A new start in India

The failure of Hindu nationalists to form a government in India has opened the way for a fractious coalition of splinter parties to make the next try. Their nominal leader, H.D. Deve Gowda is a relatively untested politician from the south who faces a formidable challenge in pleasing both the groups in his camp and the leaders of the defeated Congress Party, whose votes he needs to stay in office. Nevertheless, the odds are good that Gowda will survive, at least for a while. His record suggests that he will continue India's economic reforms and, perhaps more important, preserve its secular traditions.

Only two weeks ago, a coalition of Hindu nationalist parties was given its first opportunity to govern India. Many analysts predicted that they would use their newfound patronage resources to secure enough votes from minor parties to put together a majority in parliament. They were undone, however, by the adamant opposition of the other parties to the coalition's Hindu chauvinist platform. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised to govern by consensus and defer his party's most objectionable positions, including the imposition of a uniform civil law for Moslems. But no one seemed to believe that he could control the militant elements of his own coalition.

In a remarkable two-day parliamentary debate last week, speaker after speaker rose up to remind Vajpayee that in 1992, when his party governed the state of Uttar Pradesh, Hindu thugs destroyed an important mosque in Ayodhya. They warned repeatedly that India could not abuse the rights of its minorities if it was to survive. The debate was Indian democracy at its best, and Vajpayee, to his credit, gracefully accepted the verdict.

Gowda has a record of honest government as chief of the southern state of Karnataka, which has been one of the places most hospitable to foreign investment. Indeed, the state's capital, Bangalore, is known as India's Silicon Valley, where software for many American computer companies is made. Gowda is also a farmer and engineer who comes from a large upper-middle- class caste of landowners and is considered an effective practitioner of the country's caste-based politics.

The danger for Gowda is that with power spread among so many parties, he will face tremendous demands for government spending to keep everybody happy. That could lead to a breakdown in the fiscal and monetary discipline demanded by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

For now, former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao of the Congress Party is providing the margin of survival in parliament. But he will be looking for the first opportunity to pull his own votes back and let the government fall so that he can claim in the next election that only his party has the broad base to govern effectively. An early test of Gowda's skills will be whether he lets a bribery investigation proceed that could lead to the indictment of Rao.

Gowda starts with a great deal of goodwill inside India and among the foreign partners that have given it aid and investment, including the United States. He will need it to hold together his shaky coalition.

-- The New York Times