You need not fear this government, as you have feared all those [past] months. We are your servants, not your masters.
With these words, Morarji Desai, 81, assured a jubilant throng in New Delhi that he would "drive fear out of society." Two months earlier he had been a prisoner without trial under the repressive state of emergency; last week, as he became the fourth Prime Minister of India, he promised to restore civil liberties, adhere to the principles of local development idealized by Mahatma Gandhi and maintain a scrupulously nonaligned foreign policy. A lifelong politician in the Gandhian mold, Desai is as eccentric as he is ascetic, and he leads a fractious coalition party that could fall apart under the slightest stress Nonetheless, whatever troubles ahead for India, his party's startling tory was a momentous event for democracy everywhere in the world.
Gone was Indira Gandhi, after eleven years as Prime Minister. Gone also was her abrasive and ambitious Sanjay 30, whom she had been grooming to carry on the tradition of the House Nehru. Gone was the stranglehold of the Indian National Congress, one of the century's great political movements and the ruling party in India for the past 30 years. Gone was the state of emergency of and the common wisdom that India was drifting ever closer to dictatorship.
Since Mrs. Gandhi imposed authoritarian rule so effortlessly in June 1975, many friends of India had sadly concluded that the nation's rural masses were preoccupied with matters of food and livelihood and cared little about such transplanted blessings of a democratic society as freedom of speech, assembly and the press, and due process under the law. In what may well have been the world's most important elections since World War II, the Indian masses demonstrated eloquently that this was not so.
In a stunning upset, Mrs. Gandhi lost her own carefully nurtured constituency in Uttar Pradesh by 55,000 votes to Raj Narain, a socialist buffoon whom she had trounced by 112,000 votes in 1971. "India is Indira, and Indira is India," Congress Party President D.K. Barooah used to boast. He will say it no more. Defeated in an adjoining constituency by 76,000 votes was Sanjay, in his first try for elective office. Of 542 seats in the new Lok Sabha (Lower House), Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party won only 153 (v. 355 in the last Parliament), while Desai's Janata coalition won 270, completely routing Congress in its traditional heartland, the Hindi-speaking north. In a dramatic capitulation to the voters' verdict, Indira Gandhi drove to the home of Acting President B.D. Jatti at 4 a.m. one day last week after learning of her defeat, and asked him to lift the state of emergency that she had imposed 21 months earlier. A day later she resigned as Prime Minister.