by John Keay
But unlike the fastidious Naipaul, Raj Narain was quite at home here. He boasted never to have owned a suit, and often covered his head with a bandana-like turban. Stubbled and stocky, in dirty white kurta and pyjamas, the fifty-three-year-old was dressed for the campaign trail. To win the villagers’ votes he must remind them he was one of them. In an electoral battle with the incumbent Prime Minister, that should count.
Four weeks later, stick and stubble proved to have been of no avail. On polling day Raj Narain lost to Indira Gandhi by a crushing 100,000 votes. Yet, never one to be easily cowed, he would contest the result. He took his grouse about his opponent’s misuse of government facilities to the Electoral Commission and then the courts. Four and a half years later, the case would reach the highest court in the state. It decided in his favour. The Rae Bareilly result would be annulled, the Prime Minister disqualified from office, and India plunged into ‘the Emergency’, its greatest ever constitutional crisis. Narain felt vindicated. Better still, when after ‘the Emergency’ he again challenged his old adversary in Rae Bareilly, he would win.
The 1971 election thus had a sting in its tail. At the time it promised to be momentous, not least because it was unexpected. Given the standard five-year term, it was not actually due till 1972. That meant that for the first time India’s parliamentary elections were not coinciding with elections to the state assemblies. As Raj Narain saw it, national issues were taking pride of place, principal among them being Mrs Gandhi’s claim to the legacy of Congress. Though already in her fifth year as Prime Minister, she had called the election a year early in a bid to confound her opponents and ratify her leadership. She herself put it even more bluntly. When a Newsweek reporter had enquired what issues were at stake, ‘she answered without a pause: “I am the issue.” ’2
Nehru’s immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had never had to fight an election. As the world’s most vertically challenged Prime Minister, he had enjoyed a suitably short tenure of just eighteen months. In 1966, within hours of signing the Tashkent agreement that ended the 1965 Indo–Pak war (‘Bhutto’s War’), he had died of a massive heart attack. Once again the Congress Party’s regional bosses, collectively known as the Syndicate, had put their heads together, and this time they had chosen Nehru’s daughter. Born in 1917, the same year as Raj Narain, Indira Gandhi was not inexperienced. She had long acted as hostess for her father, and had sometimes accompanied him on foreign trips. She had also involved herself in politics, serving as President of Congress under Nehru and as a Minister under Shastri. More obviously, to an electorate primed on the heroics of the freedom struggle she sounded perfect. A Nehru by birth, she had become a Gandhi by marriage (that her now deceased husband was unrelated to the Mahatma was no secret, though neither was it a handicap). Yet she was a generation younger than most of the Syndicate bosses, added to which she suffered from the considerable handicap of being a woman. While recognising her appeal to the electorate, the kingmakers felt reassured by this. Once in office she should pose no challenge to their authority over the party or the government.
In an age when women leaders were as much a novelty in Asia as anywhere, only Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Ceylon from 1960, had preceded her. The Syndicate might usefully have studied this precedent. For ‘Mrs B’, herself the widow of one premier and the mother of another, was proving a doughty operator in her own right. She had championed a programme of nationalisation and antagonised the Western powers much as would Mrs Gandhi. More ominously she had curried favour with Ceylon’s Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority by promoting a nationalism that discriminated against the country’s Tamil minority, most of them Hindus and originally wage-migrants from south India. Naturally the DMK, the Tamil party in India’s Tamil Nadu, had taken a dim view of this; and so, perforce, had the Indian government. Already under severe pressure from the DMK over the question of Hindi versus English as India’s official language (in Ceylon Mrs Bandaranaike had outlawed the use of English despite Tamil protests), New Delhi had felt obliged to reach an agreement with Colombo: 375,000 Sri Lankan Tamils were to be given Ceylonese citizenship in return for India repatriating another 600,000. Thus began a staged migration of Ceylon’s ‘Estate Tamils’ not only to India but beyond. For once it had nothing to do with Partition, although the Ceylonese Tamils and their diaspora would continue to set a dire precedent for the subcontinent as a whole.
In 1967, less than a year into her first prime ministership, Mrs Gandhi had had to fight her first election. She had won it comfortably, if not convincingly. Congress’s share of the vote had slumped from around 45 per cent to 40 per cent, and its seat tally from around 360 to 280. A Communist-led coalition had recaptured Kerala, another edged out its rivals in West Bengal, and the DMK stormed to power in Tamil Nadu. Elsewhere, slender majorities won by patronage and bribes were soon eroded by patronage and bribes. Seemingly the broad church that was once Congress could no longer take the strain of a myriad of assertive interest groups based on caste, religion, ethnicity, language or ideological conviction. Politics were getting dirtier. Patriots with a social conscience, a decent education and a law degree had once filled the ranks of Congress. Now few wanted any part in it.
Neville Maxwell, then of the London Times, reported the future for democracy in India as ‘dark’ and ‘the crisis’ as imminent.3 Popular works like Ronald Segal’s The Crisis of India (1965) and Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (1967) faithfully echoed these sentiments amid a wrinkling of noses over ‘the dirt and the submission, the superstition and apathy, the greed and the corruption and the endless, astonishing and affronting poverty’.4 Over half of all Indians earned less than a living wage, and of these most habitually went hungry. A succession of poor harvests coupled with a hike in defence spending as a result of the China and Pakistan wars had just obliged Mrs Gandhi to devalue the rupee by half and to negotiate another massive food-aid package from the US. Later assertions that famine in India had ‘disappeared abruptly with the establishment of a multi-party democracy’ somehow overlooked the thousands starving in Bihar in 1966–67 – just as they would overlook the estimated 1.5 million who would die for lack of food and adequate relief in a democratic Bangladesh seven years later. Arguably, if India was indeed experiencing fewer in the way of newsworthy famines, it had less to do with democracy and more with Partition having relieved New Delhi of responsibility for disaster-prone East Bengal.
With Congress heavily implicated in this catalogue of woe, Mrs Gandhi needed to connect with the people by distancing herself from the party’s ‘old guard’ Syndicate and charting a new direction. Though usually diffident about her own beliefs, ‘she suddenly discovered a deep affinity for the poor and downtrodden, plus an unexpectedly dictatorial streak’.5 A programme of radical reforms was announced. Banks and insurance companies were to be nationalised, a minimum wage introduced, and the ex-rulers of the princely states deprived of their ‘privy purses’ (the privileges and annual state pensions awarded them in return for their accession). The plight of the nation’s poorest demanded that India embrace more obviously socialist policies; or as the Prime Minister’s principal adviser put it, ‘the best way to vanquish the Syndicate would be to convert the struggle for personal power into an ideological one’.6 Nehru had embraced socialism as a matter of principle; his daughter seemed to be doing so as a matter of expediency.
Though agreeable to radical young Congress activists, the programme met with stiff resistance from the Syndicate, and especially from Morarji Desai, Mrs Gandhi’s deputy and Finance Minister. She simply relieved Desai of the finance portfolio and nationalised the banks anyway. Her confidence grew even as her ‘old guard’ sponsors fumed. Matters had come to a head in early 1969 over the choice of the Republic’s next President. For an office which, though largely ceremonial, came with some constitutional powers as well as New Delhi’s massive viceregal residence, the Syndicate nominated one of their own as Congress’s official candidate. But Mrs Gandhi declined to endo
rse the Syndicate’s man. Instead she finally broke ranks by lending her support to a more obliging rival. The predicted crisis had arrived.
In what amounted to a parliamentary vote of confidence in herself, the Prime Minister’s candidate narrowly won the contest for the presidency. But the party retaliated by expelling her; she then formed her own breakaway Congress; and thus by 1970 there were two Congress parties. The Prime Minister’s was known as Congress [R] – initially for ‘Requisitionist’ (an earlier attempt to ‘requisition’ a special session of the party having failed) and then ‘Reform’ – but was later changed to Congress [I] – for Indira. The Syndicate’s party was always Congress [O] – for ‘Organisation’, then ‘Old’ and ultimately ‘Obsolete’. Like the Muslim League in the early days of Pakistan, the mighty Congress, the juggernaut of the freedom struggle and the embodiment of the national consensus, had fractured.
Mrs Gandhi preferred to think of it as purged. She soldiered on, having cobbled together a parliamentary alliance with the less radical of the two Communist parties. But with both bank nationalisation and her assault on the princes stalled on constitutional grounds by the Supreme Court, and with other reforms opposed on principle by Congress [O], in late 1970 she took her opponents by surprise and announced the snap election of 1971. Both her future and the country’s direction were in the balance. The upcoming election, and particularly the result in Rae Bareilly, could hardly have been more critical.
‘Indira hatao, Out with Indira,’ croaked Raj Narain. It was by way of a farewell as he hobbled away to find his lift into town. Coined by himself, the slogan had been adopted by the Congress [O] diehards with whom his Socialist Party was aligned.
‘Gharibi Hatao, Out with Poverty,’ countered the Prime Minister’s supporters as their flag-waving motorcade trundled off into the dead-flat distance and the dust slowly settled.
Thanks to Mrs Gandhi’s indefatigable campaigning, her catchier slogan and her relentless assault on ‘the forces of reaction’, even the pollsters were confounded. In 1971 the number of seats won by her Congress [R] was much the same as that chalked up by the undivided Congress under Nehru in 1962. It was an essentially personal triumph, and it heralded an increasingly personal rule.
Never much of a performer in the Lok Sabha, she could now afford to take her party’s support for granted. Her mandate was from the people, not Parliament, while her policies emanated from an inner circle of advisers, not the Cabinet. In a spate of constitutional amendments, she reined in the Supreme Court’s powers to interpret the Constitution by arguing that the fundamental rights accorded to the individual must be subordinated to those of society as a whole if India was to become more egalitarian. Nehru might have approved; a radical redistribution of wealth and influence to those who could only dream of such things looked possible. But it was for the state to determine what society needed; and since ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’, as one of her supporters would put it, the state had got a lot more personal. It could be caring and responsive; it could also be detached and vindictive. A rush of power to the head was no guarantee against the misuse of all that power.
Thus armed, Mrs Gandhi pushed through the takeover of the banks, then the insurance and the coal industries. Likewise, the ex-princes lost their stipends. The judiciary was encouraged to be more committed, which could mean less impartial, and the bureaucracy to be more engaged, which could mean less principled. Meanwhile hostile or non-compliant state governments were being toppled like ninepins. At the national level, participatory democracy was being corralled into the twice-a-decade vote-bazaars that heralded an election. ‘The drift was unmistakably towards a Jacobin conception of popular sovereignty,’ according to Sunil Khilnani.7 In her new avatar as a many-armed deity, Mrs Gandhi bestrode the barricades, ballot box in one hand, progressive directives in all the others. Rae Bareilly was remembered only for her reincarnation. The skeleton in the cupboard that was Raj Narain’s obsessive concern for the niceties of electoral practice looked destined to stay there, amid a whiff of sour grapes.
*
Across the border in Pakistan, Mrs Gandhi’s triumph went largely unremarked. Islamabad’s future bête noire was as yet rated no more highly than the geriatric leadership of the Syndicate she had toppled. Pakistan anyway faced a test of its own. In view of that country’s erratic acquaintance with democracy, the chances of a Pakistani election coinciding with an Indian one were slim. But in 1970–71 they fell within a few weeks of one another. Both polls were reckoned fair and highly significant. And while in Indira’s India the election proved satisfactorily decisive, in bipartite Pakistan it merely highlighted the division. ‘People power’, as yet so affirmative for New Delhi, was already proving calamitous for Islamabad.
After the fiasco of the 1965 war with India, President Ayub Khan had met the protests against his perceived ‘sell-out’ in Tashkent with firmness. Colleges and universities had been closed and efforts to restore the army’s morale got under way. A national conference staged by the leaders of the political parties became a pretext for their arrest and ‘revealed more about the divisions within the opposition than their capacity for unity’.8 Among those detained was Mujibur Rahman, the heavily bespectacled and moustachioed leader of the Awami League. An East Bengali party formed by H.S. Suhrawardy and others in 1949–50, the Awami League had just committed itself to a six-point programme demanding for East Pakistan the fullest possible autonomy short of independence. As well as insisting on a parliamentary representation commensurate with its population, the province was to exercise its own fiscal powers, mint its own currency, manage its own trade and economy and raise its own militia; only foreign affairs, defence and certain coordinating responsibilities were to be delegated to the central government in Islamabad.
President Ayub Khan regarded Mujib’s Six Points as tantamount to a demand for outright secession, and he was not alone: most of West Pakistan’s politicians agreed. Yet attributing the Awami League’s challenge to the repression of military rule, they accorded a higher priority to things like the restoration of democratic rights, the revival of the provincial legislatures (i.e. an end to the ‘one-unit’ amalgamation of West Pakistan) and the removal of Ayub himself. In effect, opinion in West Pakistan favoured political participation as the prerequisite to addressing provincial grievances, while opinion in East Pakistan would not even consider participation until provincial autonomy was conceded. Faced with this conundrum, the now ailing Ayub responded with a mixture of overtures and threats: if the parties would work with him, he would lift the state of emergency imposed during the war; if not, he would reintroduce martial law.
Neither option held much appeal for Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League. Throughout East Pakistan, intermittent protest was turning to sustained violence. An observer in 1968 found Dhaka’s students and teachers ‘readily admitting … that many student leaders carry knives and guns and use them frequently to settle political disputes’. Alongside the campus rabble-rousers, ‘workers and street mobs’ were now joining in the movement, attacking police stations, banks and government buildings. Arms were being looted and ‘disagreements … increasingly settled by terrorist methods’.9
The demonstrators demanded implementation of the Six Points as a guarantee against cultural disparagement and ethnic discrimination in the regime’s allocation of government jobs, investment and social programmes. ‘As the riots spread and intensified, the years of martial law, political restrictions, press controls, educational neglect, static wages, escalating inflation, a self-serving entrepreneurial elite, and a callous bureaucracy spurred the anger.’10
A further dimension was added by the so-called Agartala Conspiracy. In January 1968 Mujibur Rahman and thirty-five others were brought to trial for making treasonable contact with officers of India’s army. A plan to do away with Ayub and declare East Pakistan independent had allegedly been hatched, and talks had certainly taken place, notably at Agartala, just across the East Pakistan border in the Indi
an state of Tripura. But they dated back to 1962, so before the Indo–Pak war, and it was unclear to what extent senior figures on either side were involved. Ayub still felt that a state trial was essential. Well publicised, it would discredit the Awami League and bring home to his countrymen the seriousness of the situation in the eastern wing. In the event, though, it simply backfired. The prosecution faltered when it emerged that one of the accused had died in custody and that others had apparently been tortured; Mujib and his defence found the dock a congenial platform from which to proclaim their grievances; and East Pakistan celebrated its latest ‘martyrs to the cause’ with more massive demonstrations. ‘Before the trial few in Pakistan dared to discuss secession in public. But as the newspapers printed more and more details of the proceedings, debate about breaking away became a normal part of public discourse.’11 In Dhaka the trial itself came to be seen as the conspiracy, the prosecutor being Mujib, the accused Ayub, and his treachery that of blackening East Bengalis as India-loving traitors to Islam.
Recognising that the whole exercise was becoming hopelessly counter-productive, Ayub called it off, released Mujib and made a final attempt at conciliation. It took the form of round-table talks held in March 1969. Ayub had already announced that on health grounds he would not contest the presidential election to be held under his ‘Basic Democracy’ rules in 1970. He hoped that this news would concentrate minds. It did, but not the right minds. The top brass, including army Chief of Staff General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, began planning for the succession. Meanwhile Mujib, having been denied his Six Points, walked out of the talks. More crucially, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party boycotted them altogether.