Elections in India during the first week of May represent the world's biggest exercise in democracy but few Indian voters believe they will do much to change their lives. For all the exotic stories in the international news -- film stars and convicted criminals contesting for parliament, helicopters landing candidates in remote villages, destitute women donning saris to vote -- the elections in India are as devoid of important issues as the American elections coming up this November. PNS commentator Andrew Robinson is an American writer who lives and works in South Asia.

VISAKHAPATNAM, INDIA -- Americans should have no trouble understanding the largest elections in world history taking place in India this week. Here as in America, few people expect any great change as far as the real issues that affect their lives are concerned.

"It's all a big show," says Mr. Sambasiva Rao, a local insurance salesman whose opinion one hears often among Indian voters. "And when it's over, everything just keeps moving forward according to the whims of whoever has the most money."

It's easy to know what the Indian elections are not about -- all those issues that are conspicuously absent from the various party manifestos, press-releases, phony debates and media coverage of the candidates. A survey of the vast Indian media will tell you which parties have the best chances of winning, but nothing about where the parties stand on the biggest problems facing the country -- political accountability, increasing poverty and unemployment, communalism (religious strife), nuclear weapons, over-population, shortage of power supply, AIDS, the crisis in Kashmir, the cultural impact of foreign investment or even the economic liberalization reforms that have so dramatically transformed India over the last five years.

Three main political forces are vying to form a government in Delhi: The long-standing Congress (I) -- legacy of Indian's founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru -- which advocates stability, however corrupt; the Bharatiya Janata Party (PJP), the Hindu fundamentalist party which extols the rebirth of the Hindu soul; and the Left Front coalition, which rallies together a wide range of socialist and communist groups that dissemble behind bombastic vocal support for the underclassed.

Despite these external differences, all three fronts -- including the communist parties -- maintain an almost feudalistic allegiance to such global entities as the IMF, the World Bank and AT&T. Even though the economic reforms of the last five years have resulted in an increase in the number of people living below the poverty line (38 as opposed to 35 percent), an increase in foreign debt and a widely deplored deterioration of cultural values, none of the parties promote a return to the Nehru days of economic independence. Those on the left who really want to change things -- like writer P.K. Krishna Iyer who recently complained in a popular daily newspaper about the "dollarization" of India -- are left with virtually no party to support.

On the right those who want to change are pursuing a fundamentalist religious alternative, represented by the more dogmatic factions of the BJP, if not clandestinely by the BJP itself. In the U.S., these people are called "social conservatives," "economic nationalists," and "right-wing Republicans." Were Patrick Buchanan born Indian, the only difference in his political rhetoric would be a constant evocation of the Ramayana rather than the Bible, a glorification of the mythical age of Ramrajya rather than the mythical age of Puritanism and diatribes directed at the Muslim immigrants in Bombay rather than at the Latino immigrants in Los Angeles.

Mr. Sambasiva Rao comes closer to where most Indian voters are at when he comments on the influence of money on the Indian elections. As dozens of recent corruption scandals have demonstrated, politics in India is all about granting financial favors, just as politics in the U.S., is all about accepting donations from PACs. The only difference is that in India, Bill Clinton's acceptance of the $750,000 from the computer, entertainment and investment industries in 1992 (all of which pushed for global free trade and got it with Clinton's NAFTA and GATT signatures) would be considered illegal. So would Bob Dole's million dollar fundraising dinners. But law or no law, both sets of politicians -- Indian and American -- somehow manage to escape blame.

And it's this ability to escape blame that perhaps most ties the Indian and American elections together -- that feeling among voters of seeing the obvious, of clearly recognizing the political shenanigans but of having little power to do anything about it. In a perfect example of such undisguised sleight-of-hand, the local government provided this medium sized city of Visakhapatnam with a well timed political gift -- 24 hours of electricity per day. Residents know that as soon as the last vote is tallied this week, the daily power cuts to which they are accustomed will begin afresh, just as before; and like most voting participants in the American version of modern democracy, they will wait patiently -- perhaps futilely -- for the people in office to return a little power back to those who supposedly gave it to them.