For Indira: Victory and Vindication

From deepest disgrace to an overwhelming landslide

Overturning nearly all predictions, confounding every pundit, Indira Gandhi swept back into power as Prime Minister of India last week. In the biggest electoral victory of her checkered political career, and in one of the most extraordinary political comebacks of all time, Mrs. Gandhi led her Congress Party to recapture India less than three years after voters had resoundingly repudiated her 21-month "emergency" dictatorship. When the last of the 196 million votes in national elections were counted, her party had won 351 of the 525 contested seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament). With a two-thirds majority, she can legally abolish the constitutional safeguards set up to prevent a recurrence of her 1975-77 oppressive rule.

Mrs. Gandhi's triumph virtually wiped out her Congress Party's two major contenders: neither the Janata nor the Lok Dal party gained the requisite 54 seats to qualify for recognition as the official opposition. In her own home state of Uttar Pradesh, where Mrs. Gandhi had been ignominiously turned out of her parliamentary seat in the 1977 elections, she won 56% of the vote in the constituency of Rae Bareli. She also won in a second constituency, in Andhra Pradesh, capturing 66% of the vote.

Underscoring the extent of her victory--and her vindication--was the election of her son Sanjay, 33, who had been held responsible for many of the excesses of the emergency rule. Out of prison on appeal of a three-year sentence for crimes connected with abuses of power, Sanjay won his first parliamentary seat with a plurality of more than 100,000 votes in an Uttar Pradesh district.

A jubilant Indira declared that her party had won "entirely on my name." Indeed, there was little doubt that the country had responded once again to the dynastic magic of the daughter of India's venerated first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Apparently forgotten were her authoritarian ways: the coercive programs of enforced male sterilization and slum clearance that took place during the emergency, the arrest of tens of thousands of political opponents, the censorship of the press. Mrs. Gandhi had successfully appealed to the elemental needs and concerns of India's rural masses with her two election slogans: "Banish Poverty" and "Law and Order." Combining charisma with extraordinary endurance, she had given as many as 20 campaign speeches a day on a 40,000-mile, 63-day campaign tour of 384 constituencies, during which she was seen and heard by an estimated 240 million people. None of her opponents remotely approached having such exposure.

Mrs. Gandhi had delivered her most crushing blow to Jagjivan Ram's Janata Party, which had emerged triumphant in the 1977 election. Though Janata had split into two factions last summer, pundits favored Ram to become Prime Minister as head of a coalition government. Ram was re-elected to Parliament last week, but his party picked up only 31 seats, compared with 295 in 1977. Particularly mortifying to Ram, an Untouchable, was the fact that the majority of his 85 million fellow harijans had voted for the party of Mrs. Gandhi, an upper-class Brahmin.

Charan Singh, the caretaker Prime Minister and leader of Janata's spinoff, the Lok Dal party, fared little better. His campaign warnings that the election of Indira and Sanjay heralded a return to dictatorship were ignored. Lok Dal won only 41 seats in Parliament, including Singh's own. It seemed unlikely that the bitterly quarrelsome Lok Dal and Janata parties could repair their breach in order to form an effective opposition to Gandhi's Congress Party. An ominous prospect, however, is an alliance between the Communist parties that won a total of 37 seats in West Bengal. Though the parties have ideological differences, they may join with leftist parties and splinter groups in other states to qualify as India's only official opposition bloc in Parliament.

After receiving congratulations from Ram and Singh, Mrs. Gandhi proceeded to New Delhi's imposing Parliament House. Dressed for the occasion in a shiny new red and gold sari, she received bouquets of roses and garlands of white flowers from the 350 legislators who had been elected under her leadership. President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy then formally invited her to form a government.

This scene was all the more extraordinary because the last time she had appeared in Parliament was in December 1978, when she was expelled on charges involving harassment of government officials during the emergency rule. She is still under investigation on four charges of abuse of power, although the assumption is that these will be shelved. Earlier this month, she dismissed the charges as having "nothing in them." She also called for an investigation "from a purely legal point of view" of the special courts assigned to process the various cases pending against her and her son Sanjay. Still she attempted to quiet fears that her new government would strike back at those she claims have persecuted her. Calling for national reconciliation, she said: "We are not petty people. We do not think in terms of vendetta and personal vindictiveness."

Meanwhile, Sanjay was celebrating his debut as a legislator and the now probable success of the appeal of his conviction. (He was found guilty of stealing and then destroying the master print of a movie satirizing his mother's rule.) Returning to the capital from his new constituency in Amethi, he was greeted at New Delhi airport by several hundred vociferous supporters playing flutes, bugles and drums. Sanjay, who has long been his mother's most influential adviser, will wield additional power through a number of new M.P.s who were handpicked by him to run for Parliament.

With her solid majority in the lower house, Mrs. Gandhi can probably provide the stable government that voters clearly wanted after the dithering months of ineffective Janata rule. Her hyperbolic vow to banish poverty in India is clearly out of reach; still, she can and will please the poor by keeping her promise to reduce the prices of cooking oil, kerosene, sugar and, especially, the onions that are essential to the Indian cuisine. Indeed the price of onions dropped 5-c- per lb. in the wake of her election victory, as merchants reduced their prices to forestall anticipated controls. In most other respects, however, India's 21% inflation rate will prove tougher to control. A poor summer harvest has already raised food prices, while the impact on industry of the rising cost of imported oil is bound to further boost inflation.

In Washington and other Western capitals, there was concern whether Indira's India would drift from the strictly nonaligned posture of the Janata regime into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. The country's 20-year friendship treaty with the U.S.S.R. was signed in 1971, before Mrs. Gandhi's fall. The new Prime Minister, long regarded as sympathetic to Moscow, was characteristically mild in her censure of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during her interview with TIME (see box). Since the election, India's delegate at the U.N. has been instructed to support the Soviet position on Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, there were subtle changes in New Delhi, as voters and bureaucrats prepared for the likelihood that Mrs. Gandhi's promise of law-and-order would apply first to the capital. Drivers no longer ran red lights at will, and government employees, who were accustomed to arriving at their offices around 11 a.m., were now at work by 10 a.m. Above all, the election results had reflected the voters' conclusion that leadership is better than no leadership. The Janata experiment had never worked, because Janata was not a party. It was a collage of special interests united on only one issue: Indira must go. That accomplished, the coalition disintegrated in parliamentary and personal squabbles. Now, Indians believe that a chastened Mrs. Gandhi can run a single-party government with enough room to maneuver. Still, there is peril in the fact that the only coherent opposition is in the hands of the Communist bloc. With the options cast in such extreme terms, India's democracy may be entering its severest test.

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