Hindu Revivalists Claim Mantle of Stability in Wake of Gandhi’s Death : India: They say they are better able to bring order to the nation than is the Congress Party. It is still searching for a new leader.

NEW DELHI — As the son of slain Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi somberly collected the ashes from hisfather’s funeral pyre Sunday, India’s brief period of political truce ended with the nation’s powerful Hindu revivalist party asserting that it alone can now bring stability to a nation in deepening crisis.

The revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party charged that Gandhi’s disheveled Congress-I Party would lead the nation to the same fate that befell Gandhi.

Co-opting the stability issue that was Gandhi’s campaign slogan during the still-unfinished election that claimed his life, Bharatiya Janata accused the long-ruling Congress-I of betraying its own slogan during the five days it has spent desperately searching for a new leader.

“The entire plank of stability was engineered around one individual,” said BJP President Murli Manohar Joshi, whose party campaigned to unite India along religious lines with a Hindu supremacist call for “Ram Rajhya,” or realm of the Hindu demigod Lord Rama. That campaign has thrust Bharatiya Janata to the brink of victory for the first time in Indian history.

“If they can’t have stability in their own party, how can they bring stability to the country? Where is the leader of the Congress even now?” Joshi asked.

When the same question was put to Congress-I spokesman Pranab Mukherjee during a Sunday evening press conference, Mukherjee made clear that no new party president will be named until after a scheduled leadership meeting Wednesday.

“We have not failed to give stability,” he said. “If you look at the sequence of events, you will see that it (naming a new president) has not been unduly delayed. First, there was the cremation, and now there will be the ashes ceremonies.”

In fact, the party did announce its chosen replacement for Gandhi within 48 hours of the former prime minister’s assassination last Tuesday: his Italian-born widow, Sonia. But in spite of continuing efforts to draft her, Sonia Gandhi, 43, flatly refuses to take a job that she has made clear she abhors.

Mukherjee’s only reply to the revivalist party leader’s blistering attack on Congress-I was a half-hearted protest that Bharatiya Janata had committed political theft by stealing the slogan of the party of three generations of Gandhis and Nehrus, who have ruled India for all but six of its 44 independent years.

“This crude attempt of hijacking another party’s slogans could not work, as the electorate will see through the game,” Mukherjee said, reading from a prepared statement.

“I can assure my friends in the BJP that they need not concern themselves about the leaderless or rudderless condition of Congress. Congress can take care of itself. It has faced many crises in the past. . . . And even in today’s tragic situation, Congressmen are united and determined to overcome the crisis.”

Mostly, though, Mukherjee wanted to discuss Rajiv Gandhi’s ashes Sunday, that and the three days of ceremonies, processions and the 400-mile journey they will make from the capital before reaching the banks of the Ganges River in Allahabad, where they will be strewn onto the sacred waters of India.

In what critics charge is a cynical, though subtle, resumption of the election campaign for seats still at stake in parliamentary elections now postponed until mid-June, 22 copper urns, one for each Indian state, will be handed out early today to state Congress-I leaders, who will take them to state capitals throughout India for ceremonial rites.

The largest of the urns will leave New Delhi at 11 a.m. today, accompanied by Sonia Gandhi and her daughter, Priyanka, and son, Rahul, who will take it to Allahabad and the confluence of three of India’s holiest rivers--the Ganges, the Yamuna and the Saraswathi--the same spot where the ashes of Gandhi’s slain mother, Indira, and his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, also were strewn.

Mukherjee explained that it will not be possible for party leaders to meet and choose a successor for Gandhi before Wednesday because they will all be busy with the ashes ceremonies.

For opponents of the Congress-I, particularly the Hindu revivalists who have built one of the strongest grass-roots organizations in the nation, the ashes are a metaphor for the Congress-I itself. And they insist that the party’s campaign to transform the overwhelming sympathy for Gandhi into votes, just as Gandhi himself did to win a huge majority in Parliament soon after his mother’s assassination in 1984, will fail not only because the party has run out of Gandhis, but because the nation’s political landscape is different now.

“Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination was very much different from this one,” BJP’s Joshi said when asked Sunday about the potential wave of sympathy. “In Mrs. Gandhi, they saw a savior, and they reacted both sympathetically and politically. And then there was Mr. Gandhi, whom they saw as a clean-cut newcomer with a clean slate. Perhaps they thought this young man would be able to deliver the goods.

“But, within the first two years of Mr. Gandhi’s rule, that feeling changed. . . . Now people feel that this sort of faith or confidence in any of the Congressmen is missing.”

Joshi’s press conference came after a two-day meeting in New Delhi of the revivalists’ executive committee, which spent the weekend quietly plotting the party’s post-assassination strategy to add stability to its already effective election crusade to build a birthplace temple to Lord Rama on the site of an ancient mosque. The party has succeeded in making the temple a symbol of identity for India’s 750 million Hindu majority and a powerful campaign symbol, as well.

That strategy came through clearly in a committee resolution made public Sunday:

“The path ahead is strewn with dangers. There is a big vacuum at the very heart of the nation--we have been without a proper government at the center for the last six months--and violence is raging all around. . . . The economy is a shambles. The trade deficit has reached an all-time high. The mounting foreign debt, the skyrocketing high prices, the galloping inflation and rapidly growing unemployment have pushed India to the brink of an impending economic crisis.

“Congress-I today is a crowd without direction. With the departure of its only leader, the party is in complete disarray and is facing deep crisis--a total vacuum. Its response to the situation has been one of panic, and this once-great political party is reduced to groping for tears of condolence for a last chance to retrieve their political fortunes. . . .

“As things are, only the Bharatiya Janata Party stands out as a beacon of stability, high moral character and discipline amidst the spreading sea of violence, corruption and moral degradation,” the BJP resolution said.

There was a sharp contrast between the two parties’ Sunday news conferences.

The BJP met the press in the city’s modern, air-conditioned Parliament Building Annex, with reporters seated at microphones and spaced evenly around the perimeter of a large conference room. When called upon, each asked questions in turn.

But, an hour later, at the aging Congress-I headquarters nearby, no resolutions or manifestoes were distributed, just the printed schedule of the urn ceremonies. The room was sweltering in 110-degree heat. Ancient ceiling fans whirred shakily, and reporters stood on ramshackle chairs, with several of them shouting out questions at once.

And there was yet another sign in the Congress-I’s sweaty meeting room of the present level of politics within the party. Plastered to the back door and wall of the building were several photocopies of an open letter in the Hindi language from a local newspaper editor in Rajiv Gandhi’s home district of Amethi.

It was entitled, “Why, Sonia?” and it was typical of the continuing pressure that the party is putting on her to enter a political world she not only detests but has publicly stated she would never join, especially now after it has claimed the life of her husband.

The lengthy appeal, which has been appearing elsewhere in the country as well, began by telling Sonia Gandhi that, if she does not assume the party presidency, “the country will disintegrate, there will be civil war, many will be killed and India will be slave to superpowers again.”

“Dear Sonia, this is a period of trial for you. Wipe your tears, put on your white sari and come out of the house like a fighter. If you don’t achieve power, then martyrdom is waiting for you.”

But the chances are that Sonia Gandhi hasn’t seen the letter. Aside from Friday’s cremation ceremony and her two days of public mourning beside her husband’s coffin while it lay in state last week, she has remained at home with family and friends, making clear she has no interest in seeing politicians.

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