INDIA: Ill Winds Batter Indira Gandhi

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Little Help. Aware of the bitterness, Mrs. Gandhi now acknowledges in campaign speeches that "certain injustices" have taken place in the sterilization program, and promises that compulsion will cease. After one such speech, about a dozen people standing in a crowd were asked if they believed her. No, they said. A party official confided later, "She will help us very little."

While many of Mrs. Gandhi's Cow Belt gatherings have been thin and lethargic, rallies for the Janata (People's) Party—the first unified opposition to confront the Congress Party in a national election—have been packed with attentive crowds. The speakers generally echo the line of Jayaprakash Narayan, 74, the respected conscience of the opposition, who notes that this may be India's "last chance to vote for democracy." Opposition campaigners are careful to attack Mrs. Gandhi with ridicule and sarcasm rather than abuse. When supporters of Jagjivan Ram at one rally shouted "Death to Indira!" the leader of India's Untouchables rebuked them by saying, "I wish Mrs. Gandhi a long life so she can see how the next Prime Minister runs the country."

The Cow Belt is not all of India, of course, and the Congress Party still has a well-financed political machine at its disposal to win friends and influence votes. During the campaign, government workers were granted extra rent and medical allowances, some farm loans were canceled, and a stiff increase in land taxes was halved. The government refused to license private helicopters for political campaigns; meanwhile, Mrs. Gandhi's speech-making trips in her air force chopper were permitted "for security reasons."

For India, which lived for 19 months with sharply curtailed civil liberties, the campaign has been surprisingly free, with a minimum of violence. But concern grew among opposition leaders when officials in Delhi ordered some 200,000 central reserve police and members of the paramilitary border-security force to the countryside—a week before the elections—officially to maintain law and order. As Janata leaders quickly noted, their mere presence may inhibit efforts to get out the opposition vote.

When she announced the elections last January, Mrs. Gandhi told her countrymen: "The question now before us is how to restore those political processes on which we were compelled to impose some curbs." The campaign has proved that Indians know how to use those processes—if the government will let them.