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Whatever their private misgivings, most Indians apparently accepted the imposition of the emergency decrees calmly. In Bihar state, a call by non-Communist opposition parties for a general strike failed. In Ahmedabad, however, police had to use tear gas to disperse an unruly crowd, and there were sporadic demonstrations and strikes in Bombay, Poona and Mehsana, a town in Gujarat state that is now governed by Mrs. Gandhi's opposition.
Cold Storage. A major reason why internal reaction was so muted is that Indians are not particularly surprised at seeing their sometimes obstreperous politicians getting arrested. Agitation is a political weapon frequently wielded by opposition leaders, and they resort to it knowing full well that they stand a good chance of being thrown in jail. In fact, if they had not been rounded up under terms, of the emergency decree, many of the leaders who planned the passive-resistance campaign might well have been arrested singly or in batches during their proposed week-long satyagraha (literally, "truth-force") campaign. More in sorrow than in anger, the British Manchester Guardian, one of the oldest campaigners for Indian independence, editorialized: "Mrs. Gandhi has taken a desperate and perilous plunge. At stake now—with democracy in cold storage and over 700 of her opponents in hot prison cells—is not merely her personal political survival. India's whole system of government, the basis of its life since independence, is in the pot too."
The reaction to last week's events in the Soviet Union, which is India's staunch ally, was sympathetic; elsewhere in the world, the response was overwhelmingly negative. In Washington, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered State Department officials not to comment on the grounds that the Indian crisis was an "internal matter." Privately, many American diplomats concurred with a former Indian foreign service officer in Washington who observed: "I am angry. Mrs. Gandhi has used a hammer to kill a fly."
Despite the government's insistence that Mrs. Gandhi had moved only to save India from anarchy, there were inevitable charges that she had acted to ward off the threat to her position posed by the Allahabad decision. The charges of which she was convicted, as the London Times put it, were "absurdly trifling": a key aide, Justice Jag Mohan Lai Sinha ruled, had campaigned for her for one week before he resigned, and state employees had helped build rostrums and rig loudspeakers for her speaking engagements. She was exonerated of twelve other charges.