India After Independence: 1947-2000 (45 page)

Besides, Indira Gandhi had few political instruments to implement her election promises. Most of the well-known and experienced national and state leaders and her colleagues of the past had deserted her during 1977- 78. With a few exceptions, the political leaders around her, in the Centre as also in the states, were raw untried men and women, none of whom had a political base of their own and who had been chosen more for their loyalty than for their administrative or political capacities.

Sanjay Gandhi’s death while flying a stunt plane on 23 June 1980 left her shaken and further weakened. She tried to fill his place with her elder son, Rajiv Gandhi, who was brought into politics, got elected as an MP and then appointed as the general secretary of the party in 1983.

Like the first one, a major weakness of Indira’s second prime ministerial innings was the continuing organizational weakness of Congress and her failure to rebuild it and strengthen its structure. This inevitability affected the performance of the government and its popularity, for a weak party structure meant the choking of channels through which popular feelings could be conveyed to the leadership and the nature and rationale of government policies explained to the people.

Despite Indira Gandhi’s total domination of the party and the government, the central leadership of the party again faced the problem of continuous factionalism and infighting—in fact, virtual civil war—within the state units of the party and the state governments. One result of this infighting and the consequent frequent rise and fall of chief ministers was that party organizational elections were repeatedly postponed and, in the end, not held. Another result was the erosion of the feeling that Congress could provide state governments that worked. Organizational weakness also began to erode the party’s support and adversely affect its electoral performance, with dissidents often sabotaging the prospects of the official party candidates.

An example of this erosion of the party’s popularity was the serious electoral defeat it suffered in January 1983 in the elections to the state
assemblies of Andhra and Karnataka, the two states which Congress had ruled continuously since their inception. In Andhra, Congress suffered a massive defeat at the hands of the newly formed Telugu Desam party, led by the film-star-turned politician, N.T. Rama Rao. The Congress won only 60 seats against Telugu Desam’s 202. In Karnataka, a Janata-led front won 95 seats in the 224-seat assembly, with Congress getting 81 seats.

While facing hardly any challenge at the Centre from opposition parties, from the beginning of her second prime ministership Indira Gandhi faced certain intractable problems arising out of communal, linguistic and caste conflicts; none of these was dealt with firmness and insight and all of them were to drag on for years. Three of the most serious of these are discussed below in other chapters: Kashmir in chapter 22, Assam in chapter 23, Punjab in chapter 24. Communalism gained strength as discussed in chapter 33 because of the momentum it gained during 1977-79. Its overt manifestation was conimunal riots, which spanned all the years from 1980 to 1984 and beyond and which began to engulf even South India.

Similarly, atrocities on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes continued as they began to assert their social and constitutional rights. However, administrative and judicial action, which included long terms of imprisonment, was taken in some cases against the perpetrators of the atrocities.

Though hesitatingly, India once again resumed its tasks of planning and economic development, with greater financial allocations being made for the purpose. The government also took note of the changes in world economy and their impact on India and, while making efforts to strengthen the public sector, initiated measures for what has come to be known as economic liberalization. But, as brought out in chapters 25-32 on the economy, the government proceeded very gradually and hesitatingly because Indira Gandhi was worried about the role of multinational corporations in eroding India’s self-reliance. The government, however, succeeded in raising the rate of economic growth to over 4 per cent per year, with a large increase in agricultural and petroleum crude production (for details, see the chapters 25-32), and in gradually bringing down the rate of inflation to 7 per cent in 1984.

Indira Gandhi’s government also achieved some success in foreign policy. In March 1983, India hosted the seventh summit of the Non-Aligned Movement with Indira Gandhi as its chairman. As formal leader of the Non-Aligned Movement she actively worked for a new international economic order that would be more fair to the developing countries.

When on 26 December 1979 the Soviet Union sent its troops into Afghanistan to help its beleaguered government, Mrs Gandhi refused to condemn die action but, at the same time, she advised the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan as speedily as possible. She, however, opposed the indirect intervention in Afghanistan’s civil war by the United States and Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi’s stand on Afghanistan issue
was determined by India’s long-term friendship and ‘special’ relationship with the Soviet Union and India’s strategic interest in preventing Afghanistan from having an administrator hostile to India.

Indira Gandhi tried to improve India’s relations with the US despite its tilt towards Pakistan. She also tried to normalize relations with China and Pakistan, despite the latter’s support to the terrorists in Punjab. She did not, however, hesitate to order the army in April 1984 to deploy a brigade at the Siachen glacier along the line of control in Kashmir.

On the morning of 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi’s long tenure as prime minister was brought to an end by her assassination by two Sikh members of her security guard. The Congress Parliamentary Board immediately nominated her forty-year-old son, Rajiv Gandhi, as prime minister.

Any assessment of Indira Gandhi has to acknowledge that she was a highly complex person, full of contradictions, and which made her extremely controversial. During her twenty years in power she made immense contributions and exhibited many remarkable features of her political personality and approach. Of course, there were major weaknesses, but these, as well as her strengths, are to be seen in light of how she changed over the years.

Indira Gandhi possessed great political skill which she continuously developed over time as she faced new situations and challenges. Though in the habit of soliciting opinion and advice from all around her, she herself invariably made the final decision. For all of her political life, Indira Gandhi conducted herself with fierce courage. She, as also her political opponents, were quite conscious of this quality of hers. Possessed of extraordinary will, as a political fighter Indira Gandhi was tough, resolute, decisive and, when necessary, ruthless. Though quite cautious by nature and temperament, when necessary she acted boldly, swiftly, with a superb sense of timing, and decisively, as for example, in the case of the Congress split in 1969, the Bangladesh crisis in 1971, the defiance of the US decision to send the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971, the creation of the Punjabi Suba in 1966, the imposition of the Emergency in 1975, and the Janata’s persecution of her through Enquiry Commissions during 1977-79.

A major feature of Indira Gandhi’s politics was her identification with and her passionate love of the country and its people, her pride in India’s greatness and confidence in its future. Indira Gandhi was acutely aware of India’s national interests and commited to maintaining its prestige among the community of nations.

Fully realizing that real national greatness and independence lie in a country’s inherent strength, she strove hard and successfully, in the face of many dire domestic economic and political problems, to make India
economically, politically, culturally, technologically and military self-reliant and independent and to give the country confidence in its ability to do so. India under her leadership was one of the few countries to overcome the oil-shock of the seventies. The success of the Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in foodgrains and broke its dependence on food imports. Throughout the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years India was shielded from the recessionary cycles common in other capitalist economies.

Indira Gandhi used her firm grasp of world politics to ensure that there was no successful overt or covert foreign interference in India’s internal affairs. She kept India free of both the Cold War blocs and the two superpowers. While adhering to the policy of not going nuclear, she refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty even though it was sponsored by both the United States and the Soviet Union. She strengthened the foreign policy carefully crafted by Nehru.

Indira Gandhi also actively promoted the process of nation-in-the-making, strengthened the country’s unity, held it together during a difficult period, and in the end gave her life for the purpose. With all her flaws and failures, she left the country stronger and more self-confident than it was when she took command of it in 1966.

Indira Gandhi was pragmatic and lacked Nehru’s ideological moorings, but she remained committed to a progressive, reformist, left-of-centre political orientation. In the economic field she remained loyal to the Nehruvian objective of rapid economic development and strengthened planning and the public sector while maintaining a mixed economy and, except for the brief period of 1971-1974, a healthy private sector though under rigid state control. She, however, tried to relax this control gradually—perhaps too gradually—during 1980-1984.

Ideologically, she remained true to the national movement’s secular tradition and consistently opposed the communal forces, looking upon the RSS, in particular, as a great menace to the unity and integrity of the country and to its democratic polity. Her firm commitment to secularism was shown by her insistence on making Dr Zakir Hussain, a Muslim, the country’s President and when she countermanded the order to remove from duty her Sikh security guards in October 1984, on the ground that India was a secular country. For the latter decision she paid with her life.

Indira Gandhi’s major political asset was her empathy and affection for the poor, the underprivileged and the minorities, concern for their social condition and an unmatched capacity to communicate directly with them. The poor, in turn, almost throughout her political career, looked upon her as their saviour and gave her immense love and trust. There is also no doubt that Indira Gandhi played an important role in politicizing the people, especially in making the poor, the Harijans and tribals, the minorities and women aware of their social condition and its underlying unjust character, and in arousing consciousness of their interests and the political power that inhered in them.

However, in spite of all the power that she wielded for over sixteen years, Indira Gandhi achieved little in terms of institutional development,
administrative improvement, management of the political system and far-reaching socio-economic change. Her crucial weakness as a political leader lay in the absence of any strategic design and long-term perspective around which her economic, political and administrative policies were framed. As already mentioned earlier, she was a master of political tactics and their timing, without match among her contemporaries. But her brilliant tactics were at no stage components of a pre-conceived strategy. Even the imposition of the Emergency was not part of an alternative strategic design for managing the political system but merely an
ad hoc
response to a situation of crisis. But tactics, however sound, cannot suffice in themselves. They are the short-term, issue-to-issue policies through which a strategy is implemented. Without a strategy, tactics, however brilliant, hang in the air. They do not even help formulate policies which are adequate to the achievement of the proclaimed objectives of a leadership or which enable it to move a country towards the desired destination.

In economic development and foreign policy, the Nehruvian strategies were there to guide her and after some initial vacillation Indira Gandhi went back to them. For management of the political system, or even overcoming the instability of the state, or development of the administrative structure or at least preventing its downslide, there were no clear-cut or specific strategies upon which to fall back and Indira Gandhi failed to evolve any of her own. She did not creatively develop Nehru’s strategy even in the field of economic policy to meet a changed national and world economic situation as is evident from her hesitant efforts to relax the licence-quota-regulation regime. Similarly, she failed to evolve a strategic framework to deal with communalism and separatism, resulting in her failure to deal effectively with the Punjab, Assam and Kashmir problems.

The consequences of Indira Gandhi’s failure to evolve and function within a strategic framework were felt in several other fields also. Despite massive electoral majorities, Indira Gandhi was not able to make the institutional changes in political or governmental apparatus—the parliament, cabinet, police or bureaucracy or Congress party or the educational system—needed to implement her own agenda. Not only did she not build any new institutions or make any effort to reform or strengthen old ones, much worse, she made little effort to check the erosion in most institutions and, in fact, contributed to the decay of some. As a result, increasingly over time, Indira Gandhi came to rely on personal power rather than on political and administrative institutions. She concentrated and centralized authority and decision-making in the party and the government in her hands. She systematically undermined her own party leaders who had an independent political base of their own, and chose as chief ministers persons who could not survive without her support. One result of this was that the power and influence of the chief ministers declined over the years. Moreover, not having a political base of their own, these candidates were victims of continuous factionalism in the party at the state level. Indira Gandhi was forced to replace them frequently, creating instability in the
administration and the party organization in the state. Her time was taken up in day-to-day fire-fighting of problems relating to the party and government management; she had no time for evolving strategies and broader policy frameworks for dealing with the serious problems of the country or the party.