The Rise of Goliath

by AK Bhattacharya

  One possible explanation for Gandhi’s aggressive stance on imposing the Emergency was the absence of saner voices among her advisers. For well over six years, P.N. Haksar was advising Gandhi, pointing out what was right and what was wrong with regard to her various decisions on government policy matters as well as Congress party issues. Gandhi would not always appreciate Haksar’s frequent notes sent to her and, pointing out, for instance, the flaws he saw in the measures she took to address the turmoil in the Congress leadership team in Andhra Pradesh. Similarly, Haksar would not approve of many of Gandhi’s decisions. He would write to her pointing out why she should not use a government-provided helicopter to travel to her own constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Once, he even wrote to her expressing his disapproval of how she addressed a Lions Club meeting at Calcutta even as she continued to decline requests to address meetings convened by national industry bodies like the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.3

  Haksar left the prime minister’s secretariat in 1973. For about two years, he was not in the government; Gandhi occasionally requested his services as an envoy of the government to meet dignitaries coming to India from abroad or visit foreign countries. In 1975, Haksar was parked as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and he was not as regular with his advice to Gandhi as he was when he was the principal secretary in the prime minister’s secretariat.

  In 1973, the same year as Haksar left the prime minister’s secretariat, Gandhi lost another close adviser Mohan Kumaramangalam, who was also in her cabinet as a senior minister. Kumaramangalam died in a plane crash and this was a big blow to Gandhi as she now had one person less on whom she could count for advice on critical issues in the realm of both politics and economics. At around the same time eminent economist Pitambar Pant, who headed the perspective planning division in the Planning Commission, passed away. Another of her key advisers, D.P. Dhar had died just before she declared the Emergency.

  In a short span of about two years, Gandhi no longer had the benefit of frank and forthright views of three of her trusted aides—two of them died and one of them decided to leave the prime minister’s secretariat and was accommodated in the Planning Commission. The death of Pant did not affect Gandhi directly, but his absence was felt by others like Haksar, who depended a lot on the suave and mild-mannered economist.

  It is not that Gandhi did not replace these advisers with their successors. P.N. Dhar joined the secretariat to succeed Haksar. But, clearly, Dhar did not have the kind of say or influence on Gandhi as Haksar did. This was particularly so when this period coincided with the rise in the influence and clout of Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay. There were views, though unconfirmed, that Haksar decided to leave the secretariat largely because he was uncomfortable with the way Sanjay Gandhi was interfering in governance matters and how he as an adviser would be ruled out by Gandhi as Sanjay’s views gained precedence.4 There was no love lost between Haksar and Sanjay—the former having objected to the latter’s proposal for a licence to produce a small car in the country. Indeed, Haksar’s close family was later harassed no end during the Emergency months, but Haksar was too proud to raise the issue with Gandhi, although he knew full well that the excesses were being engineered at the behest of Sanjay Gandhi.5 The sense of dignity and pride he had for himself perhaps did not allow him to take up this issue either with Indira Gandhi or her son.

  There are also strong political factors that drove Indira Gandhi towards declaring the Emergency. She had notched up significant political gains as prime minister from 1969 to 1971, in particular. Bank nationalization in 1969 had isolated her critics within the Congress and her Pakistan policy, resulting in its break-up and the creation of Bangladesh, made her a popular leader in the country and even silenced her critics in the opposition parties. Even Jayaprakash Narayan, her sharpest critic, had begun to acknowledge her successes in ruling the country. That perhaps made her a little arrogant and she was unwilling to heed suggestions made in good faith by leaders within her own party and even by Narayan. Instead, she centralized the governance structure even more and the autonomy of the government as well as the party was a casualty. Her senior colleagues contributed to her decline as a democratic leader as they rarely stood up to her to tell the facts as they were. Instead, most of them were found concurring with whatever she proposed an easier and better option.

  Around the same time, the growing political clout of Sanjay Gandhi made matters worse. A powerful coterie around her, led by her son and her personal assistant, Dhawan, was gaining in strength. Key appointments now had to be cleared by Sanjay Gandhi and even the prime minister’s secretariat, in the process, got devalued. On the other hand, Jayaprakash Narayan stepped up his campaign against Gandhi and in particular the issue of rising corruption in government. The Navnirman Andolan in Gujarat gave a fresh impetus to this movement. Finally, Congress (O) leader Morarji Desai went on a fast in April 1975 against the manner in which Indira Gandhi was running her government. The Allahabad High Court judgment on 12 June 1975 was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Indira Gandhi will surely count as the key disrupter in enforcing internal emergency on the country. The consequences of what she did in 1975 have hugely influenced the nature of politics in the country in the subsequent decades. The political price she paid for having imposed the Emergency was so heavy that it is unlikely that any prime minister would ever consider using a provision in the Constitution to enforce something similar.

  Gandhi lost her Lok Sabha seat in the elections that were held in March 1977 after the Emergency was lifted earlier in the year. The embarrassing loss of this seat was the price she paid for her political misadventure. Political leaders in the years to come would not consider the option of declaring an emergency not because they were averse to the idea, but because of the fear of its adverse impact they could face at the hustings. No Indian voter will forget what the Emergency did to their fundamental rights. In that sense, the Emergency as a disruptive force had a positive outcome in an indirect way.

  The declaration of the Emergency was certainly the biggest jolt to India’s nascent democracy and that is why perhaps this has so far turned out to be the strongest force for growing and nurturing deep democratic roots in the country by people and even political parties. Any trace of authoritarianism or dictatorship is frowned upon and can become a powerful issue on which leaders associated with such a stance would have to pay a heavy price in an election. This was a disruption that clearly had short-term negative outcomes, but with a long-term positive fallout by reminding the people what it could mean if anybody tried to undermine the country’s democratic traditions and principles.

  A comparison of Gandhi’s style of leadership with that of Narendra Modi, who led a government with a single-party majority from 2014 to 2019 and was returned to power for another five-year term from May 2019 with an even greater majority, will be relevant and apt. Modi has often been compared with Gandhi and both introduced major disruptions in the policy space during their tenures. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two leaders. Gandhi used her powers to disrupt policies by not only nationalizing banks and other industries but also abridging the people’s democratic rights through the imposition of the Emergency. Modi too used his powers to disrupt policies through demonetization and the launch of the GST. If Gandhi paid a huge political price by being voted out of power by the people, it was not because of her moves on nationalization, but because of the Emergency. For Modi, Gandhi’s political career is a lesson in how to use or misuse power as a strong leader.

  The Turning Point

  A question that still remains unanswered is why did Indira Gandhi decide to end the Emergency in January 1977? The fact is, she was under no compulsion to call for the elections that were held two months later in March 1977. If she wanted to, she could have continued with the Emergency and perpetuated her authoritarian rule for a few more years. As veteran journalist Mark Tully wrote in his foreword to Kuldip N
ayar’s book, On Leaders and Icons: From Jinnah to Modi, ‘When Kuldip asked Sanjay why elections were called in 1977, Sanjay said he should ask his mother, adding that in his scheme of things there was to be no election for three or four decades. This implies that if Indira had won the 1977 election, Sanjay would have used his influence with his mother to retain the Emergency.’

  This assessment is in tune with another widely held view that Gandhi might have taken the decision to call for elections in 1977 without even consulting her son. Indeed, Sanjay Gandhi got to know that elections had been called only from her radio broadcast on 18 January 1977, after which there was an altercation over this issue between the mother and the son.6

  Another rather charitable explanation is that she might have been encouraged to call for the elections in the hope that she would make amends for the transgressions she had committed to India’s democracy by declaring the Emergency. But it was clear that she was harbouring thoughts on holding elections in less than a year and a half after imposing the Emergency. In early November 1976, Gandhi told P.N. Dhar, her principal secretary, and H.Y. Sharada Prasad, her information adviser, her plans in confidence: ‘I am going to call off the Emergency and hold elections. I know that I will lose, but this is something which I absolutely have to do. The intelligence agencies will tell me what they think I want to hear. But I know that I am going to lose, even though the IB is saying that I will win 330 seats.’7

  This is contrary to the view held by many others that she actually believed in the intelligence reports that if elections were to be held in 1977, she had a good chance of returning to power.8 Her aide during the Emergency years and after, R.K. Dhawan, said in a media interview that she called the Lok Sabha elections in 1977 after the Intelligence Bureau told her that she would win up to 340 seats in a Lok Sabha consisting of 540-odd seats. Kuldip Nayar, the journalist who had broken the news in January 1977 that Gandhi was expected to call for elections soon, wrote in Emergency Retold:

  Both the intelligence bureau and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) had estimated that she would get more than 350 seats if she were to go to polls immediately. Only CBI Director D. Sen, whom she used to raid critics’ houses, had struck a discordant note; he had emphasised that there should be a gap of six months between the release of detainees and elections so as to allow time for the halo around them to fade.9

  There is, however, no authoritative corroboration of these versions. Either way, it was her desire to legitimize her rule through an electoral process that resulted in ending an unfortunate and dark chapter of India’s democracy.

  The Emergency was India’s worst moment as far as political disruptions go, but its disastrous consequences also served as a warning to the nation and perhaps has so far prevented a repeat of that experiment by anybody else.

  The Emergency’s consequences for Gandhi were largely political in nature. She was trounced in the Lok Sabha elections in 1977 from Rae Bareli, which she had treated as her pocket borough—having won from there with huge margins in 1967 and 1971. The Emergency destroyed her image as a democratic leader and the Congress party faced an electoral rout in 1977 in almost all the north Indian states. In another way, Gandhi and her Emergency rule also galvanized the Opposition political parties to unite and form a coalition to defeat her in an election. That led to the formation of the first non-Congress government in New Delhi and the emergence of coalition politics in independent India. The defeat of the Congress and Gandhi in the 1977 elections, after the Emergency, also deepened democratic roots in India. The message went out loud and clear to political parties of all shades and opinion that voters are quick to retaliate with their ballots if any political party or its leaders make any attempts to abridge or curtail their democratic rights.

  This was also a big lesson that Gandhi learnt from her Emergency experience. That she learnt it fast helped her recover politically and bounce back in less than a year or so, first in the Lok Sabha and then as the leader of a rejuvenated Congress to be the country’s prime minister once again in 1980. Of course, the Janata Party, the coalition that had been formed after ousting Gandhi, was equally responsible for her return. It failed to operate as a cohesive coalition and its vindictive action against Gandhi (the Janata Party government sent her to jail on charges of corruption on 3 October 1977) swung the voter’s sympathy back in her favour.10

  What helped Gandhi recover from the Emergency setback was also the manner in which she responded to her election defeat, committing herself to the spirit of democracy. Immediately after she resigned in 1977, Gandhi acknowledged her defeat and said, ‘The collective judgment of the electorate must be respected.’ Shortly after resigning, Gandhi delivered an address over the All India Radio and said, ‘Winning or losing of the election is less important than strengthening the country. My colleagues and I accept the people’s verdict unreservedly and in a spirit of humility.’11 And then before demitting office, Gandhi revoked her own Emergency rules, ending a sordid saga of India’s politics.

  Section 8

  The BoP Crash and Reforms of 1991

  CHAPTER 14

  A POUND OF FLESH

  Election months are usually quiet for civil servants in most economic ministries in the government. If officers are not assigned to election duty, they can actually take it easy during the few weeks that precede the elections. And if the elections are for the Lok Sabha, this is also the time for civil servants to engage in some useful gossiping among themselves over which political party has a greater chance to retain or regain power at the Centre.

  In the summer of 1991, B.P. Verma, a joint secretary in the finance ministry, was hardly in that kind of a mood. His former colleague in the IAS, Yashwant Sinha, had become the finance minister a few months ago in November 1990, when Chandra Shekhar formed a minority government with outside support of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress. But Sinha could not present his Budget in February 1991 as Gandhi had withdrawn support to the government quite suddenly. And the government fell.1 But the Chandra Shekhar government was asked to continue to function till a new government could be formed after the elections.

  The Indian economy was going through one of its worst crises—an outcome of worsening balance of payments and growing fiscal indiscipline. A new and stable government was sorely needed to steer the economy and the country out of the perilous situation. The past two governments had lasted only a few months each—the government of Vishwanath Pratap Singh fell before completing even a year in office and Chandra Shekhar lasted for just four months before being asked by the President to run a caretaker government till the elections were completed. Just after the completion of the first phase of the elections, former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was leading the Congress campaign to regain power at the Centre, was killed in a terrorist attack in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu in the third week of May. The second phase of the general elections had to be postponed. This worsened India’s economic situation, as it was running out of its foreign-exchange reserves and there were now doubts about its ability to honour its international payments obligations.

  In such a grim and precarious situation, Verma received a phone call from the PMO. The message was brief: Verma had to go to Patna immediately with a confidential file, locate Sinha who was busy electioneering there, and get the file signed by the finance minister and return to New Delhi at the earliest. Soon, a file, marked confidential, arrived at Verma’s office through a special messenger. Verma picked up the phone to contact Indian Airlines to book an air ticket to Patna.2

  Those were the pre-liberalization days. Private-sector airlines were yet to start providing service in the domestic skies. The only air connection between Delhi and Patna was a daily service run by Indian Airlines. As a joint secretary, Verma had assumed that he would get a seat through a simple telephone call. But it was the peak election season and all the seats on the day’s Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Patna were booked and the state-owned airline expressed deep regret over its inability to provide him a s
eat. Verma was not to give up so easily. He was under instructions from the highest office in the country that he must reach Patna that day to get the file signed by Sinha.

  Verma called up a senior official of the Indian Airlines and explained to him his predicament. The airline official gave him an idea: Would Verma mind standing in the cockpit of the plane and travelling to Patna? It was a bizarre question, Verma thought. Was the Indian Airline official joking with him? Could he possibly travel in an aircraft like he had travelled standing on a public bus many times in his life?

  As it turned out, standing in the cockpit of the aircraft was the only option available for Verma to reach Patna the same day. Verma was helpfully told that the pilot of the aircraft would be aware of his emergency requirement and has been specifically instructed to allow him to stand in the cockpit.

  Verma does not recall if he had been given a ticket for the travel and whether he got himself insured. But he did get an entry card, accompanied the pilots of the aircraft and entered the plane, with the confidential file held tightly and close to his chest. The flight was uneventful, though it was a little odd for him to complete a flight standing. Thankfully, there wasn’t any turbulence, and Verma reached Patna, acutely conscious of the fact that as a law-abiding citizen and an IAS officer he had knowingly violated aviation rules of safety and security.