By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 15 2004 (IPS)

After successfully running the gauntlet of a gruelling Indian election, the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi cleared one more hurdle to the prime ministership Saturday, when the victorious Congress party that she leads elected her for the coveted job.

During the election campaign, Gandhi’s candidature for the job was challenged on the grounds of her foreign birth.

Happily for Gandhi, the powerful communist parties that form the Left Front – a key partner in the Congress-led government – have never considered her foreign origins an issue and consider her eligible to be prime minister because she has acquired Indian citizenship.

But opposition to her becoming prime minister continues to come not only from the ousted right-wing and ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but from several of Gandhi’s senior party colleagues and by powerful regional parties that may not join the new government.

Outside the ornate, teak and marble central hall of India’s parliament where Gandhi was elected leader of the Congress party’s legislative group, BJP leaders said they would pursue a promise in their election manifesto to work toward legislation that would prevent people who were not born Indians from attaining high office.

”It is unfortunate that the Congress party could not find a leader for the Congress Parliamentary Party a person of Indian origin from among a population of one billion people,” said Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, spokesman for the BJP.

Naqvi said his party would be keenly watching developments and ominously advised journalists covering the election of Gandhi as leader of the Congress in parliament to ”wait for six months”.

But Gandhi remained as unfazed as she was during a particularly vicious campaign in which she came under a barrage of personal remarks made against her by some leaders of the fundamentalist BJP.

In her acceptance speech, she referred to the verdict in the April to May poll as one that rejected the divisive and fundamentalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Forum, both of which are closely allied to the BJP.

Gandhi’s party has 137 seats and together with its regional allies controls just 217 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha or lawmaking lower house of Parliament. It therefore relies critically on the 64 seats held by the communist parties of the Left Front in order to have a simple majority.

The Congress party and the communists have a history of rivalry that goes back to before India’s independence in 1947. Even now, they are bitter enemies in such states as southern Kerala and in West Bengal, where the Left Front is in power.

But the two ideologically disparate formations have come together for the elections, held in four stages from Apr.20 to May 10, with the express purpose of defeating the pro-Hindu BJP. Both accuse the BJP of trying to alter the secular and democratic underpinnings of the Indian republic as set out in the constitution.

Having achieved that aim, the two principal members of the new ruling coalition made it clear that they have major differences in economic policies that now have to be resolved through a ‘common minimum programme’.

At the moment, several constituents of the Left Front are deliberating on whether to join the new coalition government – or limit themselves to the role of being the guarantor of the Congress party in power from the outside, if only to keep the BJP at bay. Their decision will not be known till Monday.

Recognising the critical role of the Left Front, Gandhi has publicly requested its leaders to join in her new government. Her economic advisors have already conceded a primary communist demand that the sale of India’s massive public-sector undertakings, vigorously pursued by the BJP, would be stopped.

Demands by leaders of the Left Front that the special Disinvestment Ministry – set up by the BJP government to oversee the sale of the public sector enterprises – be dismantled caused stock and rupee prices to plummet.

”We are not supporting privatisation as a matter of policy,” said Manmohan Singh, a former World Bank economist credited with launching India’s economic reforms in the early 90s. He was finance minister in the last Congress party government, which was voted out of office in 1996.

Singh is widely expected to get the same job again after a gap of eight years. This is expected to restore confidence among investors unnerved by the unprecedented clout of the communists in the new government.

However, there are fears that the Left Front may object to Singh’s candidature and that its participation in the government may be conditional on reserving the key economic portfolio for someone who has the confidence of the communists.

In an interview with IPS, D Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), said the Congress party will have to reformulate its reform agenda not only to placate the communists – but because of lessons learned from the debacle suffered by the BJP for its style of economic reforms that bypassed the rural masses.

”The new government should adopt policies which should really help the poor and marginalised people of this country,” Raja said.

”We need to reverse the policies of the BJP which had sought to dispense with self-reliance and reduced the country to being an appendage of the multinational corporations and even set up a special ministry to speed up the sale of public-sector corporations, which are really the country’s strength,” he added.

Asked about the crash in share values caused by such statements, Raja said that India’s economic health could not be measured by the ‘sensex’ (sensitive stock index). ”Our concern is not the sensex but whether or not people in this country have drinking water.”

On Friday, A B Bardhan, the dour and tough-talking general secretary of the CPI, warned that while the Left Front had no problem with Sonia Gandhi’s candidature, ”no one should take us for granted.”

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