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

by Ramachandra Guha

  It is tempting to see the JP movement as being a reprise, at the all-India level, of the popular struggle against the communist government in Kerala in 1958–9. The parallels are uncanny. On the one side was a legally elected government suspected of wishing to subvert the constitution. On the other side was a mass movement drawing in opposition parties and many non-political or apolitical bodies. Like Mannath Pad-manabhan, JP was a leader of unquestioned probity, a saint who had been called upon to save politics from the politicians. His behaviour was, or was perceived to be, in stark contrast to that of his principal adversary – for, like E. M. S. Namboodiripad in 1958–9, Mrs Gandhi had no desire to accede to her opponents’ demand and voluntary demit power.

  This was a political rivalry, but also a personal one. As a veteran of the freedom struggle, and as a comrade of her father’s, Jayaprakash Narayan would regard Mrs Gandhi as something of an upstart. For her part, having recently won an election and a war, the prime minister saw JP as a political naif who would have been better off sticking to social work.

  By the end of 1974 the polarization was very nearly complete. There were many Indians who were not members of the right-wing Jana Sangh, and yet thought the Congress too corrupt and Mrs Gandhi too insensitive to criticism. Some went so far as to hail JP’s movement as a ‘second freedom struggle’, completing the business left unfinished by the first. There were many other Indians, not necessarily members of the Congress yet pained by JP making common cause with the Jana Sangh, who saw his movement as undermining the institutions of representative democracy. The first kind of Indian criticized Indira Gandhi, and with much force; the second kind criticized JP, albeit with less enthusiasm.50

  In the first week of January 1975, a key aide of the prime minister was assassinated in JP’s home state of Bihar. This was L. N. Mishra, who had held various Cabinet appointments under Mrs Gandhi and, more crucially, was a major fundraiser for the Congress party. A politician wholly sans ideology, Mishra had collected large sums of money from both the Soviets and the Indian business class. It was not clear who murdered him – whether a personal rival, or a trade unionist bitter about his role in the suppression of the railway strike of 1974. The prime minister blamed it on the ‘cult of violence’ allegedly promoted by Jayaprakash Narayan and his movement.51

  Mishra’s death did not impede JP’s plans to march on Parliament in the spring, when the weather would be more hospitable to protesters from across the country. During January and February he travelled across India to drum up support.52 In his speeches JP urged the people to remain non-violent; any untoward incidents, he said, would prompt the prime minister to assume dictatorial powers. At several places he claimed that Mrs Gandhi was looking for an excuse to arrest him. That, he predicted, would only make the movement more widespread, as in 1942, when the jailing of Mahatma Gandhi had led to an intensification of the Quit India movement.

  JP compared himself to Gandhi implicitly and, more explicitly, the Congress regime to the colonial state. These were comparisons the prime minister naturally rejected. In an interview given to a Japanese journalist she said that, while she was not certain what the JP movement was for, ‘it is clear what it is against. It is against my party, it is against me personally and all that I have stood for and stand for today.’

  In fact, there were by now some members of Mrs Gandhi’s party who had some sympathy for the other side. Among them were the erstwhile ‘Young Turks’ Chandra Shekhar and Mohan Dharia. Shekhar and Dharia called for a national dialogue on questions of rising prices, corruption and unemployment – issues, they said, that were so conspicuously flagged in the Congress’s own 1971 manifesto.

  Another man caught betwixt and between was Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah. The government and he had finally come to an agreement, by which the Congress Legislature Party of Jammu and Kashmir would elect him as their leader, and hence also as their chief minister. Two days before his installation he went to the Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi to seek the blessings of his old friend and supporter Jayaprakash Narayan. The newspapers carried a photograph of the two in a bear hug, the Kashmiri towering above the Gandhian.

  JP told the press that he welcomed the Sheikh’s return to Kashmir; the state, he said, needed him at its helm. But his friends in the Jana Sangh attacked the accord which had brought the Lion of Kashmir back to power. The party President, L. K. Advani, claimed that Abdullah still ‘wanted to use the instrument of power to pursue his ambition of an independent Kashmir’. Others saw the matter very differently. After the Sheikh was sworn in as chief minister on 25 February, the Indian Express called it an ‘epochal event in the history of free India’. Abdullah’s return to his old post, twenty-three years after he had been forced to leave it, was ‘a tribute to the resilience and maturity of Indian democracy, for it is only in a true democratic set-up that even the most serious differences can be harmonised and reconciliations effected within the framework of common loyalty to the country’.

  The Kashmir chapter seemed, finally, closed. Jayaprakash Narayan was delighted that Sheikh Abdullah had rejoined the mainstream. On this, and perhaps this alone, Mrs Gandhi and he saw eye to eye. For on the very day that Abdullah was reading the oath in Jammu, JP called for a ‘national stir’ to oust the ‘corrupt Congress leaders from power’. The Jana Sangh joined him here even as they opposed him on Kashmir – such were the contradictions of Indian politics.

  On 2 March, four days before the planned march on Parliament, Mrs Gandhi dropped Mohan Dharia from her council of ministers. His mistake had been to request that she resume talks with Narayan. JP’s response was to ask senior ministers such as Y. B. Chavan and Jagjivan Ram to resign in protest, thus to ‘save their party from destruction’, and restore its ‘traditional values’.

  On 3 March Delhi’s inspector general of police convened a meeting on how to handle the coming influx of protesters. As many as 15,000 policemen would be on duty. To inhibit the marchers, the administration forbade the entry of trucks and buses from neighbouring states.

  Despite the ban on buses, people began streaming into the capital. They were housed in a tented camp outside the Red Fort, now named ‘Jayaprakash Nagar’. On the morning of the 6th they began walking towards the venue of the public meeting, the Boat Club lawns, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. Leading them, in an open jeep, was Jayaprakash Narayan. JP was cheered by the crowds assembled along the way, who offered garlands and showered him with petals. The slogans on display were chiefly addressed to his rival. ‘Vacate the Throne, the People are Coming’, said one, in English, with a Hindi variation reading: ‘Janata Ka Dil Bol Raha Hai, Indira Ka Singhasan Dol Raha Hai’ (The Heart of the People Is Singing, Indira’s Regime Is Sinking). Behind JP came jeeps bearing leaders of the opposition parties. Altogether, it was one of the largest processions ever seen in Delhi, drawing in an estimated 750,000 participants. There were representatives from all over India, but much the largest contingents came from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

  At the Boat Club lawns JP spoke in an ‘emotion-charged voice’. He compared the day’s events to Gandhi’s historic Salt March, and asked the crowd to be prepared for along struggle. After the meeting he led a delegation to Parliament, where he presented the Speaker with a list of the movement’s demands, which included the dissolution of the Bihar assembly, electoral reforms and the setting up of tribunals to investigate allegations a gainst the Congress of rampant corruption.

  Mrs Gandhi answered JP two days later, when in a speech at the steel town of Rourkela, she said that the agitators were bent on destroying the fabric of Indian democracy. Without mentioning her antagonist by name, she claimed his movement was nourished by foreign donations.

  On 18 March JP led a march in Patna to mark the first anniversary of the movement. There was much singing and dancing, and the throwing of colour, this also being the day of the Holi festival. In his speech Narayan urged the formation of a single opposition party or, at the very least, of a common front to fight
the Congress in all future elections.

  JP’s movement was strongly rooted in the northern states. He had supporters in the west, in Gujarat particularly, but the south was territory so far mostly untouched. So he now commenced a long tour of the states south of the Vindhyas, drawing decent but by no means massive crowds. In Tamil Nadu people warmly recalled that he had been against the imposition ofHindi.53

  VII

  While the JP movement was gaining ground, the prime minister was facing another kind of challenge, a challenge offered not through passionate sloganeering in the streets but in the cold language of the law. The scene here was the Allahabad High Court, which was hearing a petition filed by Raj Narain, the socialist who had lost to Mrs Gandhi in the Rae Bareilly parliamentary election of 1971. The petition alleged that the prime minister had won through corrupt practices, in particular by spending more money than was allowed, and by using, in her campaign, the official machinery and officials in government service. Throughout 1973 and 1974 the case dragged on, arguments and counterarguments being presented before the judge, Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha.54

  On 19 March 1975 Mrs Indira Gandhi became the first Indian prime minister to testify in court. She was in the witness box for five hours, answering questions about her election. In coming to Allahabad, the prime minister had left her son Sanjay behind in Delhi. With her instead was her elder son Rajiv, who, while his mother spoke in court, ‘took his Italian wife, Sonia, to see the ancestral home of the Nehrus’.55

  In April, Morarji Desai – an even older rival of Mrs Gandhi than JP – began a fast in Gujarat in protest against the continuation of President’s Rule. New Delhi backed down, ordering fresh elections for June. The opposition parties began the process of forming a common front to fight the Congress.

  As Gujarat went to the polls in the second week of June, L. K. Advani said the campaign had ‘accelerated the polarisation of political parties and the Jana Sangh would try to further this process’. He looked forward to his party increasing its strength ‘manifold’.56

  While the votes were being counted, attention shifted to the High Court in Allahabad. On the morning of 12 June, in Room No. 15 of a court in which Mrs Gandhi’s father and grandfather had both practised, Justice Sinha read out hisjudgement in the case brought before him three years previously by Raj Narain. He acquitted the prime minister on twelve out of fourteen counts. The charges he found her guilty of were, first, that the UP government constructed high rostrums to allow her to address her election meetings ‘from a dominating position’; and second, that her election agent, Yashpal Kapoor, was still in government employment at the time the campaign began. By the judgement, her election to Parliament was rendered null and void. However, the justice allowed Mrs Gandhi a stay of twenty days on his order, to allow an appeal in the Supreme Court.57

  The 12th of June was a very bad day for Mrs Gandhi. Early in the morning she was told that her old associate D. P. Dhar had died during the night. A little later came the news from Gujarat, which was also grim – the Janata Front was heading for a majority in the state elections. Then, finally, came this last and most telling blow, from her own home town, Allahabad.

  The judgement sparked much prurient interest in the intentions of the judge. Educated in Aligarh, Justice Sinha had practised in Bareilly for fourteen years before becoming a district judge. He had been elevated to the bench in 1970. Some claimed that his judgement was biased by the fact that he and JP came from the same Kayasth caste. Others believed that in the days before the judgement the prime minister’s men had offered him a seat on the Supreme Court were he to rule in their mistress’s favour.58

  Mrs Gandhi’s election had been overturned on a quite minor charge, yet Justice Sinha’s verdict also concentrated the popular mind on the more serious accusations levelled against her by JP’s movement. The day after the judgement, opposition politicians began a dharna outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, demanding that the president dismiss the ‘corrupt’ prime minister. In Patna, JP issued a statement saying it would be ‘shameful and cynical’ were Mrs Gandhi to listen to the ‘yes-men’ around her and stay on in office. He also noted that the Gujarat election results suggested that the ‘Indira wave’ and ‘Indira magic’ were matters of the past.

  On the other side, the yes-men were very busy indeed. On the 13th itself, the Congress chief minister of Haryana, Bans iLal, began ferrying supporters into Delhi, publicly to proclaim their loyalty to Mrs Gandhi. The roads outside the prime minister’s house were choked with her admirers. These shouted slogans in her favour and burnt effigies of Justice Sinha. Mrs Gandhi came out to address them, speaking of how foreign powers were conspiring with her domestic opponents to get rid of her. Her adversaries, she claimed, had ‘lots of money at their disposal’.

  Every day a fresh cadre of supporters would assemble outside Mrs Gandhi’s house; every day she would come out and speak to them. Some Congress members privately deplored these populist demonstrations. Others publicly encouraged them. Addressing a Congress rally in Delhi, the party president, Dev Kanta Barooah, said that ‘laws are made by people and the leader of the people is Mrs Gandhi’. Judges and lawyers, including the eminent legal luminary M. C. Chagla – once a member of Mrs Gandhi’s own Cabinet – thought the prime minister was morally bound to resign, at least until her appeal was heard and disposed of. On the other side, 516 party MPs signed a resolution urging her to stay on. Ten thousand Congress members from Karnataka signed a similar appeal, in blood. In the middle of the debate a voice spoke from across the border – it was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who worried that Mrs Gandhi would find a way out of her difficulties through ‘an adventurist course against Pakistan’.

  On 20 June Mrs Gandhi addressed a huge rally on the Boat Club lawns. A million people were said to have attended, even more than had heard JP at the same venue three months previously. The prime minister claimed the opposition was bent on liquidating her physically. Speaking after her, D. K. Barooah read out a couplet he had specially composed for the occasion:

  Indira tere subah kijai, tere sham kijai,

  Tere kam hi jai tere naam ki jai

  Or, to render it in less expressive English:

  Indira, we salute your morning and your evening too

  We celebrate your name and your great work too.

  Two days later the opposition answered with a rally of its own. It rained heavily, yet hundreds of thousands came. JP was the featured speaker, but his flight from Calcutta was cancelled at the last minute (‘mechanical trouble’, according to Indian Airlines). Representatives of the main opposition parties spoke, with Morarji Desai calling for a do or die’ movement to get rid of the Indira Gandhi regime.

  On 23 June the Supreme Court began hearing Mrs Gandhi’s petition. The next day Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer issued a conditional stay on the Allahabad judgement: the prime minister could attend Parliament, he said, but could not vote there until her appeal was fully heard and pronounced upon. The Indian Express thought this meant that Mrs Gandhi ‘must resign forthwith in the nation’s and her interests’.

  By now, at least some senior figures in the Congress Party thought that resignation would also be in the party’s interests. If she couldn’t vote in Parliament, she could scarcely lead her government to any purpose. She was advised to step down temporarily, to let one of her Cabinet colleagues – the uncontroversial Swaran Singh perhaps – keep the seat warm until the Supreme Court upheld her appeal (as her lawyers were confident it would), allowing her to return as prime minister.

  Urging Mrs Gandhi not to resign were her son Sanjay and the chief minister of West Bengal, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a well-trained barrister who had come from Calcutta to be at hand. Their advice was readily accepted. As Mrs Gandhi later told a biographer, ‘What else could I have done except stay? You know the state the country was in. What would have happened if there had been nobody to lead it? I was the only person who could, you know.’59

  Once the decision was taken, it was executed w
ith remarkable swiftness. On the 25th, S. S. Ray helped draft an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency, which a pliant president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, signed as soon as it was put in front of him. That night the power supply to all of Delhi’s newspaper offices was switched off, so that there were no editions on the 26th. Police swooped down on the opposition leaders, taking JP, Morarji Desai and many others off to jail. The next day the public of Delhi, and of India as a whole, was told by state-controlled radio that an emergency had been declared, and all civil liberties suspended.

  At the time, and later, it was thought that the reaction far exceeded the original provocation. Justice Sinha had indicted Mrs Gandhi of two quite trifling offences. The Supreme Court was less likely to construe the height of a rostrum as an ‘election malpractice’. As for the second charge, Yashpal Kapoor had resigned from service before joining the campaign, except that there was some dispute about the date on which his resignation was accepted. Most lawyers believed that the Supreme Court would reverse the Allahabad judgement. Yet, as one respected Delhi jurist put it, the prime minister forsook ‘the advantages of the ordinary judicial remedy of appeal and resorted instead to the extraordinary, undemocratic and unconstitutional measures of Emergency’.60