THE PRESS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1984. Mrs Gandhi’s death

Press, 2 November 1984, Page 12

THE PRESS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1984. Mrs Gandhi’s death

The shocking assassination of Mrs Gandhi means that the world has lost an outstanding political leader and one of the few women Heads of Government in the history of the world. The manner of her death raises again the problems about security for leading politicians. In certain countries political leaders surround themselves with heavy security. Those who become political leaders in most countries have to decide whether they value their ability to move with relative freedom among people or whether they want to impose a barricade of security between themselves and other people. Mrs Gandhi was prepared to take some risks and may have believed that the risks were worth taking. As it was, she died not because someone in one of the vast crowds she sometimes faced shot her, but because two of her own guards did. The guards may both have been Sikhs. In a more suspicious and security-conscious country any Sikh guards might have been kept away

from Mrs Gandhi. It appears almost certain that it was the storming of the Sikhs’ Golden Temple in Amritsar which led to her death. The strength of the feeling about the storming of the temple has become more obvious after Mrs Gandhi’s death. Possibly restrictions on reporting in the Punjab meant that the feelings have not been known as well until now. More Governments are changed in the world by violence than by the will of the voters expressed through ballot boxes. As a democratic State, India should not have had this way of removing a Head of Government forced upon it. A few weeks ago an assassination attempt was made against Mrs Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, which serves to demonstrate that no country is safe from assassination attempts. The range of views, the extremes of political action and the varieties of religion in India all contributed to Mrs Gandhi’s death. Such variety should not be surprising in a country that embraces more than one-sixth of the world’s population. China aside, a grouping of one-sixth of the world’s population would take in several countries, with several political systems, a range of religions and a large number of people who, given the chance, would pursue their own ends by violence. India’s sheer size makes it astonishing

that between Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi the leaders of India were defeated at the polls or died normal deaths. Mrs Gandhi accomplished a number of things in her political life. For most of her time as Prime Minister she led a democracy. She used emergency legislation and was duly punished by the voters in the 1977 election, not only by the defeat of her Congress Party but also by the loss of her own seat in Parliament. The time of the emergency was not one of Mrs Gandhi’s better moments. The memory of that time coloured some thinking about her after she became Prime Minister again in 1980, and there were dark suspicions that she might not hold the election which is due by January. Her son, who has succeeded her as Prime Minister, has not declared himself yet- on whether that election will be.held. If the rioting following Mrs Gandhi’s death continues, then it is almost certain that there will be calls for the return to a state of emergency.

Mrs Gandhi stood for the development of a secular, modern India. Born to a Hindu family herself, she was not seen to favour any one sect or any one region. What she did was to strengthen central rule against the power of the states. This became so obvious, and caused so much resentment in the states, that she recently had to appoint a commission which examined the role of the central Government and the role of the states. It was the centreState conflict which caused the trouble in the Punjab. The Sikhs wanted greater autonomy. One of the likely outcomes of the assassination is that the states will not be satisfied until they attain more power. Some states are richer than others and will be unwilling to share their wealth with others. Some will want to retain their caste structures, some to maintain the position of the rich peasants. If the central Government of India loses a great deal of power to the states, then India will become little more than a loose federation of states with enormous differences in wealth and social systems. The hope of India as a modern secular State, with the chance of playing a major role in world affairs and bettering the lot of its people, may be gone. Few people have had both the vision and the political skills to keep India together. One of the most impressive is dead.