Word: bjp
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...figure at the center of the election, and perhaps the most controversial politician in India, is Narendra Modi, Gujarat's chief minister. Modi, a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is hailed by his supporters as a modernizer who has built new roads, brought electricity and streetlights to villages and attracted new business to Gujarat. To his detractors, Modi will always be the man who stoked the sectarian tensions that made the 2002 riots possible. The riots followed a train car fire that killed dozens of Hindu pilgrims. Within hours of the blaze, later blamed...
...main role, though, will be to assess the level of support for Modi. The chief minister has recently been hit by the defection to the Congress Party of several senior BJP members, who describe their former leader as autocratic and megalomaniacal. "He wants power and for that he will do anything," says Dhirubhai Gajera, one of the BJP rebels, who spent a recent Saturday afternoon campaigning for his seat in Surat, a city of some 4 million people. "He overstates what he has done for this state in terms of progress, and even where there has been progress...
...That's rubbish, says Atul Shah, a BJP member from the neighboring state of Maharashtra, who was in Surat to support his Gujarat colleagues in the days before the first round of voting on Tuesday Dec. 11. "Gujarat is a model state and Modi has proved himself 10 out of 10." Pravin Naik, head of the BJP's Surat branch, says the idea that Modi was part of communal tensions or violence is a "whole myth." "There has not been a single incident of communal violence since [the 2002 riots]," he says. "Narendra Modi is the only competent chief minister...
...Meanwhile, India's actual opposition, led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is positively gleeful over the government's failure: Last Tuesday, BJP chief L.K. Advani derided Singh as the "weakest Prime Minister India has ever had," mocking his "opportunistic alliance" with the Left Front. Of course, the BJP had also agitated vociferously against the deal, but many suspect that had the hawkish, U.S.-friendly BJP been in power, they would have more likely embraced the nuclear treaty...
...Cynical posturing is a fact of political life in an impoverished India where politicians pander to populist sentiment. Congress came to power thanks to rural voters disillusioned with the BJP's promises of an urban, middle class "India Shining" while they remained dirt poor. The stalled nuclear deal is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the current administration. Other key initiatives of Singh's are also in trouble: A ban on child labor looks toothless one year on, while a scheme to provide every household in India with at least 100 days of work has been dogged by chronic...