Ill Winds Batter Indira Gandhi

In New Delhi, newspapers wrote of the "ill winds" battering the Prime Minister. To the east, in the city of Patna, an angry crowd interrupted one of her speeches, chanting, "Indira Gandhi, go back!" At the southern tip of the subcontinent, near the coastal city of Trivandrum, the signs posted on palm trees cried out: END DICTATORSHIP, DETHRONE THE QUEEN!

Mrs. Gandhi's campaign for the re-election of her government was running into trouble—heavy trouble. The four-day national ballot is scheduled to begin this Wednesday. Privately, some New Delhi pundits were betting that when the votes are counted next week, they will add up to the first national defeat for Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party in India's 30 years of independence. Even if the pundits are wrong, the mere fact that a defeat now seems possible marks a dramatic reversal for Mrs. Gandhi—only eight weeks after she had confidently called for elections and relaxed the authoritarian rule she had imposed in the name of a national emergency.

Cow Belt. As the election campaign wound to its climax last week, Mrs. Gandhi was desperately trying to win back some unexpected—and highly significant—defectors: farmers and villagers who live in the countryside of northern India, a densely populated area that city people have scornfully dubbed the "Cow Belt" because devout Hindu farmers do not slaughter the sacred animals. Big blocks of parliamentary seats from the Cow Belt have been crucial to all five of the Congress Party's national electoral victories since 1947. But while accompanying the candidates on a swing through the region, which includes Mrs. Gandhi's constituency in Uttar Pradesh, TIME'S New Delhi bureau chief Lawrence Malkin encountered widespread resentment of Indira's rule. "During the emergency, some local officials arbitrarily used the suspension of habeas corpus and other rights to arrest or harass whomever they chose," Malkin reported. "Stories circulate of people being picked up for distributing handbills or simply for talking out of turn. In the countryside, fear has become so widespread that the independent election commission's posters now urge: VOTE WITHOUT FEAR."

None of Mrs. Gandhi's measures has caused more resentment than the government's campaign to encourage sterilization in order to curb India's disastrous population explosion. According to one official count, this ambitious birth-control program resulted in more than 7 million vasectomies throughout India last year. In the town of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where Mrs. Gandhi's son Sanjay is running for a parliamentary seat, villagers told Malkin that they had taken to sleeping in the fields to avoid being picked up and sterilized, which many of them seemed to equate with castration. The town market of Gauriganj was closed for a time because no one would come to it for fear of being nabbed by sterilization teams. In the village of Pipli, early-morning gunfire broke out last December when villagers resisted a sudden dragnet conducted by police squads seeking candidates for sterilization; later an official claimed that the village would be bombed if any outsiders learned of the incident.