State Elections Test Resilience of India’s Ruling Party : Politics: The Congress bloc has been a dominant force for nearly 50 years. Defeats for it could weaken economic reforms.

Satish Chaturvedi is running, and running hard. He eases his 5-foot-11, 209-pound frame out of the Maruti four-door sedan and charges into the unpaved streets of Chikhali village.

Around him quickly gathers a moving chorus of Congress (I) Party workers and loyalists.

“Support the palm. Support the palm,” they chant, referring to the raised palm of a hand that is the party’s symbol. They move in unison with Chaturvedi, an incumbent member of the legislature here in Maharashtra state, as he pivots on his hips from side to side, his hands clasped to his breast in India’s traditional gesture of deference and respect.

In this 20-minute ritual known as the padyatra , or foot tour, the 48-year-old politician is on the prowl for votes in the world’s largest democracy. He wants to display his humility and continued willingness to serve Chikhali and its 350 families.

The burly Chaturvedi knows what losing feels like, and he doesn’t mean to have it happen again.

On a national scale, his venerable party, the ruling Congress (I), is coming to grips with the looming specter of defeats. It has been repudiated in the past 14 months by voters in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and the party’s former electoral bastion, and in two big southern states, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

In half a dozen other states--from Maharashtra, the country’s industrial and financial powerhouse bordering the Arabian Sea, to the sparsely populated Arunachal Pradesh on the mountainous border with China--more than 160 million voters have been called to the polls last month and this to choose new state assemblies and governments.

Despite loud protestations from the Congress high command that these contests turn on purely local issues, any defeats--and some large ones seem in the offing--will further sap the position of Congress and of the man who leads it, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao.

“The outcome in these six states will determine in large part the future of the Congress,” predicted B. L. Bholey, a professor of political science at Nagpur University. “(Rao) will definitely receive a setback, regardless of the outcome.”

What makes this much more than the inside baseball of Indian politics is Rao’s personal association with the economic reforms that he and his government began in June, 1991--reforms that U.S. firms and investors, from Kellogg’s to the Stroh breweries, have blessed with billions of dollars of capital or promised investment.

Rao and the rest of the national Parliament don’t have to run for reelection before May, 1996. But each successive Congress loss at the state level corrodes the 73-year-old prime minister’s policies and prestige and throws Congress members into a lather over whether their field marshal is leading them to a political Waterloo.

The earliest returns from the current electoral round don’t bode well on the whole for Congress, but they also indicate that those predicting the party’s imminent doom may be wrong. In the northeastern state of Manipur, where voters went to the polls Feb. 16 and 19, Rao’s party won just 21 Assembly seats, down from 26 five years ago. But Congress was able to retain control of the state’s government anyway.

In Chaturvedi’s sprawling East Nagpur district, with 24 wards and nearly 300,000 voters in India’s geographic heart, the problems besetting his party are readily apparent. When the scholarly, charisma-less Rao came last month to address a pre-election rally at Ram Nagar Park, no more than 5,000 people in this city of more than 1.6 million showed up.

Bandhu Bhiv Gave, a 23-year-old who lives in Kumbhar Toli, a slum built by members of the lowly potter caste, was one of the many who didn’t turn out. He’s fed up with Rao’s party, he said, and all it represents.

“There are many years that we blindly supported Congress in the hope they would do something for us,” said the jobless young man, whose most prized item of apparel is a pair of American-looking athletic shoes.

“Well, it didn’t and it couldn’t. That’s why this time we’ll vote against Congress.”

For the party, losing control of Maharashtra and its booming, pulsating capital, Bombay, would be nothing short of catastrophic. Polls do give Rao and his lieutenants some cause for hope. They suggest that although when ballots are tallied next Saturday, Congress support will wane, the decline will not be enough so that a right-wing Hindu alliance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena (“Shiva’s Army”)--or a “third force” of centrist and leftist parties--could form a government.

But even that is not really good news for Rao. The Congress chief in Maharashtra, former Defense Minister Sharad Pawar, has designs on Rao’s job. A Congress victory will be credited to Pawar; a loss will be blamed by many on Rao and his policies.

Congress has been so rattled by the recent defeats that open revolt broke out at the party’s top in December, when Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh quit Rao’s government. Singh accused Rao of not paying enough attention to two traditional Congress constituencies: Muslims and the abject poor.

Last month, Rao had the powerful rebel expelled from the party for six years, but more routs at the polls will only lend credence to Singh’s stinging critique.

Congress is riven with rivalries even at the state and municipal levels, and many of the party’s official nominees in Maharashtra, including Chaturvedi, face dissident Congress candidates who will make their struggle to win that much tougher.

Although India is far too diverse and complicated to allow flip generalizations, it is generally thought that most voters in state elections cast ballots on the basis of local issues and not to pass judgment on policy at the lofty national level.

In that sense, the recent Congress losses don’t automatically signify dissatisfaction with the government’s pro-market reforms, despite the scant benefit that the changes have brought so far to India’s rural masses or poorest poor.

But to stave off more defeats, the temptation has become great for Congress to take populist measures that can only slow the transition from a statist economy.

In the economically important state of Gujarat, for instance, where Congress rule appears seriously threatened, the opposition BJP has promised to subsidize wheat so heavily that it will cost consumers only 3 cents a pound.

Congress lost Andhra Pradesh in large part because it refused to engage in such cheap populism. Not this time. In Gujarat, it’s gone the BJP one better, pledging to provide rice, millet and other grains at 2 cents a pound. Neither party has said how such largess will be paid for.

In Nagpur’s Kumbhar Toli slum, where 100 residents share a single hand pump for water, the complaints these days are not about Rao or the corruption commonly said to be rife among Congress members, Chaturvedi included. Instead, people are irked about the cold shoulder Chaturvedi gave their demands for new roads, sewers and pumps.

“No work was done. Nothing,” said Rajendra Kapur, 33, who sells salty snacks, betel leaf and other treats for the poor from a small, dark booth.

Residents said they will vote instead for one of the most prominent of the 26 other candidates, Prabhakar Dhawade of the Janata Dal Party. This man, now an elected municipal official, has done things for them, they said--including getting the hand pump installed.

In Chikhali, a poor village that has sprung up by a railroad line, the reception for the Congress incumbent is warmer. It is Sunday around noon, and a few cheap carpets are spread on a flat, dry patch near a water pump. A cross section of the village assembles.

Flashing a broad smile, the seated Chaturvedi listens intently as people complain about distant bus routes, bad roads--about the nitty-gritty of local politics in any country.

Before Chaturvedi’s sedan, flying a big Congress flag on its hood, spirits him off to the next stop on his 17-day tour of his district, he makes a promise. (Each member of the 288-seat state legislature is allowed to spend $162,000 on public works projects annually, no questions asked.)

Vote for me, Chaturvedi says in Chikhali, and I will get you the money for the community hall you want to build.

Local issues aside, where Congress does seem to be hurting badly these days is in its relations with India’s minorities, especially Muslims and the very poor and illiterate.

This alarms Congress stalwarts such as Arjun Singh, because much like the old-style Democratic Party in the United States, Congress has been able to dominate India’s politics in the 47 years since independence only by amalgamating disparate blocs, ethnic groups, regions and social strata.

Nagpur, a city famous for its oranges and for the busy rail lines that pass through here to link India’s north and south, has provided a sad footnote to Congress’ new difficulties with coalition-building. On Nov. 23, 50,000 members of a poor tribe of cowherds came to Nagpur to demand preferential job quotas as Maharashtra’s assembly met in session here. Pawar, the state party chief, refused to receive them and left for Bombay.

When the frustrated protesters tried to break through a barricade about 200 yards from the Assembly House, police charged, and a panicked stampede broke out. By official count, 118 people, most of them older women, were trampled to death.

But it is the alienation of the Muslims, 9.5% of Maharashtra’s 78.9 million people and a key Congress constituency for the most part, that is especially worrisome for the party.

Rao’s failure to stop the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu zealots in Uttar Pradesh in December, 1992, offended and frightened many Muslims. Then came savage communal rioting in Bombay in which police cooperated with rampaging Hindu mobs. Six hundred people, mostly Muslims, were killed, and 2,000 were injured.

Neither the state’s Congress government nor Rao and his ministers in New Delhi took any action as violence consumed the city.

For many Muslims, what counts now is punishing Congress at the ballot box, even if that means voting for the BJP-Shiv Sena bloc of Hindu hard-liners and nationalists who reject Congress’ longstanding commitment to keeping religion out of government affairs.

The mass defection of Muslims could spell doom for Congress candidates--Chaturvedi included. In 1990, he regained the seat he now holds with a 40,000-vote margin. His district contains 30,000 Muslims. If all of them have become hostile to his party, he could be in deep trouble.

Many Muslims were among those who went to the polls in Maharashtra on Feb. 9 and 12, despite the Ramadan holiday, in a brisk-to-heavy turnout.

“The Muslim people used to be the Congress vote bank, but this time, it won’t happen,” predicted Irfan Ahmed Khan, a 27-year-old Nagpur Muslim who owns a small bicycle repair shop. “Any other party but Congress will do.”