Of Sacred Cows and Squint-Eyed Uncles

In teeming India, everything happens in superlatives, including elections. Next week some 270 million people, the largest free electorate in the world, will be eligible to vote as the nation chooses a new, 515-seat Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament. The voting will continue for ten days, and in one state alone (Kerala), 60,000 people will be needed to count ballots.

Confronting the voters will be the most crucial choice since India won independence 23 years ago. On one side is Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, 53, imperious daughter of the late Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira wants "a fresh mandate" for her New Congress Party so that she may pursue her populist policies, which so far have not gone very far toward solving India's multitudinous problems. Squared off against Indira is one of the oddest political alliances ever hatched. The four-party coalition, formed in January, consists of the right-wing, free-enterprise Swatantra Party; the Hindi-speaking, anti-Moslem Jana Sangh; the Opposition Congress Party, a split-off from Indira's Congress Party; and the Samyukta Socialist Party (not to be confused with the older Praja Socialist Party). Asked why hejoined so bizarre a grouping, Swatantra Boss M.R. ("Mi-noo") Masani replied by quoting a local proverb: ''In a family a squint-eyed uncle is better than no uncle at all."

The alliance was spurred by the Opposition Congress Party, whose leaders are still bitter about the split over party leadership in November 1969. Though Indira managed to keep 228 seats, she was left as the leader of a minority government dependent on India's two Communist parties and a regional party to remain in power.

Kali Reincarnate. The conflicting ideologies of the coalition members have made the alliance an uneasy one, at best. Bitter enemies sometimes found themselves unwilling partners. In south Bombay, for instance, Opposition Congress Party Boss S.K. Patil was forced to seek election in a neighboring state so that his arch foe, Samyukta Socialist George Fernandes, could run.

The alliance has no common program but to oust Mrs. Gandhi. Its candidates portray her as a dictator and imply that she is a reincarnation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, who wears a necklace of human skulls and bears dripping severed heads in her hands. Says Mrs. Gandhi of her opponents: "I want to get rid of poverty. All they want to do is get rid of Indira."

Mrs. Gandhi has charged that the Jana Sangh wants to do so quite literally--by assassinating her. The idea of violence is not all that remote; in the past month, some 100 persons have died as a result of electoral quarrels. Nevertheless, Indira does not shrink from the huge, open-air rallies that are the mainstay of an Indian campaign. In Hyderabad last week, a hail of shoes and stones was aimed at the rostrum as she spoke. None of the missiles struck her, and Indira, unshaken, inquired: "Has someone opened a new sandal shop in Hyderabad? If so, he must be making a fortune."

Socialist Solutions. "She is the only man in a Cabinet of old women," said one Indian observer when Mrs. Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966, alluding to the fat and gossipy old men who then ruled her party. Up at 5 a.m. and rarely to bed before midnight, she delivers as many as 40 speeches a day. During the six-week campaign, she will have visited all of India's 19 states, traveled tens of thousands of miles, often in a caravan of gleaming white World War II-vintage jeeps, and spoken to an estimated 100 millon people.

Her unvarying theme is India's desperate need for Socialist reform. "Socialism aims at lessening the economic disparities among people," she says, "and we have no greater cause for discontentment than the disparities between the rich and the poor." Indira also stresses the importance of family planning, the decentralization of monopolies, the agricultural revolution and the need for small-business opportunities. Her desire to rule with a clear parliamentary majority is fired by her sense of the urgent need for economic development. "If we don't move faster, people aren't prepared to wait for us," she says. "They'll try to take the solution into their own hands."

Mrs. Gandhi reminds voters to look for the New Congress Party's symbol on the ballot. Since perhaps 70% of the voters are illiterate, all parties use symbols (see above), and some ballots bear a score or more. Given the importance of the sacred cow in Hinduism, the New Congress symbol could hardly be more effective--a cow and a calf.

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