Indira Gandhi

by Nayantara Sahgal

  In July 1970 the Opposition brought a no-confidence motion in Parliament, charging Mrs Gandhi with rigging the state election in Kerala. She replied, ‘It is obvious that the entire motion is designed as a personal attack on me, on the supposed concentration of power in my hands… . I have been compared, not for the first time, to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. I think the people will laugh at the preposterousness of these comparisons.’ Her persistent reduction of all criticism to ‘a personal attack on me’ had the effect of slamming a door, much as tears or an emotional outburst put an end to argument. Mrs Gandhi’s public speeches through the year had a strongly defensive flavour, the lonely furrow ploughed against mighty and dangerous forces.

  The forces visibly at work in the country were not, however, vested interests obstructing socialism so much as those demanding speedier and more radical change (e.g., the Naxalite movement) by violence, though communal violence had also taken its toll at Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and other parts of Maharashtra. It was to the theme of obstruction by reactionary and communal forces that Mrs Gandhi returned in her broadcast of December 27 announcing a midterm election. She was insecure in Parliament with her reduced majority and her dependence on other parties, besides being up against a far from docile Opposition. Her reliance on extra-parliamentary devices showed her path had not proceeded smoothly. In February the Supreme Court had struck down bank nationalization. In April the government bill to end the special privileges of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) had not secured a two-thirds majority in Parliament. And on December 15 a special bench of the Supreme Court had ruled the presidential order on the princes as ultra vires of the Constitution. She would go to the polls to get a fresh mandate for her policies. For their implementation, some amendments to the Constitution would be necessary, ‘… I want to be clear… we are not in favour of removing all the fundamental rights nor are we even against the right to property, but we do believe in having a certain ceiling on property, whether urban or rural.’2

  At her news conference on December 29 a journalist asked, ‘Your broadcast speech on television and radio [on the 27th] the Opposition claimed was a political speech and wanted equal time. Do you foresee in this election campaign that All India Radio will be open to the Opposition to make political speeches?’ The prime minister replied, ‘Well, mine was not a political speech at all. I was exceedingly careful not to say anything that could be counted as party propaganda. As far as the other question is concerned, it has been debated, and we just could not get agreement on the subject.’

  The proposal of the Chanda Committee to make All India Radio (AIR) an autonomous corporation on the lines of the BBC had been rejected by the government on October 21, 1970. The Opposition was to complain of government’s unfair and unprincipled use of the media at its disposal. After the election Mrs Gandhi brushed this aside in the Lok Sabha (April 2, 1971), ‘The complaint of some members about the functioning of All India Radio and TV, that they were used by the government for party ends, need not be taken seriously.’ Two years later, the minister for information and broadcasting, I.K. Gujral, announced the prime minister’s ‘firm and irrevocable’ rejection of the Chanda Committee recommendations and said AIR would be run‘in the manner that served the country best’.

  At her news conference, the prime minister was questioned about the contradiction of her party’s electoral pact with a communal party, the Muslim League, in Kerala. She agreed the Muslim League was a communal organization, but said the way to meet it was to try and solve some of the genuine grievances of the minorities. She closed her conference by wishing the correspondents a happy new year, ‘and, I hope, a less jaundiced view of the Indian situation’.

  This period marked the end of a convention that a caretaker government functioned once an election was announced. Patronage was freely distributed by Mrs Gandhi’s government, and licences ‘worth millions of rupees’ were issued to industry. Kuldip Nayar adds in India After Nehru (1975): ‘One conscientious objector in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat was Haksar, who at least stopped the distribution of brochures containing Mrs. Gandhi’s speech which she broadcast on the day of the Lok Sabha dissolution.’

  SIX

  The Midterm Election

  India prepared for its first midterm general election in a tense and fevered atmosphere dominated by Mrs Gandhi rather than issues. Her party fielded a large number of unknown candidates, ‘lamp posts’ to the press, with the appeal that a vote for the candidate was a vote for Mrs Gandhi. The prime minister’s picture and personal message accompanied their posters. A loose alliance formed to oppose her, the ‘grand alliance’ to the press, was not able to unite under a common programme. The men in it were uncomfortable in each other’s political company and agreed only in their shared alarm at Mrs Gandhi’s style and in their determination to remove her. Their slogan Indira Hatao (Remove Indira) contrasted miserably with hers, Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty).

  Most voters wanted a stable government and felt the New Congress with enough majority would not be at the mercy of extremists, even those in its own party. The constitutional amendments Mrs Gandhi had said would be necessary caused no concern. She had repeatedly said she was a democrat. Her statements had always carried the assurance of a democratic framework and civic freedoms, whatever constitutional changes were made. The legacy of Nehru, of the democratic norms and conventions he had established and scrupulously served, was such that few anticipated any threat to democracy as India had till now understood the word and system, least of all from Nehru’s daughter. It was felt there had been pressures on her during her quarrel with her own party and her year of reliance on other parties. Once free of these she would show good judgement and balance. The Gandhi–Nehru–Shastri era, for all its mass participation, had also been an age of the educated in politics. Gandhi had welded the educated with the masses, convinced that progress to freedom required a true identity of interests between the different sections of society, a tradition carried on after Independence. Gandhi’s war had been against India’s most ancient injustice—caste. Philosophically this was the reverse of class war. The challenge was projected not as rich against poor, but as civilized men against the injustices of their society. The Indian intelligentsia had, by and large, played a responsible role in independent India, in its contribution to the wide-ranging development Nehru had termed ‘adventure’. The welding had survived principally because Indian leadership had nurtured it. It was not yet obvious that it was being taken apart systematically.

  The question arises: Was Mrs Gandhi trying, within the framework of existing democratic institutions, to blaze a new trail towards an egalitarian society against the combined weight of an outdated bureaucracy and legal system inherited from colonial times? Or were her intentions of a different kind? Was she using the credentials of her father and Mahatma Gandhi to play on the feelings and understanding of the masses, and to take in the process a calculated turn towards an authoritarian order? A single-minded woman, with a categorical sense of good and bad, for and against, not given to self-examination, forgiveness or compromise, if she saw any contradiction in her role, she may have believed herself capable of resolving it. For, above all, she believed she knew without a shadow of a doubt what needed to be done. Mission and opportunity met in her in a blaze of purpose. She had once listed the four most important influences on her character and thinking as Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Her genuine yearning towards the vision, humanity and universality of these men may have found fulfilment in another career. The road to power distorted and finally destroyed it.

  The election raises some points worth considering, inextricably connected with Mrs Gandhi’s highly personal style in politics. In 1969, before the Congress split, donations to political parties had been banned. The ban had worked since, without much secrecy, to the advantage of the ruling party. Industry knew it must invest in a winner. This alone seemed to assure permission to carry on business in a system of complex cont
rols and lengthy delays, now surmounted by threat of takeover, and the credo that to oppose government was to be a reactionary and an enemy of the people. Ajit Bhattacharjea wrote in the Illustrated Weekly of India on July 15, 1973:

  Money had been collected for election and other party purposes before, but never on the scale and in the manner it was for Lok Sabha elections in 1971 and the State assembly elections a year later. Crores are known to have been extracted from the business community, but there is no account of these transactions. The entire sum was paid in black money; no legal accounts were kept… . So a premium was placed on massive dishonesty and corruption and the parallel black money economy—with all its degrading social and economic effects—was legitimised.

  There was a procedural change in the conduct of this election. Up to now each ballot box had been separately counted at the end of polling. This time ballot boxes from several polling stations were mixed, resulting in a lapse of time, sometimes of days, before counting could begin. The reason given was that no one should know how a particular area had voted. This innovation had been considered and rejected by the Election Commission in its report on the fourth general election. The change in procedure, which involved a change in rules, should have been placed before Parliament for scrutiny. It was, however, introduced after Parliament had been dissolved and the notification for the election had been made.

  The change applied to parliamentary constituencies, not state assembly constituencies. It did not affect the three states of West Bengal, Orissa and Tamil Nadu, where assembly elections were held simultaneously with the general election, a fact of some significance later.

  Mrs Gandhi’s victory had been expected, though no one, including her own party’s best forecasters, had predicted a twothirds majority. The Opposition parties had been expected to win in areas where they existed in strength and enjoyed a good reputation on the basis of their past performance. Their almost total rout, an abnormally clean sweep, even in these areas, had an unreality, particularly when they were defeated by unknown New Congress candidates who themselves had expected to make a scant or mediocre showing. The Opposition held that deviation from established election procedure gave scope for mischief on a vast scale, particularly as this deviation, unobtrusively introduced, coincided with an election where a leader’s political reputation and future were linked to an unusual degree with the outcome.

  The prime minister, who as home minister had intelligence, the police and the Election Commission under her supervision, told the Lok Sabha after the election on April 2, 1971, ‘The complaints against the Election Commission have already been dealt with by my colleague, the Minister of Law and Justice.’ The Jan Sangh leader, A.B. Vajpayee, retorted, ‘Not satisfactorily.’ But, in the aftermath of Mrs Gandhi’s victory and the awe created by the pendulum swing of power, criticism died away and questions remained unanswered.

  The only nationally known Opposition leader to take rigging charges to court was Balraj Madhok of the Jan Sangh, defeated in his South Delhi constituency, who claimed evidence of a plan to ensure a New Congress coup. The following extracts from his book Murder of Democracy1 have some significance in view of the dictatorship Mrs Gandhi launched with ease in 1975:

  The first information about the projected fraud on the Indian electorate accidentally reached a Delhi school teacher when he was… enrolling new voters in the Karol Bagh area of Delhi. When he approached an officer of the Government of India who lived in that area but whose name did not appear on the electoral rolls… [the officer] casually remarked, ‘You may enrol me and I will vote for your party but you are not going to win. This time chemicals will be employed and all your candidates will be defeated.’… Nobody, including the officers of Delhi State Jan Sangh, took serious note of the information… . A few days before the polling a letter reached the Jan Sangh office at Lucknow. It said that the writer of the letter was staying in a dak bungalow in the Rae Bareilly constituency from where Mrs. Gandhi was contesting. He overheard some Congress high-ups staying in the adjacent room talking about the certainty of Mrs. Gandhi’s victory because of the use of a certain percentage of chemicalized ballot papers which would be pre-stamped in her favour. He thought it his duty to convey the information to the major opposition party in the State and so he wrote that letter… .

  On March 2, three days before the polling was to begin in New Delhi, a chit came on the stage of a public meeting organised by the Jan Sangh in Karol Bagh which was to be addressed by A. B. Vajpayee. The chit said: ‘I am a senior officer of the Election Commission. I want to warn you that some serious mischief is being done in regard to ballot papers. Be on guard.’… On March 3, a young man met Vidyarthi [ Jan Sangh candidate from Karol Bagh] in his office and gave him detailed information about the modus operandi of the contemplated fraud on the electorate. He told Vidyrathi that a certain percentage of ballot papers will be chemically treated and an invisible stamp will be affixed on the cow-and-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. Stamps put by the voters in polling booths on such ballots will disappear because of that chemical, and the invisible stamp on the cow-and-calf symbol will become visible after some days… .

  It is difficult to believe how responsible people who got this information dismissed it as fantastic and took no step either to inform the public about it or even to tell their senior colleagues, some of whom also happened to be candidates in the election, about it… .

  The first concrete evidence of rigging… came to light at the time of counting. A number of opposition candidates and their counting agents in Delhi, Bombay and elsewhere noted that stamp marks on the cow-andcalf symbol [of Mrs Gandhi’s party] on a large number of ballot papers appeared to be uniform, fresher and brighter than the stamps on other symbols. It was also noted that the colour of such ballot papers was somewhat different from other ballots. The matter was brought to the notice of returning officers by a number of people including Madhu Mehta, General Secretary of the Swatantra Party, who was present at the counting of votes in one of the Lok Sabha constituencies of Bombay. But the returning officers expressed their inability to take legal cognizance of these observations… .

  The first definite information about the fraud… came on the night of March 11, when a senior officer of an important department of Government burst into tears before two other officials and told them the whole story to unburden the load on his conscience.

  This was followed by a spate of unsigned letters giving details of the fraud to important leaders of the Opposition, including Nijalingappa… Charan Singh and the writer. The details given in some of these letters coming from authoritative sources were startling.

  As the information started pouring in, the first thing the writer thought of was to apprise the President of India of all the facts, with the request to act in the interest of the Constitution which he was under oath to uphold… urging him to order a judicial probe into the conduct of the elections and appoint a commission of scientists to make chemical examination of ballot papers… .

  Madhok received an acknowledgement of his letter to the President, but no reply. On March 30, 1971, he sought the chief election commissioner’s permission to inspect the ballot papers of his own South Delhi constituency. Permission was refused. On April 24 Madhok filed an election petition in the Delhi High Court, setting forth his case for an inspection of ballot papers in his constituency. The trial judge, Justice Andley, ordered an inspection. The New Congress candidate appealed against inspection to the Supreme Court. Madhok notes that Supreme Court judge Daftary, who categorically opposed any kind of inspection, and particularly a chemical inspection of ballot papers, was not long afterwards nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Two Supreme Court judges, Hegde and Khanna, however, ordered a sample inspection of a few hundred ballot papers before any general inspection was ordered. In the course of their judgement they observed:

  The march of science has shown in recent years that what was thought to be impossible just a few years back has become an easy possibility now.
What we would have thought as wild imagination some years back is now proved to be reality. Hence we are unable to reject the allegations of the election petitioner without scrutiny. We shall accept nothing and reject nothing except on satisfactory proof.

  In compliance with the Supreme Court judgement, Justice Andley of the Delhi High Court made a sample inspection of 800 ballot papers cast in favour of the New Congress candidate and 550 cast in favour of the Jan Sangh candidate (Madhok), taken at random out of bags containing them. Madhok writes:

  At the very first sight of the two sets of ballot papers, they revealed some difference in colour. While all but five ballot papers cast in the writer’s favour were found to be white, almost all the ballot papers cast in favour of the ruling Congress were found to be‘off white’ in the language of the court… [The trial judge] also asked the writer to keep his scientist and formula ready for chemical examination and reserved his order for November 12… . But the judgement could not be delivered on November 12 as the court was closed that day because of the sudden death of a judge of the Supreme Court. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had been abroad also returned to New Delhi on the same date.

  Madhok records his astonishment that the judgement when it came was a complete reversal of the trial judge’s stated position. The judge rejected the request for chemical inspection of ballot papers. He also struck the issue off the election petition.

  Unwilling to let the matter rest, Madhok took his case to the Supreme Court with the plea that the suspect ballots be chemically examined. He argued the case himself on August 9, 1972, saying the ballots were the only evidence of a calculated coup, which if the evidence were borne out, would reveal the extent the ruling clique had gone to ensure a sizeable victory. If tests could be undertaken in cases of forged documents or currency notes, the ballots, on which a country’s fate depended, should be tested. The Supreme Court now refused the plea.