Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  The authoritarianism in Nehru existed alongside and was tempered by a genuine aversion to dictatorship and rigid adherence to democratic procedure: he did not always get his way, and he accepted the outcome when he did not.

  Nehru encouraged Indira to move into his official residence once her marriage began to fall apart. Her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, were torn from their father. Sanjay, who was closer to Feroze, was deeply damaged by the separation. And when Feroze died, just before Sanjay’s fourteenth birthday, Indira and Nehru compensated for his loss by coddling him.13 Sanjay never did finish school. All he talked about was cars. So he was sent away in 1964 to England to apprentice at the Rolls-Royce factory in Crewe. It was a three-year programme. Sanjay dropped out in the second year. When he returned to India, in 1966, Nehru and Shastri were gone, and his mother was India’s prime minister.

  Sanjay’s rise in the Congress Party replicated Indira’s own trajectory under her father’s reign. But the self-moderating complexities present in Nehru seemed to attenuate with each generation in his bloodline. Indira was animated most of all by despotic impulses; in Sanjay, there wasn’t even a residue of democratic inclination. Congress was the laboratory in which Indira tested the limits of her power. If she could make Congress bend to her will, she could subjugate India.

  And so when it came time to elect a new president of India, in 1969, she prompted elected members of her party—who made up the bulk of the electoral college—to vote against Congress’s official candidate because he was not her choice. Having lost the democratic vote within the party, she called for ‘conscience voting’ to tame those who defied her.14 Wizened leaders attempted futilely to explain to Indira that her father, twice defeated in the party on the question of the presidency, had acquiesced on both occasions.

  Indira was not her father, as she was fond of reminding everybody. She refused to relent and proceeded to discredit colleagues who canvassed the opposition—which included Hindu nationalists—as agents of ‘communal and Rightist forces’ in the country.15 The president of the Congress Party recorded mournfully in his diary that, having been ‘brought up by a father who was always grooming her for the prime ministership’, Indira was incapable of tolerating dissent.16 Indira’s man ultimately prevailed in the presidential election; the candidate nominated by her own party lost by a narrow margin.

  If Congress was to survive as a democratic entity, Indira would have to be sacked. By the time the old men arrayed against her contrived to act, however, Indira had consolidated her position. When handed a notice of expulsion from Congress, she engineered a split in the party and expelled the so-called ‘old guard’ represented by Kamaraj and his cronies.

  There was now no countervailing force left in the party. Congress—which had survived the rivalries between Nehru and Sardar Patel, and between Nehru and Bose; contained within it, and reflected proudly, the ideological, linguistic, cultural and religious variety of India; and was viewed as a model by aspiring democrats everywhere in the decolonising world—now belonged to Indira. And since the country belonged, as it were, to Congress, it belonged also, by extension, to the Nehrus.

  They did not betray a hint of remorse as they eviscerated it.

  For years, India had been considering plans to build an affordable indigenous car. It would be a gigantic undertaking, requiring real expertise and hundreds of millions of rupees. But where previous proposals stalled after passing through layers of scrutiny, Sanjay’s application to open a car factory, buttressed by a grotesque ‘prototype’ rigged up in a backyard garage, was expedited by his mother’s cabinet with astonishing celerity in a command economy where private enterprises with substantial records were made to sweat for years for a licence to trade. Four hundred and fifty acres of fertile land were secured for Sanjay’s car-manufacturing plant in 1970. Families scratching a living from them were displaced. Sanjay promised to produce 50,000 small cars within a year. Five years later, he hadn’t delivered even one. Instead, once the private capital raised by his family network was exhausted, the banks nationalised by his mother were raided for unsecured loans. India’s credit policy was being undermined. But bank bosses who protested were swiftly supplanted with yes-men.17

  Indira then got to work on the judiciary. The last remnant of autonomy in the government, the Supreme Court had repeatedly hindered her efforts to disfigure the Constitution. In 1973, shredding convention, she appointed a junior (and pliant) judge as the Chief Justice of India. The gravest attack to date on the independence of the highest court in the country, the decision provoked protests in every major city. India’s maiden Solicitor General emerged from retirement to decry the ‘blackest day in the history of democracy’.18 But the prime minister could survive the backlash: she had come to be revered, since defeating Pakistan in 1971, as a semi-divine figure.

  The war itself had been swift. That year, the Pakistani state, invented explicitly to safeguard Muslims, staged the worst atrocities ever committed against a predominantly Muslim population. Three million people in East Pakistan were butchered, ten million displaced, and more than 400,000 women coerced into sexual servitude.19 It was a holocaust precipitated by West Pakistan’s unwillingness to honour the results of the first free election, swept by East Pakistan, in the Islamic Republic’s history. Zulfi Bhutto, the loser in the vote, refused to accept the outcome—and the army, egged on by the feudal megalomaniac, went on a murderous splurge. America, dependent on Pakistan to make inroads into Mao’s China, ignored the piling dead bodies and warned India to keep out. Indira, to her credit, spat at Nixon and Kissinger, and aided the Bengali rebels. In December, the Pakistani air force inexplicably offered India a casus belli by launching a series of pre-emptive strikes on Indian targets. Indira ordered her generals to punch into Pakistan. Within two weeks, Pakistan was vanquished and Bangladesh born.

  ‘War is not a game woman can play,’ Radio Pakistan had blared in the run-up to the hostilities.20 Now Bhutto, who took over the western rump that continued absurdly to call itself Pakistan even after a majority of its citizens had subtracted themselves from it, abjectly begged her for an audience. Portraits of her went up in the homes of Indians of every faith. The painter M.F. Husain rendered her as the deity Durga riding a tiger. Even Hindu nationalists conceded that Indira was the ruler of India, not just of Congress. Pakistani generals blamed an ‘Indo-Zionist’ plot for their defeat. Newspapers in the Islamic state, echoing Bhutto’s characteristically self-pitying lamentations, bemoaned that this was the first time in a thousand years that Hindus had won against Muslims.21 This summation would have struck the officers whom Indira sent into battle as odd—because none of them was a Hindu. India’s air marshal, Idris Latif, was a Hyderabadi Muslim; the commander of its ground forces in East Pakistan, J.S. Aurora, was a Sikh; the chief of the Indian armed forces, Sam Maneckshaw, was a Parsi; and J.F.R. Jacob, the brilliant strategist who captured Dhaka and forced Pakistan to surrender, was Jewish. As democracy shrank, the war of 1971 put on shimmering display that other sacred conviction of Congress: secularism. And Indira’s commitment to it could not be faulted.

  The prime minister, having received a renewed mandate in 1971 on the slogan ‘abolish poverty’, made no use of her political capital after the war to improve life for the poor. Rather than bleach Congress of the corrosive influence of the country’s tiny elite—industrialists in the cities, landowners in the countryside—she increased its dependency on them. By the mid 1970s, the party’s finances came almost entirely from ‘rich industrialists, the rich traders and … the richest smugglers’.22 At the same time, rural India, replete with stupefied skeletal figures surviving on watery gruel, devolved into a theatre of inexpressible wretchedness. Urban India sought comfort in atavistic fantasies. Travelling in Delhi, Ved Mehta was met with ‘constant talk about the glories of ancient India—about how the Hindus in Vedic times travelled around in “flying machines”, talked to each other on “skyphones”, and constructed “bridges of stones” spanning oceans’.23<
br />
  Indira’s re-election was by no means a foregone conclusion.

  Just as her term in office was nearing its end, the High Court of Allahabad announced that it was going to pronounce its decision on an election petition involving the prime minister that had been dragging on for years. Its gravamen was that Indira Gandhi had violated election codes in her own constituency during the general elections. The court agreed with the plaintiff, effectively annulling Indira’s election to parliament and imperilling her job as prime minister. Before the decision was read out, the presiding judge was offered half a million rupees and promised a seat on the Supreme Court. Officers from the Intelligence Bureau harassed him and his staff. Astonishingly, no inducement or threat worked.24 The violations were trivial and the judgement, a flickering asseveration of the rule of law, would in all likelihood have been reversed on appeal. For now, however, Indira would have to step down.

  Sanjay intervened.

  Mother and son shared the experience of traumatic upbringings. Now they sought strength and reinforcement in their mutual grievances. In the court’s decision, and in the extraordinary public outcry directed at their collective abuse of power, they espied a combination of foreign plotting and personal hatred for their family. The Supreme Court stayed the lower court’s decision, but Sanjay was by now worn out by the pretence of respect for legal restrains on power. State transport vehicles were requisitioned illegally to bus in tens of thousands of people from neighbouring states to put on a pro-Indira spectacle in Delhi.25 The judge in Allahabad was ritually denounced as a clandestine Hindu nationalist.26 A resolution exalting Indira as ‘indispensable for the nation’ was placed before the Congress Party. And Sanjay began mastering a manual on press censorship procured from the Philippines.27 Rumour went out in Delhi that the prime minister was readying to jettison the Constitution, but the opposition, submerged in slowly simmering waters, refused to believe the boiling point had been reached.28

  On 25 June 1975, Indira’s advisers, having hastily pored over a copy of the Constitution borrowed that morning from the library in Parliament House, drafted an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency to maintain the ‘security of India’, which they said was ‘threatened by internal disturbances’. The president of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, signed the document. Electricity supply to newspapers was cut off that night and the police were ordered to sweep up Indira’s critics.

  Indians woke up the next morning in a dictatorship.

  For the next nineteen months, Sanjay terrorised the country. His thinking was always plain. He wanted to construct casinos in the Himalayas. He wanted to ‘beautify’ Delhi. He wanted to curb population growth. He did not like the sight of slums, so he yelled orders to pull them down. Where would the people go? He did not care to know. When an activist complained about the demolition of stalls outside Delhi’s grand mosque—its imam had urged congregants to resist Indira—police carried him away in the dead of night, tortured him, then paraded him in chains in the old quarter of the capital.29

  The bloodiest instance of slum-clearance occurred in Turkman Gate, a mostly Muslim slum. When bulldozers began gathering outside the shanties in the summer of 1976, the residents, anticipating trouble, formed a small committee and drafted appeals to everybody who mattered. One evening, they learnt that Sanjay and his friends were ‘conferring’ with two women in a nearby hotel. They forced their way into Sanjay’s suite and implored him to call off the demolition. Sanjay remained silent. One of his goons shrieked: ‘I give you exactly five seconds to get out of this room.’30 A massacre unfurled the next day when police opened fire on peaceful protesters. Turkman Gate was razed. Families were packed into vans at gunpoint and disgorged beyond the Yamuna river, out of sight.

  As urban India was subjected to Sanjay’s prettification programmes, rural India was put through a more intimately degrading form of terror. Forced sterilisation was by far the deadliest exercise undertaken by the government during the Emergency. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had periodically shared with Delhi their fears about an uncontrolled rise in India’s population levels. Democracy, however, was a hurdle: no government could conceivably enact laws limiting the number of children a couple could have without incurring punishment at the ballot box. But with dictatorship in place, they fell behind forced vasectomies. Visiting India in 1976, Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, was full of praise for Indira. ‘For the first time, I sensed in India,’ he said, ‘a disciplined, realistic approach to development programmes; and a willingness to find practical solutions to economic problems rather than an attitude of falling back on “socialist ideologies” and didactic debate’. He left India ‘feeling that a growth rate of 3 per cent per capita per annum is possible in the next ten years’ if India continued down the path inaugurated by the prime minister’s suspension of the Constitution.31 Sanjay and Indira, habituated to whisking up noxious xenophobia among Indians by enumerating the West’s crimes and plots against India, now basked in the vindication supplied by Western loan sharks.

  Sanjay personally oversaw the sterilisation programme. Incentives—radio sets, cash, food—were at first offered to men who volunteered to put themselves under the knife. When bribes failed to draw numbers, Sanjay handed down targets to government officials. The ‘find and operate’ missions that followed were directed at the most vulnerable and defenceless men in the country. One state reported 600,000 operations in two weeks.32 In another state, a widower picked up from a bus and forcibly sterilised died of an infection. Officers on sterilisation assignments ransacked whole villages in their search for men. Hordes of policemen descended on crowds at railway stations and bus stops and dragged away adult men to operation tents. Teenagers, middle-aged men, the elderly: anyone with procreative equipment would do.33 In villages, men abandoned their houses and lived in the fields to evade capture by roving sterilisation squads. The terror was banalised into bureaucratic routine. Teachers at state schools, mandated to offer men for sterilisation in order to be paid their salaries, produced beggars they found on the street.34 Headmasters were given authority to detain students until their parents volunteered for sterilisation. Pay, promotions and bonuses in government departments became contingent on offering oneself up for sterilisation. Soon enough, obtaining even the most rudimentary government services required people to show documents attesting to their sterilised status, giving rise to an enormous demand for fake certificates.

  India, forged in the dialectic of Gandhism, now had a homespun version of Kimilsungism. Buses and billboards were plastered with ‘stray thoughts of the prime minister’ exhorting Indians to work hard alongside slogans extolling the Great Leader (‘Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name Is Indira Gandhi’). Sanjay was breathlessly glorified by India’s once-free press, which, adorned with the censor’s fetters, functioned as an implement of agitprop. Foreign journalists were expelled. ‘In ten years of covering the world from Franco’s Spain to Mao’s China,’ Newsweek’s India correspondent wrote, ‘I have never encountered such stringent and all-encompassing censorship’. ‘In my four years in Moscow,’ the New York Times’s correspondent added, ‘I was never pulled out of an interview by the police as I was here’.35 Trailed by an entourage of reporters and cameramen, Sanjay, like his Korean compeer Kim Jong-Il, materialised everywhere and dispensed curt instructions to engineers, doctors, bureaucrats and other professionals on how to do their jobs. ‘Impatient’ and ‘visionary’ were among the less orotund adjectives summoned to garland him.

  Elderly elected officials who had toiled in the freedom movement shamelessly abased themselves to tickle Sanjay’s ego. The sexagenarian chief minister of Maharashtra, India’s most commercially vibrant state, eulogised Sanjay as ‘a new star rising in the political firmament of India’ whose accomplishments were ‘written in letters of gold’.36

  Opposition figures who had miraculously been spared incarceration had to face the taxman, reinvented by the new regime as an unalloyed ins
trument of intimidation. Even Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency, was co-opted by Congress to dig up dirt on people perceived to be Indira’s opponents. Habeas corpus suspended, India’s prisons became congested with activists whose families, in many cases, had no clue where they were. ‘The Indian citizen,’ declared Indira’s Solicitor General in earnest, ‘has absolutely no right to his liberty, even if he is totally innocent.’37 A great many Indians refused to surrender. One man immolated himself in a Gandhian act of protest.

  But a substantial segment of what passed for the nation’s intellectual gentry either caved before or collaborated with Sanjay. Distinguished pundits who should have been the defenders of democracy tripped over themselves to cheer its chief cremator. Ayub Syed: ‘He has electrified the nation with his fearless call for breaking fresh ground.’38 Russi Karanjia: ‘In contrast with the Niagara of nonsense that falls from the lips of our politicians, Sanjay Gandhi is a young man of few, very few words. To him words spell works, action, performance.’39 Khushwant Singh: ‘Despite his receding hairline he is an incredibly handsome young man.’ If the religious pluralism of this pro-Sanjay triune—a Muslim, a Parsi, a Sikh—was a testament to the health of Indian secularism, the doggerel flowing from its pens was sufficiently obsequious to make even Corneliu Vadim Tudor, balladeer in Ceausescu’s court, blush with embarrassment.

  Indira’s rule is periodised today as the summit of Indian ‘socialism’. This is bizarre. There was no redistribution of wealth during the Emergency—only the usurpation of power. True, the prime minister and her son pronounced themselves tribunes of the poor. But the faction that most sedulously supported the tyranny of the pair—and was most lavishly recompensed for the support—was composed almost entirely of India’s gilded elite. Big business energetically backed the Gandhis. Naval Tata, India’s most eminent industrialist, queued up with his wife to ‘pay our respects’ to Sanjay when the princeling held court in Bombay.40 When a travelling American journalist asked a member of the Oberoi family, India’s top hoteliers, for her opinion of the Emergency rule, she replied: ‘Oh, it’s wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just puts them in jail.’41 The Emergency budget was the most pro-business to date. And it wasn’t by accident that, while the government deactivated the articles of the Constitution concerning free expression and liberty, it preserved the provisions protecting property rights. In one of the most unexpectedly courageous speeches in parliament—which functioned as a rubber-stamp—Krishan Kant, a Congress backbencher, dismantled the myth of ‘socialist’ Indira: ‘No privileges of the privileged classes are being touched,’ he said on the floor of the house. ‘They have been reassured. There is going to be no nationalisation of textile and sugar industries … On the other hand, the emergency will come down on the workers, on students, the intelligentsia, and the fixed-income groups. I would like to ask my friends if this is really a swing to the left or whether it is not in fact a swing to the right?’42