Indian Congress eyes new allies for coalition

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India’s Congress Party began the task of cobbling together a government Sunday after steering its ruling alliance to a second term in office with a resounding win over its Hindu nationalist rivals.
Senior alliance leaders met to formulate strategy and to choose which parties it might approach about securing a parliamentary majority, having fallen just a whisker short of the required 272 seat majority. Party spokesman Janardhan Dwivedi told AFP that getting the handful of extra seats was “not an issue for the Congress,” with a plethora of smaller parties willing to team up.
With all results counted, India’s Election Commission said the Congress alliance - UPA - had won 261 seats, with the party’s individual tally at 206 - its best performance since 1991.
The main Opposition grouping led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - NDA - had bagged a mere 159 seats.
India has become used to unwieldy coalition governments which expend an inordinate amount of energy on simply staying together and not enough, critics say, on the job of policy implementation.
In the process the Congress alliance trounced the BJP-led Opposition grouping. It also saw off its erstwhile communist partners, who had abandoned the ruling coalition last year in protest over a nuclear deal with the US. The communists won 22 seats - a disastrous showing for the once-powerful party.
“The people have rejected both extremes - the left and the right,” said Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a political analyst and author of a book on Indian coalition politics. The victory means a second term for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 76, whose calm, pragmatic persona appealed to voters looking for political stability.