India’s Hindu nationalists were wise to get their partying done quickly last week. The victory was fading almost as fast as the flowers wilted. With only a third of the seats in Parliament, Vajpayee’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government seemed destined to fall before May is out, setting a record for the shortest run in India’s history. “We will pull down the BJP government in no time,” said Vithal Gadgil, spokesman for the Congress party, which lost power in an epochal shift by India’s poor to parties representing narrow class interests. Congress and a left-center coalition called the Third Force announced a campaign to “Save India From Communal Forces” in the run-up to the crucial no-confidence vote. But the prospect of even a two-week administration by a party based on religious chauvinism troubled the guardians of India’s half-century tradition of political inclusiveness – and terrified its minorities. “I’m not going to stir out of my house until the confidence vote,” said Ali Mian, a Muslim rug maker in New Delhi.
If anyone from the BJP could allay the nation’s fears, it was Vajpayee, 69. A poet and a skilled orator, he is widely respected for having spent a lifetime in Indian politics without ever being caught up in scandal. During a brief term as a coalition government’s foreign minister in the late 1970s, he improved relations with Muslim Pakistan. In 1992 he openly opposed the campaign by Hindu militants to destroy an old Muslim shrine in the northern town of Ayodhya – and was vindicated when rioting that followed the mosque’s demolition killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims. Last week Vajpayee continued to play down the BJP’s anti-Muslim and anti-Western rhetoric. He named a cabinet that reflected India’s ethnic complexity – although the powerful Home Affairs Ministry went to a party hard-liner, Murli Manohar Joshi. He pledged that there would be no discrimination on the basis of “caste, class or religion.” Although BJP candidates had attacked the outgoing government’s limited efforts to open the Indian market to foreign firms, Vajpayee pledged to stay the course. And he toned down some of the party’s most divisive campaign promises. Asked about the party’s pledge to make India a nuclear power, he spoke of the need for worldwide disarmament. Even the militants’ fondest dream – to rebuild a temple to Lord Ram at Ayodhya – is open to debate, he said.
But the powers behind the new prime minister are anything but moderate. The son of a poor schoolteacher, Vajpayee rose through the ranks of a rabidly anti-Muslim organization called the Rashtri-ya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), which was founded following Hindu-Muslim clashes in 1923 to provide self-defense training to upper-caste Hindus. The victory chants in New Delhi last week echoed daily meetings for the movement’s adherents, who gather in parks and playgrounds wearing khaki shorts and white shirts to drill with bamboo staves. One early leader, M. S. Golwalkar, openly admired Hitler’s preoccupation with racial purity. An RSS sympathizer, Nathuram Godse, fatally shot Mohandas Gandhi shortly after independence; the group had accused Gandhi of coddling Muslims. Since independence, the RSS and its offshoots have been implicated in scores of violent incidents. Both Vajpayee and BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani last week called on the RSS’s current leader, Rajendra Singh, before Vajpayee formally took control of the government.
The meeting was fodder for the left’s new campaign, which promised to put anti-BJP dem-onstrators in the streets this week. The Third Force also named its candidate for prime minister: H. D. Deve Gowda, a centrist leader from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. But it took days for the coalition to agree on his candidacy, preventing the new majority from forming a government. That bloc is also riven by disagreement over economic policy; some members would return to protectionism. If Vajpayee falls as expected, the government that replaces him may be hardly more stable. And India’s Hindu fanatics will be stronger for having tasted power.
