The Sounds of Hunger

Indira Gandhi had promised that she would follow the same policies as her predecessor, and last week, as she was sworn in as India's new Prime Minister, she seemed firmly on Lal Bahadur Shastri's path. Her Cabinet retained all of Shastri's key ministers, and she vowed in her inaugural broadcast that her "first duty" would be the same as Shastri's: to find more food for India's 480 million people, who face famine in the months ahead.

Hardly had she spoken when the food problem exploded with violent rioting in desperately poor Kerala state on India's southern tip. Originally, all Kerala's political parties had agreed to call peaceful demonstrations and a one-day general strike to protest a cut in the rice ration that Shastri had ordered shortly before his death. But Communist agitators quickly began fanning the demonstrators' emotions, calling for secession from India and crying that only a bloody revolution could solve Kerala's problems. With things getting out of control, the other parties urged their followers to return to their homes. It was too late. Near Cannanore, a mob of 10,000 stopped a freight train and looted it. In the capital of Trivandrum an angry throng broke through police lines, then wrecked a railway station. Elsewhere rioters tore up rail track, built barricades across roads and highways, taunted police with the cry: "Shoot us or give us rice!" Police fired warning shots over the heads of the rioters, but no one was killed, though scores were injured in scuffles, and property damage was high.

The new Prime Minister's first impulse was to fly to Kerala at once, hoping to calm the crowds as she had done in Madras during last year's language riots. But her advisers persuaded her to give up the idea as too dangerous. Instead, she ordered half the cut to be reinstated, increasing the daily rice ration to about 5 oz. per person. That seemed to satisfy most Keralians, but it could be no more than a temporary solution. Unless fresh supplies can be found, it might well be necessary to cut the ration again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.