INDIA:SIX JAILED Indian MPs are to be freed temporarily to enable them to participate in next week's tight no-confidence vote in parliament.
The MPs, convicted of crimes including murder and extortion, will on July 22nd help decide the fate of prime minister Manmohan Singh's government and of the contentious civilian nuclear deal with the US in a vote which all anticipate will be close in the 543-member house.
With every ballot crucial, political parties have been driven to scouring the country's high-security prisons for MPs to vote. But Singh's coalition, anxious to fend off elections amid rising inflation and an economic slowdown, appears to have most to gain since five of the six imprisoned MPs belong to its allies.
"They [the imprisoned MPs] would be released [under constitutional provisions] for two days and escorted back to prison when the voting ends," an election commission official in Delhi said yesterday.
The most infamous of the six MPs is Mohammed Shahabuddin from the lawless eastern Bihar state, serving a life term for killing a political opponent and facing prosecution in 40 other cases of murder and kidnapping.
A local court has granted him bail on condition that he pays his expenses and those of his police escort for the trip to parliament.
Long shunned Rajesh Ranjan, a fellow National Socialist Party MP, also from Bihar, imprisoned for murdering a local trade unionist and still feared in the state, now finds himself feted by supporters.
"Both are important to the vote of confidence and are happy to be out of prison and spend time with fellow MPs in Delhi," senior party leader Ramkripal Yadav said.
Meanwhile, Mr Singh's desperation to remain in office took an unusual turn when the government caved in to ally Ajit Singh's demands and renamed Lucknow airport north of Delhi after his father Charan Singh, prime minister briefly in the early 1980s.
"It will facilitate better take-offs and landings," federal finance minister P Chidambaram said to much laughter justifying the move.
If the government loses the confidence vote, early elections would be called ahead of the May 2009 deadline.
The India-US nuclear deal, over which 59 communist MPs withdrew support for Singh's Congress Party-led coalition earlier this month, would also stand annulled.
The four communist parties that had supported Singh's administration since 2004 claimed the nuclear deal with the US would make Indian foreign policy subservient to Washington's influence.
The government is convinced the atomic deal which allows India to engage in civil nuclear commerce globally and retain its strategic weapons programme while remaining outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, was crucial to helping it meet its soaring energy requirements and sustain its high economic growth rate.
Mr Singh also reiterated that there was nothing in the agreement with the US that would proscribe future Indian nuclear tests, hobble its strategic deterrence, or be dictated to by Washington with regard to its foreign policy.
Once ratified, the agreement with Washington would end India's nuclear apartheid, reversing over three decades of US policy imposed after Delhi's first atomic test in 1974.