India at the crossroads

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32540, 25 February 1971, Page 11

India at the crossroads

(By DAVID BARBER, N.Z.P.A. staff correspondent)

NEW DELHI, Feb. 24. The black poll of Calcutta, which, with two weeks to go, has already taken an estimated 500 lives, has cast a shadow over India, whose 280 million people are preparing uneasily to vote in the world’s largest General Election.

Unprecedented violence and political intimidation in the state of West Bengal, and particularly in Calcutta the nation’s largest city, with five million people appears to be spreading to much of the country. The first electors will cast their votes next Monday in a poll lasting 11 days, after a no-holds-barred campaign marked by strikes, curfews, looting, arson and murder. West Bengal, where two candidates including a hero of India’s fight for independence have been murdered, will be the last state to go to the polls on March 10, allowing police and army reinforcements to be brought in from all over the country. Amid the chaos, Mrs Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru and namesake of the legendary Mahatma Gandhi, is fighting for her political life, and, perhaps, for the life of the world’s largest democracy, which at this stage seems bent on self-destruction. Mrs Gandhi, who is 53 and has gambled her future on calling the election a year before she had to, is campaigning in the name of stability. And, despite the campaign’s omens of disaster, most observers in New Delhi predict that she will be returned to power with the majority she seeks to carry out her programme of “a peaceful and democratic social revolution.”

But anything is possible in

bewildering Indian politics, in which members of a multitude of parties change sides at the drop of a hat, alliances are made and broken with disturbing regularity, and expediency, rather than policy, is the key. All these factors are to the fore as about 2750 candidates belonging to nine national and 40 regional parties fight for the 523 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower House). The Congress Party, which has ruled since independence in 1947, is divided, Mrs Gandhi, who has governed with Communist support since August, 1969, leading the radical Left-wing against a “syndicate” of older Rightists. The “old Congress” has joined three other parties in a strange alliance that has little common ground except its slogan: “Remove Indira.” Tribal, religious and linguistic minorities, voters and candidates from unprivileged castes, including the “Untouchables,” all add to the confusion and make predictions of the outcome of this, the fifth General Election, hazardous. Eighty per cent of India’s 555 million people live in the countryside. There are about 50 million new young voters. Two-thirds of the electorate are illiterate and will vote for party symbols; Nehru’s two yoked bullocks are missing from ballot papers for the first time because of the Congress Party split. Surprisingly, perhaps, amid the violence and confusion, there Is an air of excited expectancy in New Delhi. There is a feeling that Mrs Gandhi and India are at the crossroads, that she will be given a working majority, and that India will embark on the path of progress. Some of the young intellectuals in the Government talk of the radical revolution that will come when she is freed of the political considerations

that have tied her hands so far. The cynics say that Mrs Gandhi has done very little in five years in office, the nationalisation of the principal banks being her sole achievement, and its benefits yet undetermined. They say that the deprivation of the princely purses of the maharajahs is merely symbolic, and the much-needed land reform measures untested.

All this is true, but everyone agrees that Mrs Gandhi has not yet been given the

chance to prove that she is an innovator, capable of launching the social revolution that is so desperately needed, as well as India's most astute and ruthless politician.

Above all, she offers hope, and, in a massive country where about 80 per cent of the population is povertystriken, where 15 million new hungry mouths appear every year, where the number of unemployed is anything between 15 and 35 million, hope is a rare commodity.