Meeting under a gaudy circus tent in the fabled pink city of Jaipur, the leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party talked themselves hoarse last week in the first intensive effort to refurbish their political image since independence came in 1947. Propped on sausage-shaped bolsters under a huge portrait of Gandhi, the dhoti-clad politicians pledged “self-sacrifice” and “democratic socialism”—and at mealtimes roared off in fin-tailed limousines. Endorsing “non-alignment,” party leaders warned ritualistically against “entanglement with military blocs”—even as U.S., British and Indian warplanes flew over New Delhi in joint air exercises. After a six-hour debate on the definition of socialism, the delegates adjourned the two-day conference and went home to give the subject more thought.
Boost for Indira. Another subject they thought about, one that has almost become a national obsession, is the successor to Jawaharlal Nehru, 74. India today is still smarting from the savage beating it took at the hands of Red China last fall, the economy is faltering under bureaucratic controls, and the faction-riven government is flawed with corruption. Restive politicians say bluntly that all their problems cannot be solved by the stooped, careworn Prime Minister and the elderly, out-of-touch Congress Party leadership.
A celebrated criticism of Nehru is that he resembles India’s banyan tree, which proverbially kills every other organism that grows in its shade. In the wake of three parliamentary by-election defeats last spring, Nehru announced that he would ask a dozen top Cabinet and state ministers to resign from the government in order to let them go to work revitalizing the party organization and rebuilding its strength among the voters. But the Kamaraj* plan was really used by the Prime Minister as a ruse to flush out all the top contenders for his own job. There is even widespread suspicion that Nehru forced the resignations of his ablest ministers in order to clear the way for his daughter, imperious Indira Gandhi, 45, widow of a backbench Congress politician (no kin to the Mahatma), who has long been the Prime Minister’s closest confidante (he calls her Indu, or Moon), official hostess and political troubleshooter.
Ruler of the World. But discounting Indira as a real political contender, the choice of most party members at present is former Home Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, 59, an honest if colorless politician who has been one of Nehru’s most loyal lieutenants and who, like his leader, comes from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and the traditional breeding ground of Congress Party leaders. If Shastri is disqualified —he had a heart attack in 1959-a leading contender for the prime-ministership would probably be S. K. Patil, 63, a right-winger who runs Bombay with brisk efficiency and until the Cabinet purge coped ably with the thankless job of Food Minister, though grain shortages prompted the crack that he “gave India food—for thought.”
Morarji Desai, 67, a stern ascetic who was Nehru’s Finance Minister and was once a favorite to succeed him, has lost much of his popularity in the past year, largely as a result of his Draconian measures to raise taxes for the defense effort, but could still be the powerful right wing’s choice.
As for Nehru, he is determined to hold on to his post indefinitely, but even India’s most popular man occasionally faces the limitations of fame in a country that is still only 24% literate. In a survey of villagers living less than 20 miles from bustling Hyderabad, university researchers reported that peasants variously identified Nehru as “head of a German state,” “ruler of the world,” and “some Brahman.”
* Named for Kamaraj Nadar, former chief minister of Madras, who first employed it to advantage in his own state administration.
ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9vamhoZYRwtc2doJplpaOxpr6MrZ%2BeZZKWu7qtzWarq52VZA%3D%3D