Gandhi Turns Down Offer to Form New Government : India: He tells the president he would rather support socialist Shekhar, who awaits an invitation.

Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi turned down an offer Thursday to lead India through violent turmoil and economic crisis, while the man who wants the job waited for an invitation.

Veteran socialist Chandra Shekhar, who has been offering all week to form a government, said President Ramaswami Venkataraman had still not asked him to become prime minister.

“There is no appointment for Mr. Chandra Shekhar tonight,” a presidential spokesman said Thursday.

The president asked Gandhi to form a government after a crushing parliamentary defeat of Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh in a confidence vote Wednesday. Venkataraman accepted Singh’s offer to resign Thursday.

Gandhi, commanding nearly four times as many seats as Shekhar in a fragmented Parliament, told Venkataraman he would rather support Shekhar’s faction from outside the government than take back the prime ministership himself.

Hindu militant leader Lal Krishan Advani, whose Bharatiya Janata Party has become the second-largest party in Parliament during a week of political chaos, said he had also turned down an offer from Venkataraman.

Advani demanded a general election, an option the president does not favor after two months of Hindu violence against policies that brought down Singh’s minority government.

“I am very optimistic about forming a government,” said Shekhar, who split Singh’s Janata Dal party and walked away with at least 56 of its seats in the lower house of Parliament, which currently has 524 voting members.

“This vacuum cannot remain for long,” Shekhar told reporters.

The 80-year-old president was exercising his limited constitutional powers with scrupulous attention to protocol in calling first on Gandhi, whose Congress-I party has 195 seats, then on Advani, whose party has 86.