Many of us, members of the so-called top political and journalistic elites, are no longer shocked by anything. We were delighted when offices and houses of some leading businessmen were raided during the emergency and income-tax officials incapable of distinguishing a Persian carpet from a Mirzapuri imitation and an original painting from a print regaled us with the details of the so-called luxury items they had unearthed. The raids catered generously to our feeling of self-righteousness. Many of us are likely to have reacted in the same manner to the raid by the same income-tax officials on Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s farm house near Delhi. In her case some of us might find it difficult to resist the temptation to add that she is being paid back in her own coin.
We took it for granted that the businessmen in question were guilty of every crime in the book. Our only regret, if any, was that the authorities were not acting firmly enough, a euphemism for harshly and arbitrarily enough. It did not matter if at least in some cases the income-tax men found nothing incriminating or the businessmen under investigation had an excellent reputation, in all probability justified by their record. The same is true in Mrs Gandhi’s case. Many of us continue to hold her guilty of having amassed vast private fortunes as prime minister, though the most extensive investigations by the present government for 22 long months have not produced a scrap of evidence to that effect.
How many times has one even mildly sympathetic to her been asked in the last 22 months: “Do you seriously believe she does not possess crores and crores of rupees?” and watched an expression of utter disbelief, indeed horror, on the faces of one’s interlocutors if one has had the temerity to say that one will not be surprised if it turns out that she did not stack away crores and crores for her personal use. And, of course, no one has cared to answer the question where she has kept the money.
COUNTRYSIDE
Since public memory is usually short, let me recall that while the income-tax raids on business houses continued after the forcible family planning and slum clearance drives had been stepped up and the emergency had begun to become unpopular even with the people in the countryside who are otherwise not unduly concerned with issues relating to personal freedom, they had commenced much earlier. And at that stage they were, to the best of my knowledge, quite popular, as was the emergency. I recall asking almost a score of young men and women at an interview in 1977 winter what they thought of the emergency, and being told by most of them, especially the girls, that they welcomed it because it had produced order and compelled the employees to work.
I have had a gnawing suspicion that Mrs Gandhi ordered or acquiesced in – one is not sure which – these high-handed raids because she knew that they would be popular even with those sections of the intelligentsia which were critical of the emergency and all that it implied by way of curtailment of personal liberty. And I have a gnawing suspicion now that the Janata government ordered the raid on Mrs Gandhi’s farm house not because it expected to unearth some treasure trove there but because it calculated that it would enable it to demonstrate that it does not consist of “a pack of impotent men”. I have used the word government advisedly because I am convinced that the decision was taken at the highest level and not by the income-tax authorities. I for one have also little doubt that the main consideration in this case, as in Mrs Gandhi’s in respect of raids on the houses of leading businessmen, was political.
Mrs Gandhi is a shrewd person, though she, too, makes blunders. She chose businessmen as her target or agreed to their choice as the target precisely because she knew that it was easy to direct towards them the popular anger arising out of rising prices and shortages. She was perhaps also interested in frightening the entire business community so that it would, on the one hand, withhold support from the underground opposition and, on the other, make voluntary disclosures under the scheme she was about to launch in order to check the size of the parallel economy.
CAMPAIGN
The Janata leaders are not equally well placed because they cannot carry on a similar campaign against the business community in view of their links with it and incapacity to act in Mrs Gandhi’s style – she gave them concessions, collected money from them for party purposes, humiliated them from time to time and was willing to be wooed by the same individuals again. As such the Janata leaders have had to choose other targets which are not equally “good”. As home minister, Mr Charan Singh ordered the arrest of two full-fledged secretaries to the government of India who had subsequently to be reinstated. And Mrs Gandhi is able to attract a lot of sympathy among the poor people on account of her persecution. But a substantial section of the self-styled political elite is a different proposition. I would have been delighted if the government had instituted what in its ignorance it describes as a Nuremberg-type trial against her.
All this is not to issue clean bills of health either to businessmen or to Mrs Gandhi. The former have as a rule not been above taking advantage of the shortages, though essentially they are not to blame for the shortages. For all governments in India since independence have followed policies which have kept the pace of economic growth among the lowest in the world. Similarly, it is indisputable that Mrs Gandhi allowed Mr Sanjay Gandhi to use her authority for activities which were intended to make money for him and some other members of the family. The point I am seeking to make is that we have created in the country an atmosphere in which no charge against any individual is too heinous to be widely believed and that this cannot augur well for orderly progress and survival of democratic society which must rest on mutual trust among all sections of the community in general and among the political elite in particular.
At a small gathering where the policy of this paper was being discussed, a left wing editor said something to the effect that The Times of India’s position was that if we wanted democracy we should not look too closely into the activities of our leaders. This was not an unfair summing up.
I for one have little doubt that those of us who occupy important positions in society in any field have to learn to be more tolerant and charitable towards one another than we have been for quite some time. And, as I see it, this is not just a question of self protection and goodwill or, indeed, even one of avoiding aggravating the convulsion through which we are of necessity passing, though that is an important consideration.
The country is having a commercial-industrial revolution. Some millions of people have made enormous fortunes as a result of it. The rest of us may not respect them much on one pretext or another. Most of the Indian rich, as it happens, are not too well educated; they are not sufficiently articulate in the dual sense of not being able to speak English fluently and mouthing the latest theories coming out of Europe and America and so on. But most of us are in fact jealous of them and wish to join them. In big cities, especially the metropolitan ones, it is no longer fashionable to be poor, however much some of us may talk of Gandhism and however much we may denounce what we call ostentatious display of wealth or conspicuous consumption and detest what Mr George Fernandes has described rather graphically as the five-star culture, the reference being to five-star hotels and the expense accounts of company directors and executives which keep the hotels going.
The younger generation is even less willing to accept austerity as a way of life than ours. That was why it should have been a matter of relief that, to begin with, Mr Sanjay Gandhi had decided to set up a car factory and Mrs Gandhi let him. Perhaps he would not have come into politics and played the havoc he did if he had succeeded in that enterprise. Perhaps that was also Mrs Gandhi’s calculation in letting him use her authority in that connection. But be that as it may, the transition from a stagnant society where caste and family by and large determined one’s status in society to a relatively dynamic one cannot but create problems in respect of adherence to norms.
PSYCHOLOGY
The moralists with no understanding of society and human psychology or the history of other developed countries have a ready-made solution – improvement of the moral character of men in authority. The Marxists, too, have a solution – abolition of private property. For them it does not matter if that produces tyranny and covert corruption as in the Soviet Union or Boumedienne’s Algeria or Nasser’s Egypt. The Gandhians also have a solution – acceptance of poverty as a way of life. The rest of us are stuck. We have no solution to offer except a patient struggle combined with understanding of the consequences of rapid social change and tolerance towards those who may have deviated from the highest norms. All developed societies have gone through this phase and we cannot escape it.
I cannot over-emphasise the point that vigilance and the effort to enforce certain standards of uprightness among politicians and bureaucrats should, in a social situation like ours, be accompanied by charity and that some regard should be shown for those who have held or hold such high offices in the land as that of president, prime minister and chief justice. By casting doubt on their integrity we have created widespread cynicism. It goes without saying that we shall be doomed as a democracy if corruption gets out of hand. But we shall also be doomed if we continue to create the impression that everyone in authority is venal.
The Times of India, 24 January 1979