Indira Gandhi

by Nayantara Sahgal

  The election’s immediate achievement was the restoration of a legitimate political process, more important in the long run than the question of whether the coalition it had brought to power would survive. The electorate’s rejection of the dictatorship Nehru’s daughter had established was a vindication of Nehru’s own passionate conviction that his countrymen must live and grow in freedom.

  FIFTEEN

  Leadership Style

  As a member of the Congress Working Committee, Mrs Gandhi made her debut into politics at the highest level. Her first responsibility admitted her to the rarefied atmosphere of policy and programme, the top level of decision-making, without exposure to the processes leading up to it or encountering in a systematic way the lower levels, where practical experience of an organization is garnered through a daily brush with its sentiment and its problems. Policy and decision were seen by her as handed down. The ultimate attitude of a party dependent on the goodwill and votes of an electorate has to take note of local situations, personalities and compulsions. The ‘executive suite’, setting Mrs Gandhi at the uppermost layer of confabulation without a thorough education in the levels supporting it, looked to her like an easy exercise in authority. On gaining ascendancy in her party, she took, of deliberation, steps to dismantle the effectiveness of the ‘process’, establishing, as she gained control of the machine, a single omnipotent command. This left her no possibility of learning from a complex developing organism, and her concept of leadership as ‘pinnacle’ authority unaccountable to any forum perpetuated a great gulf between her and the party. No connecting links could, except as temporary devices, span the gulf, since these had to be reshuffled to prevent local seats of power from developing. The loyalty she demanded thus became an affair of change and chance. Loud and repeatedly expressed, its expression often had no meaning, a fact she was well aware of, for flattery, unless it was accompanied by subservience, was quickly detected and disposed of by her. The stripping of H.N. Bahuguna’s chief ministership in Uttar Pradesh in 1976 is a classic example of Mrs Gandhi’s treatment of allegiance when it came from a sturdy and popular politician with roots of his own. Rival power in the states was not permitted to surface. But even an assumption of indispensability to the prime minister in a more subordinate capacity was unwelcome and could be met with reprimand or suitable action. Favourites at court could not count on remaining so; hence Mrs Gandhi had no sincere inner circle to rely on. Similarly, she could not depend on the loyalty of her senior cabinet colleagues. From these, her onetime equals, public statements or other signs of allegiance were extracted. An abject example was that of Y.B. Chavan (then minister for external affairs), when, on March 8, 1975 in Sholapur, Maharashtra, he told Congress workers he had no political ambition and no stake in the prime ministership.

  Chavan had been in politics all his life. An activist in the Quit India agitation, a respected chief minister of Maharashtra, an able and popular Union defence minister during the Indo-Pakistan war in 1965, this was for him a pathetic act of submission, showing how senior Congressmen of recognized ability had been humbled in obedience to the leadership cult. On January 19, 1976, unable to attend a Congress party symposium in New Delhi to praise Mrs Gandhi’s decade, Chavan took the precaution of explaining his absence by letter, setting forth in it the standard florid tribute for her ‘amazingly firm and far-sighted leadership’. The letter ended: ‘Apart from the fact that you have grown to the stature of a leading world figure, what is important for me is that you have grown to become a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of millions of Indians. As one of them, I wish you many more years of achievement at the helm of the nation’s affairs.’

  A more significant rival cut to size was Jagjivan Ram, then Union food and agriculture minister, who was assigned the task of justifying the Emergency in the Lok Sabha on its opening day, July 21, 1975. As the government’s mouthpiece, Jagjivan Ram’s speech contained the compulsory homily to the prime minister and such stock phrases, clearly not his own, as ‘the nefarious plans of the [railway] strikes were dashed to the ground’. Brought up in the hard school of untouchability, Jagjivan Ram had known no easy road to power, and much was expected of a man whose command of a substantial untouchable vote could have carried weight in his equation with Mrs Gandhi. Jagjivan Ram was a contender for power when the move to replace Mrs Gandhi after the Allahabad High Court judgement began with the Congress Parliamentary Party collecting signatures supporting the election of a new leader.

  These two men, playing the waiting game, missed their opportunity and evidently found it preferable, in their sixties, to continue where they were than to suffer total political eclipse or arrest. If they tried earlier to dislodge Mrs Gandhi through intra-party manoeuvres, there were definite limits on how hard they could try in circumstances where surveillance had become pervasive and routine. Once a police state was openly established, they could not try at all. The average man of any nationality feels fear and caution when there is reason to feel it. A picture comes vividly to mind of Chavan’s arrival at the French embassy’s National Day reception on July 14, 1975, accompanied by seven gunmen. Wearing bush shirts that distinguished them from the invited guests, who wore ‘lounge suit or national dress’ as specified by the invitation, they made no attempt to hide the pistols bulging from their trouser pockets. They clustered around Chavan, and their presence quickly put an end to normal conversation. Chavan, of genial and pleasant disposition, looked drawn and strained by the ‘protection’ he was receiving. The glitter of naked power during the early months of the Emergency served as a businesslike warning to Mrs Gandhi’s senior colleagues and ended all political surmise and conjecture about their own possible future roles.

  An extraordinary range and depth of human encounter might have served Mrs Gandhi as ‘education’ for the political process during her father’s lifetime, through the ebb and flow of Nehru’s relationships, intimate and public, with individuals and the masses. Her own temperament set limits on this opportunity. No miracle of ‘love and affection’, so eloquently described by Nehru as his cherished gift from the Indian people—a transforming personal and political experience for him—could come her way and work its mutuality. A heritage of devotion, waiting for her, changed in her hands to the public’s awe and fear of her. Politics was for her, therefore, the very antithesis of the experience it had been for her father, for whom even a mass meeting was people, and one he addressed as such. Mrs Gandhi’s meeting with the masses was gradually reduced to a formal encounter. Her public personality, compared at first with her father’s, lost this resemblance as it took on the aura and exaggerations of The Leader. Her mass meetings were accompanied by increasingly heavier management, armed security and distance from the crowd that gave them an artificial aspect of ‘performance’ alien to Indian politics. At one time undeterred by situations of risk, she showed less confidence as she abandoned democratic procedures and relied on her intelligence and police. A government officer, referring to Mrs Gandhi’s visit to Ludhiana, Punjab, some months before the Emergency, said she had needed more security than Linlithgow, the unpopular British viceroy during the 1942 Quit India upheaval. In 1974 the contrast between her meetings and the vast spontaneous crowds drawn to Jayaprakash Narayan’s public engagements was particularly striking. Remote from the seat and emblems of power, with nothing but his personal reputation to attract the crowd and with authority mounted against him, JP represented an abiding urge: the desire for a leader whose life was his message. Mrs Gandhi thus missed the crux and essence of leadership in India. More and more her eminence had to be buttressed, arranged, safeguarded from natural political processes, from the moons and tides of Indian politics in particular. She could not permit any natural development, in her party or in the country, that might unseat her. The following she commanded progressively shed its thoughtful, enlightened, discriminating sections and was reduced either to the cynical camp follower or to the ‘lamp post’ variety, those whom she had raised to office out of med
iocrity or obscurity and who were not troubled by independent thought or the critical faculty. Prestige and following in India had taken note of the kind and quality of human being, rather than the temporal power, if any, he wielded. The Emergency, establishing a police state and eliminating civil liberties and opposing opinion, illustrated Mrs Gandhi’s total retreat behind the barrier of force.

  Talented and abundant political leadership has been a feature of modern India, an outgrowth of the national movement, for thirty years a training ground under Mahatma Gandhi. The Congress was the only liberation movement in Asia to successively convert itself into a political party and provide stable government in the post-Independence era. But the leadership phenomenon has extended to the Opposition. Gifted men of the Right and the Left, with a high degree of individualism, have been able to capture the Indian imagination sufficiently to show election results and form state governments. In the Indian context, state leadership has constituted impressive power, backed not only by large numbers but by the culture, language and economics of a region. Against this canvas Mrs Gandhi stands out as a leader, built up through the media and other channels and imposed on the Indian mind through a campaign of emotional appeal and outcry resorting to her father’s name. The campaign of manufacture was extended to her son, Sanjay, imposed on the nation in a similar way but without the credentials Mrs Gandhi brought to her job. Her drive to establish herself as India’s exclusive leader has revealed the fundamental anxiety and weakness in her position, driving her to measures that a mass-based, psychologically secure leader would never have needed to take.

  Considered a master of political technique, Mrs Gandhi has in fact demonstrated the failure of political process, and its substitution, when failure endangered her political survival, by ‘direct action’. She became prime minister through the party’s traditional method of consensus, one she fully endorsed and cooperated with at the time. She discarded consensus when it went against her in her party’s choice of a presidential candidate for the country in her support of another candidate. Unsure of her continuance as leader of the party, she used street arousal as a technique to proclaim herself the ‘people’s’ choice. Both these tactics depended for their success on moves outside her party, her cabinet and accepted political standards. Six years later, faced with the Allahabad High Court judgement and the Congress Parliamentary Party’s move to replace her, she responded with the Emergency, imprisoning and outlawing opposition, both within and outside her party.

  The absence of normal political functioning shows up, too, in Mrs Gandhi’s indifference to the cultivation of good comradeship and goodwill with her party men, ordinarily of great importance to a democratic politician. At turning points, in 1969 and 1975, when her future was in the balance, she fought a bitter battle to the kill, leaving no scope for compromise. Indifference to party opinion is unusual in democratic politics, where differences of opinion must be faced and accommodation sought.

  In the light of the Supreme Court order in Balraj Madhok’s case for an examination of ballots cast in the 1971 elections, the midterm election can no longer be ruled out as a possibility of successful ‘coup’ staged by Mrs Gandhi. Many who would not have considered an election fraud of any proportion conceivable in India, or any leadership capable of resorting to it, have had time to think again during the years that followed, when Mrs Gandhi’s uses of power did not allow ethical considerations to stand in her way. She could not risk getting less than a two-thirds majority at the polls and solved this dilemma matter-of-factly and efficiently. In this way she also ensured a docile majority for any future plans. The Congress party in Parliament that came into being with the midterm election accepted almost without demur the constitutional changes after the Emergency— Mrs Gandhi having taken the precaution of jailing its dissident members beforehand—though the party outside Parliament did not uniformly accept them. The Opposition view—that fundamental constitutional changes could only be considered by a constituent assembly elected for the purpose and could not in any case be steered through a parliament that had outlived its five-year mandate—could be ignored altogether.

  All of this, while it may be termed ‘politics’ in a broad, general sense, is far from accepted political behaviour in a democratic framework and is wholly alien to established principles and practices in India. The Emergency climaxed her style as a politician. Coming upon the decay of her personal and political image, her shock at the high court judgement and her party’s series of defeats at the polls during 1974 and 1975, it rang down the curtain on the political process altogether, sweeping from sight the issues of corruption, political scandal and economic mismanagement for which she and her party were being indicted.

  There appears to be no logic in a situation where a party leader in a parliamentary system thrives regardless of opinion in the party, where she not only ignores party support but alienates it, ultimately imprisoning those who seek, through legitimate democratic channels, to elect another leader during the breathing space provided by the high court for this purpose. Her sources of power have resided outside party forums and, if we are to include the 1971 elections as selectively rigged, outside the electoral process. Her emphasis has been on control of the party machine. Her expansion and use of intelligence and paramilitary forces has taken the place of ordinary administrative measures. The art and tasks of routine governing have diminished correspondingly as her individual power grew. The transition to dictatorship was not made overnight. It was the last step in a steady erosion of democratic procedures. The ground had been prepared for the final tilt.

  Her functioning had the ballast of Soviet support. Since 1969 the Soviet Union had thrown its immense prestige and support behind the leadership of Mrs Gandhi. Beginning with denunciations of ‘rightist reactionaries’ in her party who were said to be blocking radical policies, a tide of forceful official Soviet comment had buttressed and defended Mrs Gandhi against Indian opposition to her, a vocal flourish surrounding the solid scaffolding erected by the Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971. The Bihar Movement and Jayaprakash Narayan’s leadership were savagely attacked by Pravda, while on July 21, 1975 Pravda lauded ‘India’s new economic plans’. Admiration for Mrs Gandhi was pointedly expressed by Leonid Brezhnev at the 25th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in February 1976. Compliments travelled both ways. On April 6, 1976 Bansi Lal, new defence minister, expressed ‘a sense of deep gratitude to the Soviet Union for appreciating our special problems and difficulties’. Government denials in India’s censored press were particularly significant as confirmation of events and policy. On July 24, 1975 K.R. Ganesh, Union minister for petroleum and chemicals, ‘denied here today the presence of any Soviet experts in Delhi to help the Union Government’. Ganesh said, ‘the Rightist parties had started a whispering campaign after the proclamation of emergency that 100 Soviet experts were working in Delhi and that the Soviet Union had assured the Government of all assistance.’ For the Soviet Union its historic support of India had a hemispheric logic unaffected by India’s internal affairs or by the CPI’s ups and downs in prestige, power shares and ideological thrust in its relationship with the Congress, with Mrs Gandhi and after the Emergency with Sanjay Gandhi. Though the CPI noticeably lost influence and became increasingly disillusioned with the ruling party, the Soviet ballast remained undisturbed.

  Mrs Gandhi’s attempts to explain why she declared an emergency based on a charge of ‘conspiracy’ to dislodge her and her government, unsupported by evidence or argument, transparently lacked truth and credibility. No crisis but that of Mrs Gandhi’s own political survival necessitated the Emergency in 1975. That it was a coup for self-protection was borne out with omnibus amendments to the Constitution, giving legal definition and sanction to authoritarian power, and with the campaign to promote a dynastic succession.

  In contrast, genuine crisis conditions have been met and resolved by Indian leadership in the past through genuine practical measures that took no toll of existing freedoms
. Independence itself brought a formidable quota of crises: Partition murders on a mass scale, whole transport systems paralysed when essential supplies could not be moved, huge movements of population throwing the new nation’s unity and stability into grave jeopardy, anxieties accompanying the integration of the princely states into the Union, the 1947 war in Kashmir and the continuing pressure for a solution in Kashmir. There followed periods of flood, famine and crop failure, communist insurrection in Telangana, Naga insurgency, the Chinese attack, fevers aroused by the linguistic states, problems of law and order. At no juncture had the leadership seized on any of these very real crises to shut off democratic processes and end freedom.

  Nehru, who could with ease have become a dictator, utterly rejected the idea, believing that India’s people, long exploited and deprived, needed growth and nurture in freedom and expression, that, while dictatorship and conformity might achieve the military grandeur and destructive potential necessary for great power status, they seldom achieve the basic requirements of life and dignity faster than a free society, and that freedom, far from being a luxury for the affluent, is a fundamental human aspiration, even more necessary to those who have little else and from whom much is required in courage and endeavour. Thus the Indian people were led between 1947 and 1966 within the framework of consent into a very different dimension of life and expectation. Nothing less than a revolution took place under Nehru, with defined programmes and definite steps towards a socialist order. The base India stood on when Mrs Gandhi came to power—whether in industry and agriculture, or the confidence created by free political institutions—was the result of the Nehru years. The problems India was then facing were those arising out of change. Mrs Gandhi’s style resulted not only in a very different political order, culminating in dictatorship, but in the destruction of a vital human process, without any assurance of compensating economic gain. Inheriting a flourishing enterprise, she halted it and reversed its direction.