The Indian government was plunged deep into crisis yesterday after the defense minister quit and a key coalition partner withdrew support over a sensational arms bribery scandal.
The United News of India agency said minister George Fernandes had resigned, two days after the scandal broke.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's 17-month-old National Democratic Alliance (NDA) appeared to be in no immediate danger of collapse and Fernandes's move could calm some disaffected coalition members who had been demanding his head.
But the government still has plenty of questions to answer over a secretly filmed documentary which showed a web of public figures, army officers and bureaucrats apparently accepting money from journalists posing as arms merchants.
Opposition parties, scenting blood, have also promised to step up their pressure over the scandal that has also claimed several other senior figures.
Rival lawmakers almost came to blows outside parliament after proceedings in both houses were stalled for the second day by a deafening uproar.
Security guards had to form a line between two groups as they chanted slogans and surged menacingly towards each other.
The government earlier stood firm despite calls from opposition parties and national newspapers for Fernandes to quit.
That was too much for Mamata Banerjee, the mercurial leader of the regional Trinamool Congress party who had demanded the resignation of Fernandes and officials implicated in the documentary pending an inquiry.
Including Trinamool's nine lawmakers, the government had a fairly comfortable majority of more than 300 in the 545-seat lower house of parliament.
Trinamool's exit now leaves Vajpayee vulnerable to the perennial vacillations of the Telugu Desam Party, which supports the government from outside with a deciding 29 lawmakers.
To make matters worse for Vajpayee, another coalition partner with six lawmakers -- the Janata Dal (United) -- joined calls for Fernandes to go.
The documentary, made by an Internet news Web site, has already claimed the scalp of the ruling party's president.
Bharatiya Janata Party President Bangaru Laxman said the allegations against him were "baseless and malicious."
But he quit anyway after www.tehelka.com's footage showed him apparently taking 100,000 rupees (US$2,150) from the Web site's journalists to influence what was actually a fictional deal to supply the army with thermal-imaging cameras.
The Defense Ministry also suspended four officials implicated in the documentary and started questioning several other senior officers as part of an internal investigation.
The president of Fernandes's Samata Party also resigned on Thursday.
The scandal coincides with court hearings into the 15-year-old Bofors arms kickback case, which led to the defeat of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government in 1989.
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