India's Election: Shoe-Thrower and Politicians Miss the Mark

An attack on the Home Minister aimed to highlight treatment of Sikhs, but what really concerns most Indian voters is the economy and jobs, not sectarianism

By Mehul Srivastava

Of all the things Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's Home Minister, might have expected from his New Delhi press conference on Apr. 7, having a ratty old sneaker flung at him was probably the last. But there it was, flying past his surprised face, freeze-framed and slow-motioned on national television throughout the day, a visual echo of the shoe that U.S. President George W. Bush ducked in Iraq, or the one that barely missed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during a visit to Britain.

India's Shoe-gate, the television anchors called it—barely suppressing their smiles as teams of correspondents fanned out across the nation's capital. They went to the police station where the offending shoe-thrower, a Sikh journalist from one of the most widely read Hindi-language newspapers, was being held. They visited his house, where his family wailed at what "must certainly be a misunderstanding." And live shots of Sikh political activists banging their shoes on the pavement captured the ripple effects of India's latest election-related circus act.

Maybe this is what Chidambaram foresaw—public humiliation—when he tried to turn down the job of Home Minister back in December, after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thrust him into one of the least popular jobs in India. The last Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, resigned in December after terrorists killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai.

Focus on Terror

But the trajectory of Chidambaram's career follows a familiar arc of Indian politics and elections. He was plucked from the plush offices of the Finance Ministry, where he spent his days hobnobbing with CEOs and economists, and dispatched to the Home Ministry, where police officers and anti-terror chiefs help him navigate India's fight against global terrorism and religious violence.

As elections get closer, the economy falls to the wayside, and two issues seem to consume Indian politicians: terrorism and religious infighting. "They don't talk about the measures they are going to take in terms of job creation or infrastructure development, because they just don't feel that these things influence votes," says Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chairman of Bangalore's Biocon (BION.BO), India's largest biotechnology company. "The focus shifts to trivial—and almost dangerous—vote-catching gimmicks."

With elections due to start next week, Indian political parties are digging up the past. The national conversation is dominated by talk of various terrorist attacks, riots that targeted Muslims in 2002, and others against Sikhs in 1984. The shoe-throwing journalist, Jarnail Singh, had asked Chidambaram about a Congress Party peer, Jagdish Tytler, who recently emerged unscathed from a multidecade investigation for involvement in the 1984 riots that followed then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by a Sikh bodyguard. Historians and investigators allege that Congress, the ruling party led by Gandhi, stood by and even abetted rioters who killed nearly 2,600 Sikhs on the streets of New Delhi in retaliation. Dissatisfied with Chidambaram's answer about Tytler's right to contest elections, Jarnail Singh took off a shoe and hurled it at the Home Minister.

Party Differences

The shoe having missed, Chidambaram chided the guards to be gentle with Jarnail Singh as he was hustled out the door, and he pleaded with the remaining journalists not to let the incident disrupt the press conference. Later, Chidambaram, a Harvard-educated economist with an eye toward reelection, benevolently forgave the journalist. Although Jarnail Singh was arrested, charges were dropped, and Congress Party spokesperson Tom Vadakkan dismissed it as "an emotional outburst." While it's hard to portray the current Congress leadership as anti-Sikh—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, after all, is a Sikh himself—the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party grasped the issue with both hands.