Indira Gandhi

by Nayantara Sahgal

  Kamaraj’s death on October 2 gave Mrs Gandhi the opening she needed to suck the state’s Old Congress unit into her own party. The effort had some of the ingredients of Kathakali, the ancient dance drama of the south, with masks, costumes, and colour in full play, and great cymbal clashes punctuating the performance. Her spokesmen in Tamil Nadu announced that ‘certain outside forces, including some foreign powers, are at work in Tamil Nadu to scuttle the merger of the two Congress parties in the State.’ The Old Congress countered by suspending its state unit and instructing that no decision could be taken during the Emergency. A committee was set up in its place, headed by Ramachandran. On December 2, 1975, D.K. Barooah told a meeting at Tiruchirappalli, ‘If we fail to remove [Ramachandran] we shall be treacherous to the memory of Mr. Kamaraj.’ The Statesman account of the meeting read:

  The speeches were also notable for the frequent emotional references to Mr. Kamaraj; often many were seen wiping their tears at the reference. A number of policemen stood around the meeting venue to prevent any trouble from those opposed to the merger proposal.

  The mixture of tears and truncheon over Kamaraj’s dead body accomplished a kind of merger with a faction of the Old Congress. On January 31 a virtual occupation army in the form of Central Reserve Police contingents moved into Tamil Nadu, bringing it under control. A state assembly election was due. This could have been postponed by the Union government as the parliamentary election had been postponed and the DMK government, with its strength of 166 in a House of 234, given an extended mandate. Both these options and any semblance of constitutional action were discarded, as the Centre’s police moved in and Tamil Nadu was brought under President’s rule. On February 14, 1976, Mrs Gandhi drove in an open car under decorated arches bearing portraits of herself and Kamaraj to open the Kamaraj Memorial at Guindy in Madras. She said the merger had been his‘last wish’. He had sent her a message about it, and she had wanted to come to Tamil Nadu to discuss it with him, but he had dissuaded her, saying this would give rise to gossip about the merger.‘For me,’ she concluded, ‘it was a privilege to work with him. I sought his guidance and we discussed almost every matter of importance.’ Earlier, the newspapers had reported Kamaraj’s gun carriage funeral attended by Mrs Gandhi and her ‘great grief ’ at the loss of her adviser.

  In an interview on February 29 with the New Delhi fortnightly India Today, Union Finance Minister C. Subramaniam, once Kamaraj’s cabinet colleague in Tamil Nadu, said:

  My own impression was that [Kamaraj] would have taken the plunge for a merger, but he fell ill. Then this Emergency came. He again became allergic to any decision taken during the Emergency, when his colleagues were in jail.

  The Democratic World, political and economic weekly, offered its own unmistakeable opinion:

  [Kamaraj] never concealed his contempt for the many political fortune hunters who flocked to Mrs. Gandhi’s party since 1969… . Given his reputation for principled consistency, it is difficult to believe that during his last days he changed his stand and decided to give his colleagues short shrift.

  Gujarat’s Janata Front government took six weeks longer to remove. Hitendra Desai, defector from the Old Congress, took the lead in the campaign against it and secured a flow of youth support for the Congress party from the 1974 Gujarat agitation, helping it to an impressive victory in the panchayat elections. The Union government built a‘case’ against Gujarat on the issue of ‘clandestine’ literature being produced in the state and the discovery of dynamite, allegedly being moved to Varanasi. The Janata Front died hard. In October, November and December 1975, it won important civic elections in Rajkot, Baroda, Surat, Broach and finally to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, the largest civic body in the state. For the Ahmedabad election the bulk of Janata seats had been shared between the Old Congress (a constituent of the Front) and Majur Mahajan, the prestigious labour organization of textile workers started by Mahatma Gandhi. The Janata Front lost its majority in the state assembly when its partner, the KMLP, was dissolved by defections on February 11. It was defeated on a budgetary demand in the assembly on March 12, 1976. The Congress party secured defections of six corporations of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and gained control of this important body soon afterwards.

  A third state, Jammu and Kashmir, maintained a discreet but definite distance from the Emergency. Sheikh Abdullah, restored to power as chief minister some months earlier, refrained from joining the chorus of praise around the prime minister. He spoke of a national reconciliation and on September 20, 1975 told newsmen, ‘If I can be of any use to the Prime Minister in this regard, my services are at her disposal.’ Resisting Congress pressures to merge his own party with the ruling party, he said the National Conference had waged the people’s struggle against the maharaja’s rule. It would keep its identity, and the Congress could merge with it, if it wished. He said at a public meeting at Lal Chowk:

  Power was handed over to me when the ship of State was on the point of sinking with the loads of corruption and maladministration. We are not obliged to those who vacated office in our favour. It is they who should be obliged to us because we are being obliged to carry the mess created by them. No one voluntarily gives up power. If someone does so, it is only to save himself from the deluge. My government is determined to root out corruption. Its extent and ramifications at the moment would frighten even the devil. The image of the Congress in the State is far from healthy. But we want no confrontation with Congress.2

  Kashmir, a sensitive border state, was paradoxically less vulnerable to ‘takeover’ than Tamil Nadu or Gujarat. Its stability was vital to the country and Sheikh Abdullah was firmly in the saddle. At a public meeting in Udhampur on March 13, 1976, in what may have been an oblique reference to the massive security arrangements at the prime minister’s meetings, he objected to police barricades separating him from the crowd. He said the worst that could befall him was an assassin’s bullet, and he would prefer that to being kept at such a distance from the people.

  Mrs Gandhi had kept a group of Kashmiri Brahmins close to her. This preference for her community, and kith and kin, was climaxed by the emergence of Sanjay into the political limelight. The ease with which Sanjay was planted in the body politic was not, as it might have been in normal times, due to the respect Indians attach to family and tradition. Acceptance without demur by the Congress illustrated how thoroughly democratic procedures in the party had been gutted and the fear that now ruled out disagreement altogether. A party whose inner confidence had been shaken, and whose senior figures had been reduced to obedience, dully submitted.

  Unlike his brother, Rajiv, a happily married airline pilot and father of two, who stayed out of the limelight, Sanjay did not enjoy a reputation for modesty or pleasant human relations. A problem student, he had been withdrawn from boarding school and tutored at home to prepare him for the school-leaving examination, and later, had left Rolls Royce at Crewe before completing his training. Sanjay and his brother had never known any environment but India’s select Doon School and the prime minister’s house (first their grandfather’s at Teen Murti and later their mother’s at Safdarjung Road), with all the privilege, prestige and authority that went with it. Some of the most charming press pictures of the Nehru era had been of two enchanting children and three golden retrievers on the lawns of Teen Murti House. Sanjay had developed a taste for authority and a lifestyle lacking restraint. Much is forgiven a handsome young man, particularly a prime minister’s son, and his escapades, which at one time included hijacking cars and coarse personal behaviour, were generally ignored. He came to critical public notice for the first time as the recipient of government favour with no qualifications in education or experience to justify it, ‘suddenly heading a huge car manufacturing industrial complex involving an investment of ten million dollars, although his declared income for the year 1969–70 was Rs 748 [about $100]’.3

  The Emergency gave Sanjay wide scope for bullying command and vendetta. He already exer
cised authority without official position. He was now credited with ordering arrests and house and office raids. He gave direct orders to government officials and had squads of the Youth Congress to do his bidding. An aura of terror now attached to his name, and it was augmented by the enforced sterilization campaign conducted by him. By the end of the year he was given the status of a leading political personality, his arrivals in state capitals accompanied by official panoply to match his mother’s. He was met by chief ministers and cabinet members, his visits elaborately arranged and attended by state politicians and officials. On a ‘surprise’ visit paid by him to Patna on December 3, 1975, Jaggannath Mishra (brother of the late L.N. Mishra), Bihar’s new chief minister, told newsmen ‘everyone was impressed by the simplicity of Mr. Sanjay Gandhi and his concern for the downtrodden masses’. He made his official debut as‘youth leader’ at the Congress party’s annual session in December at Komagata Maru Nagar near Chandigarh, and was projected henceforth as one who ‘truly understood the aspirations of the poor’, gifted with brains, business acumen, vision and compassion. Not surprisingly, the halo looked incongruous, and his new personality and importance had to be reinforced by a flood of rhetoric and bestowed with a new character. The following write-up in the Indian Express on February 12, 1976, in anticipation of his visit to Calcutta, is one of the more sedate examples of the lavish build-up provided for Sanjay through the media:

  Youth Congress leaders, Cabinet Ministers, industrialists, Rotarians and intellectuals are vying with each other to give him a big reception. Welcome arches are being erected at every turn of the ten-minute route through which he will be taken in a motorcade. At one point on the VIP road, a group of Sikhs will receive Mr. Gandhi with the bhangra dance, while at other points women will accord him a welcome in traditional Bengali style. The day-long programme is so packed with functions that Mr. Gandhi will be running from place to place to keep his engagements. The highlights of the programme are his address to a mass rally at the Shaheed Minar Maidan, the reception by the six Chambers of Commerce and two other business associations at Kala Mandir, and the luncheon meeting with the Rotarians. Never before have the Chambers of Commerce and the Rotarians from all over the State jointly welcomed any national leader or even a Prime Minister as they would be doing to Mr. Gandhi.At the meeting with the Chambers of Commerce, Mr. Gandhi will be answering questions by the country’s top industrialists—an event of unique importance.

  Sanjay’s undefined powers ranged over a wide area, his activities including public meetings, interviews to newspapers and magazines, and conferences with ministers. On a visit to Bombay on January 11, 1976, Sanjay, according to a Press Trust of India (PTI) report, ‘spent over two hours discussing the economic and political problems of the country’ with a group that included Bombay’s Congress party boss, Rajni Patel, Maharashtra revenue minister, Rafiq Zakaria, Union ministers V.C. Shukla and Bansi Lal, and ‘leading journalists’.

  Asked about the powers her son was exercising, Mrs Gandhi replied in two interviews in October 1975:

  It is a big lie that the whole Emergency and so on is being run by or decisions taken by a small group including my son. (Interview with North German television, October 3.)

  This is a systematic campaign all over Europe and America, not just in Britain… . My family has been very much maligned and of course my son is not in politics at all. (Interview with the Sunday Telegraph, October 12.)

  Private Indian comment on Sanjay’s startling elevation at first favoured the view that his mother, completely isolated from her colleagues’ true feelings and beset by the actual and psychological hazards of autocratic rule, could now be sure of no one but her son. But this did not explain his natural assumption of arbitrary authority, which could more readily be understood in terms of special knowledge and information in his possession concerning his mother’s political functioning. Crucially damaging to her credibility and the cult of her popularity, for example, would be any evidence of a carefully rigged poll in 1971, more believable in view of Mrs Gandhi’s subsequent behaviour. His induction into the limelight served a useful purpose in projecting a new ‘pragmatism’ while Mrs Gandhi could continue to carry the‘radical’ posture:‘I believe in anything that will help the poor… . This is a point on which there is no difference of opinion between my mother and me.’ (April 9, 1976.) On March 20, 1976 he declared that the ‘ideological struggle’ of right and left had been started by ‘vested interests, the very forces that had supported the British in India, only to misguide youth’.

  Sanjay’s anti-communism was an assurance to industry and the propertied class that they had nothing to fear, that no radical economic change would take place, an assurance borne out by events. The annual budget, by convention a closely guarded secret, became the subject of Sanjay’s comments and revelations at a meeting of the Calcutta Chambers of Commerce in February 1976 and provided substantial tax relief for the upper class. The Democratic World commented on March 28, 1976:

  If the Finance Minister’s budget proposals are any indication, India has no poor at all. If anything, the people who need succour the most are the rich. Else why should the man who has wealth of Rs 15 lakhs pay a tax only a quarter of what he was asked to pay earlier… .

  Sanjay received Soviet recognition and blessing when he visited the Soviet Union with his mother and brother in August 1976. Soviet support for the Emergency had been announced when Pravda lauded India’s‘new economic plans’ in July 1975 and Brezhnev told the 25th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1976 that the Soviet Union ‘attaches special importance to friendship with that great country, India… close political and economic cooperation with the Republic of India is our constant policy.’

  The Congress session in December 1975, a high point of the Emergency, represented Mrs Gandhi’s style in full flower. Between the last session, almost unnoticed in the outcry of economic distress and the rising tide of Opposition opinion, and this one,Congress had suffered visible decline in reputation and popularity. In June it would have replaced Mrs Gandhi with another leader. The declaration of Emergency obviated this need. With all crucial opposition eliminated via arrest, intimidation and censorship, the one-party, one-leader idea could rise unhampered out of a levelled landscape as the single political presence. The session was celebrated as a ‘national’ event representing ‘nationalism’. D.K. Barooah declared the Congress a movement, not a party, and in February 1976, at a public meeting on Marina Beach in Madras, he said its doors were open to ‘all who believed in Indian nationalism, and were honest in personal and public conduct… . [Congress was] a brotherhood of patriotic Indians who fulfilled these two conditions.’

  ‘So far as I know,’ said Mrs Gandhi on August 21, 1975, ‘force has not been used at all, not even in a small way anywhere.’ She repeated this in an interview with a Bombay weekly later, ‘There is no use of force and… there is no show of force whatsoever anywhere in the country. The truth is that the police have had less work since the Emergency than ever before.’

  Political arrests had been a feature of the past five years, beginning with the powerful assault on the CPI-M and expanding during 1974 to fill jails with multiparty dissenters belonging to the Bihar Movement. The treatment of prisoners had drawn international inquiry and reportage and aroused shocked comment in India. Government’s budget for the police had doubled in five years. Mrs Gandhi had no basis whatever for the statement she made. On September 19, 1975, it was announced that Delhi would have a sixth police district and its police force would be expanded by 900 men. Brutality figured large in suppressing protest and extorting bribes, and torture became an instrument of vengeance. The number of citizens arrested during the months following the Emergency was not revealed. Estimates by some Opposition parties, based on the number of their workers arrested, along with state government figures quoted from time to time, put the arrests at 1,10,000. There was no way of making an exact assessment.

  For the majority, ‘preve
ntive detention’ meant punishment in primitive conditions continually strained by waves of new arrests, a policy designed to enfeeble or break opposition while the Emergency lasted. The prime targets were the Jan Sangh and the CPI-M, both with a strong following and influence in the academic and professional world. But the Emergency also gave Mrs Gandhi a unique opportunity to stamp out ‘janata sarkar’ and other aspects of the Bihar Movement. Specific cases of force used against prisoners and terror exercised by the police were brought to her notice and that of the home ministry, as well as to the President of India. There is no question that she was informed about these, and it is hardly credible that she was in ignorance otherwise of the enormities and excesses of the police state she had established.

  On October 22, six leading Socialist Party MPs wrote to the prime minister, ‘We have already addressed a few letters to the home minister regarding the ill-treatment of the political détenus in various jails. We have not received any reply to these letters so far.’

  The letter listed, among others, the following examples:

  In Muzaffarpur Central Jail in Bihar where a large number of professors and political workers are detained… a lathi charge was made on September 9, 1975 by the jail authorities and criminal convicts were let loose on them. A large number of them received injuries, some of them serious… . We are seeking your intervention not only because the Home Minister did not reply to our letters earlier, but because we feel that political detention should not amount to punishment.4