Word: gandhis
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...Belt. As the election campaign wound to its climax last week, Mrs. Gandhi was desperately trying to win back some unexpected-and highly significant-defectors: farmers and villagers who live in the countryside of northern India, a densely populated area that city people have scornfully dubbed the "Cow Belt" because devout Hindu farmers do not slaughter the sacred animals. Big blocks of parliamentary seats from the Cow Belt have been crucial to all five of the Congress Party's national electoral victories since 1947. But while accompanying the candidates on a swing through the region, which includes Mrs. Gandhi...
None of Mrs. Gandhi's measures has caused more resentment than the government's campaign to encourage sterilization in order to curb India's disastrous population explosion. According to one official count, this ambitious birth-control program resulted in more than 7 million vasectomies throughout India last year. In the town of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where Mrs. Gandhi's son Sanjay is running for a parliamentary seat, villagers told Malkin that they had taken to sleeping in the fields to avoid being picked up and sterilized, which many of them seemed to equate with castration...
Little Help. Aware of the bitterness, Mrs. Gandhi now acknowledges in campaign speeches that "certain injustices" have taken place in the sterilization program, and promises that compulsion will cease. After one such speech, about a dozen people standing in a crowd were asked if they believed her. No, they said. A party official confided later, "She will help us very little...
While many of Mrs. Gandhi's Cow Belt gatherings have been thin and lethargic, rallies for the Janata (People's) Party-the first unified opposition to confront the Congress Party in a national election-have been packed with attentive crowds. The speakers generally echo the line of Jayaprakash Narayan, 74, the respected conscience of the opposition, who notes that this may be India's "last chance to vote for democracy." Opposition campaigners are careful to attack Mrs. Gandhi with ridicule and sarcasm rather than abuse. When supporters of Jagjivan Ram at one rally shouted "Death to Indira...
...political machine at its disposal to win friends and influence votes. During the campaign, government workers were granted extra rent and medical allowances, some farm loans were canceled, and a stiff increase in land taxes was halved. The government refused to license private helicopters for political campaigns; meanwhile, Mrs. Gandhi's speech-making trips in her air force chopper were permitted "for security reasons...