A Therapeutic Session

The annual meetings of India's ruling Congress Party are an incongruous mixture of Woodstock nation and revival meeting. Thousands of the party faithful from all over India gather for a few days in the sun--and hours of righteous breast-beating about the worthiness of the party. The sessions are mostly therapeutic, allowing delegates to blow off steam while remaining comfortably aware that none of the resolutions adopted will create any real changes in the life of the party or the nation.

All this was more than apparent last week, as the party held its 74th annual meeting at Salt Lake, a desolate flat on the edge of Calcutta. Eighteen months ago, the flat was jammed with thousands of Bangladesh refugees. Last week between 30,000 and 40,000 party regulars met in a $700,000 tent city as princely as a Mogul encampment. Party Leader Indira Gandhi was housed in an elegant $107,000 "hut," which aides hastened to explain would serve as a guest house for a housing project to be built on the site. Nonetheless, New Delhi newsmen were stunned by its magnificence and reported that it had two gates: "One for Mrs. Gandhi and the other for the plebeians desiring to see her."

More significant than the money spent on the site, however, was the site itself. The Congress Party evidently felt that stability had been re-established in Calcutta, a city where, between 1967 and 1971, the extreme leftist Naxalites had been responsible for an average of ten political murders a day. There were 6,000 policemen on hand to guard the camp. But they were kept far busier separating bottle-and brick-throwing supporters of various Congress Party factions than in foiling left-wing plots.

Delegates' speeches quickly revealed a bitter schism between radical and moderate socialist factions within the Congress Party. The radicals were angry over what they consider to be foot dragging by Mrs. Gandhi's government on social reform since her overwhelming victory in March, 1971. The critics charged that despite her campaign pledges to oust corrupt old-line bosses, the party is still controlled by a conservative elite that to the radicals seems more and more out of touch with India's impoverished masses.

One key demand of the radicals is that the government create by next year 500,000 new jobs for educated unemployed Indians. In support of the demand, one delegate reminded party members that while the party campaigned on the slogan Garibi hatao (erase poverty), there remain considerable numbers of Indians who are undernourished, unable to afford medical treatment, and who do not have homes. Mrs. Gandhi agreed, but remarked that banishing poverty was "not a thing for which one can specify a definite date." She also called for an India free of communal hostilities, economic exploitation and backwardness. These words have been heard before, and as expected, the party hammered out no new programs. The lack of action gave some credence to the editorial charge by the Times of India that the party leaders believe that "the best that can be done when there is no oasis in sight is to create a mirage."

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