LUCKNOW, 30 August 2003 — A coalition of the socialist Samajwadi Party and India’s main opposition Congress party was sworn into power yesterday in the politically strategic northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Samajwadi leader Mulayam Singh Yadav took the oath of office of the post of chief minister amid tens and thousands of cheering supporters including high-profile businessmen and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.
Congress, which is the junior partner in the state government with Yadav’s party, is expected to get important ministerial posts, improving its political leverage in the country’s most populous state which has 166 million residents.
Including Uttar Pradesh, Congress now holds power in 15 of India’s 28 states, either outright or in coalition with other parties.
The BJP, despite holding together a federal coalition since 1998, has been steadily losing ground at the provincial level and now rules only three states.
Five states are to hold assembly elections in November ahead of parliamentary elections that must be held by October 2004 but could be called early.
The Uttar Pradesh political upset was triggered Monday when former Chief Minister Mayawati, who uses only one name, offered to quit over aborted plans for a shopping mall near India’s famous 17th century Taj Mahal white marble mausoleum.
The move angered environmentalists and embarrassed Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which was in a coalition in the state with Mayawati’s low-caste Bahujan Samaj Party or BSP. The BJP said it had not been consulted.
The BJP withdrew its support, forcing Mayawati to step down Tuesday.
Yadav’s Samajwadi party is the largest in the 403-member state legislature, with 146 legislators. He is counting on support from at least 190 lawmakers, including the 16 Congress legislators and 13 breakaway members of Mayawati’s BSP. Yadav will have to back up his claim to a majority with a confidence vote within two weeks.
Yadav, 63, was defense minister from 1996 to 1998 in a federal coalition government that did not include Congress or the BJP. He served as Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister from 1993 to 1995, when one of his projects was replacing English with Hindi as the language of administration.
A staunch secularist, Yadav has refused any coalition with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, a hotbed of Hindu fundamentalism where activists are campaigning to build a Ram temple over the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
