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By Elizabeth Roche
, Agence France-Presse
NEW DELHI: As the countdown
begins to national polls next year, India’s coalition government
faces rising inflation, internal security threats and a stalled
civil nuclear pact with the US, say analysts.
“The mood is far from upbeat,
the government’s report card has little to show—not much
substance in it,” said political analyst Rasheed Kidwai.
Troubles facing the Congress-led
administration are expected to take the sheen off festivities
planned Thursday to mark its four years in office.
Inflation has accelerated to a
44-month high of 7.83 percent, raising fears in the left-leaning
government of a voter backlash in general elections due by May 2009.
India’s inflation “is indeed
worrying,” said Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram last
week, amid predictions that prices were headed even higher.
According to syndicated political
columnist Neerja Chowdhury, inflation is the “most important and
biggest challenge” confronting the government.
Price rises, including of staple
foods, have hit the hundreds of millions of poor India, whose
support is vital at voting time. Indian political wisdom holds that
when the price of onions goes up, “politicians weep.”
Though the problems contributing
to inflation—higher crude oil and food prices—are a global
phenomenon, “people only feel the pinch of high prices,” said
analyst and pollster Yashwant Deshmukh.
“That hurts them and they’re
bound to be asking: ‘Is this the government which said it was with
the masses, that we voted for?’”
Compounding the government’s
woes have been a series of deadly bomb attacks over three years in
the cities of New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad—with the latest
killing 63 in the tourist centre of Jaipur only last week.
“Security is another issue
affecting the common man. It looks like the government is incapable
of providing minimum security to the people,” said Deshmukh.
On the diplomatic front, a major
civilian nuclear pact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh worked to
clinch with Washington “seems to be headed nowhere” with the
communists who prop up the minority government in parliament
“determined to oppose” the deal, said Kidwai.
The pact was aimed at allowing
India, which tested atomic weapons in 1998, to buy nuclear
technology and plants to power its economic growth without signing a
non-proliferation treaty.
Senior Communist Party of India
leader D. Raja told AFP on Tuesday that “the Left has made it
clear that we cannot support the deal.”
Politically, the Congress party
which had governments in about half of India’s 29 states when it
took office in New Delhi four years ago, has suffered a series of
poll drubbings at state level.
“The Congress now has
governments only in about half-dozen states,” said Kidwai.
On the positive side of the
ledger, the Congress, which until 2004 ran single party governments
for decades, has proved it “can successfully run a coalition,”
said Chowdhury.
She was referring to the more
than 20 parties that joined together after the May 2004 polls to
form the United Progressive Alliance, headed by the 123-year-old
Congress.
In the past four years, economic
growth has averaged close to 9 percent “which is remarkable,”
she said.
However she added that “the UPA
story has been one of opportunity lost. It promised to deliver for
the common man but its policies have benefited the well-to-do more
than the masses.”
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