THE ECONOMY-Modernisation of Export Production-A Proposal

That month must have been a period of agony and chastisement for him. Here he was, a messiah of the Telugu people, created specially by the gods to do noble deeds, forced to go around tending his fickle flock of 162 ML As, exhibiting them to all and sundry and pleading that they please count the number and tell whether it was not more than half of 294. People were writing erudite articles about the Constitution and the role of the governor, whereas as far as NTR could see, all that was needed was this little bit of arithmetic. But nobody would count them. Ram Lal, with the brazenness befitting an underworld operator, all but told him to go hell, and got him arrested by the police; Zail Singh was more polite but instead of counting the number merely promised elliptically that he would do his best to save democracy (leaving NTR to guess whether that meant he would be saved); and the suave and much-lettered Shankar Dayal Sharma, who replaced Ram Lal as governor of the state, pleaded for time and went to Tirupati to pray to the Lord. By this time NTR must have been a terribly frustrated man; here were 162 men and women, hard solid objective facts as any positivist could wish to see, and yet this slippery Brahmin at Raj Bhavan wanted the help of God to safeguard the Constitution and Democracy, whereas the most that he needed was an abacus to count them. This period of 'constitutional crisis' in Andhra was in reality a very hilarious period, to those who could see THE ECONOMY the humour of it. Here was the most democratic and secular Constitution of the Third World, which could be saved only by God and 162 purchasable MLAs who had to be guarded at a summer resort against their own temptation. In the end it was neither God nor the Constitution that saved NTR, but the violent and sustained popular reaction, which successful- ly kept the defections down to a minimum, and Indira Gandhi's opportunist handling of the situation. She has perhaps set a record in successfully playing a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game.' NTR fell when she willed, and he did not rise again till she willed again