FIVE

The New Congress Reveals Its Style—1970

When Parliament opened on November 17, 1969, the government, represented by Mrs Gandhi’s New Congress, found itself in a minority, with sixty MPs of the undivided Congress now sitting in the Opposition. But it had a working majority with the support of regional parties and some independents. Its vital support came from the CPI, whose style and slant began to be felt in some of the ministries. In spite of her reduced numbers, Mrs Gandhi was in a buoyant mood. The Congress split had secured for her an independent identity, status and following. She told the Indian Science Congress on January 4, 1970, ‘The last few months have been exciting ones. Swift and dramatic events have taken place. As a result, you will find everywhere a sense of quivering urgency, an atmosphere of heightened expectations and a demand for quick results.’ She delivered a uniform message at mass meetings through the year: the need for reducing disparities, and for ceilings on property and land. The country faced danger, she said, from those who wanted to block socialist policies. She would implement these undaunted by the canards spread against her.

She did not specify the ‘canards’ except on one occasion after the Emergency of 1975, when she told a delegation from Nehru Youth Centres of ‘baseless canards’ spread by the Opposition that she smoked and drank. Her opponents, referred to in her letter to Congressmen on November 8, 1969 as ‘the forces of the status quo, with close links with powerful economic interests’, could not by definition include the Socialist Party and the CPI-M, committed since their inception to radical change. It did not apply to the Old Congress, till yesterday her own party, dominated till the end of his life by her father and responsible for the vistas of change since Independence. With all its scope for elasticity and interpretation, it was avowedly a socialist party and would not have survived as a credible entity but for this. The terminology she employed did not apply even to the Jan Sangh, whose interest in the status quo was based on religion and culture rather than economics, and whose ‘links with powerful economic interests’ were negligible, nearly nonexistent, compared with those of the undivided Congress, and later so publicly identified with Mrs Gandhi’s party. Her forceful, insistent and repetitious language, when analysed, seemed puzzlingly remote from actual data. What did Mrs Gandhi mean? What she meant was further complicated by the pervasive personal element in her statements. Her letter to Congressmen said there was an opposition to her personally, bent on keeping her out of power. Earlier she had construed the vote of the Congress Parliamentary Board for Reddy (rather than Jagjivan Ram) as an insult and a‘plot’ against her, not the prosaic procedural exercise it was, of outvoting the leader as leaders are regularly outvoted and replaced by their parties. The dislike and distrust her former colleagues had of her—dull, inadequate material for drama—was converted by her intensely imaginative faculty into the grander stuff of hate and fear of a more-than-leader, a national symbol. Her own utterances invented the beleaguered heroine, fighting the shadowy forces of evil, one whose victory or defeat would be the victory or defeat of socialism in India.

Did Mrs Gandhi’s colleagues mean the same thing she meant? The confusion arising at times out of official statements blurred issues and debates. A haze descended on argument and was, it seemed, deliberately held there. The New Congress had broken with the old so that it would be free to move decisively leftward, but left was most of the modern Indian horizon, from the Mahatma’s socialism to that inspired by Marx. Where in the spectrum did the New Congress lie, and what did it want? What was needed, at this time of absolute break with the old party, was clear explanation, and this was lacking. Cries against the ‘rich’, the ‘big’ and the ‘monopolists’ rose with a great stir and beating of wings like flocks of birds into the air and vanished. No one quietly nailed problems to the ground.‘Commitment’ was demanded of the civil service, the judiciary and the press. Yet it meant not an educated sensitivity to what was best for the common welfare, but government control, an idea so repugnant to these institutions of free India that it had stormy repercussions. On February 9 Mrs Gandhi was obliged to say, ‘Recently my remarks that we needed government servants with commitment have been, perhaps deliberately, misinterpreted to mean that I want civil servants to support me and my political ideology. On the contrary, I do not want politically convenient or servile civil servants.’ Yet Mohan Kumaramangalam, distinguished CPI theoretician, now in Mrs Gandhi’s Congress and credited with having an increasing influence on her policies, said plainly that the government needed ‘civil servants who thought like us’.¹ Kumaramangalam, who entered the cabinet as minister for steel and mines in April 1971 and was probably its chief spokesman after Mrs Gandhi, gave ‘commitment’ its final seal of authority on May 2, 1973 in the Lok Sabha, when he defended the supersession of three judges of the Supreme Court—Justices Shelat, Hegde and Grover—and the appointment of a junior judge, A.N. Ray, as chief justice. In naming a chief justice, he said, ‘the government is entitled to look into his philosophy and outlook and decide that we must have a forward-looking and not a backward-looking man.’ It was clear what a communist meant when he said this, and in government pronouncements only its CPI spokesmen spoke in understandable language and with recognizable intent. This particular step, designed to bring the Supreme Court in line with the government, proved crucial in later events for Mrs Gandhi’s political survival. A.N. Ray, chosen for his acceptability to the CPI coterie in Mrs Gandhi’s camp, was a good example of the ‘commitment’ required of the judiciary. Had the principle of selection of a chief justice, on the basis of quality rather than seniority, been explained and suitably canvassed, it is probable that it would have won many adherents and been hailed as a reform in the judicial system. Ray’s appointment had no such high purpose to recommend it.

In 1970, at the beginning of the controversy, events had not yet forced definition, and confusion reigned supreme. Mrs Gandhi told the Rajya Sabha in early March 1970 that she believed in democracy and an independent judiciary. What she meant was again in question when the Governor of West Bengal, S.S. Dhavan, speaking to the Bar Association and Bar Library Club of the Calcutta High Court, held up the Soviet legal and political system as an example to his audience. Mrs Gandhi’s own actions clouded her meaning in what was becoming a simmering confrontation with the Supreme Court. On February 10, 1970 the Court had struck down as invalid the Act of 1969 nationalizing fourteen banks. Mrs Gandhi overcame this by a presidential ordinance on February 14 renationalizing the banks with retrospective effect from July 19, 1969. This was the first of several presidential ordinances used to enact business outside the parliamentary process, with Parliament in due course endorsing the measure taken. Government by ordinance, used at first to push through measures she could not get accepted by Parliament for want of a majority and her otherwise free use of presidential powers, became a marked feature of her style and demonstrated how valuable a cooperative President was to her concept of government. In September 1970 a presidential order was used to de-recognize the princes when the government bill to abolish privy purses and privileges failed by one vote to get a two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, though the Lok Sabha adopted it. On October 1 President’s rule was imposed with undue haste on Uttar Pradesh, and the proclamation suspending the state legislature signed on Russian soil, the President being on a visit to the Soviet Union at the time. An obvious and unseemly political manoeuvre, it had to be revoked after sixteen days of controversy, when Charan Singh, Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) leader, whose coalition had fallen apart with the sudden desertion of its New Congress members, formed a majority government without them.

The privy purse issue, and the vote concerning it in the Lok Sabha, provided a contrast with the receding values of the Nehru era. The abolition of privy purses had been raised at the AICC in 1963. Nehru had opposed abolition on the grounds that the figure of Rs 5 crore was automatically going down, each successor inheriting a reduced purse. Another more fundamental consideration ruled his approach: the Government of India had a covenant with the princes, and a government must keep its word. Writing to his sister, India’s high commissioner in London, on April 3, 1955 on the subject of foreign investment and the Government of India’s attitude towards it, he had expressed much the same sentiment:

It never pays to destroy one’s credit in the foreign market, and we have no intention of doing anything which might have that effect. Also, all major investments by foreigners are usually by contract with the Government of India. For the Government to break its own contract would be bad. Governments do not do this kind of thing. Therefore there is really no question of apprehension on the part of foreign investors in India. I have made this clear already in parliament and elsewhere. This evening I spoke at length at a huge public meeting in Delhi and again made this clear. I shall refer to it when the Bill comes up before parliament again.

The bill to abolish privy purses got the required two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha by a narrow margin of eight votes. Opposition members discovered six were invalid, as five voters had recorded their vote twice‘by mistake’, and one vote had been recorded for a member not present in the House. The Speaker agreed to hold an inquiry, but declared himself satisfied that the majority had not been affected. An episode which for its impropriety would have had repercussions of shock under Nehru and Shastri, and would have been cleared to the satisfaction of the Opposition in order to restore faith in parliamentary procedure, was glossed over. The Speaker’s reputation for impartiality suffered as did the standards expected till then of Parliament.

In March 1970 Mrs Gandhi told the Rajya Sabha, ‘At any moment if any privately owned industry is operating against the national interest or is impeding social progress, we should not hesitate to take it over.’ But since ‘national interest’ and ‘social progress’ had not been reduced to directives, it was not predictable which direction the government’s economic policy might at any moment take, and in what context industry should plan to operate.

In contrast with this (perhaps deliberate) lack of philosophy, a specific direction was taken by the government during the year in matters concerning information and culture. On February 20, 1970, diplomatic missions were required to close culture centres other than those located at their headquarters. This followed the discovery of an unauthorized Russian building under construction in Trivandrum, but the effect of the order was to shut down five offices of the United States Information Service and two French centres. The Soviet embassy gave the running of its Trivandrum centre to the Indian government, on whom it could rely for patronage to its programmes. By the end of 1970, although foreign culture centres had been closed, there were 115 embassy journals in circulation. The government’s Publications Division’s annual India 1971–72 listed forty-seven, the highest number, produced by the USSR, and seventeen, the second highest, by the USA.

On August 23 the BBC was ordered to close its office in India for showing Louis Malle’s film on India, with its reported concentration on the grimmer sights of Calcutta. Later the import of American movies was stopped, on the grounds that there was no reciprocity in the film trade between the two countries. Film selection and imports were to be channelled through the State Trading Corporation (STC). Later (1973) the STC was authorized to take over the import of textbooks, and it was suggested the control might be extended to general books to prevent ‘pornographic’ and ‘politically offensive’ books from entering the country.

The free circulation of information and ideas had been a cardinal principle of India’s leadership. Mrs Gandhi’s incursions, actual and projected, into the fields of knowledge, information and culture were evidence of another value system altogether. She was heavily dependent at this time on communist support and had former CPI members as ministers and advisers. This may have accounted for the categorical line she took and her monotonous espousal of the obstructionist theory, calculated by sheer repetition to gain credence, especially among the uneducated population. There was a communist stamp also to her violent aversion to the‘uncommitted’ intellectual, the Opposition and the press. Yet she had herself earlier advocated greater government control of the media. During the presidential election, radio and television had effectively projected V.V. Giri as the candidate with her blessing, and herself as the symbol of a mass upsurge against vested interests. It is reasonable to assume that her mind and its direction were her own. She displayed an awareness of the vital levels of power once again when on June 26, 1970, in a major cabinet reshuffle, she took the home portfolio herself. This gave her control of the intelligence network and the police, and supervision of the Election Commission. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), as the intelligence network was named, operated, in part, under Mrs Gandhi’s direct command, though in name it was made accountable to the cabinet secretariat. RAW did not remain an anonymous, behind-the-scenes agency, but became an actor on the political stage, with the press commenting on its activities, including the bugging of telephones of the government’s political opponents, censorship of their mail and the impressive growth within a few years of its 5-crorerupee budget to 100 crore. RAW was also reported to provide Mrs Gandhi with dossiers on Union and state ministers and officers of the rank equivalent to brigadier and above of the armed forces. Commenting on its methods, Jyotirmoy Basu (CPI-M) told a meeting of the home ministry’s Consultative Committee in Parliament:

On April 20, 1972, while speaking during the demands for grants for the Ministry of Home Affairs, I said that the Research and Analysis Wing formulates, operates and executes through fascist methods; with it came subsidiary bureaus and other sister organisations. The function is to keep Left forces out of power, destroy democratic methods and oppose by all possible means the persons and political parties which are against the ruling coterie headed by Mrs. Gandhi… . My information is that seven unprinted, unmarked crates arrived in Bombay dockyard a few months ago which were not even touched by the customs or port authorities under instructions from the top. The same day these boxes disappeared for Delhi. The Research and Analysis Wing is being organized purely on the lines of the Hitlerite forces, and its sole job is to destroy democracy in the country, and a White Paper on this organisation is absolutely essential.

Jyotirmoy Basu’s warning against a sinister and unaccounted growth of extraconstitutional power in Mrs Gandhi’s hands was soon backed by other parties. Mrs Gandhi’s personal interest in surveillance extended to finance. Intelligence relating to revenue, though formally under the finance ministry, took its orders from the prime minister’s secretariat, operating both from South Block, New Delhi, and her house at 1 Safdarjung Road.

The aura of personal fealty to Mrs Gandhi surrounding RAW came from its head, R.N. Kao, one of the Kashmiri Brahmins in her confidence. (Other Kashmiri Brahmins in the administration were: P.N. Haksar, Principal Private Secretary to the prime minister; T.N. Kaul, Foreign Secretary, later Indian ambassador to the United States; P.N. Dhar, economic adviser to the prime minister’s secretariat, later her Principal Private Secretary; D.P. Dhar, Indian ambassador to the USSR, later chief of the Planning Commission; B.K. Nehru, ambassador to the United States, high commissioner to Britain.) Here, as elsewhere, she provided a marked contrast with her father’s relaxed tread and his approach to the tasks of governing. The Kashmiri Brahmin clique implied a strong, almost tribal suspicion of the‘outsider’, a prejudice that found its ultimate expression in her later unabashed promotion of her son, Sanjay.

In July 1970 the Opposition brought a no-confidence motion in Parliament, charging Mrs Gandhi with rigging the state election in Kerala. She replied, ‘It is obvious that the entire motion is designed as a personal attack on me, on the supposed concentration of power in my hands… . I have been compared, not for the first time, to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. I think the people will laugh at the preposterousness of these comparisons.’ Her persistent reduction of all criticism to ‘a personal attack on me’ had the effect of slamming a door, much as tears or an emotional outburst put an end to argument. Mrs Gandhi’s public speeches through the year had a strongly defensive flavour, the lonely furrow ploughed against mighty and dangerous forces.

The forces visibly at work in the country were not, however, vested interests obstructing socialism so much as those demanding speedier and more radical change (e.g., the Naxalite movement) by violence, though communal violence had also taken its toll at Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and other parts of Maharashtra. It was to the theme of obstruction by reactionary and communal forces that Mrs Gandhi returned in her broadcast of December 27 announcing a midterm election. She was insecure in Parliament with her reduced majority and her dependence on other parties, besides being up against a far from docile Opposition. Her reliance on extra-parliamentary devices showed her path had not proceeded smoothly. In February the Supreme Court had struck down bank nationalization. In April the government bill to end the special privileges of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) had not secured a two-thirds majority in Parliament. And on December 15 a special bench of the Supreme Court had ruled the presidential order on the princes as ultra vires of the Constitution. She would go to the polls to get a fresh mandate for her policies. For their implementation, some amendments to the Constitution would be necessary, ‘… I want to be clear… we are not in favour of removing all the fundamental rights nor are we even against the right to property, but we do believe in having a certain ceiling on property, whether urban or rural.’²

At her news conference on December 29 a journalist asked, ‘Your broadcast speech on television and radio [on the 27th] the Opposition claimed was a political speech and wanted equal time. Do you foresee in this election campaign that All India Radio will be open to the Opposition to make political speeches?’ The prime minister replied, ‘Well, mine was not a political speech at all. I was exceedingly careful not to say anything that could be counted as party propaganda. As far as the other question is concerned, it has been debated, and we just could not get agreement on the subject.’

The proposal of the Chanda Committee to make All India Radio (AIR) an autonomous corporation on the lines of the BBC had been rejected by the government on October 21, 1970. The Opposition was to complain of government’s unfair and unprincipled use of the media at its disposal. After the election Mrs Gandhi brushed this aside in the Lok Sabha (April 2, 1971), ‘The complaint of some members about the functioning of All India Radio and TV, that they were used by the government for party ends, need not be taken seriously.’ Two years later, the minister for information and broadcasting, I.K. Gujral, announced the prime minister’s ‘firm and irrevocable’ rejection of the Chanda Committee recommendations and said AIR would be run‘in the manner that served the country best’.

At her news conference, the prime minister was questioned about the contradiction of her party’s electoral pact with a communal party, the Muslim League, in Kerala. She agreed the Muslim League was a communal organization, but said the way to meet it was to try and solve some of the genuine grievances of the minorities. She closed her conference by wishing the correspondents a happy new year, ‘and, I hope, a less jaundiced view of the Indian situation’.

This period marked the end of a convention that a caretaker government functioned once an election was announced. Patronage was freely distributed by Mrs Gandhi’s government, and licences ‘worth millions of rupees’ were issued to industry. Kuldip Nayar adds in India After Nehru (1975): ‘One conscientious objector in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat was Haksar, who at least stopped the distribution of brochures containing Mrs. Gandhi’s speech which she broadcast on the day of the Lok Sabha dissolution.’