Word: desai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...down, his Congress Party will nominate a straw man who resembles him as closely as possible. Likeliest candidate is Lai Bahadur Shastri, 58, Nehru's bland Home Minister, who, while probably equal to the job, lacks the personal dynamism to .#11 it permanently. Conservatives favor Finance Minister Morarji Desai, a dogged free-enterpriser in a statist Cabinet and a stern ascetic who once gave up conjugal relations with his wife for 20 years. But Desai's austerity programs have not made him popular. Socialist Leader Jayaprakash Narayan is, next to Nehru, the most pop- ular man in India...
Nothing fascinates an Indian politician like trying to guess who will succeed Pandit Nehru, now 71, and the only Premier the country ever had. The name most mentioned lately has been Morarji Desai, 64, who is India's able Finance Minister, leading prohibitionist and all-round ascetic (he eats no meat, fasts 36 hours a week, once gave up sex for 20 years). Last week Nehru clipped Desai's career back so far that the guessing game was wide open again...
...Desai's mistake was to try to get elected deputy leader of Parliament, a post vacant since the death last March of Home Minister Govind Pant. Desai, though his manner is languid, has won a wide following among Congress Party moderates (he dismisses Marxism as "a bunch of misguided theories"), and as deputy leader he would have been clearly in line for the top job. But Defense Minister Krishna Menon rallied the leftists behind gregarious Railway Minister Jagjivan Ram, 53, the only Untouchable in the Cabinet and a longtime Nehru disciple...
...only Menon is Nehru's kind of intellectual, like Nehru British-educated and capable of endless speculative, theoretical sparring. The rest are relatively unsophisticated, and Nehru finds little in common with them. Above all, most do not really believe in Nehru's rather mystical brand of socialism. Desai, for instance, is openly pro-Western and warns against socialism's tendency to "redistribute poverty." Most Congress Party leaders despise Menon, would rapidly get rid of him if Nehru died. The guessing game was still...
...prohibition in India got its start through misdirected idealism. Mohandas Gandhi, the revered father of Indian independence, maintained that "there is no halfway house between drunkenness and prohibition," and under the Gandhian influence prohibition was specified as a national goal in India's constitution. Today, Finance Minister Morarji Desai, widely regarded as Nehru's most probable successor, is also the nation's most convinced prohibitionist...