Ill Winds Batter Indira Gandhi

In New Delhi, newspapers wrote of the "ill winds" battering the Prime Minister. To the east, in the city of Patna, an angry crowd interrupted one of her speeches, chanting, "Indira Gandhi, go back!" At the southern tip of the subcontinent, near the coastal city of Trivandrum, the signs posted on palm trees cried out: END DICTATORSHIP, DETHRONE THE QUEEN!

Mrs. Gandhi's campaign for the re-election of her government was running into trouble--heavy trouble. The four-day national ballot is scheduled to begin this Wednesday. Privately, some New Delhi pundits were betting that when the votes are counted next week, they will add up to the first national defeat for Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party in India's 30 years of independence. Even if the pundits are wrong, the mere fact that a defeat now seems possible marks a dramatic reversal for Mrs. Gandhi--only eight weeks after she had confidently called for elections and relaxed the authoritarian rule she had imposed in the name of a national emergency.

Cow Belt. As the election campaign wound to its climax last week, Mrs. Gandhi was desperately trying to win back some unexpected--and highly significant--defectors: farmers and villagers who live in the countryside of northern India, a densely populated area that city people have scornfully dubbed the "Cow Belt" because devout Hindu farmers do not slaughter the sacred animals. Big blocks of parliamentary seats from the Cow Belt have been crucial to all five of the Congress Party's national electoral victories since 1947. But while accompanying the candidates on a swing through the region, which includes Mrs. Gandhi's constituency in Uttar Pradesh, TIME'S New Delhi bureau chief Lawrence Malkin encountered widespread resentment of Indira's rule. "During the emergency, some local officials arbitrarily used the suspension of habeas corpus and other rights to arrest or harass whomever they chose," Malkin reported. "Stories circulate of people being picked up for distributing handbills or simply for talking out of turn. In the countryside, fear has become so widespread that the independent election commission's posters now urge: VOTE WITHOUT FEAR."

None of Mrs. Gandhi's measures has caused more resentment than the government's campaign to encourage sterilization in order to curb India's disastrous population explosion. According to one official count, this ambitious birth-control program resulted in more than 7 million vasectomies throughout India last year. In the town of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where Mrs. Gandhi's son Sanjay is running for a parliamentary seat, villagers told Malkin that they had taken to sleeping in the fields to avoid being picked up and sterilized, which many of them seemed to equate with castration. The town market of Gauriganj was closed for a time because no one would come to it for fear of being nabbed by sterilization teams. In the village of Pipli, early-morning gunfire broke out last December when villagers resisted a sudden dragnet conducted by police squads seeking candidates for sterilization; later an official claimed that the village would be bombed if any outsiders learned of the incident.

Little Help. Aware of the bitterness, Mrs. Gandhi now acknowledges in campaign speeches that "certain injustices" have taken place in the sterilization program, and promises that compulsion will cease. After one such speech, about a dozen people standing in a crowd were asked if they believed her. No, they said. A party official confided later, "She will help us very little."

While many of Mrs. Gandhi's Cow Belt gatherings have been thin and lethargic, rallies for the Janata (People's) Party--the first unified opposition to confront the Congress Party in a national election--have been packed with attentive crowds. The speakers generally echo the line of Jayaprakash Narayan, 74, the respected conscience of the opposition, who notes that this may be India's "last chance to vote for democracy." Opposition campaigners are careful to attack Mrs. Gandhi with ridicule and sarcasm rather than abuse. When supporters of Jagjivan Ram at one rally shouted "Death to Indira!" the leader of India's Untouchables rebuked them by saying, "I wish Mrs. Gandhi a long life so she can see how the next Prime Minister runs the country."

The Cow Belt is not all of India, of course, and the Congress Party still has a well-financed political machine at its disposal to win friends and influence votes. During the campaign, government workers were granted extra rent and medical allowances, some farm loans were canceled, and a stiff increase in land taxes was halved. The government refused to license private helicopters for political campaigns; meanwhile, Mrs. Gandhi's speech-making trips in her air force chopper were permitted "for security reasons."

For India, which lived for 19 months with sharply curtailed civil liberties, the campaign has been surprisingly free, with a minimum of violence. But concern grew among opposition leaders when officials in Delhi ordered some 200,000 central reserve police and members of the paramilitary border-security force to the countryside--a week before the elections--officially to maintain law and order. As Janata leaders quickly noted, their mere presence may inhibit efforts to get out the opposition vote.

When she announced the elections last January, Mrs. Gandhi told her countrymen: "The question now before us is how to restore those political processes on which we were compelled to impose some curbs." The campaign has proved that Indians know how to use those processes--if the government will let them.

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