Indira Gandhi

  Whether the blows… were meant for me or not, is best known to the Prime Minister herself, for it was the Central Reserve Police which was wielding the lathis… . What is of great concern to all democrats is that if this is repeated, then the people will have no chance to give expression to anything that goes against government policies and actions, however bad or evil such policies might be… . I am not surprised that while the common people are the target in action, truth is the first casualty in their [government’s] campaign to defame the movement… . The Prime Minister also goes on repeating that the movement in Bihar is in the hands of the RSS and the Anand Margis. The RSS has, of course, been active in the Bihar Movement, not directly but through its members in the Jan Sangh and the Vidayarthi Parishad student wing of the Jan Sangh. But the Socialist party, the SSP, and the Old Congress and their youth wings, the RSP and the Marxist Coordination Committee are all fully involved and active in the movement. The CPI-M has not joined the coordination committee of political parties, but has extended full support to the movement. So has the Forward Bloc. Non-existent groups are repeatedly mentioned, but the active involvement of all these parties, a majority of whom are radical, is ignored… . The Prime Minister should at least know this elementary principle of politics that it is the function of opposition parties to try and dislodge the party in power.

  That the Bihar Movement, except for the Jan Sangh, was backed by parties of the Left and centre was not, as JP then believed, ‘ignored’ by the prime minister. Government’s confrontation with it was shaped, in fact, by this realization and the knowledge that its support was both progressive and broad-based. If Mrs Gandhi admitted it was a genuine symbol of the common man’s distress, she would have to concede a rising tide in the country against her. A ‘reactionary’ movement that was ‘foreign-financed’ justified its repression.

  During 1974 the police were increasingly evident in civic affairs. In January civil disobedience in Gujarat was met with violence. In May a twenty-day railway workers’ strike demanding parity with other public sector workers was efficiently crushed. Some 50,000 workers were arrested while negotiations were on between their representatives and the management. Another 1,00,000 lost seniority and other benefits, or their jobs. The treatment of these and others imprisoned for dissent gave awe-inspiring dimensions to Mrs Gandhi’s display of power. An element of unreality was added to her fight against the Bihar Movement when in November the Congress and CPI began a ‘counteroffensive’ against the ‘conspiracy to defeat democracy’.

  On November 11 a CPI procession was given permission to march through Patna carrying weapons. A cluster of onlookers who jeered the marchers were savagely attacked. The Congress held its own procession at Patna on November 16 led by its new president, Dev Kant Barooah, attended by an imposing contingent of Congress MPs from Delhi and supervised by the prime minister’s aide, Yashpal Kapoor. The railway minister,

  L.N. Mishra, had requisitioned trains to bring participants from other states and was on hand to welcome them. This set the pattern for Congress processions in different parts of the country, costly affairs backed by government’s resources importing trainloads of participants, using jeeps, motorcycles and sometimes elephants. They did much to deprive the Congress president’s office of dignity and serious purpose, while the Congress–CPI’s newly affirmed partnership against the ‘conspiracy to defeat democracy’ looked both frivolous and macabre against the neglect of the actual issues the Bihar Movement had raised. The reprisals against it contrasted unflatteringly with the movement’s non-violence. Police muscle began to figure in political comment:

  Democracy cannot last for long if its existence depends upon the continuous use of the State’s coercive power. The strength of Indian police and para-military forces, which are used against the people, has reached the level of our military forces. People have been fired at once in every 4 days since 1971. In such a situation mass agitation and even counter-violence remain the only democratic instruments for the defence of people’s democratic rights against the creeping fascism of the State.4

  … battalions of the Border Security Force, raised as a security line of national defence, have been permanently stationed in placid Bihar towns, hundreds of students and others have been arrested and put in jail without trial, and worse still, the news of the Bihar happenings is suppressed from the rest of the country. The question is, which is more dangerous, and therefore more reprehensible: the violence of an unpopular government in deploying para-military organisations against civil resisters or the acts of violence provoked by such developments…?5

  In October 1974 the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament published government’s police budget figures,§ showing allocations had doubled in five years. The increase was accounted for mainly by the steady expansion of three paramilitary services under the Union government’s control: the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police and the Central Industrial Security Force. The budget figures did not include those of the intelligence agencies, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

  I visited Patna in November:

  I went to the Patna Medical College Hospital, part of which has been turned into a prison with barbed wire fencing and armed guards. The prisoners within needed no guard. They were in no condition to move, with such injuries as a bullet in the throat, an amputated leg and an assortment of broken bones. They had been wounded in the act of doing no more than walking in a peaceful procession… . In the prison section of the hospital, food and blankets were in short supply. So were injections, X-ray plates and blood. These emergency cases had had the misfortune of falling between two stools, hospital and jail, and did not seem to be squarely the responsibility of either.

  Bihar’s jails, long overcrowded and notoriously lax in their observance of the jail code regarding food, clothing and prisoners’ rights, cannot accommodate the swelling tide of MISA, DIR and other political arrests.6

  It was plain that Bihar had become the scene of a spontaneous convulsion with repercussions far beyond its borders. Protest had been a feature of Indian politics. Strikes, processions and demonstrations had been staged by interest groups and by every political party since Independence, including the ruling Congress itself in states where Opposition governments were in power. Political protest was an accepted part of the system. Its origins in the national movement had given it an honourable stamp. It had been institutionalized by Mahatama Gandhi’s highly organized nationwide satyagraha campaigns. Individual protest had acquired dignity and distinction with his own fasts. Agitation had vast numbers to draw on, and perhaps nowhere in the world had it drawn on so many for a variety of causes, from freedom itself to wage rises, state boundaries and a ban on cow slaughter. Even against this background the Bihar meetings were extraordinary for their size and discipline, the more impressive because official policy was directed at obstructing them and preventing the surrounding population from arriving in Patna to take part in them, apart from the force used against them. Three-quarters of their participants were young, which may explain the ardent commitment, the quality of youthful outrage and the special delight taken in defying authority that had forfeited public respect. From the Bihar villager, more comfortable speaking his own dialect than Hindi, to the city student, the Bihar Movement had wideranging young support, and it seemed to find JP’s credentials particularly apt and attractive. A brilliant modern mind that had consciously rejected power in favour of the ‘Gandhian alternative’ of service, he was a combination of the ascetic and practical, intellect and action, passion and poise. His quiet, rational tone at public meetings was more philosophical than political. He seemed a counter-leader, a prevailing moral influence rather than a personality, at a time when many believed the leadership cult at Delhi had been carried too far. The idealistic and unequal nature of the confrontation now begun appealed to the best in youth. It harnessed an energy growing restless and combative in a deteriorating economic situation and a
political atmosphere of moral decline. And it gave an outlet to students who had till now seen no way but violence to change the scheme of things.

  Apart from Bihar, active participation in it was limited to neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. Its success can be judged by the UP government’s investigation into nine eastern districts of Varanasi and Gorakhpur for signs of its influence and a report on anti-Congress sentiment or activity in the area. Its influence extended further afield, to universities in Orissa, Delhi and Haryana. In November, in anticipation of JP’s visit, Kurukshetra University in Haryana was closed by the state government, a number of students arrested, and the president and secretary of the students’ union expelled for taking part earlier in a rally in Ludhiana, Punjab, in support of the Bihar Movement. Gujarat, though its own agitation had died down with the dissolution of the state assembly, gave the movement its sympathy and support.

  Why did this extent and activity of an avowedly peaceful development panic the government or make Mrs Gandhi feel gravely threatened on her pinnacle? The strong reaction it aroused in Delhi was never defined. Several reasons might be ascribed to it. The movement represented grievances that could not, now that they were being so remorselessly and publicly aired, be ignored. It could not be explained away as a reactionary or anti-people development. It looked, in fact, very much the opposite, the groundswell of a just indignation backed by profound public sympathy, if this was to be judged by the success of its programmes involving public cooperation. Its calls for bandhs effectively paralysed life in Patna particularly, with a near-total shutdown of trading and academic establishments, and rendered the administration ineffective at district and subdivisional levels. Many in the Congress tacitly sympathized with it. Bihar had been a storm centre of revolutionary agitation during the British rule and the heart of violent protest during the Quit India upheaval. That this movement was non-violent increased rather than lessened its impact. The use of force against it discredited the user, while it conferred a badge of courage on its victims. Yet a leadership caught in its own insecurity continued to use arrest, intimidation and violence to suppress it, and to be confounded by its failure to do so.

  For Mrs Gandhi the movement presented major irritants. It was a rival claimant to the people’s voice. The reputation it had brought back into focus had little to do with the politics of power and much to do with character, virtue and example. A personality reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s now occupied the centre of the stage, and it had arrived there without benefit of political paraphernalia, legend or lore. Next to it the cant and carnival lately surrounding Congress politics looked shoddy. A clear voice had broken through, and people were listening to it. Mrs Gandhi was faced with the British government’s dilemma in dealing with the Mahatma, who had been able to unite, inspire and influence because of the human being he was. Unable to resolve her dilemma, she took a whole country to task for her failure, through action that proved to be the natural culmination of her style.

  On December 3 the Indian Express reported Bihar’s jails as ‘bursting at the seams with students and political workers’ on the eve of the assembly’s winter session. Ten Opposition and Sarvodaya leaders had been externed from the state. Barricades set up by the police extended into rural areas. Forty-three assembly seats were vacant, thirty-seven of these due to resignations in response to the movement. A harassed chief minister, the polite and inoffensive Abdul Ghafoor, obediently carried out Delhi’s instructions while he tried to hold his factious party together and to prevent some members from resigning their assembly seats. Supporting the validity of the demand for the assembly’s resignation, G.S. Bhargava commented in Everyman’s on December 1, 1974:

  Richard Nixon had received a massive mandate in 1972, with all the States of the Federation except Massachusetts voting for him. Until June last, Nixon also used to argue that demands for his resignation, like the attempts to remove him from the Presidency, were anti-democratic because his mandate lasted until 1977… . It is an irony that Mrs. Gandhi who owes her pre-eminence today to the successful mobilisation of the people against the former managers of the Congress Party should pit herself against political participation by the people, which is the essence of the Bihar movement.

  JP expressed it similarly in a letter to the editor of the

  Illustrated Weekly:

  … do you also think that Mr. Nixon’s removal from the U.S. Presidentship before his term expired was wrong and against democracy? And do you think that the Washington Post and the New York Times and many other American papers were wrong in launching the campaign against Nixon? Were they enemies of democracy?… Some of the highest constitutional authorities in the world have said that, in such cases of misrule, the people have a right—and a constitutional right, mind you—to demand removal of the offending government or dissolution of the offending parliament… .

  Moscow’s concern at the blaze of opposition to Mrs Gandhi became apparent when Kitsenko, Pravda correspondent in Madras, made a stinging attack on JP and when, on December 4, the opening day of the Bihar assembly session, Soviet TV cameramen entered the assembly chamber contrary to the rule forbidding cameras in the chamber. Ilyashenko, chief of Soviet radio and television in New Delhi, said he was there ‘with the permission of the Government of India’. In the storm of objection from Opposition benches, Soviet TV withdrew, and the Union minister for information and broadcasting, I.K. Gujral, called upon to explain the intrusion, denied having granted permission, saying only that the Soviet request had been transmitted to the Bihar assembly secretariat. But the Soviet weight behind the Congress–CPI campaign against the Bihar Movement was now an open fact. In December the Congress party inaugurated a series of secret conclaves. Narora, scene of the first, was an Uttar Pradesh village about hundred kilometres from Delhi. Barbed wire, armed guards and a thousand tents for military and police personnel, brought it into national prominence. Mohan Dharia, Union minister for works and housing, revealed, on March 17, 1975, in Poona that the Narora camp had been attended by Soviet embassy officials.

  On January 1 the Hinudustan Times commented editorially:

  It was the tragedy of 1974 that development was subordinated to politics, while politics in turn has come increasingly to be influenced by black money and the economic underworld which has established an unfortunate nexus with the country’s administrative and political echelons… . The Government has not improved its image by its reluctance to move firmly, swiftly and openly against every form of corruption… . It is essentially this sense of anger and anguish that epitomises the Bihar Movement. Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan has become a symbol whose true relevance extends far beyond Bihar… .

  *A youth brigade recruited by Vinoba Bhave to work for the Bhoodan Movement.

  †A block comprises about 100 villages.

  ‡Religious foundation.

  §Police budget figures of the Government of India:

  1968–69 Rs 72.6 crore

  1971–72 Rs 118.3 crore

  1974–75 Rs 156 crore

  TWELVE

  January to June 1975

  The first six months of 1975 saw a crescendo of political activity, with Jayaprakash Narayan as its centre. The main Opposition parties acted in concert in Parliament and in some state assemblies and backed common winning candidates in by-elections. A series of Congress reverses at the polls, climaxed by its defeat in the Gujarat state election in June, brought the arousal represented by the Bihar Movement into sharp focus. Yet the new climate was fundamentally different from that of 1967, when Congress had suffered its first major electoral setback. As a result of the 1969 split in the party, followed by Mrs Gandhi’s victory in the 1971 election, high hopes and expectations had been roused. These had not begun to be fulfilled, and the electorate was sorely disappointed. A mood of euphoria had been dashed to the ground by grave economic crisis and the government’s inability to cope with it, by the scandal and strife within the Congress and its shielding of the corrupt, and by its apparent indifference to m
ounting despair. The prospect of an alternative was emerging in the form of a united Opposition. But the new atmosphere was also the result of a searing psychological experience. Those who voted anti-Congress in 1975 did so because its leader, member of a revered family—no stranger to the democratic faith—had revealed how far she could go in trifling with democratic institutions and in crushing dissent, a performance frightening in its implications for the country. In the cold political light of 1975, public sentiment, affection and indulgence, long a source of strength and succour to the Congress, had given way to distrust in its leader’s basic credentials. A rocky road had been travelled in six years, from assured political values to political extravaganza, from ethics to the lawless techniques of expediency and ambition, from open transactions to the politics of secrecy and violence. It was, in essence, the distance between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

  Events between January and June, profound in their effect on the political landscape, are best described in sequence.

  On January 2 at 5.50 p.m. L.N. Mishra was injured by a bomb explosion at a railway platform ceremony in Samastipur, Bihar. He died at Danapur, Bihar, at 9.30 the next morning. The surgeon, R.V.P. Sinha, who operated on him at Danapur, later pointed out the inordinate delay in getting him to a hospital. The train carrying the wounded minister did not leave Samastipur until 8.30 p.m. Instead of being rushed to Darbhanga, an hour away, he was taken to Danapur where another forty-five minutes were lost while the train shunted from the wrong platform to the correct one. When he reached the operating table, six hours after the explosion, he was a case of ‘grave emergency’, his injuries so advanced, ‘it was a herculean effort to start the operation’.1

  Other related information came to light: K.P. Verma, counsel for Mishra’s family, said in his evidence before the Mathew Commission appointed by the Union government, that the failure to provide security for the minister was ‘deliberate’, in spite of the Bihar government’s instructions in 1974 to all relevant departments that special security arrangements must accompany the minister’s visits to the state. After the breaking of the railway workers’ strike in 1974, Mishra had apparently feared assassination and had told some colleagues he suspected a political conspiracy against his life. A private detective had informed the Delhi police in writing of a specific threat, naming Samastipur and Darbhanga as probable danger spots. In these circumstances K.P. Verma claimed the arrangements at the railways ceremony had been extraordinarily lax.