Books: Indira Isn’t India

THE NEW INDIA by Ved Mehta Viking; 174 pages; $10

The remarkably high quality of India’s first generation of leadership long obscured a simple fact: the nature of that nation’s democracy depends largely on what the leadership cares to impose. It has the power to foster democratic institutions; it also has the capacity for tyranny.

India’s reputation as “the world’s largest democracy” perished abruptly on June 26, 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the imperious daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, imposed a “state of emergency,” curtailed civil liberties and imprisoned tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of her political opponents. But if Indian democracy had been destroyed in a single night, it was miraculously reborn only 21 months later when Mrs. Gandhi and her Congress Party were overwhelmingly defeated at the polls.

In The New India, a collection of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, Ved Mehta traces the corrosive effect of unchallenged political power during what he calls an “Orwellian passage of time.” Mehta, who was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for many years, recognized from the beginning how dangerous a path Mrs. Gandhi had chosen. By her action, he wrote, “she risked making it possible for politicians, much more ruthless and power-hungry than she, one day to dislodge her and perpetrate abuses of power previously unimagined.”

From the start she confounded her enemies, a group that included “some of the wisest old tortoises of Indian politics.” Her lieutenants grew fond of saying, “India is Indira and Indira is India.” It is clear that she came to believe it too. But as a dictator she was hopelessly flawed, a lonely woman who turned more and more to her own family, particularly her zealous younger son Sanjay. “She could not escape her Nehru heritage,” writes Mehta, “including her Nehru conscience.” Incredibly, she did not realize, or perhaps refused to believe, the extent to which the enforced sterilization campaign and the behavior of petty officials had inflamed North India. And so she made the political mistake of her life, calling the elections that summoned her defeat. Had she not done so, the fate of Indian democracy might have been far different.

If, as Mehta has observed, “anything would be better than the dictatorship of the emergency,” it does not follow that India’s problems have been solved with the election of Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi’s family-planning program was often harshly applied. But the sterilizations (8 million in her last year of power) were a human effort to deal with crushing statistics: India’s population (now over 620 million) will reach 1 billion by the year 2000. During Desai’s first nine months in office, on the other hand, there were only 636,000 sterilizations, the lowest rate in a decade. The threat of dictatorship has receded, but the conflict between traditional democracy and the things India must do to save itself remains unresolved.

-William E. Smith