/CORRECTED REPEAT/POLITICS-INDIA: Opposition Party Readies for Return to Power

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 8 2002 (IPS) - The bosses of India’s main opposition Congress party began on Friday preparations that could well see it wresting power from the pro-Hindu coalition government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Congress party president Sonia Gandhi told the meeting, held in the tourist town of Mount Abu on the border between western Gujarat and Rajasthan states, that the country was looking to the 115-year-old party to lead it “from stagnation to growth and from strife to harmony and from darkness to light”.

In an address televised live by major news channels, the Italian-born Gandhi called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at India’s political centre, which is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and recently completed three years in power, a “comprehensive failure”.

At the conference, a two-day conclave of the chief ministers from the 14 major states that the Congress party now rules, Gandhi claimed that the people were looking up to the Congress because of its ideology and principled stand.

“Let us all strive in our endeavour to fulfill what is expected as the people wants us to take the country from stagnation to growth, from strife to harmony and from darkness to light,” she said.

The Congress party lost India’s general elections three years ago, but has been staging a quiet comeback by winning nearly all of the provincial assembly elections conducted since then.

It currently rules such major states as western Rajasthan, Punjab and Maharashtra, central Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, southern Karnataka and Kerala as well as seven other smaller states.

In the recently concluded elections in Indian-controlled Kashmir, a state torn by more than a decade of violent secessionist militancy, the Congress emerged as the largest single party and shares power there with the regional People’s Democratic Party.

Gandhi judged that the party had reached “a decisive turning point” through its somewhat unexpected good showing in Kashmir, where the Congress joined hands with the PDP to defeat the ruling National Congress (NC) party, a member of the BJP-led NDA.

Although officially the conclave is meant to review the performance of governments in Congress-ruled states, the meeting is said to be a strategy session for state assembly elections scheduled for December in Gujarat – scene of a pogrom against the minority Muslim community earlier this year.

“We have our next challenge in Gujarat. Thereafter, over the course of another twelve months nine more states, five of which are under Congress rule, would go to the polls,” Gandhi reminded her party members.

“Elections at the national level are another two years away. Meanwhile, we have to consolidate, retain power in the states where we are in office and oust the BJP and its regional allies in states where we are in the opposition,” she said.

“With so many state governments under our rule, we also have great interest in seeing that the political and economic powers of the state are significantly enhanced,” Gandhi said assertively.

Gandhi warned of a possible worsening of the communal situation in Gujarat in the run-up to the elections, and said she expected the BJP to “stoop to any level in word and deed to spread poison to inflame the society” in its desperate bid to retain power in the state that borders Pakistan.

The BJP government in Gujarat has been severely criticised by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the Election Commission for its role in the pogrom, which left more than 2,000 people dead after the violence began late February.

“I am sure Gujarat will reject the politics of hate and violence and the politics of communal polarisation,” she said, underlining the secular image that has stood the Congress in good stead through decades of power after it led India to independence in 1947.

“We are going to the people of Gujarat with one overriding message, the message of religious tolerance and understanding, of social reconciliation and amity. The enterprising people of Gujarat have made the state an economic success story. That economic success can only be sustained if bigotry is defeated,” she said.

The Congress party has been out of national power since 1996, when it suffered from charges of corruption that stuck. Under its government, it initiated a process of liberalisation and globalisation that seemed to favour a small elite rather than the poorer masses of India’s billion-plus population.

Equally, the Congress suffered through a Hindu fundamentalist wave generated by the ultra right wing BJP, aimed at polarising majority Hindus against Muslims and other minority groups such as the ‘Dalits’ or low-caste people.

“We have been once again made painfully aware of the prejudices that still exists against the ‘Dalits’, even in relatively more prosperous parts of the country,” Gandhi said, referring to the lynching last month of five ‘Dalit’ youths in northern Haryana state for removing the skin from a dead cow. No one was arrested for the ghastly lynchings.

Gandhi referred to a “progressive weakening of the Centre”, apparently referring to the inability of Vajpayee’s government to control communal violence for fear of angering fundamentalist organisations that support the BJP.

After the Haryana lynchings, a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Forum) was quoted as saying that the life of a cow, sacred to Hindus, was worth more than that of five ‘Dalits’. That led to a spate of conversions by low-caste people to religions other than Hinduism.