THE REPUBLICdisappeared and Maharashtra emerged once more as a Congress stronghold.
Similarly, Andhra (which had started the whole movement) was in those
days one of the pillars of Congress rule in India. This showed that whenever
the Congress came to terms with the federal plurality of India, it gained
added strength rather than any loosening of its hold.
The Congress system and Nehru’s successorsAfter Nehru’s death in May 1964 the Congress system seemed to be in
serious danger. Under his immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, this
did not yet become apparent. Fate would have it that Shastri emerged as a
major figure of national integration, as a result of his courageous stand at
the time of Pakistan’s aggression in 1965 and his conduct at the Tashkent
Conference. He would almost certainly have won an election, but died of a
heart attack at the end of the Tashkent Conference.
Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, was selected as Shastri’s
successor by the old guard of the Congress. This move was designed
mainly to forestall Morarji Desai, who had already made it clear that he
wanted to become prime minister at the time of Shastri’s selection. The
new premier appeared to be a weak candidate, not destined to lead the
Congress to a great success. Unfortunately, she had to face an election after
being hardly one year in office and the result of that election was poor, the
majority at the centre was narrow and several North Indian states had
turned down the Congress and were then governed by coalition
governments. The year 1967 was a bad year for India in other respects: it
was the second year of a devastating drought, which not only meant a
great setback for agriculture but also brought about an industrial
recession. This long-term recession reduced the chances of thousands of
young men who had undertaken an education in engineering in the hope
that this would be the profession of the future. Unemployment amongst the
educated increased, and with it the potential for political protest.
Indira Gandhi was left with a rather brittle political system after the
elections of 1967. She used the instrument of ‘President’s Rule’ in order to
topple the unstable coalition governments in northern India, but the
subsequent election results in those states did not please her either. She then
adopted a bold and risky course of action which was ultimately successful
and assured her of a position of unchallenged leadership. She split the
Congress Party and threw out the old guard. This purge started with the
resignation in 1969 of her deputy prime minister, Morarji Desai, who
embodied the conservative opposition to her more left-wing attitude. Finally,
she separated the Lok Sabha elections from the elections in the states by
dissolving the Lok Sabha one year in advance of the elections that had been
scheduled for 1972. With the resonant slogan ‘Gharibi Hatao’ (‘Beat
Poverty’), she ran her election campaign like a national plebiscite. The