India After Gandhi (94 page)

Although it failed to last its full term, the victory of the Janata Party was a watershed in Indian politics. For the first time since Independence a party other than the Congress came to govern at the centre. In the states too the landscape of politics became more variegated, with the victory of the communists in West Bengal, and that of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu.

The Indian political system was being
decentred
, and not just in party terms. For the late 1970s also witnessed the flowering of numerous ‘new’ social movements. In 1978 there was a major conference of ‘socialist-feminists’ in Bombay, which focused on the growing violation of women’s rights. Campaigns were launched against dowry and rape, against male alcoholism and the sexual abuse it frequently resulted in, and for better working conditions for women labouring in factories and household units. This new wave of feminism was widespread as well as wide ranging, with groups active in many states, mobilizing support through public rallies, street theatre, poster campaigns and house-to-house canvassing.
⁵⁵

The late seventies also saw the assertion of avigorous environmental
movement. Peasants launched struggles in defence of their forest rights, tribals protested against their displacement by large industrial projects and artisanal fisherfolk opposed trawlers that were depleting the fish stocks of the ocean. In these protests two things stood out: the leading role of women, who themselves bore the brunt of ecological degradation, and the fact that, unlike in the West, where the concern for nature was couched in aesthetic terms and voiced by the middle class, this was an ‘environmentalism of the poor’, driven by rural communities for whom access to the gifts of nature was linked to their very survival.
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Both the feminist movement and the environmental movement actually started in the early 1970s. Their progress was interrupted by the emergency, but when that ended they emerged once more and with renewed vigour. The same was the case with the civil rights movement. This had its origins in the treatment of Naxalite activists incarcerated in Calcutta jail. When these prisoners began a
bidi-chitti andolan
, a struggle for access to cigarettes and letters (denied them by their jailers), are tired engineer named Kapil Bhattacharya decided to form an Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights. The emergency inspired the formation of other such groups, based in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and elsewhere. Some focused on ‘civil liberties’, the violation by the state of the basic human rights of its citizens. Others worked with a broader concept of ‘democratic rights’, which took the right to life and liberty guaranteed by the constitution also to mean the right to better wages and working conditions, and to gainful employment itself. The first kind of group took up jail reform and the abuse of power by state authorities (and the police in particular); the second kind also looked at the impact of state policies on the lives and livelihoods of the less privileged, the low castes and tribals in particular. These groups produced dozens of reports on the violations of civil liberties and democratic rights by the state, drawing on field investigations, often in remote parts of the country, conducted by public-spirited intellectuals based in the cities.
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These movements were described as ‘new’ because they took up issues neglected by the old, class-based social movements of peasants and workers. However, the late 1970s also saw those older concerns expressing themselves in new forms. Thus the trade union movement, which had historically focused on the factory sector, now began working among miners and labourers in household and cottage industries. Among the more notable initiatives was the Chattisgarh Mineworkers Shramik
Sangh (CMSS), whose leader Shankar Guha Niyogi sought to blend the ideas of Gandhi and Marx. The mines where the CMSS was active serviced the great public-sector steelworks at Bhilai. Working with miners of a chiefly tribal background, Niyogi campaigned for equal pay for women workers and against alcohol abuse by men, set up schools for children, and struggled to make the mine owners pay as much attention to health and safety as to a decent living wage.
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Accompanying and complementing these movements was a new kind of Indian press. For the end of the emergency unleashed the energies of journalists as only the struggle for national independence had done before it. Censorship was dead; there were now no limits to what reporters and editors could write about, or to the length of their stories. It also helped that the first offset presses arrived in India in the 1970s. No longer had type to be laboriously set in hot metal; no longer had journals to be printed in the bigger towns and cities alone.

The historian Robin Jeffrey has authoritatively tracked ‘India’s Newspaper Revolution’ which began in 1977 and has gathered pace ever since. Among the components of this revolution we may single out five. Two were enabled by the new technology: the simultaneous printing of multiple editions of the same paper in towns far distant from one other and the enhancement of print quality and, especially, of the production of pictures and other visual material. Other innovations were a product of changes in society and politics: the end of censorship facilitated the rise of investigative journalism, of hard-hitting stories on crime and political corruption. The spread of education and the expansion of the middle class gave an enormous fillip to Indian-language journalism. A national readership survey, conducted in 1979 and restricted to the towns and cities, estimated that as many as 48 million urban Indians regularly read a periodical of some kind. The fastest increase was in the smaller towns and among Indian languages. In 1979, for the first time, those who read newspapers in Hindi (a language spoken by 40 per cent of Indians) numbered more than those who read them in English (a language spoken by a mere 3 percent of Indians). The new journalism substituted a colloquial and demotic prose for the stiff, formal style once preferred by editors and reporters. Idioms and phrases derived from the classical Sanskrit, once
de rigueur
, were now abandoned in favour of the rhythms and cadences of everyday speech.
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Two somewhat contradictory trends were apparent in the India of the late 1970s. On the one hand there was an increasing fragmentation
of the polity, as manifest in the rapid turnover of governments. With ever fewer exceptions, politicians and parties had abandoned ideology for expediency, and principle for profit. On the other hand there were new forms of social assertion among historically subordinated groups such as low castes, women and unorganized workers. There was now, for the first time, an active civil liberties movement. The press, which during the emergency had mostly been cowed without a fight, had become livelier than ever before.

Viewed from the more formal, purely political side, it appeared that Indian democracy was being corroded and degraded. If one took amore ‘social’ view, however, it appeared that Indian democracy was, in fact, being deepened and enriched.

Not every individual or party is always disposed to use our democratic framework to further constructive purposes. It seems that the exercise of the democratic right sometimes takes the form of freedom even to destroy.

I
NDIRA
G
ANDHI
to J
AYAPRAKASH
N
ARAYAN
, May
1968

W
RITING SHORTLY AFTER THE
1977 elections, the
Guardian
correspondent in India thought that the return to democracy might be short lived. ‘Democracy can only survive if there is economic progress and reform,’ he wrote. ‘Already, the new [Janata] government faces an economic crisis; inflation rampant again, an explosion of wage demands, and a wave of strikes. If it is overwhelmed by protest, the cycle of repression could start all over again.’
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Altogether more optimistic was the old India hand Horace Alexander, now eighty-seven and living in retirement in a Quaker home in Pennsylvania. In a letter published in the
New York Times
Alexander said that ‘the astonishing Indian elections’ showed that ‘the common people of India have political courage’, this derived from Gandhi and the heritage of the freedom movement. In a letter to a fellow Quaker he likewise called the poll verdict ‘a triumph for the common people of India’, adding: ‘Let none ever say that “democratic liberty” is a bourgeois conception, which is only meaningful to a small number of left-wing intellectuals.’
²

The indefatigable Alexander also wrote to Mrs Gandhi. During the emergency he had peppered her with anxious letters about the fate of freedom and of the men she had detained. Now he remembered his old
friend Jawaharlal Nehru saying that he wished he could have had a spell away from politics, to read and simply relax. He wondered whether Nehru’s daughter, out of power, would ‘spend some time enjoying birds, up in the Himalaya, or in Kashmir’. There was some chit-chat about art and literature, and then the letter concluded: ‘We shall try to keep up with the news from India, and perhaps in five years from now, you will be in office once again with the biggest majority ever. Such is democracy!’
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Actually, it took less than three years for Mrs Gandhi to return to power. Her Congress Party won 353 seats in the 1980 elections, one more than in the ‘Garibi Hatao’ campaign of 1971. It did very well in the south, as before, while in the north it benefited hugely from a division of the vote between the two rival Janata factions, here contesting as separate parties. In the key state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, the Congress obtained 36 per cent of the popular vote, yet won 60 per cent of the parliamentary seats. One Janata faction got 22.6 per cent of the vote, the other 29 per cent; between them, they won 32 seats in the state to the Congress’s 50.
⁴

The 1980 elections, notes the editor Prabhas Joshi, marked the ‘end of ideology’ in Indian politics. Previous polls were fought and won on the planks of democracy, socialism, secularism and non-alignment. In 1980, however, Mrs Gandhi spoke not of the abolition of poverty but of her ability to rule. Janata could not hold together a government, she told the voters; whereas she could and had. Their bickerings apart, there were other factors that went against Janata. There were shortages of basic consumer goods, attributed naturally to the party in power. As one election cry went: ‘
Janata ho gayi fail, Kha gayi chini aur mitti ka tel
’ (The Janata party has failed, Eaten up sugar and paraffin on the way).
⁵

The Janata Party had thoroughly discredited itself. As a reporter covering the elections found, while Indira Gandhi had a ‘tarnished image’, her opponents were ‘all tarnish and no image’.
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Meanwhile, the rash of attacks on Scheduled Castes turned this very numerous voting segment back towards the Congress. Sanjay Gandhi had apologized to the Muslims for the excesses of the emergency; sections of this ‘vote bank’ returned to the fold as well.
⁷

In most of India the elections were moderately free. In parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, however, where roads were poor and telephone lines non-existent, the Election Commission was unable to monitor or check the capturing of booths by armed gangs. Here, there was a ‘free
enterprise militia’ operating, such that ‘adult franchise ha[d] been replaced by vicarious franchise’, where the candidate with the most guns at his command could ‘perform the function of “mass voting” on behalf of the electorate’.
⁸

Not long after Mrs Gandhi returned to power, a veteran political scientist with Congress sympathies advised the prime minister to remake the party as ‘the palpably real institution that the Congress was under Nehru’. For it was ‘essential that a sharing of power replace its personalisation, that a leadership drawing its power from the grassroots rather than above should be allowed to emerge’. Mrs Gandhi’s ‘restored charisma’ could then be used ‘in the service of shoring-up and reinforcing the institutions of an open polity before it dissipates again as in the past’.
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These sentiments were at once noble and naive. For it was not just the Congress Party that Mrs Gandhi believed she embodied, but the Indian nation itself. In May 1980 she told a visiting journalist how, ‘for many long years, I have been the target of attack [from] individuals, groups and parties’, these either ‘Hindu and Muslim fanatics’, or ‘old feudal interests’, or ‘sympathetic to foreign ideologies’. Where she stood ‘for India’s unfettered independence of action, self-reliance and economic strength’, those ‘who are against self-reliance, or secularism or socialism find some reason or other to malignme’.
¹⁰

‘Paranoia’ may be the most appropriate word here. Anyway, in this frame of mind Indira Gandhi was in no mood to share power except with her son Sanjay, who was now both a member of Parliament and the general secretary of the Congress Party. Indeed, as one Delhi journal remarked, Sanjay was once more ‘the most vital factor in Indian politics’. When Mrs Gandhi dismissed nine state governments after the 1980 elections it was Sanjay who allotted the Congress tickets for the assembly seats, Sanjay who decided who would be chief minister when and if Congress won. The newly appointed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, spoke for many when he told the press that ‘Sanjay is a leader in his own right and he is my leader too’.
¹¹