On May 11, 2004, political theorist and commentator Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta addressed an audience at EPPC on the recent – and dramatic – Indian elections. Speaking just prior to the announcement of the official results, he (like virtually everyone else) did not predict the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ruling coalition by the Congress Party and its allies. But he does anticipate it as a possibility and considers how the BJP might operate in opposition. Moreover, Dr. Mehta’s presentation offered a wide-ranging and compelling account of why he expected the BJP to fare much less well than many anticipated when the elections began. In particular, he highlighted several profound problems for the BJP in retaining and expanding its national dominance – including the difficulties of politically capitalizing on economic performance. He further considers the extent to which Hindu-nationalist positions and programs – such as the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya – may be adopted by other political parties, including the Congress.

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MR. TIMOTHY SHAH: -- The topic today is the Indian Elections: Counting the Votes and Assessing the Stakes. We are delighted to have with us to talk about the Indian elections, which have just concluded, the eminent political theorist and political commentator, Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

As I said, India has just concluded its elections. The world’s largest democracy has just gone to the polls. Nearly 400 million people voted. The turnout was something between 50 and 55 percent, making it a higher turnout than an average American presidential election. The votes are just starting to be counted. The 13th is the official count day, so we are in an in-between period just after the votes have been cast, just before the official results will be announced.

Already, exit polls show that the results are somewhat different from what was originally expected. The ruling coalition, the NDA, is likely to receive a smaller share of the vote than was originally anticipated and the NDA may, in fact, fall short of the 272 seats needed to form a governing coalition.

So there is an enormous instability right now, a great sense of concern. The Indian Stock Exchange, the Sensex, plunged more than 200 points because of fear about what this might mean. It’s the largest drop in four years. So, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about what these results mean.

But today, we’re going to talk about deeper issues than who may win and what precisely the coalition will be. We want to ask larger questions; for example, what do these results mean for the future of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India? What do these results mean for the future of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a major political force in Indian politics? What do the results say about the power of Hindu Nationalism as a politically mobilizing force in Indian society? Is this power on the wane?

How will the results of the election be interpreted by various movements in Indian politics? Could it be that Hindu-nationalist leaders will interpret the results of these elections as proving that the Hindutva agenda is really what is needed in order to win elections? In other words, the BJP, as has widely been noted, did not run on a Hindutva platform in this election, by and large. Perhaps, the forces of Hindutva will interpret the BJP’s failing to do as well as was anticipated as confirmation that the root to political success remains the root of Hindutva.

These very interesting election results are going to be subject to very different interpretations and we want to explore some them today. We want to test them, think through them in as profound a way as possible so that we can have a deep sense of what these elections purport for the future of Indian politics.

And, again, we’re very grateful that we have with us Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He has great expertise in not only the history of political thought, but in the areas of law, the areas of governance. He’s the author of The Burden of Democracy. He’s a frequent contributor to several Indian newspapers, journals, magazines.

He taught for several years in the Harvard Government Department, and he is again, this semester, visiting professor in the Government Department at Harvard. Until January, he was a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi but, precisely because he is so outspoken and an outspoken critic of the government, he was encouraged to leave his position at Nehru University.

We’re very pleased to welcome Pratap Mehta.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Thank you, Tim. It seems something of a reckless enterprise to actually talk about interpreting the Indian elections today, as it were, between the day when the voting was completed and the results are out. And, in part, because the full scenario looks so uncertain what will matter, in the end, is not simply the aggregate numbers but, if the exit polls are to be believed (which show the NDA falling just short of a majority, the Congress and its allies in the 200-range) then the exact composition of who’s winning, who’s losing will matter, in some senses, even more. We don’t have a clear picture on that at all.

Or, if we are discussing the question of where does Hindu nationalism go, it actually will not be insignificant which states BJP does better in, and in which states it does worse. You can imagine a dream scenario when Murli Manohar Joshi, who is our Minister for Human Resource Development, and Vinay Katiyar lose, and that would give a different spin on the same aggregate number of seats that the BJP has. So, I won't venture down that path quite yet. I think it’s an open sort of situation but, towards the end, we’ll speculate on two or three possible scenarios.

One of the things that I do want to talk about has placed the selection in a sort of slightly broader context of Indian politics. Basically one way of actually asking the question would be to just look at what the exit poll is predicting and say that in some ways, if you look at Indian politics in the last 10 years, you might say that there’s a kind of equilibrium in Indian politics: the BJP, now the single largest party in terms of number of seats in Parliament, has reached what you might call a bandwidth of sort of capacity between anywhere between 160 to 190 seats, depending on a good day or a bad day.

Congress is in a bandwidth of about 100 to 140. None of the parties are in a position of forming an absolute majority on their own, and any government that is likely to come to party again in this election or to be even in the next election, whether it happens in two years or five years, is most likely to be a coalition government.

I think one of the questions worth asking is why is this the case? Why is it the case that the Indian party system continues to remain fragmented just in this kind of way? Is it due to institutional reasons? Is it due to ideological configurations? What, in a sense, is the explanation for this? Because I think that question provides itself an interesting window on where Indian politics is at. What are the parameters within which it operates?

But, before I come to that question, just a cautionary note: I think it would be false to conclude that, just because India has been subjected to a series of coalition governments in the last, now 13 to 14 years and is likely to do so the next 5 to 7 years, that that actually means political instability.

One of the most striking features of the last 10 or 15 years is that, despite a threat of Hindu nationalism, this has been arguably one of the best decades for economic growth in India. The ‘80s India did relatively well but, in a sense, that was based on a different premise of financing rates of growth. And, I think we need to ask why is it that?

By and large, the economic outlook actually looks reasonably optimistic despite frequent changes in government. And, what does that say about the connection between economics and politics? And, that’s also one question I’m going to talk about towards the end.

So I think one should not conclude that mere change in composition of governments itself will produce some kind of instability in policy choices that could actually produce wild swings one way or another. In fact, if anything, the last 14 or 15 years have shown that that’s actually unlikely for reasons that I’ll mention below.

Three or four months ago, there was a general perception in the media, and certainly a perception that the BJP projected that this election is going to see a big surge of support for the BJP. The BJP seemed very confident. It advertised itself through this "India Shining" slogan.

And, if you look at it objectively, you might say they had a lot going for it. Seven to eight percent economic growth, low inflation, a sense of a political party with a remarkable organizational structure, great political skill, a capacity to attract enormous amounts of new political talent. In fact, it’s the only political party into which new political talent is going. An extraordinary capacity to take initiative in a wide range of policy space.

Whether or not you agree with them, the BJP has had the capacity to define what the policy space actually looks like on everything ranging from nuclear security, foreign policy, Kashmir-- where in some senses, they did manage to pull off the remarkable feat of holding arguably the first elections Kashmir has ever had.

And even after the most egregious black mark against the BJP, the horrendous violence in Gujarat, they did not get electorally penalized. In fact, they electorally gained from it within that state. If you put all of this together, then you might be forgiven for thinking that the BJP actually has a lot going for it. What else could possibly challenge it?

The Congress party organization still remains in shambles, even though it might do better than last time. It’s a party with a serious leadership crisis and a party with a serious ideological crisis. To be honest, most of us still don’t know what the Congress stands for on most issues.

So, you put all of this together and you had the BJP confounding critics by winning a three-state election with these big margins recently, two of them in Congress strongholds where Congress was supposed to win, and you might be forgiven for thinking the BJP’s on a roll. It should considerably improve its tally from the last election, right. And assuming that, the result is what the exit polls say they are going to be or roughly within the boundaries, it looks like the BJP will barely be able to form a government. The question is why did not the success of the BJP in this sense generate enough momentum so that it could actually expand to become stronger?

Now, one possible explanation for this, which I think is actually not an important one, is there was always going to be a big constraint on the BJP’s expansion. But the big constraint was not what was previously thought, namely that certain social groups across the social economic structure of India would not align itself with the BJP. The big block on its expression was going to be what you might call the success of its alliance effects. The BJP has been very good at creating alliances, in part because it was geographically a much more concentrated party in the Congress. It’s not in direct competition with different parties in the states, which makes it easier for the BJP to enter into alliances, even in states in which it is powerful. Usually, the distribution of seats between it and its alliance partner is actually geographically much more segregated. Congress has always traditionally had this dilemma that it could ally with a particular party, but at the risk of undermining its own possible expansion within that state.

BJP didn’t have this dilemma, which made it actually remarkably successful at creating a workable alliance of more than two digit parties. But one of the consequences that was going to come about as a result of its alliance politics was a limit to its own future geographical expansion. Effectively, by making alliances, the BJP was saying that these are geographical areas where we are not going to make a big push towards expansion.

Andhra Pradesh is an interesting case in point. The BJP has expanded considerably and may still do very well in this election, but Andhra Pradesh’s hitherto dominant party, TDP would be fine if the BJP is contesting only three seats or five seats. It’s not going to be happy with this alliance if the BJP creates a sort of big popular mobilizational drive. The same is true in parts of the Hindi heartland, where the BJP works through allies. They do not want to have the BJP expand on their turf. The same was true, partly with its alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party, so that there is, if you like, an upper limit, a geographical limit where you might say that the BJP is actually not being a strong contender in more than 300 seats at the outside, all right. And that, in order to expand further, become a national party in the Congress sense, it would have to actually jettison its allies and work against the interests of its allies.

So, in some ways, it’s actually not surprising that the BJP has not been able to convert itself from 175 to 280 on a national level because of its strategy was to work through allies. Unfortunately for it, and I think this is not an insignificant institutional fact about Indian elections, that’s because elections to state assemblies are now staggered across the five-year term of heavy government, so you have three elections now, five elections next year.

One of the interesting things that has happened because of that staggering is that you actually don’t get simultaneous momentum for any political party across India. So, imagine a scenario where the BJP just literally carries every single stronghold or fits together, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat, UP parts of Bihar, etc. Under those conditions, it could become a much more powerful force.

But in effect, because the performance of its state governments is assessed differently in different states, at one level, it’s proving much more difficult for any party to generate a what they used to call an "all India surge." So, when it does well in Maharashta, it’s lost its backyard in UP. When it does well in Rajasthan, it’s sort of losing its stronghold in Madhya Pradesh.

And I think it’s not an accident that the proposal to synchronize elections to state assemblies and Parliament in fixed five-year terms actually came from Bhairon Singh Shekawat who was in in the party. I think they were instinctively right about it, which is that there’s something about the way in which the staggering of elections has decentered Indian politics a little more. And, it’s difficult for political parties to regain the strongholds altogether because they’re being judged at different points in their tenure in different states. So, that is a strong institutional reason why you would not expect, despite Shining India and great organization effect, this surge in BJP’s favor.

But, there is also, I think, one more, in this case a contingent one, but I think one that goes to the heart of the matter, a reason for the BJP’s sort of slow rise in this matter, which is how do Indian voters judge the economic performance of a government? Now, one thing we know is that growth is not sufficient to win elections. Rajiv Gandhi, when he lost the election in 1989, lost it after a period of quite dramatic growth. Growth does not win elections and you might say there are four, as it were, reasons why growth does not win elections, all of which, I think the BJP has been facing without any bright ideas how to avert them.

The first significant fact about the 1990s in the economic performance is that India’s employment to growth elasticity is at its lowest that it has been in its history, which is one of the few unnoticed facts about the Indian growth performance. What it means is, in fact, that we are growing in high value added sectors.

But, that elasticity has dropped actually quite dramatically and no political party has any serious ideas about actually how to generate employment out of growth. And, this is one of the abiding political challenges that any political party will face so that the dramatic effects of growth in terms of creating a genuine sense of well being are actually slower than you might think, looking at the aggregate statistics, which is not to say that this growth is not desirable or these are not the right policies, but its political effects, if you just take this one measure, are quite, quite remarkable.

The second remarkable factor which, I think, has been borne out by this morning’s results in Andhra Pradesh where one of BJP’s key allies, the Telugu Desam Party, has been routed in the assembly election. Really, it’s a huge loss. They barely managed 49 seats. The Congress front has got 228. This is an actual result, not an exit poll. This is a result for the state in which TDP was supposedly doing well. It is an actual result.

Now, Chandrababu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party was the first to try of the new approach to the economy. He clearly was a dynamic Chief Minister with enormous sort of capacity for attracting investment, loans from the World Bank, in particular. But, after 10 years in office, he’s been voted out. And the two factors that have consistently come across is that his achievement is much more widely appreciated in urban India than in rural India.

By and large, one of the failings of liberalization, is that its effects have not reached rural India in as nearly a dramatic a way as we would have wished for and hoped for. And in fact, the political economy of rural India is such that it’s actually going to be a very treacherous ground for any political party to actually navigate.

And the problem is simply this: it’s a complicated problem. Essentially, the average size of Indian land holdings is actually very small by world standards. Now, what that has meant is that serious land reform, which is redistribution of land, politically, that was never a viable option because of the part of the state controlled by vested interests. But, even if you actually just did it logistically, it’s actually not going to make a serious dent in, as it were, the fate of rural poor India, or at least rural landless labor.

Another method for increasing rural incomes and generating rural employment is to go for high value added agriculture--commercialized agriculture. The difficulty with that is that would almost inevitably involve consolidation of land holding.

Now, in Indian conditions, commercial agriculture of that sort is still a risky enterprise. The classical development vision is you get more people off the land and you move them into the cities. That’s, in a sense, happening. But, the scale at which it is likely to happen suggests that most political parties are actually very wary of, in a sense, dismantling the very delicate equilibrium of rural India. It’s happening but with uncertain consequences, but it’s one of the reasons why I think they are, in a sense, go slow on not just agriculture liberalization, but land consolidation as well.

But, essentially, what that means is that despite profound economic changes, a significant portion of rural India, about 55-60 percent of the electorate, even though it has benefited from parts of liberalization, now has slightly different political economy considerations than, so to speak, urban India and Shining India has. And, Andhra Pradesh, in which Chandrababu Naidu lost, is a very dramatic example of that.

The third reason is the condition of state governments in India which, despite it being a national election, not an insignificant factor. One of the big consequences of liberalization is that state government finances are in deep disrepair. States’ budget deficits are running at alarming levels. What this essentially means is that state governments really have no room to maneuver in terms of spending money to generate new coalitions. If state after state is facing this crunch, whether it be a Congress-ruled state or a BJP-ruled state, and it just happens to be whichever the incoming government is in power will get, as it were, the negative assessment in this performance.

One of the principle reasons that state finances are in disrepair is that the forms of taxation have actually favored the Centre at the expense of states because liberalization requires reduction in excise, offshore customs duties, all those kinds of things. So, if you look at the capacity of state governments to generate resources, that has actually relatively declined over the 1990s.

Meanwhile, state governments have been saddled with greater bills for their public sectors, partly because the fifth pay commission decision to raise the wages of government employees, but in part because of an extraordinary Supreme Court judgment that increased the pension liabilities of state governments dramatically. Now, the reason this is not an insignificant fact is that every single state government, from Rajasthan to Kerala), has had to face the wrath of its own state employees. State governments are most likely to lose in most instances, all right. And in the end, one of the critical factors is going to be, in a sense, alienating that critical sector, politically critical sector, of the Indian government. So that you have a politics where state governments have very little room for maneuvers. So, it’s not clear how you’re actually going to use the resources of states to craft a new coalition.

Now, one of the good things that it has resulted in, but poses a political dilemma, is one of the significant things about this election, as I think the last one, is what you might say the effective death of populism in Indian elections. The government doesn’t promise too many free things. It does, occasionally, but not as many as is used to, and the voters don’t buy promises of free things anymore. There is a kind of maturity about popular assessments of the economy. But, the demise of populism means the age old question: how are you going to craft a social coalition that wins your majority? Growth is not going to do that for you, state government finances have proven serious constraints. Where are you going to go?

Now, historically there have been two or three paradigms of crafting these coalitions. One is what you might call a redistributive paradigm, which has had three components. Land reform is one. But as I said, land reform has very limited potential in most states of actually creating enduring coalitions--in part, because most states have, in a sense, reached their limits. If you take a state like Karnataka, which has actually seen more land reform than West Bengal, ironically, But it is a mistake to think that it translates into social coalitions. So, you could work with land reform at the margins, but you’re not going to create a majority social coaltion. Direct transfers of wealth to the poor? Again, very limited success. There are objective fiscal constraints to how much you can do with direct income transfers for redistributed coalitions.

And the third paradigm was redistribution through greater representation. This was the paradigm that was unleashed by the politics of the Mandall Commission where you reserved jobs in government sectors, educational institutions and so forth. And that, for a while, seemed to create an alternative coalition.

Now, the difficulty with that paradigm of redistributed politics is that it has also hit a national limit, which is, essentially, all the sectors you could reserve (which is the government), you have reserved, more or less. The question is now enforcing it. There’s no point pressing for large numbers of reservations when the size of government is not going to expand as rapidly, so it’s not actually to benefit such large numbers of people.

Some groups have tried to argue for affirmative action, roughly, in the private sector and political parties have made sort of gesturing noises towards it. It was part of the Congress manifest. I think there’s a political logic to it. But that is going to be an enormously difficult, prospect to enforce, mainly because India’s manufacturing sector and the sector that comes into the organized category of the economy is actually not that large. Ist’s about 35 million workers. So, there is, in a sense, a natural limit to what a redistributed politics through affirmative action would actually look like. So, the question is, well, where do you go for the a redistributive paradigm? You have all of these fiscal constraints. Inherited models of redistributed politics have sort of reached their temporary limits. What else?

Now, the other two models available was--one you might call a regional model, what parties in South India would opt for, where you use some issues of visual identity to carve out a local regional party. Tamil Nadu did this. Andhra Pradesh did this. Or, the other model of trying to craft a new social coalition was Hindu nationalism.

Now, the interesting thing about all of these models of distributed politics is that they play on a certain kind of politics of self-esteem. What I want to just do briefly is talk about Hindu nationalism and, again, the dilemma that the BJP is in.

Now, if you take Hindu nationalism or at least let’s put its core proposition out that politics can be quite politically potent, which is the idea of, creating greater self-consciousness amongst Hindus as a community through the political process. The BJP does this on the grounds that, unless this self-consciousness is created and systematically perpetuated by the state and political life, then the community will be the target of either, in that order, foreign affairs, a state that means to marginalize Hinduism from public life and/or from minorities that (allegedly) do not support India’s national identity.

This is very good question. Now, how would Hindu nationalist politics manifest itself? What are its concrete demands? Traditionally, its concrete demands centered around three or four issues. The first was what you might call a discourse of anti-minority politics which has, in part, a legal forum where you say that, "Look, the Indian states should have a formal legal structure such that groups like Muslims are not allowed there, personal civil laws and so forth."

The second, and most importantly, reclaiming the temple at Ayodhya and the dispute over the site where the Babri Masjid was demolished in the early 1990s.

The third was a creation of a public culture that was more openly Hindu, which supposedly compensated for a certain kind of modernalization that had happened during the last fifty years. It treid to create a new identity under the forces of modernization and sort of, in a sense, a Hinduized state. And, the fourth was protection of Hindus, which took various forms, rightfully asserting Hindu claims in Kashmir and so forth, right.

Now, look at what has happened to these politics. The BJP has become victim of something that all other political parties recognize, which is that in Indian politics, ideology can get very easily detached from electoral affiliations. To give you one example, take the politics of reservation, right. If particular political party, at that point, the Janata Dal, formulated greater affirmative action for the backward Castes in government, once that policy was formally granted, of course, nobody else could openly or seriously oppose it. So, the voters are back with a choice. You can have your cake and eat it, too, right.

In part, what’s happening to Hindu nationalism is something similar, which is many of its most manifest public expressions have actually been adopted by almost all other political parties. Take Anti-Conversion legislation, which was first, by the way, crafted by the Congress governments. State governments from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu were quite happy passing Anti-Conversion legislation. The issue of cow protection: Congress was quite willing to raise the issue in Madhya Pradesh to capitalize on the fact. So you find this odd sort of situation where many of the issues that the BJP thinks are public expressions of a particular kind of Hindu identity are actually very easily appropriated by the other political parties.

Now, you might say, well, what about Ayodhya? Now, my own sense is that, unfortunately, it is a matter of time before a temple is built at Ayodhya. The difficulty with the BJP on this issue is that it’s a form of mobilization that has intrinsically diminishing returns in the falling sense, not in the sense that the issue might not have political availance.

But, having mobilized on a mass movement around it in the early ‘90s, if the BJP mobilizes now on Ayodhya, it better make sure that the temple gets built. Otherwise, it in a sense backfires.

The BJP government has not been confident enough that it can pull it off for a variety of reasons, partly because of cost of coalition politics and you have to, in a sense, take on the cost. Partly because it’s not clear that you can create a mass mobilization when you are the party in power and then deliver on building a temple and without upholding the law. So there’s a good structural reason why Ayodhya was not a big issue in most politics. The BJP did not make it one. I don’t think it means that its fervor for building a temple at Ayodhya has actually diminished. I don’t believe that for a moment. But it will, in a sense, make that an issue, only when it’s in a position to actually deliver on it; at the moment there are external constraints, the fact that it was in the coalition.

So, the dilemma of Hindu politics is what would be the visible manifestations of Hindutva politics when a lot of its symbolic issues are free-floating. Hindu ideology has become larger than the BJP in a strange kind of way.

Now, you might say, what about generating violence through targeting of Muslims? Steve Wilkinson has made this empirical argument that communal violence intensifies at the time of elections. I think one of the things we know, just looking back at the violence, take Gujarat as an example, is that it is relatively easier to mobilize some kind of popular sentiment on the side of communal violence. So, at least not to pay the costs of permitting communal violence. Only if there is framing context which makes that violence palatable to the majority. And by framing context, I mean something like the the attack on parliament or attacks on temples that formed to the backdrop to Gujarat violence.

If you look at communal violence in the early 1980s, there is a sense of a framing context that India is besieged by all sides. You have three sectarian movements, Punjab, Kashmir, the northeast, all simultaneously going on. In the early ‘90s there was a mass mobilization based on the idea of building a temple; so there is, again, a framing context that creates anxiety.

Arguably, in the case of Gujarat, at that particular conjuncture, the ability to create a sort of nexus, so that allegedly jihadi Islamic terrorism, Pakistan, attack on a couple of temples in Gujarat and Godhra were all conjured up as a threat. Whatever the origins of these incidents, it did give a framing context on their part. Absent that framing context, it’s not a violence that can be so easily justified. the state can probably create violence whenever it wants. But, absent that framing context, unless that violence is actually linked to it, some framing context that will connect it to some form of mass politics, it’s actually not clear that the electoral payoffs of communal violence are, in a sense, that serious.

And again, ironically, the BJP has, in part, become victim of its own success, which is that, after Gujarat, the last year and a half to two years have, in some senses, been the politics of least anxiety, if you like, that India has seen for quite a while in improving relations in Pakistan-- not exactly a success in Kashmir. It’s, in a sense, too premature. But, it could not frame that violence in any visible nationalist context which, given its inability to produce mobilization on Ayodhya, left it looking for, well, what else? The politics of governance. The politics of governance, as I’ve just argued poses this dilemma--it’s actually not clear that any political party has an electoral strategy that can create a propoitious condition for a social coalition. So, they tried to run with it, tried to appeal onm governance but actually voters didn’t come, anyway.

Now, one of the things I think one has to keep in mind about Indian politics (and I think these institutional issues are even less discussed than they should be): If you ask the question why is the Indian political system fragmented in the way that it currently is 20-odd political parties, at least 10 of whom can get any seats in the range of 10 to 14. Why is it fragmented, especially in light of the fact that there seem to be no ideological obstacles to different social groups coming together under some party. In that sense, ideology is actually dashed from politics in a strange kind of way, all right. I mean, ideological politics is about who becomes the first mover and you shift the terms of debate, everything else falls in place.

And, one of the arguments that I am actually more persuaded by, which I think says something about the character of Indian politics, is that Indian political parties are not political parties. Most of them are not in the conventional sense of the term. And, by that, I mean they don’t have predictable modes of organization and recruitment and intra-party competition that would lead them to qualify as political parties.

Now, here’s what this does to the Indian electoral system. This is what I want to end with. Imagine you’re a new social group you are Charan Singh in the mid-‘70s. You are the BSP. You perform on the basis of of a new political mobilization in the 1980s and you have a small loyal significant social constituency whom you represent. Maybe 10 percent of the electorate, maybe 20 percent. You want access to power, right.

Now, there are two ways of doing it. One way of doing it would be to join an existing political party, work your way up through it, orient that party towards catering to your constituency. It can be more effective and, arguably, the advantage is that you not only get the advantage of bringing your constituency to a party, you actually get the advantage of aligning with other possible coalitions and forming a broad based party.

Or, you could hold out and say, "Look, it’s in our interests, or at least in the interest of our leaderships to basically try and assuage their co-constituency in the hopes that, in this coalition politics, the incentives are that you could actually strike it big, even with five seats, 10 seats." An interesting question is why hasn’t the former happened, which is to say why hasn’t India, as you would predict, following political science predictions, evolve towards a two-party system, especially in a Parliamentary democracy?

One of the explanations is that none of the parties, including the BJP, have any regularized system of intra-party competition. For example today, you and I want to join the Congress. How are we going to join and gain access to the top echelons of Congress? What do you do in America? You join the Republican party or the Democratic party. You have a particular set of rules. You run the primary, you can get to be candidate of this constituency, right.

In effect, what it allows you to do is it to strategize about what would it take to get access to power within the structure of this political party. At least there are rules and, mostly, these are democratic rules. The party is yours if you can win it. The party’s agenda is yours if you can win nomination. No Indian political party has such a mechanism. Congress parties, especially, should have one, but it keeps the BJP pattern on this no such mechanism.

The result has been that those new social groups that are actually active and mobilized are under a great disincentive to join any distinct political party because you simply don’t know what the rules of the game are. You are a strong leader and you’ll be with 20 percent of the vote and, tomorrow, Madam Gandhi decides she doesn’t like you. Where might you be left with then, right? So, it’s not the work it takes to shape a political party in a particular direction.

And this is not an insignificant fact because one of the remarkable things about this election, which you notice (it’s flippant manifestation is the large number of film stars that are contesting), and there is actually good data on this, is a considerable slowing down of new entrants into politics. One of the standard explanations for this is, of course, you need a lot of money to be in politics and political parties are looking to candidates to generate money. But, that’s probably true of any political system and will remain true.

But, the other reason is that it’s actually not clear what the rules of entry and exit are. The rules of entry and exit are roughly discretionally based on party leadership. Under such conditions, default markers of political entrance are given greater weight. If you have the right discretionary connection, you get it. And this lack of intra-party democracy where you don’t have any separate rules of the game that allow new entrants to move into politics and then move up the chains of command creates a seriously fragmented political system because any small group that is interested in politics has no interest in joining an existing party and hence there are no new entrants.

It has been argued that one of the reasons for the decline of the Congress party was actually its lack of intra-party democracy. In fact, the reason it survived better in the south was just because of accidental reasons in the 1970s. We had the top leadership dying and suddenly there’s this space in the political party which allowed new entrants to come out. It survived in the south because it had those structures but, in the north, it had a much harder time.

Now, if this is the case, at least I’m putting this out as a hypothesis that what one has to think much more carefully about is the institutional dynamics of the way in which parties actually operate. Political parties are essential to politics in any organized--and I suspect that the core of the way in which political parties are structured actually has huge ramifications for the way new politics is conducted.

It also actually has, I think, ramifications for why new politics is less deliberative than it should be, which is it’s not actually clear on what the forum for engaging in an intra-party discussion actually is. I mean how do you sort of convert the party to liberalization or against it? One view is that you appeal to our Congress members, stand up before them, see how many you can persuade, how many will vote for you, and you get a constituency out there.

Those avenues of deliberation, other than at the very top, the Congress working committee, the BJP high command, are actually pretty much closed which I think allows part of this detaching of ideology from electoral outcomes. So long as the party system remains what it is with no intra-party democracy and so forth, I think the prospects of getting a two-party system, or at least like-minded groups coalescing into institutional formations that are more enduring, is relatively dead.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: Thank you, Pratap. That was a fascinating tour de force and a marvelous presentation on many levels. What we’d like, of course, now to do is to engage you all and give you all the chance to offer your own comments and questions. So, just raise your hand. Raise your hand at any time. We’ll try to keep a running list of people who want to participate. Please stand, identify yourself and then pose your question or your comment. Phil Costopoulos.

PHILIP COSTOPOULOS: I’m Phil Costopoulos from the Journal of Democracy. Is there any reason to think that intra-party democracy might develop in India? You seem to be describing a pretty steady state system with some micro-level instability, but the big picture not changing, kind of in transit of equilibrium due to a lack of intra-party democracy. Do you see any forces that could cause the various factions within Indian parties to develop a more open, transparent means of competing with one another for control in those parts?

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: To be honest, I’m very pessimistic about reform, and maybe because the interest of entrenched party initiatives are against intra-party democracy. The leadership of most political parties is very insecure about its own base in a sense, the way of ensuring no challenges arise is by actually controlling the party from the top. And it’s true of even new parties like the SP and the BSP, which are actually very centralized shows. There are two or three leaders at the top, but no sort of systematic chain of command in a sense that actually runs down.

You need one of two things to happen for intra-party democracy to gain momentum: either you would have to have the sort of leaders who think of themselves as party legislators in a self-effacing sense, which is where you do stand back and say, "Look, how do we think of this party 10 years from now?" None of our politicians are operating on that kind of time horizon. Or just where do you get a sort of imaginative collective leadership in parties like the Congress, which realized that it’s in their best interest to think of it this way.

But, I think the difficulty has been that those conditions are very, very hard to bring about, and the short-term considerations that any or most party leaders have, not allowing possible challenges five years down the road means that it’s going to be very difficult.

The other reason is effectively, what happens to those who are marginalized within this new party system because they have a sense that, well, we didn’t lose by the rules of the game. It’s not that our party voted us out. Essentially, they break and join other parties or form new parties.

So, you don’t have any sense of inner momentum to sort of say, "Look, next time around, we want it done sort of better or want it done differently." And, one of the reasons why Congress had such institutional decline. It was I think precisely this which is that any leader who sort of felt they hadn’t got enough access to power basically simply packed up and left. So, I’m pessimistic about that. But, I do think that that institutional change will have profound consequences for our infrastructure.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: So, in a sense, both ideology and politicians are free-floating.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Yes.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: They can sort of go wherever they will.

ARSHI HASHMI: My name is Arshi Hashmi and I’m from the Pew Forum. I would like you to just comment on the religious factor of key political parties. You said that BJP did well because it had the religious dimension. Are you trying to say that political parties having religious dimension are more organized, more disciplined?

We have this example in Pakistan with the Jamiyaat Islami. They never did well in elections but, as far as party where structure and discipline is concerned, it’s been considered a relatively good political party. So, are you trying to say that political parties need to have this kind of a dimension?

And, my second question is what do you think of Sonia Gandhi factor? Do you think that the Congress really made a mistake? They took a risk by making her a leader of Congress because Indian people didn’t really accept her as Indian.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: I’ll start with the second question first because, in part, it actually is related to the previous one. You know, one of the things I think we have to get used to thinking of, in a Parliamentary democracy in a country the size of India is that, in a Parliamentary system, it’s not going to be easy to produce national leaders. We think of Nehru, but remember that was very anomalous. There was a party built on the backs of a mass movement over the course of 50 years. You think of Vajpayee. He’s been around 50 years in politics.

I actually do think we have to be prepared that, in a Parliamentary system, it’s actually not going to be easy to produce presidential style significant leaders. It’s a dilemma BJP will face after Vajpayee, right. I think it will resolve its succession controversy, I think, pretty OK.

But, I do think that it’s very difficult in a Parliamentary democracy of the scale of India to actually think of what it would take for a leader to become a national leader. By the time sort of you have got through your state, you are branching out to the neighboring state. And, if you branch out, you’ve lost your own base. Every single leader who’s tried to become a national figure has lost his own base, right.

So, I think we should look upon the Nehru and Indira Gandhi as actually quite anomalous in that respect because I think we are going to get the sort of leaders who are popped up by a combination of forces, rather than presidential style leaders, which comes to the Sonia Gandhi question. The Congress has had this problem, which is, in effect, those of its leaders that carry some degree of political grass roots space, let’s say you define it as can you get about 25 MPs partly because it had a diminishing stockholder, but that’s it. They have basically tended to cancel each other out in terms of leadership rivalries within the Congress in part, right?

And it’s always been Congress’s preferences, as has been the preference of every known Congress coalition government. Do not go with the leader who has political space, but somebody who either is considered neutral or all sides think he’s on their side, a kind of--somebody who is a non-entity. So, if you think of success of electorally, Narasimha Rao was a known entity, okay. Non entity in the sense at a central level.

This morning, it’s not accidental, this talk of leadership back again on the agenda that whichever coalition government is formed. Then, they think we fear this sort of mutual, in a sense, non-figure head. And, I think Sonia Gandhi performed that function for the Congress party. There is actually, again, a very good reason why you would actually expect something like this outcome to emerge. It does have a sort of Gandhi brand name. It’s a recognizable one.

I, myself, don’t think the foreign issue was a big electoral issue. There’s no serious evidence that her foreign origins itself is an issue.

The issues are more the traditional attributes that we associate with the issue speaking your mind, having charisma, ability to maintain a coalition and talk to your partners. I expect if you get a hung Parliament and if under desperation, all the other parties put their act together to try and form a coalition government, you may get a few surprises as who actually turns out to be leaders. The leadership question is an interesting one because I think you are going to get a succession of weak leaders, which doesn’t mean they can't be effective. There are some that are quite effective, but they have to be skilled at a different kind of politics.

Now, on the religion question, it’s historically true that parties of extreme right and extreme left are cadre-based parties. That’s kind of conventional wisdom all across the board. And, insofar as the BJP and its origin, it still is a sort of right wing party. It has its goal a right wing transformation. Again, conventional wisdom that what the cadre-based party can get perhaps a certain threshold of political mobilization going. But, it’s not likely to be the case unless you’re in very exceptional circumstances that there is ever going to be a single issue that I imagine working in any electoral politics.

And in the BJP’s case, especially, where actually most people don’t see quite the difference, even when the religious issue is on the ground. The difference between the BJP and the left is probably much clearer, but between the BJP and the Congress is actually not that much more in a sense, significantly different which is something the BJP leadership has realized. It has to be more than a one trick pony. It can't, for all of the obvious reasons, if it wants to be an enduring governing party, remain one

So, even if it were to build a temple tomorrow, so what? Next. Cadre-based parties have the disadvantage that they need to become something other than cadre-based parties to attract modern coalitions, and the BJP has to transform.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: Vikram Chand.

VIKRAM CHAND: As always, it’s a great pleasure to be here. I’m Vikram Chand from the World Bank. I’m working in Delhi at the moment on various state and other issues. In your talk, you implied that economic growth, measured on a quarterly basis or even an annual basis, is independent of coalition dynamics.

I still have a question about whether you can pursue the second generation of economic reforms in a fractured coalitional setting, which would then generate growth. For instance, getting a coalition together to push infrastructure reform, or cleaning up the past sector, which is a major cause, along with the effects of the fifth day commission of state failure in finances. Continue the disinvestment process, cleaning up the banking system, which is very, very weak. The non-performing assets in the system are huge and we could be sitting on the precipice of a major financial crisis, despite the large foreign exchange results, which we don’t really need to sterilize in this environment. It’s still not inflationary.

So, my question is if we teeter towards coalitional fluidity and instability, will this hinder the implementation of structural reforms that could then have a limiting effect on India’s overall economic growth? That’s the first question.

The second, the capacity to move, say, from five to six percent to seven to eight percent, which would then have some effect on poverty reduction and, hopefully, improve the elastic responsiveness to its employment growth.

Then, finally, just a theoretical question. You’ve ruled out governance as having an effect on voting behavior, more or less and also growth as having an effect on voting behavior. You also ruled out reservation policy and, as I went down my list, I was just left wondering, on what basis do Indian voters vote? And I then fell back on the old traditional vote bank issue, but I don’t think that’s the case.

I think anti-incumbency’s playing a big role. I think you’ve got a floating volatile electoral with no place to go. And, I’m still hoping that the data isn't in on governance. My sense is, if you do get this employment intensive growth and if you do get governance that has a rural focus, you might actually see that there are returns in terms of votes to these policies.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Two very important questions. I’ll again take the second one first. No, I agree. I shouldn’t imply that you couldn’t get governance to be sort of attractive enough for people to vote. All I was trying to suggest is that the current measures by which the BJP is projecting itself.

I don’t mean to imply that you could not create a social coalition based on governance. The difficulties that that would require exactly doing so many more complicated things than, as it were, the switches generating employment through the infrastructure. Delivery of social services is actually an interesting thing because one of the good stories of the late 1990s is the improvement in the education story. And that story is still pretty bleak.

The interesting thing is that that’s happened basically despite of the state, not because of it. We know that the reduction in illiteracy will largely be thought in terms of the story of private expenditure during the nineties. In a sense, as a voter you can speak in the following way. You are in a constituency and you say, "Okay, what has this government done for me?" Right. It was interesting you know that with Ashok Gehlot everybody talked. Congress would do well. He’d done well in the famine in the famine relief program. But, there was also the sense when that’s the minimum every other government has done, as well, right.

So, all I was trying to imply was that there are actually no clear markers of what counts as governance. The parties are trying to project themselves as governance parties, right. But, the markers that are most visible, in a sense, to us and then they project things like govenrance do not translate into electoral coalitions.

So, the question is the strategic and why you have the same process precisely because I don’t think any of the political parties has a very good idea of what would be a governance indicator that you could readily go in and say, "Okay, five years." What should be the basis of a social coalition, especially when also the flipside when actually the effected on-the-ground choices between the parties on this are narrow. I mean, ever since we had the voters here and we sort of want to converge right on particular degrees of left of center or right of center on most aspects of economic policy are actually--you know, the differences between parties are, in a sense, not that great.

So, despite all the talk of governance, I think that’s what all the BJP would like, the Congress would like. It’s not actually clear what translates as indicators. So, the question you ask is, well, what do people want? And, to be honest, the more I’ve looked at the data and see some of the CSDS studies, it’s actually not that easy to answer that question. You’re right. It’s not traditional vote bank politics because of the turnover.

Now, within social groupings, it’s actually very high. You can have a probability of getting elected is .49, which is the lowest in any world. Even if aggregate numbers turn out to the same for any political party, the turnover of who wins, who loses across constituencies is very bad, right.

And, we also know now, in terms of caste politics, that cast politics has become much more free floating. I mean, other than particular segmentary pockets, you have jats, who used to be sort of considered standard and predictable allies of a party. It is no longer the case. They can even go to the BJP So, it’s not traditional vote bank politics in the sense of fixed.

But I think this may not be much of an answer, but I think, like the politicians, we should be a little bit baffled by what exactly it is. You could probably tell very interesting local stories about it which is at this particular election in this particular state, this is how governance is measured. But, I don’t think we have a sort of straightforward--you know, it would be very hard to write a book called The Indian Voters. You know, the book that American voters’ classic. We predict, with the data that we have and the trends that we have seen.

Very briefly on second generation reforms, I tend to think of the reform process as what you need is very creative policy choices that, in a sense, allow you to get the significant long-term reforms through in a manner that’s compatible with--you know, building coalitions particular consequences that you need to assess carefully. I think the difficulty with second generation reforms is not, again, getting ideological convergance. I think it would even be possible to persuade the electric that free power is not a good idea. I mean, I think there are small experiments we know of where it’s actually clearly the case.

The difficulty is getting all the alternatives across visibly within the time span of a particular election cycle; so you build a power plant or you build a irrigation canal and the next government will win, not you. But, that remains intrinsic to any democratic policymaking. Or you build a school. By the time this grant gets approved, the school is built. I remember asking a Chief Minister why the investment we made was in symbolic expressions but not in school and her reply was "Five years is too long." Time and politics, right?

We knowMPs, members of Parliament in India, get this grant for their constituents. It’s the least utilized grant of any government grant. The utilization rate is less than 60 percent. Now, you might just say you give politicians--all right, this pile of money, they should be good at spending it. Part of the difficulty is that they have to use the government procedures and forces to have all of the policy types, but part of it is just the tension, which is, by the time we actually get this off the ground, it’s five years. And, all the governance indicators that we care about, health, education, they’ll all have this intrinsic problem. In a sense, you award future winners.

But, if you look at what the BJP did--that’s when you have to give the BJP some credit that there was a little bit of a debt management to solve the second generation reform issues, get interest rates down. I think the way they got down the interest rates to then allow them to give hand outs to particular influential constituencies, which is in a sense neutralizing the public sector opposition. You have to play these kinds of tricks on a much greater scale.

Infrastructure I mean, think of forms of taxation as we know from this national highway project. That is relatively marginal, very little political costs, right. One would be assessed on gasoline, right. You can actually get a lot going. So, you need very imaginative forms of taxation that can link up with these politics. I’m not as defeatist on that point. So, I would be less worried about the intrinsic fact of coalition politics. More worried about, in a sense, the intrinsic quality of the constituents of those coalitions, which I think is less encouraging.

MS. ACHARYA: Niharika Acharya with the "Voice of America." Two brief questions. One, I was just curious about how much you rely on the projections made by the exit polls this time around. And, going by the way you began, it seemed like you kind of believed what they are saying. Secondly, if we see a change of government at the center, do you see any significant impact on India-US relations or impacting in that sense?

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: I’m relying on the exit polls in the sense that within--let’s say, you know--which is a wide margin of error, a 10 percent margin of error, which would make the difference between who gets to form the government and who doesn’t. Right. So this analysis would hold so long as there is not an overhwlming mandate.

But in that sense, within that band of whatever the results are, I think the general argument would apply, no matter which party forms the government. The only thing that would sink this argument is if you actually do find a huge India surge at the end of it which now, it would look like it would have to be a BJP surge, not just an India surge. But, if that is not going to happen, then yes more or less, in a similar situation that we were in the last two elections.

On India-US relations, I think, by and large, foreign policy, despite the fact that the BJP carried out nuclear missile tests, lets in much more of a broad consensus to foreign and international affairs. So, you’re not going to see dramatic oscillations.

What India-US relations will be affected by is what the US does, not what government comes in India. I think Colin Powell’s the offer to Pakistan to be a non-NATO member and ally probably friterred more credibility in South Asia that we’ve built up over the last four or five years as a possible source of change, than any change of heart in any Indian government. And, given the world scenario we are in, it depends on what happens in Iraq and with American foreign policies. I think that’s probably all been determined by events outside India rather than changes in government.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: I just want to ask a quick follow-up. Being a political junky, I can't resist violating my own rule, which is that I wouldn’t ask about prognostication or forecast. I’m going to ask you that. But, it’s sort of a two-part question. Assuming that the BJP does much more poorly than anyone could have thought a few months ago, how will the BJP itself interpret its own political failure, do you think? And, what’s the most likely internal interpretation? And then, what are the likely coalitional scenarios? And, if there are two or three likely scenarios broadly speaking, what are those?

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: I think to be honest, it’s very hard to say in the sense that it will depend on the geographical distribution and so on, who’s winning and who’s losing within the region, who remains sort of standing at the end of this. So, as I said, you could imagine the same scenario, 170 seats. BJP hasn’t won much, but a slightly different composition of it’s Parliamentary, but you could get a slightly different outcome.

I also think that I agree with you that there is the possibility the BJP could go back and say, "Let’s go back to our core constituency for mobilization." I suspect they’re likely to do that if they are actually in opposition, not if they manage to sneak back in government, partly because it is much more difficult, and you can combine mobilization politics and opposition politics more easily. And, you want to put the pressure on the government, put it on the back for to create chaos for it, but it would be very hard for it to undertake mobilization on something like that if we are in government.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: Unless they can deliver.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Unless they can deliver it, and I think it’s still going to be not that easy for them to deliver a temple.

Now, on other possible sort of coalitions, to be honest, I think, if the poll projections are what they are, let’s take that as a baseline. I think you are in for lots of interesting possibilities. One scenario would simply be that, look, the BJP is 20 short. This doesn’t include the BSP. If the BSP gets in a good chunk the BJP can still sneak through. The BSP is not officially part of NDA The difficulty is that the same projections also show the SP doing much better than the BSP. So, it depends on what the exact number of BSP is.

There was an interesting item yesterday about Shekawat, the Vice President having a meeting with Pawar. And, with Shekawat, believe me, nothing he ever does is innocent. So, is the NCP breakable? Yes, the NCP Congress is breakable, as well. So, really I think you have lots of different possibilities.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: Including the possibility a Congress bid to form a coalition?

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: I think it would depend. For example, the SP does very well at the expense of the BSP and none of the potential BJP allies do well. You could get a bit of desperation, but I think as I said, strategizing about these exit polls is really quite hazardous at this moment.

MICHAEL BODA: Michael Boda from the Brookings Institution. The question I want to ask is about the area that hasn’t really been addressed in your talk today and you might only refer to it as the hanging chad area of this election. My understanding was that there was some new approaches to voting were introduced this time around in the electoral process. I’m wondering if you could comment on what impact that would have had in the electoral process, first.

But, second, just more generally, if you could comment on the influence that the competence of election administration has had on the electoral process over the last decade in India, I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts.

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Yes, for the first time, electronic voting machines were used throughout the country, that has raised some apprehension in some quarters that it’s basically easy to "rig up" the elections. But, I think there’s very little evidence of that

It’s significant to me that none of the political parties has seriously objected to this. There have been the usual rounds of repolling ordered in particular constituencies because some credible evidence that was specific to that constituency.

To be honest, logically, it’s very hard for me because I’ve been here during the polling, but my sense is most political parties that I’d spoken to before the election actually thought that, under Indian conditions, it actually made manipulation, insofar as you’d think there was some of the margins actually less because just think of task of counting 400 million ballots, right. One shouldn’t assume that electronic voting machines have actually made the manipulation of polling that much more significant. And one good example of this is is the fact that incumbent governments would be losing. , if anything, they would have the power over sort of the state governments. But we’ll sort of have to wait and see how it turns out..

But, the important point you mentioned about sort of the mechanics of elections is the Election Commission of India has become one of the most powerful that, by wide agreement, a genuinely independent institution. Political parties disagree with some of its methods at some points, some restrictions in various activities.

But by and large, I tend to believe that, if somebody had any real incentive to complain, they would have complained. The idea of a statuotory independent election commission, I think, is a very understudied model in comparative democratic theory, an democracy. the statutory body of this sort to just conduct elections independently. And by and large, they’ve done, with the logistical constraints, quite a remarkable job.

And you might say that one of the things that is actually facilitated is the fragmentation of the political system, that it’s not very easy for any political party to actually ride roughshod over it so that one of the good consequences of a fragmented political system is that you see independent institutions actually acquire more authority and power, of which the institution is an example of the independent Election Commission is actually another. But in a sense, it has done quite well and has asserted its independence. It really does take control of a machine when you’re conducting elections.

MICHAEL BODA: Just to follow up, how that mechanism has connected with the people, the grassroots, in terms of encouraging them to participate in the process?

DR. PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: Well, as Tim said, India’s turnout rates are actually remarkably high compared to the United States. And, all of the data we have on the composition of voting is interesting. It shows that the poor vote more in India than the privileged do.

Now, there are various reasons why you might say this. One argument is that the privileged, in a sense, try and influence politics in other ways, so voting is not that important for them. That is, for the bulk of citizens, this is sort of the one moment of affirmation. And the Election Commission has fairly standard criteria about the location of polling votes (access in terms of distance between polling booths and so forth) that it’s not actually been such a problem.

The only logistical problem are some controversies about voter lists and locations. Election Commission or something and it has done in many ways a great job of trying to update them, but you always will find some anomalies in that. But, participation in the process has not been--and, that’s one of the remarkable things about Indian democracy, that comparatively speaking voting--standards of voting criteria, it’s actually a remarkably participatory democracy.

And, by standards of compasrion, if you had a poll with this low probability of being being elected in the United States. This would be not an electoral revolution. This would be something you would--you know, sort of bridge. So in that sense, you could say that the Election Commission’s independence has given it credibility. This is a genuine election. In that sense, it totally encourages participation. Otherwise, it hasn’t had to launch any special initiatives.

DR. TIMOTHY S. SHAH: Well, as the votes are counted and the results announced and coalitions are formed, Pratap Mehta has given us a very insightful and profound basis for understanding what it all means. And, I’d like to ask you to join me in thanking him.

Thank you very much for joining us, participating in this event of the South Asia Program. I also want to thank Vinay Samuel and INFEMIT for serving as co-sponsor And, for funding from the Fieldstead Institute, and I also want to thank Sarah Mehta and the EPPC staff for all that they did to make this event possible. And, thank you, again, for joining us.