Indian government wins confidence vote

India’s ruling coalition survived a confidence vote by a slim margin Tuesday, keeping alive the possibility that a controversial nuclear cooperation deal with the U.S. would go ahead as planned.

After two days of heated debate, lawmakers voted 275 to 256 to support the government in what was not only a referendum on the nuclear accord but also, in the eyes of many here, a sorry display of backroom deal-making, alleged chicanery and political theater extraordinary even by the standards of India’s Parliament.

The government’s narrow but more-comfortable-than-expected victory means that early elections can be avoided and that its nuclear deal with the U.S. can move closer to fruition after months of delay and partisan bickering. Three years in the making, the unprecedented agreement would allow American companies to sell nuclear technology to India in exchange for the opening of this nation’s civilian reactors to international inspection.

But the coalition headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finds its credibility and scope for action weakened when inflation is at a 13-year high and the country’s economic boom is showing signs of a slowdown.

The political scene is now likely to be dominated by alliance-building, horse-trading and message-tuning in anticipation of polls due by May 2009.

“The election season has already started -- we’re already in the silly season,” said analyst Subhash Agrawal, editor of a journal devoted to politics and diplomacy. “Everybody’s going to be shadow-boxing and trying different populist measures and themes and promises.”

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said the Bush administration continued to support the nuclear pact, which critics in Congress say represents a reversal of decades of U.S. policy forbidding nuclear trade with nations such as India that have not signed the global nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

“We think that this idea of a U.S.-India civil nuclear arrangement is a good one for everybody,” Perino told reporters after the vote.

“It’s good for India because it would help provide them a source for energy that they need.”

The nuclear agreement, first proposed by President Bush in 2005, is the centerpiece of warming ties between New Delhi and Washington. Singh has staked much of his foreign policy reputation on the success of the deal.

Singh, an economist by training, contends that the accord is necessary to help meet India’s booming energy demands.

But the leftist parties that propped up his coalition say the deal would bind foreign policy too tightly to the U.S. and withdrew their support for the government this month after Singh insisted on pressing ahead with the agreement.

That paved the way for Tuesday’s vote, whose outcome remained too close to call until the Lok Sabha, or lower house, rendered its verdict in the evening.

Although the vote was nominally about the nuclear deal, in many ways it devolved into a simple contest for power, a tug of war between the government and those trying to bring it down. Both the ruling coalition and its foes pulled out all stops to shore up their positions, engaging in a flurry of wheeling-and-dealing that many commentators here are lamenting as an “embarrassing” and “ghastly” turn of events for the world’s most populous democracy.

Erstwhile enemies on the political left and right joined in marriages of convenience. The government renamed an airport after the father of one lawmaker it was trying to woo. Members of Parliament imprisoned for murder were temporarily released to cast their vote -- which, under India’s Constitution, they are allowed to do -- and at least one legislator who had been laid up in the hospital was wheeled in on a gurney to attend the raucous sessions.

Three opposition lawmakers brought proceedings in Parliament to a halt shortly before the vote after waving wads of cash that they said had been offered to them as bribes for abstaining. Critics described it as a last-minute maneuver by the opposition to derail the vote once it became clear that their drive to topple the government would fall short.

A public already jaded by official corruption and political machinations still found room to be shocked by the allegations and the theatrics.

“Black day for Indian politics,” one news channel flashed across the screen. “Parliament’s shame,” declared another.

Afterward, Singh promised an investigation of the bribery allegations. But he characterized the vote as “a convincing victory” for his Congress Party-led government that showed that India was ready “to take its rightful place in the comity of nations.”

Others say the victory came at a steep price.

“All tricks in the book were used. You’re talking about inducements; you’re talking about bribery,” said Agrawal, the journal editor. “No side has come out squeaky clean. . . . The whole process of debate and civil dialogue has been contaminated very severely and very deeply.”

During the debate, lawmakers tried to shout one another down.

One of the highlights was a speech by Rahul Gandhi, son of Rajiv Gandhi, the assassinated former prime minister, and Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Congress Party. Rahul Gandhi is seen as a possible future prime minister.

“It is important at this point not to speak as the member of a political party but to speak as an Indian,” he said in support of the nuclear deal. “There is a serious problem in India and the problem is our energy security.”

But legislator Basudev Acharya, with one of India’s communist parties, sharply disagreed.

“We want a good relation with America, but there is a difference between a good relation and a strategic relation,” Acharya said.

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henry.chu@latimes.com