Just before the assassination, leaders of the Jan Sangh, CPI-M and BLD had called for an inquiry into a series of ‘mysterious [road] accident deaths’ of men investigating cases with important political implications. These included D.K. Kashyap, connected with the Nagarwala case; R.D. Pandey, a deputy director of the Intelligence Bureau; Anil Chopra, collector of Daman, who had broken a smuggler gang; and recently, Ramanathan, a CBI inspector examining the improprieties of Congress MPs selling licences to well-known firms, an affair in which L.N. Mishra was implicated, and which was the subject of storm and stress in the current session of Parliament. Mishra’s death by violence raised a flurry of fresh speculation about his role in the ‘licence scandal’.
On January 7 All India Radio broadcast a portion of Mrs Gandhi’s speech at a condolence meeting organized by the Congress party’s Delhi unit. Her accusation that Mishra’s death was a ‘rehearsal’ for which she herself was the ‘real target’ was as shocking as her imputation of the crime to JP’s movement. An edge of hysteria was conveyed to listeners more startling than the printed account of her speech. Bewildered listeners heard her disown the crime herself and decry attempts to link her with it, ‘Even Congressmen have been misled by these blatant lies.’
The condolence meeting was converted into one of fervent support for Mrs Gandhi. Its most vigorous speaker,
H.N. Bahuguna, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said ‘fifty-eight crores of people’ stood solidly behind the prime minister. Mrs Gandhi’s own wrought-up accusation had the reverse of the effect desired. On January 8 the Hindustan Times editorial pointed out:
… those who have rushed to implicate Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan by proxy with the Samastipur outrage might recall earlier bomb explosions last May at the Bankipore [Patna] dak bungalow and the subsequent firing on JP’s procession in Patna on June 5th from a government flat allotted to a Congress MLA, Mr. Phulena Rai, and occupied by workers of the ‘Indira Brigade’ … the use of bombs and firearms in Bihar is older than JP’s movement… .
There was open talk that a government agency was responsible for Mishra’s death. Controversy over the minister had reached a peak in the licence case before Parliament, involving government in its most embarrassing collision with the Opposition. His death had come at a convenient time. Jyotirmoy Basu’s (CPI-M) statement in Parliament that Mishra’s office and home had been searched immediately after his death to remove documents connected with Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti company was not answered by the home minister. The extreme slowness of the CBI investigation created further suspicion of government involvement, while the prompt dismantling of the dais at Samastipur had destroyed primary evidence. A politician who dominated and manipulated cliques, had men and money to do his bidding and aroused disproportionate loyalties and antagonisms, Mishra had reportedly refused to resign and had a devoted following in the party to back him up.
The event served to blur Opposition differences and feed a mounting fear. The CPI-M issued a statement on January 13 from Calcutta: ‘The semi-fascist and gangster tactics of the ruling party have been continuing for the last three years, and free functioning of all opposition forces, especially the CPI-M and other Left and democratic opposition, had become an impossibility… .’ Marxist leader Jyoti Basu announced the CPI-M would, as a result, invite the Old Congress and the Jan Sangh to a conference to plan a broad-based movement in Bengal for civil liberties and free and fair elections. Each party would conduct its separate campaign but the three would be synchronized. There would be no truck, he added, with the CPI.
The CPI, also an Opposition party, was not recognized as such any more. Its interests were too closely identified with the Congress. In a recent article, Mohit Sen had explained his party’s objective as ‘unity and struggle vis-a-vis the Congress’. The unity was manifest, the struggle was not. If the CPI had disapproved of the breaking of the railways strike the previous year, its disapproval had been in a low key. During the Soviet President Brezhnev’s visit to India in 1973, the party had been told to back Mrs Gandhi regardless of her policies. The Soviet investment in India was political and geographical, not ideological. The Indian record showed that the CPI harvest out of this alliance, abundant in its share and spoils of power, had not added favourably to its reputation. An eight per cent bonus to workers, made law in September 1974 (and applicable to 1973), was withdrawn by the government in 1975. The wheat takeover, fully backed by the CPI, had been discredited by its failure. The projected takeover of the rice crop had been abandoned. The nationalization of coal mines in 1973, authored by Mohan Kumaramangalam, became linked in the public mind with the Chasnala mine disaster in Bihar in December 1975, one of the worst in mining history. It was judged to be due to ‘reckless slaughter mining endangering mine safety’ in order to increase production after nationalization. The party’s direct influence on the Congress had dwindled after its chief spokesman in government, Kumaramangalam, was killed in an air crash in 1973. The Congress–CPI combine had less logic to commend it than the Opposition of varying political complexions now drawing closer together. Developments in Bangladesh, with Mujibur Rahman taking dictatorial powers, added anxiety and incentive to this process. That the war to release a much heralded ‘Sonar Bangala’ (‘Golden Bengal’) from bondage—one that so exhaustively engaged India’s soldiery, resources and idealism during 1971— should have come to this was a reminder of what might happen next in India. The possibility of a dictatorship, with a sudden seizure of extra powers by Mrs Gandhi, was widely discussed.
On January 19, at a youth rally in Patna, JP appealed to adherents of the Bihar Movement to enlighten people about the danger ahead and mobilize them to defeat any move on Mrs Gandhi’s part to thrust dictatorship on the country. Her outburst at the condolence meeting for L.N. Mishra, he said, showed she was realizing ‘people were losing confidence in her’. Defending the multiparty membership of the movement, he said it had no labels. Members of the Jan Sangh and Old Congress had faced lathis and bullets and were in prison for their participation in it. He would not ask any party to leave it. Six weeks later (March 5), addressing the twentieth plenary session of the Jan Sangh in New Delhi, he said he wished to communicate the conclusion after a year’s work with the Jan Sangh and the RSS that he had found them neither reactionary nor fascist. Fascism was rearing its ugly head, but it came from another quarter. A similar caution was delivered by the CPI-M General Secretary, P. Sundarayya, in Hyderabad on February 12. Denying his party had joined hands with the Jan Sangh or the BLD, he said the danger of fascism, however, was much greater from Mrs Gandhi. It would not surprise him if she, aided by the CPI, repeated the Bangladesh development and called off the 1976 election.
The Opposition, though fragmented, had been a lively and talented presence in Indian politics. The combined votes it polled, even before the 1967 elections, its high point of achievement, had been more numerous than those polled by the Congress party. Single Opposition parties or coalitions had formed state governments, at times under outstanding and admired leaders, as Annadorai of Tamil Nadu and Namboodiripad of Kerala. Accomplished Opposition speakers had exerted pressure on the Congress majority in Parliament and contributed to the quality and maturity of parliamentary debate. The near-impossibility of dislodging the Congress even gave the enterprise a certain gallantry. The challenge called for discipline and dedication. Thus the Jan Sangh built up a student cadre, the Vidyarthi Parishad, a successful foil to the CPI’s All India Students’ Federation, and prided itself on the allegiance it commanded among the young. A quarter century of democratic opportunity had left the Opposition divided. When it surfaced after Nehru’s death, it did so with a distinct regional bias. It took Mrs Gandhi’s autocratic tread to goad the Opposition to unity. In this it had an advantage it had not had before—the decay of the ruling party’s image and its impotence on the economic front. Unwilling to give up party identities, the Opposition formed a single bloc in Parliament and some state assemblies and fielded common ‘janata’ can
didates for approaching by-elections. After the Emergency of 1975, prison and suppression furthered the process, with the Janata Party finally challenging the Congress in the national election of 1977. This development can best be understood in terms of a scene reduced by Mrs Gandhi’s style to a warlike confrontation between the Congress and other opinion, leaving no room for compromise or manoeuvre.
Yet there was more to Opposition unity than this. If Mrs Gandhi’s categorical style had broken with the whole texture of the Congress’s past, initiated alignment with the CPI at home and the Soviet Union abroad, and in the process fundamentally altered Indian politics and the working of Indian political institutions, Opposition parties had also undergone degrees of transformation. Some old stock images had changed and no longer applied.
The Old Congress, the rump left by the split, tainted at the time by accusations of conservatism and ‘bossism’, and expected shortly to capitulate to the ruling party and disappear from the scene, had not done so. Its president, Asoka Metha, once a leading theoretician of the Socialist Party, had always been associated with the Left. Its elder statesman, Morarji Desai, had acquired added stature as an honourable man in the hurricane of desertion and defection encouraged by the split. He stood out now as one of the last Gandhians, recalling receding values, a symbol of dignity in the muddy political landscape. The charge levelled by Congress radicals some years earlier that Desai’s businessman son, Kanti, had used his father’s position to promote his business, now looked meagre next to Mrs Gandhi’s vigorous sponsorship of her son and the official apparatus freely used to assist him. The conservative taint had faded in view of Mrs Gandhi’s lack of radical or credible performance, while her party’s extortion and use of money on a scale as yet unparalleled had given ‘bossism’ and ‘black money’ a new life and dimension.
The Jan Sangh had since its founding been open to all communities. On this issue it had parted with the Hindu Mahasabha and, under the leadership of Shyama Prashad Mukherjee, had avoided the word ‘Hindu’ altogether in its official title, using ‘Bharatiya’ instead. Its espousal of Hinduism and Hindi as the dominant culture and language of India was, it claimed, based on statistical realities, Hindi being spoken or understood by 42 per cent of the population, as against the next largest figure, 9.24 per cent speaking Telugu. Its attitude towards these two issues had, of circumstance and necessity, become more tolerant, for religion ceased to be a profitable issue in politics once the fever following the Partition subsided, while the search for support in the south and among the Muslims produced a modified stand on Hindi. Mrs Gandhi’s angry militancy towards the Jan Sangh showed its front-rank leadership up in a sober, balanced light by contrast. Even the RSS, noted for militant activities in the past and denounced for its anti-secularism and cultivation of the Hindu mystique, now contrasted favourably with the growing aggressiveness of the Youth Congress, protected when it transgressed the limits of law-abiding behaviour.
The Socialist Party, always anti-doctrine and experimental, felt vindicated in its demand for a redistribution of economic priorities and more decentralization. Mrs Gandhi’s drive for world recognition and her definition of ‘achievement’ as victory in war and the explosion of a nuclear device did not accord with these.
The Old Congress, the Jan Sangh and the Socialist Party found common ground with Congressmen who opposed the alliance with the CPI and feared the consequences of Mrs Gandhi’s present unyielding posture.
The CPI-M, its ideological purity intact, kept out of the Opposition bloc, but extended its cooperation where it thought fit. Battered by police action, its chief enemy was the ‘fascism’ of the Congress–CPI combine.
Mrs Gandhi had two choices. Influential members of her party were urging a reconciliation with the Opposition and a basic programme inviting the cooperation of all parties to meet the urgent needs of the population. She chose her second option, rejecting a conciliatory course. This meant the manufacture of a ‘right reaction’ obstructing her, with which no talks were possible.
That the time had come for a new political combine, ignoring conventional left–right divisions, was apparent to the public, for the effect of jointly fielded ‘janata’ candidates was immediate and electric. The Congress had already lost two by-elections when, in the third week of January, the Opposition won a spectacular victory in the important by-election to the Lok Sabha from Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh). The seat had been a Congress bastion for fifty years, vacated by the death of Seth Govind Das, who had held it since his membership of the Central Assembly during British rule. The New Congress candidate was his grandson, Ravi Mohan, backed by the chief minister, P.C. Sethi, who put state transport (including helicopters) and resources to lavish use in the campaign. Mohan was defeated in all eight segments of the Lok Sabha constituency, all eight of whose assembly seats were occupied by Congress MLAs—an anti-Congress wind the Times of India described as ‘a veritable tornado’. The ‘janata’ candidate, a virtually unknown gold-medal engineering student, Sharad Yadav, became Parliament’s youngest member. Welcoming the victory, JP told an interviewer in Bombay on January 22 that the people’s force now at work was more powerful than the ‘greatest and grandest alliance’:
The ‘grand alliance’ seems to have become for Mrs. Gandhi the same kind of cry as Bonaparte had become for British mothers in those times… . Mrs. Gandhi makes herself out as radical and suggests she stands for policies and ideals of which Jayaprakash Narayan and the Bihar Movement are afraid. But the people of Bihar, or for that matter, the people of India, would like to ask her what she has done in nine years of her reign. What radical change has she brought about?
The Opposition’s ‘janata’ candidate won next at the Govindpura (Madhya Pradesh) by-election. February brought further defeats for the Congress in two (Meham and Rori) out of three by-elections to the Haryana assembly. The victories of the ‘janata’ candidates, one of them a young lawyer new to politics, were particularly galling to Chief Minister Bansi Lal who had campaigned extensively with several cabinet colleagues. The Barpeta (Assam) by-election to the Lok Sabha on February 20 revealed a degree of panic in the Congress party and the government. The seat had been vacated when Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was nominated to the presidency. Now President, he paid a visit to Assam timed to coincide with the Congress election campaign. The ‘janata’ candidate, B. Goswami, with a dramatic lead of 41,000 votes in a constituency of 1,00,000 was declared defeated by 28,000—more votes than the constituency had—in favour of the Congress candidate. Goswami’s messenger, on his way to Delhi to lodge a complaint with the Election Commission, was detained at Guwahati (Assam) airport and not allowed to proceed, though the ballot papers he was carrying as evidence bore the signature and seal of a presiding officer.
Mrs Gandhi described the new wave as ‘certain outside forces’ taking a deep interest in India’s internal affairs, a theme she expounded for newspaper and magazine interviews, and in open and closed-door meetings with selected academics, businessmen and other groups. Her remarks were repeated as part of the news bulletin, or following it, over radio and television. She did not support her statements with facts, figures or precise information. Along with secret conclaves being held by the Congress party in parts of the country, her remarks shrouded the atmosphere in insinuation and vague menace, but presented no argument.
Indira Gandhi’s view of JP as a mere epiphenomenon or a shadow, or a puppet controlled by sinister forces is a typical attitude of the established reaction against the rising forces of revolution… . Each day a new scandal, a new Watergate that exposes the ruling party and the government confirms the absurdity of JP’s caricature at the hands of our rulers. Almost all the forces of fascism, such as big business, black money, bureaucratic power, secret police etc. are all lined up against JP’s movement, and on the side of the Congress-CPI alliance. Indian fascism will have a radical face, as is the case of many other countries in the Third World.2
The above comment, by no means isolated, represen
ted the opinion of several distinguished non-partisan commentators that Mrs Gandhi was pursuing a neurotic line, unrelated to facts. In her view of a black-and-white, either-or world, peopled with elements ‘for’ and ‘against’ her, it is probable she could not see the situation objectively. The act of coming ‘down from the clouds’, which her father had seen the need for years earlier, had never been accomplished. She had continued to be ‘extraordinarily imaginative and self-centred or subjective’, and the line between fact and fantasy was one she was unaware of. ‘A great actor when he is acting, never forgets that it is all a game,’ Ignacio Silone wrote of the distinction consummate actors and politicians make between deceiving others and themselves. Mrs Gandhi seemed, however, fully identified with the fictions she was playing. Her opening speech at the Jamaica Commonwealth Conference in May made admirable reading, showing a touching idealism divorced from her own reality, ‘I was brought up in an atmosphere where politics denoted neither power nor riches… . But as I look around I find that politics are taken to be the art of acquiring, holding and wielding power. International relations are said to deal with power equations among nations… . ’ Yet it was her expert use of the levers of power that marked her own success in the politics she herself had initiated—a far cry from the upbringing she had had when ‘politics denoted neither power nor riches’.
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