STATES v. NEW DELHI THIS WEEK’S ELECTIONS COULD BE INDIA’S LAST

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31295, 15 February 1967, Page 14

STATES v. NEW DELHI THIS WEEK’S ELECTIONS COULD BE INDIA’S LAST

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MICHAEL GARDNER

of the "Economist”)

The largest free elections ever held will start in India this week. Some 240 million people will be entitled to take part. By the standards of most newly-independent countries the campaign will have been clean and serious, violence and government pressure minimal, and the counting will be as honest as it is in most western democratic states.

It all adds up to a fine picture of “the world’s largest functioning democracy” holding its fourth nation-wide elections in 19 years of independerice. There is just one flaw: these election could also be India’s last.

Tensions Ahead That anyway is what some well informed observers fear. They may be wrong; but it is virtually certain that the postelectoral tensions they foresee will come about and will indeed strain the present democratic system to its limits—and perhaps beyond them.

For those brought up in western democracies the reason is paradoxical. These are the first elections in which there is any chance of the ruling party being defeated.

This would not happen in New Delhi, seat of India’s federal legislature and the Government drawn from it. There the ruling party, the Indian National Congress, has held three-quarters of the seats since independence and

is likely to win about threefifths this time. But it certainly could happen in one, and possibly in three, of India’s seventeen States where anti-Congress coalitions will be able to form a government. That is when the trouble will start.

Tolerance Lacking To us—and to many Indians, whose system, after all, is modelled closely on Britain’s—it seems odd that the prospect of an alternative government should endanger democracy. We are accustomed to think the opposite. What we forget is that, even without an opposition ready to take power, democratic pressures can and do find expression in the kind of “one party plus” system that has actually existed in India these past nineteen years; and, secondly, that our kind of multi-party system depends on much more than the written rules. It depends on a climate of tolerance, of readiness to work with one’s opponents, that has not developed in India. There the key issue in politics is the tension between the federal Government and the Governments of the States. This tension is already high, even when the Congress party rules in both centres of power and when the party machinery is there to mediate the quarrels and to help the central Government impose its authority. What will happen when the two Governments are directly opposed? There is a precedent. In 1957 the south Indian state of Kerala voted a Communist Government into power. Two years later it was overthrown: the central Government used the excuse of mob demonstrations sponsored by the central and local Congress party (and indirectly part-financed by American money) to dismiss the State Government and impose central rule. It is almost certain that

another Communist Government will be elected to power in Kerala this month. In 1959 the central Government was under no particular pressure. Things were doing well enough in India. Nehru was in control of his party and his country. He could have afforded a relaxed attitude.

Today, the central Government is under the pressures caused by two years of serious food shortages and four years of spiralling prices. The Congress Party, without Nehru to guide it, is openly torn by the feuds that he was able to patch up or at least paper over. Even Congress State Governments openly defy New Dehli. Cynical—or idealistic disillusion with the Congress Party and with the parliamentary system itself has visibly grown wider. India’s Constitution gives the Central Government wide powers to suspend the democratic process. A so<alled state of emergency in force since 1962 makes these powers almost limitless. A weak central Government defied by the States will be strongly tempted to use them. And there is no saying where that would stop. Stability First Should this worry outsiders in the developed world? The United States, for one, has recently been lending India about $4OO million a year towards economic development In the last two years it has sent 15 million tons of surplus grain, and another 7 million odd will go this year. But the western world’s efforts have been devoted to keeping India stable, not democratic. Far more aid goes to less democratic countries. Democracy may even hinder stability. An authoritarian India would be a blow to western ideals; it would not directly harm western interests—unless ideals are part of them.