tter from India
rs Gandhi's emma
"clip Na,yar
.s every reason why Mrs Gandhi should eling on top of the world; she has earned kadrnission to the exclusive nuclear club; L4S broken the railway strike which her strength and stamina. But despite achievements she is in no way the oltis she was in 1969, when she drove out I 1 Guard from the Congress Party, or in /foeri she helped Bangladesh free itself. llact, she has lost two State Assembly 1:1et10ns in Rajasthan, where she had si,efzI the nuclear device only a few days It is surprising how muted the reaction ;en to her success in the nuclear field, tee there have been no public meetings I,e,s to greet her. A much lesser thing in 'le nationalisation of sixteen Indian hailed with drums in almost all the e Ian cities. kreason why her stock has gone down is 'La has not been able to keep her election ka of ousting poverty. People appreciate 3,?fling that poverty cannot be removed by a magic wand but they did not I?rices almost to double in the last kr,months. (In the last four months prices T'ne up by 30 per cent.) They did not 4113,hortages of so many things — even ek,`' Cooking oil are hard to get. They did toot unemployment of such an extent 4` (Alt of ten graduates leaving univertwre without jobs. (One estimate is of r!,t1. ty million unemployed.) :tief and other concessions to upperl'otips have not cast off stagnation in industrial production which has recorded a zero per cent gro.wth in the last two years. Nor has the wooing of foreign companies and big Indian houses, which for long have not been allowed to expand, yielded results. Mrs Gandhi, many believe, is turning right from far left and she is willing to go still further, even at the risk of providing more grist to leftist mills, but big business is reluctant to invest. The credibility gap which widened in the wake of her populist policies looks difficult to fill.
Then once again there is not enough food to go round and there is nothing in stock. It is not that production has gone down — it is more or less what it was last year — but the price is 50 per cent more than it was last year. The government's explanation is: one, that the responsibility of feeding 15 million more mouths every year is difficult (India's present population is 575 million); and two, the new wheat crop is slow to arrive in the market.
The scrapping of the wheat trade take-over and going back to the old system has not been of much use. Big farmers helped by traders are keeping back produce to get a better price in the lean season. The government is averse to taking action against them because they are the ones who marshal votes and funds for the ruling Congress Party. Its own efforts have not resulted in procuring more than half a million tons of foodgrains as compared with nearly 4.5 million tons last year. Consequently, New Delhi has announced that it will import 3 million tonnes from America but this is barely enough to sustain the fair price shops which the government runs to feed the urban and industrial population. And what happens if there is delay in the arrival of imports since the country is living from ship to mouth?
There is yet another reason why Mrs Gandhi could not be feeling on top of the world. A new way of registering protest against an unpopular government has begun. Students get together, stage demonstrations, court arrest and force the elected representatives in the legislature to resign so as to get the Assembly dissolved.
In the recent session of Parliament Mrs Gandhi brought an amendment to the Constitution to lay down that the resignation of a Member of Parliament or state legislature would not be accepted if it had been submitted under duress. The amendment has made no difference and has only elicited this comment from the opposition: does the government want Members to be assassinated?
Mr Jaiprakash Narain, a veteran Gandhian leader who is conducting the agitation in Bihar, admits that his methods are 'unconstitutional' but argues that they are not 'undemocratic'. (It is the same kind of argument that Mahatma Gandhi used to defend his actions which he knew were 'illegal' but which were justified on moral grounds.) Mr Narain says that when a government has failed to deal with corruption and has not been able to check the price rise, it has 'exhausted' the mandate given by the people and therefore must go back to the people to get a fresh mandate.
• Mrs Gandhi's predicament is that if Bihar is allowed to go the Gujarat way, then what about the other States? If the performance of an Administration is to be weighed in the scales of honesty and fair prices, then Mrs Gandhi knows that there will have to be fresh elections all over the country. She has no intention of obliging Mr Narain or anybody else voicing such a demand. But what can she do when the President of India, Mr Gin, also says in public that the entire system in India is reeking with corruption and when the price of necessities continues to rise practically every day?
Kuldip Nayar, The Spectator's correspondent in India, is Editor of the Statesman, New Delhi.
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