POLITICS-INDIA: Polls Revive Fortunes of Opposition Party

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 25 2002 (IPS) - India’s venerable Congress party, which led the country to independence and dominated it politically for the most of the last century, is now firmly on the comeback trail through the provinces.

In elections for provincial elections staggered over the last fortnight, the opposition Congress party managed to win northern Punjab, the Himalayan state of Uttaranchal and eastern Manipur .

It also emerged as a key player in sprawling northern Uttar Pradesh state, which returned a fractured verdict when final results were available Monday.

This would mean that the Congress party controls many more provinces than does its main rival — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee which rules the center through a multi-party coalition consisting mostly of regional parties.

Key states that the Congress party now rules include Rajasthan, and Delhi (within which state the national capital is located) Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh in central India, western Maharasthra and southern Kerala and Karnataka and Assam in the north-east.

The Congress can also count on close regional allies such as the AIADMK party that rules southern Tamil Nadu, the powerful Left Front in West Bengal and the ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar. It is the main opposition in all the states where regional allies aligned to the BJP are in power.

Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born chief of the Congress party, and heir to the political legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, is already the leader of the opposition in national Parliament and vocal spokeswoman for secular groups opposed to the pro-Hindu BJP.

Gandhi, who personally campaigned in Uttar Pradesh, failed to revive her party’s fortunes in India’s largest state. But she made serious dents in the BJP’s attempt to focus the election on the issue of terrorism and the introduction in the state of anti-terrorist laws which are unpopular with the Muslim minority.

Her strong denouncement of the BJP’s attempt to whip up Hindu sentiments may have contributed to the victory of the regional Samajwadi (socialist) Party as the single biggest party with which an alliance to rule Uttar Pradesh is now being negotiated.

‘’We will not allow any non-secular party to come to power nor enter into an alliance with any pro-BJP party,” said Jaipal Reddy, spokesman for the Congress party, at a press briefing.

While campaigning, Gandhi had voiced apprehensions moves by pro-Hindu forces allied to the BJP, notably the Viahwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, to revive the issue of building a Hindu temple on the site where a mediaeval mosque was demolished in 1992.

“There seems to be a convergence of opinion across the political spectrum in the country that the Ayodhya (where the demolished Babri Masjid stood) issue must be left to the courts to give a final verdict,” Gandhi said in an open letter to Vajpayee. Vajpayee has admitted his failure in building a consensus between Hindu and Muslim leaders on an out-of-court settlement, but has been unwilling to rein in the VHP and stop it from going ahead with plans to build the temple and getting thousands of people to converge on the site and defy a status quo ordered by the Supreme Court.

In his own campaign, Vajpayee sought to counter Sonia Gandhi’s attack by harping on her foreign origins and the Congress party’s past record of high corruption.

The monolithic Congress party has been losing its virtual monopoly on power thanks to the rise of regional parties such as the Asom Gana Parishad (Assam People’s Party), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) that rules southern Andhra Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, and AIADMK and DMK (both espousing the cause of ethnic Dravidians).

Interestingly, in the current elections, the Congress party lost heavily in Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, a constituency considered a pocket borough of the Gandhi û Nehru family..

Charges of corruption, and attempts to rapidly introduce a policy of globalisation and privatisation, saw the Congress party ousted from power at the center in 1996 with the BJP deftly making common cause with the regional parties.

Although the regional constituents of Vajpayee’s BJP-led 21-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have time and again expressed unhappiness with the temple building agenda, the alliance has held together thus far for fear of the Congress party’s return.