India: A History. Revised and Updated (105 page)

It was to India’s rebuff of democratic decorum that elected regimes everywhere took exception. For Nehru’s daughter, of all people, to be ordering the detention without trial of thousands – elected politicians, exmaharajas, respected academics, social workers, labour leaders, senior journalists, student activists, placard-waving workers – almost beggared belief. It was just like one of those British crackdowns during the freedom struggle. State governments were being toppled, while a cowed parliament rubber-stamped a host of constitutional amendments, among them one prolonging its own existence indefinitely (so cancelling the elections due in 1976) and others legitimising the prime minister’s quasi-dictatorial powers. Then came rumours of these powers being exercised for crude social engineering. To beautify the urban environment, entire slum colonies were being bulldozed, while to tackle the population growth fathers
en masse
were being forcibly sterilised. Not even Mao had done that. World leaders protested, leader writers pontificated and friends of India bombarded the prime minister with missives.

Yet, for all the outrage, the crackdown lacked coherence or conviction. Mrs Gandhi left it to others, most notably her impatient younger son Sanjay, to conduct the more draconian campaigns while she herself trundled out a programme of tired placebos and conducted a rearguard defence of the whole action. Not unreasonably she did so on the grounds of national expediency. Over the preceding months the country had descended into near-chaos. As in Bhutto’s Pakistan, price increases triggered by the oil crisis had ignited massive protests leading to police shoot-outs and strikes that brought major industries to a standstill. The national rail network closed down; students barricaded their colleges. In some of the states, Congress (I) governments bore the brunt of the attacks as opposition parties quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Hauled aboard in Bihar was the seventy-two-year-old Jayaprakash (‘J.P.’) Narayan, a figure from the Gandhian past, half socialist half saint, with impeccable credentials as a champion of worthy causes. Nehru had been devoted to J.P., the whole country revered him. The disparate protests acquired a focus and a moniker as the ‘J.P. Movement’.

Demanding the people’s
swaraj
(self-rule) and an end to the misgovernment and corruption supposedly responsible for the nation’s ills, J.P. took to the road. After invoking the hallowed traditions of
satyagraha
and the
salt marches, his cavalcade headed for Delhi. Three-quarters of a million turned out to hear him; the capital was brought to a standstill. With counter-demonstrations by Mrs Gandhi’s supporters contributing to the chaos, the state elections pending in Gujarat came to be seen as a trial of strength. There, to the government’s chagrin, the ‘J.P. factor’ proved a vote-winner as well as a crowd-puller; and just as the Guj arat results were coming in, another skeleton limped from the cupboard of Mrs Gandhi’s past. With devastating timing, a long-awaited decision of the Uttar Pradesh High Court upheld the action brought against her for electoral malpractice back in the 1971 ballot. Five years on, Raj Narain, her doughty opponent for the Rae Bareli seat, had been vindicated. Albeit for minor infringements, her election was belatedly declared null and void.

She quickly lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court in Delhi. What had begun as a law-and-order crisis had now acquired a constitutional dimension. The stakes were rising. Across the city, opponents bayed for her resignation while supporters bellowed for her to stay. She could still have defused the situation by calling for national elections. With a good case based on her prompt constitutional compliance, with the southern states little affected and with all the advantages enjoyed by any incumbent administration, she might well have turned the tide. Instead she turned off the lights.

Over the next nineteen months India’s gaol population climbed by 100,000. Litigants found the courts unusually quick to convict, and the black market collapsed as profiteers joined the celebrities behind bars. The ferment of protest subsided. Strikers went back to work and the trains ran on time. But rumour fuelled as much fear as compliance. State governments protested at their peril, and the papers, resuming publication, did little to dispel it. Some advertised their censorship by leaving precious chunks of newsprint blank. Others merely parroted the government’s press releases and printed such news as the newly nationalised news agency released. A credibility gap opened. The prime minster and her advisers, lapping up their own optimistic reports, lost touch with reality; the public and her opponents, doubting every word they read, ignored her protestations of good faith.

For once it was India that was in the political doghouse, while in Pakistan Bhutto proudly upheld the banner of democratic freedom. Yet in India, though the police were everywhere, there was no sign of the army; it was not needed and Mrs Gandhi would scarcely have countenanced it. All along she had insisted that the Emergency was just that, a temporary suspension of civil and political rights while an outbreak of extra-constitutional protest was contained and the issues underlying it addressed. It was no more illegal, she maintained,
than the imposition of President’s Rule at the state level; she was acting in defence of democratic freedoms, not in defiance of them. Yet, perhaps because this refrain echoed so closely those trotted out by Ayub, Yahya, Zia-ur-Rahman and imminently Zia-ul-Haq, few took her at her word.

There was thus general disbelief when in January 1977 she sounded the all-clear. Those still detained were released, censorship was ended, party politics reactivated and national elections announced for March. India was democratic again. Because it looked to her critics like a climbdown, they claimed victory; and because it looked to her supporters like the redemption of a pledge, they felt vindicated. Either way, self-congratulation was in order. The Emergency was now portrayed as a test less of Mrs Gandhi’s commitment to democracy than of the nation’s; ‘and there is no doubt that the Indian people passed the test with distinction if not full marks’, says a standard history of the period.
⁷

The promised elections appeared to reinforce this confidence in the democratic process. Mrs Gandhi and her Congress (I) were opposed by all those party leaders who had been associated with the J.P. movement, who had been imprisoned for it and who now formed a kaleidoscopic grouping rather like the Pakistan National Alliance that was oppposing Bhutto. The two countries went to the polls almost simultaneously; but whereas Bhutto won and would be discredited for it, Mrs Gandhi lost and would be lauded for it. The manner of her defeat, the first ever for the mainstream Congress, was emphatic enough. Her party slumped to an all-time low of 154 seats out of 542. Sanjay Gandhi was routed. His mother was defeated in Rae Bareli, the litigious Raj Narain scampering to victory. Both mother and son blamed personal spite and unspecified conspiracies. They were not good losers.

But their opponents were worse winners. Ranging from West Bengal’s Marxist Communists to the Tamil DMK, the all-Sikh Akali party and a new rightist Janata party (itself an amalgam of diehards like the Hindu Jan Sangh and the Congress (O)), the victors had nothing in common other than their rejection of Mrs Gandhi and all that she stood for. J.P. had to arbitrate even their choice of leader. As the new prime minister, Morarji Desai, a desiccated octogenarian respected more for his long association with Nehru than for his tastes in traditional medicine, did his best to mollify all interests. But unity prevailed only when the government was hounding Mrs Gandhi through the courts, buttressing the constitution against any repeat of her Emergency or readjusting her foreign policy. Though good relations with the Soviet bloc remained a priority, as foreign minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee of the Jan Sangh signalled a more conciliatory attitude to traditional foes.
Anticipating his later premiership, Vajpayee visited both Beijing and Islamabad, improved relations with the new military regime in Bangladesh and in 1978 was among those who welcomed US president Jimmy Carter to Delhi.

India appeared to be opening up just when, within, it was again imploding. A bad harvest and another round of double-digit inflation had excited the usual protests, to which the faction-fighting at the top lent a dangerous dimension. Caste, calling, confession and ideology being defining traits of nearly all the parties in the ruling coalition, civil disturbances turned increasingly communal and violent. Meanwhile the Gandhis, Indira and Sanjay, protested their concern, invoked the secularist traditions of Congress, purged the party once again and bided their time.

In 1979 defections within the ruling coalition cost Morarji Desai the prime ministership. A stopgap ministry took over. It claimed support from Mrs Gandhi and promptly collapsed when she withdrew it. Government defectors now outnumbered the yet-to-defect. New elections were inevitable. They were held in January 1980 amid a sense of relief not unlike that after the Emergency was lifted. In fact it was as if the Emergency had never happened. Promising nothing more sensational than ‘a government that works’, Mrs Gandhi and her Congress (I) romped home with a two-thirds majority. Better still, anything like a national opposition disintegrated. J.P. had died, and the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh, the mainstay of the Janata Party, retired to lick its wounds and be reborn as the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), or BJP. Mrs Gandhi reigned supreme.

As usual though, when opposition at the centre was at its weakest, opponents could always be found among the state governments. Ever since Mrs Gandhi had decoupled national and state elections in 1971, incoming governments in Delhi had invariably hastened to topple any state governments not of their own party or in alliance with it. This could be done informally (by wooing defectors with, for instance, promises of office) or constitutionally (by imposing President’s Rule). Nehru had shown restraint on this front; but under his daughter the frequency of President’s Rule had increased tenfold. Once a precaution of last resort, it had become a habit, even a ritual. It might be compared to the ancient
digvijaya,
that ‘conquest of the four quarters’ undertaken by newly installed rulers to proclaim their authority, define their dominion and exact fealty and tribute.

ARE WE NOT ALL SECULAR?

Mrs Gandhi’s 1980 post-electoral
digvijaya
was the most ambitious yet. Nine state governments, about a third of the total, were suspended under President’s Rule, all but one of them subsequently being claimed by Congress (I) in snap elections. Among those toppled and replaced was the Akali Dal ministry in Panjab state. The Akali Dal was the mainstream Sikh party and Panjab was a predominantly Sikh state. Trouble should have been expected.

Ever since Partition in 1947, India’s half of the old Panjab province had been more problematic than Pakistan’s. There had been the usual tensions over the state’s official language and script (principally Hindi/Devanagri versus Panjabi/Gurmukhi) and a much more serious conflict of interest over its confessional make-up. In some areas Hindus were in a clear majority, in others Sikhs were, many of them uprooted from Pakistan. Promises had been made at the time of Partition that in India Sikhs would enjoy the freedom to practise their own faith and manage their affairs in accordance with it. Many had interpreted this as a commitment to the creation of a Sikh state; and that was effectively what had happened, in that by the 1970s India’s half of the old Panjab province had been split into three separate states: Himachal Pradesh (consisting mainly of ex-princely states in the hills), Haryana (a predominantly Hindu and Hindi-speaking state west and north of Delhi) and Panjab (a Panjabi-speaking state with a Sikh majority, wedged between the other two plus Kashmir and Pakistan). This last was the small but richly endowed and strategically crucial state that Mrs Gandhi provoked in 1980.

Officially it was not a Sikh state, just a Panjabi-speaking state. Any concession to sectarianism being anathema to Indian secularism, its creation had been justified purely on the grounds of ‘linguistic reorganisation’. As Panjabi-speakers, most Sikhs had accepted this face-saving fiction but found little else to their taste in its denial of any overt reference to their faith. In 1973 the Akali Dal, meeting at a place called Anandpur Sahib, gave vent to Sikh grievances in a list of forty-five demands. Some were of national import, like a retraction of the central government’s interventions and a return to the qualified autonomy envisaged for all the constituent states in the 1950 constitution. Others were much more specific and included an insistence on the award to their truncated Panjab of Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed city that had been the capital of the undivided state. Naturally Chandigarh was also claimed by the state of Haryana whose Hindu/Hindi majority had no intention of relinquishing such a prize without substantial territorial
concessions elsewhere. Yet no Sikh party could afford to make such concessions, and thus Chandigarh remained a bone of contention between the two states and between Sikhs and Hindus. Worse, the Anandpur Sahib resolution used an Urdu term to refer to the Sikh people that could be translated as ‘community’ – which was acceptable – or more mischievously as ‘nation’ – which was not. The resolution made no claim to an independent nation-state for the Sikhs, yet anyone keen to discredit the Akali Dal as a Sikh separatist party could here find grounds to support such a contention.

Mrs Gandhi, and more especially her son Sanjay, made just this accusation, and to discredit the Akalis (literally the ‘Immortals’, otherwise the Akali Dal leaders) with their supporters, began to cultivate divisions within the Sikh community. In 1980 some Sikh students, disillusioned with the gradualism of the Akalis and backed by co-religionists in North America and the UK, actually articulated the demand for a sovereign, independent state. A new partition and a Bangladesh-like breakaway were envisaged. The state was to be called Khalistan and as president-in-waiting a London-based politician was chosen.