Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...popular vote, but maintained a parliamentary majority because the opposition was so badly split. This time the Janata Party and its allies are contesting 538 seats (out of 542), but in practically no constituency are two opposition-party candidates pitted against each other. Mrs. Gandhi's party has fielded 492 candidates and is relying on its erstwhile ally, the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India, to carry the banner in most of the other constituencies. Mrs. Gandhi is said to have been told by her own intelligence sources that she can count on winning only 200 seats, and will...
...month ago, opposition leaders thought they had a good chance of reducing the ruling Congress Party's strength in Parliament to less than the two-thirds necessary to amend India's constitution-just in case Mrs. Gandhi might decide to push through an amendment, as she did last year, to increase her powers. Given her standing as a national figure and the entrenched position of the Congress Party, the odds are that she will slip through with a narrow victory. But opposition leaders now believe, with reason, that they just might be able to defeat the Congress Party...
Political heir. The opposition's patron saint is Jayaprakash ("J.P.") Narayan, 74, who is sometimes called the political heir of Mahatma Gandhi. It was he who declared two years ago that police and soldiers were not obliged to follow orders they regarded as unlawful -and thereby gave the government an excuse for imposing the emergency in June 1975. Narayan spent five months in jail without trial but was released in November 1975, when he appeared to be near death from kidney disease. For months he has been obliged to go either to Bombay or his home in Patna every...
Aside from Narayan, the opposition's most influential figures are two veteran politicians, each of whom has long aspired to be Prime Minister: Morarji Desai, 81, and Jagjivan Ram, 68. Desai left the ruling party in 1969 after Mrs. Gandhi fired him as Finance Minister. A teetotaling vegetarian who rises at 3 or 4 a.m. and works at his spinning wheel as a Gandhian duty, Desai has been barnstorming the country with a simple message: Mrs. Gandhi's emergency has introduced a "climate of fear," and if she wins again, she will reimpose the full force...
...having quit the party and the Cabinet only last month (TIME, Feb. 14). The spokesman for India's 85 million Untouchables, he is keeping his group separate from the Janata Party, although he has agreed not to field any candidates directly against it. In a jab at Mrs. Gandhi and her ambitious younger son Sanjay, 30, Ram remarked that whatever people may say about Congress Party bossism, they should remember that during the emergency, "the whole country has been ruled by 1½ bosses...