Indira Gandhi’s rule was a holding operation. It could not have been otherwise, though she could certainly have managed things somewhat better and reduced the damage to institutions and norms. But despite her apparent control over men and events Indira Gandhi too was a prisoner of circumstances. Helplessness and resignation were often etched on her face. If she still managed to radiate energy and confidence, it was out of a sense of deep commitment to the nation.
It is not easier to sell this assessment of Indira Gandhi one year after her assassination than it was in her lifetime. The main reason for it is psychological. The top Indian intelligentsia have desperately needed a scapegoat whom they can blame for their own failure to live up to standards of performance and morality that have been set for them by the West and Indian tradition. In view of her stature, Indira Gandhi alone could be that scapegoat in the past 15 years.
The search for a scapegoat did not begin with Indira Gandhi’s election to the office of Prime Minister. It began on the morrow of independence. Jayaprakash Narayan, who was to haunt Indira Gandhi in the seventies, for instance, accused Sardar Patel of having been responsible for Gandhiji’s assassination. For years the evil men were the so-called rightists in the Congress leadership.
Human Scapegoat
To be fair to them, the Indian intelligentsia too have been victims of forces beyond their control. They have been uprooted from their moorings, traditions and ways of life and forced to cope with an alien civilization which, as it happens, has been impinging on them with ever increasing ferocity since independence. Seen in that perspective, it is indeed to their credit that they have managed to make do with a human scapegoat and have not sought refuge in a mythical golden age.
A superficial calm has descended on the country’s scene since last December when in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership won a landslide victory in the elections to the Lok Sabha and thus disposed of those political forces that had harassed and harried Indira Gandhi for close to two decades. But the undercurrent of the unprecedented turbulence has by no means disappeared. Rajiv Gandhi will need to cope with it as Indira Gandhi had to.
To appreciate the nature and magnitude of the problems Indira Gandhi faced, it is necessary to recall that two of our major inheritances at the time of independence – a reasonably strong, competent and honest administration, especially at the top, and a fairly confident and vibrant Congress organisation and leadership – had been worn down by the time she took over as Prime Minister in 1966. The economy was not stagnant as it had been for almost half a century before independence but it was facing serious difficulties.
These facts are generally known but their interconnections need to be spelt out. The integrity of the Indian bureaucracy under the British had depended on its isolation from society and standards of rectitude imported from Britain; it was not a homegrown product. The situation disappeared with independence. The administration had of necessity to be subordinate, and answerable, to elected and even non-elected politicians who were under pressure to water down the impartiality of the administration in the interest of influential people in control of vote banks. As if this was not a serious enough problem, the quality of both administrators and politicians began to decline; of officials for the additional reason that the government machinery expanded rather dramatically and all too suddenly in response to new needs of economic development, and of politicians because men on the make in search of influence entered the political arena in large numbers. The impact of this new breed of politicians was evident at the state level in Nehru’s lifetime.
The top men in both politics and the administration upheld standards. But the rot spread irresistibly and the question of public morality began to command serious attention when Nehru was at the height of power and popularity in the mid-fifties. The Santhanam committee published its report on corruption in public life in 1959.
In the last two decades the view has spread that corruption and its twin sister, the black-money parallel economy, are the bastard children of the regime of controls and regulations which Nehru inaugurated in good faith. There is merit in it. On top of the broad conceptual framework Nehru provided, the Indian bureaucracy built a byzantine system of controls which armed them with enormous powers of patronage and punishment. But deeper forces were at work.
It is not a pleasant thing to say that our own sense of public morality, such as it was, was partly the product of a stagnant economy and lack of opportunities. But this was so. As opportunities began to increase with independence and development, long-suppressed appetites surfaced and grew with remarkable speed. The consequences could not be limited to the business class, especially since the worlds of business, administration and politics had become inter-twined as a result of the attempt at centrally planned development.
Party Voted Out
Within the Congress party, two processes were at work. It was being transformed and its popular base was being eroded. Under the umbrella of Nehru’s leadership, relatively less educated people less committed to the larger nationalist cause had moved into the organisation. And since it could not possibly fulfil the aspirations of all the newly educated and mobile groups, the dissatisfied ones came to challenge it. The result became clear in 1967 when the party was voted out of office in all north Indian states.
This was the situation when Indira Gandhi became Prime Minster in 1966 and she had no battalions of her own on which she could rely. Like the father, the daughter had not engaged in factional politics. That as Prime Minister she had to lean on a so-called kitchen cabinet consisting of political lightweights is evidence enough that her survival depended on her own tenacity, courage and skill.
Her position in the party, of course, improved with the split in 1969 when a number of stalwarts left it. But the party itself had weakened. In certain states such as Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu almost entire units moved away from her. In the Lok Sabha, the Congress was reduced to a minority and had to lean on the two communist parties. Which in turn strengthened the position of former communists in the party. This created an imbalance which could not be corrected right up to the time of emergency.
On the face of it, Indira Gandhi’s authority became unassailable with the success at the polls in early 1971 and the military victory over Pakistan in December 1971. But all the constraints created by India’s cultural-social milieu and an underdeveloped economy under strain remained in place. She had to manoeuvre within the narrow parameters set by these constraints. That was why more often than not she always temporised and vacillated. She knew she was sitting on a volcano. The volcano erupted first in Gujarat in 1973 and then in Bihar in 1974-75. The Navnirman agitation in Gujarat and the JP movement in Bihar were expressions of a social ferment which the process of modernization and development must produce in a conservative and poor country. Indira Gandhi was planning to sit out the JP movement. But just as she appeared to be succeeding, Mr. Justice Sinha declared her election to Parliament invalid. The emergency was a desperate act of a desperate leader at bay.
Liberating Herself
As she told Mrs. Pupul Jayakar later, she herself felt imprisoned by the emergency; her sensitiveness to the charge of dictatorship was evident in all her utterances then. In all probability she had ceased to be legitimate in her own eyes; perhaps the ghost of Nehru haunted her. She had to call off the emergency for her own sake, and she did. She wanted to liberate herself and a poll offered the only way out. Perhaps she even wanted to lose the elections – to be rid of the burden of managing the affairs of India.
Indira Gandhi was tom between her sense of duty to the country and the desire to call it a day. Many Indians are so torn. The desire to opt out might well have prevailed in her case if the Janata government had left her alone. But it decided to arrest her and persecute her. Thus challenged, she had to fight back. She was made that way. She brought down the Janata government and rode back to power on the crest of another pro-Indira wave in 1980.
But the Congress had split once again in 1978. So in 1980 it was in even a worse shape to rule the country than in 1969. Indira Gandhi herself was a disillusioned, if not embittered, person. On the eve of the poll, she had allowed many of her erstwhile critics to return to the fold. Sanjay Gandhi had brought in his own cronies of a very different breed. Indira Gandhi uneasily straddled these three worlds of old faithfuls, the old penitents and the Sanjay brigade. Then came Sanjay’s tragic death in June 1980 which shattered her as nothing had shattered her before. She brought in Rajiv to take Sanjay’s place. But hardly had she done so than the Akali agitation overtook her and finally overwhelmed her. She died as she had lived – in the service of India. Even if her martyrdom has not paved the way for a new beginning, it has bought India a period of respite.
Concluded
The Times of India, 2 November 1985