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

by Ramachandra Guha

  What was the prospect for the future? In an assessment on the emergency’s first anniversary, the Observer claimed to see a stirring beneath the calm. A bad monsoon could shatter the fragile economy, leading to inflation, and ‘igniting the mass discontent that smoulders beneath the surface. The resulting explosion might well produce a political crisis more serious than that of June 1975.’ Among the possible outcomes, in the Observer’s view, one could discount a return to democracy. For the most likely successor to Congress remains the Army’.46

  VII

  The Observer made the mistake of focusing on institutions rather than individuals. For, within India, what was being witnessed was not the army rising behind the facade of Congress rule, but the prime minister’s second son emerging as the most likely successor to her office.

  Recall that it was Sanjay Gandhi who had warned his mother against resigning, and he who had most strongly endorsed the emergency. In its first months he acquired a higher public profile. He was often to be seen by Mrs Gandhi’s side, and was even advising her on Cabinet appointments. When the liberal I. K. Gujral was seen as being too soft on the press, he was replaced at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) by the more hard-line V. C. Shukla. When the experienced Swaran Singh (once a senior member of Nehru’s Cabinet) was less than enthusiastic about the emergency, he was replaced as defence minister by Sanjay’s friend BansiLal.47

  Six weeks into the emergency Sanjay Gandhi gave a long interview to the Delhi magazine Surge. He spoke there of his personal life – he didn’t drink, or smoke – and of his relationship to hism other (‘yes, she obviously listens to my views’, he said in answer to one question; ‘She listened to them even when I was five years old’) He spoke of his work – he claimed to spend twelve to fourteen hours a day a this Maruti factory – and of the car he would soon produce, which would ‘out-corner either the Fiat or the Ambassador’ (the two cars that dominated the Indian market). He expressed himself in favour of free enterprise – ‘the quickest way to grow’ – and thought that the government should remove all controls on where, how and in what manner industries were established. Asked his idea of democracy, he said that it ‘doesn’t mean the freedom to destroy everything there is in a country. Democracy means the freedom to build a country.’ Asked about the Congress, he said it should become a ‘cadre-based party’. When the interviewer pointed out that both the Jana Sangh and the communists were based on cadres, Sanjay dismissed the first as ‘a favour-based party’. As for the latter, he commented that ‘if you take all the people in the Communist Party, the big wigs-even the not-so-big wigs – I don’t think you will find a richer or more corrupt people anywhere’.48

  Surge was a new magazine, and the interview was a scoop. The editor quickly sold the story to the agencies, who in turn passed it on to newspapers both Indian and foreign. These chose to highlight Sanjay Gandhi’s views on free enterprise – so at odds with his mother’s professed socialism – and his characterization of her loyal allies, the communists, as ‘corrupt’. When these excerpts were published, the prime minister sent a panic-stricken note to her secretary, P. N. Dhar. Sanjay’s comments were ‘exceedingly stupid’, she wrote. It would ‘not only grievously hurt those who have helped us’, but create ‘serious problems with the entire Socialist Bloc’. Dhar was able to contain the damage – no more snippets appeared in the press, and Surge was prevented from printing the interview. Sanjay himself was persuaded to issue a statement clarifying that leaders in the Jana Sangh and Swatantra parties were even more ‘corrupt’, and that the CPI must be saluted for its support to ‘progressive policies, specially those affecting the poor people’.49

  Sanjay was not deterred from giving more interviews, though. When the Illustrated Weekly of India asked him about curbs on the press, he answered that the papers ‘constantly told blatant, malicious lies. Censorship was the only way to put an end to this.’ Asked to provide a balance sheet of the emergency, he said that ‘the greatest gain is a sense of discipline and the speeding up of work’. And ‘what has the country lost? Smuggling, black-marketing, hoarding, bus burning and the habit of coming late to work.’50

  The editor of the Weekly, Khushwant Singh, emerged as the chief cheerleader and trumpeter of the rising son. Sanjay was termed as ‘The Man Who Gets Things Done’ and chosen as the ‘Indian of the Year’. The magazine ran lavish features on Sanjay and his young wife, Maneka, pages and pages of photographs accompanied by an invariably fawning text. (Samples: ‘He has determination, a sense of justice, a spirit of adventure and a total lack of fear’. ‘Sanjay Gandhi has added anew dimension to political leadership: he has no truck with shady characters or sycophants; he is a teetotaller, he lives a simple life, . . . his words are not hot air but charged with action.’)51

  Less surprising perhaps was the attention paid to the prime minister’s son by All-India Radio and the state-run television channel, Doordarshan. In a single year, 192 news items were broadcast about Sanjay Gandhi from the Delhi station of AIR. In the same period Doordarshan telecast 265 items about Sanjay’s activities. When he made a twenty-four-hour trip to Andhra Pradesh, the Films Division shot a full-length documentary called A Day to Remember, with commentary in three languages.52

  The surest sign of Sanjay Gandhi’s growing importance in Indian politics was the deference paid him by Union ministers and chief ministers. Before deciding on which admiral to promote, the defence minister, Bansi Lal, took the two candidates to be questioned by Sanjay. When the young man visited Rajasthan, the state’s chief minister came to the airport to receive him; on his drive into Jaipur city, Sanjay passed 501 arches erected in his honour. A similar show was organized when he visited Uttar Pradesh; at Lucknow airport, when Sanjay stumbled on the tarmac and lost his slipper, it was picked up and reverentially handed back by the UP chief minister himself.53

  VIII

  The prime minister had once chastised the Indian princes for promoting birth over talent. Now she had succumbed to that temptation herself. The elevation of hers on followed a notably feudal route. Just as an heir apparent is given a title at an early age – a duke of this or the prince of that – Sanjay was given charge of the Congress’s youth wing. (He was in theory merely a member of the Executive Council, but in practice the Youth Congress’s president took orders from him.) And just as sons of Mughal emperors were once given a suba (province) to run before taking over the kingdom itself, Sanjay was asked to look after affairs in India’s capital city. Within a few months of the emergency, the word had got around: ‘the PM herself wanted all matters pertaining to Delhi to be handled by her son’.54

  By now, Sanjay Gandhi had formulated a five-point programme to complement his mother’s twenty-point one. These dealt with, respectively, family planning, afforestation, abolition of dowry, the removal of illiteracy and slum clearance. Of these the focus was on the first, nationally, and on the fifth, when it came to Delhi. The capital was dotted with slums that had spontaneously arisen to house the migrants who did the low-paying jobs in residential colonies and government offices. Here lived sweepers, rickshaw-pullers, domestic servants, office boys and their families. There were almost a hundred such settlements in the city, housing close to half a million people.55

  Sanjay Gandhi wanted these slums demolished and their inhabitants settled in farmland across the river Jumna. Here, his ideas coincided with those of Jagmohan, the ambitious vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Jagmohan’s great hero was Baron Haussmann; he hoped to do for Delhi what that town planner had once done for Paris. By clearing the slums and building boulevards, the baron had transformed the French capital. Once ‘an ugly and despicable town’, it had become a ‘seat of vigorous and vibrant culture’. However, Jagmohan’s admiration for autocratic methods was catholic. He praised what the Chinese communists had accomplished in Shanghai, for example: this a ‘result of firm national policy and commitment’, when ‘in India, on the other hand, we are still in a state of drift’. The
DDA vice-chairman once lamented that he was

  No Haussmann reborn

  No Lutyens with a chance

  Nor Corbusier with Nehru’s arms

  I am a little fellow

  An orphan of these streets

  Still,

  With all the millstones

  Around my neck

  I stand erect

  Restless and keen

  Willing to fight

  Willing to dream. ..56

  This was written in 1974, before the emergency. A year later Sanjay Gandhi arrived, to free Jagmohan’s arms, to remove the millstones from round his neck. The town planner had long been disturbed by slums, signs of a ‘sick and soulless city’. Impatient to clean and clear them, he had been impeded by the messiness of democratic procedure – the need to obtain consent, to provide proper resettlement, to deal with political activists purporting to represent the people.

  Jagmohan was a key member of a coterie that had sprung up around Sanjay Gandhi. Others included Naveen Chawla, who was secretary to the lieutenant governor, and the senior police officer P. S. Bhinder. Among the women who worked with Sanjay were the president of the Youth Congress, Ambika Soni, and a socialite-cum-social worker, Ruksana Sultana, who was seen as his unofficial representative to the slum dwellers. Every morning the group met in Sanjay’s office to take orders and provide reports. Also in attendance was the prime minister’s stenographer, R. K. Dhawan, who provided the link between this Delhi cabal and the doings of the government of India. Preceptor to the lot was Dhirendra Brahmachari, a long-haired swami who first entered the Gandhi home as Indira’s yoga teacher, but stayed on to become a favourite of her son. Dressed and trained as a Hindu holy man, Brahmachari was yet modern enough to own and run a firearms factory in Kashmir.

  The names of this coterie became known in the city, their doings discussed in hushed whispers. It was said that the surest way to have the government act in your favour was to speak to (and please) one of the above. Businessmen seeking licences or tax exemptions rushed to them; so did MPs hoping for a Cabinet appointment. Contrasts were drawn between Sanjay’s largely ‘Punjabi mafia’ and his mother’s once-powerful Kashmiri lobby. The brashness of the former was compared with the sophistication of the latter. However, the differences were not so much of style as of intent. Where the Kashmiris were ‘committed’ to their shared socialist ideology as much as to their leader, Sanjay’s gang was committed only to Sanjay himself.57

  The exception to this general rule was Jagmohan. He had already identified the tidying-up of Delhi as his life’s mission – and was delighted to find it endorsed by the prime minister’sson. Now, Sanjay’s support and the emergency’s cover gave legitimacy to the DDA vice-chairman’s preference for coercion over persuasion. The bulldozer scould move into the slums, free even of the probing eye of the press. In the fifteen years preceding the emergency the DDA had moved a mere 60,000 families; in the fifteen months following it the number more than doubled.58

  Jagmohan’s operations focused on the old city, where Mughal monuments and mosques nested cheek-by-jowl with damp houses and dark streets. On the morning of 13 April 1976 a bulldozer moved into the Turkman Gate area, behind Asaf Ali Road, the street that divides Old Delhi from New. In two days it had demolished a slum of recent origin, housing forty families. Then it moved towards a set of pucca houses of uncertain antiquity. The residents contacted their MP, a Congress Party member and old associate of Mrs Gandhi named Sub-hadra Joshi. Mrs Joshi in turn contacted the officials of the DDA; Jagmohan himself was appealed to.

  The negotiations stalled the operations temporarily, but in a couple of days they had resumed. Three bulldozers were at work, acting, they said, on Jagmohan’s orders. They had demolished more than a hundred houses when, acting in desperation, a group of women and children squatted on the road and defied the bulldozers to run over them. When they refused to move, the DDA called for the police. In sympathy with the protesters, shops in the vicinity began to close.

  The police tried to shift the squatters with sticks and, when that failed, with tear-gas. The retaliation came in the form of stones. The fighting escalated and spread into the narrow lanes. The numbers of the mob grew; the police progressed from using tear-gas to using bullets. It took the better part of a day before order was restored. Estimates of the number who died in the fighting range from 10 to 200. Curfew was imposed in the Old City; it was a full month before it was lifted.59

  The offices of India’s leading newspapers are on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, less than a mile away from Turkman Gate. Yet in the conditions of the emergency none could write about the incident. However, the underground picked it up and played it up. The news reached Sheikh Abdullah, who was ‘terribly distressed’ by the shootings. He complained to the prime minister, who agreed that he could visit the area. Accompanied by a leading Congress politician, Abdullah toured the Old City, speaking to people about their recent experiences.60 There he learnt that aside from the natural reluctance to leave their houses, the protesters had been hurt by being subject to the first of Sanjay Gandhi’s five points – family planning. In June1976 the underground newspaper Satya Samachar reported that the Sheikh had told a group of Congress MPs that ‘the whole trouble began when young, old and even invalid people were dragged off to the sterilization camps. Nobody has any quarrel with the economic policies of the Prime Minister, but the way in which they are being implemented, I am sure, will lead to an explosion.’61

  IX

  In fairness, Sanjay Gandhi was not the only person concerned about his country’s large and still growing population. The Malthusian spectre had long haunted India, as the pages of this book should have made clear already. Western journalists feared large-scale famine; Western biologists had written off the country altogether. Many Indians also worried that a rising population would put paid to the other achievements of their nation. Between 1857 and 1947 gross national product stagnated; there were periods in which it even declined. After Independence, GNP grew at 3 per cent per annum. However, with the high increase in human numbers, the per capita income grew at a mere 1 per cent a year.

  The debates on India’s population size dated from the earliest days of Independence. Social workers had set up a Family Planning Association of India in 1949. The Planning Commission had spoken of the importance of family planning since its inception in 1950–1. However, culture and economics worked in favour of large families. The biases in educational development meant that girls were still valued more as child-bearers than as wage-earners. The continuing dependence on agriculture placed a premium on children. Indian Muslims and Catholics were enjoined by their clergy to abjure family planning. And Hindu couples greatly preferred sons to daughters, trying and trying again until they had one.

  In 1901 the population of India stood at about 240 million; by 1971 it had reached close to 550 million. In this period, birth rates had fallen slightly, from nearly 50 births per 1,000 Indians to about 40. However, the decline in death rates had been far steeper, from 42 per 1,000 at the turn of the century down to 15 by the 1970s. Advances in medical care and more nutritious food allowed all Indians, including infants previously liable to early death, to live longer. But since the birth rate and average family size did not decline at a comparable rate, the population continued to rise.62

  It is difficult precisely to date Sanjay Gandhi’s own interest in family planning. His Surge interview of August 1975 does not mention the subject at all. Yet a year later, the Illustrated Weekly of India was speaking of how ‘Sanjay has given a big impetus to the Family Planning Programme throughout the country’. He claimed that if his programme was implemented, ‘50 per cent of our problems will be solved’. He expressed himself in favour of compulsory sterilization, for which facilities should be provided ‘right down to the village level’.63

  Of Sanjay Gandhi’s five points, writes his biographer, the other four were humdrum, unglamorous, ‘hardly the stuff to build charismatic leadership credentials on’.
But ‘family planning was. Here was a Herculean project, the solving of which, everyone acknowledged, was vital if the nation hoped to survive, let alone prosper’. And so, ‘family planning became the lynchpin of Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency activities’.64

  In his tours around India, Sanjay Gandhi catalysed a competitive process between the states of the Union. Sanjay would tell one chief minister of what another had claimed to have done – ‘60,000 operations in two weeks’ – and encourage him to exceed it. These targets were passed down to district officials, who were rewarded if they met or exceeded them and transferred otherwise. The process led to widespread coercion. Lower government officials had to submit to the surgeon’s knife before arrears of pay were cleared. Truck drivers would not have their licences renewed if they could not produce a sterilization certificate. Slum dwellers would not be allotted a plot for resettlement unless they did likewise.65