The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 1971. Mrs Gandhi’s triumph

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32554, 13 March 1971, Page 16

The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 1971. Mrs Gandhi’s triumph

India’s eleven-day election is over. The Prime Minister, Mrs Gandhi, has been given the over-all majority she asked for. She can now shape Congress policy towards social and economic improvement in India without having to lean on the support of leftwing groups, including the Communists, as in the Parliament she dissolved a year before the expiry of its normal term. Mrs Gandhi’s plea to her people was simple. “ Strengthen my hand ”, she pleaded everywhere in city streets, in fields and in thousands of villages. “ I have been working for you all “my life ... I want to get rid of poverty . . . all “ they (the Opposition) want is to get rid of Indira ”. That proved to be the case as the campaign developed. A common programme between the four main groups opposing her would have been completely impossible. They settled for a simple request to the electorate “ Remove Indira Gandhi This is indeed Mrs Gandhi’s hour of triumph. The strength of the vote is not yet known. The largest vote in the past was 65 per cent of the electorate. It may well have been much larger this time, as some 50 million new voters have raised the total eligible to something like 280 millions. Mrs Gandhi will now have to attempt the definition of her policies in specific terms, not on the generalities used throughout the campaign. She has talked of. education for all: of the need to provide food for the millions clamouring for it: of the need to re-organise and re-distribute industry, as a means of reducing unemployment, said to be of the order of 15 million to 35 million.

Mrs Gandhi, with full control of the Federal Lower House, will at last have a chance to tackle India’s staggering problems not the least of them that of making birth control effective through democratic processes, as attempted earlier by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. She had no opportunity to do that in the last Parliament, having had to govern with Communist support since August, 1969, after the defection of Congress’s intransigent Right wing. The Rightists had charged that, if given a clear majority, Mrs Gandhi would wield an increasingly autocratic power, and might even seek to turn India towards communism. It is more likely, with unfettered authority in her hands, that she will lean moderately to the Left. She will have to do so, if she is to legislate for the masses, to bring about fuller peasant use of the land and a fairer distribution of wealth.

At the moment only one thing is certain; that the mass of the voters are prepared to trust her to redeem her promises, to the extent that she is able within the currency of a new Parliament. They must have realised, also, that the voting outcome had to be decisive, freeing Mrs Gandhi from the pressures of her unstable coalition partners. Continuance of the old order, as indicated by separatist talk in Bengal and in the South, may well have hastened the drift towards anarchy.