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FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1973

died. Apart from her two sons, Indira Gandhi was for the first time ever, alone.

The successor to Nehru was Lal Bahadur Shastri who died of a heart attack 18 months later, while attending a conference in Tashkent, U.S.S.R. on the Kashmir problem. Two persons contended for the vacant leadership, Indira Gandhi, who had been Information Minister under Shastri, and Moraje Desai, a powerful political leader from Southern India. Indira emerged as the Congress Party leader on January 10, 1966, and carried her party to victory in the 1967 elections.

divide and control

One of the legacies of colonialism that Indira had to uproot was the problem of the small states each with its own rule which had existed for hundreds of years. The British allowed the rulers to retain much of their power in exchange for their support. When independence came, these princes were reluctant to relinquish their power. Although they signed away their land, they still did not have to pay customs, they could not be taken to court and were entitled to a yearly "privy purse" by the government. There are 278 of these princes and their allowances constituted a yearly drain of some six million dollars on the resources of the country. It was Indira Gandhi who introduced a bill abolishing all princely privileges which represented the worst of the old vestiges of the feudal order maintained by the British. When the bill was defeated by 1/3 of a vote, it was the courageous Indira that called for the President, V.V. Giri, to dissolve Parliament and then she announced that there would be a mid-term election in 1971. The scheduled election took place in 1972. More than 278 million people were eligible to vote,  an increase of 28 million from 1967.

One person in every seven of the world's population lives on the Indian sub-continent. There is a wide variety of languages, religions and races. Indira Gandhi is in tune with the Indian public and can assess their mood better than any other politician. On March 16, 1972, Indira won an electoral mandate and by doing so reshaped the political map of India. All but three of India's 21 states supported India Gandhi: West Bengal was her prime target and her victory there was partly the result of an electoral alliance she struck with the Communist Party of India in the state. The Congress Party won 174 seats giving West Bengal its first one-party government since the Congress last won there in 1962.

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