Tài liệu hạn chế xem trước, để xem đầy đủ mời bạn chọn Tải xuống
1
/ 144 trang
THÔNG TIN TÀI LIỆU
Thông tin cơ bản
Định dạng
Số trang
144
Dung lượng
1,23 MB
Nội dung
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. To that end, this thesis was an attempt to break that
geographical barrier of research on issue ownership.
124
Bibliography
Abbott, Jason “Vanquishing Banquo's Ghost: The Anwar Ibrahim Affair and Its Impact
on Malaysian Politics.” Asian Studies Review 25, no. 3 (2001): 285-308.
Abbott, Jason P.. “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.
Abdul Hamid Abdul Fauzi. “The UMNO-PAS Struggle: Analysis of PAS’s Defeat in
2004.” In Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, edited by Saw Swee
Hock and K. Kesavapany, 100-131. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 2006.
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): 173-194.
Abdul Rashid Moten. “2008 General Elections in Malaysia: Democracy at Work.”
Japanese Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (2009): 21-42.
Aldrich, John H.. Why Parties? A Second Look. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011.
Andersen, Walter K.. “India’s 1991 Elections: The Uncertain Verdict.” Asian Survey 31,
no. 10 (1991): 976-989.
125
Andersen, Walter. “India in 1995: Year of the Long Campaign.” Asian Survey 36, no. 2
(1996): 165-178.
Barisan Nasional, 2008. Malaysia 2008: Laporan Kemajuan dan Manifesto. Available at
https://app.box.com/s/3lnkibaxaq23mvsfpnso.
Bartolini, Stefano, and Peter Mair. Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability: The
Stabilisation of European Electorates 1885-1985. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Bélanger, Éric. “Issue Ownership by Canadian Political Parties 1953-2001.” Canadian
Journal of Political Science 36, no. 3 (2003): 539-558.
Berger, Dominic. “The 2008 Malaysian General Election: Killing the Ghost of 1969?”
Flinders Asia Centre Occasional Paper 2, Flinders Asia Centre, Flinders
University,
2010.
http://www.flinders.edu.au/sabs/asianstudies-
files/asiaonline/AsiaOnline-02.pdf
Bijukumar, V.. Reinventing the Congress: Economic Policies and Strategies since 1991.
Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2006.
Biswas, Shampa. “To Be Modern, but in the “Indian” Way: Hindu Nationalism.” In Gods,
Guns, and Globalization: Religious Radicalism and International Political
Economy, edited by Mary Ann Tétreault and Robert A. Denemark, 107-134.
Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004.
126
BJP,
1998.
BJP
Electoral
Manifesto
1998.
Available
at
http://www.bjp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:natio
nal-democratic-alliance-manifesto-1999&catid=50:electionmanifestos&Itemid=446.
Bogaards, Matthijs, and Françoise Boucek. “Introduction: Setting a New Agenda for
Research.” In Dominant Political Parties and Democracy: Concepts,
Measures, Cases and Comparisons, edited by Matthijs Bogaards and
Françoise Boucek, 1-19. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Brocker, Manfred, and Mirjam Künkler. “Religious Parties: Revisiting the InclusionModeration Hypothesis – Introduction.” Party Politics 19, no. 2 (2013): 171186.
Brown, Graham K.. “Playing the (Non)Ethnic Card: The Electoral System and Ethnic
Voting Patterns in Malaysia.” Ethnopolitics 4, no. 4 (2005): 429–445.
Budge, Ian. “Electoral Volatility: Issue Effects and Basic Change in 23 Post-War
Democracies.” Electoral Studies 1, no. 2 (1982): 147-168.
Budge, Ian, and Dennis Farlie. Explaining and Predicting Elections: Issue Effects and
Party Strategies in Twenty-Three Democracies. London: Allen and Unwin,
1983.
127
Budge, Ian. “Issues, Dimensions, and Agenda Change in Postwar Democracies:
Longterm Trends in Party Election Programs and Newspaper Reports in
Twenty-Three Democracies.” In Agenda Formation, edited by William H.
Riker, 41-79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Bunce, Valerie J., and Sharon L. Wolchik. “Defeating Dictators: Electoral Change and
Stability in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes.” World Politics 62, no. 1
(2010): 43-86.
Camilleri, Rita. “Religious Pluralism in Malaysia: The Journey of Three Prime Ministers.”
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 24, no. 2 (2013): 225-240.
Carmines, Edward G., and James A. Stimson. “On the Evolution of Political Issues.” In
Agenda Formation, edited by William H. Riker, 151-168. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Case, William. “UMNO Paramountcy: A Report on Single-Party Dominance in
Malaysia.” Party Politics 2, no. 1 (1996): 115-127.
Case, William. “How's My Driving? Abdullah's First Year as Malaysian PM.” The Pacific
Review 18, no.2 (2005): 137-157.
Case, William. “Malaysia in 2007: High Corruption and Low Opposition.” Asian Survey
48, no. 1 (2008): 47-54.
Case, William. “Political Legitimacy in Malaysia: Historical Roots and Contemporary
Deficits.” Politics and Policy 38, no. 3 (2010): 497-522.
128
Case, William. “Transition from Single-Party Dominance? New Data from Malaysia.”
Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 91-126.
Case, William F., and Liew Chin Tong. “How Committed is PAS to Democracy and How
Do We Know It?” Contemporary Southeast Asia 28, no.3 (2006): 385-406.
Caulier, Jean-François, and Patrick Dumont. “Measuring One-Party Dominance with
Voting Power Indices.” In Dominant Political Parties and Democracy:
Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, edited by Matthijs Bogaards
and Françoise Boucek, 45-59. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. National Elections Studies: 1998 Post Poll
Survey. Accessed 24 January 2013,
http://www.lokniti.org/nes%20data%20lokniti%20csds/index.htm
Chaudhuri, Joyotpaul. “Coalition, Change and Continuity: The Mid‐1996 General
Elections in India.” Asian Journal of Political Science 4, no. 2 (1996): 1-14.
Chin, James, and Wong Chin Huat. “Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval.” Journal of
Democracy 20, no. 3 (2009): 71-85.
Christensen, Ray. Ending the LDP Hegemony: Party Cooperation in Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2000.
Crouch, Harold. Government and Society in Malaysia. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1996.
129
Dalton, Russell J.. “Political Cleavages, Issues, and Electoral Change.” In Comparing
Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting, edited
by Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris, 189-209. London:
Sage Publications, 2003.
Damore, David F.. “The Dynamics of Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections.”
Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 391-397.
Devadas, Vijay. “Makkal Sakhti: The Hindraf Effect, Race and Postcolonial Democracy
in Malaysia.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited
by Daniel P. S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, and Gaik Cheng
Khoo, 86-104. London: Routledge, 2009.
Diamond, Larry. “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes.” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2
(2002): 21-35.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row,
1957.
Dunleavy, Patrick. “Rethinking Dominant Party Systems.” In Dominant Political Parties
and Democracy: Concepts, Measures, Cases and Comparisons, edited by
Matthijs Bogaards and Françoise Boucek, 23-44. New York: Routledge,
2010.
Duverger, Maurice. Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern
State. Translated by Barbara North and Robert North. New York: Wiley,
1954.
130
Edie, Carlene J.. “Democracy in the Gambia: Past, Present and Prospects for the
Future.” Africa Development 25, no. 3&4 (2000): 161-198.
Enelow, James M., and Melvin J. Hinich. The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1990.
Farish A. Noor, “Blood, Sweat and Jihad: The Radicalization of the Political Discourse of
the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) from 1982 Onwards.” Contemporary
Southeast Asia 25, no. 2 (2003): 200-232.
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.
Fearon, James D.. “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country.” Journal of Economic
Growth 8, no. 2 (2003): 195-222.
Felker, Greg. “Malaysia in 1998: A Cornered Tiger Bares Its Claws.” Asian Survey 39,
no. 1 (1999): 43-54.
Friedman, Edward, and Joseph Wong. “Learning to Lose: Dominant Parties, Dominant
Party Systems, and Their Transitions.” In Political Transitions in Dominant
Party Systems: Learning to Lose, edited by Edward Friedman and Joseph
Wong, 1-12. New York: Routledge, 2008.
131
Funston, John. “Malaysia: A Fateful September.” Southeast Asian Affairs (1999): 165184.
Funston, N. J.. “The Origins of Parti Islam Se Malaysia.” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 7, no. 1 (1976): 58-73.
Funston, N. J.. Malay Politics in Malaysia: A Study of the United Malays National
Organisation and Party Islam. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational Books,
1980.
Funston, N.J.. “The Malay Electorate in 2004: Reversing the 1999 Result?” In Malaysia:
Recent Trends and Challenges, edited by Saw Swee Hock and K.
Kesavapany, 132-156. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006.
Ganguly, Sumit. “India in 1996: A Year of Upheaval.” Asian Survey 37, no. 2 (1997):
126-135.
Giliomee, Hermann, and Charles Simkins. “Introduction.” In The Awkward Embrace:
One-Party Domination and Democracy, edited by Hermann Giliomee and
Charles Simkins, xv-xxi. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999.
Goh Soo Khoon and Michael Lim Mah-Hui. The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis:
The Case of Malaysia. Penang: Third World Network, 2010.
Gomez, Edmund Terence. “The 2004 Malaysian General Elections: Economic
Development, Electoral Trends, and the Decline of the Opposition.” In
Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, edited by Saw Swee Hock and K.
Kesavapany, 73-99. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006.
132
Gomez, Edmund Terence, 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, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez
and Johan Saravanamuttu, 1-28. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 2013.
Greene, Kenneth F.. Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in
Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Gunther, Richard, and Larry Diamond. “Types and Functions of Parties.” In Political
Parties and Democracy, edited by Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond, 3-39.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Gunther, Richard and Larry Diamond. “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology.”
Party Politics 9, no. 2 (2003): 167-199.
Haggard, Stephen. The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis. Washington
DC: Institute for International Economics, 2000.
Hamayotsu, Kikue. “Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim: The Politics of State
Enforcement of Syariah in Contemporary Malaysia.” South East Asia
Research 20, no. 3 (2012): 399-421.
Hasan, Zoya. Congress after Indira: Policy, Power, and Political Change (1984-2009).
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
133
Heath, Oliver. “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.
Hew, Denis. “The Malaysian Economy: Developments and Challenges.” Southeast
Asian Affairs (2008): 207-222.
Hill, Hal. “Malaysian Economic Development: Looking Backward and Forward.” In
Malaysia’s Development Challenges: Graduating from the Middle, edited by
Hall Hill, Tham Siew Yean, and Ragayah Haji Mat Zin, 1-42. London:
Routledge, 2012.
Hilley, John. Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition. New York:
Zed Books, 2001.
Hoffstaedter, Gerhard. “Islam Hadhari: A Malaysian Islamic Multiculturalism or Another
Blank Banner?” Contemporary Islam 3, no. 2 (2009): 121-141.
Holian, David B.. “He’s Stealing My Issues! Clinton’s Crime Rhetoric and the Dynamic of
Issue Ownership.” Political Behavior 26, no. 2 (2004): 95-124.
Hwang, In-Won. Personalized Politics: The Malaysian State under Mahathir. Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003.
Indian
National
Congress,
1998.
Electoral
Manifesto
1998.
Available
http://aicc.org.in/index.php/manifestos/detail/1998#.UhQ9Ol-wqUk.
134
at
Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995.
Jalal, Ayesha. Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and
Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Stephen. Opposition Politics in Japan: Strategies under a One-Party
Dominant Regime. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the
Secular State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Kalyvas, Stathis N.. “Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of
Religious Parties.” Comparative Politics 32, no. 4 (2000): 379-398.
Kapur, Devesh, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “India in 1998: The Travails of Political
Fragmentation.” Asian Survey 39, no. 1 (1999): 163-176.
Kitschelt, Herbert. The Transformation of European Social Democracy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Kothari, Rajni. “The Congress ‘System’ in India.” Asian Survey 4, no. 12 (1964): 11611173.
Lakha, Salim. “From Swadeshi to Globalisation: The Bharatiya Janata Party's Shifting
Economic Agenda.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3
(2002): 83-103.
135
Lange, Matthew. Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and
State Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Lee Hock Guan. “Malaysia in 2007: Abdullah Administration under Siege.” Southeast
Asian Affairs (2008): 187-206.
Lee, Julian C.H.. Islamization and Activism and Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2010.
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal
of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 51-65.
Liew Chin Tong. “PAS Leadership: New Faces and Old Constraints.” Southeast Asian
Affairs (2007): 201-213.
Liew Chin Tong. “PAS Politics: Defining an Islamic State.” In Politics in Malaysia: The
Malay Dimension, edited by Edmund Terence Gomez, 107-137. London:
Routledge, 2007.
Liow, Joseph. “The Politics Behind Malaysia’s Eleventh General Election.” Asian Survey
45, no. 6 (2005): 907-930.
Liow, Joseph Chinyong. “Islamist Ambitions, Political Change, and the Price of Power:
Recent Success and Challenges for the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS.”
Journal of Islamic Studies 22, no. 3 (2011), 374-403.
Liow, Joseph Chinyong. “Malaysia’s March 2008 General Election: Understanding the
New Media Factor.” The Pacific Review 25, no. 3 (2012): 293-315.
136
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Stein Rokkan. “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and
Voter Alignments: An Introduction.” In Party Systems and Voter Alignments:
Cross-National Perspectives, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein
Rokkan, 1-64. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Loh, Francis Kok Wah. “The April 2004 General Elections in Malaysia: Looking Beyond
the “Pak Lah” Factor.” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies
20, no. 1 (2005): 3-24.
MacDonald, Stuart Elaine, Ola Listhaug, and George Rabinowitz. “Issues and Party
Support in Multiparty Systems.” The American Political Science Review 85,
no. 4 (1991): 1107-1131.
Magaloni, Beatriz. Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in
Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Malik, Yogendra K.. “Indira Gandhi: Personality, Political Power and Party Politics.” In
India: The Years of Indira Gandhi, edited by Yogendra K. Malik and
Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi, 7-21. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998.
Manor, James. “India after the Dynasty.” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 3 (1990): 102113.
Manor, James, and Gerald Segal. “Taking India Seriously.” Survival 40, no. 2 (1998):
53-70.
137
Manor, James. “The Congress Party and the ‘Great Transformation’.” In Understanding
India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation?, edited by Sanjay
Ruparelia, Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss, and Stuart Corbridge, 204-220. New
York: Routledge, 2011.
Marshall, Monty G., Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr. Polity IV Dataset. [Computer
File;
version
p4v2011.]
Centre
for
Systemic
Peace.
Available
at
http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
Martinez, Patricia. “Malaysia in 2004: Abdullah Badawi Defines His Leadership.”
Southeast Asian Affairs (2005): 189-210.
Maznah Mohamad. “Malaysia – Democracy and the End of Ethnic Politics?” Australian
Journal of International Affairs 62, no. 4 (2008): 441-459.
McCartney, Matthew. India – The Political Economy of Growth, Stagnation and the
State, 1951-2007. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Merdeka Centre. Observations on Issues, Voting Directions and Implications. Accessed
January 28 2013, http://www.merdeka.org/pages/02_research.html.
Merdeka Centre. Peninsula Malaysia Voter Opinion Poll: Perspective on Issues, the
Economy, Leadership and Voting Intentions, 14th – 21st March 2008.
Accessed January 28 2013,
http://www.merdeka.org/pages/02_research.html.
Nathan, K. S.. “Malaysia: The Challenge of Money Politics and Religious Activism.”
Southeast Asian Affairs (2006): 151-171.
138
Nayar, Baldev Raj. “The Limits of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Reforms
under the BJP-Led Government, 1998-1999.” Asian Survey 40, no. 5 (2000):
792-815.
Nayar, Baldev Raj. Globalization and Nationalism: The Changing Balance in India’s
Economic Policy, 1950-2000. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.
O’Shannassy, Michael. “Beyond the Barisan Nasional? A Gramscian Perspective of the
2008 Malaysian General Election.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 31, no. 1
(2009): 88-109.
Pai, Sudha. “Transformation of the Indian Party System: The 1996 Lok Sabha
Elections.” Asian Survey 36, no. 12 (1996): 1170-1183.
Pardesi, Manjeet S., and Jennifer L. Oetken. “Secularism, Democracy, and Hindu
Nationalism in India.” Asian Security 4, no. 1 (2008): 23-40.
Parikh, Manju. “The Debacle at Ayodhya: Why Militant Hinduism Met with a Weak
Response.” Asian Survey 33, no. 7 (1993): 673-684.
PAS, 2008. Kerajaan Beramanah, Adil dan Bersih: Menuju Negara Kebajikan. Available
at https://app.box.com/s/8dl3hpzxk9t0fennoehf.
Pempel, T. J.. “Introduction.” in Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant
Regimes, edited T.J. Pempel, 1-32. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Pepinksy, Thomas B.. “The 2008 Malaysian Elections: An End to Ethnic Politics?”
Journal of East Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 87-120.
139
Petrocik, John R.. “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.”
American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (1996): 825-850.
Petrocik, John R., William L. Benoit, and Glenn J. Hansen. “Issue Ownership and
Presidential Campaigning, 1952-2000.” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4
(2003): 599-626.
Rabinowitz, George, and Stuart Elaine MacDonald. “A Directional Theory of Issue
Voting.” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 1 (1989): 93-121.
Ratan, Sudha. “Hindutva: The Shaping of a New “Hindu” Identity.” Southeastern
Political Review 26, no. 1 (1998): 201-217.
Riker, William H.. The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986.
Riker, William H.. “Rhetorical Interaction in the Ratification Campaign.” In Agenda
Formation, edited by William H. Riker, 81-123. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993.
Riker, William H.. The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Rimanelli, Marco. “Introduction: Peaceful Democratization Trends in Single-PartyDominant Countries.” In Comparative Democratization and Peaceful Change
in Single-Party-Dominant Countries, edited by Marco Rimanelli, 1-24. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
140
Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political
Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Rudolph, Lloyd I.. “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,
edited by Harold A. Gould and Sumit Ganguly, 436-454. Boulder: Westview
Press, 1993.
Sartori, Giovanni. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Scheiner, Ethan. Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a OneParty Dominant State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Schwedler, Jillian. Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Schwedler, Jillian. “Can Islamists Become Moderates? Rethinking the InclusionModeration Hypothesis.” World Politics 63, no. 2 (2011): 347-376.
Sharma, Chanchal Kumar. “A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform
Sustainability: The Case of India.” India Review 10, no. 2 (2011): 126-184.
Shashtri, Vanita. “The Politics of Economic Liberalization in India.” Contemporary South
Asia 6, no. 1 (1997): 27-56.
141
Siddiquee, Noore Alam. “Combating Corruption and Managing Integrity in Malaysia: A
Critical Overview of Recent Strategies and Initiatives.” Public Organization
Review 10, no. 2 (2010): 153-171.
Singh, Gurharpal. “Understanding Political Corruption in Contemporary Indian Politics.”
Political Studies 45, no. 3 (1997): 626-638.
Singh, Hari. “Ethnic Conflict in Malaysia Revisited.” Commonwealth and Comparative
Politics 39, no.1 (2001): 42-65.
Singh, M. P.. “India’s National Front and United Front Coalition Governments: A Phase
in Federalized Governance.” Asian Survey 41, no. 2 (2001): 328-350.
Slater, Dan. “Iron Cage in an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the Personalization
of Power in Malaysia.” Comparative Politics 36, no. 1 (2003): 81-101.
Sridharan, Eswaran. “Coalitions and Party Strategies in India's Parliamentary
Federation.” Publius 33, no. 4 (2003): 135-152.
Stokes, Donald E.. “Spatial Models of Party Competition.” The American Political
Science Review 57, no. 2 (1963): 368-377.
Strøm, Kaare. “A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties.” American Journal
of Political Science 34, no. 2 (1990): 565-598.
Tandon, Sharad. “Economic Reform, Voting, and Local Political Intervention: Evidence
from India.” Journal of Development Economics 97, no. 2 (2012): 221-231.
142
Tarrow, Sidney. “The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice.”
Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 2 (2010): 230-259.
Tezcür, Günes Murat . “The Moderation Theory Revisited: The Case of Islamic Political
Actors.” Party Politics 16, no. 1 (2010): 69-88.
Thakur, Ramesh. “A Changing of the Guard in India.” Asian Survey 38, no. 6 (1998):
603-623.
Thakurta, Paranjoy Guha, and Shankar Raghuraman. Divided We Stand: India in a
Time of Coalitions. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007.
Walgrave, Stefaan, 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.
Walgrave, Stefaan , Jonas Lefevre, and Anke Tresch. “The Associative Dimension of
Issue Ownership.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2012): 771-782.
Ware, Alan. Political Parties and Party Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
White, David. “Dominant Party Systems: A Framework for Conceptualizing Opposition
Strategies in Russia.” Democratization 18, no. 3 (2011): 655-681.
Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the
Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party.” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004):
205-228.
143
Woelinetz, Steven B.. “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, edited by Richard Gunther, José Ramón
Montéro, and Juan J. Linz, 136-165. New York: Oxford University Press,
2002.
Zaffiro, James J.. “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.
Zainal Kling. “UMNO and BN in the 2004 Elections: The Political Culture of Complex
Identities.” In Malaysia: Recent Trends and Challenges, edited by Saw Swee
Hock and K. Kesavapany, 157-194. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 2006.
144
[...]... 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. .. 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. .. 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... 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... 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... 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. .. 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. .. 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... 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... 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 ... 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. .. 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... 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