Deposed P.M. becomes new Indian industry

Press, 31 October 1977, Page 20

Deposed P.M. becomes new Indian industry

By

IAN JACK

from New Delhi, in the “Sunday Times,” London

Mr Indira Gandhi was psychoanalysed recently in the pages of a respectable Indian news magazine. The results were not flattering. Mrs Gandhi, said the analyst hired by the magazine, “India Today,” was paranoid, melancholic and had “an insecurity so deep that it can only be characterised as congenital: an insecurity that has its roots in grave doubts about her own adequacy.” All this, said the analyst, made her extremely ambitious, extremely untrusting and to see conspiracies against herself were none existed. The analyst supplied no evidence to show he had actually met her, however, and his findings might easily be dismissed as just another examle of the huge (and profitable) anti-Indira, antiSanjay industry that has flourished in India since Mrs Gandhi lost the elections in March. Instant books on the 19 months of her emergency rule line book-shops, newspapers publich daily revelations from the several commissions which have been set up to inquire into its excesses and corruptions (the one inquiring into Sanjay’s ill-fated car plant has its own bungalow, armed guards and a large, per-

manent-looking sign labelled “inquiry into Maruti affairs”). A Bombay film producer is even making a film set in the bad days of the sterilisation campaign. It has six songs sung in Hindi and a hero whose testicles narrowly escape the surgeon’s knife. But others who know Mrs Gandhi agree with the analyst. “This lady is mad for power and she’s got the Congree Party fighting like cats and dogs,” says the Janata Government’s home minister, Mr Charan Singh. . “She is telling falsehoods -daily —' even by mistake. In a way, I admire her for it.” It was Mr Singh, a 74-year-old of small-farmer stock with the same puritanical beliefs as his Prime Minister, Mr Morarji Desai, who ordered Mrs Gandhi’s recent arrest on corruption charges. The magistrate dismissed the case — it will reappear before a high court next month — and Mrs Gandhi emerged triumphant from the court to tour the state of Gujarat before enthusiastic crowds. Mr Singh, it seemed, had bungled badly. But then Mrs Gandhi made a bungle of her own. Anxious to capitalise on this new wave of sympathy for their former leader, the AllIndia Committee of the Congress Party met in Delhi to

express their solidarity, Mrs Gandhi’s supporters tried to take over the meeting in an attempt to install her as Party President. The move was rebuffed. Many Congressmen saw it as nakedly ambitious and premature for a woman still under investigation by the police, who still refuses to dissociate herself from the activities of her son and his former caucus, and who still says that for most people, her emergency rule was good and necessary. Mrs Gandhi replied by making a bitter speech in which she seemed to accuse the Party leadership, including its President, Mr Brahmananda Reddy, of being in cahoots with the Janata Government. Later she seemed to retract the accusation. Today a split in the Congress Party is widely predicted, with the pro-Indira section leaving the main party. Mrs Gandhi needs to be projected again as a leading political figure, as this might give her immunity from the risk of further prosecutions and jail sentences. Perhaps for this reason, to, she has become remarkably accessible to pressmen and television crews. At her home in New Delhi, a large bungalow with tents in the garden for her

aides, Mrs Gandhi gave me her version of events. Why, I asked, had her group within Congress acted so hastily?

“I don’t have a group who support me. My father (Nehru) never had a group and I’ve never had a group. It’s the people who want me and a group who oppose me — they see the public’s with me and they don’t like it.” Would she like to be Prime Minister again? “No.” President of the Congress Party at least? “No.” Why then was she still so active in politics? “I don’t see politics as you people see them. I can’t ever stop doing something for the people. You may not believe it but my only ambition is to help the people of India.” Would this not best qualify her for social work? “Yes, I often think that, but politics come before social work. First you have to get the politics right.” Mrs Gandhi often stresses her dedication to the poor — “I am the foremost servant of the people,” she used to tell election crowds — and the sacrifices her family has made in this cause. It is an odd counterpoint to the various charges of corrupion that now face her son and many of her former ministers.

As to the emergency, Mrs Gandhi is absolutely unrepentent. “Ask any man in the street what he feels,” she says; “was he not safer then, were his prices not lower? I have said I’m sorry for any instances of hardship which may have been caused by our sterilisation campaign, but today there are far graver excesses: people are being tortured, the land we had given to landless labourers is being grabbed back by the landlords, the people are suffering because of rising prices.” Much of what Mrs Gandhi says is difficult to believe. If the emergency was so popular, for example, why was the Congress Party swept away at the elections? Why, in particular, did Mrs Gandhi lose her seat? But the point is that Mrs Gandhi seems to believe it and is now equipping herself to fight once again for the most popular cause in India, the cause of the poor. Thus, say cynics, she will be able to go to court as today’s defender of the masses rather than the authoritarian ruler of eight months ago. On the issues of prices and strikes some public sympathy is already moving Mrs Gandhi’s way. Both food-hoarding — which is how wholesalers keep food prices high — and strikes were banned during the emergency. Now both have returned as the cost of a free society. Last week 70,000 miners were idle in the Bengal coalfield because they lacked the dynamite to blast the coal — the dynamite men are on strike. Steel output is dropping, power cuts have increased. Last year 11 million man days were lost in disputes: this year the figure may be as high as 50 million. Mustard oil, an important cooking ingredient, has disappeared from the shops — the mustard-oil men are hoarding it because they consider the Government has set too low a price. Pulses such as lentils, a staple of the average Indian diet, have risen in price by 50 per cent over the past year. For these reasons, many people are beginning to lose patience with a Government that superficially at least, seems preoccupied with less important problems. The Prime Minister’s plans for a

teetotalitarian India, for example, are loudly proclaimed despite the fact that they will cost the country around 8580 M every year in lost excise revenue. Still, Mr Moraji Desai is providing humour as well as gloom for the Indian drinker. Recently he revealed — it had been rumoured for some time — that he is a firm believer in the health-giving properties of urine, taking a glass of his own every morning with stimulating effect. Now the clubs of Delhi are alive with the sound of schoolboy laughter, and the letters columns of newspapers crackle with pro and antiurine argument.

As Mr Desai quoted scripture in defence of his habit — “drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well” (Proverbs, ch. 5, v. 15) — some arguments have been particularly fierce. Many writers to the newspapers last week stuck firmly to the view that this meant nothing more than it said. Others interpreted it as a plea for fidelity in marriage. A few went along with Mr Desai’s version. One man said the whole subject deserved “thorough research by competent authorities.” Mr Desai, after all. does look very fit at 81, our medical correspondent writes.