or reward for extraneous, honest and good work. The interference by honorary office bearers in day to day work and constant criticism of paid and permanent personnel at the hands of these political persons brings loss of all the initiative and enthusiasm for work. Until and unless the conditions of service! are improved and a sense of security of service prevails, the municipalities as suggested by the Planning Commission would not go very far in attracting the men of ability to accept the municipal service as a career. It is the State Government alone which can give a clean administration to our Municipalities. It is being felt that a suitable amendment in the Municipal Act may confer on the Municipal Council the powers and duties of the legislative assemblies so that only policy discussions and the framing of rules and regulations are left with the body. This would bring greater stability to municipal administration and avoid unnecessary day to day interference in routine work. In the absence of planned endeavour the Municipalities do not put the public revenues to proper use. During the 4 year term of a council, every councillor seems to confine all the development activities to his own ward, but democracy demands that all undeveloped areas should receive first attention. This leads to mutual conflicts. In view of the above observations, the following suggestions deserve close consideration : (1) The election to all the Municipal cillor should be increased to 5 years (5) The financial assistance should be given only to much Municipalities as prepare their Five Year Plan and submit quarterly progress reports of the work done to the prescribed authority. (6) The present trend of division of work among the legislature, Executive and the Judiciary may be applied to the Municipal Councils also so that once the policy is bassed, the executive may go forward unhampered. (7) A separate Municipal Service Commission may be established for the entire State so that honest recruitment, stability in servise, inter municipal transfer, exchange of experience and the adoption of appropriate disciplinary action against the erring employees are made possible. Reservation of some posts by promotions should also be made and filled in on recommendation of the Municipal President. (8) A minimum secrecy should be maintained in the working and most of the decisions should be public without which the exercise of public control on the affairs may be lost. (9) There should be a positive reduction in the redtape that clogs municipal administration. Some decisions require opinions at such different levels. that by the time, the advice comes, the decisions become either useless unnecessary. Such proceedural wranglings may be reduced to the minimum. or Mr. Gokhle in his observations before the royal commission has said: "The three evils of the present system of district administration are its secrecy, its purely bureaucrative character and its departmental delays." The above mentioned observations may be taken into accounts towards the attempts that are made to make municipal administration more efficient and to evake more public interest therein. visit It has a variety of For those with a taste Issued by:- THE DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION Government of Gujarat, Sachivalaya, Ahmedabad. Leadership Struggle In New York City By William V. Shannon The struggle for leadership in New York between Mayor John V. Lindsay and Senator Robert F Kennedy gains added interest because both young men are potential U. S. Presidential candidates. The competition, many observers say, may result in better government for the huge, trouble-prone city. This account of Republican Lindsay's victory in heavily Democratic New York provides a glimpse of the city's fascinating political setup. In New York State-where the governorship is the big prize in this year's electionpoliticians are defying the law of supply and demand. The Repuplicans, the minority party, are overstocked with topflight talent. They have Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, U. S. Senator Jacob K. Javits, and New York City's Mayor John V. Lindsay-all able, willing, and accustomed to success. The majority Democratic party, however, though filled with contenders for the nomination, has only one sure winner-Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy. He is willing enough but cannot run this year since the State con. stitution requires five years of residence for Governors. This fact will defer a direct contest between the brightest young stars of both parties forty four-year-old Lindsay and forty-year-old Kennedy. It might come in the gubernatorial race of 1970. Or, since both men would like to be President and have a reasonably good chance of making it their decisive encounter may not take place until November 1972. Lindsay and the Republicans clearly bested Kennedy and the Democrats in the first round of their struggle for national power, the recent mayoral race in New York City. Kennedy's manoeuvring during that campaign suggests that he is still thinking in terms of the relatively simple ethnic and machine politics of his native Massachusetts. New York is immeasurably more complex. Its politics are affected by several unique phenomena-among them the Liberal party and a vocal, undisciplined, yet important Democratic reform movement. The Times, the Herald Tribune, and other papers in New York exert an influence for political independence that the Boston press cannot match. There is also in New York a hard-core Conservative vote-mobilized with especial effectiveness last fall by National Review editor William F. Buckley-which is as much a threat to the Democrats as to the Republicans. There is the presence of ex-Mayor Robert F. Wager-a force chronically underestimated by Kennedy. And finally there is the fantastic ethnic diversity of a city composed of Russian Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Irish, Germans, and more. than sixty other ethnic groups. Yet the mayoralty was won by Lindsay, who comes from one of the smallest minorities -he is English-Dutch, Episcopalian and educated in Eastern schools. Furthermore he is a Republican in a city with a three-toone Democratic enrolment. These were minimal handicaps in the predominantly middle-class Manhattan Congressional district where Lindsay had been rolling up increas ing pluralities ever since his first victory in 1958. He topped this performance in 1964 by winning handsomely again — over attractive Democrat-while Lyndon Johnson was sweeping the district. an Articulate, intelligent, and successful though he is, Lindsay seemed to be at a political dead end in early 1965. Javits and/ Kennedy occupied the two Senate seats and/ looked unbeatable for the indefinite future Rockefeller, who looked a good deal less unbeatable, showed no disposition to give up the governorship in 1966 Nor-in the first months of 1965-was he inclined to encourage Lindsay's dawning ambition to make the long-shot try for Mayor of New York. Throughout the spring, Lindsay had no~~ firm commitments from his party as to money or support. Still the idea of running for Mayor would not down. "He kept turning it over in his mind, and right up to the weekend before the announced his decision to run, it was yes and no, back and forth," Mary Lindsay, his wife and full-time political partner, recalled later. On May 13, he announced his candidacy. Lindsay decided to run because he and Robert Price, his campaign manager and closest adviser, had reached the conclusion that, at the least, he would make a good showing against Mayor Wagner and that even if he were defeated this show of strength would advance his career. Not quite a month after he became a candidate on June 10-Lindsay got his first big break: Wanger announced that, after twelve years in office, he would not seek reelection. Events proved that the Democrats had lost their strongest candidate, the only one who could have held together the party's warring factions, particularly the reform clubs which had fallen into nearanarchy since the death of their titular leaders, Senator Herbert Lehman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Wagner did not exactly leave office in a blaze of glory. But he did execute an orderly retreat and is in good shape to make a political comeback, conceivably by running for Governor this fall. "Wagner's pulling out would have hurt us a lot if the Democrats had stuck together and come up with a good candidate," Lindsay said a few weeks after Wagner announced his retirement. "But they didn't...... Even more important-his getting out shook loose the Liberals." To win in New York City, a Republican has to gain the support of several hundred thousand Democrats and uncounted independents. Before last year, only two Republicans had succeeded-Seth Low back in 1901 and Fiorello La Guardia in 1933. In pursuit of a non-partisan identity, Lindsay rejected all offers of help from the Republican National Committee and his party's out-of-state luminaries. He also decided early to have at least one Democrat as a running mate. Wagner's retirement made it realistically possible to seek the support of the Liberal party, which in municipal affairs had endorsed Wagner for nearly a decade. The Liberal party is a unique New York institution. It was formed in 1942 by a military anti-Communist faction which seceded from the American Labour party, a "united front" of trade unions created in 1936 to support Franklin Roosevelt without typing up with the local Democrats. For twenty-three years, two garment-industry unions-the large, powerful International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU) and the small Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Workershave provided most of the party's members and money. ILGWU president David Dubinsky has been its grand chief and Hatters president Alex Rose its principal strategist. In national politics, the Liberals have always endorsed the Democratic ticket. In state and local races, they have zigzagged depending upon the candidates and the situation. Lindsay was endorsed for the simple reason that if the Liberals were ever to assert their independence of the Democrats, they could not hope to find a more progressive Republican. In the House Lindsay had been a member of a small "ginger group" of younger liberal Republicans who were effectively isolated by the plodding Midwestern conservatives who dominate the House Republican membership. His voting record was solidly progressive. The Liberals had no severe struggle of conscience in endorsing Lindsay. On election day, they did about as well as they have in recent years. Lindsay polled 293,000 votes on the Liberal line. Since he won by only 126,000 votes, the Liberals could not be said to have elected him single-handedly but he could not have won without them. Lindsay's nomination by the Liberal party led to the next ritual-the organizing of the balanced ticket. It is one of the few triumphs of the good government forces in New York that they invented the balanced ticket and managed to stick Tammany Hall, with the opprobrium for it. Tammany Hall. a society which was formed shortly after American independence, gradually acquired control of the political mechanism of the Democratic party in New York City and county. Its slates-in that organization's heyday, from the 1860's to the 1930's-were unabashedly Irish. The bosses balanced the boroughs and picked a Dutch or English name now and then for window-dressing. But they saw no need to nominate Jews, Italians, or other lesser breeds when there were deserving Irishmen available, as there always were. Fiorello La Guardia, that master politician, invented the ethnically balanced ticket in his first successful race for Mayor in 1933. It worked for him; it did not for Lindsay. Within a few months it was clear that the contest was going to be much too close for Lindsay to carry anyone in with him. A 1965 mayoral campaign might have been expected to turn on the use of television. But Bob Price made a different decision. Lindsay regards thirty-two-year-old Price, who managed all his Congressional aaces, as a native political genius. There were many during the recent campaign who doubted it, but there is no answer to a victory cleanly won. Opinionated, hardworking, serious, sometimes brusque, Price is the epitome of the intense, dedicated staff needed by every major politician. Eating sand-wich-jello-coffee lunches at his desk and working eighteen hours a day, Price made all the key technical decisions of Lindsay's campaign. man Rather than gambling on a blitz of television spot announcements and telethons, he invested most of the available money in 117 storefront headquarters which became the neighbourhood nuclei for the canvassing drives of thousands of Lindsay volunteers. It amounted to setting up an entire clubhouse network in three months in a city where the Republican organization, in the words of one of Price's aides, "has made a career out of |