The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Indira Gandhi

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who has ruled India for eleven years, will formally resign tomorrow after a stunning election defeat. The fifty-nine-year-old daughter of the late Jawaharlal Nehru lost her own seat in Parliament, as did many members of her cabinet. The Congress Party which has governed India for all thirty years since independence, was swept out of power by a coalition of opposition parties aroused and united by nineteen months of authoritarian rule by Mrs. Gandhi. As they began preparations today to form a new government the new leaders said their first priority would be to restore democratic freedoms.

Tonight, an intimate look at this extraordinary election and its significance. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, there was no official Washington reaction to the Indian election results; the State Department said it was too early to assess what it may mean to future U.S.-India relations -that kind of an analysis will have to wait for the formation of the new government. Over at the White House presidential press secretary Jody Powell applauded the lifting of the emergency restrictions on civil liberties and the fact that the elections were even held, but said Presidents of the United States do not comment on the results of elections.

Privately, however, administration officials admitted they were stunned and surprised by the Gandhi loss. Sources said that most everyone here, from the very highest in the U.S. government on down the line, thought the American press had been incorrectly reporting the possibility of a Gandhi defeat. They figured Indira Gandhi`s talents as a campaigner would win out in the end. Well, they were wrong. Robin?

MacNEIL: We rarely get a chance to see Indian democracy in action and sample its unique flavor. We begin tonight with an extended film report from the BBC on the final stage of the campaign which led to Mrs. Gandhi`s surprising defeat. The report focuses on India`s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, and its capital city, Allahabad, the northern area where the opposition to Mrs. Gandhi was strongest. The BBC reporter is David Dimbleby.

DAVID DIMBLEBY: The porters carry building sand from the barges on the Jumna up the steep bank to a dump at the top. Like most of the voters of Allahabad they are poor. They earn under half a penny for each backbreaking trip, and make eighty pence a day if they`re very tough. Like most of Allahabad`s voters they`re illiterate and without any formal education, and in previous elections would have been expected to vote for Congress Party.

For the first time in over a year and a half Allahabad is free -- or fairly free -- to speak its mind, and Congress Party and Mrs. Gandhi can take no comfort from what`s being said. The Congress Party has. been in power in India since the independence was negotiated thirty years ago. But in this election the party of Nehru, Shastri and Mrs. Gandhi is for the first time in Allahabad facing a united opposition challenge that threatens her supremacy in an election she thought she`d win hands down.

The strident voice of the opposition booms out across Allahabad and the country around. A hastily formed alliance, a junta, a hodge podge of parties and a breakaway group from Congress Party, it`s united only in its opposition to Mrs: Gandhi and the past months of personal and authoritarian rule. It`s appealing to Allahabad to seize this chance to cut down its favorite daughter.

Allahabad lies in the hot, flat Ganges plain. Once the prosperous capital of Uttar Pradesh, its glory is now somewhat faded and many of its big houses decaying. But it`s still the seat of a famous university and it`s the place where Mrs. Gandhi was born and married. The daughter of Prime Minister Nehru, she was brought up in this house in the middle of the city, now a national monument. Great decisions were taken here, great events happened.

But there`s another memorial to Nehru in the city, in Allahabad Jail, "where our beloved Nehru was incarcerated by the British during our struggle for freedom." Now Nehru`s daughter has been incarcerating here in her turn those who claim their cause is also freedom. Since the emergency anyone regarded as a threat to the government could be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely, without evidence being produced and without trial. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act -MISA, as it`s called -- was used against over 150 citizens of Allahabad, some of them smugglers and black marketeers but the majority political opponents and trade unionists. Among them, a lecturer from the University who`d been leading silent marches and fasts in protests against Mrs. Gandhi`s failure to attack corruption.

What are your personal feelings for the woman who caused your imprisonment for nineteen months?

B.L. SHARMA, Lecturer, Allahabad University, Ex-Political Prisoner: I think that whatever she did was not in the true true tradition of this country. We are followers of Mahatma Gandhi, who allowed everyone to express his opinion however inpalatable it may be to us.

DIMBLEBY: These seven men were all held in Jail by Mrs. Gandhi. They`re Opposition Party workers, trade unionists and student leaders from Allahabad University. On release they went straight to work for Mrs. Bahuguna, wife of a former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh who is standing in the election as a candidate for Congress for Democracy.

How long were you in Jail for?

MAN: Nineteen months.

DIMBLEBY: When did you come out?

MAN: Seventeenth.

DIMBLEBY: Seventeenth of February. Just in time for the election.

MAN: Yes. (Laughing.) Last day of nomination run.

DIMBLEBY: Has it made it difficult for you, having all these people in Jail until the election, or has it helped the campaign?

Mrs. BAHUGUNA: It has helped the campaign, definitely. They are speaking in a bitter tone, it is quite true.

They are the kind we expected to speak in a mild way.

DIMBLEBY: Mrs. Gandhi argues that only a handful of Indians were directly affected by the loss of freedom of the emergency -- only thousands imprisoned in a country of over 600 million. But the evidence at Allahabad suggests the effects of the emergency were more widespread than that. Manou Khaurasia runs a store selling betel nut. As he smears the leaves with paste and folds them into wads to chew, he listens to his customers grumble; and what he says was repeated by person after person we met.

How were you affected by the emergency? What difference did it make to you?

M.L. KHAURASIA, Pan Seller: I was afraid to talk to anybody freely.

DIMBLEBY: Were other people like that, too -- I mean, your customers?

KHAURASIA: It`s true about every body.

DIMBLEBY: The Congress Party is carrying a very different message to the constituencies. Forced onto the defensive in the opening days of the campaign by the attacks unleashed against the rigors of the emergency, it`s fighting back by stressing the economic benefits the emergency brought.

V.P. Singh, Minister of State for Commerce in Mrs. Gandhi`s government, is the Congress candidate for Allahabad. He argues however much the voters may have disliked the emergency they`ll end up supporting the party that offers stability, the party they`ve always voted for.

V. P. SINGH: There is realization on certain issues, you see, that emergency has done good. If you ultimately go and talk to people about industry; peace, about industry and progress, achievement in the economic field, people do realize that there have been achievements.

Mrs. N. FIRDAUSI, Housewife: I still feel that Mrs. Gandhi still has a lot of following. She seems to be the only one who can really make India stand on its feet and go ahead, you see, because we need somebody strong, we need somebody who can really take the nation ahead with a start. A kick and a start is what India needs.

DIMBLEBY: Allahabad High Court is the fount of justice for the whole of Uttar Pradesh. Here, in June, 1975, Mrs. Gandhi was found guilty of minor breaches of electoral law in the `71 elections. The Judgment was followed by an Opposition campaign for her resignation, and it was this, say her opponents, not a threat to national security, that led her to impose the emergency. In these courts, where Nehru once worked, most lawyers are now fiercely opposed to the constitutional changes introduced by his daughter which increase the powers of government at the expense of the courts. R.C. Scrivastava was the lawyer who conducted the election case against Mrs. Gandhi. He`s a member of the State Bar Council of Uttar Pradesh, which unanimously opposed constitutional changes being made while Opposition M.P.`s were in jail and the press bound by censorship.

R.C. SCRIVASTAVA, Lawyer: It has taken away the fundamental rights, taken away the civil liberties, taken away the rights; it rather brought a (unintelligible) in the entire (unintelligible). The changes are not made for the benefit of the people. All the changes, either the constitutional amendment or in the civil laws amendment, they all say that the law courts will be deprived of giving justice to the people against the state.

DIMBLEBY: G.E.C., a subsidiary of the British firm, is one of Allahabad`s few major factories. Over a thousand men work here making transformers for village electrification schemes. Other industries in the city include battery manufacturers, flour milling and textiles.

During the emergency the right to strike of these workers was taken away from them, and the threat of imprisonment hung over union militants. As a result, G.E.C. reported better time keeping and record output last year.

B.K. KOSHER, Director, G.E.C. Allahabad: Before emergency, we are having a lot of labor unrest; there were strikes on the slightest pretexts. Basic infrastructure of industry was not working properly, like availability of materials; the trains were not running on time; and there was an all-round shortage of services -- basic services, as there was of raw materials in this country.

DIMBLEBY: At Allahabad Junction they`re putting in their extra bit of effort, too. Allahabad is an important mainline terminal, divisional headquarters of the Northern Railway. The efficient operation of its shunting yards and loading bays is vital to Allahabad`s economy. Railways are still India`s main means of transport for people and goods. The railways are also the biggest public-sector employers in India. Thirty thousand people work for Allahabad division alone. Until a few years ago they were a byword for efficiency, but delays and petty corruption had damaged their reputation.

For passengers the declaration of the emergency had an immediate effect: an end to long waits for trains; they ran on time again. Within weeks the turnaround of goods was speeded up, and even bribery to buy tickets was, at least for a while, abolished. And the same claims are made for all the other public utilities in India.

Patrika is Allahabad`s only English-language newspaper, with a circulation of 40,000. Like all the press it was an immediate victim of the emergency, subject to censorship and news management which prevented any criticism of Mrs. Gandhi`s rule. The Patrika`s editor, unlike many of his colleagues who bitterly resented suppression of news, supported both the emergency and the censorship.

Editor, Patrika: The function of the press is not only to inform. That is one part of the function. The other part of the function is also to mold and guide.

DIMBLEBY: Of all the issues which could damage Mrs. Gandhi at the polls this week, by far the most important is the sterilization program pursued during the emergency. All parties support vigorous birth control in a country of widespread poverty whose population increases annually at the same rate as the entire population of Australia -- twelve million people a year. But led by Mrs. Gandhi`s son, Sanjay, the emergency was used to hit record sterilization targets.

Ram Kishoor is a washerman with two sons and a daughter. When a team of officials from the birth control campaign came to his village to fill their quota of candidates for sterilization, he ran away.

INTERPRETER: He hid in a field of beans nearby for a few days, but thought that he couldn`t escape because he was threatened that if he didn`t get sterilized men would beat him up.

DIMBLEBY: And was he promised anything?

INTERPRETER: He says he was promised land if he got sterilized.

DIMBLEBY: Can you ask whether he was given any land?

INTERPRETER: (Asks.) No.

DIMBLEBY :Did he get anything?

INTERPRETER: He says he was promised that his house, which got washed into the monsoon last time, would be repaired. That was not done, too.

DIMBLEBY: Ram Soomer works as a rickshaw man in Allahabad. Though he only has two children he was refused renewal of his rickshaw license unless he or his wife was sterilized.

INTERPRETER: He was told that unless he produces a certificate of sterilization his license won`t be renewed.

DIMBLEBY: Most of the blame for the excesses of sterilization has fallen on Mrs. Gandhi`s twenty-nine-year-old son, Sanjay. Through the youth wing of the Congress Party he orchestrated the birth control program. Almost unknown at the start of the emergency, he rose to a position of influence bitterly resented by many within the Party itself. He`s now standing for election to Parliament, and like other Congress candidates denies the campaign was as damaging as the opposition claims.

So you would accept responsibility for Congress and the government if there had been excesses?

SANJAY GANDHI: If there have been excesses, certainly the government shares part of the blame.

DIMBLEBY: Do you support the pressure that was used wholeheartedly, the withholding of licenses, the withholding of promotion, in order to get sterilization? Are you behind that?

GANDHI: I would support it.

DIMBLEBY: Totally?

GANDHI: Totally.

DIMBLEBY: Do you believe that you have become, in these nineteen months, basically a political liability to the Congress Party and to your mother in the campaign?

GANDHI: Well, I still get more crowds than anybody other than my mother, anywhere I go.

DIMBLEBY: Mrs. Gandhi`s Russian helicopter drops from the skies for a rally near Allahabad. Local Congress officials, including the Congress candidates, are here to meet the Prime Minister. In the past they`ve always been able to get out the vote using superior organization, better resources, occasional manipulation and the enormous benefit given the Party in office to cajole, persuade and offer advantages to those who support the Congress Party.

This time it may be different. Mrs. Gandhi`s hectic campaigning with up to fifteen major speeches a day suggests she knows she faces a tough battle. The evidence is that for her audiences the emergency caused greater resentment than she expected, and even the lower prices for essentials like cooking oil are rising again.

Here she stressed, as so often in her campaign, that she was not a dictator. "Had I been, the elections wouldn`t have been called, nor would the opposition be allowed to say the kind of things they`re saying today." The police were expecting up to 50,000 people at Mrs. Gandhi`s rally; in fact, the turnout was more like 5,000.

The opposition in Allahabad have been doing better at their rallies. H.N. Bahuguna is given a hero`s welcome. This former Chief Minister of the State was sacked by Mrs. Gandhi, and with Jagjivan Ram, leader of India`s 85 million untouchables, defected from Congress to form Congress for Democracy, a powerful challenge. Bahuguna is supporting the junta candidate in Allahabad, J. Mishra, the city`s sitting M.P. who spent the past nineteen months sitting in jail under the emergency provisions.

H.N. BAHUGUNA: Mrs. Gandhi must have learned one lesson by now: that the people will not take it easy, the people will not accept her personal power.

DIMBLEBY: Isn`t it a serious drawback that if these parties that have united for this election because of the op position to Mrs. Gandhi actually come to power, they won`t have any chance at all in reality of agreeing a policy -- that they`re united on nothing except getting .Mrs. Gandhi out?

BAHUGUNA:My dear friend, the first thing that we should have been very clear in our minds from the very beginning on, it`s not a fight against Mrs. Gandhi in person. It`s a fight against Mrs. Gandhi`s entire approach to administration, approach to the people, approach to the workings of democratic institutions.

DIMBLEBY: But you have no agreement on policy; you don`t even have a leader.

BAHUGUNA: I`m sorry. We don`t (unintelligible) a leader. The people will throw out of this particular election a leader, and government of national conscience will come up, I`m more than sure.

DIMBLEBY: Four hundred miles away from Allahabad here in Delhi is the place where the emergency was introduced and controlled from and where the decision to hold this election was taken: the residence of the Prime Minister of India, number one Safdagan Road. Every morning here Mrs. Gandhi goes out to meet groups of Congress supporters who come to see her, an essential political routine that she`s been through thousands of times before. Some days it`s villagers or farmers, or women`s groups; today, students from Uttar Pradesh who are going out campaigning on her behalf. And there`s an efficient production line taking the maximum number of group photographs in the shortest possible time.

INDIRA GANDHI: When you talk of freedom the question always arises in India whether it is the freedom of a few hundred people or the larger freedom of the masses of the people. Nobody can say that bonded labor was free, but because we have released bonded labor large numbers of people under whom they were working are angry. The people from whom they took the debt, and the debt kept on increasing, they are angry. These are the groups who are motivating people against us. They may use the slogan of family planning, they may use the emergency or anything else, but the basic reason is not emergency, it is not democracy, it is not family planning; it is that we have annoyed powerful groups who had it easy before at the cost of a vast majority of people.

DIMBLEBY: You said in Parliament that the opposition, in your view, mustn`t stand in the way of what you call "national pro grams." Isn`t that exactly what an opposition is for if it doesn`t agree with the national programs that your government`s putting forward?

GANDHI: That depends what you mean by national programs. I don`t mean specific small programs. But where in a country there is large poverty I don`t think anybody can stop you from trying to lessen that poverty or burden on the people.

DIMBLEBY: What consequences do you foresee for India if Congress Party is defeated?

GANDHI: I think there are grave dangers to the stability of India.

DIMBLEBY: Why?

GANDHI: Just because these people are such a disparate, strange mixture of ideas, ideologies; not one of them has spoken about programs or their own manifesto, for instance. This remark is not made by me, it`s made by one of the opposition leaders.

DIMBLEBY: Are you fearful at this moment about the outcome?

GANDHI: I`m never fearful, you see, because I don`t do things for success or for failure.I`m not really concerned about praise or blame. I do what I think I have to do for the country. And while I can do it I have to use every ounce of strength to strengthen the base of this country so that that cannot be destroyed.

MacNEIL: Mrs. Gandhi speaking to the BBC shortly before the election. Well, she and her son Sanjay are decisively out, each defeated in his own constituency. Who are the new leaders of the second most populous country in the world, and how should the United States regard them? One of the leading students of Indian affairs in this country is Howard Wriggins, professor of political science and director of the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York. Professor Wriggins, you just heard the Prime Minister say that if her party were defeated it would pose a grave danger to the stability of India. Do you think that is right?

HOWARD WRIGGINS: It`s pretty early to tell. If we went as we have in the past, she could be right. But it does seem to me the drama of the emergency has disciplined many people`s ambitions so that they are very likely to be able to work out a government program and work out a cabinet with will be adequately representative.

MacNEIL: Can we discuss who you think the new Prime Minister is likely to be, and tell us something about him?

WRIGGINS: I wish I had seen more of the results, because it will depend to some extent -- a good deal to the extent -- on the weight of the victories of the different contending candidates. Certainly

J.P. Narayan, who is the Gandhian figure who has inspired this new coalition of a Junta Party, he is not a candidate for Prime Minister. He`s very ill, he`s always resisted the notion of participating in politics. The two real candidates are Morarji Desai -- he`s an elderly man of eighty-one from western India, a totally incorruptable kind of person, very puritanical in his views and very determined. He was Minister of Finance at one time. Then the alternative, it seems, to me, is likely to be Jagjivan Ram. He`s the one who was a member of Mrs. Gandhi`s cabinet until two and a half, three weeks ago and brought off a substantial group of people. He has won handsomely. All the other cabinet ministers except Mr. Jivan lost, but he has won, and he has a group of fifteen or twenty. And it will be between him, then, I believe, and Morarji Desai.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Yes. Dr. Wriggins, to pick up on a question that was just asked in the film, what does this party coalition really stand for other than opposition to Mrs. Gandhi?

WRIGGINS: (Laughing.) That is a very tough one. I don`t think they really know. They know that the emergency was intolerable; intolerable because of the sterilization, but also because of the fear people had of sharing their views. And it`s very difficult to stop Indians from talking; they`ve got to do that. And it was foolish, I believe, of Mrs. Gandhi to stop that.

LEHRER: Mrs. Gandhi said to David Dimbleby in that interview that these people lack a manifesto, they don`t have a policy. Is she right?

WRIGGINS: Yes; I think it`s fair to say they do not have a coherent set of specific policies. They have a host of issues that they`re going to have to work through now, on agriculture and on budget restraint, and the classic policies any government has to work on.

LEHRER: Is it possible to characterize them in the standard political terms -- liberal, conservative, anything that we Americans might be able to grasp a little better?

WRIGGINS: One of the things about the old Congress Party was that it represented an enormous spread of opinion, and the new coalition represents an enormous spread of opinion; and I believe that somehow they will work themselves through to a series of compromises which will probably be undramatic in policy, but adequate.

LEHRER: But there`s no major political philosophy that you can say we will now see with this new government. a particular direction or thrust or anything like that, right? That`s all got to be sorted out?

WRIGGINS: There may be, but I`m not aware of it. Of course, reading from the United States is rather difficult; if I were there I`d have a good deal more accurate opinion.

MacNEIL: Would you read any significance -- because I guess we have still enough of a cold war left in us to look at it -- in the fact that the Communist Party did not make any startling gains?

WRIGGINS: That`s not at all surprising. The Communist Party also, I suspect, suffered because they had been cooperating pretty well with Mrs. Gandhi`s Congress Party. They were probably harmed by their association with her.

MacNEIL: Would you agree with Mrs. Gandhi that the state of emergency, however abhorrent it was to democratic principles, did achieve some positive results in industrial productivity and more of a sense of national discipline, and that that might disappear now?

WRIGGINS : I think at the beginning it did. How long it persisted is really very difficult to say, but it certainly looks as if it didn`t persist through the emergency. I suspect the reason she called the election was that she felt things were slipping and she needed to have a reconfirmation of her legitimacy to carry on the way she had been going.

MacNEIL: Patrick Moynihan, when he was at the United Nations only a year ago, was decrying the fact that in so few countries democracy seemed healthy, and India was one of the principal ones.

What would you say that this election says about the health of Indian democracy?

WRIGGINS: I think it says a great deal. It suggests that those of us -- and I think I was one of them -- who thought that the country people, the rural folk, really didn`t care much; and it`s clear that they did care. I thought they would go with Mrs. Gandhi, the charismatic figure who had inspired them in the past. They didn`t.

MacNEIL: Thank you. We have to leave it there. Thank you, Jim; good night.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: Thank you, Professor Wriggins. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.