India: A Clear Mandate for Mrs. Gandhi

FOR ten days they thronged to the polling stations. Voters turned out from the snowswept Vale of Kashmir to the tiger-infested jungles of Assam. They came by tractor and motorcycle, on carts drawn by camels and bullocks, and most often on foot. There were youths in bell-bottoms voting for the first time, and newlyweds who married in the morning and voted in the afternoon. A 110-year-old woman was carried by her great-grandson. Women frequently outnumbered the men, and some bore babies in their arms. Others appeared in their finest saris and jewelry. Sweetmeat vendors did a brisk business. When a cow gave birth to a calf outside a polling booth, everyone hailed it as a good omen. Officials of the New Congress Party, whose symbol is a cow nursing a calf, immediately ordered a shed erected.

Beyond Expectation. Many did not know how to write their names. But most seemed to know their minds, and for an astonishing number that meant a vote for Indira Gandhi, 53, the handsome daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru who has run India for the past five years. At week's end, it was clear that an overwhelming majority of India's voters had put aside traditional caste, religious and language allegiances to give Mrs. Gandhi a firm mandate to lead the world's second most populous nation for another five years. With 518 elective seats at stake in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, her New Congress Party was assured of 339 and stood a chance of winning enough for a two-thirds majority when all the ballots were counted. Said Indira's Finance Minister Y.B. Chavan: "The mandate is very clear for the onward march of the people to socialism."

As party workers beat drums, danced in the streets and showered her with marigolds, Mrs. Gandhi appeared on the lawn of her modest bungalow in New Delhi gowned in a gay red and yellow sari. "I am not the least surprised," she told newsmen, though many observers had feared that her decision to hold elections a full year ahead of schedule was a dangerous gamble. Those who predicted her defeat, she suggested, might "eat crow." In truth, the victory was far beyond the expectations of even her most optimistic advisers. Nobody expected Indira to be defeated, but some figured that she would fall short of a 261-seat majority and be compelled to form a coalition with the Moscow-oriented Communist Party of India and a number of smaller parties. In fact, she will need no coalition at all. As one Indian put it: "Indira not only vanquished her enemies, she vanquished her friends."

The election utterly shattered a plethora of opposition parties. The Opposition Congress Party, which was formed in 1969 when the old Congress Party split in two after Indira challenged the power of the "Syndicate" bosses, had won only 16 seats at week's end. Voters for the most part rejected both the extreme left and right--as well as many of the rich. S.K. Patil, Bombay boss of the Opposition Congress Party, was defeated, as were Swatantra Party Chairman "Mi-noo" Masani and Samyukta Socialist Party Leader Madhu Limaye. One who did manage to keep his seat was Morarji Desai, Indira's old Opposition Congress foe, though his margin was narrowed from 125,000 votes in 1967 to 32,000 last week. Also re-elected were Jana Sangh Leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Rajmatas (Queen Mothers) of Gwalior and Jaipur (see color), and V.K. Krishna Menon, the scourge of Turtle Bay when he headed India's delegation to the United Nations. Now 74 and somewhat less excitable, he ran as an independent.

Child of the Nation. An irony of Indira's extraordinary showing was that the old conservative bosses who once ruled her party chose her to replace the late Lai Bahadur Shastri in 1966 primarily because they thought they could manipulate her. Though no modern leader has been so carefully groomed for leadership as Indira was in her father's house, there was no hint that her sense of duty would become one of mission, even destiny. As Nehru's only daughter, she grew up "a child of the nation," known and loved by all. She saw her parents and grandfather frequently carted off to jail. As a teenager, she organized children demonstrators--"the Monkey Brigade," they were called--for Mahatma Gandhi.

Years later, when her widowed father had become India's first Prime Minister, Indira served as his official hostess. She met most of the world's leaders and observed all the drawing-room machinations of power. In 1959, party officials asked her to take what was in effect the nation's second most powerful position --the presidency of the Congress Party. After Nehru's death in 1964, she became Minister of Information and Broadcasting. Trying to explain her hold on the people, who turned out for rallies in numbers that frequently exceeded those attracted by her father, one political commentator observed: "Her father was a dreamer, an idealist who did not act decisively. The people loved Nehru, but they are impressed by her ability to make decisions and make them firmly and fast." In short, she is a pragmatist.

She can also be ruthless. In the past 16 months, she has moved to reshape the Indian political scene. Convinced that Indians had wearied of the slow-moving Syndicate cabal that ruled the party, Indira emerged triumphant from the party split that virtually stripped her foes of power. The split also left her with a minority government. Unable to ram controversial legislation through Parliament, foiled by the supreme court when she sought to abolish the maharajahs' privy purses, she decided to dissolve Parliament and try to win a greater majority. If she winds up with a two-thirds majority, she will be able not only to enact her program but also to amend the constitution.

Twin Specters. "When one sees the response the people have made," Indira said last week, "this increases our responsibility to do something quickly." One of her first acts when Parliament convenes this week will be to present a new budget. Beyond that, the pressure will be on her to produce some solutions to India's myriad problems--inflation, a sluggish economy, unemployment, poverty. Hovering over all of these are the twin specters that have haunted the nation from its birth in 1947. One is the spate of ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions that have always threatened to tear the country apart; even today there are no fewer than 14 official languages and 845 dialects, as well as numerous castes and religions and countless sects--a forbidding recipe for unity. The other problem is a fast-growing population that has added some 200 million people since Independence and is expected to push India, which now has some 560 million people, over the billion mark by the end of the century.

Interwoven with the population explosion is unemployment. No one knows for sure how many of the rural poor are unemployed, but estimates range as high as 30%. An even greater waste, if the country is to make technological progress, is the fact that 60,000 of the country's 300,000 engineers are out of work. The educated young who are unable to find jobs and have lost all faith in parliamentary government have proved easy targets for parties like West Bengal's Maoist Naxalites.

Mrs. Gandhi is not about to abolish the right to private property, but she may very well have to put limits on it. "We want the private sector to be more spread out," she has said. "We don't want it confined to a few families." Almost all Indian business and industrial houses today are family-run--which encourages them to become monopolies and inbred cartels but deprives them of truly professional management at the top level. Indira realizes, however, that any serious tampering with property rights could antagonize the moderates and the moneymen who are the source of her party's strength, despite its socialist platform. Mrs. Gandhi is also aware that she must find ways to spur public and private investing.

Land reform is another vexing problem. To prevent further bloody peasant revolts such as those that occurred in the Naxalbari region in 1967, the government must find a way to cut through the legal red tape that has effectively hamstrung land reform. The zamindars, a breed of feudal aristocrats and absentee landlords whose estates often consisted of as many as 50 or more entire villages, have got around the law in West Bengal by parceling out property to relatives, who often number in the hundreds. Though land reform is a state problem, Indira is expected to draft model legislation and then urge state legislatures to implement it. If they do not, land-grabbing revolts could spread across the country.

One bright spot in India's future is the success of "the green revolution," the dramatic breakthrough in the use of high-yield strains of grain, chemical fertilizers and advanced irrigation techniques, which increased wheat production 50% in two years. But millions still live on the edge of starvation, and will for years to come.

Full of Faith. When Indira was 13, her father advised her in a letter he wrote while in prison: "Ordinary men and women are not usually heroic. They think of their daily bread and butter, of their children, of their household worries and the like. But a time comes when a whole people become full of faith for a great cause, and then even simple, ordinary men and women become heroes, and history becomes stirring and epochmaking. Great leaders have something in them which inspires a whole people and makes them do great deeds." Nehru's daughter has inspired India's people to give her an extraordinary mandate. Now she faces the far more difficult task of charting a program to lift an ancient burden of poverty from her land, and of inspiring her people to follow that program.

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