Chaitanya Kalbag

LUDHIANA, India, Nov 24, Reuters – Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi wound up an exhausting election campaign on Friday, addressing a sparse crowd standing up to its ankles in mud. 

Chief rival Vishwanath Pratap Singh ended his campaign jubilant. 

“Congress will be routed,” Singh told an impromptu roadside news conference in Uttar Pradesh state which he addressed sitting on the bonnet of his car. 

Gandhi, seeking votes for his Congress party in strife-torn Punjab, was surrounded by massive security. 

Most of India’s 498 million electorate, the world’s biggest, voted on Wednesday and Friday. The rest–Punjab, Sikkim and parts of Bihar –vote on Sunday. The first results should be announced shortly after polling ends. 

Metal detectors were used to check everyone going to Gandhi’s rally in Ludhiana, a major industrial town in Punjab, where Sikh militants are fighting for an independent state. 

Sikh bodyguards killed Gandhi’s mother and predecessor Indira Gandhi five years ago and he has been surrounded by tight security ever since. More than 1,900 people have been killed in the Punjab separatist campaign this year. 

Attendance was low and many of those who did turn up fled when rain came pelting down, leaving the rest standing up to their ankles in mud. The rain forced the cancellation of a second Gandhi rally on his first campaign trip to Punjab. 

Aides say Gandhi has been exhausted by three weeks of dashing around the country by plane and helicopter, addressing up to 20 rallies and working up to 20 hours a day. 

Congress workers have been embarrassed by the low turnout at some of them. At least two Gandhi rallies have been cancelled because so few people showed up, they said. 

By contrast, Singh ran an austere campaign to point up the difference between his pledge to bring honesty back to Indian politics and Gandhi’s apparently lavish spending. He attracted big crowds wherever he went. 

“I don’t think the Congress party will continue to keep (Gandhi). He has brought down the Congress government,” a smiling Singh said in Fatehpur, the Uttar Pradesh seat he expects to win. 

Gandhi’s main campaign theme was that the National Front alliance Singh succeeded in putting together, to the surprise of Congress, could not form a government from its disparate elements. 

Singh has shown no such worries. The adopted son of a minor princely family, Singh is leader of the Janata Dal party, the main element in the National Front alliance. 

Both sides said they were confident of winning an overall majority in the 545-seat parliament and there were no immediate indications of whether election-eve opinion polls showing a Congress loss were correct. 

Congress is generally expected to hold its own in the south, but the opinion polls suggested heavy losses in the northern Hindi-speaking region which dominates parliament. 

Gandhi needs to win well in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India’s Hindi-speaking northern heartland. The two states together elect 139 members of parliament. 

Pollsters believe Gandhi has been damaged in the two states by a surge of Hindu-Moslem violence over a sacred site in Uttar Pradesh claimed by both faiths. 

Interviews with voters emerging from polling booths in Patna–capital of Bihar state where the most ferocious religious violence occurred last month–suggested they were correct. 

Most said they voted either for the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has a seat-sharing deal with the National Front, or for the Communist Party of India (CPI). 

“The CPI will get most of the Moslem vote, 90 to 95 per cent,” said Rashid Akbar, a Moslem, after he voted. 

“Congress has lost the Hindu vote,” said flower seller Raj Kumar Bhagat, a Hindu.