RAE BARELI/NEW DELHI, 23 April 2004 — Opposition leader Sonia Gandhi is optimistic after the first round of the country’s staggered general election this week — what she calls a battle to save the soul of India. In her first public reaction to Tuesday’s first round of voting, Sonia, the Italian-born widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, played down exit polls showing her Congress party trailing in the race to form a government.
“We have been in touch with our workers, with our candidates in the states where we have had elections, and from there I get a very, very positive feeling,” she told Reuters in a rare interview on the campaign trail in her constituency of Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh.
She also vowed to fight to the end against the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatija Janata Party, which she said had bred social evil and divided the country through its “politics of temple and mosque”. Exit polls showed the BJP and its allies leading Congress after the first of five voting days to May 10, but suggested the gap was slightly narrower than at the last election in 1999.
The BJP rode a Hindu revivalist wave to power in the 1990s, striking at the secular ideals championed by Congress — and successive members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that have dominated this country since independence from Britain in 1947.
Sonia said it was this threat that had forced her to enter politics seven years after her husband’s death at the hands of a suicide bomber in 1991.
“The main reason which made me actively decide to participate in politics was that, at that point in time, it looked as if anti-secular forces were becoming stronger,” she said. “I felt I could not just sit by and watch this happening given that the family to which I belong fought, lived and died to see that such forces do not gain strength.”
The once-reclusive widow has often seemed an unlikely politician, and admitted she had fought to keep Rajiv out of politics in the 1980s “because I thought I would lose him”.
But she was in upbeat mood after a grueling day in the blazing sun campaigning in Rae Bareli, the old constituency of her mother-in-law and former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who was also assassinated in 1984.
Stopping every few kilometers to address crowds of a few dozen to several thousand in small villages and towns amid brown freshly harvested wheat fields, she received a rapturous reception and brought a simple message:
“We’ll defeat this government sitting in Delhi that has done nothing for the poor,” she said, dressed in a red sari, her head covered with a traditional dupatta scarf. “Vote the BJP out and vote Congress in.”
Despite a booming economy, Sonia said, the BJP had discriminated against farmers and the poor while its leaders had filled their own pockets from the proceeds of privatization.
The BJP has played heavily on Gandhi’s foreign origin in its campaign, but she said the jibes did not touch her.
“Wherever I go, wherever I have been... I have never ever been made to feel like I am not like everyone else, so it doesn’t hurt at all,” she said.
In Rae Bareli people described Sonia as their “daughter-in-law”. “A woman can never be a foreigner once she has married into an Indian family,” said 46-year-old farmer Ram Kishore, as a roadside barber trimmed his hair in Bachhrawan, near Rae Bareli.
The Congress party meanwhile was in an upbeat mood amid an anticipated bag of mixed fortunes in the race for power in three large Indian states.
Congress leaders voiced happiness amid growing signs that their party was likely to storm back to power in Andhra Pradesh after a gap of nine long years and set to retain power in neighboring Karnataka.
But the happy tidings were marred by warnings that the Congress may fail to dislodge the coalition government led by the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Orissa, one of the four states where assembly elections are taking place simultaneously with the staggered parliamentary poll.
The Congress currently rules 11 of India’s 28 states, having lost three major heartland states to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in December. A victory in at least two of the four states would significantly offset the disappointment of the December drubbings. Sikkim goes to the polls on May 10 to elect a new assembly.
An opinion poll commissioned by the Indian Express-NDTV yesterday predicted 140-160 seats for the Congress and allies in the 294-member Andhra assembly, with between 120 and 140 seats for the ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP), a BJP ally.
The Congress alliance with the Telengana Rashtra Samiti seems to have worked in its favor, with a significant swing away from the TDP-BJP combine noted by pollsters. Party leaders said they also expected Andhra Pradesh to give the Congress, more parliamentary seats this time.
At the same time, the Congress was predicted to retain Karnataka, with a possible 110-120 seats in the 224-member assembly. The BJP, which claims Karnataka will be its “gateway” in the south, is projected to win 60-70 seats, around the same as its 1999 tally. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal-Secular, according to the survey, is set to make more of a dent in the BJP’s vote share than the Congress.
