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In a broadcast to the nation, Indira Gandhi promised "constructive cooperation" with the new government and said that she accepted the verdict of the people "unreservedly and in a spirit of humility." As for Sanjay, he expressed regret that his activities might have "recoiled on my mother, whose life has been spent in selfless service." He was leaving politics, he said, to devote himself to "quiet, constructive work." Some of that constructive work may be a fight to stay out of prison. There are members of the new Parliament who want a public commission of inquiry to look into alleged irregularities involving Sanjay's automobile factory, which for several years has been developing an Indian "people's car."
The Janata wave swept clean across North India from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. In Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where the sterilization campaign had been pursued most strenuously, Congress failed to win a single seat. Among the election's casualties were three ministers closely associated with the repressive measures of the emergency: Defense Minister Bansi Lal, a crony of Sanjay's; Law Minister H.R. Gokhale, architect of Mrs. Gandhi's constitutional amendments that curbed the powers of the courts and increased those of the Prime Minister; and Information Minister V.C. Shukla, who ran the government's campaign against the press.
The opposition triumph was particularly galling to Mrs. Gandhi because of the character of the principal victors; to her, they symbolized the kind of destructive "old politics" that she had hoped to eradicate from Indian life. Two of them, in fact, she had had arrested as potential dangers to the country. Morarji Desai, the new Prime Minister, had spent 19 months in detention and was released Jan. 18, when the elections were announced. Jayaprakash ("J.P.") Narayan, 74, the grand old man of Indian politics, had been arrested in June 1975, but was released five months later when he seemed to be dying of kidney disease.
More than anyone else, it was J.P. who brought down Indira's government: by his 1974 call for "total revolution" against corruption in the Bihar state government; by his June 1975 admonition to soldiers and policemen that they need not obey unlawful orders—a statement that Mrs. Gandhi used as an excuse for declaring the state of emergency; and by his plan for the formation of the Janata Party from four opposition groups. The third man who played a decisive role in India's change of government was, in Mrs. Gandhi's eyes, nothing less than a traitor to her cause. He is Jagjivan Ram, 68, leader of the country's 85 million Harijans (Untouchables). His unexpected resignation from Mrs. Gandhi's Cabinet and from the Congress Party in early February was the first clear sign that an upset might be in the making.