Indira Gandhi's 'Peaceful Radicalism'

...Gandhi articulated during the last general elections in the slogan Gari-bi Hatao?Remove Poverty...

...We have no intention of abridging press freedom but we are determined to correct the present situation of concentration of ownership in the newspaper industry as in other industries," says Mrs...

...There is the danger thai too much concentration of power can occur under the guise of Socialism and lead to totalitarianism, but this is only a possibility...

...while the dilettantes of the big cities discuss the cultural fallout of kissing in Indian movies (not allowed by the censors at the moment), a staggering 40 per cent of the population exists "below the subsistence level"—defined as personal consumption worth less than $3 a month...

...in any other liberal democratic society, have so many difficulties been deliberately created to make life impossible for the larger and more prestigious newspapers...

...But he now professes a burning pride in Indian products and a corollary distaste for practically everything American...

...When the ruling Dravidian (DMK) party in the southern state of Tamil Nadu split recently over its own treasurer's allegations of financial hanky-panky, Mrs...

...The government has imposed an unprecedented excise duty on newspapers...

...And it is the vast majority of people, not the tiny middle class, who finally determine the character of the society and culture...

...He is an educated man by village standards and had been a few months ago an elementary schoolteacher in a neighboring village...

...Tell me, how can I feed my family...

...Once the Gateway dominated the cobbled plaza between it and the gracious Taj Mahal hotel, a reminder to many Indians of the ignominy of foreign rule...

...Always they ran to the agent of the government...

...His scorn is shared by many others...

...His brand of pessimism infuses the conservative middle class and is articulated also by the party of obscurantist Hindu revivalism, the Jan Sangh...

...She is the architect and creator of a new design for living described as a socialist pattern of society...

...We can manufacture the best stuff in the world," was his reply to my offer to bring him back something from a visit to the U.S...

...According to government figures, too...

...The statue of a warrior prince from before the time of the British was erected nearby...

...A former insurance executive who was elevated to his present position when the Tata conglomerate gained control of the Statesman and fired its liberal editor for his alleged sympathy with the Left, Irani clearly represents what the government calls "monopoly control of the press...

...He admitted nothing has happened yet...

...and there is talk of a tax on advertising budgets...

...There is no doubt that it exists," he said, stee-pling meditative fingers above his enormous expanse of polished desk...

...L. Proudfoot's article 'Fashions in Dancing' was very interesting, though it is not clear whether he is for or against ballroom dancing...

...In special newspaper supplements, in magazines, on the government-controlled radio, at public seminars, and in private discussions, the pride at having endured for a quarter-century gave place insistently to warnings about the prospect ahead...

...DEVELOPING INDIANNESS Indira Gandhi's 'Peaceful Radicalism' BY B. P. MENON Bombay The Gateway to India, a blocky and unbeautiful structure facing a choppy inlet of the Arabian Sea in Bombay, commemorates the otherwise eminently forgettable visit of King George V and his Queen Mary in 1914, during the heyday of the British Raj...

...In the summer tepidity of the Indian Parliament speech after speech struck the same blood-sweat-and-toil theme...

...With Mrs...

...Irani doubts her ability to balance the roles of Preserver and Destroyer in this delicate area...

...He was not sorry for supporting Mrs...

...I am one of those who consider [it] completely alien to Indian culture...

...Its green, mud-splashed somnolence is disappearing under the impact of a modernity encroaching not only through the new twisting roads and the Bombay movies screened daily in the open air, but with the ferment of an idea Mrs...

...But the middle-class world of imported cars, American films and cultural schizophrenia does not encompass more than a minute fraction of the country's 547 million inhabitants, three-quarters of whom live in an estimated half-million rural villages...

...For over an hour he told me of the improvements a person would find on returning to Nhavi after an absence of 25 years...

...The young are equal to the world's best...

...Somani caught himself orating and, slightly embarrassed, stopped to stroke his lean jaw with a skinny finger—despite his wealth, his eyes are as deeply sunken as those of any Nhavi villager...

...I admire many things in the West and would like my country to be more and more modernized, but I detest people who are only interested in the more glamorous and vulgar manifestations of Western living...

...They used to think, 'We spent so much last year so we have to spend so much more this year.' That, at least, has stopped...

...In his white handspun clothes and Gandhi-cap, Mahajan appeared a patrician Caesar among the muddy plebians of the village, an effect furthered by his deliberate air of authority...

...Echoing the party line about the need for uplifting the poor and the depressed, he imparted a certain steely knowledge that this would not mean any reduction in his authority...

...Nhavi, population 10,000, a village of clustered mud huts, some brick buildings, a new schoolhouse, slushy streets and musty temples, teeming with emaciated yet cheerful children, dogs, chickens and water buffalo, is as typical as anything can be of this subcontinent of diversity...

...and in his 20s he felt it necessary to attend dancing school...

...And this is not merely the result of an exhilarating military victory or a widely heralded Green Revolution that was supposed to make India a grain exporter by 1973...

...He has a honey-toned regular face with slightly protruding front teeth that hold up a naturally swollen upper lip and give the whole a faintly sardonic cast even in repose...

...Hence the CIA scare so vocally conducted by Congress party officials until the full impact of the drought began to be felt late last year, when the realization dawned that India might not be as independent of American food as had been thought...

...So with India...

...Either we do these things peacefully ourselves or we will be overtaken by violent revolution...

...As president of the Indian and Eastern Newspaper Society, an association of the most powerful publications in the land, he has said that in the case of the press "never in the history of India, and perhaps...

...He continued on a less sonorous note: "For the first time the government is beginning to plan in terms of the need inputs of the people rather than in terms of money inputs, in terms of the GNP...

...Indeed, the exuberance that accompanied Pakistan's defeat has now passed, and optimism about the high-yielding hybrid seeds has dried swiftly under the harsh skies of an unexpected drought...

...Nevertheless, it has not yet altered the existing power structure in Nhavi, where the controlling elite of some 30 landowning families is represented by a quietly intelligent man named J. T. Mahajan who is the area's elected member in the State Legislature, president of the local agricultural cooperative society, chairman of the educational society, and kingpin in the district's Congress party...

...Today people dress alike [he looked deprecatingly at himself], physical and intellectual communication is far easier, so naturally there is some blurring...

...Gandhi's Congress party is the most evident reason for this, underlying the phenomenon is a firmer assumption of Indian identity...

...dishonor was qualified...

...Prices always go up," he said, shaking the beading sweat off his brow...

...Gandhi is deemed incapable but because Basu himself did much the same thing when he was in power in West Bengal a few years ago...

...Unpredictably, however, there arose in the direct path of Viveka-nanda's eloquent gaze a monstrous expression of fleshly delight, the high, gleaming annex to the Taj Mahal hotel...

...The future, however, is "hard to see . . . everything is in flux...

...He bubbled discontent...

...Gandhi's diabolic hand was at once detected in a deep-laid plot to reestablish her party in the one state where it was virtually powerless...

...The memento of British subjection ceased to prevail...

...Despite all the studied and deliberate attempts at nation building, it took the unexpected coincidence of Indira Gandhi and Bangladesh to raise in the terrain of Indianness the new promontories that today so effectively diminish the old...

...She knows the skeletons in everybody's cupboard...

...Gandhi the largest majority ever in the Indian Parliament, with enough strength to amend and override the country's written Constitution...

...The Trimurti is one of the primal deities of Hinduism, incorporating the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer...

...The middle class is still much taken with things Western—an imported car is almost the ultimate in status symbols—but there is more appreciation of the indigenous...

...The Central Bureau of Investigation reports directly to her...

...And she is the destroyer of privileges that go with birth and the accumulation of wealth...

...A senior executive with an oil company, he goes to work in the city's moist heat dressed in starched white shirt and suit...

...Besides offering inadequate shelter to ragged vendors of spiced peas and lentil soup, it is useful today primarily as a neat paradigm of the development of Indianness...

...Smart new teachers at ***Dancing School...

...The preliminary exclamation is to insure top billing in the alphabetical list...

...There was a total lack of eloquence or heat in Tayade's woe, but his veined eyes showed a mixture of hope, anguish and desperation that is not lost on the leaders in New Delhi...

...past, but with a brooding concern about the future...

...legislation has been threatened for the "dispersion of press ownership...

...The "Guru shirt," a sleek version of the traditional kurta, is the latest in menswear, worn by those who not very long ago would have considered it improper to appear in company without wearing a tie...

...This, however, does not mean we have lost our Indianness...

...For this I am paid 75 paise [7.5 cents] a day...

...Absolutely air-conditioned...

...Gandhi's party at the polls and thus automatically also a supporter of J. T. Mahajan...

...Gandhi attempting to move to the Left in the interests of greater social equity, there is an acute consciousness that a potent coalition could form on the Right, especially if funded by an unfriendly U.S...

...Significantly, these charges excite little sympathy, not because Mrs...

...Gandhi has done a good deal, especially in the state of West Bengal, where the pro-Chinese "Left Communists" (as opposed to the pro-Soviet "Right Communists," who are at the moment sympathetic to the government) have been lodging strident complaints...

...The people who are purely imitative of the West are a small—a very small?minority of the upper-middle class...

...To prevent a violent revolution Mrs...

...Even the strong men in her own cabinet won't stand up to her anymore...

...They are looking at the real problems...

...Do you know we export diesel pumps to the United States...

...Much of that flux is the result of what C. R. Irani, the managing director of the Statesman, one of the country's leading dailies, calls the government's "total attack...

...The widely read Illustrated Weekly of India, whose novelist-editor Khuswant Singh is not an uncritical admirer of the Prime Minister, displayed her on the cover of the 25th Independence Day issue as a three-headed figure...

...When I interviewed Mahajan recently in his village, he was obviously supremely confident of his power, and it seemed to automatically impress itself on others...

...Such is the aura of power and competence surrounding the Prime Minister that the Opposition can make the most far-fetched accusations and people will believe part of it...

...Although the obtrusive presence of Mrs...

...Meaningless...

...Gandhi's stock reply to critics who accuse her of "radicalism" is: "We have no option...

...The fear of foreign plots, however, has not been reduced...

...They're members of the international jet set, yet they are all 100 per cent Indian...

...N. K. Somani, scion of one of the nation's wealthiest business families and a member of Parliament until the last election, confided to me that he is guardedly optimistic: "This is the first time since our golden age that our country is strongly unified under a single leader...

...mounted on a war-horse and brandishing a sword, he represented Martial India...

...There is no difference in quality and it's cheaper here...

...Never in the history of India has any one person wielded as much power as Indira Gandhi does today," the editor explained inside...

...Under this plan the Somani family, now barred by the government from further business expansion, might be allowed to manage publicly funded enterprises...

...Designed to match stylistically with the older half of the building, this neo-Mogul rearing of molded plaster shadowed into insignificance the warrior, the saint and the colonial memory...

...They say they will start a government [work] project here and we will all be paid 10 rupees [$1] a day...

...He was also hopeful about the government's new "Joint Sector Approach"—an attempt to hitch the best private entrepreneurial talent to the Socialist wagon by creating a realm of the economy neither entirely in the public nor the private domain...

...Choose your teacher and leam...

...A small, thin-limbed man, connoisseur of classical music and an esthete except for his synthetic, semitransparent shirt and narrow shiny tie, Menon was softly vehement about modern India's possessing a cultural identity distinctive from both tradition and other contemporary societies...

...The government, he says, does not trust the regular police any more and is using the clandestine force under the guidance of its foreign intelligence agency to "organize political murders, defections [from other parties] and to keep itself in power...

...We do not have a closed society like China's, so we have to be extra careful...

...he heard talk every day of government plans to help the poor...

...I can't define it, but look at any of our creative people—Correa and Doshi [architects!, Husain [painter!, Satyajit Ray [film director] and Ravi Shan-kar [musician]—only an Indian could produce what they produce...

...they did not know how to look after themselves...

...This is all the work I can get...

...Why should we blindly ape the Western way of life...

...The fresh-mint appeal of that concept among people unmoved by the Communists' and Socialists' more abstruse formulations for social justice gave Mrs...

...The wind from glamorous Hollywood has been too strong, said Menon—even though popular disenchantment with America following President Nixon's "tilt" toward Pakistan during the war sharply diminished its force...

...The level of our professional management is very good," Somani said with pride...

...Yet if there is no joy in India, there is nonetheless an unprecedented confidence...

...When a prominent Bombay politician died of a heart attack, rumor had it that the cause was a telephone conversation he had with her...

...When I asked if the large number of Indian teenagers who strenuously take up American trends could be significant culturally, Men-on's lip actually curled...

...A contrast in every way is Va-sant Madhav Tayade, an ex-untouchable, a supporter of Mrs...

...Still, the apes seem to carry on unperturbed, for the same newspaper's classified section carries regular advertisements that read: "Aa-aaahaaa...

...Whether she can perform her first function without seriously impairing the nation's secular democratic system is the great question facing India...

...Mahajan is proud of the accomplishments of his power...

...Latest steps...

...his children, who speak only English, call him "Daddy...

...Jyoti Basu, the articulate and locally popular Left-Communist leader, charges that since 1966 some 32,000 men have been recruited into a secret police force for the eastern region of the country...

...Unfortunately, inflation forced the school to retrench its staff, sending Tayade back to the muck from which he had raised himself...

...He concluded by citing what he called the "spiritual changes: Politically the people of Nhavi had no name 25 years ago...

...A stocky teak-brown man in ripped khaki shorts and tattered vest pungent with sweat, Tayade was in the banana fields of Nhavi when I met him, helping to load the agricultural cooperative society's truck with fruit...

...Soon he was joined by Spiritual India in the plump stone figure of the seer Vivekananda, gazing inland, a prophecy of renascence etched alongside his pedestal: "India will be raised not with the power of the flesh but with the power of the spirit . . . one vision I see clear as life before me, that the ancient Mother has awakened . . . proclaim her to the world with the voice of peace and benediction...

...Now things are different...

...We cannot allow interference in our affairs at this stage," a young Congress party ideologue told me in Calcutta...

...Of course, one's identity is not as clear as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries...

...We have learned the value of cooperation and our voice is heard with respect...

...the lot of 200 million desperately poor is a reality and it has to be tackled...

...Five papers sued the government last year for attempting to interfere with the freedom of the press and the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, but no one doubts either Mrs...

...Gandhi is believed capable of almost anything by drawing-room gossips...

...aping the West" and "becoming a brown sahib" continue to be insults...

...The next stage in the development of Indianness might well take place under closer guard than expected...

...Perhaps its most interesting aspect is a decrease in the "craze for foreign," the Western-oriented xenophilia noted a decade ago by the West Indian author V. S. Naipaul in his scathing book, An Area of Darkness...

...Take my friend in Bombay...

...Nara-yana Menon, director of the National Center for the Performing Arts in Bombay, summed up the rationale behind the government's ban by quoting Mahatma Ghandi: "I want the cultures of all lands to blow freely about in India, but I do not want to be blown off my feet...

...Her attitude can be understood best in the context of Irani's own career...

...She has taken over Revenue Intelligence from the Home Ministry," an admiring civil servant told me in New Delhi...

...The government feels that ushering in Socialism is hard enough without a chorus of the most influential newspapers in the country voicing the opinions of the rich industrialists...

...Gandhi's intention or her ability to continue her policies...

...Typical of the letters often found in the press is this one from the Times of India: "C...

...The 25th anniversary of India's independence was observed last August not with a great celebration of achievements B. P. Menon, a former political reporter for the daily Statesman and the Times of India, recently returned from a visit to his native land...

...But not long after independence efforts were made to give the alleged entrance to the subcontinent a more native character...

...it has attempted to control the selling price and the number of pages in the dailies...

...In a step widely interpreted as designed to encourage this attitude, the government last year refused to sanction further imports of American movies, ostensibly because there was no reciprocal export from India, the world's most prolific film producer...

...She is the preserver of the secular democratic form of administration...