This is not the first time that Mrs. Gandhi has spoken of foreign interference in India’s domestic politics. She has done so whenever she has been faced with a difficult political situation; on the eve of and during the emergency, for example. As in the past, she has not cited any worthwhile evidence in support of the charge. In fact, she has done worse. She has made the shocking admission that her government is not in a position to collect the necessary information. Hard evidence of foreign interference, which can stand scrutiny in a court of law, may be difficult to secure. But whoever asks for such evidence? In such cases, less conclusive evidence will be good enough provided it is reasonably convincing. But woe to a country whose intelligence agencies can gather no worthwhile evidence at all. While governments do not publicise the evidence in their possession, they do not as a rule proclaim that the charge is wholly inferential in character. In Mrs. Gandhi’s case, even her reasoning is of a surprising variety. The leaders of the Assam agitation must be manipulated by some foreign agency because they have gone back on agreements with the Union government. But why does that mighty agency allow its tools to reach the agreements in question in the first instance? And having discovered what she believes to be the true face of the agitators in Assam and Punjab, how does the Prime Minister justify continued negotiations with them?
The foreign devil is a useful device in politics. He can made to serve several purposes. Stalin used him to discredit and liquidate hundreds of thousands of fellow communists so that he could eliminate any possible source of challenge to his mad policies. That was of course the most extreme case of this kind in history. But whatever the objective in view, the foreign devil has to be credible. Mrs. Gandhi has never been able to bring him to life. So hardly anyone has taken her seriously. This time she has used this potent instrument to deal also with a rather insignificant and personal problem and thus further reduced the chances of being taken seriously. This must weaken her position and make the problems in Assam and Punjab even more intractable than they already are.
Other Congress (I) leaders too have come to follow the Prime Minister’s lead in this matter and some of them have gone about the business of trying to discredit their critics as foreign agents with remarkable crudeness. Witness Mr. CM Stephen’s recent performance over the disclosure of how the Union government ignored warnings by its own officials on the spot and went ahead with the elections in Assam, leading to the Nellie massacre. He first used the sanctuary of Parliament to make wild charges; when challenged by the journalist concerned on the question of facts, he shifted his ground but only to get on to an even more slippery slope. One must wonder how a person so indifferent to facts and logic could ever be a Union minister or a general secretary of a ruling party.