INDIAN ELECTION

Mrs Gandhi's new politics

W. H. MORRIS-JONES

Calcutta, 23 February The plane reached Calcutta from Patna an hour late that morning; three hours after Mr Hemanta Bose had been stabbed to death. At the airport, meeting me, Mr Mukerjee said, `I am afraid there has just now taken place a serious killing'. He was right, for even in death some men are more equal than others. On one count, 170 people had been murdered in Bengal in the seven weeks since the end of December when elections were called. The figure for 1970 was said to be 1,200. The general impression was certain that the proportion of 'political' murders had increased. Admittedly, this was tricky : the police would have some idea, but rumour and even the press were inclined to insert politics into cases that could be 'straight' crime: `Mr Chakravorti, a Sanskrit teacher at the Girls High School was shot dead by a group of masked young men on Friday even- ing. They also snatched away his pay packet which he had with him. The deceased is said to be a supporter of the Bangla Congress'.

The stabbing of Hemanta Bose was 'serious' in that it registered the escalation of violence into the higher levels of political notability. The victim was much more than a candidate in the elections—three others had been killed earlier; he was a senior leader of the Forward Bloc party with all the creden- tials Calcutta requires for popularity—a good nationalist record including induction into politics at the age of ten and long prison periods, a leftist position with experience of underground revolutionary activity, and close association with Subhas Bose, hero from one of Bengal's yesterdays... .

Clearly this could be a spark that might set Calcutta on fire. 'I am thinking there maybe a little difficulty in driving into town'. Mr Mukerjee was showing that Indians too knew the art of understatement; the road from the airport lay through some of the areas of regular disturbance. About a mile on our way we were indeed stopped, but most charmingly : four young ladies stood across the road and demanded a lift towards town. The buses, so easily set on fire by the mobs, were already off the road and these college students just out of Saturday morn- ing classes were not going to walk home if they could help it. A little further on, matters looked more serious: a crowd of about forty stationed at a roundabout brought us to a halt. Voices were raised, arms flung in the air, but Mr Mukerjee coped very well : we took seven on board, making ten in the four- seater, and were allowed to proceed.

The seven men were less communicative, more tense than the girls, and it was a relief from several points of view to set them down a couple of miles on. A little further ahead• the expected happened : the road was blocked by cars turning round to retreat, their drivers calling out advice to us to do the same; crowds were coming out on the streets and this was 'not a good area'.

This happened twice. Each time the driver displayed great ingenuity and extensive knowledge of Calcutta's roads and even by- lanes; he got us safely into. the office area downtown. He needed to know not geography alone but political geography too. Political Calcutta is by now substantially zoned, not merely according to degrees of safety or inflammability but actually in terms of party control. (Wall space, every available piece on any kind of building, has also been 'occupied' by parties, not so much for posters which Calcutta scorns but for artistic creativity expressed in slogans in decorative script and cartoon murals. Sites are attacked and defended and painters while

at work have been stabbed.) At least the areas of CPM (Marxist Communist) strength are fairly well defined, as are also the main patches of Naxalite (so-called Marxist- Leninist, in fact terrorist) activity. Much of the inter-party gang warfare takes place in disputed border zones, somewhat Belfast- style. There is at least one other similarity to Northern Ireland: the dispensers of violence, whether in gang confrontations or individual killings, are very young. It is said that the Naxalite elements have changed in recent months as the bright students from classy colleges have been joined by school drop-out bullies and street rowdies on the edge of the underworld.

The following day, Sunday, was the oc- casion of the funeral procession. But that was scarcely enough; parties hurriedly com- peted to ensure a real stoppage by calling for a bandit on Monday. This includes a general strike but goes further: all shops are closed and all vehicles including private cars stay off the streets. Trains stop at the Bengal border and internal flights in and out of Calcutta are cancelled. This was all generally regarded as only proper and indeed a normal `mark of respect'.

The procession passed off peacefully, less on account of the four lorry loads of soldiers which accompanied it than because any trouble-maker would have been too easily seized and slain by the processionists. It was a smaller affair than I had expected—at the place it passed me it was not more than three to four thousand and puny by Indian stan- dards. It looked pretty casual too, as was its reception by most of the spectators. On the maidan (common) several white-flannelled cricket matches were in progress. Only a Calcutta citizen could fail to be surprised that they continued unperturbed as the cor- tege went along a few yards away. Indeed the slogans of, the processionists were at one point interrupted by shrieks of delight as a batsman successfully hooked a short ball from a fast bowler to the improvised boun- dary.

The bundh next day seemed complete and not unpleasant. Without vehicles the city en- joyed a strange and beautiful quiet, disturbed only by the noisy crows. The closed shops gave streets a tidier air than usual. There was not the grim and eerie scene of desertion which a curfew creates. People were out, not in crowds but sufficient to outnumber police and army; they strolled on the roads as well as on pavements, relishing an extra liberty, looking like part of a sedate Victorian holiday. The industrial heart of India, beating irregularly at the best of times, came to a complete stop. But the one booming cottage industry, the manufac- ture of bombs and home-made 'pipe guns', presumably went ahead undisturbed. Tuesday's papers were exempt from the strike and they reported that the bundh did not extend to killing : 'Violence toll nine on day of quiet' read the headline. It might well have been more if Calcutta had not been hit by a violent thunderstorm in the late af- ternoon.

Tomorrow on my plane to more placid Madras will perhaps be some of those in- dustrialists who are eagerly seeking safer areas for their investments. Already the moving out, to Bombay, to Delhi, has begun, thus aggravating the awful unemployment situation. Poor Calcutta, brilliant, lively, sophisticated, cultured Calcutta, the sick man of India, will be left to slip down a little further into decay and despair, relieved only by a single sign of life—fury.

Delhi, 13 March Elections have become part of the Indian way of life. In the telephone directories the list of 'standard phrases for greetings telegrams' includes not only the conventional ones but also 'Hearty Congratulations on Success in Election'. This one must have been in great demand these last few days and the largest number surely went to Mrs Gandhi.

The overwhelming victory of her Congress party has left behind a number of casualties on the political battlefield. It will be some time before the post-mortems are completed. It was a political tidal wave which hardly an observer saw coming and which few even of the beneficiaries expected. Those who have been flattened cannot believe it and none of the analysts now inspecting the scene can be sure that they have quite understood where it came from and what it was made of.

The measurements of its size are easily given. At the last parliamentary elections in 1967, the first after Nehru's death, the Congress party took a relative beating, scrap- ing home with 284 seats in the Lok Sabha or lower house out of 520. In 1969 Indira Gandhi forced a split in the party; it left her with only 220 of those and it was widely ac- cepted that outside the body of MPs the balance was less favourable to her, perhaps just about even. In December last, she dissolved Parliament and went into the elec- tions contesting all but fifty seats (some of which were conceded to allies) and faced by a 'grand alliance' of four parties as well as several others against her. Pollsters, com- mentators and experts divided into three roughly equal groups predicting, though with little confidence, either that she would lose ground, or come back into the same minority position or just about get 270 or so and thus secure an absolute majority; a cou- ple of wild men talked of going over 300. Tonight, out of the 468 seats declared, she has got 331, a gain already of 1 1 1 and within sight of a two-thirds majority. Of the alliance parties, the Samyukta Socialists are crushed from twenty-three to three, the other 'half' of Congress is cut down from sixty-five to six- teen, the largest opposition party, Swatantra, shrinks from forty-four to a pathetic six and, most striking of all, the Jan Sangh, party of Hindu nationalism, the sole party to have made steady gains in each of the previous four elections, is halted and turned back from thirty-five seats to twenty-one. Even these twenty-one flatter to deceive : many are former princes who need the party less than it needs them.

Jawaharlal Nehru himself in his peak year of 1957 did not have it much better, and he never had to fight a comeback from defeat, he had never dared to split the party. It must seem that through his daughter's efforts the Congress party, not so much split after all as purged, now sits once more in dominance astride the vast bulk and infinite complexity of Indian political life.

One view is indeed that the magic was charisma; India wanted it and Indira pro- vided it. Certainly the Prime Minister's smil- ing profile was on every flag and poster; it occupied nearly half of each full-page ad- vertisement in the papers; 'On with Indira', said the slogan. The opposition alliance Played wonderfully into her hands by prin- ting and shouting 'Indira Hatao' ('Get rid of Indira'), thus confirming her person as the central issue.

An image of a person can travel far and wide even—or is it especially?—in a country of mass illiteracy and poor communications. Up in Delhi, they had heard, the daughter of Nehru had been in a struggle with the old politicians and had had the guts to throw them out. A stirring tale of single-handed courage goes a long way, but perhaps there was more: as they sniffed the air, did they not catch a whiff of that most precious of aromas, the scent of authority? Mrs Gandhi did her best not to leave matters to the chance of hearsay. For the two months of the campaign she was little in Delhi, mostly out and about, addressing hundreds of Meetings, each of hundreds of thousands.

It was not a quarrel over power but over policies. Her opponents were backward- looking men with small hearts and limited vision and they were trying to impede change, stop socialism, dilute and deflect her efforts on behalf of the poor. Bank na- tionalisation, curbs on monopolies and the abolition of the princes' privy purses—these showed clearly enough the directions in which she was eager to move. The master slogan was coined: the other side have only one policy, 'Indira Hatao', and we have only one reply, `Garibi Hatao'—Get rid of Poverty!

Not mere charisma then, but the `radicalisation of politics'. It was not simply that by calling for elections to the national parliament for the first time separately (for the most part) from elections to the several state assemblies she was managing to project an all-India leadership image to every part of the country; it was also that she had seized the message of anti-Congress disillusionment of 1967 and was determined to present a fresh gospel of hope. To survive politically it was indispensable to do a lurch to the left. As the election results have come streaming in over the past few days, they have been taken to confirm her wisdom.

Along this line, the commentators are now announcing that a 'new politics' is born. Hitherto parties have operated on the basis that voters outside the urban middle classes were moved not by general policy appeals but by the calls of caste and community and the lure of favours specific and local. Sup- port for any all-India party was in this 'old politics' patiently built up by linking up big men who tied up smaller men, who in turn were linked to still smaller men who were nevertheless big enough in a locality to be able as 'Vote-banks' to sway groups of voters. Linkage politics was a judicious mixture of ascriptive loyalties and patronage distribu- tion. Congress politicians were its ac- complished masters; it worked up to 1967 and then it seemed to come unstuck. Now Mrs Gandhi in two months has cut right through the game of knots and bundles. The old politics is dead and its practitioners lie re- jected on the mountains of ballot papers.

It is strange to think that a political system can so suddenly 'change centuries'—from, in our terms, the eight&nth century of `influence', 'interests' and rotten boroughs through Tamworth to Midlothian and

beyond. But India does change and politics is one of the great instruments of change; so why should politics itself remain unaltered? No one imagines that the bulk of the politi- cians abandoned the old techniques—but they are precisely the people who have been most surprised and overtaken by the events, even when they were not defeated. And yet in one respect there may be a chunk of the old politics embedded in the new—which, if true, would be very Indian. All reports seem to agree that two large groups, always more or less attached to Congress, have this time beaten all records in their bloc solidarity behind Indira : the untouchable scheduled castes and the Muslims. With the latter it would be fear of Hindu aggression and despair at the community's decay that would have made them cling to Nehru's daughter; with the former it could be the long-awaited stirring of aspirations, released perhaps by the very social tensions which the 'green revolution' has been bringing to India's villages. This time it has been in many parts a fairly low poll in the 50 per cent to 60 per cent range; Mrs Gandhi has some huge ma- jorities but overall her share of the vote would be around half.

This should leave Mrs Gandhi with two solemn thoughts: What is to be done to repay the faith with good works? What is to be done to disarm the unfaithful, of whom there are still many and mostly in the elite layers of society? If Mrs Gandhi were the person 01 seek an alibi, she would have been disappointed; the poor, who are many, have given her all power. (Some of them may even have believed one of her more weird slogans: 'Indira is You: Vote Yourself to Power'.) Up to now, Mrs Gandhi has, unlike her father, worked through courtiers rather than through established institutions of ac- countability like ministers and party. She can say she had no choice, but now she has. From here on it will need at least some results to sustain popularity, and courtiers, however bright and radical, will need to be steady levers as well.

There is a third solemn thought for the Prime Minister. Calcutta for me is three weeks and a world away. But the elections have not cured its sickness, and in the mean- time there is turmoil next door in the other Bengal across the border. The rescue opera- tion will need much cash and more imagina- tion. But it is after all one of India's in- dustrial and cultural power houses. The following sweet snippet came from a newspaper's correspondent in Orissa, ad- jacent to Bengal: 'Though we are keeping our fingers crossed about the fate of the country in the coming elections, everyone is looking forward to a fine mango season this summer'. It is appropriate to remember that politics is not all. It is possible that the chaps in white flannels on the Calcutta maidan care more for India's Test match victory against the West Indies than for the check to the CPM. But for people in public office things are different. For those in Delhi a good mango season will not be enough; it will matter who tastes them, in Calcutta as elsewhere in India.

Wyndraeth Humphreys Morris-Jones is Professor of Commonwealth Affairs and Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the University of London. He was Constitutional Adviser to the Viceroy of India, 1947, is author of several books on India, and is Editor of the Journal of Com- monwealth Political Studies.