The low vote for the Congress, still led by the heroes of the freedom struggle, – around 45 per cent of those polled – in the first general election in 1952, spoke of a political vacuum in the country.
This awesome reality – awesome because no other party proved capable of filling the vacuum – continued to be covered from the general view, till the first general election after Nehru’s death. Nehru died in May 1964 and the election took place in early 1967. The result was a complete surprise to almost all observers. The Congress lost its majority in all north Indian States, which had been its bastions and its majority in parliament was reduced from 361 to 283. Thus when Indira Gandhi came to the office, the Congress was clearly in decline and facing a revolt within its own ranks. This became evident within months of the poll when Charan Singh (UP), Rao Birendra Singh (Haryana) and G. N. Singh (M.P.) defected to head anti-Congress coalition governments.
Complex Challenge
Indira Gandhi faced a complex challenge. She had to restore the pre-eminence of the Congress in north India; she had to ensure that the process of defection did not get out of hand and disrupt the party; and she had to see to it that the primacy of the office of Prime Minister was once again accepted in the affairs of the party. These issues were inter-related. She began with the first. She took steps to put the Congress back into office, wherever she could. By 1969, when she forced a split in the party, on the issue of the presidential nomination, she had achieved a remarkable measure of success in regard to the third.
The story of the collapse of one coalition government after another, in one state after another, has been told any number of times. What has seldom been discussed, is the possibility that the Congress, too, could have been reduced to the status of just another party, incapable of ruling the country if Indira Gandhi had not gone about the task of reviving its fortunes, with grim determination.
We have to confront three issues at this stage. First, whether the survival of the Congress was a matter of critical importance for the country? Whether the Congress could have survived, if it had not been restored to office? In the event of the Congress disintegrating, was there any other party, which could have moved into its place?
The answer to the first and the third question cannot be in doubt, especially in the light of our experience first of Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (United Front) coalitions in the States in the Sixties and then of the Janata at the Centre, between 1977 and 1979. The survival of the Congress, in a meaningful sense of the term, was vital for the orderly government and democracy in the country.
On the second issue, there is scope for genuine differences of opinion. It is possible to argue that the Congress could have become leaner and healthier, if it had been allowed to fend for itself, for a couple of years, in the States where it had been voted out of power.
It is difficult to say what course Indian history would have taken if President Zakir Hussain had not suddenly died; or if the organisational bosses had accepted Indira Gandhi’s proposal that Jagjivan Ram, the most eminent Harijan leader, be selected as the party’s nominee to presidency; or if she had reconciled herself to the selection of Sanjeeva Reddy. These are the ifs of history, to which there can be no objective answer. But we do know that the cumulative result of events, as they developed, was the beginning of the rise of Indira Gandhi to the position her father had occupied in the Congress and the country.
The manner in which Indira Gandhi split the party has been the subject of a lot of criticism, since 1969. Her style was certainly unfamiliar. But politics, too, is a kind of war; it is war by other means, to vary Clausewitz’s famous phrase. Everything is not fair, either in war or in politics. But Indira Gandhi did not overstep the tolerable limits.
The developments in the Congress, since the 1969 split have largely been seen in relation to the emergence of Indira Gandhi as a dominant figure on the Indian national scene. It has led to the widespread view that Indira Gandhi adopted measures, such as the nationalisation of banks and the new credit policy, in order to promote her popularity. These measures undoubtedly served that purpose. But they also provided the Congress with a platform, on the strength of which, it could once again mobilise the people, this time the relatively weaker sections of the population.
Between 1969 and 1971, when the country went to the polls to the Lok Sabha, the Congress captured, for the first time, its old élan as a fighting organisation. It won a landslide victory – a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, and for the first time, it secured a majority of votes in the constituencies it contested. With this electoral triumph, Indira Gandhi had arrived in her own right.
Landslide Win
But having won the election, Indira Gandhi was confronted with the same dilemma as Nehru faced, when he took over as Prime Minister of independent India. She had to give priority to the task of governance, over that of mobilisation of the people, for an assault on the status quo.
As it happened, within weeks of Indira Gandhi’s victory at the hustings, the Pakistan army unleashed a reign of terror, in what was then East Pakistan, forcing millions of people to flee across the border into India; the final tally rising as high as 10 million. This produced a crisis of the greatest magnitude for the government. Indira Gandhi met it with a rare skill. Bangladesh became an independent country, despite U.S. and Chinese support for Pakistan, and the refugees went back.
Indira Gandhi’s place in history would have been secure, if she had achieved nothing else. In fact, she achieved much else. For instance, the merger of the strategically important Sikkim into the Indian Union and thereby plugged a big gap in India’s security arrangements in the Himalayas. And she presided over the peaceful underground nuclear explosion, which proclaimed India’s capability to join the nuclear weapons club, if and when it so decided.
The history of events beginning with the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat, in the winter of 1973-74, and culminating in the emergency in June 1975, via the so-called “complete revolution” movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, is too familiar. We are here concerned mainly with the persistent impression that the central issue in those agitations was corruption in public life. Surely, it cannot be anyone’s case that corruption in public life was not an issue in the convulsions which shook the country, from 1973-74 onwards. But the situation was far more complicated.
As is well known, middle peasant castes had moved away from the Congress by 1967, which largely accounted for the party’s debacle in the general election in that year. In plain terms, if Indira Gandhi was to revive the organisation’s fortunes, she needed to build a new alliance system, whereby significant sections of these castes could be won back, or alternatively, some others can be attracted. This required a diminution in the influence in the party, of the hitherto dominant groups, such as the Brahmins in north India, the Patels in Gujarat, the Lingayats in Karnataka, the Reddys in Andhra Pradesh and so on.
This compulsion for a new alliance system for Indira Gandhi, was reinforced by the split in 1969, when virtually whole units moved away from her, in certain states, Gujarat and Karnataka, for example. There she had to build a more or less new party. She did so, with the support of the Kshatriyas in Gujarat and of the “other backward castes’’ in Karnataka.
This was a veritable revolution in the affairs of the Congress.
To put it rather summarily, Indira Gandhi was having to play two contradictory roles – that of revolutionary leader and of a ruler. She had, of course, no choice. As leader of the Congress, she had to accommodate the ferment that developments – spread of education, communications, industrialisation and the ballot box – had produced in society. And as head of the administration, she had to contain this ferment. She could please neither those who were pushing for change in power terms, (which cannot always be understood in ideological terms) nor those who favoured the status quo. She had to try to hold the .balance, which unavoidably, made her vulnerable. J.P. took advantage of this vulnerability. Mr. Justice Sinha’s adverse judgement against her in Raj Narain’s election petition made her position even more precarious, and compelled her to take the extreme measure of proclaiming an internal Emergency.
Not An Autocrat
Indira Gandhi was not an autocrat. But she feared anarchy, as much as autocracy. She tried to avoid both, the first, by imposing the Emergency in 1975, and the second, by going in for free and fair elections in 1977. In between, she tried to widen and strengthen the party’s power base, among the weaker sections of society, which in any case had been its bastions. The task was difficult, and it was made impossible, by certain excesses of the Emergency, especially in respect of the family planning drive. Indira Gandhi herself became a victim of the Emergency. In the election in March 1977, she herself was defeated. The Congress was, of course, routed.
Indira Gandhi made a comeback in January 1980 and with her the Congress. Between then and her martyrdom on October 31, 1984, she faced new challenges in Punjab and Assam. These are complex issues which cannot be justly treated here. Suffice it to say that in handling these problems, Indira Gandhi was guided solely by the consideration of India’s integrity and security. She lived and died for the nation.
(Concluded)
The Times of India, 20 November 1986