw Swee Hock and K. Kesavapany (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 78; Francis Kok Wah Loh, “The March 2004 General Elections in Malaysia: Looking Beyond the “Pak Lah” Factor,” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 20, no. 1 (2005): 11. 205 Patricia Martinez, “Malaysia in 2004: Abdullah Badawi Defines His Leadership,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2005): 209. 85 members.206 His war against corruption slackened further in the coming years and by the end of 2007 many government leaders and prominent civil servants had been implicated in various corruption scandals, placing Abdullah in a very delicate situation.207 Malaysia’s ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index experienced a general trend of decline throughout Abdullah’s tenure up to 2008. From an overall rank of 37 in 2003, Malaysia slowly but steadily declined to an overall ranking of 44 by 2008.208 Under Abdullah, ethno-religious issues came to the fore as well, as inter-ethnic relations came under great strain. In contrast to Mahathir, Abdullah had purportedly become soft on containing the boisterous and rabid pro-Malay elements within the UMNO that had repeatedly championed Malay supremacy in Malaysia, with some making racially inflammatory comments and remarks in public. This culminated in the brandishing of the keris by Hishammuddin Hussein, the Education Minister and a highranking member of the UMNO, in two consecutive UMNO annual meetings in 2006 and 2007.209 The keris is a dagger of either Malay or Indonesian origin, which has been 206 William Case, “How's My Driving? Abdullah's First Year as Malaysian PM,” The Pacific Review 18, no.2 (2005): 144. 207 The list of those implicated included Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) director-general himself Zulkipli Mat Noor, Inspector-General of Police Musa Hassan, and Transport Minister Chan Kong Choy. The riches gained by Abdullah’s own son Kamaluddin and son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin also incited suspicions of graft. See William Case, “Malaysia in 2007: High Corruption and Low Opposition,” Asian Survey 48, no. 1 (2008): 48-51; Lee Hock Guan, “Malaysia in 2007: Abdullah Administration under Siege,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2008): 191-195. 208 Noore Alam Siddiquee, “Combating Corruption and Managing Integrity in Malaysia,” 162. 209 See K. S. Nathan, “Malaysia: The Challenge of Money Politics and Religious Activism,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2006): 156-157; Lee Hock Guan, “Abdullah Administration under Siege,” 188-189. 86 used to symbolise Malay supremacy. While his provocative actions were defended by party members and Abdullah himself, it was unsurprisingly condemned by many others outside of the UMNO, not least by the opposition parties and non-Malays. As Abdullah’s progressive and civilising vision of Islam Hadhari increasingly became nothing more than mere empty talk, the uncompromising face of Islam began to flourish in the body politic.210 Many incidents that became a major public relations disaster for the government showed the pro-Malay and/or pro-Islam bias of Abdullah’s administration. The highly-publicised case of Lina Joy in 2007 was a prime example.211 But the affair that possibly greatly damaged Abdullah’s credibility the most was the government’s decision to demolish or forcibly relocate Hindu temples that were allegedly built illegally. Up to seventy-six such temples were torn down in 2006 alone.212 In response to the perceived and blatant ethnic discrimination of the Hindus, a group called the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) was formed by various Hindu NGOs. They organised a rally on 25 November 2007 to protest against the government’s actions in demolishing and relocating temples. The police went in to break up the rally, 210 Rita Camilleri, “Religious Pluralism in Malaysia: The Journey of Three Prime Ministers,” Islam and Christian– Muslim Relations 24, no. 2 (2013): 230-234. 211 Lina Joy was a former Muslim woman who wanted the state to change her name and religion on her identification card upon conversion. However, the confusion over the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the Muslim Syariah Court over the issue of apostasy and legal changes to religious professions meant that her application was eventually denied. See Kikue Hamayotsu, “Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim: The Politics of State Enforcement of Syariah in Contemporary Malaysia,” South East Asia Research 20, no. 3 (2012): 403; Julian C.H. Lee, Islamization and Activism and Malaysia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010), 62-82. 212 Vijay Devadas, “Makkal Sakhti: The Hindraf Effect, Race and Postcolonial Democracy in Malaysia,” in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, eds. Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, and Gaik Cheng Khoo (London: Routledge, 2009), 92-93. 87 and in December five Hindraf leaders were detained under the Internal Security Act.213 These events were a major public relations disaster for Abdullah. They all showed that he was an uncompromising leader whose administration seemed to be pro-Malay and pro-Islam only. In hindsight Abdullah’s ‘biggest blunder may have been his failure to steer the country toward a more amicable state of ethnosectarian relations.’214 Abdullah had pledged to be a reformist within the UMNO, but under him corruption remained rampant or became even more entrenched, whilst inter-ethnic relations were greatly strained. William Case argues that Abdullah and the UMNO had faltered on policy output, so voters then switched towards scrutinising the government over procedural abuses, which Abdullah had also promised to address. Even here voters were disenchanted, since his anti-corruption drive was a relative failure. In the eyes of both Malay and non-Malay voters, the UMNO-led BN government had lost much legitimacy under Abdullah.215 The 2008 General Elections Speculation that Abdullah would call for elections ahead of the 2009 deadline had been rife ever since 2007. The opposition parties had already begun mobilising by 2007, even though they did know exactly when Abdullah would call for it. Eventually he dissolved the Dewan Rakyat on 13 February 2008 and elections were scheduled for 8 213 Ibid., 86-88. 214 James Chin and Wong Chin Huat, “Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval,” Journal of Democracy 20, no. 3 (2009): 77. 215 See William Case, “Political Legitimacy in Malaysia: Historical Roots and Contemporary Deficits,” Politics and Policy 38, no. 3 (2010): 497-522; William Case, “Transition from Single-Party Dominance? New Data from Malaysia,” Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 91-126. 88 March. This move was seen as a measure to prevent Anwar Ibrahim from running for the elections, since he could only run for public office from April 2008 onwards.216 Anwar, whom Abdullah had replaced as Deputy Prime Minister in 1999, had been granted an early release from prison in 2004 after secondary charges of sodomy against him had been overturned, but due to his initial conviction he was nevertheless barred from running for public office until April 2008. However Abdullah purportedly called for early dissolution to take advantage of the buoyant economy, before it was to be hit by the expected global recession from the second quarter of 2008 onwards. 217 Abdullah’s concerns were not groundless - based on a pre-electoral poll conducted by Merdeka Centre, the economic issue came in first amongst a plethora of issues that most concerned the respondents.218 As it turned out, the Malaysian economy indeed began to suffer from the negative consequences of the global economic recession beginning in the third quarter of 2008.219 216 Abdul Rashid Moten, “2008 General Elections in Malaysia: Democracy at Work,” Japanese Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (2009): 22-23. 217 See Vivian Ho, “2ND LD: Malaysia's Abdullah Dissolves Parliament for National Election,” Kyodo News, February 13, 2008; “Malaysian PM Abdullah Dissolves Parliament” Channel NewsAsia, February 13, 2008. 218 See “Observations on Issues, Voting Directions and Implications,” Merdeka Centre, Accessed January 28 2013, http://www.merdeka.org/pages/02_research.html. 219 See Goh Soo Khoon and Michael Lim Mah-Hui, The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis: The Case of Malaysia (Penang: Third World Network, 2010), 13-26. 89 Table 4 Breakdown of the Results of the 2008 Malaysian General Elections by State Level State Total No. of Seats BN DAP PAS PKR Perlis 3 3 0 0 0 Kedah 15 4 0 6 5 Kelantan 14 2 0 9 3 Terengganu 8 7 0 1 0 Pulau Pinang 13 2 7 0 4 Perak 24 13 6 2 3 Pahang 14 12 0 0 2 Selangor 22 5 4 4 9 Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur 11 1 5 1 4 Federal Territory of Putrajaya 1 1 0 0 0 Negeri Sembilan 8 5 2 0 1 Melaka 6 5 1 0 0 Johor 26 25 1 0 0 Federal Territory of Labuan 1 1 0 0 0 Sabah 25 24 1 0 0 Sarawak 31 30 1 0 0 Total 222 140 28 23 31 Source: Electoral Commission of Malaysia. Available at http://semak.spr.gov.my/spr/ Table 5 Breakdown of the Seats Won by the BN, the DAP, the PAS, and the PKR in 2004 and 2008 Election Year Parties No. of Seats Contested No. of Seats Won Vote Share Percentage BN 219 198 64.02 2004 DAP PAS 44 84 12 7 10.07 15.32 PKR 58 1 8.51 BN 222 140 51.39 2008 DAP 47 28 14.07 PAS 66 23 14.4 PKR 93 31 19 Source: N.J. Funston, “The Malay Electorate in 2004: Reversing the 1999 Result?” in Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, eds. Saw Swee Hock and K. Kesavapany (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 133; Chin and Wong, “Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval,” 72. 90 The results of the 2008 elections, put simply, were astounding. While Abdullah clearly did not expect a repeat of the 2004 elections results, he and members of the ruling coalition most probably did not anticipate that the BN would fare so badly.220 For the first time since 1969, the ruling coalition garnered its worst ever vote share in its history. From a historical high of 63.84% in 2004, the BN only managed to secure just over half of the popular vote share at 51.39% in 2008. In 2004, the BN had won 198 seats; this time round, it managed to win only 140 seats, eight seats short of the customary two-thirds majority usually expected of and secured by the BN.221 All of the three major opposition parties registered huge gains. The biggest winner was the PKR, who won 31 out of 97 seats contested. The DAP won more than half of the seats it contested (28 out of 47). Out of 66 seats the PAS contested, it won just over a third (23). The PAS definitely improved on its performance from 2004 (from 7 to 23), but the PKR recorded the biggest improvement over the same period (from 1 to 31), whilst in terms of the ratio of the number of seats won to the number of seats contested, the DAP clearly led the way. Given the context of Malaysia, the results were certainly startling. Within a span of just four years Abdullah had led the BN to both its biggest win and its worst electoral result in its history as well.222 While the UMNO performed relatively well on the whole in spite of winning 79 seats in 2008 as compared to 110 seats in 2004, the worst 220 In 2004, the UMNO won 109 seats alone, whereas in 2008 it only managed to win 79 seats. 221 Chin and Wong, “Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval,” 72. 222 Abdul Rashid Moten, “2004 and 2008 General Elections in Malaysia: Towards a Multicultural, Bi-Party Political System?” Asian Journal of Political Science 17, no. 2 (2009): 173. 91 performers in the BN coalition were the non-UMNO parties in peninsular Malaysia, namely the MCA, the MIC, and the Malaysian People’s Movement Party (Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, or Gerakan). In the many constituencies where they contested, they were trounced either by the DAP or the PKR. Where the UMNO had lost, the PAS were the biggest beneficiaries. Like the seat allocation agreements the BJP had in 1998 with several other opposition parties, in 2008 the PAS also had such agreements with the PKR to prevent multi-cornered fights, which ensured that a good number of the seats the PAS contested were located in its northern strongholds of the states of Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah. In many of the constituencies that the PAS contested, the party mostly squared off against the UMNO. While the PAS’s performance definitely improved from 2004, I posit that this only constituted as a qualified success for the party. Its gains were also the least impressive in comparison to the other two opposition parties. Running mostly against UMNO candidates required the PAS to project itself as a viable alternative to the UMNO-led BN government. In order to portray itself as a credible governing alternative, there was a need to convey to the voters that it could plausibly be in charge of issues owned by the BN/UMNO. I argue that whilst the PAS jettisoned contentious religious issues and engaged a major national-temporal issue (the economy) in 2008, it largely failed to recast the debate over the economy to favour the party itself. The main reason for this was that the PAS simply did not engage the debate over the economy on the terms preconfigured by the issue owner, the BN, or more specifically, the UMNO. As a result, the party could not craft the discursive conditions that would have enabled it to wrest away 92 the ownership over the economic issue from the BN/UMNO. Consequently, the PAS’s economic ‘talk’ failed to resonate widely across a substantial segment of the electorate. In 2008, specific economic issues like increasing inflation and cost of living, and other issues like corruption and ethnic relations also came to the fore, but for politically strategic reasons they were not and could not be made salient in the PAS’s campaign agenda. Left with engaging the BN and the UMNO on the debate of the economy in which the PAS’s economic ‘talk’ faltered anyway, it was hardly surprising that the PAS’s performance in 2008 was not as stellar as the BJP’s in 1998. Most of the PAS’s wins were in northern peninsular Malaysia, which also signalled that the party was still struggling to make inroads outside of its traditional stronghold areas. Undoubtedly, there were also other factors that explain why the PAS largely failed to perform better than it did in 2008, the most important of which was Anwar Ibrahim’s domineering role in galvanising the opposition forces against the ruling coalition which made him the central focus of the opposition camp,223 amongst other factors. While the Anwar factor loomed large, the PAS certainly did itself no favours with the failure of its strategic ‘talk’ on its own accord. From the party’s point of view, and also from a theoretical perspective, there is thus a need to understand and explicate why its attempt at strategic ‘talk’ failed and was not as successful as the BJP’s ‘talk’ had been in 1998. 223 For example, see Maznah Mohamad, “Malaysia – Democracy and the End of Ethnic Politics?” Australian Journal of International Affairs 62, no. 4 (2008): 449-452; Abdul Rashid Moten, “Democracy at Work,” 37-38. 93 Discarding Contentious Religious Issues When Yusof Rawa became PAS President in 1982, the party’s orientation took on a more Islamist overtone. It was during the beginning of this period as well that the ‘Islamic state’ issue came to the fore. Under Yusof the Islamic state issue greatly preoccupied the party’s rank and file. For the PAS ‘[t]he question was no longer whether an Islamic state was necessary, but what kind of Islamic state was to be built and how it was meant to look like.’224 However the party’s leaders initially did not see it as necessary to have to define its version of the Islamic state in detail. There was a risk that if the party did so, it would be condemned by non-Muslims, attract intra-party criticism of being not ‘Islamic’ enough if its ‘Islamic state’ concept was not far-reaching enough to appease the hardliners in the party, and also potentially hinder coalitionbuilding efforts with other parties.225 The ambiguity of the concept served the PAS well. However in early September 2001 Fadzil Noor, who had replaced Yusof as PAS President in 1989, challenged Mahathir to declare in Parliament that Malaysia was already an Islamic state.226 Instead of declaring it in the Dewan Rakyat, the wily Mahathir instead declared at a conference held by the Gerakan party, a BN party that is a predominantly Chinese party, on 29 September 2001 that Malaysia was already an Islamic state, as agreed upon by other Islamic ulama. He then threw the gauntlet down 224 Farish A. Noor, “Blood, Sweat and Jihad: The Radicalization of the Political Discourse of the PanMalaysianIslamic Party (PAS) from 1982 Onwards,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 25, no. 2 (2003): 200-233. 225 Liew Chin Tong, “PAS Politics: Defining an Islamic State,” in Politics in Malaysia: The Malay Dimension, ed. Edmund Terence Gomez (London: Routledge, 2007), 111-112. 226 Ibid., 112. 94 to the PAS by challenging them to specify what the party’s concept of an ‘Islamic state’ entailed: When we state that Malaysia is an Islamic country we have the right to do so. If Malaysia is not an Islamic country because of not implementing the hudud (Islamic corrective punishment laws), then in this world there is no Islamic country as all those countries too cannot implement hudud…. Are they (the PAS) going to abolish civil and criminal laws? By clarifying this they can show the difference of an Islamic country as set up by [the] UMNO which is accepted by the world and [the] PAS’[s] Islamic State. What is their answer?227 By proclaiming that Malaysia was already an Islamic state, Mahathir’s 29 September declaration placed the PAS in a bind. Mahathir’s ingenious offensive served two purposes. Firstly, Mahathir’s declaration sought to render irrelevant any more discussion on Malaysia’s and UMNO’s Islamicness to thwart any effort by the PAS to wield Islam as an effective political tool. Secondly, and more importantly, it forced the PAS to go on the defensive and, to its own eventual political detriment, actually initiate a long-drawn process of drafting a party memorandum on its version of an Islamic state for public scrutiny. The party accepted Mahathir’s challenge with firm resolve, and the party convened a committee beginning in October 2001 to draft a Memorandum detailing its outline of a PAS Islamic state. In total there were four drafts to the document. The first three conformed to Fadzil’s centrist and liberal beliefs of an Islamic state that would appeal to all sections of Malaysian society, especially to the non- 227 “Dr M – PAS Trying to Create Rift,” New Sunday Times, September 30, 2001. 95 Muslims. But Fadzil passed away suddenly on 23 June 2002, putting the brakes on the release of the Memorandum for the moment.228 The party’s Deputy President and Chief Minister of Terengganu Abdul Hadi Awang then succeeded Fadzil as party president. Known as a hardliner, Hadi was still willing to toe the more centrist and liberal line of his predecessor. However, in the September 2003 electoral contest for the post of Deputy President Hadi vacated, the conservative Hassan Shukri beat the technocratic-liberal Mustafa Ali for the post, to the surprise of many observers and even Hadi himself.229 This signalled to the party top brass that its members were more inclined towards Islamic conservatism and ulama leadership, rather than Islamic progressivism and technocratic-liberal leadership.230 Hadi, who was already of the hardliner ilk, was more than happy to lead the PAS towards that direction. After deciding against the official launching of the Memorandum in mid-2003, the party suddenly did a volte-face and on 12 October the party’s Central Committee decided to launch a new document called the Islamic State Document (Dokumen Negara Islam) on 27 October. After delays, the Document was eventually launched on 12 November. The Document looked almost nothing like the previous drafts of the Memorandum, suggesting that launching the Document was a decision made in haste 228 Liew Chin Tong, “ Defining an Islamic State,” 113-114. 229 Ibid., 120. 230 See Abdul Hamid Abdul Fauzi, “The UMNO-PAS Struggle: Analysis of PAS’s Defeat in 2004,” in Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, eds. Saw Swee Hock and K. Kesavapany (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), 110-111; Farish Noor, Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS: 1951-2003, Volume 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2004), 692-693. 96 and without much intra-party consultation.231 Liew Chin Tong’s detailed comparative analysis between earlier drafts of the Memorandum and the Document clearly showed that the latter was the work of the party’s arch-conservatives,232 and it is very telling that the decision to announce the launching of the Document came soon after the elections for the post of PAS Deputy President which the conservative Hassan Shukri won. Armed with this Document, the PAS campaigned on an Islamic state platform in the 2004 elections and the party was completely routed, as mentioned earlier. In retrospect, it was a major tactical blunder by the PAS to emphasise its Islamic State Document and its conservative brand of Islam. By playing into Mahathir’s hand and launching the Document, it signalled to the public that the PAS was nothing more but a party of closet conservatives and radicals. The existence of the Document and the party’s decision to promote it meant that the party attracted a lot of criticism for the parochial nature of its worldview.233 To compound matters further, it was Abdullah’s Islam Hadhari vision that had won the day instead. Islam Hadhari’s selling point was not so much the substance of this program…. but instead the form in which the concept was presented, which caught the eye and captured the imagination (and votes) of Malaysian Muslims…. This contrasts with the radical, at times exclusionary, philosophy of conservative elements in [the] PAS. 234 231 Liew, “PAS Politics: Defining an Islamic State,” 115-116. 232 Ibid., 117-118; 121-128; see also Joseph Chinyong Liow, “Islamist Ambitions, Political Change, and the Price of Power: Recent Success and Challenges for the Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party, PAS,” Journal of Islamic Studies 22, no. 3 (2011), 374-403. 233 Joseph Liow, “The Politics Behind Malaysia’s Eleventh General Election,” Asian Survey 45, no. 6 (2005): 918-919. 234 Ibid., 919-920. 97 In 2004 the PAS learnt that religious issues in themselves gain very little traction; in fact, in that year, its decision to make the Islamic state agenda salient backfired badly. In the aftermath of the elections the first major signs of change in the PAS’s trajectory began in 2005. In the intra-party elections held in June 2005, the archconservative Hassan Shukri was defeated by the much younger Nasharuddin Mat Isa, who was then the party’s Secretary-General, for the post of PAS Deputy President. Other more prominent, liberal and younger party members were also voted into positions of power – amongst them were Husam Musa and Mohamad ‘Mat’ Sabu, who were elected as party Vice-Presidents. The election of this ‘new team’ of younger and more liberal faces suggested an internal attempt by the PAS to instigate a major change in its image.235 Hadi, whose presidency was unopposed, himself urged members to consider reforming the party and changing its strategies.236 In 2008 the party made it clear that it had shelved the Islamic state agenda, at least for the time being.237 Upon the launch of the party’s electoral manifesto on 22 February 2008, Hadi said that: ‘We will not push the Islamic state agenda but have adopted a substantive approach because [the] PAS has managed to break the barrier among the non-Muslims.’238 At the very least Hadi also said that the party would not be 235 See Liew Chin Tong, “PAS Leadership: New Faces and Old Constraints,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2007): 201-207. 236 William F. Case and Liew Chin Tong, “How Committed is PAS to Democracy and How Do We Know It?” Contemporary Southeast Asia 28, no.3 (2006): 401. 237 See “PAS Putar Lidah Guna Dakyah Pancing Undi,” Berita Harian, February 14, 2008; “Manifesto Pilihan Raya Bukan Sekadar Janji,” Berita Harian, February 16, 2008. 238 “PAS Changes Tack to Attract Voters,” New Straits Times, February 22, 2008. 98 rash or hasty in its aim to implement an Islamic state, but would instead emphasise an approach towards a better understanding of Islam for all Malaysians. 239 The party’s decision to discard the Islamic state agenda was derided by the UMNO. The PAS was denounced as having ‘veered off from its original mission,’240 because it had to cave in to pressure by the other opposition parties.241 Therefore, the party’s choice to either highlight or discard the Islamic state issue seemed to be a politically expedient choice. Motivations to emphasise or de-emphasise the Islamic state issue aside, in 2008 the PAS had realised that there was more to be gained by not ‘talking’ about an Islamic state. 2008 – Not All about the Economy In the developing world, Malaysia is often touted as one of the more successful cases of economic growth and development. Although its overall pace of growth and development cannot hold a candle to the rates of growth of the four ‘Asian Tiger’ economies (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea), Malaysia’s experience in itself is impressive on most accounts. Hal Hill lists six ‘stylised facts’ that best describes Malaysia’s economic growth and development experience – consistently rapid economic growth, a major but successful transformation from a resource-based to a manufacturing-based economy, a highly globalised and open economy, good macroeconomic policies, social progress (although tempered by persistent economic 239 “PAS Ketepi Fokus Negara Islam,” Berita Harian, February 22, 2008. 240 “PAS Terpesong Perjuangan Asal,” Berita Harian, February 23, 2008. 241 “PAS dicabar Masuk Konsep Negara Islam dalam Manifesto Pilihan Raya,” Utusan Malaysia, February 23, 2008. 99 inequalities), and the unique ownership patterns and quality of institutions in the country that has helped to define the nature of the domestic political economy.242 Although Malaysia is still dogged with issues of socio-economic inequalities, declining rates of investment, and other structural shortcomings, its economic state of affairs have generally remained sound and Malaysia is set ‘to continue to be a high-growth economy.’243 It was therefore hardly surprising that in the immediate post-Asian Financial Crisis years the Malaysian economy recovered rather well, and this trend continued under Abdullah. On all accounts the Malaysian economy was definitely in a healthy state going into 2008. Despite several hitches, up till 2008 the economy had generally been on the upswing. In 2007, the real GDP growth for Malaysia was 6.3%, higher than the projected figure of 6.1%.244 Domestic private consumption had been the key driver of economic growth in 2007. The government had also increased spending in the areas of public infrastructure such as health, education, utilities and agriculture. 245 Even though the US subprime mortgage crisis was in full swing by 2006, its global repercussions had yet to be felt by the start of 2008. However, there were minor blots to this impressive state of the economy. The most pressing issues were rising inflation and cost of living. From March 2007 onwards inflation in Malaysia was slowly rising, 242 See Hal Hill, “Malaysian Economic Development: Looking Backward and Forward,” in Malaysia’s Development Challenges: Graduating from the Middle, eds. Hall Hill, Tham Siew Yean, and Ragayah Haji Mat Zin (London: Routledge, 2012), 2-31. 243 Ibid., 31, see also 31-41. 244 Denis Hew, “The Malaysian Economy: Developments and Challenges,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2008): 208-209. 245 For a more detailed explanation, see ibid., 207-222. 100 reaching 2.4% by December 2007.246 Going into 2008, inflation rates showed no signs of abating. Malaysia’s continued fiscal deficit was also a major worry, even though it shrunk slightly between 2005 and 2007.247 Food and fuel prices were also on the rise in Malaysia. Barring these two sets of issues, the Malaysian economy was generally in a state of good health. The other two biggest issues in 2008 were corruption and inter-ethnic relations, due to the inability of Abdullah’s administration to ‘handle’ them. However on the whole I did not note much mention of these two issues in my analysis of Malaysian newspaper reports. This can be attributed either to pro-government bias, or simply the fact that political parties naturally do not talk about issues that situate them in a position of weakness. Corruption received almost no mention by members of the ruling coalition – hardly surprising, given the range of scandals that had implicated various members of the government. The issue of ethnic relations, however, was talked about more by the UMNO leaders. Given the centrality of ethnicity in the prevailing political and social discourse in Malaysia, this was to be expected in spite of the furore over the Hindu temple demolitions and the Hindraf arrests. Ethnicity continues to be an important social cleavage in Malaysia, even if the ethnic factor is increasingly receding in importance. 248 The BN continuously and consciously portrays itself as a coalition that represents all the ethnic groups in Malaysia based on a system of inter-communal elite accommodation 246 Ibid., 212. 247 Goh and Lim, The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis, 10-12. 248 Hari Singh, “Ethnic Conflict in Malaysia Revisited,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 39, no.1 (2001): 5458. 101 known as consociationalism.249 Therefore ethnicity remains central to the political discourse of the ruling coalition. Historically, ethnicity has also greatly influenced voting patterns in elections in Malaysia.250 The BN’s and the UMNO’s Campaign in 2008 The government’s economic achievements became the centrepiece issue for the BN’s and the UMNO’s campaign.251 Indeed, this was Abdullah’s biggest trump card. When asked to comment on reports published which showed that Malaysia had been ranked eighth in the world in terms of global economic competitiveness, Abdullah, who was also the Finance Minister, came out strongly and said: These are not my figures. When the government says as such people refuse to believe it but when others say as such, only then people begin to believe. We (the government) are not out to fool the people. When I went to Davos, foreign businessmen met me and told me I should feel happy because our economy is in good stead; all of them said so and we cannot lie because they have read all the reports [on Malaysia’s economic progress].252 When it had been ascertained that Malaysia’s economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2007 exceeded predicted growth estimates, Abdullah revealed his surprise on the data, but went on to say that this vindicated the government’s successful economic platform: 249 Ibid., 48. 250 See Graham K. Brown, “Playing the (Non)Ethnic Card: The Electoral System and Ethnic Voting Patterns in Malaysia,” Ethnopolitics 4, no. 4 (2005): 429–445. 251 “Onwards to the General Election,” The Sun, February 14, 2008. 252 “Kerajaan Tidak Bohong Ekonomi Negara Semakin Kukuh,” Utusan Malaysia, February 17, 2008; see also “Figures Prove Economy Doing Well,” New Straits Times, February 18, 2008. 102 I did not expect the 7.3 percent growth figure. Our economic performance is an achievement which makes me proud… The rakyat (people), the investors, traders and service operators are having more confidence in us and want to continue their economic relationships with us.253 He also lauded the BN government’s phenomenal ability to deliver, saying: ‘I want to ask how many governments can actually do what we have done.’254 Unsurprisingly, the BN’s manifesto read out like a report card that detailed the achievements of the Abdullah administration, alongside its pledges to the people. Indeed, the title of its manifesto was ‘Malaysia 2008: Laporan Kemajuan dan Manifesto’ (Malaysia 2008: Progress Report and Manifesto). As the first two key thrusts of the manifesto, the progress and successes achieved in the fields of the economy and development were greatly lauded.255 The tricky issues of increasing inflation and cost of living were dealt with the government leaders in two ways. First, they were portrayed as a result of external factors beyond the government’s control.256 In this manner, it tried to diffuse any sort of criticism by the opposition parties that the causes of these issues were endogenous. Secondly, the government also tried to convey to the voters that it had done all it could 253 “PM: Economy Doing Well,” New Straits Times, February 28, 2008. 254 “PM: Few Governments Have Done as Well as BN,” New Straits Times, March 1, 2008. 255 Barisan Nasional Manifesto 2008, available at https://app.box.com/s/3lnkibaxaq23mvsfpnso. 256 “Pasaran Dunia Punca Kenaikan Minyak,” Berita Harian, February 5, 2008. 103 to mitigate the situation.257 Abdullah claimed that the government had spent over RM43.4 billion alone in subsidies for essential items like oil.258 He argued that despite the fuel hike, we have not raised electricity and water tariffs… If this government is not bothered about the people, we would have increased oil prices long ago… We are also controlling the price of essential items like rice because the BN government cares for the people.259 On the issue of ethnic relations, it was talked about by government leaders in two ways. Firstly, they tried to present the BN as a coalition that best represented all the ethnic groups in Malaysia. With regards to the perceived marginalisation of Indians, Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak had this to say: Let me assure you that if there are legitimate, relevant and genuine issues in the Indian community, both the prime minister and I are ever willing to consider those requests. I truly believe in powersharing. I believe in a multi-racial Malaysia and we all should live harmoniously.260 While campaigning in Sarawak, Najib reiterated this point: We remain as one nation not because of the need to meet the constitutional requirements, but because we are able to reach political consensus under the BN… In Malaysia, we have many ethnic groups and religions, but we are able to live in peace and harmony, and this is because of the Barisan Nasional.261 257 “Jelaskan Isu Harga Minyak,” Utusan Malaysia, February 12, 2008. 258 Husna Yusop, “Abdullah: We Keep Our Promises,” The Sun, February 26, 2008. 259 Ibid. 260 “Najib: We Will Do More for Indians,” New Straits Times, February 4, 2008. 261 “Benefits of Consensus Politics,” New Straits Times, March 5, 2008. 104 Secondly, the government tried to cast the opposition in a bad light by accusing them of ‘playing the racial card’. In his home state of Penang, Abdullah criticised the DAP for having engaged in ‘racial politics’ towards the end of the campaigning period: Recently, the opposition parties have started to engage in racial politics, trying to stir trouble, to ruin this country. So I want to reiterate that it is not the Malays that make life difficult for the Chinese, not the Indians as well, but the DAP [because it] engages in Chinese racial politics. I cannot accept this type of politics.262 He went on to add: Who says UMNO is greedy, UMNO is bad and UMNO is dominant? We have never been like that. UMNO lives on because it is fair to all (ethnic groups).263 The PAS’s Economic ‘Talk’ Seeing as voters had indicated that the economy was a priority issue for 2008, it was unsurprising that the PAS proceeded to make the economy a major issue in its campaign agenda. In place of the Islamic state agenda of 2004, the party now promoted the concept of the welfare state, or negara kebajikan. The party’s manifesto bore the title ‘Kerajaan Beramanah, Adil dan Bersih: Menuju Negara Kebajikan’ (A Trustworthy, Just and Clean Government: Towards a Welfare State).264 The details of the ‘welfare 262 “Awas Politik Perkauman DAP,” Utusan Malaysia, March 6, 2008. 263 Ibid. 264 The PAS released both the English language and Malay language versions of its manifesto. As part of my research and analysis, I mostly referred to the Malay version of the manifesto, because it is the lingua franca of most Malaysians. It must be noted, however, that the English language version is not an exact translation of the Malay version. ‘Menuju Negara Kebajikan’ appears as ‘A Nation of Care and Opportunity’ in the English language 105 state’ concept are rather sketchy, because it is a new concept touted by the party and it has hardly been elaborated at length as well in the newspaper reports that I had analysed. According to the manifesto, this ‘welfare state’ theme is built upon the foundations of its ideal ‘Trustworthy, Just and Clean Government.’265 Where the term ‘welfare’ is concerned, the manifesto urged working towards ‘defending the welfare of the people and safeguarding national interests through prudent management of the economy and a balanced approached towards development that is people-friendly and environmental-friendly.’266 What seems clear, however, is that the ‘welfare state’ concept or negara kebajikan used by the PAS differs from the notion of the welfare state associated with the advanced democracies of Northern Europe.267 Commenting on the PAS’s welfare state, PKR leader Anwar Ibrahim said that ‘the welfare state concept should be translated as ‘just government.’’268 Dzulkifli Ahmad, head of the PAS’s think tank, commented: ‘The nation we are talking about is neither a welfare state that hinges on a very heavy taxation system nor a nation of charity.’269 At best the manifesto pledged to version, whereas a direct translation of the phrase would be ‘Towards a Welfare State.’ I have decided to use ‘welfare state’ instead of ‘a nation of care and opportunity’, because this was the version and concept of the PAS’s negara kebajikan that was picked up by the media, newspapers included. The PAS also used negara kebajikan in its discourse, which essentially means ‘welfare state’. The PAS’s Manifesto, ‘Kerajaan Beramanah, Adil dan Bersih: Menuju Negara Kebajikan’ is available at https://app.box.com/s/8dl3hpzxk9t0fennoehf. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid. 267 “A Welfare State Seen through the PAS prism,” New Straits Times, February 9, 2008. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid. 106 make education up to the level of the first degree in university free for all citizens (which the PKR had also promised), provide free healthcare to expectant mothers and their babies, and to enforce a minimum wage policy. 270 Hadi had also announced that as part of the welfare state agenda the PAS would slash the prices of oil and gas and provide free education and healthcare services.271 If anything, the main difference between the European-style welfare states and the PAS’s negara kebajikan seems to lie in the added transcendental dimension in the latter. Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the Chief Minister of Kelantan and the party’s Mursyidul Am,272 claimed that PAS-ruled Kelantan serves as a model of the party’s welfare state concept. Nik Aziz argued: When we talk of ‘welfare’, the benefits derived from it must be sustained from this world till the hereafter. We cannot only think of this world; whatever that is related to welfare should be sustained till the hereafter.273 When pressed further to state if only the PAS and not the BN could provide welfare for the people that is sustainable till the hereafter, Nik Aziz replied: As Kelantan is governed by an Islamist party, surely that is the case; if we only deal with worldly benefits, then even the (godless) communist states provide welfare for its people.274 270 For details, refer to the PAS’s manifesto ‘Kerajaan Beramanah, Adil dan Bersih: Menuju Negara Kebajikan.’ 271 See “PAS Negeri Tentukan Calon,” Berita Harian, February 14, 2008; “PAS: We Won’t Touch Civil Servants if WE Win,” New Straits Times, February 20, 2008; “Hadi Enggan Tarik Kenyataan,” Berita Harian, March 1, 2008. 272 Loosely translated as ‘Spiritual Guide.’ 273 “Nik Aziz Sedia Terima Kekalahan,” Berita Harian, March 5, 2008. 274 Ibid. 107 It seemed that the PAS’s negara kebajikan goes beyond and does not fit into the ideal-types of the welfare state classification system derived by Gøsta EspingAndersen.275 But the party itself had also failed to spell out the parameters of this negara kebajikan clearly and carefully, especially as it evidently had a transcendental dimension attached to it as well. It seemed like the PAS only went as far as to jettison the Islamic state agenda, but struggled to fashion a coherent and well-grounded economic agenda in its place. Formulating the concept of negara kebajikan probably did not receive as much attention it merited as part of the party’s centrepiece agenda in 2008, unlike the attention that had been given to the long-drawn-out process in piecing together the Islamic State Document. The Failure to Recast the Economic Debate and Steal Issue Ownership As Holian demonstrated, parties must recast the debate in such a manner that a certain issue is now viewed from a different perspective which would favour the party itself. However, the party must first engage the terms of the debate by accepting the premises that form the original conception of the issue before it can engage in a ‘yes, but’ strategy. In the previous chapter I argued that this was how the BJP managed to wrest the ownership over the issue of economic reforms from the erstwhile owner, the Congress Party. For the PAS, however, the welfare state concept was packaged instead as a rejection of the economic model of development championed by the BN and the UMNO, and it was also juxtaposed as an alternative economic model that was radically different as well. In other words, there was no real attempt by the PAS or its 275 See Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 26-29. 108 leaders to engage the BN and the UMNO on the preconfigured terms and dimensions of the debate over the economy. Instead of working within the parameters of the debate and trying to shape the nature of the debate to favour the party itself, the PAS unequivocally rejected the parameters of the debate in its entirety. By declining to accept even the debate’s original discursive parameters, the PAS denied itself any credibility that would have allowed it to ‘talk’ about the economy on equal terms with the issue owners, in this case the BN and the UMNO. The leaders of the BN and the UMNO were therefore not trapped by any manoeuvres of the opposition PAS to shape the discursive dimensions that would disfavour or disadvantage them. On the contrary, as the original issue owners, the BN and the UMNO could credibly dismiss all attempts by the PAS to ‘talk’ about the economy. This they did to great effect. A newspaper report in Berita Harian went as far as to deplore the lack of opposition acknowledgement of the achievements of the BN government that had engineered spectacular economic growth rates under Abdullah.276 While this clearly represented the denigration and talking down of the BN’s opponents, the gist of the report highlighted the point that the opposition, the PAS included, in the first instance did not accept the discursive dimensions of the debate over the economy already shaped by the BN and the UMNO. Therefore any future motions to ‘talk’ about the economy by the opposition would not be credible and legitimate, and leaders of the BN and the UMNO could easily dole out their counter-arguments credibly and effectively. 276 “Pembangkang Harus Terima Hakikat Kerajaan Lonjak Ekonomi,” Berita Harian, February 29, 2008; see also “Kejayaan Kerajaan Sukar Disanggah,” Berita Harian, February 13, 2008. 109 While the PAS’s negara kebajikan was clearly not the type often ascribed to the Northern European welfare states, leaders of the BN and the UMNO conveniently ignored this point and hammered the PAS over this issue. Their feigned ignorance or even blatant misinterpretation of the PAS’s definition of the welfare state was justified, given that the PAS’s negara kebajikan argument in no way engaged the discursive dimensions of the debate over the economy in the first place. The BN’s and the UMNO’s counter-arguments took two forms. First, the leaders absorbed the ‘welfare state’ dimension by arguing that effectively Malaysia was already a welfare state. As a retort to the PAS’s welfare state, Abdullah early on declared Mahathir-style that Malaysia was already a welfare state: Indeed we are already so (that Malaysia is a welfare state) from the perspective of what that has been accomplished, we help [the people], and based on the definition of welfare we ensure that the people receive aid in the form of welfare benefits, aid for their comfort and well-being.277 Secondly, the PAS’s welfare state was viewed with suspicion and was dismissed as being detrimental if its tenets were implemented in Malaysia. The ruling coalition’s leaders claimed that if instituted, funding the PAS’s negara kebajikan will drive the country towards unsustainable levels of debt-to-GDP ratio,278 or even bankruptcy.279 277 “Malaysia Sebuah Negara Kebajikan,” Utusan Malaysia, February 4, 2008; see also “Selangor Sudah Lama Amal Negara Kebajikan,” Berita Harian, February 11, 2008; “Mereka Tak Faham Negara Kebajikan,” Berita Harian, March 4, 2008. 278 “Janji Pembangkang Tambah Hutang Negara: Khairy,” Berita Harian, February 19, 2008. 279 “Negara Akan Muflis Jika Ikut Cakap PAS,” Utusan Malaysia, February 26, 2008; “The Other Future Will Bankrupt Us,” New Straits Times, March 7, 2008. 110 The welfare state notion was also dismissed as not sensible and unrealistic, 280 and was even branded as a form of pseudo-socialism.281 Najib had also spoken out against negara kebajikan: When we speak of a welfare state, it means that even if we are not working, we will receive monthly allowances from the government. If we do that, the government will be forced to impose high taxes on those who can afford to pay them. We can also see that in developed countries with high levels of taxation, the welfare state concept was not sustainable.282 The issues of increasing inflation and costs of living, however, were not specifically dealt with by the PAS. Whatever solutions to these two issues, it seemed, lay as part of the overall negara kebajikan agenda if implemented. Therefore, there were no specific policies advocated by the party to address these issues directly. Likewise, the party did not specifically engage the issues of corruption and ethnic relations. It is most likely the case that the PAS did not engage these issues because its leaders saw no advantage in ‘talking’ about them. As mentioned earlier, in 2008 the PAS had settled seat allocation agreements with the PKR, ensuring that the PAS contested seats mostly in Malay-majority areas, a large number of which were in the mostly rural states in northern peninsular Malaysia. The issues of inflation and costs of living were acknowledged to be predominantly urban issues, because the fallout from these phenomena clearly affected urban areas more so than rural areas. Therefore 280 “Janji PAS Umpama Mimpi di Siang Hari,” Berita Harian, February 1, 2008. 281 “Senarai Muktamad Esok: Khir,” Berita Harian, February 21, 2008. 282 “BN Prihatin, Realistik,” Berita Harian, February 15, 2008. 111 these issues hold more traction amongst urban voters.283 Corruption also held little weight amongst rural voters as well. Where the PAS was concerned, as the constituencies that it contested in were mostly rural, there was not much to be gained by campaigning on those issues. Likewise, the PAS also did not stand to gain much if it highlighted the issue of ethnic relations. Indeed, vis-à-vis the Chinese and especially the Indians, the Malays, who were the PAS’s main target group, were the least disaffected group in terms of ethnic marginalisation, since they form the majority ethnic group in Malaysia. In the lead up to the 2008 elections, the Malays were said to be generally the most pro-government as the issue of ethnic relations hardly resonated with them.284 The Public Reaction to Negara Kebajikan As with the BJP case study, I do not have actual data which can corroborate how well the PAS’s negara kebajikan resonated with the voters. Based on conjectural evidence however, I argue that the PAS’s ‘talk’ was a relative failure. In terms of whole numbers, the party performed well – from only seven parliamentary seats in 2004, it bounced back to win 23 out of 66 seats in 2008. The party’s biggest wins came in Kelantan (9) and Kedah (6), states already known to have substantial PAS following. It also won four seats in Selangor, two in Perak, and one each in both Terengganu and Kuala Lumpur. But we need to look beyond these simple numbers. Here I refer to Thomas Pepinksy’s excellent research article on interpreting the results of the 2008 283 “BN Expects to Weather Tough Fight for Penang ,” New Straits Times, February 20, 2008; “KL Voters to Follow Their Stomachs and Their Heads,” New Straits Times, February 23, 2008; “A Coalition of 14 to Take Care of All,” New Straits Times, February 24, 2008; “Wind of Change or Typhoon?” The Sun, February 27, 2008. 284 “Lacking Strong Issues, Malay Opposition Can't Touch BN,” New Straits Times, March 1, 2008; “Economy Topmost Concern of Voters, Says Survey,” New Straits Times, March 3, 2008. 112 elections. His detailed analyses highlighted several findings, some of which are relevant to this section of this chapter. He discovered no statistically significant relationship between economic grievances and the propensity to vote against the BN. However he cautions that one can only go as far as to conclude that there was no general trend of economic voting in 2008.285 At best, one can possibly argue that the UMNO had at least successfully ensured that the economic issue did not become a prominent voting issue that could have disadvantaged the party while at the same time advantaging the PAS. The second set of relevant findings is that constituencies with a higher percentage of Malay voters correlated with a higher possibility of a BN win, whereas in constituencies where the Indians and/or the Chinese comprised the majority, the BN’s chances of victory dropped tremendously. However, the PAS’s victories in fact came in many Malay-majority constituencies in Kedah and Kelantan, where it mostly contested against the UMNO. Thus Pepinsky argued that the Malays in other constituencies in which the UMNO prevailed must have voted almost in toto to have produced this outcome.286 Therefore, outside of its northern strongholds the PAS largely failed to displace the UMNO as the party of choice for the Malays at least. The party’s inability to wrest away issue ownership from the UMNO over the economy meant that the PAS could not be seen as a credible alternative in terms of both vote choice and potential as a party of government. I argue that this is an important factor which influenced the resistance to vote for the PAS, although the exact degree of importance could not be 285 Thomas B. Pepinksy, “The 2008 Malaysian Elections: An End to Ethnic Politics?” Journal of East Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 99-100. 286 Ibid., 105-106. 113 deduced due to a lack of substantial data and evidence. In the post-electoral survey conducted by Merdeka Centre, respondents were asked to state which parties they had voted for.287 They were also asked to provide reasons for their voting choice. For the first question, 37% of Malay respondents stated that they had voted for the BN, whilst only 7% stated that they had voted for the PAS. 44% however did not answer this particular question. For the second question, 38% of those who had voted for the PAS claimed that they did so to ‘preserve Islamic and Malay rights’, 36% stated that they were ‘party members/loyal and confident to the party’, 12% cited the ‘candidate factor’, another 12% voted because they were ‘dissatisfied with [other] party’s performance, and the remaining 2% gave no replies. Even though there were categories like ‘continuous development’ and ‘stability/economic stability’, it seems that no one voted for the PAS based on these two reasons. The BN garnered 5% each for those two factors. This particular finding suggests that the PAS’s welfare state agenda simply found no traction. Not only was the party’s negara kebajikan outdebated by the BN and the UMNO, but on its own it seemed to gain little favour amongst the electorate. At the same time, the party was constrained by the ethnic makeup of the constituencies in which it contested the elections, and would probably not have made much headway by highlighting other important issues like corruption and ethnic marginalisation. In fact, given how little the Malays in general cared for these issues, any emphasis on such issues would probably have backfired on the party anyway. 287 For a detailed elaboration on the results of the survey, see “Peninsula Malaysia Voter Opinion Poll: Perspective on Issues, the Economy, Leadership and Voting Intentions, 14 th – 21st March 2008,” Merdeka Centre. 114 Concluding Assessment In the course of the development of the party between 2004 and 2008, the PAS party leaders have now learnt that it is in their best interests not to emphasise strictly religious issues as part of their electoral agenda. For the 2008 elections the party touted the concept of the welfare state or negara kebajikan to outmanoeuvre the BN and the UMNO on the economic issue. However, the attempt to wrest ownership over this issue failed, largely because the PAS did not engage the pre-defined parameters of the debate. Negara kebajikan was presented not only as a rejection of the BN/UMNO economic model, but also as a rejection of the parameters and dimensions of the debate itself as well. As a consequence the PAS simply failed to recast the discursive dimensions of the debate over the economy in a manner that was favourable towards the party itself. In the end, the BN and the UMNO largely remained in ownership of the issue of the economy. Where issues of increasing inflation and costs of living, corruption, and ethnic relations were concerned, the PAS simply could not make use of them because their constituents, mostly rural Malays, did not relate to such issues. The issue of ethnic relations eventually became the ruling coalition’s Achilles heel in the election, although this was little consolation for the PAS. There was also no real sign of a general economic voting trend in 2008, signifying that the economic debate did not have a generally strong influence on voting choice. As the PAS also struggled outside of its traditional strongholds, it also meant that the PAS was nowhere near displacing the UMNO as a credible governing alternative. As in the BJP case study, I do not posit my argument to be the reason why the PAS’s performance in 2008 was not very successful, as there were other factors that influenced the eventual outcome as well. 115 However, this factor needed to be clearly specified because it has been largely ignored, and yet it explains several important aspects of the relative failure of the PAS’s electoral campaign in 2008. 116 Chapter 5 Conclusion Summary of Theoretical Framework and Case Study Findings The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate why some religious political parties have emerged to form democratically elected governments in some democracies, while others elsewhere have failed to do so. Given the revival of the role of religion in politics as a global phenomenon in recent decades, religious political parties have transpired to become one of the most prominent ‘faces’ of global religious revivalism. In polities where there is an erstwhile dominant political party that is in decline, religious political parties are presented with even more opportunities to stake a claim for power. Yet we have not witnessed the inexorable progress of religious political parties worldwide towards governmental capture. On the whole the level of electoral success for religious parties has varied greatly. It is the formulation of an explanatory framework to address this variation that has been the central concern of this thesis. I have argued that for the religious political party to come to power through elections, four things should occur. Firstly, when contesting elections the party must conscientiously drop all references towards religious issues that, ironically, have made them prominent in the first place. Secondly, it must then ‘talk’ about national-temporal issues of the day, especially issues that concern governing parties. Thirdly, the party must aim to wrest away the ownership of such issues from the erstwhile dominant 117 political party by reframing the dimensions and parameters of the debate over these issues in a manner that favours the religious political party. Lastly, the recasting of this debate must find resonance amongst a substantial portion of the electorate. Through such a process the religious party aims to convince the electorate that it is both a viable option as a party of government and a credible governing alternative to the dominant political party in decline. The ownership over national-temporal issues that concern governments is a crucial step towards achieving those ends. In Chapter 3 I had argued that the BJP was able to come to power nationally in 1998 because it had dropped all contentious issues related to Ayodhya and managed to wrest away the ownership over the issue of economic reforms successfully from the Congress Party by reframing the debate over this issue using its swadeshi trump card. Swadeshi seemed to have found favour with a substantial segment of the electorate as well. In Chapter 4 I explicated the reasons why the PAS could not match the BJP’s achievements of 1998. In the 2008 elections the party did away with its Islamic state agenda. However the PAS failed to wrest away issue ownership over the issue of the economy from the BN and the UMNO, largely because it did not appropriately engage the discursive terms of the debate over the issue and consequently failed to recast the nature of the debate to favour itself. The PAS’s negara kebajikan was instead projected as a wholesale rejection of the terms of the debate and the ruling coalition’s economic model of development. On its own accord, the negara kebajikan concept also failed to gain traction amongst the electorate as well. 118 Limitations I acknowledge that there are various limitations embedded in this thesis. Firstly, due to the nature of case selection employed, the generalisability of the theoretical framework might be rather limited. The BJP in 1998 and the PAS in 2008 represent case studies of religious political parties that had to contend with a declining dominant party in a polity that is federally structured with a first-past-the-post single-member plurality electoral system. Therefore the universe of cases that can meet this set of criteria is rather small. In selecting these two specific cases I had aimed at narrowing down as many confounding variables as possible to ensure that these two cases were indeed comparable on most counts. As yet, there is no real reason to believe that the explanatory framework used in this thesis cannot be employed in other types of cases. The ability to ‘talk’ in a way such as to favour one’s self while at the same time making one’s opponent seem weak, and the importance of ‘owning’ national-temporal issues of the day are essential for parties that want to stand a better chance of becoming a party of government. Secondly, as I had mentioned in Chapter 1, as part of the research process I was only limited to an analysis of newspaper reports and articles, and party electoral manifestos where available. Although newspaper reports might contain pro-government and/or anti-opposition bias (as I had discovered for Malaysian newspapers), they remain the most easily accessible source of data for my research. At least for the Malaysian case study I have borne in mind the partiality in news reporting while conducting my analysis. There might be issues of selective reporting as well. Therefore 119 newspaper reports might not exactly reflect the actual behaviour or agendas of parties while campaigning. In this sense I acknowledge that the mass media’s portrayal of the political parties in question could have conditioned the end results of my analysis and findings. This analysis would have been more robust had I obtained access to other types of sources, especially primary resources, like party leaders’ speeches in rallies, full-length press conferences during the campaigning period, party newspapers, party advertisements on television and the like. However, due to the lack of (free) access to such data, or simply their unavailability, I have not been able to tap on a wider range of data. However, I believe that there is a substantial amount of information and insight that can still be inferred from an analysis of mainstream newspapers alone. My limited linguistic capabilities restrict me towards analysing mostly English-language resources. Due to the method of research employed, I am thus unable to select cases where the English language is not spoken and/or English-language newspapers are not in circulation, even if I had considered such cases in the first place. In relation to the first point on case selection, this also substantially limited the choice of feasible cases. Thirdly, scholars of issue ownership theory usually employ statistical methods in line with the quantitative method of inquiry. This thesis, however, has employed a smalln qualitative method of inquiry through the use of the case study approach. For one, this thesis is aimed at outlining the causal process by which a religious political party tries to engage in strategic ‘talk’ in order to wrest issue ownership away from the dominant party. However, given the dearth of the necessary empirical data from both case studies that would help substantiate my argument quantitatively, I have thus been unable to 120 consider other approaches, for example a mixed-methods approach. Where possible I have tried to bolster my argument from survey results that are publicly available. Recommendations Firstly, future research on issue ownership and the BJP and the PAS could also include other cases within the same unit, i.e. these two parties in other election years. Future research could employ the explanatory framework of this thesis on the BJP in 1999, 2004, and 2008, and the PAS in 2013. In 1999, the BJP again won the elections and continued to govern India for the next five years. However in 2004 the Congress Party won instead, as with the 2009 elections. Were the Congress wins in 2004 and 2009 a result of the party’s ability to wrest back issue ownership from the BJP this time round? Or did the BJP bring back contentious religious issues back into the party’s main agenda? In the recently concluded Malaysian elections in May 2013, the PAS was still unable to make much headway in elections. Did the PAS yet again fail to wrest issue ownership from the BN or the UMNO, or was it the case that it was the other opposition parties that managed to steal issue ownership instead? These are intriguing questions that need to be analysed. It would further strengthen the credibility of the theoretical framework of this thesis if it can still explain the mixed bag of results of the BJP from 1999 onwards and the PAS’s continuing struggle to make a meaningful impact in elections. Earlier on I noted that my research has been largely limited towards analysing newspaper articles. A second set of recommendations here would be for future research to try to rely on a wider source of data and information, both primary and 121 secondary. Given this day and age, the advent of electronic media has challenged the primacy of traditional print media as the main medium of information transmission. Television advertisements, e-newspapers, online weblogs, political party podcasts, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram present new ‘battlegrounds’ for political parties to engage with each other and with its constituents and supporters as well. Scholars have also begun to factor in these new media of information transmission in their research on issue ownership.288 Future research on issue ownership and its related aspects should begin to consider including data from such resources alongside traditional sources like newspaper reports in order to produce research with greater analytical rigour. Thirdly, and in relation to the previous set of recommendations, approaches towards research on issue ownership and related theories and concepts should go beyond the usage of only statistical methods. As Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevere and Michiel Nuytemans demonstrate, experimental methods on human subjects can also be employed in the study of issue ownership.289 However, experimental methods remain well within the confines of the quantitative approach. The case study approach, or the qualitative approach, in this thesis has shown that there needs to be an in-depth analysis of the causal process involved in the wresting away of issue ownership by one 288 For example, Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevere and Michiel Nuytemans used experimental methods in their research. They enrolled the help of actual politicians in Belgium to make brief videos on their own party’s issues, and exposed their experimental subjects to several of such videos in order to find out how party issue ownership is affected by media exposure and content. See Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevre, and Michiel Nuytemens, “Issue Ownership Stability and Change: How Political Parties Claim and Maintain Issues Through Media Appearances,” Political Communication 26, no. 2 (2009): 153-172. 289 Ibid. 122 party from another. This would not have been possible if a strictly statistical method had been adopted. Including a component on a statistical analysis on the subject matter had there been substantive data would not have been a problem, but relying purely on statistical methods would not put forward the whole picture of the actual underlying processes and mechanisms involved in the practicalities of day-to-day ‘talk’ between parties. Using case studies also help to explicate the findings from a statistical analysis of party issue ownership. The fourth set of recommendations concerns the explanatory framework of this thesis. Future research could test the framework outside of the case study parameters set for this thesis. For example, it would be interesting to note if the framework could equally apply to cases where the proportional representation electoral system is in place. The explanatory framework could also be applied equally to other types of cases – for example, opposition socialist parties contesting against declining dominant parties, or religious parties contesting against parties that are still dominant and not in decline. The main difference between religious and non-religious parties is that religious parties have to show that they have discarded religious issues as part of their electoral agenda. For some political parties, it might be the case that that they do not have to discard any issue(s) in the first place, while for other parties they might have to shelve equally contentious issues, like issues of ethnicity or anti-immigration issues. However, it must be made clear that the theoretical framework assumes that the party in question aims to become the government. Thus it will not be appropriate to select parties like niche parties, whose ultimate aim is not to form the government but to influence governmental policy at best. Additionally, research on issue ownership theory is still largely limited to 123 the confines of Western Europe and North America. There is a need to expand research beyond these two regions. 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The Malay language newspapers include Berita Harian, Harian Metro, and Utusan Malaysia I translated the Malay-language newspaper reports that I had selected for analysis into English myself 30 Jason P Abbott, “Electoral Authoritarianism and the Print Media in Malaysia: Measuring Political Bias and Analyzing Its Cause,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 38, no 1 (2 011 ): 1- 38 14 means to circumvent the. .. a major problem, since English language dailies and weeklies in India are the more prominent newspapers as they are more widely circulated than the local language newspapers.28 As a native speaker of the Malay language I am able to analyse both the major English language and Malay language newspapers in Malaysia.29 However, in Malaysia, the media companies are only privately-owned in name Many of the. .. contested and then wrested away Political Parties and Issues Issue competition’ is an umbrella term that includes spatial theory, directional theory, issue salience theory and issue ownership theory They are all related theories that try to explain a particular phenomenon – how parties convince voters that they are ‘in charge’ of a particular issue, and that voters should vote for a particular party because... favour dominant parties, 53 the practice of clientelism by the dominant party with added protection for the beneficiaries of such a system,54 the failure of opposition parties to co-operate on electoral strategies,55 the near-monopoly of the media, the press and means of advertising by the dominant party,56 and/ or the co-optation of antiregime or anti -dominant party elites.57 Dominant parties also aim at... some scholars .17 India, for one, has also been classified as quasi-democratic .18 In fact, Ayesha Jalal has gone on to argue that even under India’s first and most prominent Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru the Congress Party had an institutionalised brand of authoritarianism that was covert 19 Malaysia, on the other hand, is at best a ‘hybrid regime’, or more specifically, a type of 16 James D Fearon, “Ethnic... 2002), 15 2 -15 3 20 Opposition Political Parties and Dominant Political Parties As do most opposition parties many religious parties begin from the margins of power, outside of the governmental fold Starting out as peripheral parties as part of the opposition camp, the aim of governmental capture for many religious political parties is made difficult by the very fact of the incumbency of the parties. .. in a vacuum, and neither do they just arise naturally It is clear that in some cases politicians intentionally make salient issues as part of a strategic choice, while in other cases issues emerge and become predominant because of external conditions that are beyond the control of the government, parties and politicians alike For the religious party that wants to challenge the dominant party over the. .. according to Gunther and Diamond, is one of three programmatic appeals for mass-based parties, the other two being nationalism and socialism Mass-based religious parties consist of two types – the denominational mass-party, which is a term that they adopted from Otto Kirchheimer, and the protohegemonic religious party, also known as the religious fundamentalist party Denominational mass-based parties first... formulated by Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie Based on the concept of selective emphasis, they argue that political parties will only make salient issues that present the parties themselves in a more favourable light, rather than raising issues that are clearly identified with other opposing parties Parties then try to make as prominent as possible the issues that they raise, and to that effect increase the. .. as a dichotomy and not as ordered dimensions on a scale The second component of the theory involves intensity; that is, the strength of emotions and feelings evoked about a particular issue for the voter, and the magnitude of effort put in by the candidate to rally voters around that issue. 77 The authors argue that a party’s candidates should then take clear and strong stands to persuade voters that ... newspapers as they are more widely circulated than the local language newspapers.28 As a native speaker of the Malay language I am able to analyse both the major English language and Malay language... erstwhile dominant Congress Party In contrast, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS) of Malaysia constitutes the second and the ‘failure’ case for this thesis The PAS was... party, the Indian People’s Organisation (Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or BJS), founded in 19 51 As with the BJP today, the BJS was regarded as the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National