India's government faces confidence vote

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India's government faces a too-close-to-call confidence vote Tuesday that could scuttle a landmark nuclear energy accord with the United States and lead to early elections.

The vote caps a week of intense politicking that has seen the government rename an airport for a lawmaker's father, promise a high-level job to another, and -- two rival politicians allege -- hand out millions of dollars to many others in an effort to survive.

But hours ahead of Tuesday's vote, observers said the Congress Party-led coalition that has governed India since 2004 was anywhere from one to 10 votes short of the 272 it needs in a full house and was banking on as many as 10 opposition lawmakers to abstain.

Keenly aware that another government fell a decade ago after losing a confidence motion by a single vote, both the Congress party and its opponents were doing whatever they could to muster their forces.

Hospitalized lawmakers were being wheeled into Parliament to vote and a handful jailed for crimes ranging from murder to extortion had been temporarily released from prison.

If the government loses, the nuclear pact -- seen as the cornerstone of a budding strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington -- will likely be finished, and early elections will probably be called for later this year, months before the government's term ends in May.

With inflation running at nearly 12 percent and economic growth slowing, the government is desperate to avoid such a scenario.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had no choice but to call the confidence vote after communist political parties withdrew their support for his government to protest the nuclear deal, which they fear will draw New Delhi too close to Washington.

Singh has argued that India, which imports 75 percent of its oil, needs the deal to power its energy-hungry economy.

Under the agreement, India would open its civilian reactors to international inspections in exchange for nuclear fuel and technology, which it has been denied by its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and testing of atomic weapons.

Singh opened the debate on the confidence motion Monday, telling lawmakers the deal "was taken in the full confidence that we are doing so in the best interests of our people."

But the agreement has also challenged the views of many in India's political class, whose wariness of the United States dates back to the Cold War, when New Delhi had warm ties with the Soviet Union.

That has left the government facing its former communist allies, who have lined up alongside the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and a smattering of increasingly powerful regional and caste-based parties to bring down the government.

The communists had provided the government with its parliamentary majority, and to replace them the Congress Party cut a deal with the regional Samajwadi Party, a one-time enemy.

But its coalition is still short of an absolute majority in the 543-seat lower house of Parliament, which led to the dealmaking seen in the past week.

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