Indira's Woes

An uphill climb to 1985

"All this talk of my going downhill," insisted India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi last week, "is just so much political nonsense." Translation: she is going downhill all right, but she is fighting back. Her Congress (I) Party (the "I" is, of course, for Indira) has not won a majority in any of the eight state elections it has fought since Mrs. Gandhi's return to power in 1980. It fared particularly badly last month in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, which had supported the Congress Party since India became independent in 1947. More elections were scheduled in the Union Territory of Delhi last weekend and in the troubled northeastern state of Assam next week. Whatever the outcome of these contests, Mrs. Gandhi will have to work hard to rebuild her party in time for the 1985 national elections, when she hopes to win an unprecedented fifth term as Prime Minister.

She was voted out of power in 1977, after her countrymen grew tired of the repressive manner in which she governed India during the 1975-77 state of emergency that she had proclaimed. This time the issues are more diffuse. Opposition parties charge that the Congress leadership has become corrupt and insensitive to the public welfare. In addition, there are powerful local controversies. In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, the movie star turned politician N.T. Rama Rao won a stunning victory for his new Telugu Desam party, advocating increased powers for the state's Telugu majority. In Delhi, many Sikhs vowed to boycott last weekend's elections, thereby showing their support for the movement that is advocating greater autonomy for the rich agricultural state of Punjab, the Sikh homeland.

Nowhere is regionalism more explosive than in Assam, where voters are angry about the wave of nearly 4 million refugees who have entered that state illegally from Bangladesh in the past decade. What makes the Assamese especially bitter is that the refugees, who are grateful to have been given sanctuary in India and thus are overwhelmingly pro-Gandhi, are being allowed by the government to vote in next week's elections. As a result, all the opposition parties in Assam, including the Marxists, are boycotting the elections, thereby assuring a Congress Party victory. To halt a surge of election-related violence, the New Delhi government has sent 40 battalions of paramilitary police to Assam.

Trying to strengthen her government, Mrs. Gandhi two weeks ago asked all 60 members of her Council of Ministers to submit resignations. She fired only seven ministers and named a dozen new ones, prompting criticism that she lacked the nerve to undertake a wholesale housecleaning. Luckily for Mrs. Gandhi, the opposition parties are at least as disorganized as her Congress Party; no candidate has emerged as a serious rival for 1985, and her personal popularity remains high.

One of the mysteries of Indian politics is why the world's largest democracy has produced so few leaders of national quality. Mrs. Gandhi, the daughter of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spent years grooming her ambitious younger son Sanjay as her ultimate successor. After Sanjay was killed in an air crash in 1980, she turned to her elder son Rajiv, 31, a former commercial airline pilot. So far, Rajiv has shown little flair for politics, but never mind that. He is Indira Gandhi's surviving son and thus the heir apparent to the House of Nehru, whose street address for most of the past 35 years has been 1 Safdarjang Road, New Delhi, the Prime Minister's residence. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.