India's Election Marathon Lumbers Into Final Week
By CELIA W. DUGGER As reported in NY Times
Excerpts
NEW DELHI, India -- As India lumbers into the fourth and final week of marathon national elections, elephants bearing ballot boxes tramp into dense forests and ponies carrying election officials clop their way to dizzying heights in the Himalayas, all to make sure that every citizen -- no matter how remote -- gets a chance to vote.
---six out of every 10 adult Indians -- more than 350 million people -- will have exercised their franchise, election officials say.
The Hindu nationalist-led alliance will most likely still be in power,
Atal Behari Vajpayee, 73, seems certain to head the new government,
Much of Vajpayee's energy was consumed by the dispiriting job of placating mercurial, petulant allies.
Some analysts and Western diplomats believe that a resounding victory this time would give the government more room to take politically risky steps. On the domestic front, it could move more aggressively, for example, to shut down money-losing state enterprises and encourage foreign investment. In foreign policy, it would have more leeway to
reopen talks with Pakistan, sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and improve relations with the United States on trade and security issues.
Industrial growth is on the upswing and this season's normal monsoon will help insure that agricultural production in this predominantly rural nation is strong.
The days of one-party rule under the Congress Party are long gone.
"The BJP has tied up with more heavyweight regional allies in state after state," said E. Sridharan, a political analyst at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India, based here. "That is a huge strategic advantage."
The Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, the widowed, Italian-born heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has continued to organize its campaign around the notion that it is the natural party of governance and the only force that can provide political stability, while minimizing the need for allies. But that ,position is increasingly implausible.
The Congress Party itself has been weakened internally by disputes over the foreign origins of Mrs. Gandhi, 52. Sharad Pawar, the party's chief power broker in the large state of Maharashtra, left the party earlier this year over that issue and set up a new party that has significantly
weakened Congress in a state where it would otherwise have made substantial gains.
"The regional parties have realized that they can share in power only through alliance with one of the two major party blocs," said D.L. Sheth, a political sociologist at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. "This is a multiethnic, diverse society and it expresses itself through coalitions." |
