Rajiv and the Regionalists

...The gains the opposition registered here and elsewhere, however, have made Rajiv Gandhi tread warily...

...Following the great victory on the national level last December, it was thought the local contests would be a cakewalk...

...harashtra...

...Rama Rao(see "Indira Gandhi's Andhra Adventure," NL, August 20, 1984), convincingly trounced Congress-I...

...What is more, the advanced industrial powers may be facing a recession, whereas India, thanks to good monsoons and overflowing granaries, is poised for a major technological boom...

...In Maharashtra, a key state because its capital, Bombay, is the commercial and industrial center of the nation, Congress-I was returned with diminished support—160 seats to around 100 for Sharad Pawar's Progressive Democratic Front...

...But Farookh Abdullah, who also was replaced with a Congress stooge—his brother-in-law!—for failing to toe the party line, will no doubt come back triumphantly when local elections are finally held in that frontier area...

...Ordinarily, Chief Minister Vasantdada Patil—old, infirm and the target of much intraparty sniping— would have been asked to go in these circumstances...

...Clean," as he has increasingly come to be called, has had the advantage of being viewed as starting with a blank slate...

...Of course, having won 400 out of 508 seats in the Lok Sabha, the 40-year-old Prime Minister can afford to be more accommodating than Indira Gandhi could ever have been—or wanted to be...

...So has former Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee...

...During the last five years the country's rate of economic growth has been as high as 5.4 per cent, well above the 3.5 per cent some economists have derisively called the "Hindu rate of growth," amounting to almost perpetual stagnation...

...Barely three months later, the voters set the record straight: In early March balloting for assemblies (lower houses) by half the country's 22 states, three solidly rejected his party and one gave it a wafer-thin victory...

...The party led by Rama Rao—whose unexpected reserves of popularity in Andhra Pradesh defeated Mrs...

...When Rajiv talks of his plans to acquire the latest Japanese production know-how for cars and washing machines, he gives the impression of forgetting that they will bring little comfort to the overwhelming part of India that is Bharat...

...Yet it is equally true that the assembly results showhescoredsuchan amazing victory at the polls last December not because the opposition had collapsed, but because his mother's assassination generated an enormous fund of sympathy...

...Rajiv has further had the good fortune to come to power in an era of prosperity...

...And Ramakrishna Hegde, the victor in Karnataka, has endeared himself both to its inhabitants and to the intellectuals of the entire country by the dignified way he stood down when Janata was badly beaten in the earlier general election...

...His public pronouncements similarly suggest that he is prepared to conciliate his critics: Immediately after the state balloting was concluded, for example, he freed some of the most important Sikhs being held in detention, hoping to bring them to the peace table and to end the violence that has disrupted India's most prosperous agricultural area...

...Buoyed by the huge internal market, two sectors in particular—automobiles and electronics—appear on the verge of "takeoff...

...But Rajiv and the technocrats surrounding him must remember that there are really two Indias—a modern one and the traditional, backward "Bha-rat" (the country's Sanskrit name...

...it will also remind India that Congress-I is not the sole party capable of ruling this land...

...Moreover, a number of her trusted lieutenants, like personal aide R. K. Dhawan, a shadowy ex-stenographer who rose to occupy a powerful position through subterfuge, have been elbowed out...

...What the people clearly indicated was that although by and large they support Congress-I, India's "Crown Prince" cannot count on automatic acceptance of any policy he may choose to advocate...

...No less diehard a supporter than the national daily, The Times of India, has called the March results a " setback...

...He quit as a matter of political propriety, tremendously rare conduct in the free-for-all that is characteristic of the partisan scene in India...

...On the contrary, "Mr...

...Unemployed or underemployed they simply cannot afford to buy anything...

...Hegde's continuing presence at the head of Karnataka's government will now not only temper New Delhi's zeal to force decisions on an unwilling public...

...All these local realities can no longer be forgotten, as they were in the early years of India's independence when the center strenuously attempted to draw every region into the "national mainstream...

...Yet except for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and other parts of the Hindi-speaking hinterland—unflatteringly called the " cowbelt"—the party actually lost some ground in longstanding strongholds, including Uttar Pradesh (India's most populous state), Rajasthan and MaDarryl D'Monte frequently writes on Indian affairs for The New Leader...

...This, plus the survival of Rama Rao and Ramakrishna Hegde, and the existence of a Marxist government in West Bengal, could only diminish any enthusiasm Rajiv and his "backroom boys" (buddies from Cambridge University in the late '60s now serving as top advisers) might have had for imposing their own ideas on the states undemo-cratically...

...Running in March at the head of the local opposition, he was returned to office, and it appears that his old party will attempt to re-enlist him...

...The case of the tiny yet strategic Himalayan state of Sikkim is somewhat different...

...None of his mother's mistakes of omission and commission have stuck to him...

...simultaneously he warned that if it adopt-edapolicy of noncooperation, "wewill not take it lying down...

...He tried to assert his claims to the top post in the wake of Indira Gandhi's violent death and paid the price for his temerity by being shunted into political limbo...

...In the southeastern state of And-hra Pradesh the regionalist Telugu De-sam Party, commanded by the redoubtable film star N.T...

...Gandhi's attempt to remove him from office last year^won two thirds of the seats in the assembly...

...Strangely enough, Rajiv's lack of political experience has not hurt him in a country that has always been too prone to regard age and experience as the crucial tests of leadership in any field, at any level...

...Rajiv was decorous enough, in turn, to ask the Chief Minister to stay on as caretaker until the state elections...

...It should be pointed out, too, that Hegde and West Bengal's Marxist Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, have displayed more staying power than many politicians in New Delhi, which commentators commonly liken to the Mughal court, reeking of intrigue and treachery...

...The outcome of the state assembly elections should remind him of this, along with other simmering discontents...

...Approximately 70 million citizens enjoy the benefits of modern urban life, including access to a range of domestically manufactured consumer products (India allows imports of very few nonessential items...

...Regionalists have dominated such states as Tamil Nadu and West Bengal for quite some time and have to be reckoned with by any party holding sway in the Hindi-speaking north...

...All in all Congress-I is in a chastened mood...

...Not so incidentally, each is bigger in size and population than many West European countries and has its own language and alphabet...

...In 1984 its Chief Minister, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, lost a power struggle within the Congress-I and was booted out...

...The Prime Minister is quite conscious of this record: He observed at a recent meeting that India's economy has been expanding faster than those of the United States, Britain and Japan...

...Meanwhile, nearly 700 million Bharatis endure such dire penury that for them the bumper wheat and rice crops have had scant meaning...

...Upon returning to office, Chief Minister Hegde said he would not seek to confront the federal government...

...he would rather rely upon known allies than cultivate new ones at this point...

...In addition, the major southern state of Tamil Nadu remains in the hands of anti-Brahmin and antifederal regional-ists...

...A similar situation obtains in Kashmir, where no balloting took place this time around...

...Talk of separatism has evaporated there recently—as it has in the still-simmering Punjab—but on local issues no politician looking to Congress-I for tutelage can prevail...

...There was no constitutional necessity that he resign—national and state balloting are quite distinct...

...In last December's national elections, held shortly after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his late mother, the Con-gress-I (for Indira) Party won the biggest majority any government has ever had in the Lok Sabha, or Lower House of Parliament...

...To be fair, Rajiv has already exhibited evidence of political maturity—notably by allowing opposition leaders to make broadcasts on the country's government-controlled television before the December election, something that was unheard of in his mother's day...

...Likewise, southwestern Karnataka's popular Rama-krishna Hegde of the Janata Party, who enj oys a reputation as an intelligent and honest administrator, was voted back into power resoundingly...