Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (112 page)

The victory over Pakistan was the high tide of Mrs Gandhi’s career. Thereafter events moved against her. The friendship with Bangladesh did not last long. As an independent power it soon became a natural ally of Pakistan. Her own regional problems multiplied, exacerbated by the natural disasters which broke up Pakistan. In 1972 the monsoon failed, bringing drought and then famine. In 1973 the security forces in Uttar Pradesh mutinied. She had to turn to the army and take over the state. The following year she had to put down a revolt in Gujarat, and take that over too. The same year, in Bihar, she used the Border Security Force and the Central Reserve Police against dissenters led by her father’s old colleague Jayaprakash Narayan, who employed the Gandhi-like tactics of a
gherao
, or peaceful blockade, of the state parliament, and a
bundh
, or enforced closure, of shops and offices. All the disruptive and regional opposition forces in the nation began to congregate together in a new Janata Front, and in 1975 Narayan led demonstrations throughout India, threatening to set up
Janata Sarkars
(people’s governments) all over the north. At the same time Mrs Gandhi ran into trouble over electoral offences with the high court, which declared her 1971 election void. This was precisely the combination which destroyed British India: concerted agitation to make normal
administration impossible, and the difficulty of controlling it within the framework of the rule of law.

As an exponent of ruthlessness, Mrs Gandhi was more than a match for any viceroy. In Bihar alone she sent in 60,000 police and paramilitaries to break up Narayan’s
gherao.
She met a rail strike with mass arrests without warrants. Since the Pakistan war she had benefited from a State of External Emergency, but this did not enable her to ignore or reverse court verdicts. On 25 June 1975 she stopped the newspapers and arrested Narayan, Desai and most of her other opponents. The next day she declared a State of Internal Emergency, in effect a
putsch
by the government against the opposition. She invited her frightened party leaders to her house to put some courage into them. She said: ‘Do you know the famous proverb, “When the great eagle flies under the stars, the small birds hide”?’ Then, turning to one
MP
, she asked fiercely: ‘What was that proverb? Repeat it!’ Petrified, he replied: ‘Madam, when the great evil fries under the stars, the small birds hide.’
⁸⁷

Since independence India had clung tenaciously to democracy and had drawn condescending comparisons with militaristic Pakistan. One reason why Mrs Gandhi dabbled in authoritarianism was that she felt she had to compete with the populist demagoguery of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was a professional politician, thrust into power as an alternative to military incompetence after the Bangladesh débâcle. He ruled Pakistan with considerable
éclat
, mainly by bending all the regulations in his favour, firing judges, suppressing newspapers and fiddling with top army appointments.
⁸⁸
But, precisely because Bhutto was a civilian, Mrs Gandhi felt she could not desert parliamentarianism completely. The result was that the emergency period was a succession of
ad hoc
arrangements, without any real chain of command or clear legal responsibilities, answerable to the courts: the perfect formula for cruelty and corruption. Many thousands of political activists were held in prison, often in horrible conditions. They included prominent people, such as the dowager queens of Gwalior and Jaipur, and Snehalata Reddy, the socialist daughter of a famous film-producer, who died from her experiences. George Fernandez, who had organized the rail strike, went underground, but his brother was arrested and tortured.

Even before the emergency Mrs Gandhi had been faced with many charges of corruption, especially against her son Sanjay, and in the lawless confusion the decay of Indian public life spread rapidly. She now made Sanjay head of the Youth Congress and put him in charge of the more radical aspects of her birth-control schemes, which since 1970 she had considered the most important of all India’s domestic programmes. Sanjay and his friends took the opportunity to engage
in social engineering on the Maoist model. He brutally moved slum-dwellers from Delhi’s open spaces to the outer suburbs and, more important, set up huge sterilization camps in which hundreds of thousands of Indian males were, by a combination of bribes and bullying, subjected to vasectomy operations carried out under the most primitive conditions. With the press and radio curbed, Indians had to turn to the
BBC
to discover what was happening in their own country. Since, by her own admission, Mrs Gandhi did not listen to the
BBC
(’the
BBC
had always been hostile to me’), she was often ill-briefed herself.
⁸⁹
When Bhutto announced elections for March 1977, she felt she had to compete and hold one herself, believing (from the reports of sycophantic regional officials) that she could win and so legitimize her emergency. The results, in fact, were disastrous for both of them. Bhutto won handsomely, but the uproar over the way in which this was achieved led in turn to martial law and another military
coup.
He was charged with conspiracy to murder and, after two long and controversial trials, was hanged in April 1979.
⁹⁰
Mrs Gandhi lost the elections and her seat, dragged down by Sanjay’s social engineering and a multitude of other liabilities.

The victorious Janata Party, however, was not so much an alternative to Gandhiism as a coalition of the discontented. Its most considerable figure, Desai, had many of Gandhi’s vices and none of his virtues. He did not drink or smoke and loudly asserted that the British had introduced liquor and tobacco to corrupt the natives. He made great play with his spinning-wheel. He declined the use of modern medicine. To keep himself fit he drank a glass of his own urine every morning. The Health Minister, Raj Narain, also believed in the urine treatment and commended it officially. Asked about birth-control, he said that women should eat herbs to prevent pregnancy. Such eccentricities were unaccompanied by solid administrative gifts or probity. Indeed Janata rule was even more corrupt than Mrs Gandhi’s Congress Party. Attempts to conduct a Commission of Inquiry into her misdeeds or to bring her to trial (she spent a week in gaol) merely stirred up an immense sea of mud which flung itself in all directions. Returned to parliament at a by-election, then expelled, she was able to reverse the roles and present herself as the victim of persecution, making inspired use of the 1939 hit by the Lancashire singer Gracie Fields, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’ – a weird instance of the survival of colonial ‘values’.
⁹¹
At the election of 3 January 1980 the Indians were faced by a choice between familiar evils, and their instinct led them to vote for the nearest thing they knew to a royal dynasty. Mrs Gandhi won by a landslide, her party taking 351 seats out of 524. The 1977 result
was a verdict against tyranny even at the risk of chaos; that of 1980 a vote against chaos even at the risk of tyranny again.

The history of post-independence India tended to stress the intractable nature of the problem Britain had faced: how to keep the peace among a vast and enormously diverse collection of peoples while preserving constitutional and legal safeguards? Nehru’s assumption that the problem would ease after independence proved wholly unfounded. In fact it grew steadily more difficult, not least because population doubled during the next generation. According to government calculations, it was 683,810,051 in January 1981.
⁹²
Under the pressure of these heaving masses, the structure of civil liberties created under British rule began to subside, though it never collapsed completely. Mrs Gandhi’s emergency was, however, an important stage in this decline. Effective civil control over the police and the security forces was not re-established. Order of a sort was maintained, but more by terror than by justice. In November 1980, the press revealed that in the state of Bihar the police systematically used acid and bicycle spokes to blind suspects. Some thirty authenticated cases were brought to light. The following January, cases were reported from the holy city of Benares of police breaking the legs of men in custody.
⁹³
The police were also accused of murder in their efforts to put down dacoitry, and their use of torture became a matter of frequent censure by the judiciary. As a judge of the Allahabad High Court put it: There is no better organized force for crime in India than the Indian police.’
⁹⁴

What made such savagery particularly detestable was that it appeared to reflect the bias of caste. The boast of British rule was that, while unable to eliminate caste, its worst consequences were mitigated by the British principle of equality before the law. It had been Churchill’s great fear, his principal reason for resisting rapid independence, that the lower castes would be its principal victims, just as the higher castes (especially Brahmins like the Nehrus) were its undoubted beneficiaries. The most reprehensible aspect of police atrocities was that the police themselves, and still more the politicians who protected them, came from higher castes while, in almost every case, their victims were low-caste. Independence did nothing for the ‘untouchables’, who numbered over 100 million by the beginning of the 1980s. Their token representation in parliament and government was itself an aspect of their exploitation. Their way of life, their capacity to survive at all, remained a mystery, the least explored corner of Indian society.
⁹⁵
There were many indications that police terror, to which authority seemed increasingly indifferent, was a form of social control rooted in the infinite gradations of privilege.

More than half the human race lives in the great mainland nations of Asia. By the 1980s the Chinese population alone had passed the 1,000 million mark. All, since securing independence or escaping foreign tutelage, engaged in ‘social’ experiments. China opted for Communism, including collectivized agriculture and the total nationalization of industry. Burma chose one-party socialism, consolidated from 1962 by a further layer of military control under General (later President) Ne Win. Pakistan under Bhutto carried through a sweeping programme of nationalization. Both Pakistan and India kept out market forces by high tariff barriers. India’s predominantly socialist economy was planned with a conventional, Stalinist stress on heavy industry, and even its substantial and vigorous private sector was subjected to intense regulation, made bearable only by ubiquitous corruption. After a generation, the results in each case were depressingly similar and meagre. These powers viewed each other with varying degrees of hostility, though China and Pakistan were in an uneasy alliance dictated by their common hatred for India. China made her first nuclear weapons in 1964, India in 1974, Pakistan in 1978. All these nations (including Bangladesh, the poorest) spent a much higher proportion of their
GNP
on defence than during the colonial period. In Burma, for instance, chiefly on account of Chinese backing for Communist rebel groups, military spending by 1980 absorbed one-third of the budget and almost all foreign exchange earnings.
⁹⁶
In every case, the high hopes raised by the Bandung generation, of a sudden and spectacular attainment of Western-style living standards, against a background of peace and non-alignment, had been abandoned by the end of the 1970s.

In the late 1940s, the Asian half of the human race had been told that there was a direct, immediate and essentially political solution to their plight. Experience exposed this belief as a fallacy. There were strong grounds for concluding, indeed, that politics, and especially ideological politics, was a primary contributor to human misery. No better illustration could be provided than the grim entity covered by the words the Calcutta Metropolitan District, in and around which were grouped 150 million of the poorest people on earth. Even in colonial times it inspired administrative horror. Kipling, with his customary prescience, called it the ‘City of Dreadful Night’, it had’, he wrote, a peculiar attribute, ‘the
BCS
or Big Calcutta Stink’.
⁹⁷
In the early 1940s it was becoming difficult for the municipal authorities, leaving politics aside, to keep even most of the city properly sewered. Partition dealt the city a blow from which it never recovered. It wrecked the economy of large parts of Bengal, pushing 4 million virtually unemployable refugees into the western half, one million into Calcutta itself. Between the 1921 and 1961 censuses, the
population had trebled and the effort to run standard modern services had been abandoned.

By the end of the 1960s, an observer wrote that most of the District ‘is without municipally organized sewerage systems, without piped water, drains or sewers, and even without privately owned means of sewage disposal, like septic tanks’. There were about 200,000 primitive communal lavatories, ‘low, cramped open brick sheds with platforms above earthenware bowls or dirt floors’.
⁹⁸
As we have noted, the Bangladesh crisis tipped another 10 million homeless people into Indian Bengal, a great proportion of whom ended up on the streets of Calcutta, so that by the late 1970s a million souls were sleeping in the open in the city centre alone. The fiercely partisan and doctrinaire politics of West Bengal, run by Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s, when not under constitutional suspension and direct ‘presidential rule’, generated limitless improvidence and corruption.

Calcutta’s plight attracted many voluntary workers, who joined the efforts of Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity, who had set up their stations in Calcutta in 1948. But often the Marxist government seemed more anxious to drive out volunteer medical bodies, who drew attention to its failures, than to tackle the problem at its root.
⁹⁹
Calcutta became the realized anti-Utopia of modern times, the city of shattered illusions, the dark not the light of Asia. It constituted an impressive warning that attempts to experiment on half the human race were more likely to produce Frankenstein monsters than social miracles.