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Socialist Solutions. "She is the only man in a Cabinet of old women," said one Indian observer when Mrs. Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966, alluding to the fat and gossipy old men who then ruled her party. Up at 5 a.m. and rarely to bed before midnight, she delivers as many as 40 speeches a day. During the six-week campaign, she will have visited all of India's 19 states, traveled tens of thousands of miles, often in a caravan of gleaming white World War II-vintage jeeps, and spoken to an estimated 100 millon people.
Her unvarying theme is India's desperate need for Socialist reform. "Socialism aims at lessening the economic disparities among people," she says, "and we have no greater cause for discontentment than the disparities between the rich and the poor." Indira also stresses the importance of family planning, the decentralization of monopolies, the agricultural revolution and the need for small-business opportunities. Her desire to rule with a clear parliamentary majority is fired by her sense of the urgent need for economic development. "If we don't move faster, people aren't prepared to wait for us," she says. "They'll try to take the solution into their own hands."
Mrs. Gandhi reminds voters to look for the New Congress Party's symbol on the ballot. Since perhaps 70% of the voters are illiterate, all parties use symbols (see above), and some ballots bear a score or more. Given the importance of the sacred cow in Hinduism, the New Congress symbol could hardly be more effective—a cow and a calf.