NEW DELHI, 19 April 2004 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s election campaign manager offered yesterday to step down two days before the start of national elections after being charged over a stampede that killed 26 women and children.
“I am very sorry for the stampede that occurred on Monday,” Lalji Tandon told reporters in Vajpayee’s constituency of Lucknow.
“The fact that it has made the prime minister very unhappy has disturbed me to the extent that I am stepping down as the election convenor of the prime minister’s campaigning committee,” he said.
There was no immediate word on whether Vajpayee would accept the resignation of Tandon, who ran the 79-year-old premier’s re-election campaign for his Parliament seat.
Tandon said he will continue to work in other capacity for the re-election of the premier’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Twenty-four women and two children died April 12 when they scrambled in a Lucknow park for free saris being handed out to celebrate Tandon’s 70th birthday.
The autonomous Election Commission Friday ordered a bribery case to be opened against Tandon.
“People are caught while giving bribes but whatever I was doing was in broad daylight,” Tandon said yesterday.
On Thursday, Tandon had accompanied Vajpayee when he filed his poll nomination papers in Lucknow, which was interpreted as a show of support by the premier.
Analysts say the stampede could batter the 79-year-old Vajpayee’s towering presence in India by ending his image as clean of scandal just ahead of the elections, which will be held in five rounds from Tuesday to May 10.
Uttar Pradesh sends 80 MPs including Vajpayee to the 545-seat national parliament, more than any other state, with a good showing here vital to rule in New Delhi.
The Election Commission can bar any candidate including Vajpayee from contesting elections for six years if found guilty of voter inducement.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Indians begin voting this week in an election likely to endorse five more years of rule by Hindu fundamentalists promising gradual economic liberalization and peace with Pakistan.
Opinion polls show the BJP easily seeing off a listless challenge from the Congress party of Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
From the snowy heights of Kashmir to the scorching plains of northern India and the lush southern paddy fields, 670 million Indians are eligible to vote in the world’s largest exercise in democracy, held over five stages from tomorrow to May 10.
With its campaign motto “India Shining”, the BJP is riding high on the back of a surging economy and cheap loans which have brought cars, houses and Western consumer goods within reach of a rapidly expanding middle class.
An ambitious road-building program and an even more ambitious bid to make peace with nuclear rival Pakistan form the other pillars of its campaign and have cemented Vajpayee’s reputation as the country’s most popular politician.
“The BJP has transformed India in the last five years, and Vajpayee is far ahead of any politician today,” said Nikunj Patel, sitting on a bench outside his vegetable shop in Ahmedabad. “He has shown courage to make peace with Pakistan, built excellent roads and interest rates are so low.” Although the economic reform program began under a Congress government in 1991, the BJP has taken much of the credit for turning India away from decades of socialist-inspired policies and removing the stigma from being wealthy.
“Government and business used to be on different sides,” said car and motorbike retailer Arun Sanghi in the commercial capital Bombay. “But now the business community feels we are given the respect we deserve. That is a big, big change for us.” The BJP rode to a Hindu revivalist and often anti-Muslim wave to power in 1998, leading the campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site of 16th century Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, a mosque which was razed at the height of the campaign in 1992.
The opposition Congress party, which led India to independence and ruled it for more than four decades, is floundering in Vajpayee’s wake. Sonia Gandhi has failed to capture the imagination and her Italian-birth has proved a major handicap which the BJP has successfully exploited.
Sonia Gandhi acknowledged her Congress party was trailing in two crucial northern states.
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together send 120 MPs to the Parliament, which will be chosen in the five-round election.
“It is a fair assessment to say that we are not at the top in those states,” Gandhi said in an interview with the Hindustan Times newspaper published yesterday.
But she said neither her party nor the BJP would be able to form a government without a coalition.
However, Vajpayee appealed to voters to give the BJP a clear mandate, saying India could not afford another wobbly coalition.
“I am worried. Will we have a 22-party coalition again?” Vajpayee told a rally Saturday in the central city of Nagpur.
“It will not be good. I am asking all of you make up your minds. We need security in this country. There may be an international crisis at any time,” he said.
Campaigning for districts that vote this week closed last night.
In her interview, Gandhi dismissed BJP charges she was unfit for office because she was originally from Italy.
In Kashmir, disputed between India and Pakistan, helicopters will be used to ferry electronic voting machines to remote Himalayan polling booths.
Elsewhere the machines, used nationwide for the first time, will be carried on elephants or camels.
The threat of violence also hangs over the election in Kashmir, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers will be deployed. Militants opposed to Indian rule have called for a boycott there and already attacked several campaign rallies.
But the real significance of the election, says columnist Prem Shankar Jha, is that it is being fought on the economy, development and peace instead of on the basis of the “inherited loyalties” of caste, class and religion.
“The issues will bind whoever wins, and they will probably bind them in the next election too,” he said. “India is entering a phase of maturity and modernity.”
Additional input from agencies
