Crucial India Election Pits Secular Against Spiritual : South Asia: Hindu revivalism could undo the nation’s underpinnings. More violence is feared.

When the massive Maharajah of Mysore rumbled into the dusty hamlet of Banni Kuppe one morning last week, the villagers awoke to their elders shouting through megaphones: “Your king has come! Your king has come! Come hear him! Hear the words of the king!”

Quickly, they left their huts, put off the cows and the chores until later and flocked to the clearing near the village well, where they bowed, stared reverently and heard a most unusual message.

Their king had come for their votes--but it wasn’t just that. He had come for votes twice before, and, by the hundreds of thousands, they had given them gladly.

But Thursday, the maharajah had come to explain something strange: why he wanted them to vote against the party he had asked them to support just 30 months before--and why he was abandoning India’s century-old party of established, secular socialism to join the crest of the Hindu fundamentalist wave sweeping India.

“I was disgusted with them,” the maharajah said of the Congress-I Party, which had ruled India until its bitter defeat in 1989. “They were corrupt, and they betrayed the people of our state. . . . Now, there is this Hindu Rajya , this desire for a theocratic state, sweeping India. And, yes, it is time for a change. Please vote for me and for this new party.”

This regal scene--which unfolded in village after village in the more than 1,000 square miles of what once was India’s largest, second-wealthiest princely state--was more than 1,000 miles from the national limelight in New Delhi during the final campaign week of a historic Indian election.

But few images could match Mysore’s royal campaign for insight into the transformation in the Indian body politic as it prepares to go to the polls Monday.

The maharajah weighs in at several hundred pounds. And at 38, he represents the last in an unbroken line of hereditary kings who ruled for 600 years from atop a 1,500-pound throne of rubies, emeralds, diamonds and solid gold.

But Shrikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar, the 26th Maharajah of Mysore, stands out among India’s 8,951 other candidates for more than his physical or political heft: His political conversion may well help change the political face of this nation of 844 million.

This week’s elections are expected to be an unprecedented test of the strength of India’s underpinnings as a secular, socialist nation. India is confronting a popular, rising tide of right-wing Hindu revivalism. The conduct of the powerful Maharajah of Mysore is symbolic of radical shifts in Indian society, forces now so broad-based and geographically widespread that many Indian intellectuals fear that they are capable of bringing to power the world’s first Hindu fundamentalist government.

For nearly a decade, the maharajah aligned himself with Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former prime minister, and the Congress-I Party of Gandhi’s grandfather and mother, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

The maharajah twice was elected easily to the 545-seat Parliament, representing the Congress party that ruled India for all but five of its 44 years of independence.

But in joining the fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party)--along with many other maharajahs, film stars and other prominent, sure-win legislators now running nationwide--the maharajah clearly had motives different from the swamis, gurus, holy men and committed Hindu supremacists also on People’s Party tickets.

Like most of the others, the maharajah is committed to the party’s singular cause of Hindu supremacy, which has as its cornerstone the campaign to build a temple to Hinduism’s demigod, Lord Rama, on the precise site of an ancient Islamic mosque in north India.

But most analysts say that the maharajah--who has been fighting in court to keep his family’s enormous wealth from the clutches of socialist land-reform acts--has a motive far more personal than Hinduism’s pantheon of gods: he wants his solid-gold throne back.

He also wants to keep his eight lavish palaces, 27 temples and other real estate holdings so extensive that not even he can count them all.

He hopes to do this by winning clout in a new right-wing government, which might be willing to let him hang on to his hoard.

Such is the cynicism that has permeated the political landscape in India, a nation of 540 million voters that calls itself the world’s largest democracy. But here, where thousands have died in just the last six months in religious, ethnic and caste disputes, there are other, more sinister dimensions to the electoral malaise.

Although the maharajah’s district in India’s deep south is largely a peaceful one, dozens of other districts are not.

Sixty-seven of the more than 2,000 who have perished nationwide over the Rama temple issue since last October have died in Mysore’s state of Karnataka. But scores of other candidates and campaign workers also have been fatally shot, beaten, stabbed and burned in violence-prone northern India. There, the temple issue--and an equally prominent election controversy over a quota system to eliminate Hinduism’s ancient caste system--have deeply polarized the electorate.

Tens of thousands of troops and paramilitary forces have been deployed in the region to curb election violence. But in a nation so huge and bureaucratic that voting must be staggered over three separate days in a period ending next Sunday, police concede they expect bloodshed and an increased death toll this week.

Against this backdrop of anxiety and cynicism, political analysts say this election will be difficult to predict.

Three opinion polls released Thursday all showed Congress-I emerging with the largest vote. But polls are notoriously unreliable in India, and the three varied widely. All showed the People’s Party would become India’s second-largest political force for the first time.

In the current campaign, four key political personalities have emerged, two of whom--Rajiv Gandhi and Vishwanath Pratap Singh--dominated India’s last national election in November, 1989. Many voters rejected Gandhi then, depriving the party of the former airline pilot of a majority for only the second time in history. Nor did any other party win a majority.

Two attempts to form ruling coalitions--both headed by former Congress-I members who broke from Gandhi’s ranks to join the rival People’s Party--crumbled in bitter infighting. The last Parliament collapsed earlier this year when Gandhi withdrew his party’s support, hoping that the old opposition’s failures would restore his party to power in new elections.

For Gandhi, who has traveled tens of thousands of miles by helicopter and visited thousands of villages in the last six weeks, this week’s voting is a last, desperate attempt to save his party from oblivion. Two consecutive defeats, unprecedented for the Congress-I, would leave it a spent political force, analysts agree.

Cherubic-faced Gandhi, 46, has drawn impressive crowds, many of whom have never seen a helicopter before. His campaign theme this time has been simple: “Stability and progress.” In speech after speech, he blames the two brief coalitions for ruining India’s economy and undercutting its international image. Only the Congress-I and its proven record can restore India’s prestige and prosperity, he insists.

A People’s Party government of Hindu fundamentalists would be devastating for India’s relations with its neighbors--two of which, Pakistan and Bangladesh, rank among the globe’s largest Islamic nations, says Gandhi, who has tailored his campaign to present the Congress-I as the antidote to the “poisonous religious fury” of the fundamentalists.

Gandhi also says the thousands of deaths in Hindu-Muslim rioting are a direct result of the fundamentalist crusade to remove the five-century-old mosque to make way for the temple to Lord Rama in the northern town of Ayodhya. And he has stressed the Congress-I’s history of protecting India’s 100 million Muslims.

But Gandhi is hardly alone in his secular preachings.

The same message has been carried far and wide by the two men who tried to replace him: Singh, who sacrificed his brief, 11-month rule specifically to block the mosque’s destruction last November; and Chandra Shekhar, India’s ambitious caretaker prime minister, whose government lasted just three months after he deliberately split the People’s Party to build his own power base.

Besides the temple-mosque controversy, all three leaders share a commitment to a provocative affirmative-action plan that sets quotas to liberate India’s long-oppressed “untouchables,” the low-caste Hindus who represent 52% of the Indian population but only a tiny fraction of its emerging middle class.

So close are the views of the three leaders and their party candidates that many analysts predict that they will split the critical “minority vote,” a traditionally powerful element of Muslims and low-caste peasants. That will leave the fundamentalists as the sole beneficiary.

It will particularly aid Lal Krishna Advani, the one political leader who has been speaking a language of his own: religious rhetoric of an ideology largely confined to radical sects and splinter factions until just a few years ago.

Advani’s grandfatherly face, adorned by a white, whisk-broom mustache, now smiles down in even the most remote corner of the nation from tens of millions of posters bearing his party’s election symbol, the holy lotus of Hinduism.

His critics liken him to Hitler, because he leads a movement largely fascist in its organizational approach. (It even uses in its literature the swastika, an ancient Hindu symbol long predating the Nazis.) In Advani’s message, heard by the biggest, most enthusiastic campaign audiences, one can feel the power of the movement that the revivalists call Hindu Rajya.

Advani speaks softly of strident nationalism and unity--and his huge, enthusiastic audiences embrace his message. The Indian nation--deeply rent by suspicion and hatred over religion, caste, language and regional chauvinism--must come together before it can develop into a modern state, he says. And the only unifying principle that will work, he insists, is Hinduism. His is a call for Indians to reach thousands of years backward to find the unifying symbols of the nation’s future.

As for Muslims, “They have been the privileged ones long enough,” he insists, blaming Gandhi and other progressives for sacrificing the majority’s interests to placate the minority for their votes.

“The mosque in Ayodhya is a symbol of that slavery over the majority that has existed in this nation for so long,” Advani says, referring to the shrine’s history. The mosque was built by the invading Moguls who conquered India and ruled it for three centuries, converting millions of Hindus to Islam.

Advani’s message has struck deep: among India’s millions of educated but unemployed Hindu youth; among its beleaguered, Hindu-dominated bureaucracy, and even among the ranks of its overwhelmingly Hindu police forces.

His many critics among the Indian intellectual elite have warned with growing despair that his party’s campaign is further dividing a polarized nation.

But there were few critics to greet him when Advani personally brought the crusade to Mysore last week on a campaign tour that showed how men like the maharajah are emerging as the roots of Advani’s party.

Everywhere Advani and the maharajah went, even far out of the maharajah’s home constituency, it was for the maharajah that the rural masses knelt, adoringly committing votes.

It also was the king who escorted the party leader through a region that has long been a Gandhi bastion. In 1989, for example, Congress-I won 27 of 28 parliamentary seats in Karnataka, the new name of the redivided ancient state of Mysore. This time, local pundits say, Gandhi candidates will be lucky to win more than half; the People’s Party, which has won only one seat there ever, may win as many as 10.

“This is due to the maharajah,” said S. Bharath Kumar, the Mysore correspondent of the prominent south Indian newspaper The Hindu. “The people still think (the maharajah) is the king, and these are the leaders the (People’s Party) is using to come to power.”

In fact, the maharajah himself makes only passing reference to the Rama temple issue and Hindu revivalism when he addresses his villagers.

When asked about Hindu fundamentalism during an interview Thursday as he made his way to Banni Kuppe, the maharajah replied with a question.

“Have you read Nostradamus lately?” he asked, his huge face smiling. “He said there would be a resurgence of Hinduism in India and that, in the next century, it will reign supreme in this part of the world. It is so written, and I believe it is so. Things such as these are not so easy to erase.”

THE WRATH OF RAMA: A site holy to each now divides India’s Hindus and Muslims. Times Magazine.