India Politics

In an electoral earthquake that could force hasty corrections in India's economic reforms, the ruling Congress (I) Party has been humiliated in state elections, with the most crushing defeat coming in Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's own state. "Simply shattering. We never expected this," was the shocked reaction of Commerce Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

India wrapped up its biggest political event of the year Friday as results were announced in four state elections, including an end to the communist government in West Bengal after 34 years in power. In Tamil Nadu, a party linked to a massive corruption scandal also lost despite a promise to give away millions of food processors, laptop computers and even houses. The elections, in a nation proud of its status as the world's largest democracy (a sign reminds you in four languages as you enter from Pakistan)

Hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims, saints and politicians flooded the Indian capital Thursday in the largest single show of force by the Hindu revivalist movement that has been sweeping once-secular India. Shouting "Long live Lord Rama!"

A dingy, overcrowded cellblock in the bowels of New Delhi's Tihar jail was the perfect spot for a merger between militant Islam and the Indian mafia. Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, a chess-playing Islamic radical, made common cause with Aftab Ansari, an ambitious Calcutta gangster, when they did time together behind Tihar's high walls in the late 1990s, according to Indian police investigators.

Sonia Gandhi was in no mood for outsiders. She was with her people now, working for her husband, barnstorming his dusty, crushingly poor voting district several hundred miles southeast of the nation's capital. "No, no, sorry, no interviews, no pictures, please," she said, hiding her face and all but pushing away the reporter and photographer who had stumbled onto her election campaign party in a tiny village of the huge Amethi district during India's last hard-fought campaign in November, 1989.

Hindu nationalists surged but fell short of a majority Tuesday in ballot-counting after India's parliamentary elections, all but ensuring a future of weak, unstable governments for this country of 970 million people. The Bharatiya Janata Party, whose pro-Hindu agenda threatened to ignite ancient communal tensions, is certain to emerge as the largest party in Parliament by the time all 300 million-plus votes are tallied.

In India's highest-level political assassination in four years, Beant Singh, chief minister of Punjab state, was killed Thursday when a powerful bomb exploded as he got into his limousine. A Sikh separatist group claimed responsibility for the blast, which killed 12 others. The explosion occurred after Singh, 73, left his second-floor office in the civil secretariat in Chandigarh, the city that serves as Punjab's administrative capital. As the chief minister got into his car at 5:07 p.m.

The domestic terminal was nearly deserted when the dawn flight from Bombay touched down Saturday morning, carrying the man likely to emerge as the most powerful face on India's political landscape after the conclusion this week of the nation's prolonged and painful parliamentary elections.

Haribabu was the doer of odd jobs, a two-bit free-lance photographer who lived in a tiny hut with his parents, borrowed his cameras and film and hardly could have known that the job he took for $5 last month would leave behind the only crucial, physical clues to one of India's most brazen political assassinations. The 21-year-old Haribabu was killed in the process.

With a show of hands and a deafening thump of their table tops, members of India's long-ruling Congress-I Party on Thursday unanimously elected P. V. Narasimha Rao, an aging, scholarly compromise candidate, to serve as India's ninth prime minister. The selection of Rao brings to a close the most traumatic chapter in India's politics, which included last month's assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Opposition parties won landslide victories in legislative elections in five regions of India, in what was seen as a public assessment of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's governing alliance, according to results announced Sunday. With most of the votes counted, the Communists and the party of former actress Jayalalitha Jayaram emerged the big winners in Thursday's elections in the states of West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Pondicherry.

Defying threats of violence, millions voted in legislative elections in five Indian regions, but rebel attacks and clashes between political parties killed 16 people, officials said in New Delhi. Bomb explosions and deadly clashes marred the balloting, mostly in the northeastern state of Assam and in West Bengal. Nearly 130 million people were eligible to vote in 823 districts in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu states and the union territory of Pondicherry.

A leader of the Shia Muslim community and six separatists were among 18 people killed in a land-mine blast and gun battles in Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said. "Militants detonated [an explosive device] at Kanihama when the vehicle carrying the Shia leader Agha Syed Mehdi along with five others passed through the area, killing them," a police spokesman said.

The volatile region of Kashmir greeted this country's independence holiday Tuesday with empty streets and vacant bleachers, underscoring anew that 53 years of living in India have failed to make Kashmiris feel a part of the nation. As politicians in New Delhi made speeches and watched parades, thousands of soldiers and paramilitary troops lined the streets in Srinagar to ensure that the violence of the past three weeks didn't return.

The Islamic militants holding 160 hostages aboard a hijacked Indian Airlines jet dropped two key demands Wednesday but refused to budge any further amid reports today that Indian negotiators offered to free jailed guerrillas. As the hostages awoke from a sixth night in captivity today, Western diplomats at the scene of the hijacking in Kandahar, Afghanistan, told Associated Press that Indian negotiators had offered to release some of the jailed Kashmiri guerrillas.

The Indian Airlines hijacking took an ominous turn Tuesday as the terrorists escalated their demands, asking for $200 million and the release of 35 jailed guerrillas in exchange for the freedom of their 160 captives. The new demands, which the Muslim extremist hijackers announced in a letter dropped from the door of the plane in southern Afghanistan, included the exhumation and return of a comrade buried in India.

Their ancestors were ordered by religious edict to live in hovels away from other people, to eat only from broken dishes and to wear ornaments of black iron. For its meticulous inhumanity, the brand of apartheid the "untouchables" of India were subjected to for centuries may have no parallel anywhere else in the world. In some regions, even standing downwind from them was considered to be ritually polluting.

P.V. Narasimha Rao, a Gandhi family loyalist, was sworn in Friday as India's ninth prime minister. He named a top economist to his Cabinet to confront India's looming debt crisis. Manmohan Singh, who has headed India's federal bank and was negotiating a loan from the World Bank to tide over a $63-billion foreign debt, was among 54 Cabinet ministers sworn in along with Rao.

Instead of following through on their threats to kill more passengers, Muslim extremists who commandeered an Indian Airlines jet continued talking today with a team of Indian negotiators hastily flown to Afghanistan. Several deadlines set by the hijackers came and went without more killings, and there was no indication that progress had been made to resolve the crisis.

Hindu nationalists rode to victory Thursday in countrywide elections, leading a far-flung collection of parties with a promise to end the instability that has dogged Indian politics in recent years. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his 22-party coalition captured a comfortable majority in Parliament, possibly enough to give his new government a chance to serve out its full five-year term--something the past four governments were unable to do.