It was a dubious victory. With her own reputation tarnished by association with Jayalalitha, Sonia Gandhi now faces the task of replacing the rising star of Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Over time, Vajpayee won enormous popularity as a man of peace, and a man of war. He had unveiled India’s nuclear weapon in a test that shocked the world last year, and followed up last week by test firing a missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads up to 2,000 kilometers. Both times, Pakistan responded in kind. Yet Vajpayee dampened fears of an arms race by making bold diplomatic overtures to India’s archrival–including a now famous bus trip to Pakistan this February. Vajpayee had also tempered his party’s economic nationalism, recently reviving free-market reforms and rekindling prospects for growth and foreign investment this year. In a recent newspaper poll, three out of four Indians said Vajpayee would make a better prime minister than Sonia Gandhi. After he officially stepped down last Saturday, Vajpayee vowed in an indirect slap at Gandhi to behave as a “responsible opposition.”
There was little joy in the Congress camp. “In fact the problems start now,” admitted Kapil Sibal, a Congress leader. Though it’s virtually certain President K.R. Narayanan will give Congress the first chance to form a new government, Gandhi will have to win support from perhaps 20 rag-tag parties, some just one-man outfits, to gain a parliamentary majority. She will have to reconcile the fierce ambitions of her own party hacks with these new allies, not least Jayalalitha, who is known to demand that visitors bow in her presence. Indeed the widespread view is that Sonia’s coalition can only be a mass marriage of dueling ambitions. “This will appear as patently unethical and may prove to be Sonia’s undoing,” says political commentator Dipankar Gupta of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Many Indians wonder if Sonia is prepared to lead the nation. She has never faced a press conference, and still reads out prepared texts in English or accented Hindi. Gandhi’s platform is a work in progress, and may prove too infirm to hold back pressure from powerful new allies to roll back free-market reform, or the opening to Pakistan. She also faces an ongoing probe into her late husband’s alleged role in a scandal involving kickbacks from a Swedish arms manufacturer. After the confidence vote, the Mumbai stock exchange crashed by more than 250 points. And Pakistan publicly reaffirmed the crowning achievement of Vajpayee’s diplomacy: the Lahore Declaration of friendship between India and Pakistan.
Vajpayee will play a caretaker role until a new government forms, but he is far more than a lame duck. Even during the final days of his administration, with Pakistan firing test missiles and opposition leaders lining up to denounce him in Parliament, Vajpayee showed no anxiety whatsoever. It was as if he knew “he would maintain the upper hand in the political gamesmanship” even if he lost the vote of confidence, says Gupta. In fact Vajpayee would be the instant front runner if an election were held today. And even before Gandhi had spent one day in power, many Indians were wondering whether she had set herself up for a quick fall.
