India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In the third week of July 1979 the Socialists chose to sit in a separate group in Parliament. This catalysed a split in Janata, a loss of majority for Morarji Desai’s government and his own resignation. In his bid to construct afresh majority, Desai wooed one Congress faction while Jagjivan Ram wooed another. The third leader in the fray, Charan Singh, now constructed an opportunistic alliance with his old nemesis Indira Gandhi. With the help of a letter of support from the Congress Party, Charan Singh was able to convince the president that he enjoyed majority support in the House. He was sworn in just in time to deliver the prime minister’s annual Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, the first farmer to do so.45

  The disintegration of the Janata Party proceeded against a background of despairing letters written by Jayaprakash Narayan to his protégés. In October 1979 JP died, a broken man.The liberal editor A. D. Gorwala paid tribute to Narayan as ‘the great moral force of the country, the touchstone of right and wrong’. His ‘last great effort’, wrote Gorwala, was the formation and victory of the Janata Party, whose ‘narrow, stupid partisan men . . . absorbed in their own self-interest and self-importance, failed himbadly’.46 Those self-absorbed men – Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, jagjivan Ram – all came to JP’s funeral in Patna, as, more strikingly, did Sanjay Gandhi and his mother. ‘Poor oldj. P.!’, wrote Mrs Gandhi to a friend afterwards. ‘What a confused mind he had leading to such a frustrated life!’ She attributed his twists and turns to ‘Gandhian hypocrisy’, to the vow of celibacy extracted from him when he married the Mahatma’s disciple Prabhavati. ‘That and jealousy of my father probably conditioned the rest of hislife’, she remarked, adding: ‘It is nonsense to say that he did not want office. One part of him did, very much so. He was torn between that and the desire to be regarded as a martyr and a saint.’47

  There is a certain spitefulness in this assessment, and also a certain loftiness of tone. For Mrs Gandhi was having the last laugh, with regard not just to her old friend turned rival but also to the party he had created. Back in July, when Morarji Desai had resigned and his successor was being chosen, the journal Himmat presciently remarked that ‘Mrs Gandhi is the only one who would like to have amid-term poll -and would gain from it in the present climate. It is in her interest to have Mr Charan Singh installed as Prime Minister but only for two to three months.’48

  Charan Singh was sworn in as prime minister in the last week of July 1979; a month later the Congress (I) informed the president that they were withdrawing support. It took the president a further month to explore and reject the alternatives. When he decided that amid-term poll was the only solution, the Election Commission still needed time to prepare for it. So Charan Singh stayed on as prime minister until the end of the year, two full months more than Himmat had given him.

  IX

  The Janata Party came to power on a wave of hyperbole, with talk of a second freedom from authoritarian rule and a resounding restoration of democracy. Almost from its first weeks in office, the party seemed determined to squander this goodwill. It was soon noticed that in both the centre and the states janata ministers were grabbing the best government bungalows, raiding the Public Works Department for air-conditioners and carpets, organizing lavish parties and weddings for their relatives, running up huge telephone and electricity bills, travelling abroad at the slightest pretext (or on no pretext at all).49 Even traditionally anti-Congress journals were writing about the ‘death of idealism’ within Janata, of how it had so quickly become a ‘political party of the traditional type’, its members ‘interested more and more in positions and perquisites and less and less in affecting society’. It was being said that while it had taken the Congress thirty years to abandon its principles, Janata had lost them within a year of its formation.50

  Looking back on the three years of the Janata regime, one analyst remembered it as ‘a chronicle of confused and complex party squabbles, intra-party rivalries, shifting alliances, defections, charges and countercharges of incompetence and the corruption and humiliation of persons who had come to power after the defeat of Mrs Gandhi’.51 Most Indians who lived through those years would make the same assessment, if more succinctly; the Janata Party, they would say, were merely a bunch of jokers. It takes a distinguished foreign observer to remind us that, beyond the fighting and squabbling, the Janata government made a notable contribution to Indian democracy. This, in the words of Gran-ville Austin, was its ‘remarkable success in repairing the Constitution from the Emergency’s depredations, in reviving open parliamentary practice through its consultative style when repairing the Constitution, and in restoring the judiciary’s independence’.52

  The initiative here was taken by Morarji Desai. In an interview on the eve of the 1977 election, he remarked that during the emergency, democracy itself had been ‘vasectomised’. If his party won, they would ‘work for the removal of fear which has enveloped the people’. Then they would undertake ‘to rectify the Constitution’. Morarji was clear that ‘we will have to ensure that Emergency like this can never be imposed. No Government should be able to do so.’53

  After Janata’s victory, the job of repairing the constitution was supervised by the hard-working law minister Shanti Bhushan. The key amendment to be overturned was the 42nd. To replace its ‘defiling’ provisions, two fresh amendments were drafted, which reverted the term of Parliament and state assemblies to five years, restored the right of the Supreme Court to adjudicate on all election matters (that of the prime minister included), limited the period of President’s Rule in the states, made mandatory the publication of parliamentary and legislative proceedings and made the promulgation of a state of emergency much more difficult. Any such act had now to be approved by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, had to be renewed every six months after a fresh vote on it, and had to be in response to an ‘armed rebellion’ (rather than a mere ‘internal disturbance’, as was previously the case). These changes were intended to curb the arbitrary powers of the executive and to restore the rights of the courts; in effect, to restore the constitution to what it was before Mrs Gandhi’s emergency-era amendments.

  The drafting of these amendments took time, because of the demands of legal precision and the need to ensure the kind of cross-party support that would make their passing in both Houses of Parliament possible. As these restorations were being debated, the press was reporting avidly on the Shah Commission, while a string of books and memoirs documenting the excesses of the emergency were being published. In this climate of opinion, even the Congress was in no mood to defend the changes in the constitution that its leaders had wrought. That damage was now undone by the freshly drafted 44th Amendment. When this was passed by a comfortable majority on 7 December 1978, among those voting for it were those two old enemies, Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi.54

  X

  Although it failed to last its full term, the victory of the Janata Party was a watershed in Indian politics. For the first time since Independence a party other than the Congress came to govern at the centre. In the states too the landscape of politics became more variegated, with the victory of the communists in West Bengal, and that of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu.

  The Indian political system was being decentred, and not just in party terms. For the late 1970s also witnessed the flowering of numerous ‘new’ social movements. In 1978 there was a major conference of ‘socialist-feminists’ in Bombay, which focused on the growing violation of women’s rights. Campaigns were launched against dowry and rape, against male alcoholism and the sexual abuse it frequently resulted in, and for better working conditions for women labouring in factories and household units. This new wave of feminism was widespread as well as wide ranging, with groups active in many states, mobilizing support through public rallies, street theatre, poster campaigns and house-to-house canvassing.55

  The late seventies also saw the assertion of avigorous environmental movement. Peasants launched struggles in defence of their forest rights, tribals protested against thei
r displacement by large industrial projects and artisanal fisherfolk opposed trawlers that were depleting the fish stocks of the ocean. In these protests two things stood out: the leading role of women, who themselves bore the brunt of ecological degradation, and the fact that, unlike in the West, where the concern for nature was couched in aesthetic terms and voiced by the middle class, this was an ‘environmentalism of the poor’, driven by rural communities for whom access to the gifts of nature was linked to their very survival.56

  Both the feminist movement and the environmental movement actually started in the early 1970s. Their progress was interrupted by the emergency, but when that ended they emerged once more and with renewed vigour. The same was the case with the civil rights movement. This had its origins in the treatment of Naxalite activists incarcerated in Calcutta jail. When these prisoners began a bidi-chitti andolan, a struggle for access to cigarettes and letters (denied them by their jailers), are tired engineer named Kapil Bhattacharya decided to form an Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights. The emergency inspired the formation of other such groups, based in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and elsewhere. Some focused on ‘civil liberties’, the violation by the state of the basic human rights of its citizens. Others worked with a broader concept of ‘democratic rights’, which took the right to life and liberty guaranteed by the constitution also to mean the right to better wages and working conditions, and to gainful employment itself. The first kind of group took up jail reform and the abuse of power by state authorities (and the police in particular); the second kind also looked at the impact of state policies on the lives and livelihoods of the less privileged, the low castes and tribals in particular. These groups produced dozens of reports on the violations of civil liberties and democratic rights by the state, drawing on field investigations, often in remote parts of the country, conducted by public-spirited intellectuals based in the cities.57

  These movements were described as ‘new’ because they took up issues neglected by the old, class-based social movements of peasants and workers. However, the late 1970s also saw those older concerns expressing themselves in new forms. Thus the trade union movement, which had historically focused on the factory sector, now began working among miners and labourers in household and cottage industries. Among the more notable initiatives was the Chattisgarh Mineworkers Shramik Sangh (CMSS), whose leader Shankar Guha Niyogi sought to blend the ideas of Gandhi and Marx. The mines where the CMSS was active serviced the great public-sector steelworks at Bhilai. Working with miners of a chiefly tribal background, Niyogi campaigned for equal pay for women workers and against alcohol abuse by men, set up schools for children, and struggled to make the mine owners pay as much attention to health and safety as to a decent living wage.58

  Accompanying and complementing these movements was a new kind of Indian press. For the end of the emergency unleashed the energies of journalists as only the struggle for national independence had done before it. Censorship was dead; there were now no limits to what reporters and editors could write about, or to the length of their stories. It also helped that the first offset presses arrived in India in the 1970s. No longer had type to be laboriously set in hot metal; no longer had journals to be printed in the bigger towns and cities alone.

  The historian Robin Jeffrey has authoritatively tracked ‘India’s Newspaper Revolution’ which began in 1977 and has gathered pace ever since. Among the components of this revolution we may single out five. Two were enabled by the new technology: the simultaneous printing of multiple editions of the same paper in towns far distant from one other and the enhancement of print quality and, especially, of the production of pictures and other visual material. Other innovations were a product of changes in society and politics: the end of censorship facilitated the rise of investigative journalism, of hard-hitting stories on crime and political corruption. The spread of education and the expansion of the middle class gave an enormous fillip to Indian-language journalism. A national readership survey, conducted in 1979 and restricted to the towns and cities, estimated that as many as 48 million urban Indians regularly read a periodical of some kind. The fastest increase was in the smaller towns and among Indian languages. In 1979, for the first time, those who read newspapers in Hindi (a language spoken by 40 per cent of Indians) numbered more than those who read them in English (a language spoken by a mere 3 percent of Indians). The new journalism substituted a colloquial and demotic prose for the stiff, formal style once preferred by editors and reporters. Idioms and phrases derived from the classical Sanskrit, once de rigueur, were now abandoned in favour of the rhythms and cadences of everyday speech.59

  Two somewhat contradictory trends were apparent in the India of the late 1970s. On the one hand there was an increasing fragmentation of the polity, as manifest in the rapid turnover of governments. With ever fewer exceptions, politicians and parties had abandoned ideology for expediency, and principle for profit. On the other hand there were new forms of social assertion among historically subordinated groups such as low castes, women and unorganized workers. There was now, for the first time, an active civil liberties movement. The press, which during the emergency had mostly been cowed without a fight, had become livelier than ever before.

  Viewed from the more formal, purely political side, it appeared that Indian democracy was being corroded and degraded. If one took amore ‘social’ view, however, it appeared that Indian democracy was, in fact, being deepened and enriched.

  24

  * * *

  DEMOCRACY IN DISARRAY

  Not every individual or party is always disposed to use our democratic framework to further constructive purposes. It seems that the exercise of the democratic right sometimes takes the form of freedom even to destroy.

  INDIRA GANDHI to JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN, May 1968

  I

  WRITING SHORTLY AFTER THE 1977 elections, the Guardian correspondent in India thought that the return to democracy might be short lived. ‘Democracy can only survive if there is economic progress and reform,’ he wrote. ‘Already, the new [Janata] government faces an economic crisis; inflation rampant again, an explosion of wage demands, and a wave of strikes. If it is overwhelmed by protest, the cycle of repression could start all over again.’1

  Altogether more optimistic was the old India hand Horace Alexander, now eighty-seven and living in retirement in a Quaker home in Pennsylvania. In a letter published in the New York Times Alexander said that ‘the astonishing Indian elections’ showed that ‘the common people of India have political courage’, this derived from Gandhi and the heritage of the freedom movement. In a letter to a fellow Quaker he likewise called the poll verdict ‘a triumph for the common people of India’, adding: ‘Let none ever say that “democratic liberty” is a bourgeois conception, which is only meaningful to a small number of left-wing intellectuals.’2

  The indefatigable Alexander also wrote to Mrs Gandhi. During the emergency he had peppered her with anxious letters about the fate of freedom and of the men she had detained. Now he remembered his old friend Jawaharlal Nehru saying that he wished he could have had a spell away from politics, to read and simply relax. He wondered whether Nehru’s daughter, out of power, would ‘spend some time enjoying birds, up in the Himalaya, or in Kashmir’. There was some chit-chat about art and literature, and then the letter concluded: ‘We shall try to keep up with the news from India, and perhaps in five years from now, you will be in office once again with the biggest majority ever. Such is democracy!’3

  Actually, it took less than three years for Mrs Gandhi to return to power. Her Congress Party won 353 seats in the 1980 elections, one more than in the ‘Garibi Hatao’ campaign of 1971. It did very well in the south, as before, while in the north it benefited hugely from a division of the vote between the two rival Janata factions, here contesting as separate parties. In the key state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, the Congress obtained 36 per cent of the popular vote, yet won 60 per cent of the parliamentary seats. One Janata fa
ction got 22.6 per cent of the vote, the other 29 per cent; between them, they won 32 seats in the state to the Congress’s 50.4

  The 1980 elections, notes the editor Prabhas Joshi, marked the ‘end of ideology’ in Indian politics. Previous polls were fought and won on the planks of democracy, socialism, secularism and non-alignment. In 1980, however, Mrs Gandhi spoke not of the abolition of poverty but of her ability to rule. Janata could not hold together a government, she told the voters; whereas she could and had. Their bickerings apart, there were other factors that went against Janata. There were shortages of basic consumer goods, attributed naturally to the party in power. As one election cry went: ‘Janata ho gayi fail, Kha gayi chini aur mitti ka tel’ (The Janata party has failed, Eaten up sugar and paraffin on the way).5

  The Janata Party had thoroughly discredited itself. As a reporter covering the elections found, while Indira Gandhi had a ‘tarnished image’, her opponents were ‘all tarnish and no image’.6 Meanwhile, the rash of attacks on Scheduled Castes turned this very numerous voting segment back towards the Congress. Sanjay Gandhi had apologized to the Muslims for the excesses of the emergency; sections of this ‘vote bank’ returned to the fold as well.7