Gujarat Legislative Assembly Dissolved, Modi Remains Chief Minister
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Modi dubbed Milosevic of Gujarat. |
By
Zafarul-Islam Khan, IOL South Asia Correspondent
NEW
DELHI, July 19 (IslamOnline) - Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi
resigned this evening and asked the state Governor Sundar Singh
Bhandari to dissolve the state legislative assembly. The Governor
readily accepted the advice and asked the pogrom-tainted Chief
Minister to remain as "caretaker" chief minister till a new
government is sworn in after the elections. In other words, the
elections will be held under an administration headed by Modi.
Modi's
gamble is to force early elections before February 2003. He has been
keen on forcing early elections to benefit from the communal
polarization of votes after the anti-Muslim pogroms in the state
wherein his administration played a certain role according to many
human rights and political organizations' reports. According to most
recent reports even the burning of train bogey at Godhra, seems to
have been engineered by people, who took advantage of it to spread the
fire all over the state. In Modi's calculation any delay will nullify
the positive effects of the pogroms for his party.
India's
powerful election commission has opposed early elections in the state.
The election commission has the power to reject state government's
request for early elections. Modi's plan to overcome this hurdle is to
invoke a legal provision that there should be new elections if the
period between two sittings of the legislative assembly is more than
six months. In his view, the Election Commission will have to conduct
elections next October since there will be no sitting since the
assembly last met on April 5.
In
the current state legislative assembly the BJP has 117 legislators out
of 181. The Congress Party claims that it will win 80 percent of the
seats in the next elections. If municipal elections are any
indication, this may not be wide of the mark. The Congress has just
placed a former BJP stalwart and a former chief minister, Mr Vaghela,
as its state unit chief. Vaghela is seen as more than a match for Modi
who faces dissent even within his own party.
Meanwhile
in Delhi, a delegation of prominent citizens, led by former Prime
Minister IK Gujral, met the 3-member Election Commission today and
returned with an impression that there was no likelihood of an early
poll in Gujarat "whether or not the state assembly is prematurely
dissolved".
"Determination
of the date of elections and the conduct of the polls are the
prerogative of the election commission which appears inclined to wait
until it is satisfied that the right conditions prevail", the
delegation of the Forum for Fraternity and Reconciliation said in a
statement after the meeting.
The
delegation was informed that the Gujarat state's electoral rolls would
be revised before the polls, it said. The delegation told the
Commission that in the continuing environment of insecurity and
uncertainty in the state, advancing elections would be inimical to a
free and fair poll.
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