13th Lok Sabha 1999
Jayalalithaa had consistently threatened to withdraw support from the ruling coalition if certain demands were not met, in particular the sacking of the Tamil Nadu government, the control of which she had lost three years prior. The BJP accused Jayalalithaa of making the demands in order to avoid standing trial for a series of corruption charges, and no agreement between the parties could be reached, leading to the government's defeat.
The main Opposition party, the Congress, could not muster enough support to form a majority government with regional and Left-wing groups. On April 26, the then President of India, late K R Narayanan, dissolved the Lok Sabha and called for early elections. The BJP continued to rule as an interim administration until the polling, the dates of which were announced on May 4, by the Election Commission.
As General Elections had previously been held in 1996 and 1998, those of 1999 were the third in 40 months. Their dates were spread over five weeks to allow for the deployment of security forces around the country's 31 states and Union Territories to stem electoral fraud and violence. Altogether 45 parties (six national, the rest regional) contested the 543 Lok Sabha seats.
During the lengthy election campaign, the BJP and the Congress generally agreed on economic and foreign policy issues, including the handling of the Kashmir border crisis with Pakistan. Their rivalry only boiled down into a personal confrontation between Vajpayee and the Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
The entry of Sonia Gandhi, a relative newcomer having been elected to the party presidency in 1998, was challenged by then Maharashtra Congress leader, Sharad Pawar, on the grounds of her Italian birth. This led to a crisis within the Congress and the BJP effectively used this as an electoral issue.
Another issue running in the BJP's favour was the generally positive view of Vajpayee's handling of the Kargil War, which had ended a few months prior to the polls and had affirmed and strengthened the Indian position in Kashmir. Also, in the previous two years, India had posted strong economic growth on the back of economic liberalisation and financial reforms, as well as a low rate of inflation and higher rate of industrial expansion.
The 1991, 1996, and 1998 elections saw a period of consistent growth for the BJP and its allies, based primarily on political expansions in terms of cultivating stronger and broader alliances with other previously-unaffiliated parties; and regional expansion which had seen the NDA become competitive and even the largest vote takers in previously Congress-dominated areas such as Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Assam. These final factors were to prove decisive in the election outcome of 1999.
The outcome which began on October 6 gave the NDA 298 seats, 136 to the Congress and its allies. Vajpayee was sworn in as Prime Minister on October 13.
| Dates: 10/10/1999-06/02/2004 |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment