[Reuters]

Published date: 1st March 1998

1 March 1998

Reuters News

English

(c) 1998 Reuters Limited

NEW DELHI, March 1 (Reuters) – Indians waited uneasily on Sunday for official results from a drawn-out
election that looks set to confirm their worst fears of more political instability in a hung parliament.

State television Doordarshan forecast large gains for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies, while private television channel TVI saw the BJP’s arch-rival Congress and the United Front coalition winning enough seats to cobble together a new government.

The two polls clearly predicted sharply opposed outcomes in the 545-seat lower house of federal parliament.

But neither poll gave any one group a clear majority, and political analysts said India’s second general election in as many years will only yield another transitional parliament that cannot last a full five-year term.

Jaipal Reddy, the spokesman for the caretaker United Front government, was dismissive of the exit polls. “Here, exit polls reflect the urban/upper class bias of the people who conduct the exit polls,” he said. “The hollowness of these exit polls will be exposed by the election results.”

More than 605 million people were eligible to vote in what was billed as the world’s largest democratic
exercise, The final big phase of voting ended on Saturday.

Counting of votes will start on Monday morning and a clear picture of winners and losers is expected by
Tuesday evening.

Voting for all but six of the 543 seats at stake has been completed and the rest will trickle through until June 21. Two seats are nominated by President K.R. Narayanan.

But for most Indians Sunday brought a brief respite from an election marked by vote-rigging and violence in which at least 152 people have died since February 14.

N. Bhaskara Rao of the Centre for Media Studies cautioned that neither of Saturday’s exit polls was definitive.

“You’ve got to take this with a pinch of salt,” Rao said. “Recent polls have all proven wrong. Neither of yesterday’s polls detailed its methodology. Exit polls are not a final verdict.”

Prannoy Roy, president of New Delhi Television Ltd and a former pollster himself, sald the Doordarshan exit poll gave the BJP 244 seats and the private channel gave it 208. “That’s a difference of 36 seats that fits in with both polls’ declared margin of error,” he said.

Roy noted that the British Broadcasting Corp had got three exit polls wrong in a row and only called it right for Britain’s last general election when Labour won a decisive majority.

Nearly unnoticed in the flurry of electoral arithmetic was one of the last official acts of Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral’s United Front government, which has been a lame-duck administration since its resignation exactly three months ago.

The government on Saturday refused to extend the term of a commission of inquiry into the 1991
assassination by a suicide bomber of former Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The commission’s interim report, released in mid-November, triggered the collapse of Gujral’s government when Congress withdrew its lifeblood support over a demand that the United Front expel one of its southern allies named by the inquiry for possible links with Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels.

The inquiry’s final report was expected to determine if a widespread conspiracy had led to Gandhi’s murder.

Earlier last week 26 people condemned to death by a south Indian court for involvement in the assassination filed an appeal before India’s Supreme Court. It was not clear what effect the abortive inquiry would have on the mercy petition.

On Sunday Gujral’s government unveiled a draft five-year plan for the 1997-2002 period and again it was unclear if the new government would accept the weighty document’s prescriptions.