Hindu Nationalists to Form India’s Government

India’s Hindu nationalists were asked to form a government here late Sunday, all but ensuring that they will take charge of the world’s most populous democracy and rein in their staunchly sectarian agenda.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, was invited by President Kocheril Raman Narayanan to lead the fifth Indian government in two years. The move was intended to end three months of political turmoil that has paralyzed the government of this vast and impoverished land.

No party captured a majority in parliamentary elections that ended earlier this month, but the BJP emerged as the largest single group. Allied with a string of other parties, it will probably lead a government eight votes shy of a majority in the lower house of Parliament, the 545-seat House of the People, or Lok Sabha.

Narayanan set March 28 as the date of a parliamentary confidence vote the BJP must win to make its hold on power official.

The party’s apparent victory Sunday capped an extraordinary rise by an organization whose core supporters were considered political pariahs only a decade ago.

The BJP, associated with a hard-line organization some of whose members were convicted of murdering Mohandas K. Gandhi half a century ago, advocates an unabashedly pro-Hindu agenda that many here fear could ignite India’s long-simmering religious tensions.

Among other things, the party has promised to abolish the separate civil code governing India’s 100 million Muslims, to ban the slaughter of cows--which Hindus consider sacred--and to bulldoze several Muslim mosques that the party claims were built atop Hindu temples centuries ago.

The BJP also has promised to assemble nuclear weapons, a move that could well provoke Pakistan, its adversary, and strain relations with the United States.

And the party has pledged to curtail the country’s 7-year-old liberalization program, which has spurred rapid growth but also brought change and disruption to a deeply traditional society.

But the BJP’s failure to capture a parliamentary majority will hinder its ability to enact the more controversial elements of its agenda, analysts say. Many of the smaller parties central to the survival of a BJP-led coalition oppose those elements--making it unlikely that the planks will ever be enacted.

In a statement Sunday night, Prime Minister-designate Vajpayee called on “every section of society and polity to help us provide India with political stability, economic prosperity and social harmony.”

Said Vajpayee: “Let us together dedicate ourselves to the tasks ahead and not look back at our past differences.”

As the BJP inched closer to power in recent months, its leaders, like Vajpayee, muffled their more zealous cadres and began to dispense a more moderate and conciliatory line. Party leaders acknowledge that they will have to restrain themselves if they want to stay in power.

“We will have to govern by consensus,” said R. K. Sinha, a member of Parliament and BJP leader.

The party’s only other shot at power came in 1996, when a BJP-led coalition government collapsed after just 13 days.

The BJP’s rise coincides with the decline of the Congress Party, which has governed India for most of the more than 50 years since its independence. The party of many national heroes--Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister, and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi--it has self-destructed in recent years amid a series of spectacular corruption cases.

On the brink of collapse, Congress was rescued in the closing days of the campaign by yet another Gandhi--Sonia, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991. Crisscrossing the country, the Italian-born Gandhi drew vast and adoring crowds and warned of the consequences of a BJP-led India. When the BJP fell just shy of a majority in Parliament, many Indian commentators said it was Sonia, as she is known, who blunted the BJP’s charge.

Over the weekend, the Congress Party named the 51-year-old Gandhi its leader. Though the selection drew headlines, Gandhi and the rest of the party seemed resigned to wandering for a time in the political outback.

It was Gandhi who opened the door for the BJP on Sunday when she told the Indian president that her party would not be able to form a government.

“We have no numbers,” she said as she left their meeting.