The Emergency: One Year Old

For days before Indira Gandhi's arrival, Soviet newspapers published story after story about the glories of Soviet-Indian friendship. The soaring trade between the two countries (expected to reach $1.1 billion by 1980). The launching last year of the Indian satellite Aryabhata from a Soviet cosmodrome. The Russian-language publication in Moscow of a collection of Mrs. Gandhi's articles and speeches. At a Kremlin dinner during which he delivered a speech in defense of dtente, Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev endorsed the Indian state of emergency ("Your government's actions against internal and external reaction met full understanding in the U.S.S.R.") and concluded: "May the tree of Soviet-Indian friendship strengthen and blossom." In reply, Mrs. Gandhi assured her hosts that Indo-Soviet cooperation was "a striking example of how two peoples with different political ideologies and socioeconomic structures can work together for mutual welfare and progress."

The warm words largely obscured the apprehension with which Moscow is believed to have viewed recent events in India, the third-world state in which the Soviets have the greatest economic, political and ideological investment. The strengthening of Mrs. Gandhi's government during the emergency, for instance, has reduced her dependence on the Moscow-lining Communist Party of India. The government's crackdown on some trade union groups, and its efforts to shore up the long-neglected private sector of the Indian economy, have struck the Soviets as downright ominous --as has the dramatic political emergence of Mrs. Gandhi's son Sanjay, 30, who has shown little sympathy for Marxist e thinking and is identified with the more moderate wing of the ruling Congress Party (TIME, Feb. 2).

Harsh Measures. Last month India announced that it would exchange ambassadors with China for the first time in 14 years, and made significant progress in normalizing its relations with Pakistan--all of which will inevitably reduce New Delhi's reliance upon the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, both nations still have important reasons for maintaining the special relationship that has existed since the signing of a 20-year friendship treaty in 1971, and the Soviets are obviously relieved that Mrs. Gandhi has finally made her long-postponed visit.

For most of the past year, Mrs. Gandhi has been busy at home enforcing harsh measures to justify the state of emergency she declared last June. That she felt free enough now to make her trip to Moscow, her first overseas journey since the emergency began, is an indication that India is in many respects in surprisingly robust economic health. Thanks to a record wheat harvest of 114 million tons last year--which in turn was produced by the most beneficent monsoon in modern history--the country is enjoying a period of rare prosperity. As a result of a two-year-old tight-money policy and a very tough economic reform program imposed during the emergency, India last year may have been the only major nation in the world with a negative inflation rate (-6%). India's educated classes still lament the suspension of civil liberties and the continuing detention of thousands of people without trial, but the country at large is reasonably contented.

"Can anyone say," demanded Mrs. Gandhi in a speech before her departure, "that we have ever been more united, more stable and more strong than we are now?" She was addressing a special meeting of the All-India Congress Committee, the decision-making body of the ruling party, at which delegates dutifully approved several proposed constitutional changes that will further consolidate the Prime Minister's rule. Among other things, the new amendments will limit the right of the judiciary to strike down laws passed by Parliament, and explicitly forbid court challenges to constitutional amendments passed by Parliament.

In the same speech, Mrs. Gandhi proposed a "national fitness" program because "we cannot afford to be a flabby nation--we must get rid of flabbiness in body and mind and be strong in every way." She deplored the fact that women in India, by and large, "have no personality of their own and exist merely to serve the whims of men." Then she turned to the government's stern family planning policy, which aims at reducing the country's growth rate from over 2% to 1.4% by 1980. Among her recommendations: providing a strong program of incentives and "disincentives," raising the legal marriage age from 15 to 18 for girls and from 18 to 21 for young men, and imposing compulsory sterilization on couples who already have two or more children. She preferred to use persuasion, said the Prime Minister, but warned: "We don't have all the time in the world."

The government's concern about birth control is based upon tough economic realities: the per capita share of gross national income is falling because of the ever-rising population (currently estimated at 612 million and increasing at the rate of 12 million per year). Nonetheless, India's recent gains have been impressive. Last year, for instance, largely because of the high prices of imported food, fertilizer and oil, the country suffered a record trade deficit of $1.2 billion. Now, as a result of an intensive campaign of exploration, some petroleum experts believe India can be self-supporting in crude oil by 1980.

New Monsoon. However bright India's short-term economic outlook may be, its political prospects are far less certain. If the new monsoon is normally heavy, if public order prevails, and if she can be absolutely sure that she and her party will be returned with a handsome majority, Mrs. Gandhi will call free--and presumably democratic --elections late this year or in the spring, and these elections will undoubtedly be accompanied by a relaxation of the strictures imposed during the emergency. This does not mean that Indian democracy will ever be quite the same again; the parliamentary system, the courts, the opposition, the press--all have been permanently changed. Regardless of what has been accomplished by the "discipline" of the past year, the tragedy is that most of it could have been achieved by a stronger leadership without resorting to such drastic emergency action.

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