It is legitimate to be critical of the Union home minister’s handling of the Makalu affair. Mr Zail Singh has been over-anxious to prove that the alleged saboteurs, acting possibly on foreign instigation (according to the CBI), wanted to kill the Prime Minister. But from being critical of the home minister, it is a long jump to conclude that Mrs Gandhi herself is deliberately using the attempt to sabotage the Makalu to create an atmosphere in which she can justify re-imposition of the emergency. This is what Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee has done, if he has been correctly reported by one of the national news agencies. In doing so, he has been as rash as Mr Zail Singh.
Mr Vajpayee’s statement betrays a distrust of Mrs Gandhi which is wholly unwarranted if only because she has so far not sprung a total surprise on the country. This is true in respect of all occasions when she is supposed to have acted in an unpredictable manner.
Warning
When the Congress parliamentary board, meeting in Bangalore in the summer of 1969, did not accept her nominee for the office of president of the republic, she made a public statement to the effect that the consequences would be terrible. This was a clear warning that she would not mind splitting the party in order to have her way. Only her opponents in the party did not have the foresight to realise that she would go that far. They had all along underestimated her courage, determination and political skill.
In 1971, she left the Pakistani ruling military junta in no doubt that she would go to war if it did not reach a settlement with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and take steps to ensure the return of all refugees from India to Bangladesh. President Yahya Khan and his American supporters, President Nixon and Mr Kissinger, were foolish enough to believe, especially after the conclusion of the Indo-Soviet treaty, that she would settle for something less. But they could not claim that she had not given them adequate warning.
In 1975, she let it be known first through her lawyers in the Allahabad high court and in the Supreme Court and then through a number of public speeches at rallies near her official residence in New Delhi, that she would go to any lengths to frustrate attempts to remove her from the office of Prime Minister. In fact, at the time of Mr LN Mishra’s assassination itself – over five months before the Allahabad high court’s adverse judgement – she had said as clearly as she possibly could that she was planning some drastic action to save the country from the anarchy into which the JP movement, according to her, was pushing it.
The issue is not whether she was justified in doing what she did either in 1969 or 1971 or 1975, but whether or not she gave her opponents a sufficient enough warning in each case. The answer must be in the affirmative. Her detractors failed to read the signals and that is one reason why they failed to meet her challenge.
Mr Vajpayee’s statement also speaks of fear of Mrs Gandhi, view of his own and his party’s bitter experience of the emergency. But this fear betrays a woeful lack of understanding of both Mrs Gandhi’s personality and the situation in the country.
One does not need great insight into Mrs Gandhi’s psychological make-up to appreciate that she is at her determined and ruthless best when she feels seriously threatened and has good reasons to feel so threatened. Her actions in 1969, 1974-75 and 1977-79 speak for themselves. The situation is very different today. She has no reason at all to feel vulnerable. On the contrary, she has never been in a stronger position. Indeed, that is one reason why it is difficult to understand why she has allowed Mr Zail Singh to blow the Makalu affair out of all proportions.
In view of the impression her critics have successfully spread partly on the strength of pseudo-psychology, it may perhaps be useful to recall that in 1969 and in 1974-75 there was a determined bid to topple her, in 1969 by the organisational bosses in the Congress and in 1974-75 by Mr Jayaprakash Narayan and those ranged behind him. And in 1977-79 the Janata leadership wanted to drive her out of public life by disqualifying her from holding an elective office.
The point I wish to underscore is that she responded to these challenges in the manner she did, not because she is paranoid but because she had no other option unless, of course, she was prepared to go into the wilderness, Mrs Gandhi has a strong survival instinct. But that is an altogether different proposition.
Violation
Two other aspects of Mrs Gandhi’s personality deserve to be noted; her concern for the letter, if not always for the spirit, of the law and for legitimacy. In 1969, she showed disregard for the Congress party’s political culture and displayed a kind of ruthlessness Congress leaders were not familiar with. But she did not violate any law. Similarly, after the Allahabad high court judgment in June 1975, she disregarded only the convention that a minister should resign if his or her election is set aside and not any provision in the Representation of the People Act. It is also possible to argue that she might not have imposed the emergency if the opposition headed by Mr Narayan had heeded her appeal to let the law take its own course and not threatened to make it impossible for her government to function.
As we know, the constitutional provision in respect of the emergency is now different from what it was in 1975. Then, an internal emergency could be proclaimed if the President on the advice of the Prime Minister felt satisfied that a serious threat to the country’s internal security had arisen. The present provision is that the President can proclaim a state of emergency only in the event of an armed rebellion, war and threat to the country’s security from external aggression. This means that Mrs Gandhi will need openly to flout the letter of the law in order to proclaim an emergency. This is something she has not done before.
This brings me to her concern for legitimacy. In 1975 and 1976, neither her opponents nor her supporters took at their face value her repeated statements that she had taken the drastic step of imposing the emergency in order to put “democracy back on the rails”. But in 1977, it became evident that she had meant what she said.
Her frequent attacks on the Western press in that period carried a message. The message was that she was highly sensitive to the charge of being a dictator and would want to take steps to end the emergency which exposed her to the charge. But once again most of her critics and supporters alike failed to read the message. Finally when her desire for legitimacy drove her to order the poll, she made no use either of the emergency or other powers vested in her government by parliamentary enactments to muzzle the verdict of the people. She wanted to win but only in a fair and free election. For otherwise, she would not be able to see herself as India’s legitimate ruler.
Negative
In 1976, it came to be widely alleged and believed that one reason why Mrs Gandhi had proclaimed the emergency was that she wanted to ensure Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s succession to her. The argument in favour of this charge was that the party leadership with stalwarts like Mr Jagjivan Ram and Mr YB Chavan in it would otherwise never have accepted him. Assuming that Mrs Gandhi made such a calculation, she has no need to do so in the present context. The Congress (I) is more than keen that Mr Rajiv Gandhi comes in and occupies a top position. Apart from Mrs Gandhi herself, it has no one else to look up to.
This leaves two issues to be debated – whether Mrs Gandhi can work an emergency regime and whether it can serve any useful purpose from whatever point of view. My answer to both these questions would be in the negative.
The administrative machinery is in a much worse shape than it was in 1975. It would also be far less obedient to central direction if only because it has become much less coherent. Above all, if it took the police about a year last time to display publicly its rapaciousness and unconcern for the popular weal, it will do so much more quickly next time. The Bhagalpur blinding episode is a grim warning of how far the police, unrestrained by political authority and fear of exposure, can go. Indeed, we now have a new breed of politicians in office who would certainly run berserk if they did not have to contend with an independent press, the judiciary and the opposition.
Finally, an emergency can be useful to a ruler for disposing of an organised challenge from a recognisable opposition. This was the case in 1975. Since 1979, all major agitations have taken place outside the framework of the party system – the Assam one over the issue of the “foreigners”, the kisan one for higher prices for their produce and the anti-reservation one in Gujarat. An emergency can perhaps help the administration suppress agitations for some time, but only at the grave and certain risk of accentuating the underlying tension.
The Times of India, 6 May 1981