INDIA: Another Setback for Indira

BEFORE the polls opened, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi seemed confident and optimistic. Later, while her opponents smeared their foreheads with vermilion and danced in the streets of Calcutta, Indira was withdrawn and downcast. In last week's off-year elections in four of India's most important states, Indira's once all-powerful Congress Party emerged undefeated only in her home state of Uttar Pradesh. Elsewhere it went down to stinging defeats. The results were, in fact, so poor that they cast grave doubts on the Congress Party's ability to continue as India's ruling party after the 1972 elections.

The elections were especially important because Indira's party in most cases had schemed to bring them about. After the Congress Party's initial setbacks in the 1967 state elections, the four states --West Bengal, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh--had ended up with weak, ineffectual governments, which Indira subsequently suspended, placing the states under direct President's Rule. After a period of political fence mending, Indira hoped that her party would regain its dominance in the new elections.

Communist Victory. Her hopes were rudely rebutted by the results. They showed that Indian voters are increasingly disenchanted with the Congress Party, and are voting along communal and regional lines (see following story). Another lesson: the small parties, once lost among the myriad of India's miniparties, have a chance of defeating the Congress monolith if they join electoral alliances. In the fertile northeastern state of Bihar, where the small parties failed to unite, no single group emerged with enough strength to form a government. As a result, the Congress Party, which ended up 42 seats short of a majority, is attempting to organize a government by lining up the support of independent legislators. But in the northern state of Punjab, the Sikh communalist party, the Akali Dal, entered into a working arrangement with the Hindu Jana Sangh Party that will enable the two parties to form a coalition government.

The Congress Party's most stunning setback came in India's most strategic state, West Bengal, which borders East Pakistan. It also contains India's largest concentration of industry and its most miserable city, Calcutta. In West Bengal, the twelve-party United Front, which is dominated by Peking-lining Communists, won 214 seats in the 280-seat legislature, while the Congress Party's holding dropped from 127 seats to only 55. There was little doubt that the United Front would now put together a government that may well be headed by a Maoist chief minister.

Special Torture. But there was considerable anxiety about how the new government might behave. In 1967, the United Front government ruled for nine turbulent months. On instructions from leftist ministers, the police stood aside while workers illegally picketed, and sometimes pillaged, their plants. In more than 1,000 instances, the workers subjected their helpless employers to a special Bengali torture--the gherao. They kept their superiors trapped in their offices, often without recourse to sanitary facilities, until they acceded to the often unreasonable union demands. Soon West Bengal was in a dangerous state of disorder, with its industry grinding toward a standstill. Indira placed the state under New Delhi's rule.

Most Indian political experts believe that the United Front will behave somewhat better this time in order to keep the Prime Minister from reimposing President's Rule on West Bengal. That may be overly optimistic. In all likelihood, the Communist victory there and the process of political fragmentation elsewhere in India forebode a period of increasing instability and chaos.

The Fires of Hatred

For four terrifying days, maddened rioters surged through the streets of Bombay, burning, looting and battling police for control of India's most westernized city. When calm was finally restored last week, 52 Indians lay dead, more than 650 were injured and nearly 3,500 were under arrest. Only eight days before, Moslems across the subcontinent in Calcutta, angered by what they felt was a newspaper's slur of Mohammed, exploded in a brief outburst of violence that cost five lives. The two clashes were the latest manifestations of the communal hatreds that have plagued India for generations--and are the chief obstacles to the long-cherished dream of Indian unity.

The coming of independence, which might have been expected to bring Indians together, instead exacerbated the problems of its linguistic, regional and religious animosities. In Indian parlance, the feuds are lumped together under the word communalism. The term once connoted a beneficial form of cooperation but in the last decades of the British Raj came to mean precisely the opposite. Communalism has long been one of India's paramount concerns, and there is every indication that the process of fragmentation is speeding up.

Border Dispute. The Bombay riots were a classic example of regional chauvinism. In recent years, at least 50 regional-minded organizations called senas (armies) have sprung up across India. The most potent of these is Bombay's Shiv Sena, formed in 1966 by a hot-tempered political cartoonist named Bal Thackeray.* A fierce anti-Communist who admits to an admiration for Adolf Hitler's nation-building abilities, Thackeray emerged as a political force in 1967, when he and his followers engineered the defeat of Krishna Menon's bid for re-election to Parliament. Since that time, Thackeray has fought hard to obtain a better break for the natives of Maharashtra State, of which Bombay is the capital; in particular, he worked to get more white-collar jobs for them, charging that outsiders from the neighboring states of Mysore and Kerala hold a disproportionate number of these eagerly sought posts in Bombay. His war cry is "Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians," and he has been pressing the Indian government for several months for a resolution of Maharashtra State's long-pending claim to 814 villages in Mysore.

Last month Thackeray coolly announced that henceforth no government minister would be allowed to enter Bombay until a decision was made. The ban was challenged by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Morarji Desai less than two weeks later, and the Shiv Sena turned out in force. In the ensuing fracas, Desai's car seriously injured two of Thackeray's troopers, and a riot followed. Bombay's police fought back bitterly--all but .one of the 52 dead were killed by police bullets. The riot damage was awesome. Five suburban rail stations were burned, 34 buses went up in smoke, and more than 100 private cars were burned. Despite the best efforts of the police, the rioting ended only when Thackeray, who was jailed on the second day of the riots, sent orders from his cell that peace be restored.

Hindu Mistrust. The Bombay affray focused attention on regional antipathy, the latest communalist problem to surface. Religious hatred, however, has been a serious concern for years. At least 100,000 Hindus and Moslems died in the vicious clashes that marked the division of former British India into the Indian Republic and Islamic Pakistan in 1947. For a time, the religious wounds seemed to be healing: between 1954 and 1959, only 367 clashes were recorded, but then the trend reversed. In 1964, the temporary disappearance from a Kashmir mosque of a sacred hair from Mohammed's head ignited trouble all across India. In 1967 alone, there were more than 200 outbreaks. The number al most doubled last year, the worst since independence.

Many Hindus mistrust Moslems on principle. "It is very difficult," asserts Professor Balraj Madhok of the pro-Hindu Jana Sangh Party, "for a religious-minded Moslem to be patriotic --Islam does not believe in territorial nationalism." Other Indians disagree, feeling that India's 70 million Moslems support Pakistan in its feuds with New Delhi. The accusation is denied by Moslems, who point out that they chose to stay in India, and they charge Hindus with discrimination despite the fact that India's President, Dr. Zakir Husain, and Chief Justice Mohammed Hidayatullah are both Moslems.

Caste Problems. The dark shadows of Hindu caste prejudice, illegal since 1950, are just as pervasive as religious differences. Food and Agriculture Minister Jagjivan Ram, himself a member of the fourth and lowest caste, the untouchables, says that "the overpowering influence of the caste system has not been eradicated but has become inherent in the entire Indian society."

Kshatriyas and Vaisyas, though high-caste Brahmans, today no longer visibly flinch if an untouchable sits next to them in a bus or restaurant but they will not, if they can help it, lease a house, flat or room to one. At village council meetings, untouchables are often forced to sit apart. In Andhra Pradesh early last year, a 19-year-old untouchable youth, accused of stealing a few rupees worth of cooking utensils, was tied up and burned alive.

Is any solution in view? Indian Express Columnist Nandan Kagal warned that India seemed engaged in a "dance of death" and that "the prospects of In dian unity seem bleaker today than at any time since Indian independence." Times of India Editor Sham Lai, in a signed editorial-page column, said that "a poor country of India's size cannot cope with its problems unless it learns to place the national interest above every parochial interest." Government officials, however, seemed intent on ducking decisions. Home Minister Y. B. Chavan confined himself to saying that he considered the Bombay uproar "most unfortunate." Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made no statement at all.

* Originally, Thackeray's family name was Thakre. His father decided to change the name, so Thackeray says, because of his great admiration for the writings of William Makepeace Thackeray.

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