SANJAY GANDHI: FEARSOME AND INSPIRING Op-ed

• Published in: The New York times
• Main Author: Traub, James S
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y New York Times Company 26.06.1980
• Edition: Late Edition (East Coast)
• Subjects: Gandhi, Sanjay
• ISSN: 0362-4331

The symbol that adhered to Mr. Gandhi was the bulldozer, the instrument of his infamous national slum-clearance program. A judicial inquiry into possible crimes committed during Mrs. Gandhi's repressive 20-month ''emergency'' rule that began in 1975 concluded that Mr. Gandhi had ''literally amused himself with demolishing residential, commercial, and industrial buildings ... without having the slightest realization of the miseries he was heaping on the helpless population.'' A nation seeking a bully rarely takes long to find one. Though [Sanjay Gandhi] could not have gained the prime ministership without wresting it from his mother before 1985, and probably not even then, she had already accorded him vast, if undefined, executive powers. He would have plowed ahead with his perverse variations on nationbuilding, rallying the reluctant masses with such stirring slogans as ''Work more, talk less,'' or terrifying them into temporary submission, as he did during the emergency. Perhaps this campaign would have included a salutary shot of capitalism, as his followers in the business community believed, or perhaps it would have consisted merely of ''goonda raj'' - ''thug rule'' - as Devaraj Urs, the former chief minister of Karnataka state, charged recently. In any case, Mr. Gandhi's version of ''progress'' would almost certainly have led India into a wilderness of national discontent and division, deepening the fissures that have already caused near-civil war in the northeast. What Mrs. Gandhi started during the emergency, her son might have finished.