India Elects a New Crown Prince
D'MONTE, DARRYL
INDIRAS INTRIGUES India Elects a New Crown Prince by darryld'monte Bombay The massive victories that the party named after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Congress (I), registered in last month's...
...Because she is obsessed with the idea that a Cabinet colleague might supplant her one day, she makes it a point of selecting sycophants as Cabinet members and state chief ministers who are yes-men...
...Now, flushed with her electoral success, the word in the capital is that The Lady does not have a post to offer Chavan...
...Gandhi with no one to turn to, except her "nonpolitical" Rajiv...
...Sanjay Gandhi, had he lived, would surely have succeeded his mother...
...The other major opposition force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is still strong in two Northern states where no by-elections were held...
...Gandhi'sforte is intrigue—an ability to outmaneuver her party's adherents and her opponents with equal skill, and to project herself as the one person who can save the world's second heaviest populated country from disaster...
...Sodoesthe instability in beleaguered Bangladesh, where those who recently attempted an abortive coup sought to exploit the anti-Indian sentiment...
...arming of Pakistan with F-16s poses a new threat to India (see "Arming Pakistan Again," NL, June 15...
...These underprivileged, moreover, are to this day swayed by the " I ndira factor," the belief that she alone can transcend the age-old barriers of caste and community to push through an economic new deal in the divisive society...
...He appeared in public as part of Mrs...
...Gandhi's family, never on a platform, or meeting politicians at his mother's official residence...
...His approach was to foil the succeeding Janata government's efforts totryMrs...
...That is one of the few truly heartening developments in an otherwise bleak political scene...
...Ever since Mrs...
...Charan Singh's Lok Dal remains a rich farmer lobby confined to certain parts of Uttar Pradesh...
...Foreign policy has not fared much better...
...Chavan had always been an unsuccessful contender for the prime ministership himself in his day, and his rushing in demoralized both his own faction and the entire opposition...
...Gandhi when she first came to power in 1966, but she proved her mettle in the 1969 Congress split and ever after...
...Its scarcely poses a threat to her because she has nearly total control in the country, but she is paranoid enough to seek to destroy it at the earliest opportunity...
...Ironically, the sole danger to Mrs...
...It has given its partners in the Left Front coalition important state cabinet portfolios, and by having its cadres fan out into rural areas it has established a firm base...
...But Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter has never shown that she is capable of tackling problems on her own: She lacks the vision of her father, India's first Prime Minister after independence in 1947...
...In the emergency Sanjay's band, a motley assortment of Punjabi political hustlers, took over...
...The BJP, on the other hand, is backed by traders in towns as well as large sections of the urban middle class...
...But instead of fighting the Prime Minister, the opposition leaders are more concerned about fighting themselves...
...Just last August, he told an interviewer: "I am not prepared to jump into politics from Amethi or Allahabad...
...There is no prospect whatsoever of the opposition joining hands in the foreseeable future to forge the force it mustered in 1977, when the Congress (I) Party could not win a single parliamentary seat in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar...
...As always, therefore, the Indian economy hinges on the monsoon...
...The denouement of the latest voting was, of course, facilitated by the total disintegration of the opposition, with the notable exception of the CPM in West Bengal...
...Meanwhile, labor militancy, especially in the commercial capital of Bombay, has been on the rise...
...things are simply allowed to take their own perilous course...
...Yet in contrast to his politically shrewd and ambitious brother, Rajiv had kept a low profile...
...Rajiv changed his mind for reasons that are as depressing a commentary on the Prime Minister's mental makeup as on the feudal dynastic tradition in Indian politics...
...Gandhi has been plotting to dislodge the Left Front administration in West Bengal, by foul means rather than fair...
...He took the place of his brother, San-jay, who was killed while performing a daredevil air stunt exactly a year ago...
...now his brother has moved into the wings...
...The futile hope was to tap the vast funds circulating in the flourishing parallel economy...
...Gandhi in '77...
...when the same Prime Minister rigged the state Assembly elections by bringing out the Army and sent the party into hibernation for several years...
...The enfant terrible of Indian politics, Sanjay had cold-bloodedly planned his mother's strategy after she was shorn of her power in the general elections she ordered to endorse her notorious "emergency," which lasted from June 1975 to March 1977...
...Gandhi's elder son, Rajiv...
...The actual declarations were a fraction of what the government claimed would pour in...
...Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she has been drifting along...
...Even in her heyday, in the post-1969 euphoria that culminated in the resounding victory over Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, she relied on a band of trusted advisers who actually plotted a course for her to pursue...
...This is how, with a streak of ruthlessness that would prove characteristic, she split the Congress Party the first of four times in 1969 and caught the imagination of the poor with her "Remove Poverty" slogan...
...Initially he gave the impression of being a reluctant recruit, and his mild-mannered demurrals seemed to indicate that he would not abandon the coz-iness of his family: At 37, he has two young children by his Italian wife, Son-ia...
...For some time, Mrs...
...A prominent example is Maharashtra's Abdur Rehman Antulay (whose chief claim to fame is that he wants to start a government-run paper so that the "news" might be correctly presented...
...It was the J ana Sangh, a Right-wing Hindu chauvinist party, until it merged into the Janata coalition formed to overthrow Mrs...
...It is now transparently clear to any observer of the Indian scene that Mrs...
...Gandhi's bandwagon, saying that their joining Congress (I) is a "homecoming...
...Except for two seats won by independent candidates, the Congress (I) scored clean sweeps in the two most pop-ulous and politically powerful states in the Hindi-speaking North, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar...
...One of her tactics was to deny il funds from a "food-for-work" program run by the central government, in an attempt to discredit it as a popular regime...
...Rather, the dismaying reality is that for all the eulogies paid to India as a vibrant democracy, trying hard to modernize and develop economic self-reliance, it suffers the vestiges of dynastic rule...
...At stake were seven seats in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, and another 27 in the legislatures of five states...
...Aside from the Janata interlude and a slight break between the death of Nehru in 1964 and that of his diminutive successor, Lai Bahadur Shastri, two years later, one family has ruled the more than 600 million people of the world's largest democracy...
...Gandhi is her personal style...
...Should that fail, it could fuel the inflation in urban areas and erode Mrs...
...The CPM and BJP have effective local organizations, and that explains their relative strength...
...It is pertinent to recall that the same doubts were expressed about Mrs...
...She decided to hold the 1977 general elections against her younger son's advice, despite the fact that she could have tampered with the constitutional provision to stage them every five years because she had put the opposition in jail...
...Besides the emasculation of the opposition, stalwarts of the insignificant Congress (U)—for undivided—Party like Yeshwantrao Chavan areclambering on to Mrs...
...The defiant posture paid dividends...
...Indeed, the listlessness of the balloting was a measure of the outcome's predictability...
...Nevertheless, pundits in New Delhi have for many months been speculating about how the wily Prime Minister will banish the government ruling in Calcutta...
...The much-chastened Janata is a shadow of its former self, with ex-Prime Minister Morarji Desai continuing to indulge in his customary cant and political wishful thinking...
...At the same time, Sanjay emerged victorious from his bid to become a member of Parliament from Amethi, an arid rural area of Uttar Pradesh...
...One can already hear jokes about how Rajiv's son, who cannot be more than 10 years old, is being groomed to follow his father...
...Perhaps the only competent Union minister is R. Venkataraman, who holds the finance portfolio and was singled out for the sack by Sanjay, but fortunately survived him...
...The campaign that attracted the greatest national interest marked the formal entry into politics of India's new "Crown Prince," Mrs...
...The U.S...
...cause it would be wrong purely from a moral point of view...
...In West Bengal the ruling Left Front government, headed by the Communist Party (Marxist)—or CPM—confirmed its hold, although the Congress (I) did manage to make some inroads...
...A notable exception was the closing down for one night of the two major newspaper chains in Bangalore, capital of Karnataka State, by the Chief Minister himself, a Sanjay Gandhi protege...
...mainly beDarryl D'MoNTEfrequently writeson Indian affairs for The New Leader...
...As a result, it enjoys support in cities like Bombay and New Delhi, yet does not have sufficient resilience in huge states like Uttar Pradesh (population over 80 million) where low-caste Harijans, the rural landless and Moslems form a sizable part of the electorate...
...The government fumbled on the Afghanistan invasion, then came out with a statement of neutrality that in fact, endorsed the Soviet action...
...Gandhi's popularity...
...Master tactician that she is, the Prime Minister let it be known just before the by-elections that she would leave her door ajar for former colleagues to trek back...
...Sanjay's death left Mrs...
...Whether Rajiv has the stuff to cope with the severe strains of reigning over a nation as diverse and volatile as India, time alone will tell...
...Once he was sifting requests made by politicians and other favor-seekers for a while, it became apparent that the new Crown Prince would have to be officially armointed by joining Parliament...
...Hehad given up his job asapilot with the state-owned Indian Airlines and started to act as an "adviser" to his mother...
...All these and other situations call for a subtle response that New Delhi no longer seems capable of...
...Even the national budget has reflected the ab-senceof direction...
...But the likelihood that Rajiv Gandhi will contend for the throne is not something the Indian intelligentsia looks forward to...
...In Allahabad, the hometown of the Nehru family, for example, less than 15,000of the 721,000 people eligible to vote went to the polls...
...While the CPM rules in three states—West Bengal, Tri-pura and Kerala—this has condemned it to being considered a "regional" party...
...This marriage of convenience soon soured, and when the already fragmented Janata lost the 1980 elections the Jana Sangh was resurrected as the BJP...
...Following three years of tottering, the Janata government and a subsequent short-lived caretaker regime led by Cha-ran Singh collapsed to make way for Indira Gandhi's spectacular comeback in the January 1980 national elections...
...Gandhi found that she could no longer trust Sanjay's stooges —or, for that matter, his equally ambitious wife, Maneka—sheeased them out of their position and persuaded Rajiv to occupy a room at her official home as an "office...
...The single major economic "reform" introduced by the ruling party was the pardoning of owners of "black" or unaccounted money who converted their untaxed hoardings into legal bonds...
...What is more, cases of specific atrocities such as the unspeakable blindings of suspected da-coits by the police in Bihar—which has raised an international outcry—have been spotlighted by the new groups...
...The judiciary has not been so fortunate, but the ruling party has not come down on it as heavily as it would like to either (see "Juggling Judges," NL, June 29...
...Gandhi for her offenses during the emergency, even to the extent of defying directives from courts...
...Organizations championing the cause of democratic rights are mushrooming in every major city, and they are forging national alliances...
...When Mrs...
...Interestingly, the names of all three major opposition groups—Janata, Jana and Lok—mean "people...
...the first two are in the highly politicized East, the third is at the southernmost tip of the country...
...The June 14 contests revealed more about present-day India, however, than such figures might suggest...
...They were largely "progressive" economists, as well as high-caste Kashmir Brahmins like herself...
...Much will-he-won't-he guessing preceded Rajiv's decision to enter the electoral fray during the recent by-election and thereby confirm a status he had only held unofficially since his brother's accident...
...But the CPM wisely learned its lessons a decade ago...
...INDIRAS INTRIGUES India Elects a New Crown Prince by darryld'monte Bombay The massive victories that the party named after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Congress (I), registered in last month's by-elections were entirely expected...
...Thanks to the sobering experience of the emergency, though, the Congress (I) is not taking any liberties with the press...
Vol. 64 • July 1981 • No. 14
