Strength in Weakness

As the Prime Minister who presided over the worst election setback in the history of India's ruling Congress Party, Indira Gandhi might well have expected to be dismissed from office, for her lackluster campaigning and uncertain leadership contributed to the debacle. Yet, as Congress Party leaders gathered in New Delhi last week to decide what to do next, Indira seemed almost certain to hold her job.

The reason was ironic: many of the party's kingmakers, who had planned to oust her, had themselves been voted out of Parliament and were thus in a weaker position than Indira, who won her own constituency in Uttar Pradesh by a 3-to-1 margin. Most of the surviving leaders, especially the powerful state chiefs, rallied to Indira--though hardly for the best of reasons. They prefer a relatively weak Prime Minister, who will let them run their own affairs with a minimum of direction from New Delhi, to someone like Indira's main rival, former Finance Minister Morarji Desai, 71, who undoubtedly would like to curb their independence. To give Desai less time to collect supporters, the party's parliamentary board moved the selection of Prime Minister forward by three weeks, to March 12. Indira was also helped by a feeling that the party should avoid any further upheavals. Said one state chief: "Enough blood has flowed already."

Decline of Discipline. The hemorrhage was grave. The Congress Party lost 96 seats in the lower house of Parliament, held on to only a 17-seat majority in the 521-seat body. It lost control of five of India's 17 states, and all of the major cities.

Why? The factors making for the Congress Party's unpopularity are not new; they have simply grown worse and more wearisome with the passing of time. For one thing, the party's discipline dissolved; in most states, dissident members bolted and created rival parties that siphoned off millions of votes. For another, India's warring opposition parties finally began to join forces. They accounted for more than 50% of the ballots in three previous elections, but their votes had often been canceled out through disunity. This time they formed alliances to overwhelm the Congress Party, whose share of the total vote fell from 44.7% in 1962 to 39.6%. In the hunger-racked West Bengal, 13 parties got together behind a former Congress Party leader and won control of the state. In Kerala, Bihar, Madras and Orissa, opportunistic alliances unseated Congress-controlled state governments.

Many Indians blamed the Congress Party and government for rising grain prices, which have jumped about 17% in the past year, with the result that the average worker must now spend 60% of his wages on food. Food shortages have forced many Indians to switch reluctantly from native rice to U.S.-supplied wheat. In such drought-stricken states as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the government's grain-distribution program has been so ineffective that thousands of people suffer from acute malnutrition and cattle are dying in the streets.

Instability Ahead. Millions of voters nursed other grudges against the Congress Party, which on the state level is often arrogant, inept and corrupt. Farmers resented the fact that they must bribe local officials, mostly Congress Party machine men, in order to buy fertilizer or to get state-backed loans. Entrepreneurs bridled at the way local bureaucrats expect payoffs for transacting even the most minor pieces of business.

The elections generally reflected more a protest against the Congress Party than an endorsement for the opposition parties. Nevertheless, the election brought into being for the first time a potent opposition force. The rough and tumble of multiparty politics portend a time of instability for India, especially in the important states of Kerala and West Bengal (Calcutta), where governing coalitions of Communists and other left-wingers were formed last week.

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