India After Gandhi (85 page)

Mrs Gandhi’s election had been overturned on a quite minor charge, yet Justice Sinha’s verdict also concentrated the popular mind on the more serious accusations levelled against her by JP’s movement. The day after the judgement, opposition politicians began a
dharna
outside Rashtrapati Bhavan, demanding that the president dismiss the ‘corrupt’ prime minister. In Patna, JP issued a statement saying it would be ‘shameful and cynical’ were Mrs Gandhi to listen to the ‘yes-men’ around her and stay on in office. He also noted that the Gujarat election results suggested that the ‘Indira wave’ and ‘Indira magic’ were matters of the past.

On the other side, the yes-men were very busy indeed. On the 13th itself, the Congress chief minister of Haryana, Bans iLal, began ferrying supporters into Delhi, publicly to proclaim their loyalty to Mrs Gandhi. The roads outside the prime minister’s house were choked with her admirers. These shouted slogans in her favour and burnt effigies of
Justice Sinha. Mrs Gandhi came out to address them, speaking of how foreign powers were conspiring with her domestic opponents to get rid of her. Her adversaries, she claimed, had ‘lots of money at their disposal’.

Every day a fresh cadre of supporters would assemble outside Mrs Gandhi’s house; every day she would come out and speak to them. Some Congress members privately deplored these populist demonstrations. Others publicly encouraged them. Addressing a Congress rally in Delhi, the party president, Dev Kanta Barooah, said that ‘laws are made by people and the leader of the people is Mrs Gandhi’. Judges and lawyers, including the eminent legal luminary M. C. Chagla – once a member of Mrs Gandhi’s own Cabinet – thought the prime minister was morally bound to resign, at least until her appeal was heard and disposed of. On the other side, 516 party MPs signed a resolution urging her to stay on. Ten thousand Congress members from Karnataka signed a similar appeal, in blood. In the middle of the debate a voice spoke from across the border – it was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who worried that Mrs Gandhi would find a way out of her difficulties through ‘an adventurist course against Pakistan’.

On 20 June Mrs Gandhi addressed a huge rally on the Boat Club lawns. A million people were said to have attended, even more than had heard JP at the same venue three months previously. The prime minister claimed the opposition was bent on liquidating her physically. Speaking after her, D. K. Barooah read out a couplet he had specially composed for the occasion:

Indira tere subah kijai, tere sham kijai,

Tere kam hi jai tere naam ki jai

Or, to render it in less expressive English:

Indira, we salute your morning and your evening too

We celebrate your name and your great work too.

Two days later the opposition answered with a rally of its own. It rained heavily, yet hundreds of thousands came. JP was the featured speaker, but his flight from Calcutta was cancelled at the last minute (‘mechanical trouble’, according to Indian Airlines). Representatives of the main opposition parties spoke, with Morarji Desai calling for a do or die’ movement to get rid of the Indira Gandhi regime.

On 23 June the Supreme Court began hearing Mrs Gandhi’s petition. The next day Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer issued a conditional stay on the
Allahabad judgement: the prime minister could attend Parliament, he said, but could not vote there until her appeal was fully heard and pronounced upon. The
Indian Express
thought this meant that Mrs Gandhi ‘must resign forthwith in the nation’s and her interests’.

By now, at least some senior figures in the Congress Party thought that resignation would also be in the party’s interests. If she couldn’t vote in Parliament, she could scarcely lead her government to any purpose. She was advised to step down temporarily, to let one of her Cabinet colleagues – the uncontroversial Swaran Singh perhaps – keep the seat warm until the Supreme Court upheld her appeal (as her lawyers were confident it would), allowing her to return as prime minister.

Urging Mrs Gandhi not to resign were her son Sanjay and the chief minister of West Bengal, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a well-trained barrister who had come from Calcutta to be at hand. Their advice was readily accepted. As Mrs Gandhi later told a biographer, ‘What else could I have done except stay? You know the state the country was in. What would have happened if there had been nobody to lead it? I was the only person who could, you know.’
⁵⁹

Once the decision was taken, it was executed with remarkable swiftness. On the 25th, S. S. Ray helped draft an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency, which a pliant president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, signed as soon as it was put in front of him. That night the power supply to all of Delhi’s newspaper offices was switched off, so that there were no editions on the 26th. Police swooped down on the opposition leaders, taking JP, Morarji Desai and many others off to jail. The next day the public of Delhi, and of India as a whole, was told by state-controlled radio that an emergency had been declared, and all civil liberties suspended.

At the time, and later, it was thought that the reaction far exceeded the original provocation. Justice Sinha had indicted Mrs Gandhi of two quite trifling offences. The Supreme Court was less likely to construe the height of a rostrum as an ‘election malpractice’. As for the second charge, Yashpal Kapoor had resigned from service before joining the campaign, except that there was some dispute about the date on which his resignation was accepted. Most lawyers believed that the Supreme Court would reverse the Allahabad judgement. Yet, as one respected Delhi jurist put it, the prime minister forsook ‘the advantages of the ordinary judicial remedy of appeal and resorted instead to the extraordinary, undemocratic and unconstitutional measures of Emergency’.
⁶⁰

A mere four months before the emergency was declared, the
Indian Express
had paid tribute ‘to the resilience and maturity of Indian democracy’, of how it allowed ‘even the most serious differences [to] be harmonized and reconciliations effected’. The paper could now eat its words. Indian democracy,
circa
1975, could reconcile the Valleyof Kashmir to the Union of India, butnot Indira Gandhi with Jayaprakash Narayan.

Future generations will not remember us by how many elections we had, but by the progress we made.

S
ANJAY
G
ANDHI
, December 1976

A
T
6
A.M.
ON
26 J
UNE
1975, a meeting of the Union Cabinet was convened. The ministers, unthinking and bleary-eyed, were informed of the state of emergency, in effect since midnight. Their formal consent was obtained before Mrs Gandhi proceeded to the studios of All-India Radio (AIR) to convey the news to an equally unsuspecting nation. ‘The President has proclaimed Emergency’, she announced: ‘There is nothing to panic about.’ This, she said, was a necessary response to ‘the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India.’ ‘Forces of disintegration’ and ‘communal passions’ were threatening the unity of India. ‘This is not a personal matter,’ she claimed. ‘It is not important whether I remain Prime Minister or not.’ Still, she hoped that conditions would ‘speedily improve to enable us to dispense with this Proclamation as soon as possible’.
¹

The disclaimers betray a certain defensiveness. For the fact was that the emergency had come hot on the heels of the Supreme Court order forbidding her from voting in Parliament. When the emergency was declared, the prime minister’s closest friend, the designer Pupul Jayakar, was away in the United States. On the 27th Mrs Gandhi sent Mrs Jayakar along note, explaining that the action was taken in response to the ‘increasing violence’ caused by a ‘campaign of hate and calumny’. The
number of arrests, she claimed, were a mere 900, most detainees kept not in jail but ‘comfortably, in houses’. The ‘general public reaction’ was ‘good’, and there was ‘tranquillity all over the country’. The emergency, the prime minister told her friend, was ‘intended to enable are turn to normal democratic functioning’.
²

Across India people were being picked up and put into jails. These included leaders and legislators of parties other than the Congress, student activists, trade unionists, indeed, anyone with the slightest connection to the Jana Sangh, the Congress (O), the Socialists, or other groups opposed to the ruling party. Some of the detainees, such as Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai, were placed in government rest houses in the state of Haryana, not far from Delhi. However, the majority were sent to already overcrowded jails. And Mrs Gandhi’s arithmetic was soon shown to be wildly off the mark. Thousands were arrested under MISA – the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, known by its victims as the Maintenance of Indira and Sanjay Act. And there were other legal instruments at hand. The Rajmatas of Gwalior and Jaipur, old political opponents of Mrs Gandhi, were jailed under an act supposedly meant for black-marketeers and smugglers.
³

In the first few months of the emergency, the prime minister gave a flurry of interviews defending its proclamation. These too displayed a deep defensiveness. It is wholly wrong to say that I resorted to Emergency to keep myself in office,’ she told the
Sunday Times
of London. ‘The extra-constitutional challenge [of the JP movement] was constitutionally met.’ The emergency was ‘declared to save the country from disruption and collapse’; it had ‘enabled us to put through the new economic programme’, and led to ‘a new sense of national confidence’. ‘What has been done’, she told the
Saturday Review
of New York, ‘is not an abrogation of democracy but an effort to safeguard it’. In these interviews she attacked the Western press for ‘India-baiting’, for picking on her country in preference to more visibly authoritarian nations such as Pakistan andChina.
⁴

In her interviews and broadcasts the prime minister spoke of the need to infuse a ‘new spirit of discipline and morale’. The government’s copywriters were put to work, coining slogans such as ‘Discipline Makes the Nation Great’, ‘Talk Less, Work More’, ‘Be Indian, Buy Indian’, ‘Efficiency is our Watchword’. Other exhortations were less impersonal, such as She Stood between Order and Chaos’ and ‘Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name is Indira Gandhi’. Rendered in Hindi as well as
English, these slogans were painted on the sides of buses, across bridges and on outsize hoardings erected outside government buildings.

These were the signs of a creeping dictatorship. Like military men who seize power via a coup, Mrs Gandhi claimed to have acted to save the country from itself. And, like them, she went on to say that, while she had denied her people freedom, she would give them bread in exchange. Within a week of the emergency she was offering a ‘Twenty Point Programme for Economic Progress’. This promised a reduction in prices of essential commodities, the speedy implementation of land reforms, the abolition of indebtedness and of bonded labour, higher wages for workers and lower taxes for the middle class.
⁵

Female dictators are altogether rare – in the twentieth century Mrs Gandhi may have been the only such. However, as a woman autocrat, she could use images and symbols denied to her male counterparts. On 11 November, four and a half months into the emergency, the prime minister came to the microphone to ‘meet’ and ‘have a heart-to-heart talk’ with her countrymen. She spoke for over an hour, on the need for discipline, on her economic programme, on the glories of ancient India and the duties of its modern citizens. ‘Our opponents’ wanted to ‘paralyse the work of the Central Government’, said the Prime Minister, and thus

we found ourselves in a serious situation. And we took certain steps. But many of the friends in the country were rather puzzled as to what has Indiraji done? What will happen to the country now? But we felt that the country has developed a disease and, if it is to be cured soon, it has to be given a dose of medicine even if it is a bitter dose. However dear a child may be, if the doctor has prescribed bitter pills for him, they have to be administered for his cure . . . So we gave this bitter medicine to the nation.

. . . Now, when a child suffers, the mother suffers too. Thus we were not very pleased to take this step . . . But we saw that it worked just as the dose of the doctor worked.
⁶

On 15 August 1975
The Times
of London carried a full page advertisement taken out by the ‘Free JP Campaign’. The ad had been paid for by
individuals: the first person to contribute being Bishop Trevor Huddles-ton, the last Dame Peggy Ashcroft. The other signatories to the appeal included such long-standing friends of India as the socialist Fenner Brockway, the economist E. F. Schumacher and the political scientist W. H. Morris-Jones, as well as celebrities with no specific connection to India, such as the actress Glenda Jackson, the historian A. J. P. Taylor and the critic Kenneth Tynan. On the page were printed photographs of Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan. Aside from the long list of names, the text show cased at estament to JP’s character and patriotism from the Mahatma himself.

‘Today is India’s Independence Day’, said the ad. ‘Don’t Let the Light Go Out on India’s Democracy’. The signatories called upon Mrs Gandhi to release all political prisoners, and Jayaprakash Narayan especially. The singling out of one person was not just in deference to his leadership of the oppositional movement in India. The prime movers of the ‘Free JP Campaign’ had known him from long before he launched his ‘Total Revolution’. The left-wing Labourites, such as Brockway, had known him from the 1930s, as a great hero of the independence movement. The environmentalists, such as E. F. Schumacher, had known him from the 1950s, as alike-minded votary of decentralized development. The political scientists had known him from before and after Independence, as an ever-present, always influential exemplar of what Morris-Jones had called the ‘saintly idiom’ in Indian politics.