Indira Gandhi

by Nayantara Sahgal

  The most unusual aspect of India’s political system has been the nature and quality of its leadership, committed to serve and safeguard the liberties of a people not yet experienced enough in the exercise of freedom to defend free institutions for themselves. India’s leadership before Mrs Gandhi was among the world’s most sensitive, civilized and humane. Her two predecessors treated their task of guiding the millions of an underdeveloped nation as an adventure of faith and trust in circumstances where dictatorship would have been the cruder and more facile choice. Mrs Gandhi’s recourse to dictatorial power was a reflection of her own temperament and not of any new need in the Indian situation. That she succeeded in establishing it is not surprising. The twentieth century in Europe provides ample example of nations with far better and older opportunities in education, economic development and political experience who fell prey to totalitarianism. That Indians, who in 1947 had their first opportunity in centuries to live as free human beings, responsible for themselves, should have so succumbed is not strange. The tragedy of this situation was Mrs Gandhi’s betrayal of a trust.

  The style that had crystallized in the Emergency remained basic to an understanding of the woman who would become prime minister again in 1980.

  SIXTEEN

  The Janata Government Assists Mrs Gandhi’s Return

  The midterm election in January 1980 returned Indira Gandhi to power just two years and nine months after her decisive defeat. Her party, now known as the Congress-Indira, had come into being on January 2, 1978, with herself as its president, following serious disagreements within the Congress party about its future course of action. The controversy centred on Sanjay Gandhi, who had enjoyed unlimited power during the Emergency and had been ranked the country’s most important leader after his mother. Congressmen who had impassively watched Mrs Gandhi’s autocratic progress woke suddenly to the prospect of a hereditary leadership. More immediately, since it was clear that Sanjay’s unpopular acts, chiefly his campaign of compulsory sterilization during the Emergency, had been a major cause of the party’s defeat in 1977, he would have to be cut to size if the electorate’s confidence were to be regained.

  Emotion and calculation met in Mrs Gandhi’s rejection of this counsel. The youth wing of the party had received her special blessing during the Emergency, specifically because it was Sanjay’s developing power base. The beginning of a youth cult associated with him had been a means of legitimizing him as her heir. The original list of candidates for election to Parliament in 1977 had contained a majority of his nominees. Sanjay was the central consideration in her plans for her party and the country. He had advised her against holding an election, and the party’s debacle had increased her reliance on his opinion. Her defeat had brought a decensored critical press to life and a surfeit of hostile books, some by her former admirers. The opinion that travels with the tide had settled around the new government. Stunned by her defeat and convinced her career lay in ruins, she expected succour and support from her own party. The dissenters in it, who had been silent through the Emergency, looked like deserters.

  Mrs Gandhi’s aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, had been as shocked as her niece by the humiliating verdict in Raebareli and had broken down and wept when she received the news. Though she had come out openly against the Emergency and had campaigned against the Congress during the 1977 election, the issues she had fought for had been, for her, strictly political and not to be confused with her abiding devotion to her family. It was inconceivable to her pride that the electorate should have returned such a verdict against her brother’s daughter, even though she believed it had rightly defeated her party. Uncertain of her welcome, she called on her niece in July 1977, four months after her defeat, accompanied by her daughter, Mrs Rita Dar.

  Indu broke away from the circle [around her] and came toward me. I put both my arms around her and kissed her. She also kissed me and then Rita. She looks terribly worn out and ill and was trembling when I embraced her. We went in and sat on a sofa and I put my hand over hers which was really shaking. She was obviously trying not to cry. I began by saying that she should understand that I had been compelled to work against Congress in the election because the events of the last few years leading up to the Emergency, and then the Emergency itself, were a negation of all the values which both she and I had been taught to live by. Throughout the Emergency I had some contact with the underground and knew something of the horrors that were being perpetrated on those whose fault was that in some way they had opposed the government. But even this did not upset me so much as the dreadful manner in which men and women submitted and denigrated themselves for fear of jail or of losing their jobs. This was unforgivable and my own self-respect demanded that I should protest. The moment the opportunity came I did so. I worked with conviction for the restoration of civil liberties and human rights, and when these were vindicated, and the ‘haramis’* who had misguided her had been beaten, my conscience was at ease… . For you, I said, there is great sorrow in my heart and though the law must take its course I am with you to help you in any way I can. She was crying and said, ‘What can I say?’ ‘Don’t say anything.’ I replied, ‘Let us talk about the family.’ Then the children came in and Maneka and Rita carried the conversation most of the time. Rajiv was on flight and Sonia had a sick headache. Sanjay was in the garden and he didn’t come in.1

  If Mrs Gandhi had second thoughts about the Emergency, her public utterances gave no indication of it, and there was no visible crack in her public poise and composure. She defended Sanjay’s role. If there had been errors and enormities, they were the fault of overzealous officials. This posture should have come as no surprise to her party. As prime minister she had held the reins of power close to her, afraid that vigorous regional and local leadership would weaken her own authority, until finally the Emergency had confined effective decision-making to a small, unofficial retinue, referred to by the press as her ‘caucus’, that took its orders directly from her household. She had turned instinctively to her own Kashmiri community in her selection of key advisers. Fame, admiration and elected majorities had done nothing to relax her dependence on the talisman of birth and family. She had seen no impropriety in promoting her son’s business ventures through the prime minister’s secretariat and relevant ministries. An entrepreneurship that Sanjay had neither the qualifications nor experience to pursue had proceeded automatically on the assumption of special privilege amounting to royal prerogative. His failure to produce the car he had been licensed by the government to manufacture, or to honour the terms of his licence, had elicited no comment from her.

  Sanjay took charge of the active core of the newly formed Congress-I party. It was understood that Indira Gandhi was its leader until Sanjay could take her place. Those who objected to this scenario remained in the existing Congress. If the Congress-I itself had members who did not subscribe to the ‘family’ mantra, they must have realized that the logic of a Congress named Indira must result in the special claim of her descendants to lead it. The party would remain a family preserve so long as it did not raise the standard of revolt, and this was not a thing a party so recently restored to power on the strength of Indira’s name alone would do. Mrs Gandhi had correctly assessed the feudal factor as the lowest common denominator in the social fabric, and the only way to install family power in a democracy.

  In a curious reversal of roles, Sanjay Gandhi now became his mother’s mentor. It was Sanjay who launched a militant confrontation directed against the commissions of inquiry appointed by the Janata government to investigate illegal and suspected criminal conduct during the Emergency and against the courts trying cases against him. In cooperation with a section of the Janata leadership, he brought about the government’s collapse in July 1979. The election that followed gave the Congress-I 351 Lok Sabha seats out of 525 for which polling was held and 42.5 per cent of the total vote cast, with 55 per cent of the electorate voting. Sanjay was elected from Amethi, where he had lost in 1977. Mrs Gand
hi contested two parliamentary seats (the Indian Constitution allows a candidate to stand for election from more than one constituency, though he can represent only one constituency in Parliament, or in a State Legislative Assembly)—Raebareli in the north and Medak in the south—and won both by big majorities. She resigned the Raebareli seat and, drawing on close personal support, chose a young relative rather than a candidate from her party to stand for by-election to the constituency. Arun Nehru was elected from Raebareli. After Sanjay’s death he became secretary of the Sanjay Memorial Trust, and though he was not the party’s official treasurer, its funds were channelled through him.

  Several factors contributed to this remarkable turn of the tide in Mrs Gandhi’s favour, none more than the Janata government’s failure to fulfil its pledge to bring to justice those responsible for Emergency excesses. The Janata government, India’s first national alternative to the Congress, consisted of a merger of five parties. It took office on March 24, 1977, buoyed by the high hopes of a euphoric electorate, jubilant in its release from the fear and repression of the previous twenty-one months. The new government’s priorities were broadly defined as the restoration of civil liberties, with changes in the Constitution to undo the damage of the 42nd Amendment; the punishment of those guilty of crimes during the Emergency, ‘from the highest political authority to the lowest functionary of the government’;2 and the charting of a new economic direction favouring the rural sector and decentralization as a means of bringing economic opportunity, the fruits of development and the governing process nearer to the people. Civil liberties were immediately restored, the process of amending the Constitution† begun and economic priorities mapped out,‡ but the mechanics of bringing the accused to justice revealed the fatal flaws and weaknesses of a system whose essential scaffolding had been shaken by neglect and abuse. Mrs Gandhi, the architect of the Emergency—itself a violation of constitutional and cabinet authority, in the manner and for the reason it was proclaimed—remained the Janata government’s main dilemma. The question of how to even begin dealing with her misuse of power came no nearer solution in a situation where the government’s five constituents were locked in a struggle for control of their party. This was further complicated by intense personal rivalries among its three senior leaders, two of whom—Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram—had been bitterly disappointed when Morarji Desai was chosen prime minister by consensus. Divisions in the party began to appear as the election victory faded, but Charan Singh virtually wielded the scissors that took the government apart.

  Dissatisfied with the home portfolio, he carried out the precipitate arrest of Mrs Gandhi on October 3, 1977, without sufficient evidence to convict her. Her immediate and unconditional release by a magistrate was the first step towards her political rehabilitation, while the government was condemned for its ill-prepared move. On April 9, 1978, Charan Singh resigned from the Janata Party’s national executive and parliamentary board. His open attacks on the government led the prime minister to ask for his resignation from the cabinet on June 30. On July 12 he withdrew his earlier resignation from party posts as a gesture of conciliation, yet on December 23 he celebrated the defiant strength of his independent political base—the middle caste peasantry of north India—by holding an impressive rally in New Delhi. On January 24, 1979, he rejoined the cabinet as finance minister. Six months later he crossed the floor of Parliament to join an advance contingent of thirteen supporters who then achieved sixty-two more defections and formed a party known as the Lok Dal. The exercise showed how ephemeral Janata unity had been. It also demonstrated the fragility of a parliamentary system the conventions of which had been ignored or debased during the past decade. The manner of the Janata government’s fall showed that the Union Parliament now reflected the same stratagems for upsetting or augmenting numerical strength as state legislatures had long done. The price of defections had increased, but the practice itself had lost its shocking edge and was settled deep and pervasive as the Indian dust into the fabric of elected assemblies.

  On July 26, 1979, Charan Singh became prime minister as head of a coalition government, consisting of the Lok Dal and the Congress, whose continuance depended on the crucial support it had from the Congress-I. No sooner had he been installed than Mrs Gandhi’s party withdrew its support in a calculated move to escalate a constitutional crisis that had begun with the Janata government’s resignation. The Congress-I emerged the chief beneficiary when President Sanjiva Reddy announced a midterm election. In his pursuit of prime ministership, Charan Singh became the pawn of a shrewder tactician, Sanjay Gandhi.

  The question of how to deal with Mrs Gandhi might have been resolved in one of two ways. As an ex-prime minister, she could have been pardoned and the law allowed to take its course with those of her aides who were found culpable. This would have had the advantage of bringing the curtain down with dignity over a traumatic period of history. The second alternative was to put her on trial before a specially constituted tribunal for the unjustifiable declaration of Emergency and the subsequent drastic amendment to the Constitution by a parliament whose validity had expired. Either course would have had the overwhelming mandate of the election result. Intimidation, imprisonment, police savagery and the lawless acts of her son and her aides were fresh in public memory. Mrs Gandhi herself seemed to expect summary punishment at the hands of the men she had imprisoned without trial—a measure of her own failure to recognize the return of normal conditions and democratic functioning. The new prime minister, Morarji Desai, paid a courtesy call on her, and his government, which was committed to restore the rule of law, was particular to refrain from any act or suggestion of vendetta.

  The Union government appointed several commissions of inquiry to investigate Emergency excesses. The chief of these was the commission appointed on May 28, 1977, under a retired chief justice of the Supreme Court, J.C. Shah, with extensive terms of reference:

  (i)Subversion of lawful processes and well-established conventions, administrative procedures and practices, abuse of authority, misuse of power, excesses and/or malpractices committed …

  (ii) Misuse of powers of arrest or issue of detention orders …

  (iii) Specific instances of maltreatment and/or atrocities on persons arrested…

  (iv) Specific instances of compulsion and use of force in the implementation of the family planning programme …

  (v) Indiscriminate, high-handed or unauthorised demolition of houses, huts, shops, buildings …3

  It was also asked to ‘recommend measures which may be adopted for preventing the recurrence of such abuse of authority, misuse of power, excesses and malpractices’.

  Under Indian law a commission of inquiry may be appointed to look into matters of public importance. It is a fact-finding body, with no judicial powers of punishment. Its findings determine whether cases can be framed and the judicial process begun. The Shah Commission’s first interim report was delivered to the government on March 3, 1978, the second on April 7, and both were presented to Parliament on May 16. The third and final report was delivered on August 6. Their most important finding was that Mrs Gandhi had imposed an internal emergency ‘in a desperate endeavour to save herself from the legitimate compulsions of a judicial verdict against her’.4

  … There is no evidence of any breakdown of law and order in any part of the country—nor of any apprehension in that behalf; the economic condition was well under control and had in no way deteriorated. There is not even a report of any apprehension of any serious breakdown of the law and order situation or deterioration of the economic condition from any public functionary. The public records of the times, Secret, Confidential or Public, and publications in newspapers, speak with unanimity that there was no unusual event or even a tendency in that direction to justify the imposition of emergency. There was no threat to the nation from sources internal or external. The conclusion appears, in the absence of any evidence given by Smt. Indira Gandhi or anyone else, that the one and only motivati
ng force for tendering the extraordinary advice to the President to declare an ‘internal emergency’ was the intense political activity generated in the ruling party and the opposition, by the decision of the Allahabad High Court declaring the election of the Prime Minister of the day invalid on the ground of corrupt election practices. There is no reason to think that if the democratic conventions were followed, the whole political upsurge would in the normal course not have subsided. But Smt. Gandhi in her anxiety to continue in power, brought about instead a situation which directly contributed to her continuance in power and also generated forces which sacrificed the interests of many to serve the ambitions of a few. Thousands were detained and a series of totally unwarranted actions followed involving untold human misery and suffering …

  The nation owes it to the present and succeeding generations to ensure that the administrative set-up is not subverted in future in the manner it was done, to serve the personal ends of any one individual or a group of individuals in or near the Government.5

  Mrs Gandhi reacted spiritedly to what she called the persecution launched against her and her family. In a nationwide campaign, carried to London in November 1978, she expressed fears of being jailed and, after the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, that this might be her fate. She was in fact sentenced to a brief token imprisonment. On November 21, 1978, the Privileges Committee of the Lok Sabha held her guilty of breach of privilege and contempt of the Lok Sabha, for obstructing four government officials from collecting information for a question on Maruti (her son’s car project) in 1975 and for instituting false cases against them. On December 19, 1978, the Lok Sabha expelled her and sentenced her to imprisonment until its prorogation a week later, on December 26.