New Delhi--In a document dated March 2, 2004, the Catholic bishops' conference appealed to India's voters to elect candidates who respect life and promote human dignity, social equality, religious harmony, and national integrity.

New Delhi -- In a document dated March 2, 2004, the Catholic bishops' conference appealed to India's voters to elect candidates who respect life and promote human dignity, social equality, religious harmony, and national integrity. The bishops exhorted the faithful to fast and pray for peaceful, fair, and free elections. The text urged Catholics and all people of good will to discharge their civic duty with utmost seriousness.

Since then, the governing Hindu Nationalist Party, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has been defeated as the Congress Party, led by Sonja Ghandi, swept to power. Once elected, however, Mrs. Ghandi, a nominal Catholic born in Italy, declined the Prime Ministership, making Dr. Manmohan Singh, an economist and a Sikh, the new Prime Minister of India.

This change in government may defuse anti-Western and anti-Christian sentiments for the time being. "The people of India have voted for peace and social harmony," Catholic bishops' spokesman Father Babu Joseph Karakombil said. The people "have chosen not to give in to fundamentalism, not to mix politics and religion; they have demonstrated that they want a secular nation built on the values of tolerance and freedom," the Divine Word missionary told the Vatican agency Fides May 13, 2004 (Zenit, May 16).