Indira Gandhi

  Figures reveal a well-cushioned economy during 1977–79 under a finance minister, H.M. Patel, who administered his portfolio with moderation and competence. The year 1977–78 had been a peak season for grain production with a record output of 12.56 crore tonnes (13 per cent above previous performance). In June 1979 the buffer stock of food grains stood at 2.14 crore tonnes, 50 per cent higher than at any time before. An additional 1.25 crore hectares were brought under irrigation, and there were substantial increases in the use of fertilizer and the production of commercial crops. Consumer industries, many with a base in rural areas, showed significant growth. After the spiralling inflation of 1973–74 (20.2 per cent) and 1974–75 (25.2 per cent—the highest up to the time of writing), prices were comparatively stable. Foreign exchange reserves had doubled, rising to Rs 53 crore by early 1979, as against Rs 28.63 crore, the highest figure during Mrs Gandhi’s prime ministership. Exports totalled Rs 110.95 crore and imports Rs 128 crore, in each case Rs 20 crore more than during the two years of the Emergency, which Mrs Gandhi had used as an argument for economic gains.

  Professor Raj Krishna of the Planning Commission, assessing the economic situation in a three-part article, ‘Performance of the Economy’ in January 1979, wryly concludes:

  The recent positive performance of the Indian economy, without authoritarianism, and in spite of floods and labour unrest, is in sharp contrast with the performance of the Indian polity, particularly in respect of the maintenance of unity at the top, and the physical protection of the weak at the bottom of the polity. Most national leaders do not even seem to know many facts about the performance of the economy, for all their songs are burdened with ‘non-performance’. Since considerable performance has materialized without the leaders even knowing about it, they can obviously claim no credit for it, and they could not have contributed to it… . History would perhaps offer few similar examples of the leadership of a great and vast nation so busy with petty personal quarrels that they are utterly innocent of the very encouraging economic events occurring around them.1

  The unity move intended to strengthen the Janata Party and government that brought Charan Singh back to the cabinet on January 24, 1979, proved abortive. Politically it failed when Charan Singh broke with the party in July, and economically its consequences were far-reaching. The budget became Charan Singh’s opportunity to unfurl his own flag of leadership and reach out in preference to his own particular constituency—the ‘large farmers’ who had profited most by the new techniques, some requiring costly inputs, in agriculture. They now formed a powerful political lobby and dominated the northern countryside, sometimes in confrontation with lower castes, the Harijans and the landless. The budget, which was technically the Janata government’s, actually represented Charan Singh’s sectional interest—at the cost, as it turned out, of the rural poor and the urban working class, as well as the middle class.

  On March 1, 1979, under the heading ‘A Political Budget’ the Indian Express editorial noted:

  The savage tax imposts proposed, which are estimated to net a record of Rs. 665 crores of additional revenue … are so constructed that they are likely to have an opposite impact… . The stark fact is that the proposals are highly discriminatory in their nature and incidence, the main target being the urban middle class… . [Mr Charan Singh] has sacrificed revenue of the order of nearly Rs. 125 crores by excise reductions on certain inputs of interest to large farmers… . An extremely facile reason presented in justification of additional excises on a large number of consumption items is that this will price the products of big industry out and allow small industry to enter the market… . The danger of the economy getting stuck in the mire of stagnation, instead of advancing on the path of development, would appear to have become very real.

  The four months from August 1979 to January 1980 registered the highest prices since Independence. An erratic monsoon stopped suddenly in mid-August. The century’s worst drought brought brutal suffering to human beings and livestock. The severity of the economic crisis overshadowed election issues. A determined government could have taken remedial measures when the monsoon failed, but the Lok Dal–Congress coalition hurriedly fashioned out of opportunism and now embroiled in election preparations could provide neither relief nor sense of purpose. It was inevitable that the mass of the electorate were unable to distinguish between the caretaker coalition and the previous ( Janata) regime. No mysterious change in mass psychology accounted for the reversal of the mandate at the polls. The Congress party had had thirty years of uninterrupted rule when Indians had had no alternative in a national election. The 1980 election, like that of 1977, gave them a choice. On each occasion they rejected those immediately responsible for their troubles.

  Disenchantment with the Janata and its successor government strengthened Mrs Gandhi’s position in a campaign that took her to 384 of the Lok Sabha’s 525 constituencies, projecting her as the only clear answer in a muddle. She promised stability, curbs on prices and ‘a government that works’. Her natural energy was fuelled and fired by the obsession that failure this time would bring not only political oblivion, but possible legal action against her and her son, as the cases against them approached conclusion. The campaign became as profoundly personal a mission as it was political.

  Deteriorating economic conditions were preceded by a prolonged constitutional crisis. The steps President Sanjiva Reddy took to resolve it made his announcement of a midterm election both controversial and suspect. On July 10, 1979, Y.B. Chavan, leader of the Congress, the main Opposition party in Parliament, introduced a no-confidence motion against the Janata government. Normally a routine affair, routinely defeated when a government enjoys a substantial majority, this one had unexpected results. Morarji Desai was compelled to resign as defections led by Charan Singh’s followers began. The initiative passed to the President, who, in accord with convention, asked the leader of the Opposition to form a government. The invitation was a formality. Chavan, with only 75 MPs, was unable to do so. The President next asked both Morarji Desai (with 203 MPs) and Charan Singh (now with 76) to submit lists of their strength in the House within forty-eight hours. Only Mrs Gandhi’s assurance that her party would back Charan Singh can have persuaded the President to include him in this exercise—though it is not clear why he cut short the extension he had given Desai to prepare his list and, in a surprise move, called on Charan Singh to form a government, directing him to seek a vote of confidence in Parliament within three weeks.

  A positive vote for the Lok Dal–Congress coalition government led by Charan Singh needed and relied on Mrs Gandhi’s continued support. The Congress-I now withdrew this, leaving Charan Singh without the crucial count he needed. Isolated and anxious to keep out his rivals in the Janata Party, he drove to Rashtrapati Bhavan on August 20, 1979, without facing a vote of confidence, and advised the President to announce a midterm poll. The President complied. The communiqué he issued on August 26 was silent on two points. It did not explain why he had not invited Jagjivan Ram, who had replaced Morarji Desai as the Janata Party’s leader, to form a government. With Y.B. Chavan in Charan Singh’s coalition government, Jagjivan Ram was now the leader of the Opposition and merited the invitation in that capacity. Nor did the communiqué explain why the President had accepted Charan Singh’s advice to dissolve the Lok Sabha and call an election. Constitutional experts he had consulted had informed him he was not obliged to accept the advice of a prime minister whose strength in Parliament had not been tested. Moreover, Jagjivan Ram enjoyed an established reputation for constructive compromise, which Morarji Desai had, during this crisis, forfeited. The conclusion was inescapable that Jagjivan Ram had been ignored precisely because, with 203 MPs behind him, he would have had no difficulty in getting the additional support he needed to form a government. The midterm poll desired by Mrs Gandhi, who saw it as her opportunity to return to power before legal processes against her and her son matured, would then not have been held at all. On September 2, 19
79, the President declared he always took decisions according to his conscience and in the name of Lord Venkateswara, deity of the Tirupati temple.

  The Indian Express quoted N.A. Palkhivala, authority on constitutional law, whose advice the President had sought, on August 23, 1979:

  The President’s decision to dissolve the Lok Sabha is, to use the language of studied moderation, unjustified to the point of constitutional impropriety. The dissolution of the House, when it had finished only half its term, should have been the option of the last resort and constitutional propriety dictated that the President should have acceded to the request of Shri Jagjivan Ram, leader of the Opposition, and of the single largest party in Parliament, that he be given an opportunity to form a government.

  The Times of India commented on September 5, 1979:

  President Sanjiva Reddy has been quoted as having said that he was not ‘under pressure from anybody’ and that whatever he has done is ‘based on the dictates of his conscience’. The reference is clearly to his recent decision to deny Shri Jagjivan Ram an opportunity to form a government, to dissolve the Lok Sabha and to ask the Charan Singh Cabinet to stay on in office till the poll next December. It is possible that the ugly rumour of the President having allowed himself to be blackmailed has reached him and that he has thought it necessary to repudiate it. But whatever the provocation, Shri Reddy has enunciated a doctrine which is highly dangerous… . He has to be guided by the Constitution, and not by his conscience.

  In these circumstances the opinion gained widespread currency that the President’s action was the result of inducement to use his ‘conscience’. The suspicion was so strong and pervasive that the Janata Party for a time considered impeaching the President if it was returned to power.

  A pall of degeneracy and decay enveloped New Delhi, with even the President’s image under a cloud. The Janata Party had badly tarnished its own with its disintegration. More damage followed when Morarji Desai, on resigning the prime ministership, did not simultaneously relinquish his leadership of his party in Parliament as convention required, thus creating a tense and unpredictable situation within the party and complicating the constitutional crisis. The public mood was cynical—and, as election turnouts revealed, apathetic—as the lines were drawn for electoral battle.

  The arrival of the vice-president of the Supreme Soviet in India on August 10, 1979, on an eleven-day goodwill visit, should have interested political observers in an age when the big powers critically influence the affairs of nations in manifold ways. His presence, to observe the eighth anniversary of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971, was not remarkable, but a visit of this duration by a figure so high in the Soviet hierarchy at the height of a political crisis, when there was in effect no government in New Delhi, was not normal. The presidential announcement dissolving the Lok Sabha and calling for a midterm election was made on August 22. The Soviet visit at this time also, is of special note in terms of the developing situation on the subcontinent, which culminated just before the Indian election in the Soviet Union’s military entry into Afghanistan, and in the support it needed and received from the new Indian government after the election.

  After a curious initial aloofness immediately after Independence, the Soviet Union established cordial relations with India, including cooperation in the development of vital areas of the Indian economy. The Indian navy has been built largely with Soviet aid, and Soviet ships enjoy facilities at several Indian ports. Under the Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971, the two countries share security concerns, though the treaty covers a wider area. Mrs Gandhi has a friendly personal relationship with Soviet leaders and has established an identity of interests with the Soviet Union in matters relating to the subcontinent that reached its zenith with the birth of Bangladesh in December 1971. The relationship has travelled far since Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, Secretary General, ministry of external affairs, wrote on February 6, 1948, to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Indian ambassador to the USSR:

  The silence from Moscow over Gandhiji’s death persists. One cannot protest about such things, forced sympathy is not worth having. I confess, however, that India will feel it when it becomes known, as become known it must, that the U.S.S.R. alone sent no message of condolence in our hour of unparalleled sorrow.

  In November 1978 Mrs Gandhi returned to New Delhi from London via Moscow, travelling by Aeroflot. She was received by senior Soviet officials, including Prime Minister Kosygin, who conferred with her and gave her dinner at the airport during the scheduled three-hour stop. A year later her election manifesto stated her government would ‘recognise the new revolutionary government of Kampuchea’. This was the pro-Vietnamese government of Heng Samrin that took control of Phnom Penh in January 1979. Prime Minister Kosygin obtained no such assurance from the Desai government, though he sought one on a six-day visit to India in March 1979. Addressing the Indian Parliament on March 9, he had said with reference to ‘China’s aggression in Vietnam’:

  Should an armed robber or murderer attack somebody, all the rigours of the law are applied to him in any country… . But one would like to know what punishment deserves a criminal who has encroached on the life of an entire nation, and who seeks to assume the right to use arms against other peoples and decide their fate as he pleases? No peace-loving country, no person of integrity should remain indifferent when that sort of thing happens, when an aggressor holds human life and world public opinion in insolent contempt, commits an outrage against international law… . Indeed it would be unpardonable if the least opportunity is missed for cooperation in the struggle against aggression and against the policy of blackmail and diktat… . On behalf of the Soviet Union’s Supreme Soviet, I can assure with full responsibility that any initiation by the Parliament of India serving that goal will find our most active support.

  The language was outspoken in view of the Desai government’s policy of normalizing relations with China. In its editorial of March 10, 1979, the Economic and Political Weekly remarked that the ‘content and tenor of Kosygin’s speeches on the very first two days of the visit have raised certain important questions about the nature of India’s relations with the Soviet Union and the extent to which these relations circumscribe this country’s freedom to pursue independent policies toward other countries’. The joint communiqué at the end of the visit did not mention Kampuchea, though it called for a Chinese withdrawal from Vietnam, which India had, in fact, called for earlier. Morarji Desai took the view that India would neither lead an anti-China front nor be party to an anti-Soviet front. The succeeding caretaker government asked the Soviet Union, on December 31, 1979, to ‘pull out from Afghanistan’. Mrs Gandhi told correspondents the same day, ‘We do not believe in intervention of any nation in the affairs of another nation’, though on January 3, 1980, she amplified, ‘They [the Soviet Union] think the Western presence in Afghanistan was very strong’ and that the Soviet action was not a ‘one-sided affair’. On January 10, as prime minister-designate, she told foreign correspondents the Soviet action was ‘best resolved by Afghanistan itself ’. On January 12 the Indian statement in the United Nations General Assembly debate on the resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops largely absolved the Soviet Union of blame. While disapproving of outside interference in Afghanistan, it said, ‘We have no reason to doubt assurances, particularly from a friendly country like the Soviet Union, with whom we have close ties’. India abstained on the resolution, while all the countries of the subcontinent, but one, voted in favour of it. The exception was Bhutan, which avoided an awkward situation with India by not participating in the vote at all.

  By January 1980 the Soviet Union had support it could count on in New Delhi, whose diplomatic initiatives to ‘defuse’ the Afghan crisis took care to recognize the Soviet Union’s interests on the subcontinent, in the Indian Ocean and in Asia—a position that set India apart from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. India thereby, in effect, accepted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as
justified in order to strengthen Soviet strategy in the region. Mrs Gandhi’s government’s recognition on July 7, 1980, of the Heng Samrin regime in Kampuchea, also gave implicit Indian backing to Soviet policy of military support of Vietnamese hegemony over Indochina as a counter to Chinese power in South East Asia.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘A Dynamic Manufacturer’

  The nature and conduct of Sanjay Gandhi’s business transactions probably did more to injure his mother during the 1970s than any other factor, with public comment and criticism in Parliament focusing on the promotion of Sanjay’s interests at the cost of policy and rules. His undefined and unaccountable political role strikingly illuminated the power structure she headed. His encroachments into affairs of state extraordinarily increased the isolation that was her natural climate, alienating her principal adviser, P.N. Haksar, and her old colleagues and confounding a large, admiring public. His business interests were sponsored by ministers, some of whom valued the perquisites of office higher than standards or integrity and were advanced through an administration often too timid to insist on proper procedures. Indian politics has its share of sycophancy, nepotism and corruption. In more than one state, governing families have been reputed to have made fortunes in office, while there has been no dearth of politicians who have influenced the official machinery to benefit their relatives and friends. But the Sanjay phenomenon was of a new scale and dimension. It arose and flourished at the level of the Union government at the peak of the power apparatus, and could not have done so without the approval of the prime minister herself. Mrs Gandhi’s opponents and supporters alike were baffled by her disregard of the proprieties and of vital considerations, even including defence requirements, where her younger son was concerned.