Prime Minister of India Loses Vote and Quits

Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh submitted his resignation today after overwhelmingly losing a vote of confidence in Parliament, ending 11 months in office troubled by increasingly violent religious and political upheavals.

Immediately after the vote, Singh convened his defeated Cabinet, which endorsed his letter of resignation to President Ramaswami Venkataraman. He was to meet with the president Thursday.

He was defeated by a vote of 346 to 142, with eight abstentions.

“The Lok Sabha (lower house) has taken the right decision,” said opposition leader and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. “The nightmare is over. The important thing is V.P. is out,” he told reporters.

After the vote, many of Singh’s former allies who had turned against him approached him on the floor and shook his hand.

The vote came at the end of an 11-hour debate in which Singh was accused of leading the country deeper into class divisions, failing to control prices and ignoring separatist insurrections in border states.

At least 368 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim riots in the last two weeks when Hindu fundamentalists defied Singh and pressed ahead with their campaign to replace a Muslim mosque with a Hindu temple in northeast India.

In the last two months, at least 150 upper-caste students have died in suicides or protests against the government’s efforts to reserve nearly half of all government jobs for low-caste Hindus.

The two issues grew into serious crises for Singh and alienated him from many members of his own party.