Word: gandhis
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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...
...public disavowal of Indira by her aunt, the illustrious Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 76, was a stinging slap in the face. Mrs. Pandit, onetime President of the U.N. General Assembly and former ambassador to Moscow, Washington and London, had made no secret of the fact that she disapproved of Mrs. Gandhi's emergency. A fortnight ago she told reporters that although she loved her niece dearly, she would speak out during the campaign "in order that democracy can be put back on the rails in this country...
...effort to rejuvenate the ruling party, Sanjay Gandhi's youth branch had previously demanded that it be allocated as many as 200 of the party's nominations. But once the veteran Ram quit, the Congress leadership began to name the safest candidates it could find, including several former princes who could be counted on to deliver the vote in their old principalities. Sanjay's allies wound up with fewer than ten nominations-one of which, to be sure, went to Sanjay. He will be running for a seat adjoining his mother's in Uttar Pradesh...