Gandhi’s floundering campaign hasn’t helped the Congress cause. The Italian-born widow of one prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and the daughter-in-law of another, Indira Gandhi, she entered the race with unparalleled name recognition but untested political skills. Her opponents have skillfully made her lack of Indian roots an issue; they regularly refer to her as an “alien.” An embarrassingly public search for a constituency she could easily win produced a wave of negative press coverage. And when she thought she had found a safe constituency, the BJP put forward a popular candidate who will force Gandhi to mount a serious campaign for the seat.
That doesn’t leave her much time to go after Vajpayee, even if he had any obvious weak spots. The economy is healthy: inflation is down to a record low 1.3 percent, industrial production is picking up and the stock market has hit unprecedented levels. There was a record harvest last year–200 million tons of grain–and a bumper crop this year. The BJP could have been a liability; it was once known for its rabid pro-Hinduism. But Vajpayee has curbed the party’s extremist factions and emphasized the BJP’s moderate, free-market reform policies. As a result, he is seen by many voters as a national leader and not the head of a particular community or a party. Even Muslims, who remain apprehensive of the BJP, turn out to hear him speak.
Gandhi and the Congress party have tried to make the war an issue. The party attacked Vajpayee for “lapses” that, it says, provoked the Pakistani invasion. Congress leaders have also asked when Vajpayee first discovered the infiltration and when he learned the identity of the raiders. “All these could be debating points,” says sociologist Dipankar Gupta of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “But these are hardly issues on which you can rally support in an election, particularly when the nation is gripped by the emotive issue of patriotism.”
That’s probably right. Speaking last week at a rally in the small northern Indian town of Muzaffarnagar, the prime minister knew just which buttons to push. After describing the fall of the government last spring, he told the crowd of 10,000: “Our neighbor saw the chance in this turmoil and intruded into Kargil [in Kashmir]. A patriotic surge swept across the country and our soldiers gave a fitting reply.” The crowd broke into cheers. Now all Vajpayee has to do is keep them cheering all the way to the polling station.
