Regional Outlook : S. Asia Buries Gandhi but Not Democracy : * It remains fragile, however, as the subcontinent watches India’s next move.

Funerals, it is said, are reunions, tragic yet social affairs that bring together a wide assortment of friends, family, and colleagues whose worlds seem to intersect only at the point of one individual’s death.

So it was last Friday at the cremation site called Shanti Sthal on the banks of New Delhi’s Yamuna River, where thousands of presidents, politicians and public worshipers from throughout the world came together to witness the spiritual departure of slain Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi.

Vice President Dan Quayle was there in the VIP section, seated just a few feet from the blazing stack of sandalwood as it consumed Gandhi’s remains. So was Britain’s Prince Charles.

But, almost lost to the outside world, there was also present an assortment of lesser-known national leaders who together constitute one of the more extraordinary regional phenomena taking place in the world today.

Theirs were the human faces of South Asia’s newly emerged democratic club, five neighboring nations--Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka--that now for the first time share the same constitutional commitment to political freedom and majority rule.

The fact that these official mourners included representatives of both the ruling parties and the opposition in some of those South Asian countries was an optimistic sign. But the fact that it took an assassination in the one nation that has served as both anchor and model for the region’s new democratic order to bring them all together was a painful reminder of just how fragile their ideology remains in lands where poverty has long succumbed to dictatorship.

How India copes with the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination could have wide implications for democracy throughout the region, most analysts agree, and nowhere more so than in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where New Delhi has served as a particularly important touchstone for democratic reformers.

For the first time, right-wing Indian analysts have publicly speculated that this nation might be better off in the hands of its military. Few take seriously the idea of a takeover by India’s highly professional and historically apolitical armed forces, but the fact that such ideas are even floated suggests the depth of frustration and chaos accompanying what has been an unusually violent election campaign here.

A more important question may be the impact of the assassination on voter participation when the interrupted balloting resumes next month. Low voter turnout on the first day of polling was more reminiscent of the apathetic United States than a vibrant, regional model of democracy.

It was all there--this equivocal picture of democracy’s future in South Asia--in the faces of the VIP mourners at Gandhi’s funeral. . . .

There was Khaleda Zia, the prime minister of Bangladesh, who is desperately trying to preserve her fragile, newly won democracy amid unprecedented disaster. The recent cyclone that caused $1.5 billion in damage to her impoverished, 20-year-old nation and killed at least 138,000 of its people is testing to the limits the new democratic order that Zia helped bring about during a popular rebellion that just months ago brought down long-serving dictator Hussain Mohammed Ershad.

The middle-aged Zia could easily empathize with the widow who stood stoically beside the pyre Friday. Like Sonia Gandhi, the Bangladeshi leader lost her husband to democracy’s enemies a decade ago, when he was killed during a military coup that ushered in the country’s decade of dictatorship.

Seated nearby, however, was a human symbol of hope for Bangladesh’s newly elected Parliament--Zia’s principal opponent, Hasina Wajed, whose Awami League party has decided to play one of the most crucial roles in a democracy, that of the loyal opposition.

“I think the killing has dealt a big blow to democracy in India, and, in fact, all over South Asia,” Wajed said, reflecting on the cause that brought them all together.

Just a few seats away was another woman who now knows that same opposition role all too well. Draped in Asia’s traditional white dress of mourning and wearing her trademark, high-fashion sunglasses was Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, who was defeated last year by the very democracy that she sacrificed so much to win.

Bhutto, whose father was overthrown in 1977 during one of Pakistan’s many military coups and later hanged, instantly became a world symbol of democracy when she led her Pakistan People’s Party to victory just three months after the nation’s military ruler, Zia ul-Haq, was blown up by an assassin’s bomb in his C-130 presidential aircraft in August, 1988.

But, as in so many nascent democracies, Bhutto’s government was paralyzed by political squabbling and charges of massive corruption, which struck so close to home that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is now in prison awaiting trial on a number of those charges.

Seated in the front row just six feet to Bhutto’s right on Friday was the heir to Pakistan’s democratic throne, Nawaz Sharif, whose conservative, Islamic alliance defeated Bhutto’s party at the polls last year and is now seen as one of South Asia’s main democratic success stories.

To Bhutto’s left was a South Asian leader who espouses a desire to join the democratic club, but has a long way to go--war-torn Afghanistan’s strongman President Najibullah. The former head of his country’s dreaded secret police took pains to bolster his much-touted policies of democratic reforms back home with an arrival statement to reporters extolling Rajiv Gandhi as “a great symbol of democracy” for the region and the world.

But Najibullah, who conceded during a recent interview with The Times that the civil war between U.S.-backed Islamic rebels and his Soviet-backed regime makes all-encompassing democratic reform difficult, has been unable to convince his many enemies at home and abroad that he truly means peace. It’s a failure that many analysts believe marks him for what could be South Asia’s next high-profile assassination.

War also has been an impediment to a full and successful democracy in India’s southern neighbor, Sri Lanka. And, as Dingiri Wijetunge, prime minister of the island nation, sat among his colleagues, he was a living reminder of the intractable conflict that many Indian leaders blame for having brought South Asia’s democratic club together that day. These leaders suspect that the female suicide bomber who killed Gandhi was sent by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has conducted a prolonged guerrilla war for Tamil autonomy against Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-majority government.

The war has stymied the elected government of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a tough leader whose counterinsurgency campaign has stifled many of democracy’s most basic rights.

Finally, seated at the center of the democratic club was the leader who some say best embodies the hopes for true democracy in South Asia today. A slight man, nearing 80, he was wearing the strange, conical hat of his national dress. Unlike the others around him, who either possess or aspire to power, he had just gracefully ceded his amid one of the region’s most successful democratic exercises.

Krishna Prasad Bhattarai stepped down as prime minister of Nepal when his Himalayan kingdom became the latest entry in the region’s democratic club. He had lost his own district by just 761 votes out of more than 100,000 cast in Nepal’s historic May 12 legislative vote. Just a year before, Bhattarai’s moderate Nepali Congress Party had joined with the nation’s Communists and Nepalis from all walks of life in a people power revolt that forced the Nepalese monarchy to give up the absolute power it had enjoyed for three decades.

In the end, Bhattarai’s party fared better than he did, winning a narrow majority in the new, 205-seat House of Representatives. But the Communists, who emerged with nearly 70 of those seats, are now a powerful watchdog force. Despite fears that the ideologically opposite parties will fall victim to the same paralysis and corruption that plagued Pakistan’s induction into the democratic club, optimistic analysts see Bhattarai’s gentle resignation as a symbol of Nepal’s democratic potential.

“Democracy has worked,” the elder statesman told his people in conceding defeat. “And I humbly bow to the will of the people.”

In analyzing why some of South Asia’s new democratic ventures are succeeding while others are flagging, Hussein Haqqani, an aide to Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif, said the key is not simply installing a government that has a popular mandate delivered at the polls. In a region of poverty, corruption and long-suppressed public expectation, even popular elected regimes must develop the public confidence needed to deter those tempted to return to the relative security of military rule, he said.

“Now, for the first time in history, Pakistan has a government that is actually far more stable than any of our many military regimes,” said Haqqani, a former journalist who became one of Sharif’s top policy advisers during his first unsuccessful bid to defeat Bhutto in 1988.

“After independence (in 1947), we were still groping around for a system that would work for us. And each time it failed, we stepped back while the military took over again. We just finally decided that instead of groping any further, we should learn to make what we have work, and to keep working until we get it right.”

Still, as these leaders search together for ways to strengthen democracy in the region, the state funeral was a painful reminder of the forces at work to defeat them.

Gandhi’s assassination came at a campaign rally that is the heart of the democratic process, during parliamentary elections billed as the most crucial test for democracy in a nation where religion, caste, and organized violence are tearing at the seams of Indian society.

In the four decades since the British ended their colonial rule in the subcontinent, India has been the democratic ideal for its South Asian neighbors. Throughout the long stretches of harsh, military rule in Pakistan and Bangladesh, political opposition leaders looked to New Delhi for support and guidance in their campaigns to bring democracy to their lands.

Though long plagued by some degree of violence, never had the bloodletting associated with India’s democratic system become so institutionalized as this year. The six-week campaign has already been marred by more than 200 deaths in rioting and execution-style attacks on several other candidates before Gandhi.

This new marriage of politics and violence in India could have enormous regional consequences. There are voices--however faint--speculating that the nation might be better off in the hands of the military, which routinely must be called out to check rioting that spins out of the control of police and paramilitary forces.

More significantly, never before have Indian pollsters and political analysts sensed the depth of voter apathy and cynicism that has accompanied the nation’s latest democratic exercise, billed as the largest election ever attempted anywhere.

Voter turnout on the first day of polling, in which more than a third of the 545 seats in Parliament were at stake, was the lowest ever recorded in Indian history--just over 50% on average, and as low as 40% in most regions hit hardest by the violence.

If the VIPs at Gandhi’s funeral symbolized the hope for democracy in South Asia, perhaps the starkest illustration of the forces threatening to undermine it came the other day in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, a land that ranks as India’s poorest in almost every category of human needs.

It was there that a reporter watched criminal gangs capture polling booths, using rifles and machine guns to keep “untouchable” caste Hindus and other impoverished minorities far from the polls all day. It was there that candidates ran for office despite facing as many as 20 criminal charges, among them murder. It was there that, during the last elections in November, 1989, a group of “untouchables,” whose voting confidence had been raised by armed escorts from an ultra-left Communist party, did manage to vote for the first time ever, only to see more than two dozen of their number massacred by high-caste landlords hours after the polls closed.

Soon after this year’s voting began in Bihar state’s village of Kasain, Bhuvaneshwar Prasad emerged from the gritty two-room schoolhouse that served as the local polling station. He was 57, with a white fringe of hair around a bald head baked deep brown from decades of working his small plot of land.

“None of the candidates are any good,” Prasad said when asked which of the 35 men vying for power in his district he favored. “In this area, there is no one who is going to help the poor.”

“Who did you vote for last year?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t remember his name. In fact, I’ve forgotten who I just voted for now.”

“Then why vote at all?”

“Well, I have a right to vote, so I must exercise this right. I always have. . . . Next time? Well, I don’t know. This democracy, it seems, is no more than a little piece of paper right now.”