A Remarkable Passage for India

India, the largest democracy, has completed another national election that appears to be a reasonably faithful reflection of the will of its 830 million people. This process, and the post-election statesmanship of the defeated leader, provide a model of responsible democratic government duplicated in few other developing nations.

The corruption and violence that marred the voting in some areas must be regretted. But it is remarkable in many ways that there was not even greater violence in a nation of such overwhelming diversity, disparity, size and tension, where wealth and misery are in constant confrontation.

Rajiv Gandhi will remain as head of the leading party, the Congress Party, which had ruled the nation since independence, save for a 30-month period. The defeat may not mean the end of the family dynasty established by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, and continued by his mother, Indira Gandhi, until her assassination in 1984. But for the moment, at least, there is the prospect of a tenuous coalition of smaller parties that will somehow seek to govern that complex nation. The work of the new prime minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, will be made no easier by the surge of strength on the part of a religiously oriented Hindu nationalist party.

Gandhi has promised constructive opposition. And he has offered sound advice, appealing for a continuation of secular government in the tradition of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the other founding fathers, who foresaw the peril of religion mixed with the politics of a nation where religion historically has been the source of communal violence. The grace with which Gandhi has accepted defeat, and his counsel to those who now will try to govern, celebrate the democratic tradition of India.