SIX
The Midterm Election
India prepared for its first midterm general election in a tense and fevered atmosphere dominated by Mrs Gandhi rather than issues. Her party fielded a large number of unknown candidates, ‘lamp posts’ to the press, with the appeal that a vote for the candidate was a vote for Mrs Gandhi. The prime minister’s picture and personal message accompanied their posters. A loose alliance formed to oppose her, the ‘grand alliance’ to the press, was not able to unite under a common programme. The men in it were uncomfortable in each other’s political company and agreed only in their shared alarm at Mrs Gandhi’s style and in their determination to remove her. Their slogan Indira Hatao (Remove Indira) contrasted miserably with hers, Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty).
Most voters wanted a stable government and felt the New Congress with enough majority would not be at the mercy of extremists, even those in its own party. The constitutional amendments Mrs Gandhi had said would be necessary caused no concern. She had repeatedly said she was a democrat. Her statements had always carried the assurance of a democratic framework and civic freedoms, whatever constitutional changes were made. The legacy of Nehru, of the democratic norms and conventions he had established and scrupulously served, was such that few anticipated any threat to democracy as India had till now understood the word and system, least of all from Nehru’s daughter. It was felt there had been pressures on her during her quarrel with her own party and her year of reliance on other parties. Once free of these she would show good judgement and balance. The Gandhi–Nehru–Shastri era, for all its mass participation, had also been an age of the educated in politics. Gandhi had welded the educated with the masses, convinced that progress to freedom required a true identity of interests between the different sections of society, a tradition carried on after Independence. Gandhi’s war had been against India’s most ancient injustice—caste. Philosophically this was the reverse of class war. The challenge was projected not as rich against poor, but as civilized men against the injustices of their society. The Indian intelligentsia had, by and large, played a responsible role in independent India, in its contribution to the wide-ranging development Nehru had termed ‘adventure’. The welding had survived principally because Indian leadership had nurtured it. It was not yet obvious that it was being taken apart systematically.
The question arises: Was Mrs Gandhi trying, within the framework of existing democratic institutions, to blaze a new trail towards an egalitarian society against the combined weight of an outdated bureaucracy and legal system inherited from colonial times? Or were her intentions of a different kind? Was she using the credentials of her father and Mahatma Gandhi to play on the feelings and understanding of the masses, and to take in the process a calculated turn towards an authoritarian order? A single-minded woman, with a categorical sense of good and bad, for and against, not given to self-examination, forgiveness or compromise, if she saw any contradiction in her role, she may have believed herself capable of resolving it. For, above all, she believed she knew without a shadow of a doubt what needed to be done. Mission and opportunity met in her in a blaze of purpose. She had once listed the four most important influences on her character and thinking as Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Her genuine yearning towards the vision, humanity and universality of these men may have found fulfilment in another career. The road to power distorted and finally destroyed it.
The election raises some points worth considering, inextricably connected with Mrs Gandhi’s highly personal style in politics. In 1969, before the Congress split, donations to political parties had been banned. The ban had worked since, without much secrecy, to the advantage of the ruling party. Industry knew it must invest in a winner. This alone seemed to assure permission to carry on business in a system of complex controls and lengthy delays, now surmounted by threat of takeover, and the credo that to oppose government was to be a reactionary and an enemy of the people. Ajit Bhattacharjea wrote in the Illustrated Weekly of India on July 15, 1973:
Money had been collected for election and other party purposes before, but never on the scale and in the manner it was for Lok Sabha elections in 1971 and the State assembly elections a year later. Crores are known to have been extracted from the business community, but there is no account of these transactions. The entire sum was paid in black money; no legal accounts were kept… . So a premium was placed on massive dishonesty and corruption and the parallel black money economy—with all its degrading social and economic effects—was legitimised.
There was a procedural change in the conduct of this election. Up to now each ballot box had been separately counted at the end of polling. This time ballot boxes from several polling stations were mixed, resulting in a lapse of time, sometimes of days, before counting could begin. The reason given was that no one should know how a particular area had voted. This innovation had been considered and rejected by the Election Commission in its report on the fourth general election. The change in procedure, which involved a change in rules, should have been placed before Parliament for scrutiny. It was, however, introduced after Parliament had been dissolved and the notification for the election had been made.
The change applied to parliamentary constituencies, not state assembly constituencies. It did not affect the three states of West Bengal, Orissa and Tamil Nadu, where assembly elections were held simultaneously with the general election, a fact of some significance later.
Mrs Gandhi’s victory had been expected, though no one, including her own party’s best forecasters, had predicted a twothirds majority. The Opposition parties had been expected to win in areas where they existed in strength and enjoyed a good reputation on the basis of their past performance. Their almost total rout, an abnormally clean sweep, even in these areas, had an unreality, particularly when they were defeated by unknown New Congress candidates who themselves had expected to make a scant or mediocre showing. The Opposition held that deviation from established election procedure gave scope for mischief on a vast scale, particularly as this deviation, unobtrusively introduced, coincided with an election where a leader’s political reputation and future were linked to an unusual degree with the outcome.
The prime minister, who as home minister had intelligence, the police and the Election Commission under her supervision, told the Lok Sabha after the election on April 2, 1971, ‘The complaints against the Election Commission have already been dealt with by my colleague, the Minister of Law and Justice.’ The Jan Sangh leader, A.B. Vajpayee, retorted, ‘Not satisfactorily.’ But, in the aftermath of Mrs Gandhi’s victory and the awe created by the pendulum swing of power, criticism died away and questions remained unanswered.
The only nationally known Opposition leader to take rigging charges to court was Balraj Madhok of the Jan Sangh, defeated in his South Delhi constituency, who claimed evidence of a plan to ensure a New Congress coup. The following extracts from his book Murder of Democracy1 have some significance in view of the dictatorship Mrs Gandhi launched with ease in 1975:
The first information about the projected fraud on the Indian electorate accidentally reached a Delhi school teacher when he was… enrolling new voters in the Karol Bagh area of Delhi. When he approached an officer of the Government of India who lived in that area but whose name did not appear on the electoral rolls… [the officer] casually remarked, ‘You may enrol me and I will vote for your party but you are not going to win. This time chemicals will be employed and all your candidates will be defeated.’… Nobody, including the officers of Delhi State Jan Sangh, took serious note of the information… . A few days before the polling a letter reached the Jan Sangh office at Lucknow. It said that the writer of the letter was staying in a dak bungalow in the Rae Bareilly constituency from where Mrs. Gandhi was contesting. He overheard some Congress high-ups staying in the adjacent room talking about the certainty of Mrs. Gandhi’s victory because of the use of a certain percentage of chemicalized ballot papers which would be pre-stamped in her favour. He thought it his duty to convey the information to the major opposition party in the State and so he wrote that letter… .
On March 2, three days before the polling was to begin in New Delhi, a chit came on the stage of a public meeting organised by the Jan Sangh in Karol Bagh which was to be addressed by A. B. Vajpayee. The chit said: ‘I am a senior officer of the Election Commission. I want to warn you that some serious mischief is being done in regard to ballot papers. Be on guard.’… On March 3, a young man met Vidyarthi [ Jan Sangh candidate from Karol Bagh] in his office and gave him detailed information about the modus operandi of the contemplated fraud on the electorate. He told Vidyrathi that a certain percentage of ballot papers will be chemically treated and an invisible stamp will be affixed on the cow-and-calf symbol of the Indira Congress. Stamps put by the voters in polling booths on such ballots will disappear because of that chemical, and the invisible stamp on the cow-and-calf symbol will become visible after some days… .
It is difficult to believe how responsible people who got this information dismissed it as fantastic and took no step either to inform the public about it or even to tell their senior colleagues, some of whom also happened to be candidates in the election, about it… .
The first concrete evidence of rigging… came to light at the time of counting. A number of opposition candidates and their counting agents in Delhi, Bombay and elsewhere noted that stamp marks on the cow-andcalf symbol [of Mrs Gandhi’s party] on a large number of ballot papers appeared to be uniform, fresher and brighter than the stamps on other symbols. It was also noted that the colour of such ballot papers was somewhat different from other ballots. The matter was brought to the notice of returning officers by a number of people including Madhu Mehta, General Secretary of the Swatantra Party, who was present at the counting of votes in one of the Lok Sabha constituencies of Bombay. But the returning officers expressed their inability to take legal cognizance of these observations… .
The first definite information about the fraud… came on the night of March 11, when a senior officer of an important department of Government burst into tears before two other officials and told them the whole story to unburden the load on his conscience.
This was followed by a spate of unsigned letters giving details of the fraud to important leaders of the Opposition, including Nijalingappa… Charan Singh and the writer. The details given in some of these letters coming from authoritative sources were startling.
As the information started pouring in, the first thing the writer thought of was to apprise the President of India of all the facts, with the request to act in the interest of the Constitution which he was under oath to uphold… urging him to order a judicial probe into the conduct of the elections and appoint a commission of scientists to make chemical examination of ballot papers… .
Madhok received an acknowledgement of his letter to the President, but no reply. On March 30, 1971, he sought the chief election commissioner’s permission to inspect the ballot papers of his own South Delhi constituency. Permission was refused. On April 24 Madhok filed an election petition in the Delhi High Court, setting forth his case for an inspection of ballot papers in his constituency. The trial judge, Justice Andley, ordered an inspection. The New Congress candidate appealed against inspection to the Supreme Court. Madhok notes that Supreme Court judge Daftary, who categorically opposed any kind of inspection, and particularly a chemical inspection of ballot papers, was not long afterwards nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Two Supreme Court judges, Hegde and Khanna, however, ordered a sample inspection of a few hundred ballot papers before any general inspection was ordered. In the course of their judgement they observed:
The march of science has shown in recent years that what was thought to be impossible just a few years back has become an easy possibility now. What we would have thought as wild imagination some years back is now proved to be reality. Hence we are unable to reject the allegations of the election petitioner without scrutiny. We shall accept nothing and reject nothing except on satisfactory proof.
In compliance with the Supreme Court judgement, Justice Andley of the Delhi High Court made a sample inspection of 800 ballot papers cast in favour of the New Congress candidate and 550 cast in favour of the Jan Sangh candidate (Madhok), taken at random out of bags containing them. Madhok writes:
At the very first sight of the two sets of ballot papers, they revealed some difference in colour. While all but five ballot papers cast in the writer’s favour were found to be white, almost all the ballot papers cast in favour of the ruling Congress were found to be‘off white’ in the language of the court… [The trial judge] also asked the writer to keep his scientist and formula ready for chemical examination and reserved his order for November 12… . But the judgement could not be delivered on November 12 as the court was closed that day because of the sudden death of a judge of the Supreme Court. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had been abroad also returned to New Delhi on the same date.
Madhok records his astonishment that the judgement when it came was a complete reversal of the trial judge’s stated position. The judge rejected the request for chemical inspection of ballot papers. He also struck the issue off the election petition.
Unwilling to let the matter rest, Madhok took his case to the Supreme Court with the plea that the suspect ballots be chemically examined. He argued the case himself on August 9, 1972, saying the ballots were the only evidence of a calculated coup, which if the evidence were borne out, would reveal the extent the ruling clique had gone to ensure a sizeable victory. If tests could be undertaken in cases of forged documents or currency notes, the ballots, on which a country’s fate depended, should be tested. The Supreme Court now refused the plea.
The voting pattern did indeed reveal that, in the states where assembly elections had been held at the same time and where, in accordance with past election procedure, there was no time lag between polling and counting, the Opposition had done well. In Tamil Nadu, where the Congress did not contest, the DMK swept the assembly poll. In West Bengal the CPI-M did better than the New Congress,* and in Orissa the Swatantra Party made a good showing. Losing candidates lost with fairly narrow margins in these states. As against this, in other states Congress candidates won by uniformly high margins of about 1,00,000 votes.
Madhok did not get his party’s support in his charges and was expelled from it on differences of ideology after the election. He was considered a diehard and the Jan Sangh was anxious to relax its conservative image to combat the ‘Indira wave’. A fierce critic of Nehru, whose policies the Jan Sangh had adamantly opposed, Madhok makes observations in his book about Nehru and Mrs Gandhi that are interesting for their contrast:
Pandit Nehru’s greatest contribution for which his memory will be cherished by every democrat was that he gave respect to democratic institutions and kept the structure of democracy alive when he was in a position to destroy them if he so wanted… by showing due respect to fundamental rights, particularly to freedom of thought and expression, and by preserving the independence of the judiciary and sanctity and fairness of elections… .
Of the midterm election and Mrs Gandhi he concludes:
The allegation was not about any electoral malpractice but about rigging of the election on a large scale… . The plan to rig the elections must have been a closely guarded secret, and no non-Communist colleague of Mrs. Gandhi, including her Party president and Defence Minister, Jagjivan Ram, was privy to it.
Madhok’s account is painstaking and pedestrian, and carries no breath of the sensational. The handling of his charge makes strange reading, with its inexplicable reversal of the stand taken both by the high court and the Supreme Court after a sample inspection of ballots had been ordered and carried out, the results found revealing enough to merit a chemical examination and that examination ordered. If the whole issue was a crank’s fixation, thorough scrutiny would have shown it up for what it was. Instead, the legal process was suddenly halted and reversed. A tradition of investigative reporting might have served India well at this time, but if any newspaper thought it worthwhile to pursue this line of inquiry, it did not do so in the glitter of Mrs Gandhi’s victory and her well-known intolerance of opposing opinion. Madhok’s charge, moreover, had the ring of fantasy about it. Though two Supreme Court judges were on record as saying that not even the most fanciful possibility could be lightly dismissed in this age of sophisticated technology, most people did so dismiss it. Four general elections had already taken place since 1952, and the public believed in the fairness of elections. Even those politicians who, according to Madhok’s account, received information about a ‘conspiracy’ beforehand, did not imagine so brazen a scheme could be perpetrated, though they were opponents of the regime. It is perhaps a strain on the imagination to suggest that a familiar process is going to be subverted under one’s gaze while the sun shines. The average person, who has come and gone in freedom, spoken, written and voted as he pleased, does not recognize the alien chord struck on just such an ordinary day.
If one were to give credence to the possibility of a coup through a certain number of spurious ballots, the election of 1971 could become a link in the chain starting with Mrs Gandhi’s charge of the home ministry, and the unorthodox manner of change in election procedure. One question would still remain: Why was a ‘coup’ necessary, if indeed it took place? The New Congress was, in the general assessment, more than likely to win. The element of chance hung only on its majority. Yet Mrs Gandhi needed a two-thirds majority to control Parliament and to carry through her amendments to the Constitution. Anything less would have put a continued brake on her functioning. She had gambled for high stakes when she broke with her party on the question of unfettered command, a meaningless gamble if lack of majority at the polls were to render her ineffective once again. That the stakes in the power game became higher, until in June 1975 she wiped all elements of chance off the scene, imprisoning her opponents within and outside her party, seems to suggest that the 1971 election might have been a stage in a process.
The character of this election may also explain the subservience of Parliament in accepting and consolidating the dictatorship after June 1975. If many MPs—‘lamp posts’—were her creatures rather than known and accepted personalities in their constituencies, they would have a vital interest in prolonging their tenure and displaying the perfect obedience that would keep them in the leader’s favour.
*In the West Bengal state assembly election in 1971 the New Congress won 105 seats (29.8 per cent votes) and the CPI-M won 111 seats (33.8 per cent votes).