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Indian prime minister wins time to prove majority
President pushes for no-confidence vote
March 31, 1997
Web posted at: 2:55 p.m. EST (1955 GMT)NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- India's prime minister has won four more days to garner enough support in the country's lower house of parliament to save his government.
India's President Shankar Dayal Sharma had asked Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda Monday to prove a majority in the country's lower house of parliament by April 7.
But the president agreed to extend the deadline for a vote of confidence to April 11, since a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in New Delhi was scheduled on the earlier date.
The request for a no-confidence vote in India's Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament, came a day after India's Congress Party withdrew its support for the prime minister and asked him to resign.
Without the Congress Party's support, Gowda's United Front coalition, with only about 190 of the 543 total seats in the Lok Sabha, risks losing the vote.
Nonetheless, Gowda said he will not resign, and will go forward with the no-confidence vote. According to Indian news agencies, United Front spokesmen say the 15 parties in its coalition remain united and intend to stick out the political crisis together.
But coalition members aren't saying how the Gowda government will survive the crisis, and nobody can predict whether it will survive. In addition to calling for Gowda's resignation, the Congress Party also has staked a claim to form the government that would replace his.
Since Congress also lacks enough seats in the parliament to form its own government, the party can only do so by engineering defections from the United Front coalition.
India may be headed for early elections
Such is the legacy of the hung parliament thrown up in last year's elections. If coalition efforts fail, then the country is headed for premature elections -- something most political parties wish to avoid.
If elections do take place, experts say, the only party that stands to gain anything is the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. It emerged in the 1996 elections as the single largest group in India's lower parliament and could make substantial gains if mid-term polls are held soon, according to an opinion poll last month.
India may lose regardless, both politically and economically. New talks between India and Pakistan, the first in three years, have been overshadowed by the new threat of internal political upheaval in India; they aimed to ease tensions between the bitter rivals.
And approval for India's new budget, proposed by Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, is also on hold. The parliament was scheduled to meet April 21 to talk about the 1997-1998 budget, which has been touted as growth-oriented.
Economists and industrialists had hoped the budget would help pick up economic reforms and stabilize investor confidence; now, its fate hangs in the balance, and Indian stocks are showing the lack of investor confidence. Indian stocks dropped more than 8 percent Monday on the news of the Congress withdrawal.
Correspondent Anita Pratap contributed to this report.
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- India, Pakistan start first talks in 3 years - March 28, 1997
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