NINETEEN
The Face of the Future
A prime minister’s personal tragedy does not usually become a political dilemma, but Mrs Gandhi’s political career had been shaped by ever growing personal and family considerations, and Sanjay’s death left her in a political and psychological vacuum of her own making. She faced the gravest problems in her career with the weakest and most inexperienced team of ministers, most of whom had been chosen for their special equation with Sanjay. The price rise achieved new heights, tensions in the rural sector mounted, communal violence erupted and an increasing sense of insecurity gripped the cities. An electorate that had hoped Mrs Gandhi would be better able than a disunited coalition to cope with problems found her unequal to the task. After Sanjay’s death she also faced turmoil within her party. This, unlike 1971, was not the settled weather of an exhilarating victory.
The use of her party as an instrument of dynasty should in the ordinary course have become irrelevant after Sanjay’s removal from the scene, leaving his following to find its own level. The men his patronage had elevated to importance had, almost without exception, no firm political base of their own and, in the case of some new entrants from among the princes and business houses, very recent and tenuous links with the party. Sanjay’s satellites found they needed a new and powerful sponsor close to Mrs Gandhi to ensure not the seats they already occupied in Parliament and state legislatures but the leverage and ultimate control they had counted on capturing. The keys of this kingdom were now out of reach, along with the expectation of a steady harvest of material advantage. The campaign to draft Sanjay’s elder brother, Rajiv, as his successor recognized Mrs Gandhi’s incapacity to repose her confidence outside her bloodline.
Mrs Gandhi could at this stage have abandoned dynastic notions and trappings, using her own now undiluted authority to end dissensions in the party and restore it to the kind of functioning that would admit new political blood. Her reaction was quite different. She appeared to take it for granted that her elder son should now enter politics, if not as his brother’s successor—which his own dislike of such a proposition made unlikely—then as his mother’s aide. This development laid bare the extremity of her isolation and the extent of her estrangement from normal parliamentary government and of her own retreat behind the blood bond. As a leader she had shown little interest in, or aptitude for, the interaction and interdependence of the parts of a system that makes for a balanced, healthy whole. The plan to induct Rajiv into politics occasioned no surprise in public comment and none in her party. Rajiv Gandhi, uninterested in politics, reluctant to give up a career as an Indian Airlines pilot, in which he enjoyed high professional standing, found himself forced to make a difficult and unwelcome decision. It was, however, clear that he would not in any sense be a Sanjay substitute when Mrs Gandhi moved swiftly to strip Sanjay’s inner circle of the free access his key associates had had to the prime minister’s house. Implicit was the warning that they no longer could count on special status or protection. The action was reminiscent of similar treatment in the past towards colleagues of her own generation who had become security risks. Yet it had its own significance. The house that Sanjay built contained elements, some disreputable and dangerous, that only he could control. The disciplining of a corps that would have presented her with problems of impatient ambition, even had Sanjay lived, seemed to free her from imminent and even ugly duress. Publicly she showed every sign of relaxation. The Youth Congress-I too, placed under a more pliant leadership that did not seek laurels for itself, would be more amenable to her own guidance. This quiet demotion of Sanjay’s following proceeded alongside memorials to him. This kept the family name before the public, while the ground was prepared for the new member, Rajiv, to fill the gap.
Not given to consensus or compromise, Mrs Gandhi was vulnerable to the tides she had helped to create. Charisma and manipulative talent were not enough to integrate a divided polity and administration or win back a suspicious intelligentsia. Both urban and rural society were beginning to demand efficient performance from political leaders, and the blurred ideology of the Congress-I gave no indication of clear intent or direction. Mrs Gandhi had built her reputation on radical credentials, through her break with the old guard of the Congress, her alliance with the CPI and such measures, hailed as progressive, as the nationalization of fourteen banks. Sanjay Gandhi had come to the country’s notice as a young man inordinately interested in money and power and not too particular how he came by either. From Sanjay’s anti-Left stance, it was inferred he favoured private enterprise. Yet, he did not possess the true credentials of private enterprise, as the Maruti saga had shown. It is probable that, had he remained in charge, the country could have expected, under the mantle of a bigger role for private industry, political management that would serve the interests of a group, through benefits not available to industry in general. As though this were understood, the sudden nationalization of six commercial banks in April 1980 had not created a ripple. Principally it seemed to assure the ruling clique of a controlling voice in their affairs. In a like control operation, the Planning Commission, conceived in 1950 as an independent body of experts engaged in policy perspectives, had been virtually reduced to a department of government. The draft of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, drawn up under the Janata regime, may have been the last creative exercise of its kind for some time to come.
Until his death, essential political authority vested in Sanjay, although, until he was appointed General Secretary of the Congress-I shortly before he died, his position in the party was technically no higher than that of other members of Parliament. His style was evident in the administrative control established in several states by mass transfers of civil servants and their replacement. The Congress-I also launched ‘direct action’ in the form of a blockade to prevent supplies from reaching Assam, where a state-wide protest demanded the expulsion of illegal immigrants from its electoral rolls. Mrs Gandhi assured Parliament that nothing should be done to ‘increase the tension or aggravate the situation in Assam’. Yet, on March 19, 1980, UNI reported the ransacking by Congress-I demonstrators of the Calcutta office of the Assam Tribune:
Over 300 demonstrators went into the paper’s office in a procession after staging an hour-long demonstration outside the Assam House here. A group of demonstrators stormed into the office of the daily on the third floor and threw furniture out into the street. Later they set it on fire. Typewriters and other equipment were also damaged… . Mrs. Subrata Mukherji, general secretary of the West Bengal Congress-I … said the only recourse to tackle the Assam movement was to counter it by another movement… . [They] would be launching this movement by closing all routes of supplies to Assam to bring about an undeclared ‘economic blockade’ against the State.
This treatment of the Assam situation, a complex one outside the scope of this study, is of interest here as an example of the direct and violent interference with the orderly and peaceful solution that Mrs Gandhi claimed her government was seeking. Assam was declared a disturbed area and the army was moved into the state.
When the minister for information and broadcasting, Vasant Sathe, announced that radio and television would continue under government control, thus reversing the Janata government’s decision to grant autonomy, a direction halted by the 1977 election was resumed. Two further developments also provided windows to Mrs Gandhi’s frame of mind, indicating that she was picking up with deliberation the threads where she had left them. In September 1980 she armed her government, as she had done in 1971, with arbitrary powers to arrest and detain anyone ‘acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of the State or to the maintenance of public order or maintenance of supplies and services essential to the community’. The provisions of the National Security Ordinance (NSO) exceeded those of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) as originally enacted in 1971, though MISA was amended during the Emergency to tighten and extend its provisions. The NSO enabled the government, in effect, to detain a citizen indefinitely without trial.* The measure, promulgated by presidential ordinance, along with several other ordinances between the monsoon and winter sessions of Parliament, showed Mrs Gandhi’s characteristic lack of confidence in the art and processes of administration and in the normal legislative process, in spite of her unassailable position in Parliament.
The second window to Mrs Gandhi’s mind was her party’s sponsorship of an All-India Lawyers’ Conference, October 22–23, 1980, inaugurated by her in New Delhi, holding the predominant view that the present form of government be replaced by the presidential system. The idea, advanced during the Emergency, had been withdrawn when the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution secured for the prime minister a position above the law. The dilution of this amendment by the Supreme Court judgement during the Janata regime apparently makes a new approach to the objective of expanded executive powers necessary.
Mrs Gandhi may be encouraged to seek greatly enlarged executive powers once again because a fragmented Opposition cannot obstruct her plans. Coherent opposition now comes only from the CPI-M, with governments in three states, Kerala,† West Bengal and Tripura, and the newly formed Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with substantial support in the Hindi heartland, and improving its position in the south. The BJP’s platform of ‘Gandhian socialism’ and its cadre structure make it the only organized non-communist Opposition in national politics at present. Mrs Gandhi’s earlier ally, the CPI, is divided into two parties, one supporting her, the other working for closer cooperation with the CPI-M. The CPI-M’s battering by the Gandhi government in 1972 has taught it to walk the tightrope of Centre–state relations with care, and not invite another confrontation. Unless a stronger democratic Opposition emerges either among the non-communist Opposition parties, or through a convulsion within the Congress-I, the coast is clear for Mrs Gandhi to move towards a change of system, or expanded powers for herself within the existing system. In March–April 1982 the Rajya Sabha will admit new members by election through state legislatures, where her party now enjoys majorities. She will be able to get enough party members into the Rajya Sabha to create the majority her government needs to amend the Constitution and usher in the changes she desires.
Any such move would have the undoubted support of the Soviet Union, as the Emergency had in 1975 to 1977, and the greater ballast provided by its presence in Afghanistan.
Mrs Gandhi’s election manifesto had promised ‘stability’ and the control of inflation. Stability, seen as the natural consequence of government under a leader of national stature, was clearly too simplistic a conception of India in the 1980s. It did not reckon with conditions needing the government’s supervision and guidance of change rather than its guardianship of the status quo. In February 1980 two villages in Bihar highlighted the terror facing the rural poor who decided to assert their democratic rights. Peasants demanding the return of expropriated land in Parasbigha, and agitating for the minimum wage in Pipra, met with slaughter and carnage by the landlords’ hired assassins who apparently had the local government’s protection. Crime figures showed the continuing decline of law and order in the cities, while according to the home ministry’s annual report published in April 1981, 1980 registered the highest figures of communal violence since 1976.
There was no relief from the rise in prices. J.D. Singh commented in the Times of India, June 6, 1981, on official statistics released the day before:
Since the present government assumed office in January 1980, the wholesale index has risen by 24 percent. The increase in retail prices has been much sharper, thus causing distress to millions of families in the country.
A project to collect black (unaccounted) money by the sale of government bonds on attractive ten-year tax-free terms, after which the money would be accepted as legitimately earned, met with a limited response. The government collected only about one-third of its target figure of 1000 crore rupees, perhaps because the major portion of unaccounted money was already profitably invested, and certainly because the public doubted that anonymity would be respected. A parallel economy of this dimension could not have existed without political backers and manipulators who were its main beneficiaries, and it was believed that the bonds project was conceived as a means of converting political collections into legitimate legal tender.
The government was faced with convulsions in two states. In Assam the popular movement demanding the expulsion of illegal immigrants was able to halt its most vital industry, oil production and transportation, with calls for civil disobedience. In Gujarat caste, and the government’s faulty implementation of the reservation policy laid down in the Constitution, became a live issue when doctors held demonstrations against reservations at the postgraduate level of medical education for backward castes and tribes.
Against this disturbed domestic background the induction of Rajiv Gandhi, inexperienced and hesitant, as Mrs Gandhi’s assumed successor, showed her curious apathy to political and economic realities. Rajiv was elected member of Parliament from Amethi, his late brother’s constituency, in June 1981. He had, prior to this, while still holding his job as an Indian Airlines pilot, assembled aides who, it rapidly became known, were the new ‘durbar’, dispensing influence, patronage and privilege, though discretion replaced the arrogance, aggressiveness and vulgar display of authority flaunted by Sanjay’s men. No more is heard of this coterie, or of Sanjay’s young widow, Maneka.
The government took a categorical turn away from the Janata regime’s concept (in continuation of previous policy) of non-alignment as equidistance from the super powers, when it identified itself with the Soviet Union’s global and regional perceptions. When the foreign ministers of non-aligned countries met in New Delhi, February 9–12, 1981, India’s desire not to offend the Soviet Union isolated it from the majority view at the conference, in spite of the appearance of unity achieved by a consensus declaration. The conference revealed the gap that now exists between the Soviet Union and most of the non-aligned, one that will make India’s role as a leader of the non-aligned movement both problematic and suspect.
A new society, Friends of the Soviet Union, inaugurated by Mrs Gandhi on May 27, 1981, Jawaharlal Nehru’s death anniversary, established her own party’s direct links with the Soviet Union, and served as a rebuke to the CPI, no longer cooperating with her as it had done 1969–77. Present on the occasion was S.A. Dange, expelled chairman of the CPI, and now Secretary General of the new All India Communist Party, solidly behind Mrs Gandhi.
With an amazing new lease of power, after a near total eclipse, what had Mrs Gandhi achieved? The withdrawal of court cases against her had wiped awkward past history off the record, insofar as it blemished her, her associates and her son Sanjay, who had attained rare heights in manipulating the administration for his private purposes. Colleagues and officials who had been significant instruments in the misuse of power were reinstated. This whole development had the implicit sanction of the highest legislature in the land. On May 7, 1981, the Lok Sabha—with the main Opposition absent in protest—adopted a resolution revoking its predecessor’s expulsion of Mrs Gandhi on December 19, 1978. She was thereby absolved of her guilt of breach of privilege and contempt of Parliament. Her crowning achievement, however, was the entry of Rajiv into politics. The calamitous setback to her dream of family rule by Sanjay’s death had been smoothly and swiftly overcome with the replacing of one son by another, accompanied by the loud acclamation of her party. As a member of Parliament, Rajiv is poised to succeed his mother, should she continue in power until the appropriate time.
This virtuoso performance, with its unerring ability to exploit the most pervasive strands in Indian culture, had not, by mid-1981, redeemed the ruling party’s pledge to provide ‘a government that works’. Unemployment, prices, and law and order remained deteriorating problems. The Janata government’s programmes for an assault on poverty had been dismantled or eroded, and no alternative had appeared. The question is, can the triumph of the family principle survive the neglect of bare necessities?
Though Mrs Gandhi still believes in her family’s right to rule, the country—with the possible exception of sections of her party—does not. The Janata experiment ended in confusion but its lessons were important. It was a reaffirmation of the case for liberty, and it halted an inexorable tide. None of its quarrelling constituents would have compromised on the principle of individual freedom or the checks and balances that distinguish the democratic form of government. In favouring decentralization, it accepted the reality that only local institutions, given the support they need, can stimulate effort and self-confidence. A strong and stable Central government, a necessity for India, is the end result of the satisfaction of legitimate local needs and aspirations and cannot survive as the independent creation of a despot. Indeed, the centralization of power, above all if it vests in an individual or a family, and the strong-arm techniques implicit in centralization are discredited answers for societies in need of change. With the dismantling of authoritarian rule, the Janata government’s two and a half years in power also registered the highest growth the country had known. During this period, too, the country became a signatory to two international covenants to safeguard human rights.
The Janata experiment was the first attempt at a national consensus since Nehru, despite his big majorities, sought and attained one in the nation. Its composition was evidence of the new elite that democracy had brought to power and of the rapid social transformation that had taken place, until recently without violence, especially in the changing patterns of land ownership since Independence. Continuance in democracy will require an understanding of the new forces that have arisen during the past decade and changes in the system’s structure to cope with them. Enlightened opinion, ranging over the Opposition, believes there must be more not less democracy to resolve the current tensions and that the exercise of human rights is the only guarantee of a greater voice to the deprived layers of society. The Emergency was a salutary experience in this regard. Those accustomed to taking their civil liberties for granted and suddenly deprived of them were compelled to become aware of the majority whose human rights remained largely on paper, and for whom both justice and compassion still need translation into daily life. It will need a leadership of example, with a rigorous commitment to democracy, to restore India’s political system to health and to assert the priorities that will narrow the gap between the privileged and the great majority. Mrs Gandhi’s record shows that, though she asserts these commitments, she had led her Congress away from the party’s early vision and inspiration, rendering it incapable, in its present form, of serving democratic ideals.
Founded in 1885 by an Englishman A.O. Hume, the Indian National Congress began as a ‘loyal Opposition to Her Majesty’s Government’, elite in composition and moderate in its objectives. Under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership from 1920, it launched a countrywide struggle for freedom that mobilized the working class and the peasantry and cut across caste and class. In 1947 the Congress made the successful transition from liberation movement to ruling party, providing the continuity, stability and psychological security the country needed as it faced the traumas of partition and the challenges of independence. Jawaharlal Nehru could, in addition, invite and sustain the broad consensus vital to the tasks of development. The first departure from this tradition of containment was Mrs Gandhi’s break with the party in 1969. Her rival Congress acquiesced to a cult of personality and family, served as her stepping stone to arbitrary rule and became her means of promoting her son as her successor. The Emergency alienated many in it who favoured or tolerated Mrs Gandhi’s special status but were not willing to accept Sanjay as her political heir, and the Congress split again in 1978. Yet in 1980 the hereditary principle had triumphed and the Congress-Indira was frankly a family concern.
This outcome, feudal and despotic in character, is wholly at variance with the Congress party’s evolution. As a democratic, egalitarian organization, its strength came from different levels of state and local leadership that had played an active role in the political education of the Indian people. The Congress had been a political tradition as much as a political party, the middle road committed to democratic government and growth in freedom. Mrs Gandhi’s preference for a one-leader, one-party state and finally her imposition of an emergency startlingly altered this course, completing her party’s divorce from the historic Congress. As the exclusive preserve of a family, her party had reached the end of the road. With an organization based on this inspiration at the helm of affairs, the threat to India’s unity and progress does not come from internal or external challenges so much as from the possibility that these real or imagined dangers will be used as an argument to rebuild an authoritarian structure of power.
The question may be asked how 351 members of Parliament in a democracy can be regarded as part of a leadership’s personal estate and expected to do its bidding. This is not the paradox it seems. It is the result of a system whose politics of patronage have come home to roost. With government the monolithic source of crucial production and distribution, a high degree of centralization has provided the means to set an unparalleled trend of political interference. Where routine business depends on obeisance to power, and public recognition on an intimate identification with the power structure, the politician has come to exercise more than normal influence within his ambit. His enormous powers of patronage give him control over important levers of economic and social development. Mrs Gandhi broke with the undivided Congress in 1969, defining the break as her fight against the political bosses—the ‘vested interests’—who held progress to ransom. Yet, in place of the small group she broke with and whose functions had been kept within the limits imposed by the democratic and decentralized functioning of the party, a proliferation of bosses now reign in the countryside. The local political boss, particularly if he belongs to the current ruling party, treats his territory as a fiefdom, anchoring his hold in those who depend on his bounty, at times in alliance with an established local mafia, as in the coal region of Bihar. He commands local levels of the police and the bureaucracy as of natural right and uses them to keep his own interests—on the land or in industry—secure. He is the means whereby political parties control bloc votes and ensure their delivery at the polling booth. Mrs. Gandhi’s, and earlier her son’s, command of a following resembling, in fact, proclaiming, itself as a bodyguard of militant personal loyalty has climaxed and legitimized this process at the national level. A situation that is by no means confined to the party in power obviously has much more to offer the party in power.
Mrs Gandhi’s appears to have been as much a search for a secure personal identity as it has represented the road to personal power. Her style, more than most, has been shaped by the traits and inhibitions of her personality—its solitariness, its reserve, its suspicion of the outsider. She thought of her childhood in terms of two kinds of people, those identified with the struggle for freedom and all the rest, and life remained for her a stark and narrow weave, unlike the many-textured fabric of her father’s personality and growth. The vital human difference between them made for very different political values and expression. Nehru’s temperament was the fireside at which many warmed their hands, took strength and went on their way to personhood, more confident for the encounter with him. Indira’s was the flame—lone, dependent on shelter for its glow and survival, leaving its surroundings dark. Nehru nurtured the institutions that would safeguard a democratic future. Indira’s confrontations with democratic institutions shook established norms and finally found expression in the Emergency of 1975–77. Nehru, effortlessly a leader of men, had the self-confidence of which equal relationships, personal and political, are born. Indira clung to ‘family’ as anchor, making it a platform for superiority. Though her style represented a clear departure from that of her predecessors, it resembled that of a number of Third World leaders who saw themselves as the saviour of their people. She has, however, been the only one to get her son accepted by her party as her successor—a feat that she may accomplish a second time.
In May 1964, when Nehru died, dynasty was by no means a goal with her. But ideas like this do not spring full-blown from a void. Indira frankly believed she was uniquely qualified to lead the country, and in some respects better qualified than her father, whose civilized attributes could, she believed, be a disadvantage in politics. Yet it was the Congress party, not Indira, that planted the seed of dynasty when, in January 1966, it backed her to succeed Lal Bahadur Shastri, convinced that as prime minister she would be its best vote-getter in the approaching general election of 1967. The seed found fertile soil in an imagination nourished on patriotism, with a belief that her family had played an exclusive role in the fight for freedom and with an exaggerated view of her own. After seventeen years of Nehru government, and over a decade of Indira’s it was not surprising that her relatives too spoke, not always jokingly, of belonging to the royal family. These and other beneficiaries of the family cult have been glad to fan the feudal flame and keep it alive. Yet the idea of family succession as a birthright, tragic and retrograde for a republic, will, if it succeeds, provide an ironic ending to a heroic experiment in democracy, unique in Asia.
*The National Security Ordinance provides that the detainee must be given grounds for his detention, but not if it is against the public interest to disclose these. Detention is to last for three months at one time, or a maximum of twelve months, but it can go on being extended by three months at a time, so long as a government functionary thinks this is necessary.
†In October 1981, President’s rule was established in Kerala when the communist-led coalition lost its majority with the withdrawal of its two main coalition partners.