Mrs. Gandhi's Dangerous Gamble

"The President has proclaimed a state of emergency. This is nothing to panic about."

With those crisp words, in an unscheduled radio broadcast on All India Radio last Wednesday, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced the temporary suspension of civil liberties in the world's largest democracy and second most populous nation (600 million). It was, both for Mrs. Gandhi and for India, a dangerous gamble that caught her political opposition off guard and shocked much of the rest of the world. Assuming extraordinary powers under the emergency decree, Mrs. Gandhi inaugurated a nationwide roundup of her political opponents. At week's end, the government admitted that more than 870 people had been taken into custody (some observers believe the total is far higher). None of those detained under terms of the emergency decree will be able to appeal to the courts for release. Many details of the crackdown and its aftermath were hard to discern; for the first time since India won its independence from Britain in 1947, censorship was imposed not only on the country's press but on foreign journalists as well.

Mrs. Gandhi insisted that the abrupt suppression of political dissent was "not a personal matter. It is not important whether I remain Prime Minister or not. However, the institution of the Prune Minister is important." Despite the argument, many Western critics felt that the imperious Mrs. Gandhi--rather like Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis--had come to identify her own survival in office with the office itself. As the president of her ruling Congress

Party put it, "India is Indira and Indira is India." Although the Prime Minister insisted that the suspension of political liberties was temporary, there were some who inevitably wondered whether she would use the emergency to seize absolute power.

There was little doubt that the country had been in a state of turmoil and uncertainty ever since a judge in her home city of Allahabad found her guilty of campaign irregularities and deprived her of her seat in Parliament (TIME, June 23). Even before that, as Mrs. Gandhi noted in one speech last week, there had been threats to India's internal security. "Duly elected [state] governments have not been allowed to function, and in some cases force has been used to compel members to resign in order to dissolve lawfully elected assemblies," she declared. "Agitations have surcharged the atmosphere, leading to violent incidents." Although she did not mention the apparent attempt on her own life in March, when a Hindi newspaper editor was arrested with a loaded pistol as he entered the courtroom in which Mrs. Gandhi was testifying, the Prime Minister did cite the "brutal murder" of Railways Minister L.N. Mishra in January and the unsuccessful assassination attempt on India's Chief Justice three months later.

Implicit Call. Mrs. Gandhi's decision to suspend civil liberties was a response to the political tactics of Jayaprakash Narayan, 72, a mercurial onetime Mohandas Gandhi disciple whose grass-roots movement against corruption in the ruling party has become an umbrella for Mrs. Gandhi's political opposition. In a fiery and ill-considered speech to a crowd of 50,000 in New Delhi, Narayan announced a week-long massive civil-disobedience campaign to force Mrs. Gandhi from office until the Supreme Court rules on the Allahabad decision. His plans called for anti-Indira rallies in all state capitals and district headquarters down to the village level, as well as daily marches to Mrs. Gandhi's New Delhi home. In what appeared to be an implicit call for the overthrow of the government, he ended his speech by urging the army and police to mutiny--a remark that went well beyond the very permissive limits of Indian political rhetoric.

Following the rally, Mrs. Gandhi conferred with top-level Cabinet officials, including senior officers of the army. A short time later she asked President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, whose job is mostly ceremonial, for a new emergency proclamation; the 1971 emergency powers she assumed during the war in Bangladesh have never been rescinded but they apply principally to external threats. Even though civil disobedience has been so closely identified with India's struggle for independence, a government spokesman argued that the opposition demonstrations were "aimed at disturbing communications and generally affecting the law-and-order situation." He emphasized that it was "the call for action on the part of the armed forces and police" that led the government to act.

Who's Who. Operating under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, which gives the government broad powers of detention, police began the sweep of dissidents in the early hours of Thursday morning. The police blotter read like a Who's Who of Mrs. Gandhi's bitterest foes: Morarji Desai, 79, a former Finance Minister who formed the Opposition Congress Party after a split with Mrs. Gandhi in 1969; Piloo Mody, 48, leader of the right-wing Swatantra Par ty; Asoka Mehta, 63, a former Congress Party minister who left the government in 1968; Raj Narain, 58, the Upper House member who brought charges of campaign irregularities against Mrs. Gandhi; and Jayaprakash Narayan. Also arrested were some 30 members of Mrs. Gandhi's own Congress Party, including Chandra Shekhar, 45, a member of the top policy committee, representatives of the Communist Party of India (Marxist),* and assorted nonpolitical "troublemakers."

Many of the arrests were apparently carried out with traditional Indian decorum. Desai, a lofty ascetic who undertakes Gandhi-style fasts and works at his spinning wheel (once when asked how he was able to make pronouncements with such absolute certainty, he replied, "Because I'm an instrument of God"), kept police waiting for an hour and a half while he carefully bathed and dressed. Mody was said to have kept four policemen waiting while he drafted a dramatic statement deploring "the inevitable knock on the door" by the "fascist forces."

Whatever their private misgivings, most Indians apparently accepted the imposition of the emergency decrees calmly. In Bihar state, a call by non-Communist opposition parties for a general strike failed. In Ahmedabad, however, police had to use tear gas to disperse an unruly crowd, and there were sporadic demonstrations and strikes in Bombay, Poona and Mehsana, a town in Gujarat state that is now governed by Mrs. Gandhi's opposition.

Cold Storage. A major reason why internal reaction was so muted is that Indians are not particularly surprised at seeing their sometimes obstreperous politicians getting arrested. Agitation is a political weapon frequently wielded by opposition leaders, and they resort to it knowing full well that they stand a good chance of being thrown in jail. In fact, if they had not been rounded up under terms, of the emergency decree, many of the leaders who planned the passive-resistance campaign might well have been arrested singly or in batches during their proposed week-long satyagraha (literally, "truth-force") campaign. More in sorrow than in anger, the British Manchester Guardian, one of the oldest campaigners for Indian independence, editorialized: "Mrs. Gandhi has taken a desperate and perilous plunge. At stake now--with democracy in cold storage and over 700 of her opponents in hot prison cells--is not merely her personal political survival. India's whole system of government, the basis of its life since independence, is in the pot too."

The reaction to last week's events in the Soviet Union, which is India's staunch ally, was sympathetic; elsewhere in the world, the response was overwhelmingly negative. In Washington, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered State Department officials not to comment on the grounds that the Indian crisis was an "internal matter." Privately, many American diplomats concurred with a former Indian foreign service officer in Washington who observed: "I am angry. Mrs. Gandhi has used a hammer to kill a fly."

Despite the government's insistence that Mrs. Gandhi had moved only to save India from anarchy, there were inevitable charges that she had acted to ward off the threat to her position posed by the Allahabad decision. The charges of which she was convicted, as the London Times put it, were "absurdly trifling": a key aide, Justice Jag Mohan Lai Sinha ruled, had campaigned for her for one week before he resigned, and state employees had helped build rostrums and rig loudspeakers for her speaking engagements. She was exonerated of twelve other charges.

But the verdict stung. The very next day, Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party lost the Gujarat state elections. The Prime Minister had stumped the state with a vengeance, and had put her personal prestige on the line. At that point, she reportedly wanted to hand over power to Defense Minister Swaran Singh until the Supreme Court could hear her appeal of the Allahabad ruling. But a majority of Congress leaders insisted on Agriculture Minister Jagjivan Ram as Interim Prime Minister. Rather than risk a party quarrel, Mrs. Gandhi decided to stay on. Last week she was again rebuffed when a Supreme Court vacation judge issued a conditional rather than an unconditional stay pending her appeal. The ruling stipulated that Mrs. Gandhi could perform her duties as Prime Minister but denied her the right to vote in Parliament or draw her salary for her seat.

In the wake of that Solomon-like ruling, a number of India's leading newspapers editorially suggested that Mrs. Gandhi step down. The independent Indian Express put the matter bluntly: "The course for the Prime Minister, until the Supreme Court pronounces its final verdict, admits of no ambiguity. She must resign forthwith in the nation's and her own interest." That cry was echoed by Narayan and other opposition leaders, who promptly laid plans for the civil disobedience campaign that forced Mrs. Gandhi to act.

Preemptive Strike. Mrs. Gandhi still commands a popular following unequaled by any Indian leader since her father, the late Jawaharlal Nehru. But there is no doubt that she is confronted with an increasingly restive populace that is angered by pervasive bureaucratic and governmental corruption and failing economic conditions. Since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, when Mrs. Gandhi's esteem was at its highest, India has been plagued by widespread drought and famine, coupled with the enormous blow its economy has suffered since oil prices were hiked in 1974. As a result, the price of food and other essential commodities has soared.

If Mrs. Gandhi keeps her promise to lift the emergency soon, her "preemptive strike" against her opponents may be rather quickly forgotten--if not forgiven. Theoretically, she will need parliamentary approval to extend her extraordinary powers beyond two months--something that would not be difficult since her Congress Party holds 355 of the 516 seats in Parliament. The question, though, is whether the people of India, who have considerable pride in their nation's democratic traditions, would accept a new political system that would allow her to keep so much power in her own hands.

Should the emergency drag on--and should popular opposition to Mrs. Gandhi's seizure of power grow--the key to the crisis may well lie with the Indian army. In the British style, it is apolitical by tradition, and for the time being it is believed that military leaders support Mrs. Gandhi, primarily to see that law-and-order is maintained. Only one Indian officer, moreover, the illustrious Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, 61, has the standing and charisma needed to win the backing of the army for a military takeover. But Manekshaw was closely associated with Mrs. Gandhi in the Indian army's military triumph over Pakistan in the Bangladesh war. All that could conceivably change, of course, should Prime Minister Gandhi attempt to use her emergency powers to push

India into all-out socialism. Late last week Mrs. Gandhi said she would announce some new measures in a few days to increase production and alleviate economic hardship.

But her real intentions will probably be shown by the extent to which she is prepared to punish her political opponents and suppress a free press --and by whether she uses her new powers to postpone the national elections due next spring. An extended period of political suppression would certainly pose the severest threat to India's 28-year-old experiment in democracy.

*Not to be confused with the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India, which strongly backs her.

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