India: Triumph for Democracy

IN INDIA, we have exhausted our exclamatory diction in describing the triumph of Mrs. Gandhi in the recent elections. So I will simply say it has been the greatest ever—quantitatively as good as Nehru’s, qualitatively better still. She had been in a minority in the Lok Sabha, the lower and directly elected House of India’s Parliament. But she was reasonably safe, for the opposition was so badly split that it could never succeed in voting her down on the floor of the House. But she decided that this was not good enough. Against the advice of Mr. Jagjivan Ram, the president of her party, she dissolved the Lok Sabha, the first time this gamble was ever taken in India. Now she has pulled it off, brilliantly.

She has won a comfortable two-thirds majority in the new Lok Sabha, enough to amend the Constitution without the support of any other party, and she has done so against odds that had never confronted her father. Her party was no longer the omnipresent electoral ...