Steel-Stemmed Lotus

In India nearly every political discussion sooner or later ends in the same question: Who will take over when 68-year-old Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru passes from the scene? Last week Indians got a strong hint on how Nehru himself proposes to answer the question. To replace hapless T. T. Krishnamachari, forced out of office by a scandal over government misuse of insurance funds (TIME, March 3), Nehru chose as his Finance Minister 62-year-old Morarji Desai, who was Minister of Commerce and Industry.

Desai is a paradoxical figure whom most Westerners--and not a few Indians--find hard to understand. An outwardly placid man, Desai devoutly copies all the personal habits of Mahatma Gandhi. He is a vegetarian, fasts 36 hours every week, generally drinks nothing but water--although at a party, to get into the spirit of things, he will sometimes take coconut milk. His views on sexual continence are so rigid that he once boasted that he had not had relations with his wife for 20 years. Almost alone among India's leading politicians, he has never traveled abroad. Chief reason: he is opposed to "injections of foreign substances into the body," i.e., inoculations.

Penholders & Prohibition. For all his other-worldly air, Morarji Desai has been described by fellow Indians as "a lotus with a steel stem." The son of a struggling schoolteacher, he was well started on a brilliant civil-service career under the British when he resigned his job to join Gandhi's independence movement in 1930. Of the 17 years between his resignation and India's independence, Desai spent more than six in British prisons. With independence, he emerged as Congress Party strongman in Bombay State, won a reputation as a hard-boiled politician who never forgot an injury or a friend.

His devotion to Gandhian principle is almost autocratic. As Bombay's Chief Minister, he decreed that all schoolchildren must use cheap penholders so that those too poor to afford fountain pens would not suffer from a sense of inferiority. Despite Nehru's objections, he saddled Bombay with a prohibition law that has cut deeply into government revenues, turned bootlegging into big business. To charges that he was arbitrarily imposing his own standards of morality on his fellow citizens, he replied: "I am not trying to reform anybody. I am merely trying to remove temptation."

Two years ago, when the Gujarati community of Ahmedabad rioted against Nehru's plan to submerge them in a huge, new state dominated by the Marathas, Desai--a Gujarati himself--first tried to shame the rioters into submission by staging a public fast in the Gandhian tradition. When that failed, Desai ordered the police into action. They opened fire on the mobs, injuring at least 100 people.

Cops & Conservatism. Fact is that Desai has never hesitated to ignore Gandhi's injunctions against violence, when necessary, in order to uphold the law. During the bloody rioting between Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs that racked India in the months before and after independence, Desai's skilled and vigorous handling of his police cut casualties immeasurably. In 1954 U.S. Ambassador George V. Allen publicly declared that Desai's Bombay had been selected as the site of a $30 million Standard Vacuum refinery because of its "remarkable stability."

In the long run, no one sets any fiscal policy in Nehru's India that does not suit Nehru himself, and among knowledgeable Indians, the Finance Ministry is often referred to as "the graveyard of political reputations"; of Desai's four predecessors in the job, two left under a cloud, two resigned over policy differences with Nehru.

But Desai is a man of greater political stature than any of his predecessors. He is considerably more conservative than Nehru in his economic views, outspokenly pro-Western and antiCommunist; Desai flatly insists that Karl Marx wrote his "cluster of erroneous theories" out of "personal fits of frustration." To India's businessmen, increasingly nervous about their prospects for survival in the quasi-Socialist economy envisaged by Nehru, Desai's appointment to the Finance Ministry last week came as a relief and a hope for the future.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.