It was almost a palace coup in reverse. With
the cool, crisp disdain of a modern-day Victoria, India's Rajmata
of Gwalior informed the governor of the state of Madhya
Pradesh last week that 36 members of the state's ruling Congress Party
had defected to her opposition United Front Party. That gave the
Rajmata, who is 47 and as tough a politician as they come, a clear
majority in the 296-mem-ber state legislature. Flabbergasted, the
governor suspended the legislature indefinitely, a move that could
either open the way to new elections or lead to an invitation to the
Rajmata herself to form a new government. The legislative turmoil in India's seventh largest state was only one numbing throb in what has become a royal
headache for Indira Gandhi's Congress Party. Twenty years after India's
independence and the merging of the country's 554 autonomous kingdoms
with its British-run provinces, the maharajahs, princelings and other
assorted royalty left over from the old days are turning to politics
and making things increasingly warm for the Congress Party. The party,
in turn, is angrily threatening to cut off the pensions and special
privileges of the princes. Into Decline. Under India's terms of independence, the old royal
families who governed half the country and one-fourth of its people
turned over their kingdoms to the central government in exchange for
tax-free pensions and a series of special privileges. The pensions
varied all the way from $26 to $665,000 a year, depending on the size
of the kingdom; many princes retained most of their accumulated wealth.
The privileges included immunity from arrest and civil lawsuit, and
retention of old titles, many palaces and estates. Without the prestige and power of old, the princely life went quickly
into decline. Many princes now sit in their drawing rooms amid
moldering Victorian knickknacks, with the swords and shields of their
martial caste decorating the walls and the reproachful gaze of
full-length ancestors in oils staring down on them. Others converted
their palaces into hotels. The Rajmata's former kingdom of Gwalior is
now a quiet, ordinary part of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The lavish
royal guest house is a Girl Scout training center, and the main palace
is a museum that charges 300 a head for admission. Many out-of-work
princes drifted into the foreign service. Some took a fling at
business; the Maharajah of Cooch Behar even organized tiger-hunting
safaris, complete with flush toilets under canvas. By the early 1960s, more and more princes were drifting into a new
princely calling—politics. Their former subjects, nostalgic for the
good old days of low prices and far less bureaucracy, turned out in
droves to vote for them. In a 1962 parliamentary election, the Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur
ran up the biggest majority vote of any candidate—192,909 votes out of
246,516 cast. In the latest parliamentary elections last February, 28
princes won sizable parliamentary victories, only nine of them Congress
Party members.
