India: A Plague of Unrest

India is undergoing another plague of political unrest. It grows out of last February's elections, in which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Congress Party, in an unprecedented defeat, lost control of nine of India's 17 states. In only one of those states did a non-Congress party emerge with a large enough majority to rule alone. In all of the others, the vote was so splintered that the parties were forced to form coalitions that sometimes included as many as 14 parties of wildly incompatible political persuasions. The result in some states was chaos, in others instability. Taking advantage of this situation, the Congress Party in the past two weeks has overturned or suppressed the new governments of three states, and is looking on three others as ripe for takeover.

Indira's party took over the West Bengal government because the Communists, who won a dominant role in the government in the elections, encouraged workers to strike and imprison their employers in their offices. To oust the Reds, Congress threw its support to a defecting coalition minister, who formed a new government. In Haryana, the legislators switched parties with such rapidity that the workings of the government were paralyzed. New Delhi placed the state under direct "President's rule" and ordered new elections to be held after a one-year cooling-off period. Though two religious parties managed to form a fairly strong coalition in the Punjab, the Congress Party successfully brought down the coalition by offering to throw its support to a Sikh minister if he would form a rival government.

The Communists in West Bengal immediately organized a protest against the Congress Party takeover, and the result was violence in Calcutta, where workers closed down plants and offices, set fire to autos and battled police. Though no Communist himself, the Speaker of the West Bengal house chose to suspend the legislature rather than allow the new Congress-supported government to take office. In the volatile Punjab, religious leaders greeted the Congress move as an attack on the Sikhs and warned their followers to defend themselves. The Congress Party had used its muscle to recapture states that it could not win at the ballot box, but it seemed only to have supplanted one kind of chaos with another.