India After Gandhi
Page 109
28
See K. K. Birla, Indira Gandhi: Reminiscences (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1987), pp. 50–1.
29
Bhargava, The Press in India, pp. 65–6.
30
Quoted in Ved Mehta, The New India (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), pp. 63–4.
31
Report by Jonathan Dimbleby in the Sunday Times, reproduced in Amiya Rao and B. G. Rao, eds, The Press She Could not Whip: Emergency in India as reported by the Foreign Press (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1977), pp. 20–1.
32
Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p. 182.
33
Report by J. Anthony Lukacs in the New York Times, reproduced in Rao and Rao, eds., The Press She Could not Whip, pp. 186–98.
34
See Basu, Underground Literature, pp. 7–11.
35
P. G. Mavalankar, ‘No, Sir’: An Independent MP Speaks During the Emergency (Ahmedabad: Sannistha Prakashan, 1979), pp. 20–5, 29–30 etc.
36
The Economist, 24 January 1976. This is almost certainly an over-estimate, and based on the figures supplied by the underground newspaper Satya Samachar.
37
Satya Samachar, 20 September 1976, in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML.
38
Translated by Sugata Srinivasaraju and reproduced as an epigraph to his translation of Chi Srinivasaraju’s Phoenix and Four other Mime Plays (Bangalore: Navakarnataka Publications, 2005).
39
Basu, Underground Literature, pp. 27, 29, 65; Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 21.
40
These paragraphs on George Fernandes’s activities during the emergency are principally based on C. G. K. Reddy, Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy: The Right to Rebel (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1977); supplemented by material in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML, and in Snehalata Reddy, APrison Diary (Mysore: Karnataka State Human Rights Committee, 1977).
41
Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 27.
42
I regret I cannot provide a precise reference for this story. I cannot remember where I first heard or read it; whether from a friend who knew Kripalani, or in an obituary printed in the papers when he died. Sadly, as with so many remarkable characters who figure in these pages, Kripalani is yet to find a biographer.
43
‘The Emergency: A Needed Shock’, Time, 27 October 1975.
44
Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1976.
45
Letters in The Times, 3 and 14 July 1976.
46
‘Indira Gandhi’s Year of Failure’, editorial in the Observer, 27 June 1975.
47
The only serviceable biography of Sanjay Gandhi at the time of writing remains Vinod Mehta’s The Sanjay Story: From Anand Bhavan to Amethi (Bombay: Jaico, 1978).
48
The interview is reproduced in full in Uma Vasudev, Two Faces of Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), pp. 193–208. Vasudev, who conducted the interview, was editor of Surge.
49
Ibid., pp. 108–10; Dhar, Indira Gandhi, pp. 325–9.
50
Illustrated Weekly of India, 25 January 1976.
51
Illustrated Weekly of India, 15 August, 14 October and 7and 14 November 1976.
52
Dayal and Bose, Shah Commission, pp. 189, 229; Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 139.
53
Janardhan Thakur, All the Prime Minister’s Men (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 57; Satyindra Singh, ‘Pleasing the Crown Prince’, Sunday Pioneer, 25 June 2000; Mehta, The Sanjay Story,pp. 87, 97, 165.
54
Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 81.
55
Cf. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’ (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 80–2, 98, and map after p. 148.
56
Jagmohan, Island of Truth (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), pp. 9–10, 182—3 etc.
57
Mehta, The Sanjay Story; Thakur, All the Prime Minister’s Men; and Vasudev, Two Faces, all deal at some length with this coterie and its doings.
58
Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, p. 140.
59
This account of the Turkman Gate incident is principally based on John Dayal and AjoyBose, For Reasons of State: Delhi under Emergency (Delhi: Ess Ess Publications, 1977), chapter 2. But cf. also Mehta, The Sanjay Story, pp. 90–5; and Inder Mohan, ‘Turkman Gate, Sanjay Gandhi and Tihar Jail’, PUCL Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 8, August 1985. Dayal and Bose, as well as Mehta, write that Jagmohan’s determination to clear Turkman Gate was in part motivated by the fact of the residents being Muslim – he saw them, apparently, as Pakistani fifth columnists. Jagmohan’s own account of the incident is in Island ofTruth, pp. 144–9.
60
Mohammad Yunus, Persons, Passions and Politics (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980), pp. 251–2.
61
Satya Samachar, 12 June 1976, in ‘Emergency File’, Haridev Sharma Papers, NMML.
62
There is a very extensive literature on this subject, which this bare summary by no means does justice to. For an introduction to the complexity of issues involved, see Pravin Visaria, ‘Population Policy’, Seminar, March 2002.
63
Illustrated Weekly of India, 15 August 1976.
64
Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 112.
65
Ibid., pp. 117–29; Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, pp. 80–2, 98, 140, 150–1.
66
Lee I. Schlesinger, ‘The Emergency in an Indian Village’, Asian Survey, vol. 17, no. 7, July 1977.
67
Satya Samachar, 26 September 1976; news bulletin of Lok Sangharsh Samiti dated 23 November 1976, both in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML.
68
Basu, Underground Literature, p. 36; Gangadharan et al., Inquisition, pp. 130–3.
69
The locus classicus of this view is the book written by her former Secretary P. N. Dhar on the Emergency. But shades of the argument haunt virtually all the biographies of Mrs Gandhi. See Dhar, Indira Gandhi, as well as the biographies by Jayakar, Malhotra, Moraes, and Vasudev cited above.
70
The Times, 26 August 1976.
71
John Grigg, ‘Tryst withDespotism’, Spectator, 21 August 1976.
72
See the correspondence between Alexander and Mrs Gandhi in File 78, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
73
Levin’s articles are reproduced in full in Rao and Rao, eds., The Press She Could not Whip, pp. 124–31, 268–76.
74
Dhar, Indira Gandhi, p. 344.
75
Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 153; Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement: Inside Story of the Emergency in India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 55.
76
A. M. Rosenthal, ‘Father and Daughter: A Remembrance’, New York Times, 1 November 1984.
77
See Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (1934; 4th edn London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949).
23. LIFE WITHOUT THE CONGRESS
1
S. Devadas Pillai, ed., The Incredible Elections; 1977: A Blow-by-Blow Document as Reported in the Indian Express (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1977), pp. 19–22, 37–8, 43.
2
Ibid., pp. 74–6, 107–11.
3
Illustrated Weekly of India, 6 March 1977.
4
Ajit Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution: A Political Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2004), pp. 282–3.
5
Pillai, The Incredible Elections, pp. 196, 198, 237, 244–5, 247.
6
Inder Malhotra
, ‘The Campaign that Was’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 20 March 1977; Javed Alam, Domination and Dissent: Peasants and Politics (Calcutta: Mandira, 1985), pp. 63, 65, 98, 168–9.
7
Reports in Pillai, The Incredible Elections, pp. 419–22.
8
S. L. M. Prachand, The Popular Upsurge and the Fall of Congress (Chandigarh: Abhishek Publications, 1977).
9
Cf. Theodore P. Wright, Jr., ‘Muslims and the 1977 Indian Election: A Watershed?’, Asian Survey, vol. 17, no. 12, December 1977.
10
Indira Gandhi to Fory Nehru, 17 April 1977, copy in Pupul Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.
11
Khushwant Singh, writing in his ‘Editor’s Page’, Illustrated Weekly of India,27 March 1977.
12
Janardhan Thakur, All the Janata Men (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979), p. 148.
13
See Himmat, 30 June 1978.
14
New York Times, 22 March 1977, and Washington Post, 19 April 1977, both quoted in Baldev Raj Nayar, ‘India and the Super Powers: Deviation or Continuity in Foreign Policy?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 July 1977.
15
Ajit Bhattacharjea, ‘Janata’s Foreign Policy’, Himmat, 30 December 1977.
16
Cf. press clippings on Carter’s visit in File 77, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
17
Report in The Times, 7 November 1977.
18
As recalled in ‘When Zia Complimented Vajpayee’, New Indian Express, 21 February 1999.
19
Cf. report in Himmat, 4 November 1977.
20
Himmat, 20 January 1978.
21
K. A. Abbas, Janata in a Jam? (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1978), p. 84.
22
Ajit Roy, ‘West Bengal: Not a Negative Vote’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 July 1977.
23
Sunil Sengupta, ‘West Bengal Land Reforms and the Agrarian Scene’, Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Agriculture, June 1981; Atul Kohli, The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chapter 3; Prabir Kumar De, The Politics of Land Reform: The Changing Scene in Rural Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1994).
24
Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 283–6; K. Mohandas, MGR: The Man and the Myth (Bangalore: Panther Publishers, 1992), pp. 11–12, 33–4.
25
The Guardian, 12 November 1977.
26
D. D. Thakur, My Life and Years in Kashmiri Politics (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2005), p. 277.
27
Shamim AhmedShamim, ‘Kashmir’, Seminar, April 1978. Cf. also Mir Qasim, My Life and Times (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1992), pp. 154–5.
28
Gilbert Etienne, India’s Changing Rural Scene, 1963–1979 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
29
Useful overviews of Operation Flood are contained in Martin Doornbos and K. N. Nair, eds, Resources, Institutions and Strategies: Operation Flood and Indian Dairying (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990); Shanti George, Operation Flood: An Appraisal of Current Indian Dairy Policy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).
30
Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 4.
31
Cf. ibid. and Ashok Mitra, Terms of Trade and Class Relations (London: Frank Cass, 1977).
32
Neerja Chowdhury, ‘Sharpening the Battle Lines’, Himmat, 23 March 1979; Harry W. Blair, ‘Rising Kulaks and Backward Classes in Bihar: Social Change in the Late 1970s’, Economic and Political Weekly,12 January 1980.
33
Kalpana Sharma, ‘Bihar the Ungovernable State?’, and Rajiv Shankar, ‘Why Bihar Remains Poor’, both in Himmat, 6 October 1978.
34
Sachidananda, ‘Bihar’s Experience’, Seminar, November 1979.
35
Arun Sinha, ‘Class War, Not “Atrocities” against Harijans’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 December 1977; Pravin Sheth, ‘In the Countryside’, Seminar, November 1979.
36
Atyachar VirodhSamiti, ‘The Marathwada Riots: A Report’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 May 1979.
37
Owen M. Lynch, ‘Rioting as Rational Action: An Interpretation of the April 1978 Riots in Agra’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 November 1981.
38
Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), pp. 253–4, 263–4.
39
Madhu Limaye, Janata Party Experiment: An Insider’s Account of Opposition Politics, vol. 1 (Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1994), p. 451.
40
New York Times, 30 October 1977.
41
Cf. Himmat, 10 March 1978.
42
Cf. James Manor, ‘Pragmatic Progressives in Regional Politics: The Case of Devaraj Urs’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, February 1980.
43
Ramesh Chandran, ‘The Battle for Chikmaglur’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 5 November 1978.
44
Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 463–4.
45
This account of the conflicts within Janata and the party’s split is based on Arun Gandhi, The Morarji Papers: Fall of the Janata Government (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1983); Limaye, Janata Party Experiment, vol. 2; Terence J. Byres, ‘Charan Singh, 1902–87: An Assessment’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1987–8; and issues of the Himmat weekly throughout 1978 and 1979.
46
Editorial in Opinion, 16 October 1979.
47
Indira Gandhi to Fory Nehru, 17 April 1977, in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai. In her own biography (Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 303), she quotes this letter but leaves out the crucial last sentence.
48
Himmat, 20 July 1979.
49
Jag Parvesh Chandra, Verdict on Janata (New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Co., 1979), pp. 26, 96; Thakur, All the Janata Men, pp. 148–50.
50
Himmat, issues of 6 January and 10 February 1978.
51
Sharad Karkhanis, quoted in Gandhi, The Morarji Papers, pp. 97–8.
52
Austin, Working the Democratic Constitution, pp. 403–4.
53
Illustrated Weekly of India, 6 March 1977.
54
This account is based on Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, pp. 409–30. But cf. also Soli Sorabjee, ‘Repairing the Constitution: The Job Remains’, Himmat, 23 March 1979.
55
Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1860–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993), esp. chapters 6 to 8; Chhaya Datar, Waging Change: Women Tobacco Workers in Nipani Organise (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).
56
For details see Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), chapter 2, ‘The Indian Road to Sustainability’.
57
This account is based on my own interactions with these groups over the past three decades. Unfortunately, there is no history of the civil liberties movement in modern India, or studies of its most important groups: such as the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, both based in Delhi; the pioneering Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, based in Calcutta; the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, based in Bombay; and the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Comm
ittee, based in Hyderabad. Dr Sitarama Kakarala of the National Law School in Bangalore is currently completing a book on the last-named group.
58
Anil Sadgopal and Shyam Bahadur ‘Namra’, eds, Sangharh aur Nirman: Shankar Guha Niyogi aur Unka Naye Bharat ka Sapna (Struggle and Construction: Shankar Guha Niyogi and his Dreams for a New India) (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1993). Niyogi was murdered by an assassin – hired, most likely, by local industrialists – in 1992.
59
Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 1977–99 (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2000).
24. DEMOCRACY IN DISARRAY
1
Walter Schwarz, ‘Two-Party Democracy Faces a Test Run’, Guardian, 14 May 1977.
2
Clippingfrom the New York Times, 4April 1977; letter to S. K. De, dated 17 June 1977, both in Temp Mss 577/81, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
3
Horace Alexander to Indira Gandhi, 8 April 1977, ibid.
4
These figures on seats and vote shares come from the statistical supplement to the Journal of Indian School of Political Economy, vol. 15, nos 1 and 2, 2003, this part of a special issue on ‘Political Parties and Elections in Indian States: 1990–2003’, edited by Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav.
5
Prabhas Joshi, ‘And Not Even a Dog Barked’, Tehelka, 2 July 2005; India Today, 1–15 January 1980.
6
SeeMervyn Jones, Chances: An Autobiography (London: Verso, 1987), p. 271.
7
Moin Shakir, ‘Election Participation of Minorities and Indian Political System’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, February 1980.
8
Nalini Singh, ‘Elections as They Really Are’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 May 1980.
9
Bashiruddin Ahmad, ‘Trends and Options’, Seminar, April 1980.
10
Typescript of interview with Bobby Harrypersadh, dated 31 May 1980, in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.
11
India Today, 16–31 May 1980.
12
The Hindu, 24 June 1980.
13
The Tribune, 27 October 1980, copy in Pupul Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.
14
India Today, 16–31 August, 1980.
15
M. V. Kamath, ‘Why Rajiv Gandhi?’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 31 May 1981.
16
India Today, 1–15 December 1981.