It is comforting to believe that the prolonged political crisis into which India was plunged on July 15, 1979, when Morarji Desai resigned as Prime Minister-but not as leader of the Janata Parliamentary Party-was resolved on January 3 and 6, 1980, when the country went to the polls to elect a new Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), and gave an overwhelming majority to Mrs. Indira Gandhi and her Congress (I) Party. Despite this seemingly decisive verdict, however, the elements of change will continue to work furiously on the artificial political alignments which have been forged during the crisis. In the favorite expression of many Indian politicians, a realignment of forces is inevitable. India's greatest political failure since independence has been the lack of a viable, functioning party system of the kind which exists, say, in Sri Lanka. This failure has adversely affected the functioning of India's greatest political achievement, a democratic constitution, and has resulted in a marked distortion in the working of the document. A constitution provides the bare essential skeleton for the polity. Politics, through the party system, provides the flesh and blood. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that the political crisis in India affects the very survival of the system. The decade since Indira Gandhi split the then-powerful ruling party, the Indian National Congress, in 1969 witnessed an intensification of the political battle and a steep decline in political morality, to which her ruthless and unscrupulous tactics largely contributed. The process was arrested when the nation threw out her dictatorship in the March 1977 general elections and brought to power the Janata Party, which had been forged by the highly respected Jayaprakash Narayan, the leader of the revolt against her rule.