NEWS ANALYSIS : India Pays Price for Dynasty Politics : Assassination: Gandhi’s widow doesn’t want the role, and the party is left without a tradition for choosing a leader.

Just hours before the body of slain Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi was cremated, one of the oldest, gentlest members of his long-ruling Congress-I Party stood up at an emergency meeting of party elders to suggest, in the softest terms, that it might be time for them to change their ways.

Arvind Ganesh Kulkarni pointed out to the gathering of Congress-I members of Parliament that for the first time since India’s independence 44 years ago, there is no clear successor to the party throne from the family dynasty that began with Jawaharlal Nehru and ended two generations later with Rajiv Gandhi.

Gandhi’s widow, Sonia, had flatly refused the party’s offer of its presidency, Kulkarni reminded the group politely, and there was no use continuing to pressure her, particularly in her time of grief.

But he never got a chance to finish. His colleagues started shouting, “Sit down! Sit down!” Then they grabbed him. “I nearly lost my balance,” Kulkarni, 74, recalled at a news conference later. “After all, I am an old man.” And finally they physically pulled him back into his chair.

When the meeting ended, the resolution was emphatic: another “unanimous” vote electing Sonia Gandhi as the party’s new president.

Predictably on Saturday, the 43-year-old, intensely private widow again refused to accept the post. And the leadership vacuum continued within the party that has long steered the huge Indian nation, with Congress-I elders unable to reach a consensus on Gandhi’s replacement in talks that lasted well into Saturday night.

The physical muzzling of Kulkarni by his fellow party members starkly illustrated the price India is now paying for decades of dynastic politics.

At stake for this nation of 840 million people, a regional power that boasts the world’s fifth-largest army, is not simply the fate of its largest political party but the future of its foundations as a secular and democratic state.

Gandhi, 46, was assassinated in the midst of India’s most critical national election, a hard-fought contest between the secular Congress-I and a burgeoning Hindu revivalist party that represents the most cohesive and popular threat to the party that has ruled India for all but six of its 44 democratic years.

When Gandhi was blown up by his suicide killer at an election rally in southern India last Tuesday, the nation had completed only the first of its three days of staggered balloting, and last-minute opinion sampling and exit polls when voting began Monday indicated a possible wave in favor of the revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The final two days of balloting were put off until mid-June to let tempers cool after the assassination, and initially many analysts speculated that the Congress-I would benefit from an enormous sympathy vote after so tragic a death of a proven national leader.

But as Congress-I continues to waver over the selection of a new president--traditionally the leader most likely to become prime minister if the party wins next month--those same analysts say that Congress-I, without a strong leader, may well lose by default to what would become the world’s first Hindu fundamentalist government.

To the rest of the world, perhaps the most inexplicable part of the crucial political process still unfolding here is Congress-I’s repeated choice of a new president who clearly does not want the job--a widow, who, despite her Italian birth, probably would have overcome, through sheer force of popular sympathy and tradition, opposition charges of dynastic politics and dark appeals to India’s innate fear of foreigners.

According to most analysts, the solution to the confusion now lies in the personality of Congress-I, a party not unlike the Cook County Democratic machine of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.

“The (party) working committee never asked Sonia before they elected her because, quite frankly, it never occurred to them that she would refuse,” said one party leader who asked not to be named. “She’d resist at first, of course. She hates politics, and maybe even the party. But, for the good of the party, the good of her husband’s party, and for the good of the family name, she would be persuaded. After all, they did the same thing to Rajiv, and he came around. It’s just the way it’s done, something that has become reflex.”

Indeed, real power has always changed hands this way within Congress-I, a party with deep traditions that began during the nonviolent independence struggle of Mohandas K. Gandhi and that became institutionalized and dynastic after India freed itself from Britain.

When Nehru died after serving as prime minister for nearly 17 years, for example, there was a short interregnum under Lal Badahur Shastri and then the party immediately turned to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was not related to Mohandas Gandhi. It did not matter that the young Indira was politically inexperienced and that she had been viewed by most Congress leaders as simply her father’s shy but intelligent hostess during state functions--precedents that many Congress-I members used last week to justify their choice of equally inexperienced Sonia, who, like Indira when her father died, has never held public office.

“There was just this feeling that whatever Nehru had somehow had rubbed off on Indira,” the party leader added.

That feeling wasn’t far from the truth. Within just a few years, Indira Gandhi had established herself as the toughest and shrewdest leader in Indian history, serving nearly 16 years as its prime minister and losing power just once, a three-year hiatus after she had undertaken, in the mid-1970s, a period of Draconian rule under a state of emergency.

And when Indira Gandhi was assassinated, shot more than 40 times as she walked in the garden of her New Delhi home by two Sikh bodyguards on Oct. 31, 1984, there was never a doubt about her successor. Rajiv, who had been persuaded to enter politics after his younger and politically active brother, Sanjay, was killed in a plane crash, was rushed to New Delhi and hurriedly sworn in to replace his mother even before most of the Indian nation knew she was dead.

It was largely the memory of Rajiv’s resounding election victory two months later--the Congress-I won the largest majority in Indian history that year with three-quarters of the seats in Parliament--that prompted Congress-I leaders to instantly choose Sonia Gandhi as his successor last week, banking on a similar wave of reaction in the current election.

With her continuing refusal, however, has come a crisis that critics say exposes the ultimate danger of India’s Byzantine politics of dynasty.

Throughout three decades--and three generations--of relatively smooth succession, a deep sense of sycophancy has infected the highest ranks of Congress-I--”a rubber-stamp mentality that freezes any new thought,” as one critic put it. Any ambitious new leader who emerged as a possible candidate to challenge the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was checkmated by the next generation, and most of the young party rebels soon quit politics or left to form splinter parties--hence the “I” for Indira after the Congress Party name.

“They all knew that with a Gandhi as their party leader, they could never aspire to the chair,” said Cho Rangaswamy, an independent analyst based in the south Indian city of Madras. “So they left to find another road to power.”

Among the most obvious examples are India’s present caretaker prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, who left Congress-I for the opposition during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule, and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, another former Congress Party figure who served for a year as prime minister of a wobbly, anyone-but-Gandhi coalition government after Congress-I failed to win a majority in the last elections in November, 1989.

Now, without Sonia Gandhi and the Gandhi name to place in opposition not only to the rising Hindu fundamentalists but also to the two Congress splinter parties of Shekhar and Singh, Congress-I leaders are left with few choices, according to India’s political pundits.

The most likely is to select an unthreatening consensus candidate as their new president to carry the party through the elections but make it clear that the post of prime minister remains open to all comers, even from the ranks of coalition partners. And the name that surfaces most often from the Congress-I leadership is that of former foreign minister V.P. Narasimha Rao, an elderly, soft-spoken statesman who was close to both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.

“He is certainly the most acceptable character,” said Kushwant Singh, a prominent Sikh author and political analyst whose weekly newspaper column is entitled, “With Malice Toward All.”

“He’s a very neutral character. He’s never offended anyone, largely because he’s never acted positively on anything. He’s very much a yes-man. He’s polite and charming and that is all.”

Most of the alternative names that have emerged as candidates for party president are those of past and current chief ministers (the highest elected state office) in Indian states where Congress-I has been, or continues to be, in the majority. Chief among them are Sharad Pawar, leader of Maharashtra state that includes Bombay, and Arjun Singh, former head of Madhya Pradesh state, site of the 1984 Bhopal disaster that killed more than 2,000 people when gas leaked from a pesticide plant.

Faced with so few alternatives, some analysts, such as Madras’ Rangaswamy, see an almost inevitable reunification of Congress-I with the splinter-party leaders, under the banner of Congress or those of Shekhar and Singh.

“These leaders will drift closer to the Congress now that the last obstacle to the chair is gone,” Rangaswamy said.

But the South Indian analyst also echoed the view of many observers in New Delhi when he spoke of the dangers inherent for the nation in the current power vacuum in Congress-I.

“The biggest negative aspect at the moment is that I don’t see any other leader who will have an appeal all over the country the way Rajiv Gandhi did,” he said. “We lack this personality right now, and, when you look at the forces at work in the country today, that is dangerous.”