The Battle Royal

It was almost a palace coup in reverse. With the cool, crisp disdain of a modern-day Victoria, India's Rajmata (Queen Mother) of Gwalior informed the governor of the state of Madhya Pradesh last week that 36 members of the state's ruling Congress Party had defected to her opposition United Front Party. That gave the Rajmata, who is 47 and as tough a politician as they come, a clear majority in the 296-mem-ber state legislature. Flabbergasted, the governor suspended the legislature indefinitely, a move that could either open the way to new elections or lead to an invitation to the Rajmata herself to form a new government.

The legislative turmoil in India's seventh largest state (pop. 36,000,000) was only one numbing throb in what has become a royal headache for Indira Gandhi's Congress Party. Twenty years after India's independence and the merging of the country's 554 autonomous kingdoms with its British-run provinces, the maharajahs, princelings and other assorted royalty left over from the old days are turning to politics and making things increasingly warm for the Congress Party. The party, in turn, is angrily threatening to cut off the pensions and special privileges of the princes.

Into Decline. Under India's terms of independence, the old royal families who governed half the country and one-fourth of its people turned over their kingdoms to the central government in exchange for tax-free pensions and a series of special privileges. The pensions varied all the way from $26 to $665,000 a year, depending on the size of the kingdom; many princes retained most of their accumulated wealth. The privileges included immunity from arrest and civil lawsuit, and retention of old titles, many palaces and estates.

Without the prestige and power of old, the princely life went quickly into decline. Many princes now sit in their drawing rooms amid moldering Victorian knickknacks, with the swords and shields of their martial caste decorating the walls and the reproachful gaze of full-length ancestors in oils staring down on them. Others converted their palaces into hotels. The Rajmata's former kingdom of Gwalior is now a quiet, ordinary part of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The lavish royal guest house is a Girl Scout training center, and the main palace is a museum that charges 300 a head for admission. Many out-of-work princes drifted into the foreign service. Some took a fling at business; the Maharajah of Cooch Behar even organized tiger-hunting safaris, complete with flush toilets under canvas.

By the early 1960s, more and more princes were drifting into a new princely calling--politics. Their former subjects, nostalgic for the good old days of low prices and far less bureaucracy, turned out in droves to vote for them.

In a 1962 parliamentary election, the Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur ran up the biggest majority vote of any candidate--192,909 votes out of 246,516 cast. In the latest parliamentary elections last February, 28 princes won sizable parliamentary victories, only nine of them Congress Party members.

Anachronism of Honor. Concerned about this royal showing, Congress Party leaders called a special meeting after the election and decided to try to hit at the princes by abolishing their privileges and privy purses, which cost the government $6.5 million a year. All that was needed was an amendment to the constitution, which seemed certain to carry in Parliament. "There is no doubt that these privileges and privy purses are an anachronism," said Home Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan. "Do we want this country to remain set in this immobility of 1948 or go ahead?"

The princes are arguing back that the government is bound as a matter of honor to preserve the purses and privileges. Last week princes of both the ruling and opposition parties held hasty meetings all over India to discuss their next step. In Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, 40 former rulers decided to fight with modern methods: they formed what was, in effect, a trade union to battle for their rights.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.