BEFORE the polls opened, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi seemed confident and optimistic. Later, while her opponents smeared their foreheads with vermilion and danced in the streets of Calcutta, Indira was withdrawn and downcast. In last week's off-year elections in four of India's most important states, Indira's once all-powerful Congress Party emerged undefeated only in her home state of Uttar Pradesh. Elsewhere it went down to stinging defeats. The results were, in fact, so poor that they cast grave doubts on the Congress Party's ability to continue as India's ruling party after the 1972 elections.
The elections were especially important because Indira's party in most cases had schemed to bring them about. After the Congress Party's initial setbacks in the 1967 state elections, the four states —West Bengal, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—had ended up with weak, ineffectual governments, which Indira subsequently suspended, placing the states under direct President's Rule. After a period of political fence mending, Indira hoped that her party would regain its dominance in the new elections.
Communist Victory. Her hopes were rudely rebutted by the results. They showed that Indian voters are increasingly disenchanted with the Congress Party, and are voting along communal and regional lines (see following story). Another lesson: the small parties, once lost among the myriad of India's miniparties, have a chance of defeating the Congress monolith if they join electoral alliances. In the fertile northeastern state of Bihar, where the small parties failed to unite, no single group emerged with enough strength to form a government. As a result, the Congress Party, which ended up 42 seats short of a majority, is attempting to organize a government by lining up the support of independent legislators. But in the northern state of Punjab, the Sikh communalist party, the Akali Dal, entered into a working arrangement with the Hindu Jana Sangh Party that will enable the two parties to form a coalition government.
The Congress Party's most stunning setback came in India's most strategic state, West Bengal, which borders East Pakistan. It also contains India's largest concentration of industry and its most miserable city, Calcutta. In West Bengal, the twelve-party United Front, which is dominated by Peking-lining Communists, won 214 seats in the 280-seat legislature, while the Congress Party's holding dropped from 127 seats to only 55. There was little doubt that the United Front would now put together a government that may well be headed by a Maoist chief minister.
Special Torture. But there was considerable anxiety about how the new government might behave. In 1967, the United Front government ruled for nine turbulent months. On instructions from leftist ministers, the police stood aside while workers illegally picketed, and sometimes pillaged, their plants. In more than 1,000 instances, the workers subjected their helpless employers to a special Bengali torture—the gherao. They kept their superiors trapped in their offices, often without recourse to sanitary facilities, until they acceded to the often unreasonable union demands. Soon West Bengal was in a dangerous state of disorder, with its industry grinding toward a standstill. Indira placed the state under New Delhi's rule.