Mrs. Gandhi's Shifting Fortunes

...Reddy, seeing a chance to stay in power, reneged on his promise...

...Gandhis Shifting Fortunes BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay Indira gandhi's campaign to return to the center of Indian politics received a substantial boost last month, thanks to the bungling of the ruling Janata party...

...I wish her a brighter future and brighter prospects...

...Certainly, no one forced to undergo a vasectomy or watch as his flimsy hut was pulled down by municipal bulldozers in one of the abortive "slum-improvement" schemes will have any tears to shed for her, the recent outburst of sympathy notwithstanding...

...Known as a tough, ruthless political operator even when he was Congress party boss for his home state of Uttar Pradesh (India's most populous), Singh's hatred of Mrs...

...Nor will Indians quickly forget her execrated son, Sanjay, whom Indira continues to defend...

...Uma Vasudev, suggests that in the three days between the March election and Indira's resignation, these funds were transferred by the carload to safer quarters elsewhere...

...Just after the election loss, Congress' lack of leadership worked to her advantage...

...And someone who has committed so many crimes, abuses, irregularities-call them what you will-could finally be trapped...

...One of his most ardent devotees in the '50s was none other than Jayaprakash Narayan, the spiritual architect of the Janata victory, now sick and bedridden in his home town of Patna in Bihar, from where he makes occasional pronouncements to all and sundry...

...Arrested October 3 on two charges of corruption, she was freed just hours later by a magistrate who cited the lack of prima facie evidence-a turn of events that unleashed a flood of public sympathy for the former Prime Minister...

...For instance, ex-Socialist firebrand George Fernandes, now industries minister in the coalition, breathes fire over certain multinationals like Coca-Cola (forced to wind up its affairs here), yet thinks nothing of inviting other foreign giants to step into areas formerly reserved for Indian big business...

...But by last month's party convention, forces were regrouping and Indira came under attack for her government's authoritarianism...

...To add insult to injury, "J.P...

...She quickly exploited it for all it was worth...

...Meanwhile, her treatment has once again demonstrated what she failed to fully understand: that democratic traditions have struck deep roots in India...

...This refusal to acknowledge her own or her cohorts' crimes during the emergency probably grates on Indians more than anything else...

...Lately, Congress has been fully exploiting the violence done to Harijans throughout the country, and would like to have people believe it was triggered by the Janata victory...

...Local Janata leaders used her absence while heading an official delegation in Eastern Europe to settle old scores by raiding her house to look for the funds-a move that did not redound to the ruling coalition's credit or cohesiveness...

...In a BBC interview with David Frost, Indira insisted Sanjay was totally innocent of any excess during the 20 months of emergency rule...

...Frequently, the party's left hand does not know what the right one is doing...

...In addition, Mrs...

...Although she remains a leading-if not the leading-political force within Congress, she clearly has much fence-mending to do in the party and among the people if she hopes to return to power...

...disarmed her critics and enabled her to nominate her own man for the party presidency: Brahmanda Reddy, a pliable home minister during the emergency, who had promised to step aside should she want the job...

...Whether this is true or not, the mud certainly stuck...

...People remember her oppressive regime too well...

...Still, it is doubtful that Indira Gandhi will be able to pull it off...

...Gandhi dates back to her humbling him in the eyes of his local supporters...

...For Indira, the pilgrimage was no dip in the baptismal water of the Gandhian Hinduism that Bhave practices but a calculated appeal to the masses for their blessings as she began political life anew...

...But he had been restrained by Prime Minister Morarji R. Desai, now a mellow 82, who had refused either to circumvent the courts to get even with the woman responsible for keeping him and other prominent opposition leaders incarcerated during the state of emergency she had declared, or to arrest her on weak grounds...

...Gandhi will have to contend with Janata's continuing investigation into her affairs...

...Understandably, his pious sentiments raised a furor in Janata, prompting a spokesman to clarify that Narayan was in no way expressing the party's views...

...Expel me...

...Since the money had to come from big business houses, it should be within the Home Minister's resources to persuade these firms to admit to having made the donations, thus implicating Mrs...

...To cite just one situation, it is widely alleged that she used to keep certain illegal party funds in her house...

...To Mrs...

...Gandhi as one of the people who handled the money...

...The population's bitter memories of Mrs...

...While still in Bihar, Indira rode elephant-back to the village of Belchi, where 11 Harijans (lower castes) had been burned to death in what the government described as gang warfare between rival Harijan factions, but was later found to be a diabolical crime committed by upper-caste villagers...

...This first foray from her home in the capital city of Delhi was followed by a visit to her former constituents in Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh...

...No sooner was she out of detention than she launched a broadside against Janata, accusing it of diverting the attention of the people from its failure to improve their lot by indulging in a vendetta against her...

...among the first to be imprisoned in the predawn swoop that heralded the imposition of the emergency) went on record as saying: "She has my best wishes...

...The ruling party's inconsistent policies, its sanctimonious preaching, its steady descent into Hindu chauvinist politics, its failure to lower prices and evolve a comprehensive economic and industrial program-all of this points to a moral and intellectual bankruptcy in its leadership...

...The Janata coalition, in winning an overwhelming victory last March, pledged to restore all fundamental liberties and could not possibly give its archenemy a dose of her own medicine by locking her up without trial under the notorious Maintenance of Internal Security Act, which, interestingly, it has yet to repeal...

...It is no secret that Defense Minister Jagjivan Ram is extremely unhappy with Charan Singh's consolidation of power via the all-important law-and-order machinery...

...in other words, become-at the very least-the full-fledged leader of the opposition and wait for the next elections, when the contradictions in Janata may split it wide open...

...Adding to the disarray are the deep political rifts within Janata that Indira hopes to capitalize on...

...The second was that she, along with her petroleum minister and other officials, accepted a $17.4 million oil-development bid from a French company when another firm had submitted a tender for only $4 million...

...The weakness of the government's case was underscored by Singh himself, who said at a news conference that he did not know whether Indira had benefitted personally from the oil contract...

...All of her former closest colleagues-former Defense Minister Bansi Lai and aides R. K. Dhawan and Yashpal Kapoor-are on bail for similar wrongdoings...

...The very fact that Janata is appealing the decision of the magistrate who dismissed the corruption charges against the former Prime Minister suggests that Charan Singh may not have botched things up so badly after all, and that he may yet have plenty of surprises in store for "the prima donna of yesterday...

...The first charge against Indira related to her national election campaign's use of about 100 jeeps supposedly paid for by some industrialists...

...It is likely, therefore, that the Home Minister convinced Desai that the case against Indira was water-tight and that, anyway, the mood of the Indian people was overwhelmingly against her...

...Nandini Satpathy, was implicated in a case involving defalcation of party money in the Orissa state (where she was Congress chief minister for part of the emergency before breaking with Mrs...

...One of the members of Janata's own executive committee, Mrs...

...That more citizens are today nevertheless willing to lend Indira a sympathetic ear reflects, in part, the sad shape Janata is in...

...The crackdown on Indira was masterminded-though that is hardly the right word given the outcome-by Home Minister Charan Singh, who had been straining at the leash to put her behind bars...

...Her cry of "Expel me...

...Her biographer-turned-critic, Mrs...

...He was wrong on both counts...

...After keeping a studious silence following the March debacle at the polls, she shrewdly signalled her intentions by paying a much-publicized visit to Acharya Vinobha Bhave, the nearly senile Gandhian leader who has attracted attention and respect for his espousal of the Sarvodaya (self-help) philosophy...

...Gandhi makes her a political liability to her own party...

...She even went so far as to claim her son never set foot in her office during that period...

...Gandhi, the arrest and subsequent release was the high point of a comeback she had been engineering for three months...

...Such atrocities against the most underprivileged of India's poor, though, were an everyday affair during the 30 years of Congress misrule...

...Then, horror of horrors, she paid a courtesy call on Narayan himself and spent 50 minutes with the 74-year-old leader...

...Desai also threatens to prohibit drink-his bugbear-within four years, despite the fact that the state will stand to lose about $500 million in excise duty on liquor, as his own ministers anxiously point out...

...Similarly, Prime Minister Desai roundly criticized a new system of high-school-to-university education at a top-level conference, but the officials present blithely went on to announce its nationwide implementation...

...others stood by him, and Indira was thwarted...

...Darryl D'Monte is the assistant editor of the Times of India...