Mrs. Gandhi's Grim Decision
OREN, STEPHEN
RADICAL RHETORIC OR U.S. SUPPORT Mrs. Gandhi's Grim Decision by stephen oren Washington's decision last month to break off aid talks with India may have signaled the start of an increasingly...
...support of India's surrounding rivals...
...Government ministers blandly insist the Indian Constitution exalted private property over the needs and wishes of the masses??represented, of course, by the Congress party...
...CIA plots are a favorite theme, if not exactly new...
...Since the emergency, the Prime Minister has charged two outlawed Hindu revivalist groups...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, Mrs...
...on the contrary, Industry Minister T.A...
...Pai has stressed the need for even nationalized businesses to show a profit...
...Despite the breakdown of the aid talks, in 1975-76 the U.S...
...investments beyond the oil explorations already agreed to...
...But times have changed...
...Gandhi's assumption of absolute power has destroyed that support...
...The same approach is reflected in the plan to deny various government benefits to families of civil servants and Delhi residents who insist on having more than two children...
...They had called for political and economic reform, while senior cabinet members like External Affairs Minister Y. B. Chavan had expressed private doubts about Mrs...
...Gandhi and her associates may feel, too, that closer U.S...
...last fall, one of his major objectives was the formation of an Indo-U.S...
...The Prime Minister announced that the same force responsible for the overthrow of President Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile was attempting to "destabilize'' India...
...aid should be used as a weapon of foreign policy, and the White House appears to agree...
...That is a tiny percentage of India's own 110 million-ton production, and only a small fraction of what it is expected to buy on the open U.S...
...Her enemies are denounced as agents of the rich...
...Since the June pronouncements, however, the Prime Minister has not been acting on the basis of ideology...
...Chamber of Commerce that could serve as the vehicle for stimulating American business investments...
...And among these supporters, the special decrees were considered a victory for the CPI and the "ginger groups" of Congress...
...Hostility to New Delhi presents the United States as a potential ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union...
...who are accusing Gerald Ford of compromising too easily with the USSR and Third World countries...
...base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, 1,000 miles from the nearest Indian territory, was cited as a threat justifying restrictions on civil liberties...
...Firmness toward India serves two functions...
...For them, President Nixon's 1972 visit to Peking confirmed the wisdom of the 1971 In-do-Soviet Pact...
...It might be noted, too, that whereas Western demographers have long been pointing out the dangers of population growth in developing countries, Marxist and Third-World nationalists argue that basic economic changes rather than birth control are the keys of affluence...
...The Right and Center, from the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh to the Socialist party, angrily demanded the Prime Minister's resignation...
...More important, the renewed rupture, accompanied by a number of other low-keyed Administration actions designed to show displeasure with the present performance of the Indian Prime Minister, points up New Delhi's need to reconcile radical rhetoric and authoritarian actions with an essentially conservative economic approach...
...For their part, the opposition parties have carefully confined their protests to what they consider to be constitutional and traditionally accepted procedures, including nonviolent demonstrations...
...New Delhi is also afraid that the U.S...
...a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Asian and Middle Eastern a??airs...
...ties would limit U.S...
...This emphasizes such nonradical goals as rooting out corruption and inefficiency in government, tax reform for those earning $565-$795 a year (who in India are members of the middle class), and, above all, increased production...
...The only complaint against the current "tough" approach has come from Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass...
...market...
...in Mrs...
...The pattern is apparent as well Stephen Oren...
...is committed to collaboration with China and to at least some support of Pakistan...
...The winding down of inflation started before the emergency and is largely due to the good harvest...
...There have been no corresponding moves against private companies...
...Censorship of the press, now scheduled to continue even if the emergency is lifted, is justified for the same reasons...
...Yet the assistance will conserve scarce foreign exchange funds, and will enhance the government's image by playing a role in enabling it to control the price of grain in the cities...
...The CPI only mildly dissented when the decision to stop bonuses was announced...
...Moreover, the two major labor federations, the Indian National Trade Union Congress and the All India Trade Union Congress ??controlled by the Congress party and the CPI, respectively??have been effective instruments for persuading the urban working class of the dictatorial government's virtues...
...Gandhi maintain Communist support and the illusion of radicalism at home...
...She has simply cracked down on groups that oppose her??regardless of their socio-economic policies...
...The resumption of other forms of aid, suspended during the 1971 lndo-Pakistan war, would not only have the same effects but would possibly encourage private U.S...
...The man who was Richard Nixon's ambassador to India and Gerald Ford's ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has persuasively argued that U.S...
...Last spring, even before the special decrees, the U.S...
...Gandhi's Grim Decision by stephen oren Washington's decision last month to break off aid talks with India may have signaled the start of an increasingly troubled period for Indira Gandhi's dictatorship...
...These concerns have been intensified by the fact that Bangladesh's current rulers turn for support to the Islamic world, to Peking and to Washington, the first capital to be informed of their uprising...
...It is not merely that the proposed $75 million for economic development will be missed...
...First, it counters the attacks by Presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and Senator Henry Jackson (D.-Wash...
...Nevertheless, Mrs...
...The successes Mrs...
...When External Affairs Minister Chavan visited the U.S...
...Why, then, hasn't Mrs...
...So have Indian diplomatic speeches, votes at the UN, the alliance with Moscow, and the general tone of international affairs reporting in the press...
...Similarly, the Dravida Munneta Kazhagam (DMK) government in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu was dismissed in January, although the party was linked to the Congress and CPI in 1970-71 and continues to maintain positions akin to theirs...
...Ironically, the only functioning undergrounds appear to be the Socialist party, headed by Railway Workers Union chief George Fernandes, and the pro-Peking Marxist-Leninist Communist party of India...
...will provide India with 800,000 tons of grain at concessional rates...
...who protested linking aid to politics...
...policy-makers may well sympathize with the Right and Center parties, no evidence of conspiracy has been uncovered by New Delhi's security forces...
...Indeed, only a dictatorship could attempt measures of this kind, which have been so unpopular with the average Indian that all previous contraception drives soon petered out...
...That would seem to explain why the tycoons who own most of India's newspapers and magazines (as opposed to editors and reporters) have been only too happy to cooperate with Mrs...
...The courts that threatened to end Mrs...
...The 1975 American decision to resume limited arms sales to Pakistan is seen as a threat to India's goal of hegemony in South Asia...
...Ostensibly, the June 1975 "emergency" terminating Indian democracy came as a reaction against the Right...
...backing will strengthen the resolve of Bangladesh's General Ziaur Rahman to remain beyond its sphere of influence...
...The Nixon Administration's effort to "tilt" U.S...
...Although U.S...
...Gandhi's populist and socialist oratory continues...
...Gandhi reduced the level of her anti-American rhetoric...
...Yet the excellent crop (actually a decline in per capita grain production compared to 1971) is attributable to a favorable monsoon season and not the actions of the Prime Minister, who has reduced government investment in agriculture...
...The regime has also banned strikes and last December announced that industrial workers would not be paid their normal bonuses...
...In any case, the 1971 slogan of Garibai Hatao (Remove Poverty) is heard less and less these days...
...The Prime Minister's boasts about a record harvest and achieving self-sufficiency notwithstanding, India must import food, and the Soviet Union, itself a major grain importer, cannot help...
...Gandhi's indispensability and the usefulness of ties with the CPI...
...Prime Minister Gandhi thus faces a grim decision: If she wants better relations with the U.S., and all that she seems to realize this implies for India's progress, she is going to have to adjust her rhetoric accordingly??even at the risk of alienating her Congress party s political allies at home...
...Gandhi's problem is that her words are now clashing with her need to improve relations with the U.S...
...Perhaps she hoped for a repeat of the situation in the '50s and early '60s, when Washington usually reacted to the verbal denunciations of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his close associate, V. K. Krishna Menon, by turning the other cheek and offering more assistance...
...the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Samaj (RSSS) and the Anand Marg...
...Thus the Marxist Communist party (CPM) has suffered along with the opposition parties of the Right and Center...
...The rhetoric, admittedly combined with the recent economic advances, appears to have mobilized substantial popular support for Mrs...
...Gandhi has attempted to link her internal opponents to the U.S...
...Gandhi now boasts about are the curbing of inflation, rising industrial output and a record grain harvest??all real enough...
...policy against India in 1971, when its status as the world's largest democracy endowed it with special grace, evoked a storm of protest from American liberals...
...To the Chinese, who recently advertised their unhappiness with Ford by hosting Nixon, India is part of an encircling Soviet ring...
...Gandhi's 20-point social and economic reform program...
...Gandhi's censorship schemes...
...with scattered acts of sabotage, alleging U.S.-made arms were found in RSSS headquarters...
...India, meanwhile, has lost its constituency in the U.S...
...It is a wise silence, since studies of the Indian countryside (where 80 per cent of the population still lives) show a growing economic inequality there over the last generation, plus an absolute decline in the living standards of the poorer elements...
...This makes it necessary to turn to Washington (an embarrassment New Delhi at first unsuccessfully sought to diminish by trying to persuade the Administration to magnanimously "offer" the food so that India could avoid having to "ask" for it...
...The coup last August in Bangladesh that unseated pro-Indian Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the failure of an Indian-backed counter-coup in November, also raised fears of Americans encouraging the Indian military to take action...
...An anti-American foreign policy has helped Mrs...
...Only her Indian National Congress, with its commitment to a "socialistic pattern of society," and its allied pro-Soviet Communist party of India (CPI) stood fast...
...This is particularly important to India, for Soviet insistence on collecting debts has produced a sharp capital outflow to the USSR...
...Gandhi's political career by ruling her 1971 election to Parliament illegal were charged with being Rightist because of their repeated, if unsuccessful, attempts to protect property in accordance with the guarantees of India's Constitution...
...Besides, as long as the antagonisms with Peking and Islamabad persist, Indians cannot forget that the U.S...
...Second, it demonstrates a desire for friendship with China...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 7
