by Kuldip Nayar
The pro-Emergency group even spread the impression that democracy was not suited to India’s genius, as many foreigners claimed. Many did not even see anything wrong in the return of Sanjay Gandhi who, the commission said, ‘was not answerable to anybody’, or Bansi Lal who, the commission said, was an example of ‘an authoritarian chief minister’.
In the meanwhile, officers who had cooperated with the commission began dragging their feet. The fear that Indira Gandhi might return one day silenced them. What could they do when they saw some top political leaders changing their tone and colour?
Open differences within the Janata Party, virtually from the outset, only served to alienate the public. When I met Morarji to draw his attention to the growing disillusionment with the government consequent to the bickering at the top, he said there were a few disgruntled elements which he would pulverize. Charan Singh’s attitude was equally unaccommodating.
When Indira Gandhi was unceremoniously defeated people felt that they had won freedom all over again, saying openly that the Janata Party’s victory had given them a second Independence (doosri azadi). They would rebuild the country and bring about the change that JP had promised. Unfortunately, the Janata leaders did not rise to public expectations. Most of them were the same old faces, tarnished with misdeeds; old wine in a new bottle. The defeat of Mrs Gandhi had given people hope of a new lease of life, different from whimsical personal and sterile rule. Now disappointment and disillusionment began being writ large.
I went to Patna to meet JP. He too was feeling let down with the way government was functioning. I asked him to intervene because people had voted in his name and he should not fail them. To my surprise, he told me that ‘nobody listens to me’. These words had a familiar ring. Mahatma Gandhi too had expressed helplessness when Nehru and Patel had accepted Partition without consulting him.
My plea to JP was that he should go back to the people to apprise them of his inability to bring about the change he had promised because the government paid no heed to his advice or principles. He said he could not travel because of his ill health. What he said was true. He was on dialysis as a result of a kidney malfunction.
On my return to Delhi, I told Morarji about JP’s sense of disillusionment. Rather than speaking of remedial measures to improve the Janata government’s performance, Morarji said: ‘What does he think of himself. Is he Gandhi? I did not even go to meet Gandhi.’ Morarji’s obduracy did not surprise me. He was known for his rigidity. He was a rightist at a time when a poor country like India needed someone who was at least left of centre. Only socialists like Madhu Limaye, Janata Party’s general secretary, could share JP’s grief, not many others.
In fact, the Janata government had made its indifferent attitude to JP amply clear from the outset when he returned from the US after medical treatment. The Air India plane stopped at Delhi on its onward journey to Bombay. The government had deputed Information Minister Purshottam Kaushik to receive JP at the airport on the government’s behalf. JP had at least expected, as he told me, Babu Jagjivan Ram, who was known to him because both came from the same state, Bihar, to have come to receive him. Jagjivan Ram was however miffed with him because he had claimed the support of the majority of Janata members and yet JP had preferred Morarji to him.
RNG, who wielded a lot of influence in the Janata government, began settling scores with individuals he did not like. One among them was Dhirubhai Ambani. He provided Arun Shourie, who had, like a paratrooper, landed as executive editor of the Indian Express, with material relating to Ambani. Arun Shourie, who had come into the Indian Express through Nanaji Deshmukh, an RSS stalwart, used the material to make ‘disclosures’ against Ambani. So strong was the impact of repeated campaigns by the Express that the shares of Ambani’s Reliance company came tumbling down. Goenka and Ambani subsequently mended fences.
I met Dhirubhai for the first time when I was waiting for someone at the Taj on Mansingh Road, New Delhi. He came up to me and asked if I was Kuldip Nayar. When I replied in the affirmative, he said that he was Dhirubhai. I was flabbergasted and inquired, ‘the Dhirubhai?’ He told me that he had been reading my articles from his college days. In reply I said: ‘See, where you are and where I am.’ The following day he sent me a box of chocolates.
12
The Janata Party Government
A Case of Musical Chairs and a detour to Afghanistan and Pakistan
The Janata government’s first task was to undo the excesses committed by Indira Gandhi, and particularly so by her son, Sanjay, and to revive the institutions she had destroyed in order to concentrate power in herself.
However, within a few months of forming the government, it dismissed all the Congress-run state governments. Though this was constitutionally correct, it was morally wrong. It set a precedent which Indira Gandhi followed when she returned to power in 1980. I openly criticized the Janata Party’s dismissal of these state governments. RNG told me that the party leaders had not liked my criticism of the new government.
The Janata government withdrew the various amendments to Article 42, undertaken in the name of providing ‘just and humane conditions’ of work. The word ‘secular’, which had been included in the preamble to the constitution, was retained. Education, which had been placed on the concurrent list, had been a state subject since the introduction of the constitution. The Janata government let it remain in the former category although it encroached on the exclusive domain of the states. This created problems 35 years later when the Centre included in the constitution the Right to Education (RTE) for every child between the ages of 6 and 14 years. The Right to Education was an epoch-making measure but it suffered from infirmities. For example, élite private schools still continue to bar poor students and those of lower-caste and lower-income families though entitled to equal education. Remedial measures to fulfill this fundamental right are still being attempted.
Through the 44th Constitutional Amendment Act, the Janata government made the proclamation of Emergency as difficult as possible. Internal disturbance, not amounting to armed rebellion, would not be a ground for the issue of such a proclamation. The maximum duration of an Emergency was fixed at three years rather than the earlier stipulation of an indefinite continuance at the discretion of the prime minister and the cabinet. Indira Gandhi had extended the tenure of parliament to six years, which was reduced to five years as was originally provided in the constitution.
The amendments could not undo the damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted. One irreparable blow was the free hand given to the police. The force had carried out the most barbaric acts at her behest and on behalf of her coterie. The Janata Party appointed a National Police Commission under the chairmanship of Dharma Vira, a very senior retired bureaucrat, to make recommendations in order to ensure that the force was not used for acts of oppression or to chastise opponents of the government. The principal purpose of this commission was to end political transfers. The force was administered by a law the British had enacted in 1888.
When I spoke to Dharma Vira he admitted that the police was misused by the administration and the only remedy was to stop whimsical transfers of top officials. His formula was to keep the force isolated from political interference. I wondered if this would be acceptable even to Janata’s chief ministers like Devi Lal in Haryana and Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar.
The report was pigeonholed by Indira Gandhi. She had a grievance against some police officials who had prepared a report about the ‘excesses’ during her regime. Therefore, at a function over which she was presiding, she stopped the gallantry awards once R.K. Dhawan whispered in her ears that they were being rewarded for post-Emergency inquiries.
The report, finally retrieved after her death, had suggested the formation of a board in every state comprising the home minister, the inspector general of police, the leader of the Opposition, a high court judge, and three apolitical persons. The board was meant to supervise the recruitment and the transfer of policemen. No state governm
ent was willing to implement the report. The matter went up to the Supreme Court and it appointed a committee to monitor police reforms. The result of this was no different. Chairperson K.T. Thomas reported to the Supreme Court that he had spoken to the chief ministers of the states individually and had found each of them was against the board. He said: ‘They laugh and ask me: “Why did I win the election if I do not have even the power to decide about my own police officers”.’
The Janata government motivated by high ideals should have overhauled the system which reeked of misuse of power and corruption going right to the top but the leaders in authority were no different from their predecessors. Where JP went wrong was in leaving the selection of ministers to leaders like Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, and L.K. Advani. They were more interested in their ‘own persons’ rather than in having clean and capable ministers. Those who came to hold senior positions at the Centre and the Janata-led states were mostly of the old ilk: ambitious, power hungry, and unprincipled. There was no vision, no idealism, not even any inclination to implement JP’s core message of parivartan to which the electorate had responded with great expectation.
Indeed, Prime Minister Morarji Desai proved to be the greatest disappointment. He was rigid and arrogant. The long spell in the wilderness had left him bitter, and had fired him with a desire to settle old scores with all those who had ever crossed his path in politics.
Had there been a free election in the Janata Party, Jagjivan Ram would have won hands down. He was disappointed when JP was entrusted with the task of selecting the leader of the parliamentary party. Jagjivan Ram knew that JP had not forgiven him for his alliance with Indira Gandhi even after letting it to be known that he would revolt against her if she imposed the Emergency.
‘I had no option,’ JP said, when I drew his attention to Morarji’s uncompromising attitude. ‘I could not make Jagjivan Ram the prime minister because he had sponsored the Emergency resolution, and Charan Singh did not have sufficient support in the party. Therefore, Morarji was the obvious choice.’
After a few weeks of enthusiasm over the first non-Congress government at the Centre, people felt disillusioned over the same old system taking over and the same old tainted people getting prominent positions. The intelligence agencies were back to their familiar activity, collecting information on critics and opponents. The same unethical and illegal methods that Sanjay Gandhi had adopted were now being used against Congressmen with impunity, particularly in the states. A new set of bureaucrats who claimed to have suffered during Indira Gandhi’s rule came to the fore. A few, very few, unsoiled hands achieved importance in the new government but they were largely ineffective.
What could be considered a change was in foreign policy. Morarji Desai and the Minister of External Affairs Atal Bihari Vajpayee began moving away from the course adopted by the Congress government. Both Pakistan and China had celebrated the ouster of Indira Gandhi, who had adopted a hard-line posture against them. In 1979, Vajpayee was the first foreign minister to visit China after 1962 aggression but he had to cut his visit short when he found that during his visit China had attacked Vietnam, India’s friend. Even so, the Vajpayee visit subsequently had a demonstrable effect.
The Morarji government stopped India’s support for the guerrillas loyal to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, still fighting against the military government in Dhaka. New Delhi announced a desire to achieve ‘genuine’ non-alignment in the Cold War, which had been the long-standing national policy.
Morarji Desai was morally against nuclear weapons for India. He once said, ‘We can drive out any aggressor even without the bomb,’ adding, ‘if China were to throw an atomic bomb on the Indian border, she would create an impenetrable barrier for herself’. At his first press conference as prime minister he expressed doubt as to whether a nuclear programme would be useful for India and suggested returning to ‘cottage industry’.
Morarji Desai verbally agreed to ‘reject future nuclear explosions’ even though New Delhi did not formally accept this provision. In return, President Jimmy Carter promised that he would authorize one more pending shipment of US nuclear fuel supplies to India. In 1978, however, the US Congress intervened and officially blocked the administration from exporting nuclear fuel to India by passing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act.
The new government withdrew all charges against the 25 accused in the Baroda dynamite case, which included the new Minister for Industries George Fernandes. As railway minister he had reinstated the railway employees dismissed after the May 1974 strike.
The Morarji Desai government also appointed the one-man Justice J.C. Shah Commission to investigate allegations of corruption and human rights abuses by members of her government, the Congress party, and the police force. Specific inquiries were instituted into Sanjay Gandhi’s management of the state-owned Maruti Udyog Ltd., and the activities of former Defence Minister Bansi Lal. Both Indira and her son Sanjay were charged with allegations of corruption.
True, Indira Gandhi’s defeat had given the nation, particularly in the north, a sense that the country had won independence once again (doosri azadi), without realizing that the instruments for parivartan were the same ambitious politicians and the same old breed of bureaucrats out of touch with the requirements of the day and having their own agenda.
It was sad to see a group of people who had wholeheartedly rejected Indira Gandhi bickering amongst themselves, both at the Centre and in the states. The people had never imagined that the principal occupation of ministers would be to pull one another down. Senior leaders would meet at Morarji’s house to sort out their differences but disperse without resolving them. This was disappointing because the people wanted the government to deliver.
I met Morarji Desai and Charan Singh in order to appeal to them to work as a team. Morarji said that he was determined to reduce Charan Singh to Churan Singh. The meeting with Charan Singh was equally disappointing. He wondered how he could accept Morarji as his leader when he (Morarji) had won election with only 20,000 votes as against even an unknown Janata Party candidate securing a majority of at least a lakh of votes. When I saw neither an end to infighting nor even the government showing a modicum of performance, I wrote a strong open letter to JP pointing out the aims and values of his agitation against Indira Gandhi’s government and its complete lack of realization under the present one. My plea was, ‘What Delhi represents today cannot be to your [JP] liking, nor is it to the liking of the people’.
Nothing improved in terms of governance, nor did JP’s letter to Janata Party president Chandra Shekhar had an impact. The letter which JP wrote after 15 months of Janata government rule was indicative of JP’s anguish and pain. His was a warning that if the party continued its infighting and failed to fulfill the hopes kindled amongst the people with the formation of the Janata government, there was a danger of a re-emergence of dictatorial forces and tendencies.
The Janata government’s functioning did not improve. I remember visiting Bombay in those days and meeting Justice J.C. Shah who headed the commission. He was very disappointed by the Centre’s performance and said that governance was in fact worse now than under Indira Gandhi.
Pursuing his whimsical policy, Morarji ousted both Charan Singh and his Man Friday Raj Narain from the cabinet. Pressure from Vajpayee and Advani, then information minister, brought Charan Singh back into the cabinet, but they were unable to reinstate Raj Narain as health minister. This indeed proved to be the biggest error committed by the Janata Party leaders. Madhu Limaye, a socialist colleague of Raj Narain, warned me that if he was not reinstated, he would wreck the government. This proved to be the case.
Raj Narain made no secret of his ambition to replace Morarji with Charan Singh as prime minister. Other socialist associates of Raj Narain did not want to disturb Morarji, fearing that were they to rock the boat it might sink. Desperate, Raj Narain contacted Sanjay Gandhi who did not take him seriously at that time believing it was too early for that to happen.
The functioning of the Janata Party as a team was becoming more and more of a formality. The different constituents of the party began operating on their own. The Jana Sangh continued to behave as an unofficial handmaiden of the RSS even after joining the government.
JP also felt cheated. The Jana Sangh leaders had pledged to him that they would delink their association with RSS but did not do so. When I told JP to ask the Jana Sangh to live up to their pledge, he said that he had tried but had not succeeded. ‘It’s a betrayal,’ JP regretted, and it was this issue that eventually split the Janata Party.
The old Congressmen and the socialists who constituted the majority passed a resolution asking the old Jana Sangh members to sever their connections with the RSS (the resolution was passed by a majority of one, Dinesh Singh, who was a Congress plant). Members of the Jana Sangh, in turn, insisted on retaining their dual membership which the other units of the Janata Party could not tolerate, and that was the beginning of the end. Ultimately, the old Jana Sangh members walked out of the party, Advani being the most prominent among them. They founded another party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980.
To Raj Narain’s delight, Sanjay Gandhi took the initiative and showed interest in the move to dislodge the Janata Party government and install Charan Singh as prime minister with the support of the Congress. Raj Narain felt aggrieved because he had been asked to apologize to party President Chandra Shekhar for a snide remark he had made about him. Raj Narain embarked in all seriousness on his plan to break the Janata Party government. The session of parliament scheduled to be held in a few days’ time became critical because the differences between Morarji Desai and Charan Singh appeared to be coming to a head. The demise of the Janata government seemed imminent. However, in 1979, during the last few months of the government it appointed the Mandal Commission to ‘identify the socially or educationally backward’ sections of the backward castes.
