India: Radicalism on the Cheap

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A Revolutionary Turn? As far as Indira's leftist supporters are concerned, she is not going nearly far enough. Chandra Shekhar, a leader of the so-called "Young Turks," says: "People have lost patience. They have waited 22 years [since independence], and nothing has been done." Unless the resolutions are acted upon soon, Shekhar warns, "history in India will take a revolutionary turn." That may be an exaggeration, but the left's increasing restiveness is becoming a problem for Indira. Only two days after the party meeting in Bombay came to an end, her government announced that the giant house of Birla, which is to Indian radicals what Dow Chemical is to the American variety, had been licensed to build a $75 million fertilizer plant in partnership with U.S. Steel. The National Herald, founded by Indira's father and now the unofficial organ of her wing of the Congress Party, condemned the deal as "unsustainable."

Even the Syndicate, the Congress Party's conservative branch, has taken note of the fact that the idea of socialism exerts irresistible magic in Indian politics. A week before Indira's faction met in Bombay, the rival Syndicate gathered in Ahmedabad and found it expedient to shift markedly to the left in its own economic sloganizing. Syndicate leaders, however, were seriously considering talks with a couple of right-wing Indian parties to form an anti-Indira coalition. In public, some of the faction's orators savagely attacked the Prime Minister. Mrs. Tarakeshwari Sinha, for example, won heavy applause by charging that Indira was a "security risk" because of her apparent pro-Soviet leanings. Neither the negotiations nor the attacks, however, prevented the Syndicate from adopting much of Indira's approach in an effort to win popular support.

Mrs. Gandhi has no doubt about the effectiveness of her approach among the masses of India's voters. Privately, she seems aware that too rapid a shift toward socialism would damage India's fragile economy and alienate its budding middle class, and she has her foot firmly on the brake pedal. In public, her commitment to socialism knows no bounds—"not because it is a glamorous word," as she said in Bombay, "but because there is no other path for the solution to these problems. The question is, can we do it?" For Indira's half a billion people, there are even more pressing questions: How? And how soon?