India: Triumph for Democracy
Chopra, Pran
New Delhi, April 5, 1971 IN INDIA, we have exhausted our exclamatory diction in describing the triumph of Mrs. Gandhi in the recent elections. So I will simply say it has been the greatest...
...The more wordy "socialism" of some of her opponents was seen as hollow, especially because of the kind of candidates fielded by them: more industrial magnates, more princes, and bigger farmers than ever before...
...But she was reasonably safe, for the opposition was so badly split that it could never succeed in voting her down on the floor of the House...
...she reads the signs of the times much better, and no sign is clearer than that economic discontents must be contained and the fear overcome that there is always a conflict between distributive justice and economic growth...
...this time it stems from very clear and specific commitments that were written into the strategy for winning...
...Equally important is the division of the vote between the two mainstreams of the classic parliamentary system...
...The two Communist parties are bitterly divided, with the CP (Marxists) intensely opposed to Mrs...
...Those parties will win them which are best able to sail in the local winds...
...That is why many people thought that her political end was near...
...The electorate has shown that it can comprehend all-India issues and react to them as a single political culture...
...On the other hand, the very moderation with which Mrs...
...But the main reason was the penetrating power of the dominant theme around one person...
...Independents and small parties, usually listed as "others," had 67 seats between them in the last House but have only 33 in this one...
...Faced only with the question whether Mrs...
...will the Congress (R) hegemony and its Lok Sabha majority prove to be durable...
...Yet it would be a mistake to believe, as Indian politicians do, that this is all there was to the elections...
...Gandhi because it sees it threat in her mild but attractive brand of socialism, and the more moderate or Moscow CPI, which has supported Mrs, Gandhi and won most of its seats and votes in areas in which the Congress decided not to oppose it...
...It may seem fantastic to those more familiar with yesterday's India than today's, but she now looms larger on the scene than Nehru ever did...
...Most other national parties have been just about completely wiped out...
...This time they were bolder, possibly expecting a defeat of the Congress (R) because of the apparently formidable alliance conservatism had built up against it...
...Just as the decision to call the elections and the strategy for winning them was born in her mind, the credit for the victory goes, almost undivided, to her...
...Fourth, the public identifies these commitments more with the Prime Minister than with anyone else...
...The picture was completed for the voter by many reports in the newspapers that a sharp division was taking place in rural India...
...Gandhi is a much shrewder politician than her father was...
...Gandhi strongly clashed with a galaxy of older leaders of the Congress (0) and their newfound electoral allies, the main party of economic conservatism, the Swatantra party, and the main party of social conservatism and Hindu orthodoxy, the Jana Sangh...
...after tasting blood in 1967, they were thirsting for more...
...Gandhi openly clashed with the conservative president of the party, Mr...
...whereas the backdrop to Nehru's victories was the unbroken supremacy of the party ever since before India won independence...
...Partly, this may have happened because now for the first time parliamentary elections were not accompanied by elections to local state assemblies except in three states— West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Orissa—and were therefore free of the parochialism of local issues...
...But power will remain with the Congress (R) for a number of years to come if Mrs...
...But it also shows the true emphasis that should be read into the sweeping success Mrs...
...But some guesses are in order...
...In her personal triumph there is also the triumph of certain policies...
...Nijalingappa, on the place and performance of the public sector of the economy...
...She was then an even more youthful looking, persuasive, modern, and attractive personality...
...The Akali Dal, a parochial party of the Sikhs that has had an apparently unshakable grip on Punjab, has won only 10 percent of the seats in which it opposed the Congress (R...
...Because of the enormous margins by which Mrs...
...This means that in the middle area of Indian politics—despite the "radical" thunder which booms out of Calcutta, the political game is mostly played in our democratic middle—there is a sharper differentiation than at any earlier time, It is mostly between the moderate Left represented by the Congress (R) and the moderate Right represented by the alliance between the Congress (0), the SWatantra party, the Jana Sangh, and the SSP, this last a splinter socialist party always moved more by Its opposition to the Nehru family than by socialism...
...Will all this jubilation turn out to be premature...
...In terms of seats, the top seven parties had 420 in the dissolved Lok Sabha...
...But here again I think the chances are better than at any time in the past...
...First of all, the hegemony...
...there were scores of parties but three-quarters of the vote in the Lok Sabha elections was harvested by the top five or six...
...Both phenomena were new...
...During the campaign some of them tried to keep pace with the socialistic phrases in Mrs...
...First, no prime minister ever stood so far above competing centers of power as Mrs...
...Gandhi's Congress (R), took 23...
...These issues are specific and clear enough to make the political convictions of the democratic Left more appealing to the people and more easily understandable...
...Gandhi's fortunes, which make these elections a landmark in the evolution of Indian democracy...
...She had been in a minority in the Lok Sabha, the lower and directly elected House of India's Parliament...
...Her party was no longer the omnipresent electoral machine it had been under Nehru, with a network of influence and an office in every sizable village and town...
...the conservative parties are bound to try to organize themselves better, and they can expect to cut into the margins of the Congress (R...
...Second, she was fighting against the backdrop of disastrous reverses suffered by her party in 1967...
...given proof of the effort, they will give her time for results...
...Gandhi's Congress (R...
...In the politics of elections Indian voters have shown themselves to be grouped in autonomous "cells," each separated from the next by the dividing walls of some intensely local identity, distinguished either by caste or language or religion...
...if these are used well, people will worry about the point of divergence when they get to it...
...The poorer sections and especially the depressed classes, the Harijans, were showing uncommon independence of action and defying the pressure of the traditionally strong economic and caste interests which were openly opposing Mrs...
...Jagjivan Ram, the president of her party, she dissolved the Lok Sabha, the first time this gamble was ever taken in India...
...Charan Singh, chief minister of the state and a hopeful for the prime ministership...
...But all these were reactions to external stimuli which, being external, provoked automatic self-awareness...
...Gandhi is able to satisfy the expectations aroused by her...
...The overwhelming onesidedness of the verdict has belied the expectation, strong until polling began, that the two would be more evenly balanced, creating the chance that they could alternate in power as in an ideal two-party system...
...they have a stake in the new homogeneous character of the Lok Sabha elections...
...On the whole, the chances are better than even that they will, because the leading parties have all-India ambitions even if all of them do not yet have an all-India character...
...It must have the organization to exploit it or, failing that, a leader with such widespread personal appeal as Mrs...
...The BKD, a powerful combination of caste and farming classes in the Hindi belt of northern India, shook Uttar Pradesh with its power in 1969, made its leader, Mr...
...The vote had never been so fragmented among parties as distant observers sometimes thought it to be...
...Now she has pulled it off, brilliantly...
...Third, the source of the expectation is not the vague rhetoric of the usual manifestoes...
...But she had not, as she has since then, surrounded herself with a few simple, bold, and popular issues such as bank nationalization, abolition of the princes' privy purses, and the proposal of a law requiring the public listing of all private property...
...it ignores, as many sociologists and especially Americans do, that elections here have often shown large countrywide responses and swings, which account for the stable hegemony of the Congress during the first 20 years of freedom...
...This consolidation of the vote behind the main parties is one of the three reasons, each more important than Mrs...
...Now most of them are gone...
...EVERY MAJOR POLITICAL CONTROVERSY in India, before or after the split in the Congress in the summer of 1969, was built around an issue that was ideological in fact or at least in appearance...
...while it endures, will Mrs...
...I think local issues are bound to come to the fore in future elections to state assemblies...
...Gandhi should be overthrown or returned with a stronger mandate, people have voted as though they were a single constituency...
...The Shiv Sena, a facsistic Maratha band that has been terrorizing all nonMaratha communities in cosmopolitan Bombay, was defeated in every constituency it contested in its debut in parliamentary politics...
...For the first time the election results in all parts of the country can be interpreted in terms of the same single issue...
...Against the advice of Mr...
...But the differentiation is unmistakable and has probably come to stay...
...Her image grew day by day, and in the last 10 days before the polling it swept her opponents out of the ring...
...WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT...
...Even so, the rest were a confusing mass, especially the army of unattached independent members, who used to get the next highest block of votes and seats after the Congress...
...Given either of these assets it can hold back the tide of conservatism...
...Answers to these questions need a little time to emerge...
...After: on her decision to nationalize banks, on the abolition of the special privileges and privy purses of the princes, and on social limits upon the right to property...
...The Bangla Congress in West Bengal, strong in the previous State Assembly and aspiring to be the leader in the new one, has taken only five seats out of 277 in the State Assembly and none in the Lok Sabha...
...That is why these elections have been described as India's first national referendum held on an issue that was made equally comprehensible in all parts of the country...
...There have been occasions before when all Indians have reacted as a single nation: during the struggle for freedom from British rule, for example, before the movement broke up into Hindus and Muslims...
...The newfound homogeneity can endure...
...Parties of Muslim identity did not do too badly, but a much higher proportion of the Muslim vote went back to the Congress...
...So I will simply say it has been the greatest ever—quantitatively as good as Nehru's, qualitatively better still...
...Gandhi's manifesto and speeches...
...The controversies that had rocked the Congress had already made her a nationwide figure...
...What they want to see most is sincere effort, which they have not seen for some time...
...The three main rightist parties allied against her have taken only 46 seats among them...
...but to that extent it will prove to be premature to read stable centralism into the restoration of its hegemony...
...They have voted far more heavily for it than in any previous election, more heavily than for the opposing alliance, and probably more heavily than COMMENTS AND OPINIONS for the parties of the far Left—although a higher proportion of the latter's vote came from the poor...
...There is not...
...Some illustrious army generals, including former Chief of the Army Staff General Cariappa and Lt...
...It is the leaders who have to raise their appeal above parochial divisions...
...Because the election was so unified and homogeneous, virtually every party of local identity has had a crashing downfall, except the DMK in the South, which was in a powerful local alliance with the Congress (R), and the Praja Samithi in the neighboring State of Andhra which is demanding a new state of Telengana...
...but it has not taken a single seat in the new Lok Sabha, and Mr...
...in the new they have 467 out of 515...
...There are areas and stages in which the two approaches coincide...
...during the fighting with Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947 and in the much bigger clash of arms later, in 1965...
...whether it will depends now more upon the leaders than upon the voters...
...She has won a comfortable two-thirds majority in the new Lok Sabha, enough to amend the Constitution without the support of any other party, and she has done so against odds that had never confronted her father...
...Second, never was popular expectation pushed up so much or with such deliberate calculation...
...On the Left, the more extreme Communists, the CPI (Marxist), have taken 25 and the more parliamentarian CPI, COMMENTS AND OPINIONS which fought partly in alliance with Mrs...
...Gandhi does today...
...But, with a few straggling results yet to come in, she won 350 seats out of 515, and with a much bigger vote per winning candidate than in any previous election...
...This DESCRIPTION to some extent overstates the case...
...Accompanying the consolidation of the vote in large and reasonably well-defined aggregates is the homogeneity that India's political culture has displayed for the first time in these elections...
...If they remain homogeneous, a party of the democratic Left will be able to thrive because the socioeconomic environment of the country is weighted in its favor...
...The voter has thus reminded any army people who may have political ambitions that he regards politics as outside the military domain...
...Each "cell" has been a political universe in itself, responsive only to its own internal politics and to the leadership of its own elite...
...Gandhi has had, bulldozing the dividing walls and getting the electorate to act as a single whole...
...That tide is much stronger than the results of these elections suggest, and is likely to grow with prosperity...
...In the past, these interests had either supported the Congress so as not to displease the established authority which had conferred many benefits upon them, or they had opposed it surreptitiously, and in each operation had carried the poorer voters, who were dependent upon them...
...The Congress (R) may be able to do so as well as any other party, but only to the extent that at the state level it agrees to be a federation of state parties and confines the instincts of a party in power at the center to its work at the center...
...And all the rightist parties had united against her, which they never could do against Nehru...
...Gandhi was her charismatic father's daughter even in 1967, when the Congress party tumbled to shame in its first debacle in a general election...
...But when the opposition made her deposal the major plank in their platform, she seized the chance gladly and, with great political astuteness and daring, made herself the issue without untimely modesty...
...right now we are too close to this blinding flash to see the future very clearly...
...Before: the supporters of Mrs...
...Gandhi made her promises to the poor was taken to be an earnest token of her oft-repeated declaration that this time the Congress meant to do what it promised and therefore would promise only what it could do...
...But she decided that this was not good enough...
...Gandhi's today...
...At both times Mrs...
...Gandhi because she is seen as the durable leader of the new alliance she has forged between the minorities, the poor, and the democratic Left sections of the majority community...
...The split in the Congress two years ago had ruined its organization, and what was left of it had gone with the splinter that took itself off as the Congress (0)—for opposition...
...Gandhi's candidates won, it is clear that the Congress (R) has expanded its support among the lower economic and social strata...
...Gandhi be able to meet the obligations that are implicit in it...
...General Harbaksh Singh who fought brilliantly in the 1965 war with Pakistan, are among those who fell miserably...
...Charan Singh has been defeated...
...New Delhi, April 5, 1971 IN INDIA, we have exhausted our exclamatory diction in describing the triumph of Mrs...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS This has made the elections an enormous personal triumph for Mrs...
...the Sikh general fell in a predominantly Sikh constituency and lost his "deposit," a small sum of money each candidate is asked to deposit to discourage frivolous candidacies...
...during the Chinese attack in 1962...
...but they were not taken seriously...
...There are four reasons at least why an exceptional responsibility for the future devolves upon Mrs...
...It can do so well, and in the past has done so...
Vol. 18 • June 1971 • No. 3
