In Final Stage of India's Election, a Fearful City Votes
Joydeep Mitra
In Final Stage of India's Election, a Fearful City Votes
By JOHN F. BURNS: March 1, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>
COIMBATORE, India -- India's general election came to a tense end Saturday
as voters in this southern textile city joined 150 million others in choosing
between Sonia Gandhi's vision of a secular India and a rival vision of a
country dominated politically by the culture and preferences of its 700
million Hindus.
When results begin flowing in Tuesday, India will know whether a seven-week
election campaign produced a return to government by the Congress Party,
whose frayed banner Mrs. Gandhi carried, or a historic turn to the Hindu
nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Hindu party entered the
campaign with a large lead in opinion polls, which eroded as the drive
mounted by the Italian-born Mrs. Gandhi caught fire.
Most forecasts are for a close result, probably tipped one way or the
other by Saturday's voting -- the third and decisive round in the staggered
voting that began across the country two weeks ago. The system is India's
solution to the huge organizational difficulties of running an election with
605 million voters, 5 million election officials and security personnel,
900,000 polling places, nearly 5,000 candidates and 543 parliamentary
districts.
The tensions that marked the election reached their peak here in Coimbatore,
1,250 miles south of New Delhi on the edge of the vast southern plain that
dominates the subcontinent as it narrows to a meeting point between the
Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Two weeks ago, 62 people were killed by
17 bomb explosions that ripped through the city shortly before a rally
scheduled by Lal Krishna Advani, the Bharatiya Janata Party's hard-line
president.
Altogether, at least 150 people have been killed in election violence
across the country. But the Coimbatore bombings came to encapsulate what
many Indians found most fearful about the campaign, since they were rooted in
rivalries and suspicions between the majority Hindu population of India
and its 120 million Muslims.
Mrs. Gandhi and other opponents of the Hindu nationalists have warned
that these tensions could revive on a broader scale if the Bharatiya
Janata Party wins.
In Coimbatore on Saturday, voting that was deferred for a week because
of the bombings went off peacefully, with large contingents of paramilitary
police officers guarding polling places and cordoning off the old Fort
district, near the city center, where many of the city's 90,000 Muslims live.
Police have arrested scores of Muslims since the blasts, contending that
a Muslim youth group, Al-Umma, set the explosions to try to disrupt
Advani's rally or even to kill him.
But Muslim leaders in the city repeated Saturday what they and the Congress
Party's national president, Sitaram Kesri, alleged immediately after the
bombings. They say the explosions were, in effect, India's equivalent of the
Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933 -- a provocation organized by Hindu
nationalist extremists to stampede Hindus into voting en masse for the Hindu
party. Historians have said that the Nazi Party organized the Reichstag fire,
which gutted Germany's prewar Parliament, then blamed the Communists to
justify emergency measures that consolidated Hitler's power.
"We Muslims didn't do it," said Abdul Latif, 50, a property dealer who is
secretary of the Coimbatore Muslim Federation, one of the most influential of
the city's Muslim groups. "The bombings were a stunt organized by the Hindu
nationalists to assure that they will win in Coimbatore, and get a majority in
Parliament. They want to herd all Hindus in India into the Hindu
nationalist camp."
But this view found few takers among Hindus arriving at the city's polling
places, who appeared to favor the Hindu party strongly. Crowds of eager voters
pressed around trestle tables set up by the Hindu nationalists near the
polling places, where voters were given white paper slips marked with their
voter registration numbers. These were then taken into the polling places,
making it easier for election officials to find each voter on their
lists quickly.
A short distance away, similar tables set up by the governing party in
Tamil Nadu State, allied in the elections to the Congress Party, were quiet
for long periods. In the last election in 1996, the Coimbatore parliamentary
seat went by a large margin to this party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam,
with the Hindu party candidate nowhere close. In fact, a Coimbatore victory
for the Hindu party, widely expected since the bomb blasts, would be the
first time the Hindu nationalists have won any seat in the four southern
Indian states, which account for 125 parliamentary seats.
At many polling places, the voting was being closely watched by members of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a secretive Hindu nationalist group founded
in 1925 and closely modeled in its early days on the Nazi Party. The group
has helped to found a succession of political parties, including the
current one.
One man who identified himself as an official of the group, Ramayah Nagraj,
a 63-year-old industrialist, said he viewed the voting as "a very big day"
as he expected that it would bring the Hindu nationalists to power in New
Delhi for the first time. "This has been my life's mission," he said.
Like Advani and other Hindu nationalist leaders, Nagraj described the
bombings as the work of "Muslim fundamentalists," and said it would be the
work of a Hindu party government to cleanse Indian politics of such
disruptive elements.
"We are looking for a change in direction, a radical break with the ways in
which our democracy has been distorted by terrorists, criminals and antisocial
elements," he said. "With the BJP, we shall have a cleaner politics."
Whatever way the election goes, few Indians doubt that it will represent a
historic turning point -- made all the more poignant by Mrs. Gandhi's
involvement and the coincidence of the election occurring in the 50th
anniversary year of India's independence. If the Hindu nationalists win,
their critics say, it will be a rejection of much that India has stood
for in its first half-century as a free nation.
As much as they have been fascinated by the role of Mrs. Gandhi, a
51-year-old Roman Catholic who came to politics as the widow and
daughter-in-law of two assassinated prime ministers, Rajiv and Indira Gandhi,
Indians have been transfixed by what her battle with the Hindu
nationalists represents.
The special irony of this -- endlessly highlighted by the Hindu nationalist
leaders in their personal attacks on Mrs. Gandhi as a "foreign hand" and as a
representative sent to India by "Rome" -- has been that the Congress Party,
tired and corrupted after more than 44 years in power, had to turn to a
foreign-born woman, albeit one with Indian citizenship, to make its case.
The central issue, protagonists on both sides of the struggle say, has
been the choice the election has given voters between the India envisioned by
Mohandas Gandhi, the independence leader, of a nation that is an equal fusion
of myriad cultures and faiths, and another India, one that hearkens back to
an ancient time before Hinduism was forced by conquest and contact to
accommodate Buddhist, Islamic, Christian and other beliefs.
The Hindu party built its campaign around its candidate for prime minister,
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a 71-year-old parliamentary veteran who is considered a
moderate in Hindu nationalist terms, and on promises by Vajpayee and others
that the party will moderate its program if necessary to retain parliamentary
support. This approach seemed to be broadly successful with many Hindus who do
not favor measures that would be harmful to Muslims and other groups, but
feel that it is time to give the Hindu nationalists a chance to govern.
"The BJP have not been given a chance to rule; that is it, nothing else",
said Venkatarama Padmanabhan, 67, the director of the Coimbatore chapter of
the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a powerful lobbying group.
"People want to have a look and see what they can do."
But he acknowledged that the party's prospects in Coimbatore, remote
before the bombings, had been given a big boost.
"It was convenient for them, there is no doubt," he said. "It was a
big help for them politically."
The benign view of the Hindu party found echoes in some unexpected quarters.
V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born novelist of Indian origin who has written
widely about India, most recently in his book "A Thousand Mutinies Now,"
visited India during the campaign and wrote a widely read newspaper article in
which he contended that the election of the Hindu nationalists could be viewed
as the inevitable result of Hindu India reclaiming itself 1,000 years
after the first Muslim invasions.
But many Hindu voters in Coimbatore said it was the bombings that persuaded
them to back the Hindu nationalists. The bombs, wired into parked cars and
scooters, exploded outside the city's main hospital, in the railway station,
and in crowded shopping streets, among other places.
A claim by Advani that a "human bomber" had been waiting for him near the
site of the rally he was to have addressed proved to be unfounded, officials
in Coimbatore said. However, Advani continued to repeat his assertion across
India until the end of the election campaign.
The blasts were a profound shock to the city's population of 1.5-million
people., since Coimbatore, unlike big northern cities like Bombay, where
Hindu-Muslim tensions trace back to the partition that split British India
into India and Pakistan in 1947, Coimbatore was little touched by partition
and had experienced relatively little of what Indians call "communal"
tensions.
The most serious incident in years, until the bomb blasts, occurred after
a traffic incident in November led to two Muslim youths stabbing a Hindu
policeman to death. In the ensuing rioting, Hindu mobs killed 17 Muslims,
including two youths who were doused with gasoline and immolated in
front of the hospital.
So far, the police in Coimbatore have brought no charges in the bombings,
but the state government has banned Al-Umma, the Muslim group that police
commanders blamed for the blasts immediately after they occurred.
Fears that caused thousands of Muslim families to flee the city after the
explosions have subsided somewhat, but Muslims who clustered around polling
places Saturday said they were afraid of what could happen if the election
produced a Hindu nationalist government.
"We are all afraid," said Anwar Hussein, a 30-year-old vegetable seller.
"With the BJP in power, nobody will be safe."