As Indians Cast Ballots, the Powers That Be Look Shaky

The future of the world’s most populous democracy is in the hands of Narender Singh Ohlayan and millions of ordinary Indians like him.

Should India proclaim itself a nuclear power and openly build bombs? What role should foreign capital be allowed to play in the economy? Should India wholeheartedly embark on an arms race with archenemy Pakistan?

To address those issues and others, Indians began voting Saturday to choose a new Parliament and government. The latest opinion polls suggest that voters will shun the Congress (I) government of Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and award the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party the most seats.

In this wheat- and mustard-growing region in northern India’s Haryana state, dissatisfaction with the status quo is almost palpable. Like many of his neighbors, Ohlayan, 60, a former worker in the state irrigation system, is fed up with the rulers in New Delhi and longs for change.

“It’s because of the politicians that everything has gone wrong,” the bespectacled retiree said after trudging half a mile in a neatly pressed pajama suit to cast his ballot at a one-story schoolhouse. “Congress used to work for people’s welfare. Now Congress workers are all corrupt and work only for themselves.”

In part because of a recent payoffs scandal that has tainted not only the Congress (I) Party but the BJP and other parties as well, Indians’ faith in their leaders has never been lower. In the city of Patna on the Ganges River, a eunuch has been running for Parliament with the campaign pitch that since the men and women elected to office have proved corrupt, why not support someone who is neither?

Voting by India’s immense 590-million-member electorate is spread over six days, with troubled Jammu and Kashmir state being the last where ballots will be cast. Tabulation of results for all states save Jammu and Kashmir will take place May 8-9.

Once the votes are counted, Congress seems certain to win fewer seats than the 232 it snared in the last general election, in 1991. Although Congress has been in power for all but four of India’s nearly 49 years as an independent nation, some observers think this year’s elections will sound its death knell as the dominant factor in Indian politics.

“The very survival of India is at stake in these elections,” Congress spokesman V. N. Gadgil warned. “Congress is the only political force which can hold the country together.”

On the campaign trail, Rao has asked for the same support given Congress predecessors Jawaharlal Nehru; Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi; and her son Rajiv Gandhi. But this election is Congress’ first without a Nehru-Gandhi clan member as its standard-bearer, and the diffident, scholarly Rao, 74, a former defense and foreign minister thrust into the limelight after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, is no charismatic substitute.

Lacking a real crowd-puller as its leader, Congress is banking instead on Indians’ desire for stability, social harmony and continuity in the Rao government’s economic reforms, which have opened up India to foreign capital and technology over the past five years.

Even if Congress does not win the “clear majority” in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, that Rao has predicted, it could cut a deal with smaller parties to create a coalition government.

For its part, the BJP, the largest opposition party, is gearing up for a big win, and one recent nationwide poll published by the Times of India predicted it will be the top vote-getter with 180 to 195 seats, versus 135 to 150 for Congress.

“I can say with confidence that everywhere we are gaining further public support and we are moving toward victory,” Atal Behari Vajpayee, 71, the party’s leader in Parliament and its designated prime-minister-in-waiting, told reporters in New Delhi.

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If India’s first BJP government in history is formed, the party has vowed to “opt for the nuclear bomb,” deploy missiles against Pakistan, close off the frontier with Muslim Bangladesh with barbed wire to halt illegal immigration and abolish special legal provisions for India’s 110-million-member Muslim minority.

Vajpayee, a former foreign minister, is an avuncular, reassuring presence atop the BJP ticket. But his party, which championed the march that led to the razing of a mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992--an event that touched off rioting in some Indian cities--frightens many Indian Muslims with its stated ideal of “one nation, one people, one culture.”

The BJP, which campaigned against the construction of an Enron power plant in Maharashtra state--a project that was later scrapped--and which temporarily shut a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in New Delhi after two flies were found in the kitchen, is also hawking a different economic policy than Congress.

The BJP says it welcomes foreign capital to improve India’s overwhelmed roads, ports, power grid and other infrastructure elements--but it adds that investment in the consumer sector by foreign multinationals will not be a priority.

The “Third Force,” a grab bag of leftist and low-caste parties, is the other major player in India’s 11th national election since independence, and its members will probably end up being kingmakers if neither Congress nor the BJP bags an outright majority.

To bolster the chances of one Third Force leader, Bihar state Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav of the Janata party, 100 green parrots trained to squawk “Vote for Janata, vote for Laloo-ji” were released in his home state. But on the whole, by Indian standards, the run-up to the national election was a drab affair.

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Dahlburg was recently on assignment in Sampla.