BY BRIAN TAYLOR

Following parliamentary elections in which no party could win a clear majority, India's rulers scrambled for three weeks to put together a government. The situation highlighted the growing economic crisis and social tensions in the world's second most populous country.

Of all the parties that ran, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist group, won the most votes. The Congress Party, which has ruled for all but four of the last 49 years, lost nearly half of its seats in the legislature.

The liberal and social democratic parties attempted to form a coalition to block the BJP from setting up a government. When that failed, the BJP moved into interim power. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the new prime minister and head of the BJP, resigned two weeks later, just before a confidence vote he was sure to lose. Meanwhile, the social democratic and liberal forces cobbled together a coalition called the United Front, with H.D. Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal party as prime minister.

The previous Congress Party government of P.V. Narasimha Rao had carried out an austerity drive that squeezed the living standards of workers and peasants in India. This included the privatization of many state enterprises and other "market reforms," aimed at making Indian capitalists more competitive on the world market.

On the land, Rao's policy included steps such as abolishing price supports for fertilizer. As a result, many farmers have been driven off the land and into the crowded cities to work in factories for low pay.

Congress Party's decline
The Congress government faced growing troubles in the months before the elections. The ruling party suffered a string of defeats in state elections last year, and seven of Rao's cabinet ministers resigned in corruption scandals in the first two months of 1996 alone.

India has a population of more than 900 million. Three- fourths of the population live in rural areas. Forty percent of the people live below the official poverty line, and the average life expectancy is 58. The infant mortality rate is 78 per thousand live births. About half the people living in India are illiterate.

India still has a caste system that places people in permanent categories of social status. Brahmin are the top caste, with "untouchables" at the bottom and other categories in between. Muslims, who make up 11 percent of the population, are denied equal status in society. They face discrimination and attacks on religious freedoms.

There is an ongoing national struggle in Kashmir, a region divided between northern India and northeastern Pakistan. Some 400,000 Indian troops occupy the two-thirds of Kashmir inside India's border. Kashmir was the only state in the subcontinent that was prevented from carrying out a vote in 1947 on self- determination.

There have been numerous confrontations over the past five years between Indian forces and Kashmir independence fighters, which have resulted in nearly 50,000 casualties and thousands more being jailed or killed as "suspected" fighters.

In the latest elections, Indian troops were sent into Kashmir to rouse people out of their homes and make them vote. Angry Kashmiris chanted "Freedom!" and "India get out!" as they were herded to balloting stations.

In New Delhi, the Jammu and the Kashmir Islamic Front set off a car bomb May 21 to protest the elections, while others organized an election boycott.

The rightist forces of the BJP and allied groups appeal to the insecurities and prejudices of middle-class and other layers, purporting to offer solutions to India's crisis. They scapegoat Muslims for the country's problems" and call for Hindutva, which means Hindu civilization. Murli Manmohar Joshi, former BJP president, said, "They should refer to themselves as `Hindu-Muslims' and `Hindu-Christians,' " referring to India's religious minorities.

Chauvinist attacks
Jaswant Singh, another member of the BJP, asserted, "Hindutva is merely an attempt to generate a sense of being. India is not identified with one church." The BJP's track record doesn't match these statements, however. The group spearheaded the political campaign that led to the destruction of a 16th- century mosque in Ayodhya by a mob in 1992. More than 3,000 were killed in anti-Muslim riots that followed, many of them by the police. Vajpayee has called for constructing a Hindu temple on the site where the Muslim mosque was leveled.

A feature of the BJP's foreign policy is support for India becoming a declared nuclear state. The Indian regime exploded its first nuclear device in 1974, but denies having a nuclear arsenal, as does its rival and neighbor, Pakistan.

The BJP has taken an aggressive stance against the Pakistani government, demanding the return of portions of Kashmir that are currently part of Pakistan. The conflicts between the two regimes over the years have posed the possibility of nuclear war. Just last March, Indian and Pakistani troops clashed again along the border in Kashmir.

During his brief tenure as prime minister, Vajpayee said the BJP government would accelerate privatizations and continue social cuts begun under his predecessor.

The new United Front government has likewise vowed not to stray too far from the program previously implemented by the Congress Party.

Washington Post reporter Kenneth Cooper wrote in a June 2 article that prime minister Gowda "sought to reassure other governments and international markets of the front's support for a free-market economy, saying that the foreign trade and investment policies that Rao [of the Congress Party] initiated in 1991 would generally continue."  
 
 
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