2009 Election and UPA Back in Power

The country went to the polls in April–May 2009 to elect the 15th Lok Sabha. Posters for the Congress campaign showed three faces: those of Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi (party president), and her son, Rahul Gandhi (who had become general secretary of the party in 2007), confirming the hold of the ‘First Family’ and the dynastic trend in the party. The

main opposition party, the BJP, projected L.K. Advani as the prime ministerial candidate. (Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not keeping well by this time.) Several regional parties too were in the fray, some of them allied with the BJP and some ready to support the Congress if the occasion demanded.

The election results showed that the Congress was able to increase its tally of seats, though it could not get a majority on its own. The reasons for the endorsement probably were that the middle classes were satisfied with the economy which was doing quite well, and they favoured the nuclear deal with the US; the welfare schemes initiated by the government at the behest of the NAC under Sonia Gandhi appealed to many in the rural sector, especially the women and the underprivileged, and had begun to show positive results; and Rahul Gandhi was expected to and, probably did, appeal to the younger voters.

The UPA was once again in a position to form the government. Manmohan Singh was sworn in as the prime minister on May 22; as per norms, he had submitted his resignation on May 18 to President Pratibha Patil. Manmohan Singh, thus, became the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1962 to be re-elected after completing a full term.