India’s Congress party was in talks yesterday to finalize a coalition government, a day after its resounding victory in monthlong national elections.
Congress officials were meeting with leaders of smaller parties, officials said, to nudge its coalition over the halfway mark in parliament.
The Congress-led coalition won 260 seats in India’s 543-seat parliament, requiring just 12 more spots. The Congress, which on its own took 201 seats in parliament, won one of the most crushing electoral victories by an individual party in nearly two decades in India’s fractious political arena.
The victory defied expectations as Congress brushed aside the Hindu nationalist opposition and a legion of ambitious smaller parties.
The strong showing by the party, which is dominated by the powerful Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, laid to rest fears of an unstable, shaky coalition heading the South Asian giant at a time when many of its neighbors are plagued by instability, civil war and rising extremism.
Party officials said yesterday that it was likely Congress would prefer to ally itself with numerous small parties and independents — a move that would spare them from giving too many concessions or Cabinet posts to a larger party.
“We are very close to the magic figure of 272,” Rajiv Shukla, a party leader, told the NDTV news channel. “So we won’t require large parties.”
In the last parliament, Congress were dependent on the support of the communist parties for much of the term, hampering their efforts at economic reforms.
On Saturday, when votes were finally counted from an election that began in the middle of last month and stretched across five phases, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared victory saying voters had given his party a “massive mandate.”
For months, polls and political observers had predicted that neither of the country’s two main parties would emerge a clear winner, forcing an unstable and unwieldy coalition that could have conceivably included dozens of smaller parties.
But after the victory, analysts said that Congress reaped the rewards of dramatic economic growth during their last term and a series of high-profile pro-poor programs.
“It’s not just because it oversaw four years of 9 percent growth. What has probably helped was that its agenda was one of inclusive growth,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst in New Delhi.
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