POLITICS-INDIA: Ruling Fundamentalists Faces Rout in State Polls

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 15 2002 (IPS) - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faces an electoral rout in its stronghold of northern state of Uttar Pradesh, going by exit poll results following the first phase of a three-part election held on Thursday.

Sprawling Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with a population of 166 million people and 22 million eligible voters, is considered the country’s “political crucible” and where Vajpayee has his own parliamentary constituency.

The average of exit polls conducted by three major television channels after Thursday’s first phase covering 92 of the state’s 403 provincial assembly seats indicated a five percent swing away from the BJP and a remarkable performance by its main rival, the Samajwadi (socialist) party.

Analysts said the swing could hold for elections in the remaining 311 seats scheduled for Feb.18 and Feb. 21. The staggering of the voting process was done deliberately to enable the movement of police contingents to ensure maintenance of law and order in a state where crime and violence are rampant.

Also doing well was the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP), a party that supports the interests of the Dalits, or Hindu castes at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy, and which has in the past switched loyalties between the BJP and the BSP.

However, Raashid Alwi, a top leader of the BSP and member of parliament, has categorically said that his party would rather sit in the opposition than join hands with the BJP, which it sees as a natural enemy representing mostly upper-caste Hindus’ interests.

Uttar Pradesh is where the BJP first tasted power by running a campaign through the 90s to build a temple on the site where a mediaeval mosque stood until 1992, when it was razed by party volunteers and their supporters.

Vajpayee has since expressed regret at the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya town only to have hardliners remind him that he owes his job to the campaign to replace it with a temple devoted the legendary warrior god Rama, who believers say was born at the site 10,000 years ago.

In the run up to the elections, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, which has close links with the BJP, ratcheted up the temple campaign by defying a Supreme Court order to maintain the status quo on the heavily barricaded site at Ayodhya.

Ashok Singhal, the VHP’s firebrand leader, has declared that “matters of faith were not justiciable” and warned that work on the temple could begin later this month or early March with the support of volunteers.

Nervousness in the BJP camp regarding the outcome in Uttar Pradesh is discernible in Vajpayee’s repeated assertion that the assembly elections are not a referendum on the performance of his BJP-led multi-party coalition government at the center.

However, according to Rajnath Singh, the present chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, it was important for his pro-Hindu party to win in Uttar Pradesh if India was to carry on the war against “international terrorism emanating from Pakistan”.

Vajpayee has blamed Pakistan for a terrorist attack on India’s Parliament on Dec. 13 and ordered the deployment of close to a million troops along the border with the neighbouring country. But the BJP’s opponents have said the move was made with an eye to whipping up pro-Hindu sentiments in Uttar Pradesh.

“The warlike situation on the border is being shamelessly exploited by the BJP,” said Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, now favoured to make a comeback as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

The Italian-born president of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, has also charged the BJP with raising the bogey of terrorism to deflect public attention away from the “failure and corruption” of the Vajpayee government and to gain ” political mileage” in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and in three other states where elections are being held simultaneously.

According to exit polls, the BJP was expected to fare poorly in the northern hill state of Uttarnachal, in western Punjab state and in Manipur, a state in the extreme north-east of the country bordering Burma.

But analysts say there is no immediate danger to the Vajpayee government, which is supported by powerful regional parties although most of them do not support its fundamentalism and have warned the BJP against pursuing the temple-building agenda.

Uttar Pradesh, which is noted for its deep-rooted caste and communal divisions, has India’s worst social and developmental indices. It has the highest crude death rate, the highest fertility rate, the lowest number of attended births, the highest maternal mortality and the highest under-five mortality among the country’s 22 major states.