Indira Is Back

The lush, hilly, coffee-and rice-growing district is known as Chikmagalur, "the abode of the little daughter," in the local Kannada dialect. This Indian constituency, some 1,000 miles south of New Delhi, has now become a political shelter for "Behnji" (Honored Sister)--a favorite nickname of the formidable Indira Gandhi. In a bitter by-election, the former Prime Minister last week defeated a lackluster candidate of the country's ruling Janata coalition to win a seat in India's Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), where she has not been seen since her Congress Party was thrown out of office in 1977.

Indira's victory--she won 55% of the 450,000 votes cast--was something less than a landslide, even though she campaigned hard and the local branch of her party pulled out all the stops to produce a heavy vote. Soon after the two-week campaign began, she abandoned her ostentatious Chevrolet Impala and toured the 2,780-sq.-mi. district in locally made cars and Jeeps, presenting herself as a friend of the poor. Although widely known to be a religious skeptic, she invariably paused to meditate at village shrines and sacred trees.

Mrs. Gandhi had jailed her most prominent political opponents without a qualm during the 21-month state of emergency she declared in June 1975; nonetheless, in Chikmagalur she charged that the Janata government was harassing her by preparing "false cases against me, my family and my party members." That was a reference to the government's declared intent to file charges of criminal conspiracy against her by the end of the year, arising out of abuses of power exposed by a tribunal that investigated her emergency dictatorship. (Her younger son, Sanjay, 31, is already on trial for the theft and destruction of a satirical political film.)

While playing the martyr's role, Indira managed to ignore a wave of violence by police, seemingly designed by her sympathizers in the local bureaucracy to intimidate Janata supporters. An actress from Bangalore appeared at campaign rallies carrying a sign protesting her mother's torture and death at the hands of police during the emergency; she was beaten by cops and had to be hospitalized. The brutality culminated in havoc at the village of Ujire, when police fired in the direction of press photographers, badly injuring one and killing a 19-year-old woman student who was sheltering them. Three photographers were beaten, and TIME New Delhi Bureau Chief Lawrence Malkin was arrested for demanding the name of the police commander.

In New Delhi, Indira's win was seen as a rebuke to the Janata government. The five-party alliance led by Prime Minister Morarji Desai, 82, has been riven by petty factionalism. In fact, the record is not all that bad: the government has curbed inflation, restored most of the civil liberties abridged during Mrs. Gandhi's emergency, and developed a soft-sell foreign policy that has erased Indira's threatening "big brother" image in South Asia. But Janata has failed to carry out promises for rural development and small-scale industry. Street crime in India is increasing, and the country has been beset with riots that pit Untouchables against higher caste Hindus. Says Industry Minister George Fernandes: "The Janata must cease to be a nonperforming government and a nonperforming party." Admitted another party official: "We are suffering from auto-intoxication."

Still, Indira is a long way from taking power away from Janata, which holds 330 seats in the 542-member lower house. Although her branch of the Congress Party, which split up last January, controls India's upper house, the Council of States, it has only 78 members in the lower house. Even with a parliamentary forum, Mrs. Gandhi will probably continue to concentrate on her role of party chairman, providing guidance to her followers as they try to disrupt government timetables and block Janata legislation.

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