May 13, 2004
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Photo: Supporters of India's opposition Congress party flash victory signs as they celebrate in Ahmedabad on Thursday. (Reuters Photo)
NEW DELHI, -- India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee resigned Thursday following the stunning electoral defeat of his Hindu nationalist-led coalition, which has governed India for the last five years.
Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party had conceded defeat after early parliamentary election results pointed to a clear win by the secular opposition alliance led by India's Congress Party, headed by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, widow of slain Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The outcome of the three-week elections marked a dramatic and unexpected reversal for Vajpayee and the BJP-led coalition, which only a few weeks ago had been expected to coast to victory on the strength of India's booming economy, Vajpayee's personal appeal and a popular peace initiative with neighboring Pakistan.
It also marks a comeback for the Congress Party, which led India for almost half a century after independence from Britain in 1947.
Sonia Gandhi is now a strong candidate to succeed Vajpayee as prime minister, depending on the outcome of negotiations among Congress and its coalition partners in the coming days.
Rajiv Gandhi was the son of assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The prospect of an Indian government led by the Congress Party and its left-leaning allies is likely to cause some apprehension in Washington.
The Bush administration has enjoyed warm relations with Vajpayee's government, with which it shares common views on Islamic extremism and economic policy.
Congress Party leaders have been critical of the BJP's closeness to Washington and have blamed its economic policies for neglecting the poor.
Based on early returns from counting that began Thursday morning, television stations by midday were predicting that Congress and its allies would easily surpass the 272 seats required for a majority in parliament's lower house, called the Lok Sabha.
Projections also showed that Congress alone won 149 seats, up 35 from the last election, while the BJP won 136, down 44. If those numbers hold, the outcome would mark the first time that Congress had occupied more seats than the BJP since 1996.
Officials from the BJP-led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), expressed shock at the outcome.
"There was an invisible undercurrent in the Indian electorate against the NDA that none of us could gauge," Sushma Swaraj, a minister in Vajpayee's government, told reporters at BJP headquarters this afternoon. "The results are totally against our expectations. We will have to sit in the opposition."
Swaraj added, however, that the election results are "not a verdict for Sonia Gandhi to become prime minister either . . . We should not conclude that people of India have accepted a foreigner as prime minister. My mind still does not accept Sonia Gandhi as the prime minister."
Besides attacking Gandhi's foreign roots, the BJP and its allies also campaigned on the theme of "India Shining," highlighting the country's rapid economic growth and its success in capitalizing on the boom in outsourcing of service jobs from the United States and other developed countries.
The theme played well within the country's growing -- and predominantly urban -- middle class, but it apparently failed to resonate in the impoverished rural villages where most of India's billion-plus people still live.
"The ground reality and the results have called the bluff of the artificial atmosphere of feel-good that the NDA had created," Ahmed Patel, Ghandi's political secretary, told reporters.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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