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

by Ramachandra Guha

  A mere four months before the emergency was declared, the Indian Express had paid tribute ‘to the resilience and maturity of Indian democracy’, of how it allowed ‘even the most serious differences [to] be harmonized and reconciliations effected’. The paper could now eat its words. Indian democracy, circa 1975, could reconcile the Valleyof Kashmir to the Union of India, butnot Indira Gandhi with Jayaprakash Narayan.

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  AUTUMN OF THE MATRIARCH

  Future generations will not remember us by how many elections we had, but by the progress we made.

  SANJAY GANDHI, December 1976

  I

  AT 6 A.M. ON 26 JUNE 1975, a meeting of the Union Cabinet was convened. The ministers, unthinking and bleary-eyed, were informed of the state of emergency, in effect since midnight. Their formal consent was obtained before Mrs Gandhi proceeded to the studios of All-India Radio (AIR) to convey the news to an equally unsuspecting nation. ‘The President has proclaimed Emergency’, she announced: ‘There is nothing to panic about.’ This, she said, was a necessary response to ‘the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India.’ ‘Forces of disintegration’ and ‘communal passions’ were threatening the unity of India. ‘This is not a personal matter,’ she claimed. ‘It is not important whether I remain Prime Minister or not.’ Still, she hoped that conditions would ‘speedily improve to enable us to dispense with this Proclamation as soon as possible’.1

  The disclaimers betray a certain defensiveness. For the fact was that the emergency had come hot on the heels of the Supreme Court order forbidding her from voting in Parliament. When the emergency was declared, the prime minister’s closest friend, the designer Pupul Jayakar, was away in the United States. On the 27th Mrs Gandhi sent Mrs Jayakar along note, explaining that the action was taken in response to the ‘increasing violence’ caused by a ‘campaign of hate and calumny’. The number of arrests, she claimed, were a mere 900, most detainees kept not in jail but ‘comfortably, in houses’. The ‘general public reaction’ was ‘good’, and there was ‘tranquillity all over the country’. The emergency, the prime minister told her friend, was ‘intended to enable are turn to normal democratic functioning’.2

  Across India people were being picked up and put into jails. These included leaders and legislators of parties other than the Congress, student activists, trade unionists, indeed, anyone with the slightest connection to the Jana Sangh, the Congress (O), the Socialists, or other groups opposed to the ruling party. Some of the detainees, such as Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai, were placed in government rest houses in the state of Haryana, not far from Delhi. However, the majority were sent to already overcrowded jails. And Mrs Gandhi’s arithmetic was soon shown to be wildly off the mark. Thousands were arrested under MISA – the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, known by its victims as the Maintenance of Indira and Sanjay Act. And there were other legal instruments at hand. The Rajmatas of Gwalior and Jaipur, old political opponents of Mrs Gandhi, were jailed under an act supposedly meant for black-marketeers and smugglers.3

  In the first few months of the emergency, the prime minister gave a flurry of interviews defending its proclamation. These too displayed a deep defensiveness. It is wholly wrong to say that I resorted to Emergency to keep myself in office,’ she told the Sunday Times of London. ‘The extra-constitutional challenge [of the JP movement] was constitutionally met.’ The emergency was ‘declared to save the country from disruption and collapse’; it had ‘enabled us to put through the new economic programme’, and led to ‘a new sense of national confidence’. ‘What has been done’, she told the Saturday Review of New York, ‘is not an abrogation of democracy but an effort to safeguard it’. In these interviews she attacked the Western press for ‘India-baiting’, for picking on her country in preference to more visibly authoritarian nations such as Pakistan andChina.4

  In her interviews and broadcasts the prime minister spoke of the need to infuse a ‘new spirit of discipline and morale’. The government’s copywriters were put to work, coining slogans such as ‘Discipline Makes the Nation Great’, ‘Talk Less, Work More’, ‘Be Indian, Buy Indian’, ‘Efficiency is our Watchword’. Other exhortations were less impersonal, such as She Stood between Order and Chaos’ and ‘Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name is Indira Gandhi’. Rendered in Hindi as well as English, these slogans were painted on the sides of buses, across bridges and on outsize hoardings erected outside government buildings.

  These were the signs of a creeping dictatorship. Like military men who seize power via a coup, Mrs Gandhi claimed to have acted to save the country from itself. And, like them, she went on to say that, while she had denied her people freedom, she would give them bread in exchange. Within a week of the emergency she was offering a ‘Twenty Point Programme for Economic Progress’. This promised a reduction in prices of essential commodities, the speedy implementation of land reforms, the abolition of indebtedness and of bonded labour, higher wages for workers and lower taxes for the middle class.5

  Female dictators are altogether rare – in the twentieth century Mrs Gandhi may have been the only such. However, as a woman autocrat, she could use images and symbols denied to her male counterparts. On 11 November, four and a half months into the emergency, the prime minister came to the microphone to ‘meet’ and ‘have a heart-to-heart talk’ with her countrymen. She spoke for over an hour, on the need for discipline, on her economic programme, on the glories of ancient India and the duties of its modern citizens. ‘Our opponents’ wanted to ‘paralyse the work of the Central Government’, said the Prime Minister, and thus

  we found ourselves in a serious situation. And we took certain steps. But many of the friends in the country were rather puzzled as to what has Indiraji done? What will happen to the country now? But we felt that the country has developed a disease and, if it is to be cured soon, it has to be given a dose of medicine even if it is a bitter dose. However dear a child may be, if the doctor has prescribed bitter pills for him, they have to be administered for his cure . . . So we gave this bitter medicine to the nation.

  . . . Now, when a child suffers, the mother suffers too. Thus we were not very pleased to take this step . . . But we saw that it worked just as the dose of the doctor worked.6

  II

  On 15 August 1975 The Times of London carried a full page advertisement taken out by the ‘Free JP Campaign’. The ad had been paid for by individuals: the first person to contribute being Bishop Trevor Huddles-ton, the last Dame Peggy Ashcroft. The other signatories to the appeal included such long-standing friends of India as the socialist Fenner Brockway, the economist E. F. Schumacher and the political scientist W. H. Morris-Jones, as well as celebrities with no specific connection to India, such as the actress Glenda Jackson, the historian A. J. P. Taylor and the critic Kenneth Tynan. On the page were printed photographs of Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan. Aside from the long list of names, the text show cased at estament to JP’s character and patriotism from the Mahatma himself.

  ‘Today is India’s Independence Day’, said the ad. ‘Don’t Let the Light Go Out on India’s Democracy’. The signatories called upon Mrs Gandhi to release all political prisoners, and Jayaprakash Narayan especially. The singling out of one person was not just in deference to his leadership of the oppositional movement in India. The prime movers of the ‘Free JP Campaign’ had known him from long before he launched his ‘Total Revolution’. The left-wing Labourites, such as Brockway, had known him from the 1930s, as a great hero of the independence movement. The environmentalists, such as E. F. Schumacher, had known him from the 1950s, as alike-minded votary of decentralized development. The political scientists had known him from before and after Independence, as an ever-present, always influential exemplar of what Morris-Jones had called the ‘saintly idiom’ in Indian politics.

  These foreign friends of I
ndia’s freedom were old enough to have seen how close Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan had once been. They were appalled that Nehru’s daughter had jailed JP, and hoped that an appeal to history would take him out of prison. So did that great group of pacifists, the Quakers, who did not put their name to the Times advertisement but tried the back-channels of reconciliation instead. The group had an old and honourable connection with India. Quakers such as Agatha Harrison and Horace Alexander had played crucial intermediary roles between British colonialists and Indian nationalists. More recently, they had worked with JP in attempting reconciliation between India and Pakistan and between the Naga rebels and the government in New Delhi.

  In August, a month after the emergency was declared, the sociologist Joe Elder was sent by his fellow Quakers on a fact-finding mission to India. He met many people; JP’s followers, Congress politicians and the prime minister. He found himself ‘decreasingly prone to condemn one side or the other’.JP had erred in launching a mass movement without a cadre of disciplined, non-violent volunteers. His ideas had ‘struck many as naive, untested, or unconvincing’. His movement’s credibility was weakened by the presence within it of extremists of left and right. On the other hand, the prime minister had clearly over-reacted in imposing the emergency. This had created fear in the minds of the people, and undermined the democratic process and democratic institutions.7

  As Elder’s account suggests, the emergency was a script jointly authored by JP and Mrs Gandhi. Both had shown too little faith in representative institutions: JP by asking for the premature dismissal of elected governments, Mrs Gandhi by jailing legally elected members of Parliament and legislative assemblies. Neither properly appreciated the role of the state in a modern democracy. JP wished simply for the state to disappear, for the police and army to ‘disobey immoral orders’. On the other hand, Mrs Gandhi sought to make the state’s functionaries ultimately dependent on the will of a single person at the helm.

  The clash was made poignant by the fact that the adversaries had once been friends, bound by ties of history and tradition and by intimate personal relationships stretching across generations. One does not know how Mrs Gandhi felt about jailing JP. We do know that her staff had deeply ambivalent feelings. The prime minister’s Information Adviser, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, was an old patriot and freedom-fighter himself. He had been jailed in 1942, in the same Quit India campaign that first made JP a national figure. Unlike Joe Elder, he could not bring himself to admit that the prime minister had over-reacted. Yet, as he wrote to a friend, he grieved that a man like JP, ‘at a moment of crucial ethical importance, decide[d] that RSS and CPM are more acceptable than the Congress. This is an excursion in reasoning that I have not been able to understand, much less excuse. I can only console myself with the thought that he would not have been so desperate if [his wife] Prabhavatiji had been alive.’8

  Also unhappy about JP’s incarceration was the economist P. N. Dhar, who had succeeded P. N. Haksar as the prime minister’s principal secretary. He sent several emissaries to JP to see whether a conciliation could be effected, with prisoners released and the emergency lifted, in time for the next parliamentary elections, due in early 1976. The emissaries found JP willing to negotiate. A flood in his native Bihar had made him impatient to go and work among the sufferers. Talk that his irresponsibility had caused the emergency had reached his ears. He said he had no desire to revive the popular movement, but when elections were called would ask for a combined front to oppose the Congress, and canvass for its candidates.9

  JP was keen that his old friend Sheikh Abdullah, now also a part of the Indian establishment as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, be the mediator between him and Mrs Gandhi. He had read a report quoting the Sheikh as saying that he was in favour of ‘conciliation at All-India level’, and that the prime minister was ‘more than keen to end the emergency’. JP now wrote to Abdullah offering him his ‘full co-operation’ in any move he might make to resolve the differences between the opposition and the government. That said, the letter betrayed signs of wounds still not healed, as in JP’s reference to himself being portrayed as ‘the villain of the piece, the arch-conspirator, the culprit number one’, and in his concluding challenge that ‘the first test of [the prime minister’s] keenness [to end the emergency] will be whether this letter is allowed to be delivered to you and whether you are permitted to see me’.10

  The prime minister failed the test. The letter was not passed on to the Sheikh, and the moves to effect a reconciliation died with it. However, in November 1975 JP’s health took a turn for the worse. With his kidneys failing, he was taken to a hospital in Chandigarh and, when the doctors there proved unequal to the task, released on parole and shifted to the Jaslok Hospital in Bombay, to be placed under the care of the nephrologist M. K. Mani. The government’s action was hastened by the realization that all hell might break loose if JP were to die in jail.11

  Although JP lay in a Bombay bed, chained to a dialysis machine, there was no general parole of political prisoners. An estimated 36,000 people were in jail under MISA, detained without trial. These were rather ecumenically spread across the states of the Union, 1,078 from Andhra Pradesh, 2,360 from Bihar and so on down the letters of the alphabet, until one reached 7,049 from Uttar Pradesh and 5,320 from West Bengal.12

  These victims of political vengeance were housed, fed and clothed like common criminals – in fact, made to share their cells with them (prompting the witticism that Mrs Gandhi’s much vaunted socialism was at least practised in the jails). Older prisoners looked nostalgically back to the days of the Raj, when the jails had been cleaner and the jailers altogether more humane. It seemed that women prisoners were singled out for special treatment. The Rajmatas of Gwalior and Jaipur were now living in conditions of unaccustomed austerity and filth. The socialist Mrinal Gore, more used to the simple life, was asked to share a toilet with the woman in the adjoining cell – who happened to be a leper. In the cell opposite was a lady lunatic who wore no clothes and shrieked day and night.13

  III

  Writing to a friend in January 1963, Indira Gandhi complained that democracy ‘not only throws up the mediocre person but gives strength to the most vocal howsoever they may lack knowledge and understand-ing’.14 Three years later, when she had just become prime minister, Mrs Gandhi told a visiting journalist that ‘the Congress has become moribund’, adding, ‘Sometimes I feel that even the parliamentary system has become moribund.’ Besides, the ‘inertia of our civil service is incredible’; we have a system of dead wood replacing dead wood’. ‘Sometimes I wish’, said the newly elected prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, that ‘we had a real revolution – like France or Russia – at the time of independence.’15

  The impatience with democratic procedure had been manifested early, as for instance with the packing of the civil service, the judiciary and the Congress Party with individuals committed to the prime minister. But the process was taken much further with the emergency. Now, with opposition MPs locked away, a series of constitutional amendments were passed to prolong Mrs Gandhi’s rule. The 38th Amendment, passed on 22 July 1975, barred judicial review of the emergency. The 39th Amendment, introduced two weeks later, stated that the election of the prime minister could not be challenged by the Supreme Court, but only by a body constituted by Parliament. This came just in time to help Mrs Gandhi in her election review petition, where the Court now held that there was no case to try, since the new amendment retrospectively rendered her actions during the 1971 elections outside the purview of the law.16

  Some months later the Supreme Court did the prime minister a greater favour still. Lawyers representing the thousands jailed under MISA argued that the right of habeas corpus could not be taken away by the state. Judgements in the lower courts seemed to favour this view, but when the case reached the Supreme Court it held that detentions without trial were legal under the new dispensation. Of the five-member bench only one dissented: this was
Justice H. R. Khanna, who pointed out that ‘detention without trial is an anathema to all those who love personal liberty’.17

  It was suggested that the judgement was influenced by extralegal considerations – by the hope of three of the judges that they might one day become chief justice, by the fear inspired by the punitive transfers of officials that had commenced with the emergency. In a despairing editorial entitled ‘Fading Hopes in India’, the New York Times remarked that ‘the submission of an independent judiciary to an absolutist government is virtually the last step in the destruction of a democratic society’.18

  In fact, there were other steps still to be taken. These included the 42nd Amendment, a twenty-page document whose clauses gave unprecedented powers to Parliament. It could now extend its own term -which it immediately did. The amendment gave laws passed by the legislature further immunity from judicial scrutiny, and further strengthened the powers of the centre over the states. All in all, the 42nd Amendment allowed Parliament ‘unfettered power to preserve or destroy the Constitution’.19

  In January 1976 the term of the DMK government ended in Tamil Nadu. Rather than call fresh elections, the centre ordered a spell of President’s Rule. Two months later the same medicine was applied to Gujarat, where the Janata Front had lost its majority owing to defections.