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

by Ramachandra Guha

  At least in northern India, the elections were inevitably seen as a referendum on those policies and programmes; and on one programme in particular, that of compulsory sterilization. There was, reported one journalist, a ‘burning hatred against forced vasectomies’; this extremely emotive and explosive issue’ had ‘become the focus of all pent-up frustrations and resentment’. Voters told Congress candidates to show their own sterilization certificates; when they couldn’t, they were simply asked to leave. Opposition election slogansalso harped on the issue; these dismissed the Congress as a sarkari khasi kendra, the official castration centre, and warned that to re-elect the party would be to bring back forced sterilization. Other slogans targeted the programme’s chief promoter: Gandhi Nehru ke desh main kaun hai ye Sanjay Gandhi? asked one -In the land of Gandhi and Nehru, who is this impostor Sanjay Gandhi? Particularly active in the election campaign were school teachers and lower officials, those who had their promotions stopped or were punitively transferred for not having met the ‘quotas’ (of males to be sterilized) assigned them by the administration.6

  On the night of 20 March 1977 the election results were posted outside newspaper offices in Delhi as they came in. The next day’s papers reported that the crowds ‘were partisan and loudly pro-Janata’, cheering as ‘the kingpins of the Congress Party tumbled one after another’. When news of Mrs Gandhi’s defeat in her previously safe seat of Rae Bareilli was announced, ‘the people in high spirits thronging the streets began shouting slogans and bursting crackers’. The news of Sanjay Gandhi’s defeat was followed by louder cheers and more prolonged celebrations still. Mrs Gandhi had lost to her old foe and litigant Raj Narain; in the adjoining constituency of Amethi, Sanjay had been defeated by an obscure student leader.7

  The defeats of mother and son were part of a wider washout of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh. They lost all 85 seats in the state, and all 54 seats in neighbouring Bihar, to the Janata–CFD alliance. In Rajasthan the Congress won one seat out of 25; in Madhya Pradesh one out of 40. These losses were partly offset by a robust performance in southern India, where the emergency had rested lightly. In Andhra Pradesh the Congress won 41 seats out of 42; in Karnataka, 26 out of 28; in Kerala, 11 out of 20; in Tamil Nadu, 14 out of 39. The Janata surge had scarcely dented the south; still, given the higher population densities and seat shares of the northern states, in the aggregate the Congress fell far short of a majority. They won 153 seats in a house of 540, down more than 200 from the 1971 elections. On the other side, as many as 298 Janata and CFD candidates were successful.8

  The elections had revealed a manifest regional divide, and also a divide by caste and religious affiliation. Two groups in particular, long considered to be loyal ‘vote banks’ of the ruling party, had this time deserted the Congress. One was the Scheduled Castes, many of whom were swayed into voting for Janata by the defection of Jagjivan Ram. The other was the Muslims, who had suffered grievously at the hands of Sanjay’s pet programmes. When elections were called, the influential Imam of Delhi’s greatest mosque, the Jama Masjid, asked Muslims to vote against the Congress. This they mostly did, contributing in good measure to the party’s disastrous showing in northern India.9

  Sober commentators spoke of a ‘Janata wave’; less sober ones, of a ‘revolution’. For the first time in the nation’s thirty-year history, a party other than the Congress would govern at the centre. No Indian alive in 1977 knew what it was like not to have the Congress as the country’s dominant and ruling political party. Few knew what it was like not to have Nehru or Indira Gandhi as its dominant and ruling political figure.

  The results of the elections delighted many, angered some and surprised all. In a letter to a friend Mrs Gandhi attributed her defeat to malign forces. ‘People have always thought that I was imagining things and overreacting’, she wrote, ‘but there has been a deep conspiracy and it was bound to overtake us.’10 One editor who had been among her most steadfast supporters took the long and more hopeful view. Like Winston Churchill, Indira Gandhi had led her nation to victory in war; like him, she had been cheered for it; and like him she had been thrown out of power by an ungrateful people. There was consolation here for Mrs Gandhi, as well as a lesson for those who had replaced her. Thus the Janata-CFD regime ‘will soon learn that promises are like lollipops, but performance is like a dose of bitter medicine. And the people are as mercurial as quicksilver. The cheering crowds of yesterday may turn into a jeering mob tomorrow.’11

  II

  Unlike the Congress, the Janata Party had not fought the elections under a single leader. After the results were in, a controversy arose as to who should be chosen prime minister. The supporters of Charan Singh felt that the sweep in northern India made him the logical choice. Jagjivan Ram’s men argued that since his defection had been decisive he should be considered. Then there was Morarji Desai, who had almost become prime minister in 1964 and again in 1967.

  The last week of March saw hectic canvassing on behalf of the three candidates. Finally, it was decided that the Grand Old Men behind Janata, Jayaprakash Narayan and J. B. Kripalani would make the choice. They settled on Desai, who had unparalleled administrative experience as well as a spotless personal record. Jagjivan Ram was offered the prestigious Defence portfolio, Charan Singh the powerful Home Ministry. Finance went to the old civil servant H. M. Patel, External Affairs to the Jana Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee.

  What would be the policies of the new government? It was hard to predict, since within both party and Cabinet there was a veritable mishmash of ideologies: some baiting Nehru, others praising him, some talking about the commanding heights of the public sector, and others brashly championing the Japanese and American models, ‘some asserting the need for heavy industries, other clamouring for a “return to the villages”’.12 The importance of Charan Singh signalled an anti-urban bias, and the Planning Commission was now dominated by economists who specialized in agriculture rather than industry. The importance of the socialists signalled a hard time for foreign capital; indeed, the industries minister, the fiery trade union leader George Fernandes, announced that the American multinationals Coca-Cola and IBM would both be made to quit India (which, in due course, they were).

  Among the more pragmatic ministers was Madhu Dandavate, who was put in charge of the railways. This was the branch of government which serviced more Indians than any other, and none too well either. Dandavate too was a socialist, but his socialism eschewed rhetoric against the rich in favour of policies for the poor. As he put it, ‘what I want to do is not degrade the first class but elevate the second class’. Dandavate initiated the computerization of railway reservations, which reduced corruption among booking clerks and uncertainty among passengers. He set in motion the repair or replacement of 5,000 kilometres of worn-out tracks. But his most far-reaching measure was to place two inches of foam on the hard wooden berths that passed for second-class ‘sleepers’, thus bringing their comfort levels closer to that prevailing in the first-class section of trains. Introduced at first on the major trunk lines, this change was in time effected on all trains, cumulatively benefiting hundreds of millions of travellers.13

  In the government’s early months observers waited with keen anticipation for a shift in foreign policy. The day after the election results were announced, the New York Times wrote that, whereas the attitude of the Congress towards the West had varied from a self-righteous edginess’ to ‘a chilliness bordering on hostility’, ‘all indications’ from the Janata alliance were that ‘a friendly attitude can be expected towards the United States, with a noticeable cooling of feelings for the Soviet Union’. American strategists were salivating at the prospect of a China–India–US alliance against the Soviet Union. The Janata victory, they thought, ‘represented] something of a windfall for Washington’.14

  The mistake being made here was to equate one family with the nation as a whole. Washington believed it was only the personal choices of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter that expla
ined the alliance with the Soviets. In truth, this had also to do with amore general scepticism regarding American intentions, caused both by its support of Pakistan and by the Indian intellectual’s distaste for unbridled capitalism. Besides, the threat from China meant that New Delhi could scarcely turn its back on Moscow.

  The Janata leaders did not want to reject the Soviets for the Americans, but to move towards aprincipled equidistance from the superpowers. As the influential editor (and JP biographer) Ajit Bhattacharjea remarked, the challenge for the new regime was ‘to correct the tilt non-alignment had acquired over the years towards the Soviet Union without, if possible, antagonising Moscow’.15 Thus in October 1977 Morarji Desai and A. B. Vajpayee together visited the Soviet Union to underline that the relationship between the two countries was much more than a familial one.

  At the same time, overtures were also made to the other side. The jurist Nani Palkhivala, known for his pro-Western and free-market orientation, was sent as ambassador to Washington. In reciprocation, Jimmy Carter came to India in January 1978, the first American president to do so since Eisenhower. In a moving address to the Indian Parliament he spoke of the ‘commonality of our fundamental values’, and of how both countries had recently passed through ‘grave crises’ (namely, Watergate and the emergency) yet come through with their commitment to democracy intact. Then, in a spontaneous coda to his prepared text, he spoke of the debt owed by Martin Luther King’s civil rights struggle to the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi.16

  The Janata government also sought to mend fences with India’s neighbours. In November 1977 India and Bangladesh signed an agreement for the sharing of the Ganga waters, which gave the former 20,500 cubic feet of water during the lean season, and the latter 34,500 cubic feet. The accord was signed over the protests of the state government of West Bengal, which claimed that Calcutta port would silt up if denied adequate water.17 In February 1978 Foreign Minister Vajpayee visited Pakistan, where he charmed his hosts, the dictator General Zia-ul-Haq included, who had assumed that a man reared in the Jana Sangh would exhibit a fanatical hatred towards Muslims.18 A year later Vajpayee visited China, the highest-ranking Indian to do so since the border war of 1962. On this occasion, however, the trip was marred by the Chinese attack on Vietnam, launched in arrogant disregard of India’s long friendship with the country being invaded.

  On economic policy the janata government was less than unified; on foreign policy a little more so. The greatest consensus was on the new regime’s treatment of the former prime minister. The Janata leaders were determined to make Mrs Gandhi pay for having imposed the emergency. As many as eight Commissions of Enquiry were appointed, each headed by a retired judge. Several dealt with the corruption of Congress chief ministers, one with the treatment of JP in jail and one, absurdly, with the possible maltreatment in a government hospital back in 1967 of the socialist leader (and founder of ‘anti-congressism’ Ram-manohar Lohia. There was also a commission set up to enquire into the affairs of Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti company.

  The enquiry with the widest ambit was the Shah Commission, set up to punish those guilty of the excesses of the emergency. It was headed by a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, justice J. C. Shah. It met in a courtroom of Patiala House, in central Delhi, where the white-haired judge sat on a raised platform flanked by two assistants. Below him, on a table with a microphone, sat the witness of the day, his testimony heard by a crowd composed mostly of journalists.19

  In its first few months the Shah Commission examined scores of witnesses: bureaucrats, police officers, municipal officials, members of Mrs Gandhi’s Cabinet. But the lady herself refused to testify. Three times she was called to the witness box; three times she came, and chose not to answer questions, claiming she was bound by the oath of Cabinet secrecy. A journal victimized during the emergency saw this as ‘an outrageous attempt to make a mockery of the proceedings of the Commission’.20 A journalist more sympathetic to the other side sarcastically commented that the ‘Shah Commission was supposed to be a sort of Nuremberg Trial. Instead it has become a tamasha in which the heroine (or vamp) is constantly absent, and minor villains or comedians hold the stage. It is even losing its publicity value, as people have got bored with the commentaries on TV and radio and switch it off, just as the name of the Shah Commission is mentioned.’21

  III

  The change of government at the centre presaged changes of regime in the provinces as well. Following Mrs Gandhi’s lead in 1971, Janata dismissed state governments across northern India, claiming that the results of the general election showed that these had ‘lost the confidence of the people’. In fresh elections held to the state assemblies, Janata won easily in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar.

  In other states too changes were afoot. In West Bengal a coalition of left-wing parties came to power with a comfortable majority. The CPM itself won 178 seats out of 294 at stake with its allies winning a further 52. Back in 1967 and 1969 the CPM had shared power in Bengal with non-communist parties, in unstable coalitions easily undone by Machiavellian governors sent from New Delhi. Now they faced no such problem, and could set about effecting reform within the bourgeois system.22

  The new chief minister was Jyoti Basu, the Middle Temple lawyer who had been the number two in those UF-LF governments of the 1960s. Others in his Cabinet were less genteel, coming from a background of work with farmers and labourers. Their top priority was agrarian reform. This focused on legalizing the rights of the bargadars (sharecroppers) who cultivated the bulk of the land in rural Bengal. The new government’s Operation Barga set about recording their rights, and enhancing the share of the crop they could keep. Previously, the landlord would take half or more of the crop from the tenant; after the reforms, this share was reduced to 25 per cent, with75 per cent being retained by the bargadar. More than a million poor peasants benefited from the reforms.

  Meanwhile, the Left Front also conducted elections to village panchayats. Panchayati Raj, or local self-government, was a stated policy of the government, mandated by the constitution, but honoured mostly in the breach. The panchayat elections of 1977 in West Bengal were the first conducted with such seriousness and on such a wide scale. As many as 55,000 seats were contested for, with Left Front candidates winning two-thirds of them. Notably, most of those elected on the communist ticket were not sharecroppers but small landholders, teachers and social workers, members of what, in classical Marxist parlance, would be termed the ‘petty bourgeoisie’. But they were party members or sympathizers withal. Along with Operation Barga, the panchayat elections helped deepen the hold of the Left Front over the Bengal countryside.23

  There was also a change of regime in Tamil Nadu. Here the DMK had ruled for a decade before being dismissed on spurious grounds during the emergency. In the elections now called, their main rivals were the AIADMK, a breakaway from the parent party led and completely identified with the legendary film star M. G. Ramachandran. In the polls, the superior organizational machine of the DMK proved no match for the charisma and appeal of MGR. The AIADMK won 130 seats to its rival’s 48. MGR quickly made it clear that the old slogans of ‘Northern/Hindi imperialism’ were now out of date; he wanted, he said, good relations with the centre. Within Tamil Nadu the government instituted a slew of populist schemes in keeping with the chief minister’s image, on the silver screen, of being a friend to the poor and needy. Among them was a ‘midday meal’ provided at state schools, in the hope that this would induce girl children to come to class and stay there.24

  In the east, communists were becoming reconciled to bourgeois democracy; in the south, erstwhile secessionists to making their peace with the Indian nation-state. And there were also hopeful developments in regions and among peoples traditionally more truculent still. In the summer of 1977 Morarji Desai met the Naga leader A. Z. Phizo in London; although no settlement was reached, the fact that the two met, and in a foreign country, was seen as a significant concession by the Indian Government. L
ater in the year assembly elections were held in Nagaland. The 82-year-old Desai went to campaign, braving the risks of landing in mist-covered valleys. His visit, commented one newspaper, was ‘testimony to the importance’ he attached to the polls, which New Delhi hoped would ‘end once and for all the sectional claims of Mr Phizo and hisfollowers’.25

  There were also fresh polls conducted at the other and equally troublesome end of the Indian Himalaya. Before the emergency Sheikh Abdullah had come to power in Kashmir at the head of a Congress regime, as part of an accord he had signed with Mrs Gandhi. Morarji Desai was keen that elections be held to test the legitimacy of apiece of paper signed by two individuals. The assembly was dissolved and the Sheikh re-established his National Conference. The revival of the party stoked great enthusiasm; as one Kashmiri recalled, ‘the entire valley was red with N. C. flags. Every house and every market stood decorated with bunting.’26 The National Conference won 46 out of 75 seats, a comfortable majority, this a little distorted by the fact that whereas the Sheikh’s men had swept the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley, in the Hindu-majority jammu region it won only 7 seats out of 32 at stake. That said, this was still the first ‘truly fair and free’ elections in the state since Independence, ‘proving to the people of Kashmir that they too have the same fundamental rights which the people in the rest of the country enjoy and exercise’.27