NEW DELHI, June 1 -- India's new Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda was sworn in Saturday, becoming the third person to hold the post in little more than two weeks. As former Prime Ministers P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee looked on, Deve Gowda took the oath of office along with his Cabinet at Rashtrapati Bhawan, the official residence of India's President Shankar Dayal Sharma. Earlier this week, Sharma invited Deve Gowda and his United Front alliance of 13 centrist and leftist parties to form a government after Vajpayee resigned rather than face a parliamentary vote of confidencehe was almost certain to lose. Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party edged out Rao's Congress party in a recent round of inconclusive polls, but the BJP was unable to garner enough support in Parliament to sustain itself in power. The defeat of the long-dominant Congress party of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty triggered a period of instability in the nation's politics that is likely to continue under Deve Gowda, who must now hold together an unwieldy coalition of competing interests. Deve Gowda, until recently the chief minister of India's southern state of Karnataka, has no previous experience in national-level politics. He will be India's first prime minister who does not speak Hindi, the country's official language. The constraints of the new United Front governing coalition have also forced Deve Gowda to surround himself with a number of Cabinet ministers who have more experience in India's hinterlands than in the country's power centers of New Delhi and Bombay.
'It will be difficult for Mr. Deve Gowda to function effectively as prime minister,' an editorial in The Pioneer newspaper proclaimed Saturday. 'He carries an onerous responsibility of running a coalition government and will have to do a lot of tightrope walking.' But the new government is set to be one of the most representative in India's history, with ministerial posts going to politicians from a diversity of religions, castes and regions which historically have been shut out of the country's national leadership. Several of the ministers sworn in Saturday are from the lowest rungs of India's rigid caste system as well as the country's Muslim minority community. The Cabinet will also have the highest-ever representation of politicians who, like Deve Gowda, hail from the country's sparsely populated south. But many important states such as industrial giants Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh will not be represented. 'The contrast in the leaderships of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the United Front is so striking that they represent two different images of Indian society,' Surendra Mohan, a United Front leader wrote in The Hindu newspaper. '(The United Front) represents the periphery as against the metropolis, the vast farming rural masses as distinct from industry.' However, the new government will also be heavily dependent on Rao's Congress party for its political survival. Congress, which holds a crucial bloc of 136 seats in the Lok Sabha house of Parliament, has pledged support to Deve Gowda's government but has declined to join the coalition as a governing partner. Underscoring his government's need to stay in the good graces of the Congress party, Deve Gowda Saturday told reporters he was committed to continuing a massive economic reform program which was the hallmark of the Rao government. Pointing to Rao who was seated next to him at the press briefing, Deve Gowda said 'I fully agree with him that the reforms are important. ' International investors, who have poured billions of dollars into the country since the reforms began five years ago, have been nervous about the fate of India's economic liberalization following the Congress party's ouster. In an apparent effort to allay those fears, Deve Gowda appointed one of the reform program's chief architects, former Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram to his Cabinet. Deve Gowda said he will seek a vote of confidence on June 10 to prove his government commands a majority of seats in Parliament.
