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INDIRA GANDHI AS WORLD LEADER
MARY TERRELL

"LIFE MEANS STRUGGLE and the higher you aim, the more you wish to achieve, the greater is the work and sacrifice demanded of you." The above statement represents the recurring theme of the many addresses and speeches made by India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. The significance of such a theme has implications not only for India but for the majority of the world's people who find themselves in a similar struggle for survival against colonialism, racialism, and neo-colonialism. 
As Prime Minister of India, Shrimati Indira Gandhi has inherited a country with a history and culture over 2,000 years old. Her ability to understand the historical development of India and her acute sensitivity to the needs of the Indian people have given her the foresight and vision to blaze a new path of economic and social development for this ageless society. A society that has to face both the problems of the past such as 200 years of British colonial rule, superstition and fatalism and the problems of the future such as industrialization, unemployment, food shortage and threat of war. 
In keeping with course and direction established by Mahatma Gandhi and her father Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi is leading India on a path of secularism, socialism and democracy. Indira has made every effort to creatively adapt socialism to the needs of India; therefore socialism as applied to India is not a ready-made ideology but a flexible concept. Her definition of socialism is "that poverty should be eradicated; disparities between rich and poor should be reduced; the backward people be they Harijans [untouchables], adivasis [tribal] or the hill people should have equal opportunities to make progress, and there should be equal distribution of the national resources. This is our socialism and this is our goal. We want to achieve this goal rapidly."
This program is one of advanced democracy through the noncapitalist road of development rather than one of socialist construc-
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Mary Terrel spent two years in the Peace Corps in India (1966-68). Her previous article on Bangladesh appeared in the special African-Asian issue of FREEDOMWAYS, Vol.12, No.3, 1972

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