Vote Fraud Probed in Gandhi Area : India: Poll watchers call violations in prime minister’s home district ‘shameful.’ New elections may be called.

India’s federal election commission Thursday launched an unprecedented investigation into allegations of massive vote fraud and armed intimidation in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s home district during ongoing elections that independent poll watchers already have concluded are “shameful.”

Responding to appeals from India’s most prominent jurists, intellectuals and senior officials, among them President Ramaswamy Ventkataraman, Election Commissioner R. V. S. Peri Shastri pledged to order new elections in Gandhi’s district if investigators can document the allegations.

The accusations charge Gandhi’s party workers and federal police with blatantly stuffing ballot boxes, threatening voters at gunpoint and “capturing” entire polling stations.

“We feel extremely disturbed at what has happened,” a visibly shaken Shastri said at a news conference in announcing the probe. “If (the allegations) are correct, we have to take drastic action.” Shastri’s three-member commission was appointed by Gandhi earlier this year.

No results of Wednesday’s polling in Gandhi’s Amethi parliamentary district and elsewhere will be announced until Sunday, the last of India’s staggered three election days. Recent national polls indicated, however, that support for Gandhi and his ruling Congress-I party had seriously eroded and that Gandhi himself may be in trouble in his own district.

Amethi is just one of 525 districts at stake in the national elections, but the 45-year-old prime minister must win his seat if he is to even hope to continue ruling the second-most-populous nation on Earth.

Still, even without the results, independent poll watchers, national opposition leaders and Gandhi’s opponent in Amethi, Rajmohan Gandhi, who is the grandson of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, cried foul.

Rajmohan Gandhi charged that he personally watched federal police stuffing ballot boxes in several towns in the district. And dozens of journalists who observed the voting reported that scores of armed Congress-I workers in jeeps scoured the constituency, telling voters to cast ballots for the prime minister.

In one incident that analysts expect to trigger another round of bloodshed during the second day of voting today, Amethi opposition leader Sanjay Singh, the best friend of Gandhi’s brother before his death, was shot and critically wounded by Congress-I party workers.

So concerned was the government that Singh’s death could plunge the region into deeper violence today that state-run television aired a long interview with Singh’s doctor, who announced that Gandhi’s former family friend is still alive.

The prime minister also personally visited Singh in his hospital room and later declared at a news conference that his ruling party was not responsible for the violence and fraud. But Gandhi did not visit the district to cast his vote Wednesday, preferring instead to vote around the corner from his heavily armed New Delhi home.

Elsewhere in the nation, the death toll during Wednesday’s voting was at least 44, which analysts said they consider average for national polls here. But they added that it was the first time that the worst of the violence and alleged cheating had taken place in the prime minister’s home district.

“We have had stray shootings here and there in earlier elections, but not on this scale--and never in prestigious places,” said prominent Indian political analyst Rajni Kothari, whose recently formed Independent Initiative group of poll watchers appealed to both the Indian president and the election commission to order a new election in Amethi.

“It’s a very serious situation,” Kothari added. “It’s not just violence in the elections--it’s violence in the prime minister’s own constituency. And it is obvious there was panic in the ruling-party circles. That’s why these kinds of attempts to intimidate people took place.”

In a public meeting sponsored by the Independent Initiative on Thursday night, co-founder Krishna Iyer, one of India’s most respected retired jurists, shouted: “What has happened in Amethi is the beginning of a fascist dictatorship which will grip this country if you do not act now! Amethi shall have a repoll. I demand in the name of the Indian people that the election commission take official note of the horrendous happenings in Amethi!”

Commissioner Shastri, during his news conference, said his office had already ordered new elections at more than 600 polling stations where local officials and candidates confirmed that fraud or armed violence had taken place.

Asked why no such order was issued for Amethi, where the largest number of complaints was filed, Shastri replied, “We have to treat it as a special case.”

But Iyer later charged that the investigation appeared to be a deliberate stall by Gandhi’s increasingly beleaguered government. Referring specifically to Shastri, he added: “I pity the man. I appreciate his pathetic lot. But I hope he will have enough sagacity and courage to do the right thing at the right hour.”