Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Youth Congress even put pressure on the lower level bureaucracy by making district officials fulfill sterilization quotas each month. As if this was not enough, during her campaign Gandhi blamed these officials for what actually had been Sanjay's excesses. This frightened members of the bureaucracy into supporting the opposition. It has even been suggested that worried government officials tried to 'fix' Indira's defeat...
...Gandhi's confidence in her authority caused her to foster the political ascendancy of her son Sanjay, thereby provoking the accusation that she was attempting to continue the Nehru dynasty into a third generation. Sanjay, though, lacked political experience and would hardly have been a competent successor to his mother, or anyone else. By making him the head of the Congress Party's youth wing, Gandhi not only supplanted several senior party leaders, but she also disregarded an Indian political ethos which holds that age and experience deserve proper respect. After all, Sanjay was little more than a rich, rowdy...
...campaign. He turned India's Family Planning program into what was virtually a mass castration crusade. The government not only used a wide variety of economic incentives and disincentives to encourage sterilization, but also crude, strongarm tactics. These tactics alienated the teeming peasantry and urban poor who once supported Gandhi. The Youth Congress carried out sterilization and the companion slum clearance program with excessive brutality among the Muslims in Delhi, who saw the drive as an oppressive religious assault by the Hindus. Both the poor farmer and the menial city laborer viewed the aggressiveness of these programs as an attempt...
...there can be no doubt that it was the arbitrary use of authority, as in the sterilization program, which ultimately led to Gandhi's defeat. Measures which suspended habeas corpus and gave the police sweeping powers touched city and countryside alike. Dislike of Gandhi, her son and her programs narrowed the gap between the urban and rural poor. As the biographer of Jayaprakash Narayan, the moral leader of the opposition to Gandhi, has written, "A good many villagers simply agreed with the farmer who said 'Just because a man is poor and maybe cannot read it does not mean that...
Just as the Munchkins celebrated the death of the Wicked Witch of the West, India celebrated Gandhi's defeat last month. But now that the celebration is over, India, unlike Munchkinland, has to face the most crucial question: how will the new government differ from the old one? Will it improve the government or break down because of the factionalism that Gandhi suggested in her campaign slogan 'Stability or Chaos...