The contrary positions of Moustafa and Velangany add colour to the election debate, but they have the same worries. There isn't much to choose between Velangany's 'Little Hitler' phrase, and Moustafa's distaste for Sarkozy's tough line against immigration. "Does national identity signify that you must have fair skin and be a Christian?" he asks. He also objects to new French laws that privilege knowledge of the French language. "When the people of Pondicherry responded to de Gaulle's call in the 1940s, were they asked if they could speak good French?" Moustafa asks sharply.
Velangany and Moustafa also have the same grouses about free education and social security. They feel the French state does not fully extend these commitments to the Franco-Pondicherians.
Concludes Dr Olivia Aubriot, a water management expert on a short stay at the Pondicherry French Institute, who's been watching the election closely: "Being French in Pondicherry is about a higher social status and a hope of a better life in France and Europe for their children." Struck by how disconnected this election campaign is from the one running in France, she says that Royal's first-round victory in Pondicherry had less to do with her ideology (which has in fact taken a centrist hue back home) than "the work and network" of the local Socialists. "What the Socialists say here is not what their counterparts in France utter," she points out.
It was very interesting, says Aubriot, to watch the people who came out to vote: "Most of them didn't know French, and they didn't watch French TV. They were mostly past middle age, and there were many widows." The few youngsters around, she said, want to join the French army for a few years and return with a pension, to Pondicherry. "Back home in France, French citizens from Pondicherry are seen as foreigners. These people don't seem to realise that," says Aubriot.
In fact, for all the electoral noise, there is a certain epicurean calm about the Franco-Pondicherians, which has mostly to do with French pensions and a strengthening Euro. A minimum pension earned by a non-commissioned officer is anywhere between Rs 35,000 and Rs 40,000, good money in Pondicherry, and fuel for many happy hours at the Cercle de Pondichery club, a Franco-Pondicherian hub.
Interestingly, there is a different kind of calm among another lot of French citizens in Pondicherry: the spiritual solace-seekers from France who belong to the Auroville community. While the first set of French nationals hangs on to the illusion of bonding with a distant motherland for socio-economic benefits, the second aspires to become 'unhoused souls', transcending matters national and material, and therefore has no interest in this election. On May 6, the former will vote and the latter will abstain.
