INDIA: Congress forms new government

Sam Pillay

Seven days after India's voters ditched the Hindu chauvinist BJP-led government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh was shown in as India's 14th prime minister, at the head of a new Congress Party-led government.

The 71-year-old Singh, previously expected to be finance minister, became Congress's nominee for PM after Sonja Gandhi, the Italian-born president of the party which has governed India for about 40 of its 57 years since independence declined the post.

Congress won 145 seats in the 545-member lower house of parliament and formed the government with the support of 72 members from a dozen other parties, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist). With 44 seats, the CPI(M) is the third largest party in the Indian parliament.

Sonja Gandhi will remain Congress Party leader, and for the first time in modern India's political history, the prime minister will be the deputy party leader.

Singh was the architect of India's free market policies when he was finance minister from 1991 to 1996 in the PM Narasimha Rao's Congress government. A graduate of Punjab, Cambridge and Oxford universities with a doctorate in economics, and a former director of the Reserve Bank of India, Singh will be the country's first Punjabi prime minister.

In a media statement issued at the weekend of May 16-17, the CPI(M) warned: "The threat posed by the BJP and the communal forces continues to exist, despite their ouster from the central government. All the secular and democratic forces should remain vigilant to foil their designs."

From Green Left Weekly, June 2, 2004.

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From GLW issue 584