It appears, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has come back with a stronger heart and new and improved strength (is Mrs. Sonia Gandhi noticing?) after his recent operation and it also appears Mr. L K Advani is keeping is heart hale and hearty. And both are fighting it out in front of the voters in the race to be the Prime Minister of India in May 2009.
Singh, Advani Swap Barbs as Polls Near: India Votes
April 13 (Bloomberg) — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and chief rival Lal Krishna Advani lashed out at each other, raising the political temperature three days before the first votes are cast in general elections.
Advani, prime ministerial candidate for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, branded Congress party incumbent Singh a “weak” leader who had devalued the office by having to bow to party chief Sonia Gandhi over key decisions.
Singh used a press conference in Mumbai today to hit back, accusing 81-year-old Advani of wringing his hands in frustration while one of his chief ministers “condones a pogrom targeted at minorities.”
That was a reference to Narendra Modi, the controversial BJP chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, where more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in 2002 riots after a fire on a train claimed 58 lives, largely those of Hindu pilgrims.
Opinion polls suggest neither of India’s main political alliances will be able to win a clear majority in the elections, which end on May 13.
“Mr. Advani has the unique ability to combine strength in speech with weakness in actions,” Singh said. “This is not the kind of strength we need.”
Advani went on the offensive as he campaigned today for his party in the southern state of Kerala before the first round of voting on April 16.
‘Weak Prime Minister’
Singh “has been proved a weak prime minister, particularly because he has for the first time since democracy devalued the high office of prime minister,” Advani said in a televised press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala.
In the run-up to voting, Singh, 76, and Advani have frequently sparred over their ability to lead a young nation.
The slowdown in the economy, militant violence and tensions with Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks last year, have sparked a debate on the qualities of the leading contenders for prime minister during the campaign.
Former finance minister Singh was picked to be prime minister by Congress’s Gandhi after the last polls in 2004, as she decided to stand aside to spare the party criticism over her Italian origins.
Singh heads the federal government in New Delhi and is expected to remain in office if a Congress-led coalition is voted back to power. Advani has repeatedly termed him a weak leader who needs to get approval for key decisions from Gandhi, the wife of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The alliances headed by Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are opposed by a third group of communist and regional parties. The so-called third front is not expected to declare a candidate for prime minister before the vote.
Heart Surgery
Singh, who has been challenged to a televised debate by Advani, underwent a bypass surgery in January, and today said he has been given a “clean bill of health” by his doctors.
“The people of India should judge me by my performance rather than the abusive language of Mr. Advani,” he told reporters in Mumbai.
He said that food security for hundreds of millions of poor remained his priority, and added the government’s policies were helping the Indian economy recover from the impact of the global financial crisis and recessions in leading export markets.
Since declining the premiership four years ago, Gandhi has wielded power from behind the scenes.
Her backing enabled Singh to force through a landmark civil nuclear co-operation deal with the U.S. in the face of opposition from Communist allies, which provided the government with its parliamentary majority.
In Brief:
* The Samajwadi Party, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, a former chief minister of India’s most-populous state of Uttar Pradesh, pledged to abolish schools providing expensive education in English and reduce the use of computers to save jobs, the Times of India reported yesterday, citing the party’s manifesto.
The party, supported by sections of the underprivileged, is against mechanized farming as it denies jobs to impoverished laborers, the newspaper said.
Uttar Pradesh sends the highest number of lawmakers to the lower house of parliament, and is run by the Samajwadi Party’s chief rival, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party.
* In Kerala, police asked BJP supporters to remove their shoes before greeting Advani as he arrived to campaign in the southern state, Headlines Today television channel reported.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram had a shoe thrown at him last week by a journalist angered over the minister’s reply to a question relating a Congress party leader alleged to have played a role in anti-Sikh riots in 1984.
Latest Comments:
* “I have full faith in my brother. He is hard working. He means well. He is, according to me, qualified. So one day he will. He will do a good job of it,” Press Trust of India quoted Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, daughter of Sonia Gandhi, as saying when asked about brother Rahul’s suitability to one day lead the country.
* “I don’t agree that the Congress party promotes dynastic rule,” Rahul Gandhi told a press conference in Kochi, Kerala. Rahul, a top campaigner for the Congress party, which his mother leads, is the son of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Rahul’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi, and great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, were also prime ministers of India. Rahul said the issues facing the poor were of prime importance, and whether he would one day lead Congress was an irrelevance.
* “The Prime Minister had said the country’s resources belonged to minorities first; this is vote-bank politics. But the BJP’s stand is that the poor have the first right on the country’s resources,” Press Trust of India news agency quoted BJP leader Narendra Modi as saying at an election rally in the eastern state of Jharkhand.
Poll Schedule:
Elections in 543 parliamentary constituencies in the world’s biggest democracy will be held on April 16, April 22, April 30, May 7 and May 13. The voting is staged to enable security forces to fan out across the country to secure ballot stations.
Counting of votes will take place in all constituencies on May 16.
Opinion Polls:
The elections will probably result in a fragmented verdict with no existing political alliance able to form a government, a poll by Star News-Nielsen said last week. The Congress party-led ruling coalition may win 203 seats in the 543-seat lower house, with 191 for the opposition BJP-led alliance, it said.
A survey in India Today magazine in the first week of April showed the United Progressive Alliance, headed by Congress, may win 190 to 199 seats, while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance may get between 172 and 181 seats.
On March 22, an opinion poll by Star News and AC Nielsen Co. said the UPA would win 257 seats, short of the 272 needed for a majority. The NDA would have 184 lawmakers in the new parliament.
Economy:
India’s $1.2 trillion economy expanded 5.3 percent in the three months to Dec. 31 from a year earlier, the slowest pace since 2003, after a 7.6 percent gain in the previous quarter, as the world’s worst recession since World War II lowers output and demand for Indian goods overseas.
Central bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao, who has cut borrowing costs five times since mid-October, said last week policy will be tailored to arrest a steeper-than-estimated moderation in growth.
Declining overseas orders and shrinking local demand may make it difficult for India to achieve its 7.1 percent growth estimate for the year that ended March 31, 2009, according to Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the prime minister’s top economic adviser. The current estimate would be the slowest pace of expansion since the 12 months to March 2003.
Prime Minister Singh’s government has announced three fiscal stimulus packages.
India’s annual inflation rate slowed to 0.26 percent in the week to March 21 from a year earlier, the slowest pace in at least two decades
By Bibhudatta Pradhan and Paresh Jatakia @ http://www.bloomberg.com
