Uniting Against Indira

A shoo-in for Indira. That was the dominant opinion when, after a year and a half of "emergency" rule, India's Prime Minister two months ago called elections for mid-March. Presumably, went the argument, shrewd Indira Gandhi would not be going to the voters unless she was certain of victory. But by last week, many observers in New Delhi were convinced that the elections Mrs. Gandhi could not lose had turned into a horse race.

What happened? For one thing, smarting under Indira's quasi-dictatorial rule, the opposition learned to work together for the first time. Said a former Cabinet member: "She has forged us together with bars of steel." Most of the country's leading opposition parties have merged into a new group, the Janata (People's) Party.

In previous elections, the Congress Party has always received between 40% and 46% of the popular vote, but maintained a parliamentary majority because the opposition was so badly split. This time the Janata Party and its allies are contesting 538 seats (out of 542), but in practically no constituency are two opposition-party candidates pitted against each other. Mrs. Gandhi's party has fielded 492 candidates and is relying on its erstwhile ally, the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India, to carry the banner in most of the other constituencies. Mrs. Gandhi is said to have been told by her own intelligence sources that she can count on winning only 200 seats, and will have to fight for the rest.

A month ago, opposition leaders thought they had a good chance of reducing the ruling Congress Party's strength in Parliament to less than the two-thirds necessary to amend India's constitution--just in case Mrs. Gandhi might decide to push through an amendment, as she did last year, to increase her powers. Given her standing as a national figure and the entrenched position of the Congress Party, the odds are that she will slip through with a narrow victory. But opposition leaders now believe, with reason, that they just might be able to defeat the Congress Party for the first time in India's 30 years of independence.

Political heir. The opposition's patron saint is Jayaprakash ("J.P.") Narayan, 74, who is sometimes called the political heir of Mahatma Gandhi. It was he who declared two years ago that police and soldiers were not obliged to follow orders they regarded as unlawful --and thereby gave the government an excuse for imposing the emergency in June 1975. Narayan spent five months in jail without trial but was released in November 1975, when he appeared to be near death from kidney disease. For months he has been obliged to go either to Bombay or his home in Patna every two or three days for dialysis treatment. Last week, exhausted, he entered a hospital for further treatment, announcing that he would be unable to take an active part in the rest of the campaign. What effect his illness will have on the election outcome is not yet clear.

Aside from Narayan, the opposition's most influential figures are two veteran politicians, each of whom has long aspired to be Prime Minister: Morarji Desai, 81, and Jagjivan Ram, 68. Desai left the ruling party in 1969 after Mrs. Gandhi fired him as Finance Minister. A teetotaling vegetarian who rises at 3 or 4 a.m. and works at his spinning wheel as a Gandhian duty, Desai has been barnstorming the country with a simple message: Mrs. Gandhi's emergency has introduced a "climate of fear," and if she wins again, she will reimpose the full force of the emergency.

Ram is the newcomer within the opposition leadership, having quit the party and the Cabinet only last month (TIME, Feb. 14). The spokesman for India's 85 million Untouchables, he is keeping his group separate from the Janata Party, although he has agreed not to field any candidates directly against it. In a jab at Mrs. Gandhi and her ambitious younger son Sanjay, 30, Ram remarked that whatever people may say about Congress Party bossism, they should remember that during the emergency, "the whole country has been ruled by 1 1/2 bosses."

Stinging Slap. If Ram's resignation was a body blow, the public disavowal of Indira by her aunt, the illustrious Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 76, was a stinging slap in the face. Mrs. Pandit, onetime President of the U.N. General Assembly and former ambassador to Moscow, Washington and London, had made no secret of the fact that she disapproved of Mrs. Gandhi's emergency. A fortnight ago she told reporters that although she loved her niece dearly, she would speak out during the campaign "in order that democracy can be put back on the rails in this country."

In an effort to rejuvenate the ruling party, Sanjay Gandhi's youth branch had previously demanded that it be allocated as many as 200 of the party's nominations. But once the veteran Ram quit, the Congress leadership began to name the safest candidates it could find, including several former princes who could be counted on to deliver the vote in their old principalities. Sanjay's allies wound up with fewer than ten nominations--one of which, to be sure, went to Sanjay. He will be running for a seat adjoining his mother's in Uttar Pradesh --a fact that strikes many Indians as ironically in keeping with the party's electoral symbol, a cow and a calf. In this case, mother and son are yoked together in what seems, more and more, to be the political campaign of their lives.

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