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| Wednesday, 7 April 2004 |
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Gandhi heir enters Indian poll fray, politicians crowd vote-rich state AMETHI, India, Tuesday (AFP) Rahul Gandhi, great-grandson of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, filed his nomination papers to run in upcoming general elections as political heavyweights went full tilt in the vote-rich state of Uttar Pradesh. India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has given the country seven of its 13 prime ministers since independence in 1947 and accounts for 80 of 545 seats of parliament's lower house, besides being home to the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty. Aside from Gandhi, Uttar Pradesh was thronged with other politicians campaigning for the elections that opinion polls project will be won by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The elections are due to be held in five phases from April 20. Vajpayee went to his home seat of Lucknow, the state capital, where his deputy Lal Krishna Advani, who is on a cross-country election trek, teamed up with his boss before a crowd of around 20,000. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati, who uses one name, added fuel to the fire with shrill attacks on both the BJP party and the secular opposition Congress party of Rahul's mother, Sonia Gandhi. Rahul and his sister, Priyanka, rode into the family seat of Amethi on the roof of a car and were showered by rose petals. Sonia accompanied them as Rahul, 33, signed documents to contest the seat on behalf of the 119-year-old Congress party which dominated the nearly first half century of India's independence but now is seen struggling in the elections. Sonia, who took over the party reins six years after the 1991 killing of her husband, former premier Rajiv Gandhi, will file her papers from Rae Bareli, the bastion of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, until her assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Rahul, a financial consultant, said his father's spirit would guide him through the campaign in Amethi from which his father was elected three times - in 1984, 1989 and 1991 - the year he was killed by a female suicide bomber. "It gives me an opportunity to represent the same constituency as my father," Gandhi told AFP in Amethi, a dusty cluster of villages that were showered with electoral goodies during Congress's nearly four decades of rule in India which ended in 1996. In nearby Lucknow, Vajpayee attacked the Congress, saying promises made by Indira Gandhi to eliminate poverty remained a pipe dream. "Sonia Gandhi told me in parliament the BJP was daydreaming and we said we dream but we turn those dreams into reality and today our economic growth is 10.4 percent. Who is dreaming? Who has been successful in taking the nation forward?" Vajpayee said. "India's food production is up, the manufacturing sector is booming and we are repaying the external debt we inherited from our predecessor. Today, we are in a position to lend to others and still we have no inflation. Prices are stable and there is happiness. "Did anyone ever dream that our relations with Pakistan will improve to an extent that instead of shooting at each others across the borders we will be playing cricket?" the prime minister added. Vajpayee's BJP-led coalition is seeking re-election on the back of a robust economy and a nascent peace process with nuclear rival Pakistan against which India has fought three wars, two over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Advani echoed Vajpayee's words to applauding BJP supporters who turned out despite the beating tropical sun and the television broadcast of the second Test cricket match between India and Pakistan in Lahore. "India has 600,000 villages and we have pledged by 2020 not a single one of them will be without electricity, water, health or education," Advani said. Mayawati, a schoolteacher-turned politician who was pushed out of office last year by the BJP, also filed her papers from the state's Faizabad district. |
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