New Indian Prime Minister, Diverse Cabinet Sworn In

NEW DELHI —  The head of India’s first Hindu nationalist government, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was sworn in as prime minister Thursday with a conspicuously diverse Cabinet as he battled the clock to widen his support.

The televised oath-taking, held in a domed palace built for the British viceroys, was a sterling opportunity for Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party to hammer home that it is blind to religious creeds and caste hierarchy.

In addition to the 69-year-old Vajpayee, who was foreign minister in the late 1970s, 11 new ministers took their oaths of office.

Among them were Urban Affairs and Environment Minister Sikandar Bakht, a Muslim; Health and Family Affairs Minister Sartaj Singh, a Sikh; Agriculture Minister Suraj Bhan, an activist for India’s “untouchables,” who occupy the lowest rung of the Hindu social ladder; Welfare Minister Karia Munda, who is from an impoverished tribe in the state of Bihar; and Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj, the BJP’s most visible woman.

Former BJP President Murli Manohar Joshi became India’s new home minister, and the finance portfolio went to former army officer and deputy parliamentary leader Jaswant Singh.

Pramod Mahajan, BJP general secretary, became minister for defense and parliamentary affairs. The lawyer who defended the assassins of Indira Gandhi, Ram Jethmalani, was named law and justice minister.

Each new Cabinet member swore in Hindi or English to “do right to all manner of people.”

“We will show you our majority on the floor of the house,” Vajpayee said after the ceremony. President Shankar Dayal Sharma has given him until May 31 to squeeze a majority from the badly deadlocked Parliament.

That may be impossible for the BJP, shunned by many other parties in multicultural India because it mixes religion and politics. P. V. Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee’s predecessor, also attended the ceremony under the glittering chandeliers of India’s presidential palace. His Congress (I) Party, which had dominated national politics since independence in 1947, took a drubbing of historic dimensions in the recent elections, opening the way for the first national government formed by the 16-year-old BJP.

Congress and the “Third Front,” a loose constellation of leftist, low-caste and regional parties that boycotted the swearing-in, have vowed to topple the new government. The front has scheduled a national day of protest for Monday “to defend the secular fabric of our country,” a Communist Party official said.

The coalition has its own prime ministerial candidate, H. D. Deve Gowda, who governs the state of Karnataka. The Congress Party gave him its formal support Wednesday, the same day Sharma asked Vajpayee to form a government--and some smelled a conspiracy between the president and Rao.

Since Vajpayee could fail to achieve a majority and be out of office within days, they reasoned, Rao might be summoned, as leader of the second-largest party in Parliament, to try his luck at forming a government.

The Cabinet met Thursday night for the first time, and as one of its first official acts offered aid to neighboring Bangladesh, where a tornado this week killed more than 500 people.