Indira Wriggles Out

Since she declared a state of emergency eight weeks ago, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has suspended civil liberties, imposed rigid press censorship and arrested at least 20,000 people (some estimates go as high as 60,000), including a number of opposition political leaders and dissident members of her ruling Congress Party. Last week, in the harshest step toward authoritarianism since the original clampdown, Indira rammed through Parliament a bill that would end her current battle with the courts by changing--retroactively--the election laws she had been convicted of violating.

From the beginning, the irony of the whole political crisis has been that India's violent lurch toward totalitarian rule has stemmed from the most trivial of cases. Mrs. Gandhi was convicted in June on two charges of electoral abuse during her re-election to Parliament in 1971. The conviction would have disbarred her from Parliament and disqualified her from holding elective office for six years. Specifically, she had been accused of 1) using a key government official to help with her campaign and 2) receiving government-paid help at a political rally from special police provided by the state of Uttar Pradesh. Mrs. Gandhi's lawyers argue that the official had actually resigned his post before undertaking a role in her campaign and that the extra police had been necessary for security reasons. In any case, by India's standards of political corruption, the abuse was minor.

Coming Dictatorship. The Supreme Court had been scheduled to begin hearing arguments on Mrs. Gandhi's appeal this week. It might well have ruled in her favor, but Mrs. Gandhi was taking no chances. With most opposition members absent in protest or prison, Parliament passed legislation that rewrote the very laws under which she had been convicted. "This bill," declared Mohan Dharia, a former Cabinet Minister who was ousted last March after a dispute with Mrs. Gandhi, "is a surrender of parliamentary democracy to the coming dictatorship."

The Indian people never learned the significance of last week's parliamentary action, except perhaps by word of mouth in the principal cities. The two national news agencies dutifully carried the text of the legislation and a summary of the brief parliamentary debate on their news wires. But government censors ordered them to issue a subsequent "kill" order to subscribers. The only reference to the parliamentary action that newspapers were allowed to carry was a two-line statement that amendments to the Representation of the People Act of 1951 had been introduced, and would be discussed later. There was no mention whatever of the effect of the legislation on Mrs. Gandhi's court case.

The new legislation should have satisfied even the imperious Mrs. Gandhi. It did not. A day after its passage, the government pushed through Parliament a constitutional amendment that gave her the power to maintain the state of emergency indefinitely. More important, the amendment had the effect of removing her case from the jurisdiction of the courts. The parliamentary action, which swept through the Lower House by a vote of 336 to 0 and the Upper House by 161 to 0, was a ludicrous case of overkill. First, Indira rewrote the law under which she had been convicted. Then, once again taking no chances, she had the constitution amended to render the Supreme Court powerless to rule on her case. That is the way things are today in "the world's largest democracy."

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