A coalition for India

A coalition for India

With no single party achieving a majority win in the ongoing
general elections to end this month, India, the world's largest
democracy, is certain to be ruled by a coalition government.

India's once-revered Congress (I) Party, which suffered a
humiliating defeat in the current elections, has no choice but to
join hands with one-time staunch opposition, the center-left
alliance of the National Front-Left Front (NF-LF). This move
prevents the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from
governing the world's second most populous country.

Until yesterday afternoon, results of the elections for the
545-member Indian parliament showed that BJP and its allies had
182 seats, far ahead of the outgoing Prime Minister Narasimha
Rao's Congress, which obtained 138. Meanwhile, the NF-LF held 113
seats, with regional parties controlling only 92.

As reflected in the opinion polls published early last month,
Rao's Congress Party government -- which had remained shaky over
the past few months due to bribery scandals forcing seven of his
cabinet ministers to resign, as well as high levels of violence
affecting various parts of the country (especially in Kashmir and
northeast Indian states) -- was not an impressive one.

Analysts have said that the image of the Congress Party, which
has ruled India for all but four years since the country gained
independence from Britain in 1947, is fading away under Rao. The
party, once known to represent people of different castes,
classes, and religions, is now seen as "heartless towards the
poor" because too many of its policies have detracted from the
interests of the grassroots and too much power is held by Rao.

"Over the past nine months, the prime minister-cum-Congress
president had so centralized all authority in himself that he
alone had to take the blame for the Congress party's worst
electoral performance in 44 years," commented the Hindustan
Times.

One of the opinion pieces published in the independent Pioneer
newspaper said: "A master of survival and political manipulation,
the prime minister however knew next to nothing about running a
poll campaign, let alone how to win the elections for a party on
the verge of becoming a political fossil."

Given all this, the results of India's elections have shown
that there is no single political party on earth that can rule a
nation for a prolonged period of time without its ruler becoming
arrogant. This holds true for even India's Congress Party, which
was set up more than a century ago by its founding fathers,
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Although Rao's economic reforms have successfully shrunk trade
deficits and balance of payments, while maintaining a growth rate
of around 5 percent, the achievements were not sufficient to
readily improve the conditions of the hundreds of millions of the
poor, who crave concrete results in development and equal
distribution of wealth and power.

In addition, the country's 110 million Indian Moslems, from a
population of 930 million, felt that Rao's government had not
responded quickly enough in handling the 1992 bloody communal
riots, during which Hindu fanatics razed a mosque in Ayodhya, a
town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Three thousand people
-- mostly Moslems -- were killed.

The Ayodhya incident is also a key factor preventing the BJP
from achieving a sweeping victory, which has resulted in a hung
parliament.

Doubtless, a coalition government between Congress and the NF-
LF is much preferred by many of India's neighboring countries,
who want to see India's economic reforms continue to contribute
to regional stability in welcoming a new era of globalization as
we approach the 21st century.