DICTATORIAL RULE SOME GAINS TO INDIA FROM MRS GANDHI'S HARSH STYLE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33929, 23 August 1975, Page 14

DICTATORIAL RULE SOME GAINS TO INDIA FROM MRS GANDHI'S HARSH STYLE

i By PETER CjILL. reporting to the "Daily Telegraph R.m .i r - .i-1 'Reprinted by arrangement)

By the simple expedients of rewriting the law under which ' • was found guilty and then declaring herself immune from all leg.;! actaci. ndira Gandhi lias gained the reprieve she sought and slapped the la>i brick on that jerry-built structure, the Indian emergency.

During her nine years as; Prime Minister. Mrs Gandhi has transformed what Indians call "ad hocism" into| a political philosophy, and l the course of the present crisis has proved no exception. Her giant's strides towards dictatorial rule have i not been taken out of any | long-held conviction that j this might be best for India — ail the evidence suggests she believes otherwise — but because she and her I advisers consider politics to Ibe the art of day-to-day, I sometimes hour-to-hour, maI noeuvres.

Confronted in June by the appalling coincidence of a High Court conviction for electoral corruption and a devastating setback in State elections in Gujarat. Mrs Gandhi briefly considered stepping aside to let the Supreme Court have its say. But those equally shrewd, if substantially less courageous, tacticians in her Cabinet murmured among themselves that they might not let her back. So she decided to fight on and the rest has followed as inevitably as Indian floods follow Indian droughts. The crackdown on politicians, Parliament and the press had in the nature of things to be brutal. India was a free country and free India would not for long have tolerated one woman’s determination, however respected that woman was, to go it alone.

The murmurers in her Cabinet proved men of staw. as she knew them io be. Congress backbenchers took fright after a fresh glance at their Government perks, and those industrial barons who own the presses, for long the object of her wrath, fell over themselves to protect their jute mills and their car plants from swift nationalisation. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Moslem President of India, offered no threat, it has latterly become the practice of I Indian Heads of State to lay: claim to a spurious independence of their Prime Minister. but only from the safety of retirement. Mr Ahmed, promoted to the Presidency after a disastrous stay at the Ministry of AgriI culture, has these last few weeks been signing on the dotted line till his arm aches. Heads fall The only Indian poodles : still suspected by their mistress of poor house-training were the judges. The remarkable Mr Justice Sinha had, after all, misbehaved quite disgracefully in the Allahabad High Court in June by announcing the original verdict of guilty, and little better could be expected of the Supreme Court judges [due to hear the appeal today. So off with their | heads.

The rewriting of the 1951 , Representation of the People ■ Act was on the wall for several weeks in New Delhi, but no pundit in his wilder dreams believed that it could be as blatant and as shamless as the amendments hustled through Parliament. Not only do they specifically legalise the malpractices of which Mrs Gandhi was found guilty, they also legalise a few more on which she was cleared — just in case the judges had oretensions to martyrdom. What if the judges really went off their wigs, banged their gavels in unison and announced that the Queen of Hearts was guilty anyway — guilty of something, anything, under the amended act and was thereby disqualified from holding office and from re-election for the next six years? So great is bureaucratic apprehension in Delhi that they thought of that one as well, and at the) stroke of a new amendment! transferred the power to disqualify an M.P. all the wayback to poor Mr Ahmed and his aching palm. With India’s rump Parliament exhibiting the consis-i tency of soft putty in Mrs Gandhi’s hand, the next' steps were easily contemplated and rapidly taken Two constitutional amendments approved on the nod earlier this month provide legal immunity for herself

and for the entire structure of her emergency. Mrs Gandhi can now even declare an end to the emergency without suffering any diminution on her power.

The reaction in the West to the demise of Indian democracy and- the rule of law in India has been predictable. Hands have been raised in horror, crocodile tears have been wept co piously and the ghost of Lord Acton once again stalks the editorial pages But Mrs Gandhi has never ruled by the genteel stan dards of Westminster and deserves more than to be judged by them now What then, of her brave new India?

Brutal tactics Over the last year, Mrs Gandhis Government has 'notched up one impressive achievement, impressive in the sense that any small improvement in economic conditions is remarkable in aj country so beset by poverty and over-population. She has licked inflation at a time when most other market economies have retreated beI fore its implications. Her tactics. always ruthless, I were once again brutal. Wage inflation has been checked by mass Govern-ment-backed lockouts, as in the case of an Indian Air lines strike, by the whole[sale arrest of trade union-: lists, as in the case of the, i Indian railway strike, and by, [the compulsory banking of| [pay increases. Government! expenditure has been checked by, among other devices, refusing to allow local governments to run up their customarily huge deficits. When famine raged ini much of eastern India last autumn and additional funds were desperately needed to provide relief, Mrs Gandhi land her officials turned a 'blind eye, and people starIved. ; There’s hard-headedness for you, but it worked and the doom watchers in Delhi ; I with their confident pre-, 'dictions' of imminent econ-' omic collapse were confounded.

The emergency came at a 'time when economic pros-, pects for India looked substantially less gloomy than for years past, and Mrs Gandhi was damned if she was going to give up power I when there were still at least even odds on salvaging her otherwise slim electoral chances in next year's General Election. It is even possible that the same calculation may prompt her at the turn of the year to reverse the current authoritarian trend and hold the election after all. In the meantime, Mrs Gandhi has to make the emergency a success. The Hindu pantheon appears at present to be showering blessings on its earth-bound cousin, and that’s a start. With a moderately good spring harvest already in the bin, the summer monsoons are making tens of thousands homeless and that, unfortunately, is a sure sign that the autumn harvests will be even better. In addition, Mrs Gandhi’s new powers of arbitrary arrest are encouraging what passes for terror in the Indian populace. Indians are now prepared to try anything. even moderately hard

work, for a change, particularly if their formidable I Prmie Minister sth But the impact of the emergency will not be indefinite the Pakistanis, who i are more experienced in the I diminishing returns of dicta i torship than most, give Mr* i Gandhi about six months in which to prove something that could swing an election With no fresh powers, n i new decrees to he brought H forth from the Prime Minis ter's gun-room. India will b\ (then be reverting to that posture best characterised asplendid sloth, and the no tion, current among thusiasts in Delhi, that the Indian Congress Parte and the Indian bureaucracy can .assume the role of twin | catalyst for sustained revolution is laughable. Maybe the improvements l will remain insubstantial and maybe, in consequence, Mrs Gandhi will avoid election' That way lies uncharted darkness, with the implicai tions for India and the re ’ gion only to be guessed at. The time-frame is. of ! course, imprecise, but a smooth succession can be I discounted. Power in Delhi could pass finally to anyone ! from colonels to Maoist' Regional strains are such 1 that the very integrity of India cannot be guaranteed land troubles with her neighbours are certain. Deprived of that superior I complacency that went yy uh 128 years of Parliamentary evolution, and in deep domestic travail. India could become as brutish a country to live with as to inhabit