Hindu nationalists on Monday threatened to launch a nationwide agitation against Sonia Gandhi’s ”foreign origins” and promised to boycott the new prime minister’s swearing-in ceremony.
The Bharatiya Janata party, which was defeated in general elections, said it wanted to ”give vent to the sense of outrage felt by millions of patriotic Indians” and would not be attending the inauguration.
The BJP’s statement came as India’s president, Abdul Kalam, invited Gandhi and her coalition partners to form the next government.
After a brief flurry of speculation that Gandhi would step down as a prime ministerial candidate because she had been ”hurt by personal attacks”, Congress party MPs were told late on Monday night that she would meet the president on Tuesday and be sworn in on Wednesday.
Gandhi will become the fourth member of the Nehru-Gandhi clan to run India since it became independent in 1947.
A hardline section of the Hindu nationalist movement has stepped up a campaign against her foreign roots — she was born in Italy — saying that only those born in India should occupy the highest elected office in the land.
”We are a Hindu nation with a Muslim president and about to get a Christian prime minister,” said Tarun Vijay, the editor of the Hindu nationalist movement’s Panchjanya newspaper.
”No other democracy would allow this to happen. I respect Sonia Gandhi. She has followed our traditions but she should not be prime minister.”
There were signs that the BJP would use the issue of Gandhi’s heritage to whip up anti-Congress party sentiment. At least one BJP member of India’s upper house has offered to resign rather than address Gandhi as ”prime minister”.
Uma Bharti, a former Hindu monk turned firebrand politician who runs one of India’s largest states, said on Monday that there was a ”conspiracy to put a foreigner to take up the PM’s post”.
But the BJP, which has 138 seats, said it would not boycott the new Parliament.
Gandhi’s United Progressive Alliance will command 317 out of 543 seats in the Parliament, but even the decision by communist parties to support the new government from outside the coalition could not stem the slide in India’s stock market.
In what Indian television was describing as ”Black Monday”, the shares on the Mumbai stock exchange plummeted by more than 11% to 4 505 — the biggest one-day point fall in its 129-year history.
The market crash, which started when the election results were announced last week, has cost Indian investors more than two-trillion rupees (£25-billion, R300-billion).
Yet many analysts said the worst was over. Gandhi’s economic team is taking shape, the spectre of the communists running ministries is receding and, most importantly, Gandhi’s key economic adviser, Manmohan Singh, is certain to become finance minister.
”Singh was the architect of the original reforms led by the Congress government in 1991,” said Alok Vajpeyi, the president of DSP Merrill Lynch.
”So I would expect the new government policy to be congenial to economic growth.”
The left said it had decided to sit outside the government because the Congress party and communists square off against each other in key states including Kerala and West Bengal.
”We do have a common understanding though, and that is to check the rise of Hindu nationalist forces,” said Atul Kumar Anjaan, the national secretary of the Communist Party of India.
”We shall bear that in mind. This should indicate why we will not destabilise the coalition.”
Pakistan also welcomed Gandhi’s intention to press ahead with peace talks which it is hoped will end five decades of enmity between the south Asian rivals.
A Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson, Masood Khan, confirmed that officials would travel to New Delhi this month for negotiations on confidence-building measures.
Gandhi’s late husband, the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, visited Pakistan in 1989 and met his Pakistani counterpart, Benazir Bhutto.
The pair agreed to resolve all divisive issues between the two countries, including the status of the disputed state of Kashmir, through talks.
But Bhutto’s first government fell the next year, and the peace moves floundered. – Guardian Unlimited Â