Turmoil in India's Largest State Clouds Vote

[user-Narotham Reddy]

From: Joydeep Mitra <joy...@bcmp.med.harvard.edu>
Turmoil in India's Largest State Clouds Vote

By JOHN F. BURNS: February 23, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>

NEW DELHI, India -- India's system of staggered voting moved through
the second of three crucial days on Sunday, with 200 million voters
going to the polls in a general election. But with an overall result
still at least 10 days away, the probable outcome became murkier than ever.

Opinion polls that Indian election law allowed to be published up to
the first day of voting last Monday mostly forecast a close contest.
Those polls predicted no outright winner, with two possible outcomes:
either a coalition government led by a Hindu nationalist group, the
Bharatiya Janata Party, or a rival coalition of so-called "secular"
parties opposed to Hindu nationalism.

In the latter case, the coalition leader would probably be the
Congress Party, which has governed India for more than 44 of the 50
years since independence in 1947.

But political turmoil at the weekend in Uttar Pradesh, the country's
most populous state and biggest electoral prize, has brought new
uncertainty. Many Indian political commentators had already described it
as one of the most confused since Indira Gandhi called an election in
1977, after a 20-month period of emergency rule, and contrary to most
predictions, lost in a landslide.

Since the 1970s, election forecasts have become more perilous because
of the larger number of political parties that have joined the fray --
more than 600 in the current election -- and the number of those
parties, about 30, that are likely to win seats.

The events in Uttar Pradesh, a banana-shaped state of 140 million people
that lies along the banks of the Ganges River on India's impoverished
northern plain, showed how volatile the coalition politics forced on
this nation of 980 million people by the multiplication of parties can be.

A state government formed five months ago by Bharatiya Janata collapsed
on Saturday night when defectors from two other parties, including Congress,
switched sides and pledged their support to a coalition government formed
by a cluster of parties, including Congress, that have little in common
but opposition to Hindu nationalism.

By all accounts, the defections that brought down the Hindu party's
most important state government were organized by its opponents to cause
a loss of face on the eve of voting in the state in the national election.

Apart from presenting the Hindu party as a loser in a state that it has to
win by a large margin to have any hope of triumphing in the national vote, the
purpose of the exercise appeared to be to strike at the power that its
government, like all state governments in India, had to influence
voting patterns through its control of the local administration.

The strategy's impact on the voting in Uttar Pradesh was questionable,
coming as it did only hours before the poll opened in the state -- and
too late for 52 of the state's 85 electoral districts, where voting
already took place last Monday. In any case, it was far from certain
whether the new coalition sworn into power on Saturday night in Lucknow,
the state capital, would last.

An emergency session on Sunday of the High Court in Lucknow delayed
until at least Monday a decision on a challenge by the Hindu party to
the legality of the state government's ouster. The party contended that
the Congress-appointed state governor allowed the takeover without
allowing the administration to test its support in the state legislature.

While this left Uttar Pradesh in a political limbo, opinions were
divided on the likely impact on the general election, in which there was
voting Sunday in nine of India's 25 states.

Some commentators thought that the blow to the Bharatiya Janata's
prestige could be costly in the third round of voting next Sunday, when
another 150 million of the 600 million voters will go to the polls in an
array of states.

Next Sunday's voting includes a band of territory in southern India
where the Hindu party and allied groups need a breakthrough to get to
the number of seats, at least 215 by most estimates, that they need to
have any prospect of forming a government coalition.

Another view was that the turmoil in Lucknow could play to the party's
advantage by allowing its leaders to claim that its ascent to power in
New Delhi over recent years has faced a "conspiracy" from Congress and
other parties.

A hint that the Hindu party's leaders inclined toward a pessimistic
view came when Atal Bihari Vajpayee, its candidate for prime minister,
announced he would begin a "fast unto death" in his Lucknow residence to
protest the unseating of the Uttar Pradesh government.

Vajpayee, 71, has generally been regarded as the most publicly acceptable
face of the Hindu nationalists. He won a reputation as a safe pair of hands as
foreign minister in a non-Congress government in the late 1970s, and in the
current campaign, he has almost completely shunned the disguised anti-Muslim
rhetoric that has been a staple of Hindu nationalism.

Vajpayee described the events in Lucknow as "a deep-rooted conspiracy"
aimed at denying the Hindu party power in New Delhi, and added: "To
oppose it is my moral responsibility."

Vajpayee's main rival for mass support in the election, Sonia Gandhi
-- the Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, the former Congress Party leader
and prime minister who was assassinated while campaigning in 1991 --
continued her own campaign Sunday despite the upheaval in Uttar Pradesh,
still drawing large crowds.

Most polls have shown that Mrs. Gandhi's efforts have checked Congress' long
downhill slide and could cause as many as 5 percent of the voters to shift back
to Congress -- enough to make a Congress-led coalition government possible.

Only next Sunday's balloting remains before vote-counting begins, on March 2.
Although voting in three electoral districts in the Muslim-majority state of
Jammu and Kashmir will take place later, the counting that begins on March 2
is expected to provide results by March 3 in most of the 540 electoral
districts up for election in the rest of the country.

Two other seats are reserved for representatives of the "the Anglo-Indian"
community, meaning people of mixed Indian and British descent, and they
are filled by nomination after the new Parliament sits.