Defectors to BJP lured to safe distances

INDIA's political circus has begun again following the installation of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government under its prime minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Over 100 opposition and regional party MPs are being invited to faraway places to prevent them from joining the BJP before the vote of confidence it faces in parliament at the end of the month.

According to senior opposition MPs, a substantial number of their colleagues from smaller, "regional parties were keen to join the BJP after Mr Vajpayee was sworn into office on Thursday, lured by inducements and promises of high office.

But the centre Left National Front - which is confident of forming the government with support from the Congress I party - is taking no chances, and doing its best to keep the unattached MPs out of the BJP's way.

The BJP and its allies control 187 MPs, 83 short of the required number in the 554 member Lok Sabha (lower house). To survive, Mr Vajpayee would have to engineer defections from either the Congress Party, which suffered its worst ever electoral defeat, or the National Front, an alliance of leftist and low caste parties, or else persuade a host of small, regional parties to support him. But he faces severe problems after the Congress and a clutch of regional parties reiterated their support for a National Front government headed by Mr H. D. Deve Gowda, chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka.

Meanwhile, the BJP government, committed to perpetuating Hindu hegemony, has India's 120 million Muslims worried. Mr Vajpayee added to Muslim insecurity when he pledged to build a Hindu temple on the site of the 16th century mosque demolished by Hindu zealots at Ayodhya in north India in 1993, believing it to be the exact birthplace of the Hindu god Lord Rama. He also reiterated India's claim over Pakistan controlled Kashmir.

The BJP has also said it would develop nuclear weapons to contain neighbouring Pakistan, modernise India's military and economic self reliance rather than overseas investment.

The BJP wants the disarmament conference at Geneva negotiating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to commit itself to a time bound programme for global elimination of nuclear weapons as the price for India to be a party to that treaty. India is the linchpin of the entire CTBT agreement as its reaction would determine Pakistan's, also a nuclear "threshold state".

"The BJP will destroy the secular and peace loving India the world has known," said Mr Salman Khurshid, a former junior foreign minister and a Muslim.

Analysts said the BJP's election success was also bound to encourage the extremist Shiv Sena, its' coalition partners in the westerns state of Maharashtra. Millions of Muslims hold the Shiv Sena BJP coalition responsible for organising the worst ever sectarian riots in Maharashtra's capital, Bombay, after the Ayodhya mosque's demolition, in which over 1,200 people died.

Mr Balasaheb Thackeray, the Shiv Sena leader who holds Adolf Hitler as a role model, claimed his party had "chastised" Muslims, and dared them not to assert themselves in any way or the pogrom would begin again.

But Mr Vajpayee is soft pedalling on his party's sectarian image and trying to project a liberal and secular outlook to earn the support of smaller, regional parties. However, it remains to be seen how successful he will be.