THREE

Emergence—1967–69

Just before the 1967 election the Soviet journal New Times commented that the prestige and influence of the Congress party had notably declined and India had lost its socialistic zeal after Nehru (a sentiment expressed by Mrs Gandhi earlier). After Shastri, the journal said, the conservatives in the party had kept the radicals out of government, while a ‘prominent right winger’, Morarji Desai, had been installed. This analysis ignored the fact that Nehru’s choice of men in the composition of his cabinets was not bound by the conventional left–right division. It had been based on the complexities of the parliamentary and federal system and on his vision of India as one of the world’s most complex societies, capable of generating great strength through its political and cultural heterogeneity, once it was planted firmly in freedom. Morarji Desai and Lal Bahadur Shastri had both held portfolios in Nehru’s cabinets. The view that India had lost it socialistic zeal after Nehru is, however, significant because it became the platform for events to come, featuring a more facile outlook and a more impetuous breed of politicians than had been able to surface in Nehru’s time.

Nehru’s own opinion and assessment of Shastri, a man he liked and trusted, are on record. In a letter dated November 27, 1956 to his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was then high commissioner for India in Britain, Nehru wrote:

Over and above all this came Lal Bahadur’s resignation which I decided to accept, though very reluctantly. He resigned because of the terrible Railway disaster recently which was the second of its kind in two months. Of course it was not Lal Bahadur’s fault. But taking everything into consideration and more especially Lal Bahadur’s extreme unhappiness, I decided to accept this resignation. It is odd and pleasing to me to find how much this resignation has affected people. There has been a cry of regret and almost of sorrow from all kinds of quarters all over the country. It shows how popular Lal Bahadur is. He has gone up in people’s estimation by this resignation. So far as I am concerned, he will not be out of Government for very long. That is, if things function as expected, he will come back into Government after the general election.

A later letter written at midnight on June 6/7, 1961 to his sister in London confirms this opinion over the years:

A little while ago Lal Bahadur came to see me. He came direct from Palam where he had arrived from Assam via Calcutta. We sent him from Durgapur to Assam because of the language trouble there. He has dealt with this matter with great tact and ability and come as near to a possible settlement as we could have hoped for. Of course, there are extremists who will create trouble and I am by no means sure of the settlement yet. Anyhow, Lal Bahadur has done a first class piece of work. It pleases me to see how he has grown with additional responsibilities. This is not my opinion only, but the general impression.

Mrs Gandhi, who did not share her father’s opinion of Shastri, later wrote:

For the general elections of 1957, I campaigned all over the country. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was then Railway Minister, was put in charge of the elections and this is really why he resigned. There was a railway accident and everybody thought that he had resigned his ministership merely because of the accident. It may have had something to do with it, but one reason was the elections.¹

Nehru’s satisfaction in the accomplishments of younger colleagues and the responsibilities he gave to men and women whose political reputations were made as a result of their exercise, produced an array of experience in the Congress, providing it with the material of leadership. His consistent refusal to name a successor showed confidence in the men who would come after him. He valued Shastri’s roots in the soil and the quiet conciliatory manner distinguishing him as a successful negotiator on thorny issues. Gravely ill in 1964 from a stroke he had suffered at Bhubaneswar, he chose Shastri to take over his work, a factor that weighed with the party leaders who made him prime minister on Nehru’s death.

The Soviet analysis with its black–white political divisions was not yet reflected in Mrs Gandhi’s utterances. Asked by a journalist what the significance of her election as the country’s leader was, she replied, ‘Perhaps it ensures some kind of continuity—continuity of policy, and also perhaps continuity of personality.’² The reply showed she believed she had stepped into her father’s shoes as the imaginative rallying point for all Indians. Yet Nehru had been, of desire and discipline, a man of his party, shaped and moulded by his service of it and profoundly conscious of his debt to it. Mrs Gandhi already saw herself as something more, a party-plus image not yet attributable to her own leadership or record, and taken for granted as a birthright. Asked if she represented the Left, there was more than a touch of impatience in her reply, ‘I am a representative of all India which includes all shades of opinion.’³

The press and the public automatically identified her with her father, until marked differences of political style and behaviour became obvious and finally erupted into the open in 1969. The overt likenesses were there, and she cultivated them. She had adopted his mannerism of flinging back garlands she received to delighted observers, especially children, and of delving into a crowd to find out for herself what was happening. Her speech from the Red Fort on August 15, 1967, an annual event, was patterned on Nehru’s own. Mrs Gandhi, who made an awkward impression as a public speaker on formal occasions before discerning audiences, when her delivery of a written speech was flat, came into her own before a crowd, where she was fluent and emphatic. On this occasion she congratulated the people on their courage and fortitude in facing drought. Warning them of difficulties ahead, she said India was in ‘mid-stream’, where the water is deepest and current strongest, a rural analogy of the kind her father often used, easily understood by country folk used to crossing monsoon-swollen streams. She gave them ‘a simple definition of socialism’: ‘Poverty should be eradicated; disparities between the rich and poor should be reduced; the backward people, be they Harijans or the hill people, should have equal distribution of national resources.’ And she ended with a Nehru-like flourish, ‘Through your veins runs the blood of heroes and great men. Let diffidence give way to confidence; let despair give way to hope… .’ In conclusion, she asked, as her father had always done at public meetings since Independence, that the crowd shout ‘Jai Hind’ after her.

Her father had presided over a very different political picture from the one she now faced. Other programmes and ideas, besides those presented by the Congress, were beginning to influence Indian voters. Four general elections had built an expanding and more selective political consciousness. There were choices, and the voter made use of them. The chief feature of the 1967 election was the gain of the Jan Sangh in the north and the two communist parties in West Bengal and the south.

Two kinds of violence had made their appearance: the Hindu–Muslim riot, of which Indians thought they had seen the last after the shock of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, and the activities of the Naxalites. So named because of their seizure of the tribal village of Naxalbari in north Bengal (an uprising put down by the Marxist government of the state), Naxalism spread and formed cells in other states, often in universities, with a powerful attraction for sections of the educated young.

This picture showed no single ideological trend, leaving the Congress, though it had lost its privileged status, with a vital central role to play in the country once it adjusted to the post-election realities. Yet with the death of the towering figure to whom its factions—always forthright in inner-party debate—had given their allegiance, its dissident voices spoke louder. The long argument over the respective importance of its organizational and governmental wings began again. And with its loss of power in five states, the Congress now entered a phase of hard bargaining with other political parties in state assemblies. Coalitions were made and unmade by a parade of floor-crossers and defectors, as unprincipled on the part of the Congress as other parties. These gave a caustic new term to Indian politics—‘Aya Ram Gaya Ram’ (‘Easy come, easy go’, with reference to defections and floor-crossings). President’s rule was imposed on states where government broke down, followed by fresh elections with no firmer majorities.

Though she was still ‘Nehru’s daughter’ to the country, Mrs Gandhi’s style showed differences from his, some of them fundamental in outlook and value. In her first broadcast as prime minister, on January 26, 1966, she had spoken of ‘the disconcerting gap between intention and action’. ‘To bridge this gap we should boldly adopt whatever far-reaching changes in administration may be found necessary.’ She repeated the theme during the year and developed it in her convocation address to Roorkee University on November 18, 1967:

I have no doubt that our present administrative system uses the expert inadequately and indifferently. It gives undue weight to the generalist and persists with criteria of competence developed in times when the range of Government decision was very limited and was unrelated to the demands of economic management and growth… . The officer mentality is also responsible for holding up progress.

Administrative reform had been the subject of expert advice and investigations since Independence. With the government engaged in an enormous expansion of its activity and its bureaucracy, some of the ground it covered was experimental, directives not uniformly backed by political will, and the resulting performance uneven. This situation was to worsen, not improve, under Mrs Gandhi who saw a ‘committed’ civil service as essential to remedy. ‘Commitment’ struck at the concept of the neutral civil servant, trained to advise on the risk and practicality of schemes. It left the government (many of whose members, later handpicked by her, were inexperienced in practical matters concerning administration) free to embark on poorly assessed ventures on the platform of ‘ideology’. The civil service found itself the scapegoat for the whims and often the failures of policy. But it was the beginning of the inner structure of personal loyalty to Mrs Gandhi that was to be the trademark of all her functioning.

‘We have to ensure,’ said Mrs Gandhi at a meeting of the revived National Integration Council in June 1968, ‘that our educational processes, the books we read, the radio we hear, the films we see, do not distort the Indian mind but lead it to integration and solidarity.’ Her remarks were not then construed as a call for reins on the mass media, but they were the first sign that the media must be more pointedly directed by government, the first sign, too, of a policy, contrary to the principle and practice so far, that expression must be free and it was the leadership’s duty to safeguard that freedom until it became part of the people’s natural expectation. India had inherited a government-controlled broadcasting system from the British regime. Mrs Gandhi, who had been minister for information and broadcasting in Shastri’s cabinet, was the first prime minister to show a recognition of its importance as an instrument of power. In April 1971 she took charge of the portfolio herself.

Though she had at first welcomed the Opposition governments in the states as part of the democratic process, she later said in reply to a questionnaire from Asia Magazine (Hong Kong), ‘Fanatic and parochial forces are much in evidence. Some of them have been fomented by parties or individuals. I am deeply conscious of the danger they pose to our democracy.’ She found it hard to accept as ‘Indian’ any view that did not accord with her own. ‘… our intellectuals, our industrialists and businessmen do not yet feel proud of being Indians,’ she told an interviewer from the Spanish magazine Revista de Occidente,⁴ voicing her suspicion of a section of her own people for foreign readers. These attitudes, perhaps because they were so unlike her father’s, paradoxically went unnoticed. Nehru had regarded an ineffective and even obstructive Opposition as integral to democratic growth and had, both as philosophy and deep personal impulse, included the various elements of society as partners in progress.

Mrs Gandhi’s position within the Congress and her standing with the old guard were by no means secure or friendly, and she was clearly unable to cope with what she felt was an animus directed personally at her.

… every time we had a meeting of the Executive of the Parliamentary Party, there would be tension and some people would deliberately try to—I won’t say insult, although it was pretty near—but needle me on any small point and make it as unpleasant as possible.⁵

Nehru had dominated the Congress, but his innate civility and courtesy had gone far in keeping diverse teams of colleagues together and had given him the personal regard of those who crossed swords with him over policy. Mrs Gandhi’s determined advocacy of herself did not endear her to men who had given their lives to the struggle for freedom, been repeatedly imprisoned and since Independence occupied important positions, some in her father’s cabinets. When in 1967 she considered taking on the Congress presidentship herself after Kamaraj (as her father had done for a time), the suggestion was not approved by her party, and Nijalingappa became president. At the annual session of the Congress in Hyderabad in January 1968, six of the seven elected seats on the Working Committee went to the old-guard candidates, and only one to Mrs Gandhi’s choice. These circumstances, where she had the symbols but not the actuality of power, frustrating to her pride and authority at home, may have led her from the start to establish wide personal contacts abroad. She went on her first foreign tour as prime minister in March 1966, less than two months after taking office, visiting London, Paris, Moscow and Washington. In September 1968 she toured Latin America and the Caribbean (the first Indian prime minister to visit these areas) and visited the USA, Britain and West Germany.

In sharp contrast to her father, too, she was ill at ease with the press. Nehru, whose relations with it were confident and cordial, met the capital’s press corps once a month. Mrs Gandhi held her third news conference in three years on January 1, 1969. The national press was generally indulgent towards her. Men who had covered her father’s speeches, activities and policies for decades and had praised or condemned him with equal fervour were apt to tread more softly with her in her inexperience and to be generous in their judgements. Her inhibitions were often puzzling to them. Frank Moraes, a leading editor, recalled, ‘Nehru talked a great deal in an interview. You started him off, and off he went. She is not forthcoming. She’s rather like a convent schoolgirl, tongue-tied. Nehru didn’t care what the newspapers said about him. With her, if there’s an article, editorial or cartoon, she doesn’t like, one of her entourage lets her disapproval be known.’ Her disapproval was generally ignored by the editors and proprietors of leading newspapers, who had a healthy disrespect for authority, but it became noticeable enough after 1969 to be raised in Parliament, when Opposition MPs objected to governmental pressure to silence dissent.

At Mrs Gandhi’s news conference on January 1, 1969, Trevor Drieberg, Sri Lanka–born member of Delhi’s press corps, noted more poise and confidence than she had shown since becoming prime minister. Her two flashes of temper were ‘whether natural or carefully stage-managed, very effective. There was more than a touch of the old Nehru fire about them. The P.M. still lives very much under the shadow of her illustrious father, as her references to him in the course of her replies showed.’⁶

A critic, Rajinder Puri, later put the same view somewhat differently:

Indira, in fact, does not have a style which she may call her own. And because the style is phony, the words ring false, with a jarring clatter against the manner she perhaps seeks to emulate, that of her father. Her every gesture, every mannerism, seems to be modelled on that of the late Jawaharlal Nehru. The hurried, almost running walk, the rambling informality, the stimulated anger with an uncomprehending public, it is all there, a trifle parodied, a little grotesque, as it evokes nostalgic memories of the original… .⁷

The standard people remembered was her father’s, and whether the comparison was made by supporter or critic, in kind or harsh terms, it found her lacking. Yet the comparison persisted, no one yet recognizing her as being differently constituted and inspired. Her belief in her own superior knowledge and judgement dating from her tender years displayed itself once again when, on August 23, 1968, she spoke in the Rajya Sabha on the situation in Czechoslovakia. Members had objected to the government’s mildly stated stand on Soviet interference, and her minister for petroleum and chemicals, Asoka Mehta, had resigned over the issue. Mrs Gandhi said:

I have said in the other House and I would like to repeat here, that perhaps there is nobody in this House who has had such close contacts with Czechoslovakia for so many years as I have had personally, not as a member of the Government, but ever since I was a small girl. I have known the people of the country very well, and I have known large sections of the people in the universities and in other spheres of activity.

Yet it took another year until, in the struggle for power that split the Congress and startled the country, her typical assertiveness finally burst through to the public, and people put her in a class by herself, no longer in her father’s shade or mould.