The CPI leadership in government showed its customary energy when it invited ‘intellectuals’—actors, writers, singers, dancers, painters and academics—to a meeting arranged by the education ministry in the capital to discuss ways and means of strengthening ‘national solidarity’. Mohan Kumaramangalam, and not the education minister, was in the chair. The procedure and terms employed differentiated it from similar gatherings in the past, when plenty of time was allowed for a ventilation of opinion. Kumaramangalam called upon the assembled company to elect a ‘presidium’ of five, and these were named and elected with obviously rehearsed speed. The head of the presidium, the distinguished communist writer, Sajjad Zaheer, took the chair. Selected members of the audience were called upon to speak, leaving no time for discussion. The ‘manifesto’, to be drafted by the presidium during the coffee break and discussed after coffee, had, the invitees discovered, already been drafted. Copies of it lay in front of Kumaramangalam. A few writers heatedly objected to being hustled, but the manifesto was duly adopted.
In January 1972, Mrs Gandhi used the opportunity provided by Mujibur Rahman’s halt in Delhi (from London en route to Dacca) to address a mass rally jointly with him. In her ‘Letter to the Voter’, appearing as an advertisement in national newspapers on March 10, 1972, she reminded people of the Bangladesh victory and the return of the refugees to their own country, and urged voters to return her party to the state assemblies in overwhelming strength in the coming elections. The Congress, backed by a mood of national excitement and euphoria, had an impressive success. The Congress–CPI electoral pact in Bihar, West Bengal and Punjab had its most spectacular result in Bengal,* where the CPI-M was reduced from 111 to 14 seats. The Congress–CPI landslide was preceded by an eventful history.
President’s rule, imposed on Bengal on March 19, 1970, had ended a year later, with the 1971 election in that state giving the CPI-M 111 seats in a House of 280 and the position of single largest party in the assembly. The Governor, S.S. Dhavan, however, was directed to favour the formation of a ‘Democratic Front’ six-party coalition, supported by the New Congress. During the next two months, the Democratic Front was reduced by defections, while the CPI-M improved its position by two more seats in constituencies that had held late polls. The coalition announced its inability to continue without a fresh mandate, and President’s rule was imposed on the state once again.
An organized police terror then subjected the CPI-M rank and file to arrests and killings. The revival of the Preventive Detention Act by ordinance in May 1971 and the enactment of MISA in June facilitated this campaign, described by a Bengali film director as the Second Great Calcutta Killing— the first having been the country’s most ferocious communal orgy in 1946. In the course of it, the CPI-M was lamed and the Naxalite movement broken, its members hunted and jailed or killed. A bloodied CPI-M contested the assembly election in 1972. In July 1973 the death of the activist Charu Mazumdar in a ‘police encounter’ completed the rout of the extreme Left outside the CPI-M and crippled its impact. According to an Amnesty International report3 published in 1974, the Bengal government held 20 to 30 thousand political prisoners, apart from 17,800 ‘under-trial detainees’. Among the methods of torture it listed were: (1) severe beating, sometimes resulting in fractured limbs, (2) hanging prisoners upside down with pins inserted into their nails and other sensitive organs of the body, including genitals, (3) electric shock, (4) burning with cigarettes, (5) denial of medical aid to tortured prisoners. Justice Sarma Sankar, heading a commission to investigate the deaths of five Naxalites in Howrah Jail, concluded that ‘firing inside Howrah Jail in 1975 violated the jail code, the penal code and the human code.’
There was irony in this formidable bloodletting to end the established hold of the CPI-M in Bengal and make way for a Congress† victory at the polls. Its chief beneficiary was the CPI, Mrs Gandhi’s ally, whose avowed goal was a political system identical to that desired by the CPI-M. It bolstered an alliance based on a degree of opportunism that was beginning to repel sensitive sections of both the CPI and the Congress. Communist critics would have preferred the dignity of an ideologically reliable partnership with the CPI-M or a neutral role between it and the Congress. Congress critics found communist philosophy and methods altogether alien and unpalatable. Mrs Gandhi’s indifference to political principle, so graphically illustrated by her partnership with the CPI, had already been seen in her electoral pact with the Muslim League in Kerala and later in Congress collaboration with the Shiv Sena, a militant mafia-type organization in Maharashtra. In her pursuit of immediate political advantage, the Congress was smearing its respected stand on basic issues and, through the widespread use of police terror, forfeiting its claim to just and decent political functioning. Scrupulous sentiment within her own party surveyed this debris of a high moral and political stand with apprehension and dismay.
The campaign against the CPI-M represented Mrs Gandhi’s violent answer to political violence. It also effectively crippled the legitimate functioning of this particular adversary. In 1974 a campaign as thorough was mounted against a non-violent movement in defence of parliamentary democracy that threatened Congress rule in Bihar, and ultimately in India.
*Bengal is used from now on,rather than West Bengal,as with the end of the 1971 war with Pakistan, East Bengal became Bangladesh.
†Congress is used from now on rather than the New Congress.
EIGHT
Reaping the Whirlwind
Victory in Bangladesh and the return of the refugees gave the country a psychological lift unequalled since Independence. Mrs Gandhi’s prestige and popularity were at their height. To the mandate she had received in the 1971 election was now added the resounding success of the Congress in the 1972 State Legislative Assembly elections, reflecting the country’s hope that stable majorities in the states would provide the base for economic improvement. With an immense fund of goodwill and no political challenge to impede her, Mrs Gandhi could begin her programme for the removal of poverty. Urban and rural unrest, the growing militancy of organized labour, the general impatience of the electorate, all demanded it. Yet this proved to be a period of total political involvement for Mrs Gandhi, to the neglect of economic affairs, though her party kept up a high temperature of vocal demand for ‘radical’change, along with a denigration of those said to be obstructing it. This may have been a useful strategy where, in the nature of things, lightning changes cannot take place, while it also furnished a smokescreen for measures that had profoundly altered the body politic under the guise of ‘constitutional’ change.
India’s political system, a marriage between the British liberal constitutional tradition and Mahatma Gandhi’s humanitarian ideals, was also a deliberate choice at Independence. It rested on the belief that a country so large and diverse could most humanely preserve its unity, as well as its legitimate diversity, within a parliamentary and federal system. While Mrs Gandhi functioned within the system she had inherited, an obsessive concern with her own importance led her progressively to tamper with the brakes and balances it provided and to block the vents that might in time and in the natural course of events give the system a chance to replace her. She did not openly challenge it. She simply maintained the continuous contradiction of publicly professing concern for parliamentary institutions, while undoing their inner scaffolding, a style that had significantly altered the Indian landscape.
She had used Parliament to endorse ordinances promulgated when she encountered resistance to a measure. An assembly in which Nehru’s meticulous regard for democratic principle and procedure had produced a high level of debate had descended to the bulk and intimidation of sheer numbers, blunted to or contemptuous of an opposing opinion. Nehru had run government on big majorities, but much of the modification or acceptance of policy had come from an exchange of views within the party as well as criticism outside it. Mrs Gandhi treated the Opposition as illegitimate, and this inevitably affected fresh air and freedom within her own p
arty. The strict conformity demanded as patriotic paralysed expression and ideas. The civil service was similarly affected. Administrative reform, accented by her as a vital need, had in actual working become an arbitrary exercise, with administrators dependent on government favour, instead of an overhaul of administrative procedures themselves.
The atmosphere for magnanimity and cooperation, now that her own political strength was secure, was vitiated when Congress MPs were told not to foregather with Opposition MPs in the central lobby of Parliament, traditionally a meeting place for politicians and journalists, where political crosscurrents met in a relaxed exchange of views and humour. The directive was condemned as absurd by A.B. Vajpayee ( Jan Sangh), Hiren Mukerjee (CPI) and Madhu Limaye (Socialist Party), but the absurdity had a sombre touch. The ruling party behaved not only as dominant but permanent, and the prime minister seemed temperamentally unable to adjust to the very concept of Parliament. In an article published in August 1973, Hiren Mukerjee wrote:
Unlike her father, who rejoiced in Parliament, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, though Leader of the Lok Sabha, apart from being Prime Minister, has an allergy to it. One may understand a certain personal reticence, for Parliament today is a peculiar and sometimes repellant kettle of fish, very different from what it was till ten years ago; but it is representative of our people’s soured mood and the Prime Minister must come to terms and make friends with it. She prefers, however, to let hordes of people interview her, and listen rather than talk, keeping away even when most needed in Parliament sessions. One wonders if she prefers the Presidential form of government, but meanwhile the business of the country suffers. Her massive majority and the fact of the Opposition being miscellaneous and very differently motivated, has enabled a gloss to be placed even over what can be called a political enormity, namely, the phenomenon of unprecedentedly heartless treatment of political prisoners, large numbers of whom have been beaten up and killed, inside and outside of jails, without anything like a judicial process, without conformity with routine regulations regarding post mortem and other investigations.
Her style had affected the balance between the states and the Central government. With many, and eventually all, of Congress chief ministers her nominees—not the choice of the party’s state units—the Centre’s* detailed interference became the norm in state affairs. While this enormously strengthened Mrs Gandhi’s own grip on her party’s state units and made reward and punishment in the form of granting or withholding loans and assistance from the Centre to state governments her own prerogative, the damage to the federal structure soon showed. State politics revealed an instability resembling the period of unsteady coalitions after the 1967 election, with bargaining and defections confined now to factions of the Congress. A jungle of intrigue and intra-party feuding sprouted, unlike the factional differences of the Nehru era, when state leadership and considerations had resolved crises. The rungs of the ladder of command now dispensed with, all decisions issued from the top. The results were detrimental to both party and country. In her grasp of the nuts and bolts of the machinery of power, so essential to control, Mrs Gandhi exhibited a curious lack of overall vision, if power was to be vested in a community and not in the person of a single leader. She installed a strategy of command that depended entirely on personal loyalty. It did not train a leadership for the future, taking care to remove or subdue any sign of emerging leadership. Her vision stopped at the machine, and her hold on it produced near-chaotic conditions in the states. Faction quarrels in Orissa forced Nandini Sathpathy (sent there by Mrs Gandhi as chief minister in 1972) to quit. Kedar Pandey in Bihar and Ghanshyam Oza in Gujarat followed suit. In Madhya Pradesh P.C. Sethi fought the rebel faction in order to retain control as chief minister. In Andhra Pradesh where a separatist agitation started, Mrs Gandhi’s nominee faced rough weather. By 1973 faction fighting in many states was endemic, with state units in disarray and their leaders abandoning deteriorating conditions of law and order and economic decline while they sought the prime minister’s intervention to keep their seats from rivals in their own party. Shaky on their own ground, each problem sent them hurrying to Delhi for orders.
The props and conventions of political behaviour had been set aside by Mrs Gandhi during 1969, and her own party felt the recoil. She was acknowledged leader over its mushrooming indiscipline, but did not seem able to prevent it. There was disgrace in the spectacle of the ruling party in its exalted, unrivalled position fallen into a snarl of schemes and intrigues. The Patriot lamented editorially in July 1973:
While the Congress factions were busy cutting each other’s throats, Ahmedabad witnessed a shameless outbreak of communal violence, a gruesome reminder to the ruling party that communal gangsters, if not the more unscrupulous elements in its own ranks, are ever on the prowl to exploit every unstable situation for their own ends.
In another July editorial the Patriot described the condition of the ruling party as an
… epidemic of petty factionalism that is spreading in the Congress from State to State, paralysing its organisational structure, benumbing whatever mind it had and threatening to create a mortal political crisis when the country is reeling without any sense of direction in a chaotic economic morass… .
These indictments by a CPI-owned newspaper and supporter of the Congress were almost indistinguishable from the right wing Jan Sangh organ, Motherland’s comment on Madhya Pradesh’s affairs:
Mr. Sethi’s personal fate or the outcome of the Congress faction fights, however, is of little concern to the people. What is really tragic is that the destiny of the nation should be in the hands of these morally sick leaders of a sick political party.
There was an increasing awareness of corruption at high levels. The public was convinced of authority’s lucrative alliance with corrupt elements in the country, important smugglers among them, and with the ‘black money’ that flowed from sections of industry.
It was finally the state of Bihar that showed the most dire effects of federal corrosion when, in 1974, the state government gave up all pretence at decision-making during a period requiring the most careful judgement and action.
Tension mounted within the Congress over its alliance with the CPI. The Nehru Study Forum considered it unnecessary and harmful to the party’s image in the country. The Young Turk, Chandrasekhar, spoke scathingly of communist ‘management’ of the Congress, violently objecting to this new political elite, the control it exercised and the communist stamp that flourished under Mrs Gandhi’s umbrella. It was feared the extent of Indian commitment to the Soviet Union was cutting out other options when India needed wheat and skills. Yet the alliance with the CPI was officially and publicly affirmed in March 1973 when the CPI and the Congress took part in a New Delhi seminar organized by the Congress Forum for Socialist Action, presided over by Congress President Shankar Dayal Sharma, to alert the people against ‘the Rightist counterrevolutionary challenge’. Mrs Gandhi ordered both forums to wind up when they clashed in open recrimination. But the tension continued.
As the bloom faded from the ruling party’s image, disillusionment focused on two of its prominent figures: Lalit Narayan Mishra, Union minister for railways, and Bansi Lal, chief minister of Haryana. The 53rd Report of the Estimates Committee of the Bihar Assembly had recorded that L.N. Mishra and his family had made substantial fortunes out of contracts connected with Bihar’s Kosi project. Specific charges of corruption and misuse of authority had been brought against Bansi Lal by Opposition leaders. These, addressed to President V.V. Giri, were contained in three documented memorandums, calling for an inquiry. As the demand for an inquiry gathered force during the 1972 monsoon session of Parliament, Mrs Gandhi gave the charge sheet against him to a sub-committee of the cabinet, of which D.P. Dhar, Kashmiri head of the Planning Commission, was an important member. It exonerated Bansi Lal and dismissed the charges. If Mrs Gandhi was disturbed by the reputations of these colleagues she gave no indication of it. Her public references to them were warm and ap
preciative. The expectation that she would replace or reprimand them did not materialize. The impression grew that these were key figures in her confidence whose services could not be easily replaced. Her patronage of them made them flashpoints of a rising resentment. While L.N. Mishra, associated with fund-raising for the party, remained in the background, Bansi Lal, a cruder and more colourful political figure, was involved in open controversy and was known to have the prime minister’s special protection in return for his staunch support and 291 acres of requisitioned land provided for her son’s car factory in his state.
In her capacity as leader, Mrs Gandhi apparently did not feel accountable to her party. She cultivated a monarchical remoteness, above and beyond the growing uproar of factionalism and criticism, untouched by and oblivious to it. Indeed she denied any interest in leadership. She had told the Congress Parliamentary Party on March 13, 1972, ‘I am not one of those who believe in leadership. My whole attempt is to create a society in which people do not need leaders.’ The society she was creating showed all the grotesquerie of the opposite trend. For those who had long known it, there was a peculiar pathos in watching the Congress, once a national movement inspired by high ideals, in its best days devoted to hard work and a constructive purpose, thus succumb. The idea of a leader as the focus of admiration and adulation was not new to Indians, a people more willing than most to follow a leader. But modern India’s leadership had been built and based on professional excellence or on great example, not on the emblems or actuality of power. Mrs Gandhi’s citadel attracted an older simile, that of a reigning medieval monarch surrounded by the panoply of a court, its flattery, its intrigue and the swift retribution that visits offenders. Backed by the modern machinery of state power in a country where the majority were uneducated and could be easily manipulated, her scope for the exercise of arbitrary leadership was almost unlimited. The pedestal she occupied, high above the party, served her well. Indicative of her lack of the common touch, her inability to tolerate equals, her trust of no one created the necessary regal distance between her and the party, her and the crowd, so that, though the muddy tide of corruption and confusion lapped at her, it could not overwhelm her. She could remain unsullied by it.
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