FOURTEEN

Why Mrs Gandhi Called an Election

The Constitution of 1950 allowed the government, under conditions of emergency, to postpone elections to Parliament for a year at a time. Mrs Gandhi took advantage of this provision to postpone the election due in March 1976 for one year. In November 1976 she announced a further year’s postponement. Her November decision and its sudden reversal on January 18, 1977 when she announced an election for March revealed once again personal temperament rather than orderly political process as characteristic of the style she had brought to Indian politics. Like her declaration of Emergency, the new decision appeared to be intimately connected with her estimate of her own political fortune and now, in addition, that of her son’s.

Mrs Gandhi had declared an emergency when her party’s future was at a distinct crossroads. In the preceding months the Congress had suffered stunning defeats in four out of five by-elections at the hands of the Opposition combine, known as the Janata Front, that was produced by the Bihar Movement. These defeats had been climaxed on June 12, 1975 by the Front’s victory in the Gujarat state election. While by-elections and state elections are not always pointers to major change on the national scene, the emergence for the first time of a united Opposition as victor showed a new weight in politics that could not be ignored. The Congress might be returned to power in the next election, but not since 1967 had its credit been so low. If it was returned with a greatly reduced majority it would pave the way for Opposition governments in several states, and the breakdown of its monolithic rule at the Centre and states since 1971–72. The Bihar Movement, apart from securing the cooperation of four political parties, had been a potent force in intensifying political awareness in the countryside and organizing new sections of the population against the Congress. It had also stirred the conscience of Congressmen and driven high office holders in the party and the government to forthright criticism. By June 1975 the cracks in the Congress were plain to see, but it was plainer still that Mrs Gandhi had a fight ahead of her to retain control of it. For those now grouping against her, she represented the autocratic structure that would have to be dismantled if the Congress were to recover the confidence of its own rank and file, as well as mass sympathy and backing. The Allahabad High Court judgement invalidating her 1971 election to Parliament for two violations of the election law gave the Congress a quiet opportunity to replace her, without any tinder being lit over the event or appeals to loyalty and emotion being launched. The citadel of power she had built did not permit a normal open debate about a change in leadership. But Chandersekhar, Mohan Dharia, Krishna Kant, Ram Dhan and others had already made their views public and had become the focus of admiring attention. This admiration was reinforced by the wall of unspoken resentment her style of leadership had brought into being. The astute and ambitious among her rivals in the party bided their time for the denouement that now seemed inevitable.

Mrs Gandhi’s characteristic recourse to ‘spontaneous’ rallies arranged at her residence—this time to condemn the high court judgement and uphold her as the people’s choice—and her effort to stir and inflame feeling in the capital was drawing little response. The routine had staled. Small, straggling groups, rounded up with difficulty from Delhi and its environs, sat polite, patient and bored in the enervating heat, listening to the now familiar claim to unique sacrifice, ancestry and position. The signs, for any temperament not comfortable with the democratic process and the change it now seemed certain to bring, were ominous. Against an impending possibility of checkmate, Mrs Gandhi declared an emergency and launched a police state, with one gesture disposing of her opponents in and outside her party and immobilizing the gathering opposition to the Congress. What were the factors, nineteen months later, that influenced her to risk an election?

The element of risk now seemed small, as far as a Congress win was concerned, for it had held the stage without competition for those nineteen months. During that period Mrs Gandhi had disciplined the dissidents in her party through arrest or its threat. She had successfully introduced, and systematically pushed, the idea of dynastic rule, a thing she would have found difficult if not impossible to do in normal times. The Opposition was severely handicapped by nineteen months out of the public gaze, with no chance to make its views heard, while the government, with its monopoly of public meetings, demonstrations and media control, had been able to keep up a steady barrage of accusation and condemnation in extreme language against it. Some Opposition leaders were crippled with illness in long confinement. The chairman of the Socialist Party, George Fernandes, was not granted release to stand for election and had to do so from jail. For thousands of party workers, release from jail would mean first of all the urgent rehabilitation of their families, often reduced to severe hardship with the sole wage-earner in prison. For the Opposition as a whole, the process of reassembling, collecting funds and preparing for an election would be painful. The censored press—its independent editors dismissed or silenced—had daily assured Mrs Gandhi of her popularity. It is certain she believed the election would be a formal affair renewing her mandate.

There were other hopeful signs for a ruling party victory. The Emergency had benefited by two good harvests when grain had been abundant and its price comparatively stable. With about 80 per cent of the average Indian budget spent on food grains, inflation of the basic needs had been kept in check. High inflation in the West at this time had provided Indian exports with a noticeably improved market, and these had fetched better prices, adding substantially to India’s foreign currency reserves, as had the government’s belated measures against smuggling and tax evasion.

As against these advantages, the prices of many goods had risen and there were signs of shortage. Protest had remained alive, confirmed by expanded police vigilance and continuing arrests. The law courts had tried to act as a brake upon the government’s arbitrary behaviour and to uphold prisoners’ rights. In Delhi and Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, there had been large-scale and bloody riots against forced sterilization and peremptory eviction. And vigorous objection to the constitutional amendment package, giving the prime minister virtually unlimited powers, had erupted when the government modified the ban on public meetings to permit a degree of debate on the amendments. The outcry against the amendments, not confined to the intelligentsia and the cities, was heard in the countryside. The Indian villager had come to rely on the court system for redress of wrongs. Courts took time, but he could expect justice from them. Under the new dispensation, the powers of the courts to deal with land and other specific categories of cases were to be reduced or eliminated. For land cases, government tribunals were to be appointed. Small landowners and the landless feared that local vested interests and government bosses would end all impartial decision-making.

A combination of these plus and minus factors may have decided Mrs Gandhi to go to the polls while she had complete control of the situation, and before affairs, in the shape of man or nature, took an uncontrollable turn.

But the election appears to have been necessary for another reason. Mrs Gandhi had used the Emergency to bury the scandal surrounding her son’s business ventures and to raise him to an exalted status surrounded by the obeisance due to a hereditary heir apparent. Though he had no official position or political experience and was not even a primary member of the party, Sanjay was hailed as the leader and inspiration (even though he was not official president) of the Youth Congress. A concerted drive was launched to swell the organization’s membership, to provide him with a following personally loyal and beholden to him and to empower the organization with independence of authority and action. Mrs Gandhi introduced the new perspective at the annual session of the Congress in Guwahati (Assam) in December 1976, when she praised the exemplary role of the Youth Congress and spoke of its importance for the country’s future.

Sanjay had, since the Emergency, been a force to reckon with in political and administrative decisions in Delhi and in the states, and in December 1975 he had been escorted with fanfare into the party limelight at the Komagata Maru annual session at Chandigarh, but even earlier there were strong indications that Mrs Gandhi had succession in mind. On September 19, 1975, in a speech to educators, she had denied allegations of vast powers in her hands and said that nowhere in the world had the head of government less power than she had. ‘Every decision,’ she said, ‘has to go through a number of levels.’ In the same speech she continued, ‘But I may not be alive. What happens then? What is the next rank? Who is going to carry the fight forward?’ In normal democratic procedure who would this be but the next democratically chosen leader and his cabinet? Why, with less power than any head of government in the world, did Mrs Gandhi then raise the question of what may happen after her?

The rise and projection of Sanjay in the face of his reputation and the bitter resentment against his arrogant use of power during the Emergency reveal a curious yet classic flaw in his mother’s otherwise tough political armour, without which it is conceivable that Mrs Gandhi’s experiment in dictatorship might have survived an election, or at least not ended in her own humiliating defeat at the polls. Her refusal to acknowledge the facts about Sanjay’s behaviour and transactions had been an emotional blind spot. She now seized the moment to consolidate his future so that, if she died within the next five or six years, his power base would be secure. The 1971 Parliament, a body largely subservient to her individual authority, had secured her own power base. The 1977 Parliament would ensure Sanjay’s if it brought in a majority of his handpicked supporters.

As soon as censorship was suspended for the election, campaigning permitted, and the fear guaranteeing obedience and silence lifted, it was obvious this strategy could not be employed. A political avalanche in support of the Janata Party had overtaken opinion, with huge crowds walking miles to listen in pin-drop silence to Mrs Gandhi’s recent prisoners. Another impending development fast followed, with a break in the Congress led by Jagjivan Ram and his formation of Congress for Democracy, and its electoral alliance with the Janata Party. Jagjivan Ram gave as his reason for silence thus far that, had he made his intention clear any earlier, the election would not have taken place, and he would probably never have been heard of again—reasons the public considered valid, judging by the enthusiasm and support his breakaway received and his own election to Parliament. In these circumstances further erosion in the Congress could not be risked, with elements in the party known to be antagonistic to Sanjay’s domination. The original list, heavily weighted with Youth Congress names, had to be abandoned and a majority of the old candidates brought back.

Yet Sanjay’s rise had been made possible by the police state, and it could have been consolidated within it. He himself, according to her statement in a post-election party meeting, had advised his mother against an election. Why then did she decide to hold an election?

The answer may lie in the complexity of human personality. India’s leader, from 1966 to 1977, had been a woman whose childhood, education and family tradition had provided her with unusual opportunities for training in democratic ideals, yet whose own temperament had apparently never felt entirely comfortable with this inheritance. The stages of her career as prime minister made it plain she was not a democrat in practice. She firmly believed in her own indispensability. Concessions, compromise and discussion signified weakness to her, and opposition jarred and angered her. She needed the constant assurance of acceptance and loyalty to feel secure. Psychologically she seemed incapable of settling down into the routine of conducting the business of government, doing the homework practical decisions required, or understanding that in a democratic country the leader is fallible and dispensable, besides being mortal. She had watched democracy and indispensability successfully at work in her father’s lifetime and had assumed the combination would be hers by right of birth. When it did not appear to be so, she looked for reasons outside the pale of fact or logic. Though, as Nehru’s daughter, she had from the start an assured and prestigious place in the party and became the choice of its senior leaders for its highest post, yet she imagined vested interests obstructing and threatening her and used argument to seize and retain absolute control. She saw enemies in the normal democratic process and frequently claimed she was in physical danger from the Opposition. She gave extreme labels—‘fascist’ and ‘reactionary’—to her critics and to a genuine mass movement, Gandhian in method and programme, led by a nationally revered figure. Finally, she assumed dictatorial powers under the cloak of an ‘emergency’ on unproven accusations of conspiracy against herself and her government.

Democracy was not Mrs Gandhi’s style, but it remained an insistent craving. In a world where leadership had to be one of two kinds, coercive or persuasive, she could not resolve her dilemma and fell between the two, debasing democratic values while repeatedly avowing her dedication to them. The confusion gave her pronouncements during the Emergency a ring of unbalance. With tens of thousands of citizens jailed without charges or trial and her critics outlawed and silenced, she could calmly and convincedly repeat, ‘I am a democrat.’ The repetition carried an element of yearning.

Why should democracy have been a craving? It had been the heart and soul of India’s struggle for freedom, recalling much older values in the soil. It had been fundamental to her father’s philosophy and the letter and spirit of his government. The modern Indian imagination could not easily set democracy aside. It was a spectre that haunted Mrs Gandhi. She longed for a democratic image and never admitted to having any other. It was an image an election could only strengthen and brighten and a continuing Emergency could only tarnish. She did not doubt that the outcome of the election would be favourable to her party and to herself. But it might also achieve the deeply desired establishment of Sanjay as her successor.

India’s sixth national election to Parliament was transformed by the events of the Emergency to a referendum on a single issue: Would Indians give the Congress party a mandate to continue the form of dictatorship established by Mrs Gandhi in June 1975, or would they choose to return to a rule of law and the restoration of civil liberties? Of an electorate of 32 crore, roughly 60 per cent voted a new party to power, reducing the Congress for the first time since Independence to a minority. Significantly, Mrs Gandhi and her son, along with the ministers who had represented unpopular policies—V.C. Shukla (information and broadcasting), H.R. Gokhale (law), Bansi Lal (defence)—went down to shattering defeat at the polls. George Fernandes, who had to contest from prison, won by one of the largest majorities of any candidate.

The election made history for other reasons. The Janata Party that defeated the Congress was inspired and led by the most unusual figure in Indian politics since Mahatma Gandhi. Jayaprakash Narayan’s return to national prominence as leader of the Bihar Movement in 1974 had the profound impact it did because it restored the breath of idealism to the political controversy and revived echoes of an age of grand striving still fresh in Indian memory. Though he had been long regarded as an impractical idealist and visionary, it was his supremely practical accomplishment to unite the Opposition and guide it to victory on the issue that the masses need both bread and freedom, and there is no separating the two.

The election opened the way for two political processes stunted by Mrs Gandhi’s style and techniques of governing party and country: the natural development of the post-Nehru leadership within the Congress, and the natural development of an opposition as a growing challenge to the Congress. The myth of indispensability was quietly disposed of at the polls, and a path was opened for a new, perhaps unknown leadership of the Congress. With the vote in favour of the Congress concentrated in the south, for the first time since its birth its centre of power might shift to the south. The expanding political awareness of the electorate had first made itself felt with significant Opposition victories in 1967. It was reflected in the Opposition’s by-election victories in early 1975, while the 1977 elections reflected the new preference in the mass vote. The Indian Express editorial of March 22, 1977, entitled ‘Finest Hour’, called attention to this mass awareness, not a small, tidy, city elite, when it wrote:

The average Indian voter had demonstrated his maturity in exercising his franchise and has taught a lesson to rulers who might be inclined to take him for granted as a passive and pliable pawn in the game of power politics. Indian democracy will never again be the same after the traumatic experience of the last two years. No future government, however large its majority in Parliament, can afford to assume that it can drive a coach and four through the Constitution and the laws, make inroads on the liberties of the people and hope to escape nemesis from an outraged people. It is significant that the people’s vote went against Mrs. Gandhi despite all her warnings that her defeat would mean plunging the country into chaos… .

The election’s immediate achievement was the restoration of a legitimate political process, more important in the long run than the question of whether the coalition it had brought to power would survive. The electorate’s rejection of the dictatorship Nehru’s daughter had established was a vindication of Nehru’s own passionate conviction that his countrymen must live and grow in freedom.