India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  These changes, predicted the Swedish sociologists, ‘will have widespread consequences for India’s future’. Blood was being spilt (as Marxist theory said it must). ‘The antagonisms are sometimes so violent that they are hard to imagine.’ Fortunately, ‘the new revolutionary movement . . . was growing in India today’. The authors were clear that ‘only when these millions of poor people take their future in their own hands will India’s poverty and oppression be brought to an end’. They left their readers with this hope: ‘Perhaps Naxalbari does stand for the Indian revolution.’70

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  THE ELIXIR OF VICTORY

  Gungi gudiya [dumb doll]

  Ram Manohar Lohia on Indira Gandhi, circa 1967

  I

  IN NOVEMBER 1969 THE Delhi weekly Thought commented that ‘the Congress seems to have written itself off as a nationally cohesive force’. The once-mighty party was now split into disputatious parts. When the next general election came, said Thought, ‘Congressmen will be fighting Congressmen to the obvious advantage of regional or sectarian groups’. Consequently, ‘Mrs Gandhi’s party may not secure more than one-third of the seats in Parliament. The chances of the other group seem to be even slimmer.’1

  A year later the prime minister called an election, fourteen months ahead of schedule. Her party – Congress (R) – wanted a popular mandate to implement the progressive reforms it had initiated, now held up by the ‘reactionary’ forces in Parliament. Its manifesto offered a ‘genuine radical programme of economic and social development’, upholding the interests of the small farmer and the landless labourer, and of the small entrepreneur against the big capitalist. It stood for the betterment of the lower castes, and for the protection of the minorities. Particular mention was made of the Urdu language, which ‘shall be given its due place which has been denied to it so far’. It promised a ‘strong and stable government’, and asked for support in the fight against the ‘dark and evil forces of right [wing] reaction’, which were ‘intent upon destroying the very base of our democratic and socialist objectives’.2

  The position in which Indira Gandhi found herself in 1971 was in many ways reminiscent of her father’s in 1952. Like Nehru then, Mrs Gandhi went to the polls having fought a bruising battle with members of her own party. Like him, she offered to the people a fresh, progressive-sounding mandate. And, like him, she was her party’s chief campaigner and spokesperson, the very embodiment of what it said it stood for.

  In calling an early poll, the prime minister had astutely dissociated the general election from elections to the various state assemblies which in the past had always taken place concurrently. That meant that parochial considerations of caste and ethnicity got mixed up with wider national questions. In 1967 this had proved to be detrimental to the Congress. This time, Mrs Gandhi made sure she would separate the two by calling a general election in which she could place a properly national agenda before the electorate.

  The opposition, meanwhile, was seeking to build a united front against the ruling party. Urging it on was C. Rajagopalachari, now past ninety years of age. A common leader could not be agreed upon so, said ‘Rajaji’, the fight had to be conducted ‘on the pattern of guerrilla warfare. Indira’s candidates . . . must be opposed everywhere on the single ground that we oppose the conspiracy to tear up the constitution and to extinguish the people’s liberties and put all power in the hands of the state’.3

  The opposition constructed a ‘Grand Alliance’, bringing together Jana Sangh, Swatantra, Congress (O), the socialists, and regional groupings. The idea was to limit the number of multiway contests. A copywriter came up with the slogan ‘Indira Hatao’ (Remove Indira). This prompted the telling rejoinder, offered from the lips of the prime minister herself: ‘Wo kehte hain Indira Hatao, hum kehte hain Garibi Hatao’ (They ask for the Removal of Indira, whereas we want an End to Poverty itself).

  Whether the work of the prime minister or one of her now forgotten minions, ‘Garibi Hatao’ was an inspired coinage. It allowed Congress (R) to take the moral high ground, representing itself as the party of progress, against an alliance of reaction. Personalizing the election was to backfire badly against the opposition, whose agenda was portrayed as negative in contrast to the forward-looking programme of the ruling party.

  Mrs Gandhi worked tirelessly to garner votes for her party. Between the dissolution of Parliament, in the last week of December 1970, and the elections, held ten weeks later, she travelled 36,000 miles in all. She addressed 300 meetings and was heard or seen by an estimated 20 million people. These figures were recounted, with relish, in a letter written by Mrs Gandhi to an American friend. She clearly enjoyed the experience; as she remarked, ‘it was wonderful to see the light in their [the people’s] eyes’.4

  The prime minister’s speeches harped on the contrast, perceived and real, between the party she had left behind and the party she had founded. The ‘old’ Congress was in thrall to ‘conservative elements’ and ‘vested interests’, whereas the ‘new’ Congress was committed to the poor. Did not the nationalization of banks and the abolition of the privy purses show as much? The message struck a resonant chord, for, as one somewhat cynical journalist wrote:

  The man lying in a gutter prizes nothing more than the notion pumped into him that he is superior to the sanitary inspector. That the rich had been humbled looked like the assurance that the poor would be honoured. The instant ‘poverty-removal’ slogan was an economic absurdity. Psychologically and politically, for that reason, it was however a decisive asset in a community at war with reason and rationality.5

  Her travels within India had made the prime minister far better known than she had been in 1967. In asking for votes, she exploited her ‘charming personality’, her ‘father’s historical role’ and, above all, that stirring slogan ‘Garibi Hatao’. The landless and low castes voted en masse for the Congress (R), as did the Muslims, who had been lukewarm the last time round. The new party’s organizational weakness was remedied by its young volunteers, who went around the countryside amplifying their leader’s words. The massive turnout on election day suggested that ‘the people had been fired with a new hope of redemption’.6

  Back in 1952 it had been said that even a lamp-post could win if it ran on the Congress symbol. It turned out that Mrs Gandhi’s victory was even more spectacular than her father’s. Congress (R) won 352 out of 518 seats; the next highest tally was that of the CPM, which won a mere 25. Both victor and vanquished agreed that this was chiefly the work of one person. As the writer Khush want Singh commented, ‘Indira Gandhi has successfully magnified her figure as the one and only leader of national dimensions’. Then he added, ominously: ‘However, if power is voluntarily surrendered by a predominant section of the people to one person and at the same time opposition is reduced to insignificance, the temptation to ride roughshod over legitimate criticism can become irresistible. The danger of Indira Gandhi being given unbridled power shall always be present.’7

  Among the consequences of the 1971 election was a change in the name of the ruling party. The Congress (R) now became known as Congress (I), for ‘Indira’; later, even this was dropped. By the margin of its victory, Indira’s Congress was confirmed as the real Congress, requiring no qualifying suffix.

  Her success at the polls emboldened Mrs Gandhi to act decisively against the princes. Throughout 1971, the two sides tried and failed to find a settlement. The princes were willing to forgo their privy purses, but hoped at least to save their titles. But with her massive majority in Parliament, the prime minister had no need to compromise. On 2 December she introduced a bill seeking to amend the constitution and abolish all princely privileges. It was passed in the Lok Sabha by 381 votes to 6, and in the Rajya Sabha by 167 votes to 7. In her own speech, the prime minister invited ‘the princes to join the elite of the modern age, the élite which earns respect by its talent, energy and contribution to human progress, all of which can only be done when we work together as eq
uals without regarding anybody as of special status’.8

  II

  The statistics of the fifth general election were printed in loving detail in the report of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC). The size of the electorate was 275 million, a 100 million up from the first edition in 1952. Yet no Indian had to walk more than two kilometres to exercise his or her franchise. There were now 342,944 polling stations, up 100,000 from 1962; each station was supplied with forty-three different items ranging from ballot papers and boxes to indelible ink and sealing wax; 282 million ballot papers were printed, 7 million more than the number of eligible voters (to allow for accidents and errors); 1,769,802 Indians were on polling duty – for the most part, these were officials of the state and central governments.

  The CEC then turned, with less pleasure, to electoral malpractices. A study of the 1967 elections had found 375 cases of electoral violence of all kinds; of these, 98 were in Bihar.9 In 1971 the Election Commission reported 66 instances of ‘booth-capturing’, where ballot boxes were seized by force and stuffed with ballots in favour of one candidate. In Anantnag in the Kashmir Valley a woman took away a ballot box under her burqa before returning it, now heavier by several hundred ballots. Again, the most violations were in Bihar – the state accounted for 52 of 66 booths captured by hooligans hired by leaders of caste factions. The CEC believed this was ‘perhaps the most caste-ridden State in the whole [of] India and this bane of excessive casteism vitiates in no mean degree the political atmosphere’.

  These disfigurements notwithstanding, the holding of its fifth general election was a matter on which the country could congratulate itself. So wrote the CEC, in a preface whose lyricism sat oddly with the hard nosed numerical analysis that followed. For in between the last poll and this one, ‘India was in the middle of the deepest and darkest woods and was groping for a way out’. Factionalism was rife; SVD governments came and went, and the president of the republic died, making ‘the already dark political situation . . . darker’. Then the mighty Congress Party split; this, in the CEC’s view, was comparable only to ‘the Great Schism in the Whig Party in Great Britain in the year 1796’. In this ‘state of tension, stress, confusion and flux, the prophets of doom, both inside and outside the country, started expressing serious misgivings and doubts as to the very survival of democracy in this Great Land’.

  These doomsayers, said the chief election commissioner, had not reckoned with Bharata Bhagya Vidhata (The Supreme Dispenser of India’s Destiny), which from ‘ancient times’ had thwarted ‘adverse and hostile circumstances’, by blowing ‘into the soul of India that elixir-giving inspiration which imparted rejuvenated vigour to her vital, moral and spiritual forces’. Others might have disagreed, seeing the holding of this election not as a victory for Indian spiritualism but as a vindication of that very modern political form, electoral democracy.10

  III

  Three months before India held its fifth general election, Pakistan held its first ever election based on adult franchise. The poll had been called by General Yahya Khan, Ayub Khan’s successor as president and chief martial law administrator.

  Two parties dominated the campaign; Zulfiqar Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in West Pakistan, and the National Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (‘Mujib’) in East Pakistan. The son of a large landowner, educated at Oxford and Berkeley, Bhutto sought to declass himself, at least rhetorically, by promising every Pakistani roti, kapda aur makaan (food, clothing and a roof over your heads). Mujib’s campaign was based on East Pakistan’s sense of victimhood, its anger at the suppression of the Bengali language and the exploitation of its rich natural resources by the military rulers of the western half of the country.11

  Yahya Khan appears to have called for elections in the hope that Bhutto’s PPP would win, and allow him to continue as president. The polls were held in the third week of December 1970. The PPP won 88 out of the 144 seats in West Pakistan, whereas the Awami League swept the more populous East, winning 167 of its 169 seats. These results surprised Mujibur Rahman, and shocked Yahya Khan. For the president had intended that the newly elected assembly would frame a democratic constitution; the worry now was that the Awami League, with its majority, would insist on a federation where the eastern wing would manage its own affairs, leaving only defence and foreign policy to the central government. Mujib had already indicated that he would like East Pakistan to have control over the foreign exchange its products generated, and perhaps issue its own currency as well.

  Yahya’s reservations were reinforced by the ambitions of Bhutto. For the relationship between Pakistan’s two wings had always been a colonial one, with West dominating East militarily, economically and even culturally. For both general and patrician, the prospect of having a Bengali decide their destinies was too horrible to contemplate. For the Bengali Muslim was regarded by his West Pakistani counterpart as effete and effeminate, and too easily corrupted by proximity to Hindus (over 10 million of whom still lived within their midst). Among these Hindus were many professionals – lawyers, doctors, university professors. The fear of the West Pakistani elite was that, if Mujib’s Awami League came to form the government, ‘the constitution to be adopted by them will have Hindu iron hand in it’.12

  On the other side, the East Pakistani Muslims looked upon their West Pakistani counterparts as ‘the ruling classes, as foreign ruling classes and as predatory foreign ruling classes’. They resented the rulers’ dismissal of their language, Bengali; they complained that their agricultural wealth was being drained away to feed the western sector; and they noted that Bengalis were very poorly represented in the upper echelons of the Pakistani bureaucracy, judiciary and, not least, army. The feeling of being discriminated against had been growing over the years. By the time of the elections of 1970, ‘the politically minded’ East Bengali had become ‘allergic to a central authority located a thousand miles away’.13

  In January 1971 Yahya Khan and Bhutto travelled separately to the East Pakistani capital, Dacca. They held talks with Mujib, but found him firm on the question of a federal constitution. The president then postponed the convening of the National Assembly. The Awami League answered by calling an indefinite general strike. Throughout East Pakistan shops and offices putdown their shutters; even railways and airports closed down. Clashes between police and demonstrators became a daily occurrence.

  The military decided to quell these protests by force. Troop reinforcements were flown in or sent by ship to the principal eastern port, Chittagong. On the night of 25/26 March, the army launched a major attack on the university, whose students were among the Awami League’s strongest supporters. A parade of tanks rolled into the campus, firing on the dormitories. Students were rounded up, shot and pushed into graves hastily dug and bulldozed over by tanks. There were troop detachments at work in other parts of the city, targeting Bengali newspaper offices and homes of local politicians. That same night Mujibur Rahman was arrested at his home and flown off to a secret location in West Pakistan.14

  The Pakistan army fanned out into the countryside, seeking to stamp out any sign of rebellion. East Bengali troops mutinied in several places, including Chittagong, where one major captured a radio station and announced the establishment of the Independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh.15 To combat the guerrillas the army raised bands of local loyalists, called Razakars, who put the claims of religion – and hence of a united Pakistan – above those of language. Villages and small towns, even the odd airport, fell into rebel hands, then were recaptured. The reprisals grew progressively more brutal. As an American consular official reported, ‘Army officials and soldiers give every sign of believing that they are now embarked on a Jehad against Hindu-corrupted Bengalis.’16

  One soldier later wrote a vivid recollection of the counter-insurgency operations, of the ‘reassertion of state power’ and the capture of those ‘places [which] had been occupied by anti-state elements’. As he remembered, ‘there was more resistance offered by the terr
ain than by the miscreants. Extensive damage to land communications and free intermingling of hostiles with the general populace made progress tedious.’17

  After the first swoop, foreign correspondents were asked to leave East Pakistan, but later in the summer some were allowed to return. A German journalist saw signs of the civil war everywhere: in bazaars burnt in the cities and homesteads razed in the villages. There was ‘a ghostly emptiness in settlements once bubbling with life and energy’. An American reporter found Dacca ‘a city under the occupation of a military force that rules by strength, intimidation and terror’. The army was harassing the Hindu minority in particular; the authorities were ‘demolishing Hindu temples, regardless of whether there are any Hindus to use them’. A World Bank team visiting East Pakistan found a ‘general destruction of property in cities, towns, and villages’, leading to an ‘all-pervasive fear’ among the population.18

  The army action in Dacca sparked a panic flight out of the city. The repression in the hinterland magnified this flight, directing it across the border into India. By the end of April 1971 there were half a million East Pakistan refugees in India; by the end of May, three and a half million; by the end of August, in excess of 8 million. Most (though by no means all) were Hindus.19 Refugee camps were strung out along the border, in the states of West Bengal, Tripura and Meghalaya. To distribute the burden, camps were also opened in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The refugees were housed in huts made of bamboo and polythene; the luckier ones in the verandahs of schools and colleges. The food came from Indian warehouses – not as bare as they would have been before the Green Revolution – and from supplies provided by Western aid agencies.20