Rao’s Future at India’s Helm in Doubt as Vote Count Starts

Across India, the tedious task of counting ballots by hand in a watershed election began Wednesday and continued into the night, with Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao headed for victory in his own races but his days at the helm of the world’s most populous democracy apparently at an end.

“It appears clear that Mr. Rao will have very little option except to quit. Unless he can pull off a miracle,” said G.V.L.N. Rao, director of the Center for Media Studies, a polling organization. Rao is not related to the prime minister.

Exit surveys after polls closed Tuesday indicated that Prime Minister Rao’s Congress (I) Party had made its worst showing ever in an Indian general election. But such surveys are an unproven novelty in India, and most analysts were hedging their bets until the vote count, which began with the unsealing of ballot boxes at 8 a.m. Wednesday and is supposed to conclude today.

As midnight neared, returns posted by the government Press Information Bureau’s election center indicated the Congress Party had bagged 75 of the first 160 seats in Parliament where voting trends were clear. But officials said those races were unrepresentative.

More problematic for Congress was its disastrous performance in Karnataka, a southern state, where it lost at least 17 of 23 parliamentary seats, and in neighboring Tamil Nadu, where Rao’s alliance with Jayalalitha Jayaram, a highhanded actress turned state chief minister, seemed to have led to a debacle. A rival alliance that included Congress members hostile to Rao was headed for a landslide.

More bad news for the ruling party is expected when the returns are in from the northern Hindi belt, home to the country’s two most populous states.

On Wednesday night, Rao’s foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, conceded for the first time what had been obvious to most observers for days: that the ruling party will not get enough votes to retain control of the government.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which ran against Congress “misrule” and pledged to restore “Hindu values” to public life, seemed destined to supplant its rival for the first time as the largest party in Parliament.

The taciturn Rao, 74, a former foreign and defense minister, was drafted as leader of Congress following the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

In the two districts where Rao was running, the Congress chief who opened up India’s economy to the outside world was ahead by a comfortable cushion totaling almost 60,000 votes, returns issued by the election center indicated.

Rao could try to hang on to the prime minister post if his party can forge a coalition government. But an influential figure in the “third front” electoral bloc of low-caste and leftist parties, a group that seems destined to be the kingmaker of India’s next government, said the bloc would not support Rao.

“Congress is like a battered car, lying on the corner of the street,” former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh said. “Someone has taken the wheels, somebody else the engine, but the leader is still sitting at the wheel, trying to steer.”