India Government

Hoping to end a three-week political crisis and reluctant to call new elections less than a year after the last national vote, India's president on Sunday accepted Inder Kumar Gujral as the country's new prime minister. Gujral was sworn in early today.

The Congress Party, which has dominated Indian politics since leading the country to independence in 1947, suddenly withdrew its support from the governing coalition Sunday, meaning new elections may be necessary for the second time in a year. Congress called on Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda to resign, blaming his center-left government for what it called a failure to curb Hindu nationalism and for a breakdown of law and order. Congress said it will seek to form the next government.

The Congress (I) Party, which ran India for much of its independence only to lose power this year, chose Sitaram Kesri, a low-caste confidant of the former prime minister, as its temporary president. Former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao resigned the party leadership after a judge ordered that he be charged with corruption. Kesri is a respected leader of low-caste Hindus in northern India. He has been party treasurer for the last 20 years.

In the alpine vales and mountains of bloodied Kashmir, voters went to the polls Saturday to choose their government for the first time in nearly a decade, an act that Indian officials hailed as a triumph of democracy and a vital step on the road to peace. Instead, many Kashmiris said they trooped to the ballot box only under threats and pressure from the Indian army and security forces.

India's new prime minister won a vote of confidence in Parliament, ending a month of turmoil caused by elections that ousted the party that ruled the country since independence. Parliament endorsed the government of Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, who oversees a conglomerate of 13 parties ranging from Communists to centrists. The alliance is India's first coalition government.

"The Indian elephant has awakened and begun to dance," Anil Ambani, one of his country's leading industrialists, told a conference earlier this year in the United States. This week, the music changed. A wobbly 13-party coalition--composed of free marketeers, Communists, regional parties and low-caste Hindus--is now in charge after five years that saw India sever a 4-decade-old tradition of quasi-socialism and begin adopting market-driven reforms. On Wednesday, the government of Prime Minister H.

India got its third government in three weeks Saturday, a motley alliance mirroring the great political and social transformations underway in this diverse land, where power is shifting slowly from higher castes to lower, from New Delhi to the outlying states. H. D. Deve Gowda, 63, farmer's-son-turned-politician and former chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka, was sworn in as prime minister along with a score of Cabinet members.

There was a time when politics in India was the Congress, and the Congress was politics. The Indian National Congress party was the locomotive powering the independence struggle, political instrument of luminaries such as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The party ultimately marshaled one of the world's most diverse populations--landlords and poor peasants, Hindus and Muslims, Brahmins and untouchables--and mitigated and reconciled their demands.

As of now, predominantly Hindu India has a Muslim foreign minister, a ban on a TV commercial based on Marilyn Monroe's famous billowing-skirt scene and an edict for female newscasters to wear saris that bare less. All of this, and the Hindu nationalist government that willed it into being is expected to be gone with the wind next week.

For many Indians, their new prime minister is the best man for the job but comes from the worst party. Atal Behari Vajpayee has less than two weeks to resolve the contradiction, or he will go down in history as India's shortest-lived head of government, having foundered on the widespread unpopularity of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. A bachelor and an accomplished poet and cook, the silver-haired, black-browed Vajpayee, 69, is the moderate face of Hindutva, or political Hinduism.