India Gets Rid of Racist, Fundamentalist, Nationalist Regime

Maybe we can too

Gandhis Return to Power in India

Vajpayee resigned after his party lost about a quarter of its parliamentary seats. Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, claimed a mandate to govern — a political act that many Indians thought would never happen.

The prospect of a foreign-born prime minister angered many nationalist supporters of Vajpayee's ousted alliance, whose leaders vilified Gandhi's Italian roots during the hard-fought campaign.

During Vajpayee's seven-year rule, India achieved record economic growth and became a global power in information technology.

His defeat appeared to have resulted in part from a backlash by masses of impoverished voters who felt excluded from recent economic gains.

More than half of 670 million eligible voters cast ballots on electronic machines in four phases over three weeks to allow security forces and election officials to move around the country of more than 1 billion people.

[The victory was] a stunning comeback for a party and leader written off as chronic losers a few weeks ago.

Muslim victims of mob violence and human rights groups accused state Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu hard-liner, and his government of complicity in attacks on Muslims, which many witnesses said were carried out as police stood by.

Gandhi accused Vajpayee's alliance, which is dominated by Hindu nationalists, of fomenting religious hatred and betraying India's poor and its secular past by pushing through economic reforms that benefited the middle class[?].


el - This article has a series of slanted opinions against the winners and the leftward movement of India.

The Washington Post labels their editorials.

The Upset in India

IN 1998, WHEN Atal Bihari Vajpayee took the helm of the world's largest democracy, nobody predicted the extent of his success or his alignment with U.S. interests. His Hindu nationalist party seemed likely to exacerbate tensions with India's non-Hindu minorities, inflame relations with Muslim Pakistan and generally make India an awkward international partner -- a prospect that appeared to come true a few months into Mr. Vajpayee's tenure, when his government defied the world by detonating five nuclear bombs. Six years later, however, Mr. Vajpayee has improved relations with Pakistan, gone out of his way to forge an alliance with the United States and advanced the remarkable program of liberalization that has turned India into a star economy. But if all that was unexpected, so was yesterday's news. Having called an early election to capitalize on his apparently robust popularity, Mr. Vajpayee lost.

Mr. Vajpayee is said to have been punished for the pro-market reforms that fostered India's high-tech boom; voters in the villages felt left out and took their revenge at the ballot box. This suggests that even the world's most successful economic reformers run big political risks.