Indira Gandhi
Page 7
Mrs Gandhi and her camp did not anticipate the breakup of the Congress, nor did they desire it. But, as the crisis proceeded, it became evident that unity was not a concern either, unless the party put her in sole command. That she would settle for nothing less and saw the battle through to rupture seemed to indicate her plans were not of an order acceptable to the party’s broad centrist approach and that a sharp turn in its affairs was intended. To bring this about, the old guard had to be discredited, so that the new leadership could emerge without the taint of the old. At the same time homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru—essential for a hold on the masses—had to be maintained. Both these objectives were brilliantly accomplished in a series of moves resembling a coup, leaving Mrs Gandhi’s opponents confounded and confused. The rallies at her residence blazoned bank nationalization as a people’s measure, pushed through against vested interests in the Congress. They marked the beginning of populist politics and a leadership cult. With its dynastic, emotional flavour, the cult highlighted the theme of Mrs Gandhi’s uniqueness among her contemporaries and her special claim to patriotism by virtue of her Nehru blood. A souvenir, Re-birth of the Congress, published in December, featured an extract from a book by Mrs Gandhi’s late aunt, Krishna Hutheesing, ‘In her veins flows the blood of her father and grandfather… like the Ganga she belongs to India and India is the one passion of her life.’
This sentiment was more poetic than accurate. Though she belonged imaginatively to India, Mrs Gandhi was probably less a product of the Indian environment than any contemporary in Congress circles. She had, intermittently with her Indian schooling, attended schools in Switzerland and England. Her father had never considered an Indian university for her. His own education had been British, and his plans for his daughter reflected this preference. Nehru had written to Mrs Pandit from Badenweiler on November 15, 1935, when Indira was four days short of her eighteenth birthday:
The problem of Indu’s further eduction is not an easy one to solve. Practically all the countries, excepting England, France and Switzerland are barred for some reason or other… . After a great deal of thought I came to the conclusion that she might go to Oxford in October 1936 and after completing her three years there, proceed to Paris for a year or so, subject to political developments on the continent… . The examination for October 1936 takes place in December 1935, that is, next month. Indu cannot appear for it so soon. The next examination is early in 1937 for October 1937, which means that Indu has to wait for two years before she joins Oxford. That is rather a long time. A year would have been the right period and would have suited her, for she is not quite grown up enough, intellectually or otherwise, for the university… . For the present I propose to send Indu, probably next week, to Mlle. Hemmelin at Bex… . From October 1936 onward for about a year she might be in Paris attending lectures at the Sorbonne, and if so decided, taking the Somerville entrance and scholarship exam early in 1937… .
V.V. Giri declared his candidature for the presidency when Mrs Gandhi failed to get Jagjivan Ram accepted by the Parliamentary Board. She had filed Reddy’s nomination papers and, as prime minister, still ostensibly supported her party’s candidate, but the campaign had become a prestige issue for her, and it was an open secret that she did not intend to abide by her commitment.
This explosive change from the political style of her two predecessors lit up Mrs Gandhi’s individual approach in a way that none of her statements and emphases had done till now. The dynamic for political action had earlier issued from the national movement, from the multilayered following of Mahatma Gandhi constituting a great social force, and its continuance by Nehru into the Independence era. The earlier phase had been distinguished by the discipline of non-violence. After Independence the Indian scene remained unusual in Asia because of the restrained, educated tone the leadership employed in seeking the cooperation of a vast, unlettered electorate for the understanding and solution of long-term problems. This atmosphere began to be rapidly dissipated. In search of support, Mrs Gandhi had found the CPI, anxious for political respectability and power, eager to cooperate. The skilful use of economic conditions and the vivid vocabulary of class war as political weapons yielded rapid initial dividends. The campaign of street arousal introduced a throbbing undercurrent of exaggeration, excess and violence, waiting like electricity to be switched on.
The national newspapers expressed their downright dismay at these developments, seeing them as a virulent struggle for power carried too far for the country’s good, and deplored the inflaming of uninformed sentiment by dramatic methods and catchy slogans. When the Supreme Court issued an interim stay order on bank nationalization, this, together with the reservations of the national press, gave Mrs Gandhi cause to say ‘the people’ were with her, while ‘vested interests’ were not.
Meanwhile the quarrel over the presidential candidate raged furious. Till this election, it had been a routine affair decided by mutual consultation between parties so that the highest office in the land—one above politics—should not become a matter for political bargaining. Mrs Gandhi accused Nijalingappa of ‘collusion’ with the Right parties, the Jan Sangh and Swatantra, over the choice of the presidential candidate. It had been accepted practice to solicit the votes of other parties for one’s own candidate, and the Jan Sangh and Swatantra had agreed to support Reddy, though the two communist parties had declared their support for Giri. In the new political atmosphere the arrangement acquired the ring of betrayal and Nijalingappa the label of ‘reactionary’ in a precision attack directed against his political integrity. The threatening mood of the party’s radicals prompted him to ask Mrs Gandhi to issue a whip to Congress MPs to vote for Reddy. On August 15, five days before the election, Mrs Gandhi called instead for a ‘vote of conscience’, saying, ‘I feel that the issues go beyond the presidential poll.’ That morning her speech at the Red Fort had referred to the ‘tremendous and spontaneous reception’ bank nationalization had received. ‘Today we have taken a new turn and a new dawn has set in… . I want to assure the rich and the capitalists that the step we have taken is not directed against them.’
Mrs Gandhi’s personal and public image—indeed her political future—were heavily dependent on the election result, and it is interesting to speculate on the turn of events had Giri been defeated. He won by a narrow margin in the second count, with 4,20,077 votes in his favour and 4,05,527 against him. This was the signal for a fresh turnout of rallies and street celebrations outside the prime minister’s house. Nijalingappa called the ‘personality cult a mischievous and dangerous trend in democracy’, but with his candidate’s defeat he and his supporters had suffered an irreparable loss of face. When the Working Committee met in New Delhi on August 25, Y.B. Chavan, minister for home affairs, attempted to hold the party together by means of a ‘unity resolution’ separating the scope and tasks of its parliamentary and organizational wings. However, Mrs Gandhi did not attend the meeting, and her supporters held an angry demonstration at the Congress headquarters at 7 Jantar Mantar Road while the meeting was in progress, in defiance of the prohibitory orders then in force. The demonstration, organized by Shashi Bhushan, MP, consisted of more than the MPs who officially constituted it. Rajinder Puri, journalist, gives the following account:
When I approached the spot there was a great commotion going on. The demonstrators, a few hundred of them, stood in the middle of the road in front of the Congress Party office building, waiting to leap into their orgy of screams and abuse, of kicking, shoving and spitting, as each member of the Working Committee drove up to attend its meeting, Mrs. Gandhi and all her supporters having boycotted it. Most of the journalists were inside the gates on the lawn, while she stood outside it watching the spectacle. Movie cameramen from the Government Films Division and the TV men from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting stood in strategic positions with their cameras posed to record for posterity and cinemas throughout the country the historic scenes of mass upsurge being enacted there on tha
t otherwise quiet, mild autumn day in Delhi… . They were all in at last, only C. B. Gupta coming in without any mishap as his car drove into the gateway through the milling demonstrators, C. B. himself smartly rapping a cane on the knuckles of those who had the temerity to push their hands through the window of the car… . Poor Nijalingappa walked all the way through the yelling screeching demonstrators, bare-foot, with footwear in hand, and his glasses slipping all over his face… . There were two aspects of it which were particularly ugly. These were for the most part old men, incapable of violence, who were being threatened in such cowardly fashion… . The police prevented any real violence from taking place, it is true, but they did not prevent the demonstrators from offering real provocation for a violent retaliation, which naturally could never come from Nijalingappa and company… . The more disturbing aspect, however, was the fact that in the capital of India this ugly demonstration with fascist overtones was not only allowed to take place but actually encouraged by the government… .4
The ‘unity resolution’ was accepted by the party, but the war between its factions, now out in the open, continued. Mrs Gandhi launched a signature drive for an early session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) to elect a new president, though Nijalingappa’s term was not over. Nijalingappa called this a violation of party discipline and asked her to explain her conduct. But the legalities and proprieties now looked anaemic next to Mrs Gandhi’s bank nationalization coup and the election of V.V. Giri. She received the presidential seal of approval for her conduct when Mrs Giri, receiving her joyfully after her husband’s victory, welcomed Mrs Gandhi as ‘my darling daughter’. On November 8 Mrs Gandhi released a letter to Congressmen:
What we witness today is not a mere clash of personalities, and certainly not a fight for power. It is not as simple as a conflict between the parliamentary and organizational wings. It is a conflict between two outlooks and attitudes in regard to the objectives of the Congress and the methods in which Congress itself should function.
The letter established her personal links with the Congress’s past and her special claim to the Mahatma Gandhi–Nehru inheritance:
The Congress was moulded by Mahatma Gandhi and my father to be the prime instrument of social change… . In his last years my father was greatly concerned that there were people inside the Congress who were offering resistance to change. My own experience even before the fourth general election was that the forces of status quo, with close links with powerful economic interests, were ranged against me.
On November 12 Nijalingappa expelled her from the Congress, and the break was complete when two parallel AICC sessions were held in Delhi on November 22. In December rival Congress sessions were held at Ahmedabad (Nijalingappa) and Bombay (Mrs Gandhi). The Hindustan Times noted that ‘there was little specific to differentiate them’. K. Rangachari, economic analyst, writing in the Statesman on January 5, 1970, agreed that ‘the economic manifestoes of the two Congress factions have much in common as they both take the 10-point programme of the undivided Party as their starting point. In the context of the controversy raised over the sincerity of their pursuit of socialism, neither wished to yield to the other in its desire to appear more radical… .’
Rangachari detailed the economic steps the undivided Congress had taken towards socialism, comparing them with the measures taken or proposed by Mrs Gandhi’s Congress at Bombay. The first social measure taken in independent India had been the nationalization of the Imperial Bank of India, which gave the state
a commanding height in the banking system, which along with the Reserve Bank’s control of monetary policy, gave all the power it required to make the banking system subserve the needs of planning and industrial development. The takeover of fourteen more banks last year has merely extended the public sector’s share in banking from one-third to four-fifths… achieved at the cost of creating misgivings in many quarters about future policy, and jettisoning the principles of the mixed economy… the nationalisation of life insurance in 1956… transferred large public funds to Government; the proposed nationalisation of general insurance [by Mrs Gandhi’s Congress] is unlikely to provide anything equally substantial either in terms of resources or of opportunities of improving public welfare, since general insurance does not touch the life of the ordinary citizen in the way life insurance did.
The right of property had earlier been modified:
The exemption of 64 State laws on land reform from the scope of the fundamental rights, the exclusion of the courts’ jurisdiction on questions of adequacy of compensation, sanction for interference with the rights of joint stock companies, and for modification of mining leases, and the wide definition given to the term ‘estate’, together constituted a major assault on property rights. It is significant that on the present occasion the radicals could only think of abolishing the fundamental right to property altogether.
He listed the tax measures already taken towards the socialist orientation of economic policy: estate duty (1953), capital gains (1956), taxes on wealth, expenditure, gifts, company dividends and bonus shares. In 1960 Morarji Desai had introduced the corporation tax as a separate entity and the super profits tax. Desai was responsible, too, for the gold control order, initiated when he was finance minister in Nehru’s cabinet, ‘as a measure of social reform to discourage the craze for gold ornaments’.
And the outstanding contribution to the socialist ideology was, of course, the massive investments in the public sector under three Five Year Plans which gave the State a dominant position… . State undertakings in industry alone have claimed more than Rs. 3,000 crores; to this has to be added large outlays on irrigation, power, shipping, air and railway transport. The commanding heights are now all in the public sector. The State Trading Corporation occupies an important position, in both the import and export trade… . Her [Mrs Gandhi’s] theory of obstruction cannot therefore stand scrutiny.
I myself assessed the Congress split in 1969 and the main current thereafter as a publicized ‘radicalism’, which masked the entrenchment of personal rule:
During the months since the Working Committee last met as one body on August 25, the government has put on a performance worthy of the best gangster tradition in politics. With the throwing aside of its own party’s constitution… with the summoning of mass rallies… and with the full use of all its powers in its intraparty warfare, it has launched a new unprincipled era in Indian politics… . The word ‘leader’ has assumed menacing proportion. Apparently it no longer requires answerability to a party… . It denotes personal rule with all the dangers inherent therein… .5
…what the Indian people have achieved in two decades of toil and aspiration may soon be blotted out in the interests neither of socialism nor revolution, but merely of brazen power.6
The Congress split and the way it was brought about transformed the political atmosphere. Nehru and Shastri, inheriting the Gandhian approach to politics, with its marriage of ends and means, had personally practised and upheld a meticulous standard of political behaviour. Mrs Gandhi’s role in the presidential election had been one of manipulation and intrigue, and her strategy to gain control of her party had displayed a militancy foreign to Congress tradition. She represented something ruthless and new. She had astonished people with her flair for cold assessment, shrewd timing and the telling theatrical gesture; above all, with her capacity for a fight to the finish, even to bringing the eighty-four-year-old party of liberation to rupture. She had made use of realpolitik, suiting the action to the moment’s need, undeterred by any backlog of sentiment or ethics. Her own emergence from an image of extreme withdrawal and reserve was now complete.
The effect on her party was immediate. A swing to the winning side began, with the majority deserting the sinking ship of the Old Congress. Morality was not, in any case, the order of the day. Jagjivan Ram, one of Mrs Gandhi’s crucial supporters during the split, had not, it now appeared, filed tax returns for ten years. Questioned about this at a meeti
ng of the Press Club in New Delhi, Mrs Gandhi remarked that he was a busy man and had probably forgotten. Jagjivan Ram, who controlled the Untouchable vote, was an important ally. He was obliged in the glare of publicity to pay his taxes but, at a time when stringent laws for default existed, not penalized for the delay. His forgetfulness provided excellent material for the cartoonists and more acid comment on the political scene.
The shine had rubbed off most politicians for a country that was tired of their calls for sacrifice from their own safe and comfortable berths. Mrs Gandhi evoked considerable public admiration for having outmanoeuvred them all, the exponent of a tough new breed. She later described herself in much the same terms, ‘My father was a saint who strayed into politics. I am a tough politician.’ The public hoped that her toughness, along with fresh blood in the organization, might provide the momentum the country needed. She had sympathy in abundance for her fight against bossism and the enthusiasm of many who hoped for the ‘new dawn’ she had spoken of at the Red Fort. As a child she had imagined herself a Joan of Arc, leading her people into battle. To this, her public relations office now added the more relevant Indian image of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who had so valiantly led her army against the British during the Revolt of 1857. She was no longer the mere leader of a party; she was now projected as the agent of a historic process, woman of destiny, champion of the poor, in touch with the people’s urges and aspirations and uniquely qualified to lead them. She was now in command over a thoroughly roused public, to whom she had promised a new era in socialism in the language of incitement and emotion. The outward resemblance to her father was over, and this showed most clearly on the public platform. Nehru’s speeches had had a quality of intimacy with the crowd. A huge assembly became for him a person and a ‘speech’ a conversation. He was given to displaying his doubts, to self-searching, to taking the people he addressed into his confidence. It is likely that the unsophisticated, who formed the bulk of his audiences, came to listen to a chat, albeit about grave and solemn affairs of state. The political air one breathes affects the talk in streets, market places and drawing rooms. The talk had flowed over a scene extraordinarily lacking in political tension. Mrs Gandhi’s pent-up intensity, finding release on the public platform, charged the atmosphere with peculiar tension.