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

by Ramachandra Guha

  The hand of the state fell heavily in the towns, but the villagers were not spared either. An anthropologist doing fieldwork in Maharashtra’s Satara district reported that the emergency had little impact in its first year. A few homes were built for the landless under the twenty-point programme. A few slogans were painted denouncing the dictatorship. Then, in September 1976 – shortly after Sanjay Gandhi’s visit to the state – a campaign for compulsory sterilization began in the villages. Local officials prepared lists of ‘eligible men’, that is, of those who already had three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders. Those who had undergone a vasectomy were too embarrassed to talk about it.66

  As with slum demolition, here too there was resistance. In September 1976 an underground newspaper reported a ‘wave of protests’ against family planning in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. There were clashes between health officials and shopkeepers refusing to be sterilized. Resistance was reported from many towns in UP – Sultanpur, Kanpur, Bareilly.There was great resentment among school teachers, who had been asked to conduct house-to-house surveys in pursuance of the sterilization campaign. As many as 150 teachers were arrested for defying orders.

  The worst incident, the Turkman Gate of family planning so to speak, took place in the town of Muzaffarnagar, seventy miles northwest of Delhi. The district magistrate here was notorious for his zeal, and for his communalism – under his orders, the chiefly Hindu police had gone with particular relish for Muslim artisans and labourers. On 18 October a scuffle broke out between officials promoting sterilization and their potential victims. Their pent-up anger released, the mob torched the health clinics and threw bottles and stones. The police were called in, and resorted very quickly to firing, in which more than fifty people died. A delegation of opposition MPs rushed to the town but were prohibited from speaking to the residents. However, reports leaked into the foreign press, and the prime minister was constrained to admit in Parliament that there had been an ‘incident’ in Muzaffarnagar.67

  An incidental victim of Sanjay Gandhi’s family planning drive was the great popular singer Kishore Kumar. Other film stars and musicians agreed to perform in a programme to raise money forsterilization, but Kishore refused. As a consequence, his songs were banned from Vividh Bharati, the AIR channel that exclusively broadcast film music. The Film Censor Board was instructed to hold up the release of movies in which Kishore acted or sang. Sanjay’s men also warned record companies against selling Kishore’s songs. It was an act of petty vindictiveness in keeping with the times.68

  X

  That the prime minister chose, at a time of crucial political importance, to rely on Sanjay Gandhi rather than P. N. Haksar and company – this was an excursion in reasoning that even her close friends found difficult to understand. Various theories were offered – that it was the manifestation of the guilt of a working mother and single parent, that she was paranoid about assassination and hence could trust only her family, that Sanjay knew her darkest secrets and hence had a hold over her, that she was grateful for his support when the emergency was declared. However appealing to the biographer, to the historian such speculation is nearly useless. For what matters here is not intent but consequence – not why Mrs Gandhi chose to rely so much on her younger son but on what this reliance meant for India and Indians.

  It is tempting to view Mrs Gandhi’s political career as being divided into two phases, with the emergency and Sanjay Gandhi providing the dividing line. Before Sanjay, it might be said, she won elections, created Bangladesh, reformed the Congress Party and made bold attempts to reorganize the economy. Under Sanjay’s malign influence she turned her back on these larger social goals and became obsessed with the preservation of herself and herfamily.69

  However, when one views the prime minister’s career in the round, Sanjay and the emergency should be said to mark not a radical departure from past practice, but a deepening of it. From the time of the Congress split, Mrs Gandhi had worked to place loyal individuals in position of authority, and to make public institutions an instrument of her will. Institutions such as the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the presidency and the Congress Party had been eroded well before the emergency. Sanjay’s arrival took the process further – some would argue much further. It also vulgarized and corrupted it, and made it more violent. But the process itself antedated his entry into Indian politics.

  By June 1975 Mrs Gandhi had been prime minister of India for a little less than a decade. When one compares her tenure with that of her father, one is struck by a striking paradox – that Nehru’s halting yet honest attempts to promote a democratic ethos in a hierarchical society were undone by his own daughter, and in decisive and dramatic ways. The grievously mistaken dismissal of the communist government in Kerala aside, Nehru took seriously the idea of an opposition. But Mrs Gandhi paid other political parties scant respect. She attended Parliament less regularly than Nehru, and spoke much less when in it. Nehru forged abiding friendships with politicians of other parties – something quite inconceivable in the case of Mrs Gandhi. Then there was the contrast with how they treated their own party. In Nehru’s time the Congress was a decentralized and largely democratic organization. Even had he been so inclined, he would not have been able to impose a chief minister against the will of a state’s own politicians.

  The contrast is reinforced when one considers the other, non-political aspects of democratic life in India. Nehru respected the freedom of the press, and allowed it to flourish. Nehru respected the autonomy of the bureaucracy and the judiciary: there are no known cases of his having intervened to favour or act against a particular official.

  At least from the time of the Congress split in 1969, Mrs Gandhi had begun to depart from the political traditions of India’s founding premier. The departures became more marked over the years, and became fully apparent only with the enactment of the emergency and the repression that followed. For partisan reasons of their own, opposition politicians could not posit a contrast between the first and third prime ministers of India. Because they had once opposed Nehru, and because the Congress was now led by his daughter, they could scarcely praise one and diminish the other.

  Unbound by such constraints, Western writers who knew both leaders could see quite clearly how Indira Gandhi had departed from Jawaharlal Nehru. A year into the emergency, two British friends of Nehru made the contrast the focus of their criticisms of the regime. Writing in the Times, Fenner Brockway deplored the conversion of ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ into a ‘repressive dictatorship’. Himself ‘a son of India’, Brockway ‘appeal[ed] to Mrs Gandhi in memory of the principles of her distinguished father, to end these denials of freedom and liberty’.70 Writing in the Spectator, John Grigg recalled Nehru’s commitment to free elections and a free press. India’s first prime minister was ‘a true patriot because he was a true democrat . . . During his long premiership he made many mistakes but on the vital libertarian issue he never broke faith with the Indian people.’ But now, noted Grigg sadly, ‘Nehru’s tryst with destiny seems to have been turned into atryst with despotism – and by his own daughter.’ Mrs Gandhi ‘should have been the proudest upholder of India’s democratic experiment, which was proving to the whole world that people did not have to be rich or educated to enjoy civil liberties’. Yet by her actions she had ‘spuriously confirmed’ the view of ‘old-fashioned imperialists’ that ‘only authoritarian methods can work in a country like India’. Grigg asked the prime minister to free herself from her son’s influence and return to the values of her father’s generation. Indeed, he implore[d] her – at whatever cost in power, “face”, and mother-love – to restore the freedoms she has taken away’. To do so, he wrote, ‘would be the hardest act of her career but it would also be the bravest and best’.71

  Other British friends wrote privately to Mrs Gandhi, urging her to end the emergency. One such was the old Quaker Horace Alexander, w
ho had once mediated between Mahatma Gandhi and the British Raj, and also first introduced the current prime minister to the delights of bird watching in the Indian countryside.72 There was also impersonal yet very public criticism, offered in the then widely respected Times newspaper by the even more widely respected columnist Bernard Levin. In October 1976 Levin wrote two long articles on the recent attacks on democracy in India. Speaking of the suspension of habeas corpus, and the curbs on the press, he warned that Mrs Gandhi was turning her country into a ‘tin-pot dictatorship’. In the first week of January 1977 he wrote two more essays, criticizing the constitutional amendments passed to emasculate the presidency and the judiciary. These ‘tyrannous provisions’ were ‘entirely unnecessary except to one who wants total power and the ability to use it without check’. These latest changes, said Levin, had confirmed the ‘transformation of India into a fully authoritarian regime under its seedy dictator, Mrs Indira Gandhi’.73

  On 18 January 1977 the prime minister announced that Parliament was to be dissolved and fresh elections held. This came as a surprise to her political opponents, who were let out of their cells even as the announcement was being made on All-India Radio. And, from all accounts, it came as a shock to hers on Sanjay, who too had not been informed before hand. The term of the present Parliament could have been extended, year after year. The underground resistance had been fully tamed. And yet Mrs Gandhi decided, suddenly and without consulting anyone, to return India to democracy.

  There was much speculation as to why the prime minister had turned her back on emergency rule. In the Delhi coffee houses, the gossip was that her intelligence chief had assured her that the Congress would be re-elected with a comfortable majority. Some felt that it was the consequence of competitive one-upmanship. President Bhutto had just announced elections in his usually autocratic Pakistan; could Mrs Gandhi delay elections in her unnaturally autocratic India? Her secretary, writing long after the event, offered yet a third explanation. The emergency, he noted, had cut Mrs Gandhi off from the public contact that previously nourished her. ‘She was nostalgic about the way people reacted to her in the 1971 campaign and she longed to hear again the applause of the multitudes.’74

  Perhaps all these factors contributed. So did the criticism from Western observers and (especially) friends. Aside from those already quoted, the emergency was strongly condemned by the former German chancellor Willy Brandt and the Socialist International ‘all socialists must now feel a great sense of personal tragedy at what is happening in India’; by the World Council of Churches in Geneva (‘a very serious abridgement of human rights’); and by the leading American trade union organization, the AFL/CIO ‘India has become a police state in which democracy has been smothered’.75

  What, finally, persuaded Mrs Gandhi to end the emergency? One cannot say for certain, but it does seem that she was stung by the comments of those foreign observers impossible to dismiss as enemies of India. Fenner Brockway and John Grigg were not Richard Nixon and the CIA. Nor were they sceptics who had sneered at India, who had hoped that its democracy would fail. These, rather, were very old friends of India’s freedom. While the Raj lasted they had pressed the British to leave, and after Independence had saluted the installation of a democratic regime. We do not know whether Mrs Gandhi read their essays, or indeed the articles by Bernard Levin. Yet it is more likely than not that she did. They might have been placed before her without comment by a member of her own staff, or of her intimate circle, himself less than enamoured of the emergency. It is a striking coincidence that the elections were called two weeks after Levin’s second series in The Times – just enough time for them to be air-mailed to India, seen by someone in the PM’s office, clipped and passed on to her.

  But coincidence it may be. We shall never know for sure, one reason being that Mrs Gandhi’s papers remain closed (and shall probably always be so). Still, it is appropriate to end this chapter with a fragment underlining how the dictatorship imposed by India’s third prime minister was so much at odds with the democratic legacy of her father. Visiting New Delhi during the emergency, the New York Times’s A. M. Rosenthal – who had once served as his paper’s correspondent in India – concluded that, had Jawaharlal Nehru lived while Indira Gandhi reigned, the two would have been political opponents rather than allies. An Indian friend of Rosenthal’s captured that imagined scenario in this way: ‘Indira is in the Prime Minister’s house, and Jawaharlal is back to writing letters to her from jail again.’76

  The allusion was to a series of letters written to Indira Gandhi by Nehru in the early 1930s, while lodged in a British jail. These presented his thirteen-year-old daughter with a panoramic sweep of world history. Starting with the Greeks, and ending with the Indian freedom struggle, the story as told by the father unfolded the (oft-interrupted) progress of the human animal towards greater sociability and freedom. The later letters explored how ‘democracy, which was for a century and more the ideal and inspiration of countless people, and which can count its martyrs by the thousands,’ was now ‘losing ground everywhere’. The last letter, sent to Indira on 9August 1933 – three years after the first – ended with the stirring paean to freedom contained in Rabindranath Tagore’s great poem Gitanjali.

  When published in book form, the letters sold briskly, and in time the author was persuaded by his publisher to bring out an expanded edition. A freshly written postscript, dated 14 November 1938, outlined the major political developments of the latter part of the decade. ‘The growth of fascism during the last five years and its attack on every democratic principle and conception of freedom and civilization’ wrote Jawaharlal to Indira, ‘have made the defence of democracy the vital question today.’ Unfortunately, ‘democracy and freedom are in grave peril today, and the peril is all the greater because their so-called friends stab them in the back’. 77

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  LIFE WITHOUT THE CONGRESS

  All my father’s works have been written in prison. I recommend prison life not only for aspiring writers but for aspiring politicians too.

  INDIRA GANDHI, 1962

  I

  IN JANUARY 1977, WHILE announcing fresh elections, the prime minister recalled that ‘some eighteen months ago, our beloved country was on the brink of disaster’. The emergency had been imposed ‘because the nation was far from normal’. Now that it ‘is being nursed back to health’, elections were permissible.

  Even as Mrs Gandhi spoke over the radio, her opponents were being released from jails across the country. The next day, 19 January, the leaders of four parties met at the residence of Morarji Desai in New Delhi. These parties were the Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal (a party principally of farmers, led by the veteran Charan Singh), the Socialist Party and Morarji’s own Congress (O). The following day Desai told the press that they had decided to fight the elections under a common symbol and a common name. On the 23rd, the ‘Janata (Peoples) Party’ was formally launched at a news conference in the presence of Jayaprak-ash Narayan.1

  Ten days after the formation of the Janata Party, Jagjivan Ram announced that he was leaving the Union government. Known universally as ‘Babuji’, Ram was a lifelong Congressman, a prominent minister in Nehru’s and Indira Gandhi’s Cabinets and – most crucially – the acknowledged leader of the Scheduled Castes, the former Untouchables who made up some 15 per cent of the electorate. It was Ram who had moved the resolution in the Lok Sabha endorsing the emergency. His resignation came as a shock to the Congress, and as a harbinger of things to come. For Babuji was renowned for his political acumen; that he chose to leave the Congress was widely taken as a sign that this ship was, if not yet sinking, then leaking very badly indeed. In resigning from his old party Ram formed a new one: the Congress for Democracy. The CFD, he said, would collaborate with the Janata Party regarding candidates in order to avoid the Congress gaining from a split opposition vote.

  The elections had been scheduled for the third week of March. The opposition campaign
kicked off with a mass rally at New Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds on Sunday 6 March. In a desperate measure to stem the crowds the government chose to telecast a popular romantic film, Bobby, at the same time as the rally. There was only one TV channel in 1977, this run by the state, and in normal circumstances half of Delhi’s adult population would have been huddled around their screens. But, as one pro-Janata paper gleefully reported, on this day Babuji had won over Bobby. A million people heard JP and Jagjivan Ram speak, along with the leaders of the other opposition parties, all now pledged to a common fight against Indira Gandhi and the Congress.2

  In India’s commercial capital, Bombay, the same day saw the city’s most popular weekly hit the stands containing interviews with Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan, a veritable double scoop. The prime minister told the interviewer that the Janata men ‘are only united against me, but not on any positive programme’. The new name could not hide the same old aim, which is to get rid of Indira Gandhi’. In his interview, JP claimed that the Janata Party is no greater hotchpotch than the Congress’. For the ruling party had within it ‘all types of vested interests and it is seething with internal differences’. Asked for a message to the weekly’s readers, Narayan said they should vote without fear, and remember that ‘if you vote for the Opposition you will vote for Freedom. If you vote for the Congress you will vote for Dictatorship.’3

  The chief protagonists of the conflicts of 1973–5 were also the chief campaigners in the elections of 1977. Despite hisage and indifferent health, JP hit the road. Between 21 February and 5 March he spoke at Patna, Calcutta, Bombay, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Indore, Poona and Ratlam – pausing only to spend time with his dialysis machine. Everywhere, he warned the audience that ‘this is the last free election if the Congress is voted back to power’; then, ‘nineteen months of tyranny shall become nineteen years of terror’.4 In her speeches Mrs Gandhi denied that her party was the monopoly of one family. In any case, ‘few families in the world’ had a comparable record of service and sacrifice. She admitted that there had been some excesses during the emergency, yet defended the regime as necessary at the time. ‘We don’t care who criticises us’, she insisted. ‘We have to proceed on the right path guided by sound policies, programmes and principles.’5