A Plea for the Tree

The slight, doe-eyed lady in the simple cotton sari finished her speech and stepped up to the bamboo barricades that held back the crowd. While thousands of brown hands danced in the air, she took from an aide the day's accumulation of garlands and tossed them to her listeners. Indira Gandhi was doing what she had so often watched Jawaharlal Nehru do in those years past when she had stumped with him across the length and breadth of India. This time, as she pressed her campaign for the national elections that will be held from Feb. 15 to Feb. 22, she was stumping hard to save her own political life after a year as India's Prime Minister.

Because they knew that she was their beloved Panditji's daughter, Indians by the thousands last week turned out to greet her. Traveling mostly by auto, Indira went from one dusty village to another in the impoverished state of Uttar Pradesh, campaigned there in the electoral district in which she herself will stand for re-election to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Rarely speaking for more than ten minutes, she pleaded for support for the Congress Party. "Do not cut down a tree," she said, "when it is about to bear fruit."

The crowds received her message quietly. For them, the important thing was simply to gaze, almost reverently, on Indira. Villages built arches bearing signs of welcome. Crowds stopped her car, presented her with flowers and begged her to speak. Smiling, Indira responded with "Hail India!" in Hindi before her caravan passed on. In the next two weeks, she intends to keep up the pace; she will visit 15 of the country's 17 states.

Party Problems. Indira is running at such a fast pace because her party is in its deepest trouble since India won independence from Britain in 1947. Always an unwieldly conglomerate of everything from conservative businessmen to dreamy leftists, the Congress Party is suffering from an attack of election-eve defections. Fiery old Leftist Krishna Menon, India's onetime Defense Minister, has bolted the party after failing to win its nomination for Parliament from Bombay, is running as an independent. Key leaders in six other states have also broken with the party and taken their followers along with them. Worse yet, the rebels have somewhere to go. Two up-and-coming conservative parties--the Hindu Jana Sangh and the free-enterprising Swatantra--are welcoming Congress Party defectors.

Indira has had her own share of troubles since she succeeded the late Lai Bahadur Shastri one year ago. Her attempts to rejuvenate the country's stag nating economy by devaluating the overpriced rupee brought loud screams of protest from most of the nation's politicians. Though she has so far saved India from widespread famine by arranging for special shipments of U.S. grain, many Indian leftists denounced her for relying too heavily on the Americans for help. Her attempts to free the country from crippling state controls have brought charges that she is abandoning the socialism of her father in favor of capitalism.

Ban the Butcher. No other problem plagues Indira so badly as the agitation for a nationwide ban on cattle slaughter. Revered by Hindus, some 175 million cattle roam the country, competing for India's limited food supply and finally being sent to "convalescent homes" to die. The country's meat-eating Moslems, on the other hand, slaughter some 1,000,000 cattle each year. Nehru had no patience with the wastefulness of the Hindu reverence for cows but never dared to thin out the uneconomic herds. Indira has also been ambivalent about the matter, and the sadhus (Hindu holy men) felt that near election time they could manage to force her to grant their ban-the-butcher request.

Though Indira's responses to many of India's problems have often been weak, this time she did not cave in. She insisted that under the constitution the issue was one for the states to decide separately, but offered to set up a national panel to study the situation. But nothing has placated the Hindu extremists. Naked sadhus rampaged in the shadow of Parliament as part of the national "All Party Cow Protection Movement," and two holy men have vowed to fast to the death unless she bows to their demand. Last week, after two months of hunger, both men were very weak. When false rumors of the death of one began to circulate, angry Hindu mobs rioted in Hyderabad in southern India, stoning buses and the local Congress Party headquarters. Such violence, which will almost certainly spread if the sadhus die, can only end up helping the Jana Sangh and Swatantra parties, both of which strongly endorse an immediate national ban on cow slaughter.

Differing Forecasts. Despite these problems, Indira Gandhi expects the Congress Party to suffer only marginal losses, if any, at the polls. She is also confident that no one will be able to elbow her out of the prime ministry after the elections. But other Indians are less sanguine. Most forecasts predict that the Congress Party will lose control of three or four states to right-wing alliances and perhaps the state of Kerala to the Communists. The Con gress Party is also expected to lose 80 or so of the 374 seats that it now ho'ds in the 521-member lower house of Parliament. It would still be India's largest party by far, but no longer quite so all-powerful.

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