Following the Indian military’s decisive victory over Pakistani forces at Kargil in July 1999, it was not surprising that the 20-party coalition National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, won a landslide victory in the general elections held between September 5 and October 3, 1999.
On April 17, 1999, the government, led by a coalition of passionate orators, A motion of no confidence in the House of Representatives fails by one voteWhile the Bharatiya Janata Party contested 339 seats ahead of the 1999 elections and vacillated over whether to form a coalition or alliance, the Bharatiya Janata Party contested the remaining seats to 20 allies.
By the time Vajpayee was sworn in as prime minister for the third time on October 13, 1999, at age 75, the BJP’s next generation of leaders had moved from front stage to backstage, and in the July 2002 presidential elections the BJP played its trump card in “Missile Man” APJ Abdul Kalam, whose candidacy helped the BJP further consolidate its strength.
A rebellious Sharad Pawar was expelled from the Indian National Congress along with two others on 20 May 1999 for criticising Sonia’s foreign origin, and founded his own political party, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), on 10 June 1999. Sonia’s role in the 1998 elections was largely confined to party campaigning, but under her leadership the Indian National Congress contested 453 out of 543 seats in the 1999 elections. Although the party’s tally fell to an all-time low, Sonia consolidated her position within the Indian National Congress and gave a tough fight to the BJP in the 2004 elections.
Voting and counting
The elections, postponed due to the Kargil War, which ended on July 26, 1999, were finally held between September 5 and October 3. For the first time since independence, an eight-phase schedule was announced. Three of these phases had a total of only four seats, effectively making it a five-phase election, also a first for the country. Vote counting began on October 6, 1999, and the results were announced a few days later.
Of the 619.5 million eligible voters, 371.6 million or 59.99% of adults voted. Of these, 295.7 million were women. Of the 4,648 candidates, the highest number, 32, contested from Gonda in Uttar Pradesh. Former president of the Indian Wrestling Federation, Braj Bhushan Sharan Singh, won from Gonda on the BJP ticket. Of the 284 women candidates, 49 were elected.
TN Seshan, who served as the Chief Election Commissioner from December 12, 1990 to December 11, 1996 and is credited with improving the way elections are conducted in India, ran as the Congress candidate from Gandhinagar in Gujarat against the BJP’s LK Advani. However, the career bureaucrat lost to the veteran politician. As the Samajwadi Party (SP) did not field a rival candidate, former prime minister Chandra Shekhar won in Ballia, Vajpayee retained his Lucknow seat, and Murli Manohar Joshi won in Allahabad.
The 1998 elections were the first in independent India to feature no prominent candidate from the Nehru-Gandhi family. Maneka Gandhi ran as an independent from Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh. In the 1999 elections, Sonia Gandhi, wife of Rajiv Gandhi, made her electoral debut from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and won.
BJP’s vote share remains unchanged, Congress’ vote tally falls further
The BJP won 182 seats this time, the same as in 1998, but the Indian National Congress’s tally dropped to 114 seats, down from 141 in 1998. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) won 33 seats, the Telugu Language Party (TDP) 29 seats, the SP 26 seats, the Janata Dal (United) 21 seats, the Shiv Sena 15 seats, the Bahujan Samaj Party 14 seats, the Dravidian National Congress (DMK) 12 seats, and the National Congress Party (NCP), contesting its first general election since being formed by Sharad Pawar on 10 June 1999, won 8 seats, while Mamata Banerjee’s Indian National Congress won 8 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party 7 seats and the CPI 4 seats.
The Uttar Pradesh election results came as a shock to the BJP, where a clash of egos between Vajpayee and Chief Minister Kalyan Singh took its toll. Of the 85 seats in the state, the party’s tally dropped to 29 in the election from 58 in the previous election. Vajpayee still managed to muster a majority (303 seats) for his coalition.
Vajpayee’s critics expelled, Modi gets a foothold
The post-war glow faded quickly as the BJP suffered a series of embarrassing incidents. In 2001, an undercover journalist decided to carry out a sting operation, which resulted in BJP leader Bangaru Lakshman, from a Scheduled Caste (SC), being caught on camera in his room at the party headquarters accepting a bribe of Rs 100,000 in exchange for cooperation in a fictitious defence deal.
The agitation ended when he resigned and was replaced by Jena Krishnamurti, after three new Indian states were created: Uttarakhand (later renamed Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh), Jharkhand (from Bihar), and Chhattisgarh (from Madhya Pradesh).
Meanwhile, during a meeting with diplomats, BJP’s general secretary (organisation) KN Govindacharya, appointed by the Rashtriya Sangh, called Vajpayee the party’s Mukota (Wearing a mask) He added that the “real leader” was party chief LK Advani, whose criticism of Vajpayee led to his expulsion from the party.
Govindacharya initially claimed he was taking time off to study the impact of globalisation on ordinary citizens, but he never returned to the BJP and was not defended by Advani or the RSS. A similar conflict with Vajpayee led to Kalyan Singh being removed from office and briefly replaced by septuagenarian Ram Prakash Gupta. Rajnath Singh subsequently replaced Gupta as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh from October 2001 to March 2002.
In another major reshuffle in October 2001, the incumbent Gujarat Chief Minister, Keshubhai Patel of the BJP, was asked to step down to make way for 51-year-old Narendra Modi. Sanjay Joshi, then general secretary of the BJP’s Gujarat unit, replaced Modi as general secretary, a post held by an RSS leader.
Sonia takes on critics in parliament
The BJP was also busy putting out the fires of a minor rebellion against Sonia, who had taken over as party leader from Sitaram Kesri in March 1998. Kesri “resigned” after the BJP Working Committee (CWC) passed a resolution to that effect.
Her biggest critics within the Congress party have been Rajesh Pilot, a former Indian Air Force officer, and Jitendra Prasad, a political advisor to former prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao and father of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jitin Prasada.
With party leadership elections scheduled for late 2000, both Pirot and Prasad had their sights set on the party leadership. Pirot died in a road accident in June 2000, and Prasad contested against Sonia but only managed to secure 94 votes. Sonia won more than 98% of the votes, demonstrating her superiority over the party and its politics. Prasad passed away in January 2001.
Presidential polls and surprise candidates
In a subtle move to sideline all the veteran politicians aspiring for the presidency, the BJP suddenly put forward the name of Kalam, the pioneer of India’s missile programme, as its candidate. The opposition parties suggested the name of Captain Lakshmi Sahgar, a former associate of Subhash Chandra Bose. With the support of Mulayam Singh Yadav of the SP and Sharad Pawar of the NCP, Kalam won the election. The vice-president’s post was held in August 2002 by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the first BJP leader to be elected, who, like Vajpayee and Advani, was one of the founders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJS).
His support for the BJP’s presidential candidate in 2002 paid off handsomely for Mulayam when the BSP-BJP government collapsed in August 2003. In a tacit understanding with the BJP, the SP leader became the Chief Minister on August 29, 2003.
A small step towards generational change and a coalition government
While the BJP’s original leadership, active since the BJS’s founding in 1952, was ageing, a new generation was gaining power in both state and central government. Consecutive victories in state assembly elections in Gujarat (2002, Modi), Madhya Pradesh (2003, Uma Bharati, replaced by Babulal Gaur in August 2004), and Rajasthan (2003, Vasundhara Raj) boosted the party’s confidence.
Delimitation was necessary as a 1976 policy change had frozen the parliamentary and assembly constituencies until the 2011 census. The Vajpayee government decided to continue freezing the assembly seats in the state till 2026, but the coalition was in favour of rationalising the boundaries of the constituencies in the state and the apportionment of voters among them. To do this, an Electoral Delimitation Commission was constituted in July 2002 under the leadership of retired Supreme Court judge Justice Kuldeep Singh.
meanwhile, Gujarat was devastated by sectarian riots in February 2002.Modi was also heavily criticised within the party.
One of Modi’s fiercest critics was former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Shanta Kumar. But at a BJP national executive meeting in Goa in April 2002, second-generation leaders including M. Venkaiah Naidu (later vice-president) and Arun Jaitley (later Union minister) blasted Modi’s critics. Following the Goa meeting, just before the July 2002 presidential elections, BJP leader Jena Krishnamurthy was replaced by Naidu.
While the BJP was preparing for the next general elections in alliance with other like-minded parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party was becoming overconfident that it could win again without actually fighting. Rising star Pramod Mahajan was dismissed from the Vajpayee government on 29 January 2003 to help prepare the Naidu government for the 2004 general elections.
The elections were scheduled for September-October 2004, but young BJP leaders persuaded Vajpayee to bring them forward, arguing that now was the right time for the party to win. The Young Turks were confident that their “India Shining” campaign, combined with the party’s “goodwill” among the people, would ensure an easy victory. This “overconfidence” led Vajpayee to dissolve the Lower House six months before the end of his term, and instead the National Assembly elections were held in April-May 2004.
