India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  These elections brought a coalition government to power. It included several former rebels, who said they wanted to work for ‘a final, negotiated settlement’, to be brought about by ‘faith, not guns’. A Delhi journal wrote hopefully that ‘by and large the Nagas have been reconciled and if the Government of India diverts more funds for education, employment and economic development, the “hard core” will crack in the course of time, and there will be peace which is so urgently and vitally required in this border state’.30

  V

  In its time as an independent nation, India had faced conflicts aplenty – conflicts around land, language, region, religion. Of these the troubles in Kashmir and Nagaland had perhaps been the most serious. Ever since 1947 there had been charismatic leaders in both places, seeking a free state of their own. Their message had resonated widely among the people. Were they given the option, a majority of the inhabitants of the Naga hills as well as the Kashmir Valley might very well have chosen independence rather than statehood within India.

  In 1973–4, however, Sheikh Abdullah was preparing to rejoin the system in Kashmir, and many rebel Nagas had come overground and taken part in elections. The once turbulent extremities were quiet. As if to compensate, there was now trouble in the heartland, in parts of the country which, for reasons of history, politics, tradition and language, had long considered themselves integral parts of the Republic of India.

  The trouble began in Gujarat, the land of Gandhi, the Father of the Nation. The state was run by a Congress regime notorious for its corruption; the chief minister, Chimanbhai Patel, was popularly known as Chiman chor (thief). In January 1974 students led a movement demanding the dismissal of the state government. It called itself Nav Nirman, the Movement for Regeneration. The protests turned violent, with buses and government offices being burnt. Chiman chor was compelled to resign, and Gujarat came under President’s Rule.31

  The events in Gujarat inspired students in Bihar to launch a struggle against misgovernance in their own state. Bihar had witnessed a great deal of political instability, with defections galore and governments made and unmade. A Congress regime came to power in 1972, but within it corruption was rife. There was deep discontent in the countryside, where land was very unequally held; and in the cities, where there had been a steep rise in the prices of essential commodities. Left-wing groupings, led by the Communist Party of India, had formed a front with simple aims and a complicated name – Bihar Rajya Mahangai Abhaab Pesha Kar Virodhi Mazdur Swa Karamchari Sangharsha Samiti (The Bihar State Struggle Committee of Workers and Employees against Price Rise and Professional Tax). In the last week of 1973 the front organized a series of mass demonstrations, where the call was heard, ‘Pura rashan pura kam, nahin to hoga chakka jam’ – ‘Give us work and give us food, or else we will bring life to a standstill’. Which is exactly what they did.

  These protests by the left sparked a competitive rivalry with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student union linked to the Jana Sangh. The ABVP and other, non-communist student groups came together in a united front of their own, the Chatra Sangharsh Samiti (CSS). This grew rapidly, and soon had branches in most towns of the state. Campus life was in turmoil, and classroom instruction came to an abrupt halt.

  On 18 March 1974 the CSS marched on the state assembly in Patna. When police pushed them back, the retreating mob set fire to government buildings, a warehouse of the Food Corporation of India and two newspaper offices. The police clashed with protestors in several parts of the city; several students were badly hurt, and at least three died. The news of the trouble spread, provoking clashes between students and the police across the state.32

  After the incidents of 18 March the students asked Jayaprakash Narayan to step in and lead their movement. ‘JP’ was now seventy-one, a veteran of movements militant as well as peaceful, the upholderor instigator of a hundred mostly worthy causes. In recent years he had worked for reconciliation in Nagaland and Kashmir, sought sympathetically to understand the Naxalites and persuaded the notorious bandits of the Chambal valley to lay down their arms. The call from the students was one he found impossible to refuse. For, long ago, he had started out as a student radical himself. But that had been in the American state of Wisconsin; this was in his own native state of Bihar.

  In Jawaharlal Nehru’s lifetime, Narayan had many exchanges with India’s prime minister. The older man tried to get him to join his Cabinet, but JP preferred to stay outside. From there he chastised and scolded Nehru, but he was withal devoted to him, and devastated by his death. Through their friendship he knew the daughter, too. He was one of the first to congratulate Mrs Gandhi on her elevation to prime minister and, in years following, frequently offered her (unsolicited) advice. He applauded her leadership during the Bangladesh war, but was less approving of her conduct during the presidential election and (as we have seen) with regard to the supersession of the judges of the Supreme Court.33

  When the Chatra Sangharsh Samiti asked him to lead their movement, JP agreed, on two conditions – that it should be scrupulously nonviolent, and that it should not be restricted to Bihar. On 19 March, immediately after the clashes in Patna, Narayan said he could no longer ‘remain a silent spectator to misgovernment, corruption and the rest, whether in Patna, Delhi or elsewhere’. It is not for this that I had fought for freedom’, he continued. He had now ‘decided to fight corruption and misgovernment and blackmarketing, profiteering and hoarding, to fight for the overhaul of the educational system, and for a real people’s democracy’.34

  Narayan was a figure of great moral authority, a hero of the freedom struggle who, unlike so many others of the ilk, had not been sullied by the loaves and fishes of office. His entry gave the struggle a great boost, and also changed its name; what was till then the ‘Bihar movement’ now became the ‘JP movement’. He asked students to boycott classes, to leave their studies for a year and work at raising the consciousness of the people. All across Bihar there were clashes between students seeking to shut down schools and colleges, and policemen called in by the authorities to keep them open. In the towns, at least, the support for the struggle was widespread. In Gaya, for example, the courts and offices were closed as a consequence of ‘housewives of respectable families of the town who were rarely seen out of [purdah] sitting on [picket lines] with small boys’. The authorities tried to clear the streets, but this provoked violence, with students raining bottles and sticks on the police and being answered by bullets. The riot left three people dead and twenty grievously injured.35

  The Gaya incident took place in the middle of April 1974. The call was now renewed for the dissolution of the state assembly, for the imposition of President’s Rule following the example of Gujarat. On 5 June Narayan led a massive procession through the streets of Patna. The march culminated in a meeting at the Gandhi Maidan, where JP called for a ‘total revolution’ to redeem the unfulfilled promises of the freedom movement. India had been free for twenty-seven years, said JP, yet hunger, soaring prices and corruption stalk everywhere. The people are being crushed under all sorts of injustice’.

  Addressing himself to the students in the crowd, he warned that the road ahead would be a rocky one: ‘You will have to make sacrifices, undergo sufferings, face lathis and bullets, fill up jails. Properties will be attached.’ Yet, he was convinced that, in the end, the struggle would be worth it: ‘Gandhiji spoke of Swaraj [freedom] in one year. I speak today of real people’s government in one year. In one year the right form of education will emerge. Give one year to build a new country, a newBihar.’36

  It was in this meeting that JP spoke of ‘total revolution’ for the first time. The term, the struggle and the struggle’s chosen agents all recall the activities a decade previously of the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. In the late evening of his life, Mao had called upon the youth – in his case, the Chinese Red Guard – to rid society of its accumulated corruptions, to stamp out revisionists and capitalist-roaders who stoo
d in the way of the creation of the perfect society. Robert Jay Lifton has suggested that the Cultural Revolution in China was impelled by its leader’s frustrations at the gap between expectations and reality, by his impatient desire to transform his country before he left this earth. I find the argument persuasive, not least because it also helps explain the events in Bihar and India in 1974, this sudden turn towards radical politics by a man who, for so many years past, had disavowed politics altogether. Throughout the 1950s and 60s JP had been a social worker, are conciler, a bridge-builder. Now, like Mao, he turned to the students, to what he called yuvashakti (youth power), to bring about the total revolution he had dreamed about in his own younger days.37

  In between the Gaya firings and JP’s Patna speech, the country was paralysed by arailway strike. Led by the socialist George Fernandes, the strike lasted three weeks, bringing the movement of people and goods to a halt. As many as a million railway men participated. Western Railways, which serviced the country’s industrial hub, was worst hit. There were militant demonstrations in many towns and cities – in several places, the army was called out to maintain the peace.38

  While the strike was on, India exploded a nuclear device. For several years now scientists had been pressing the government to conduct an atomic test. When the prime minister finally agreed, in May 1974, it was because the test helped to divert attention from the challenges posed by the railwaymen and the students in Bihar. Among certain sections the blast led to a surge of patriotic pride. There was, a reporter wrote, an ‘unmistakable air of excitement in Delhi’ when the news of the explosion came through. MPs gathered in the Central Hall of Parliament to congratulate one another – for them, ‘the railway strike and the country’s numerous economic problems had suddenly disappeared from view’.39

  Others were less impressed, pointing out that membership of the elite nuclear club could not wish away the fact that India ranked 102nd among the nations of the world in terms of per-capita income. The test was also deplored in Pakistan, as a setback to the normalization of relations between the two countries.40

  Following the nuclear test, Mrs Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan exchanged a series of letters, the exchange beginning on a civil note but ending in acrimony. On 22 May the prime minister wrote to JP expressing concern about his health, and hoping that, in view of the long friendship between the two families, their political disagreements could be expressed ‘without personal bitterness or questioning of each other’s motives’. Narayan answered that Mrs Gandhi was being disingenuous, for in a recent speech in Bhubaneshwar she had alluded to JP keeping the company of the rich and ‘living in the posh guest-houses of big businessmen’. Those remarks, he said, had ‘hurt and angered me’. He added that her recent utterances seemed ‘not only to misunderstand me profoundly butalso to miss – and to do so at the risk of tragic consequences – the meaning of the upsurge that is welling up from below’.

  Mrs Gandhi replied immediately, clarifying that, in those remarks about the corruption of Sarvodaya leaders, ‘I did not take your name or make any references personally derogatory to you. I cannot help if some newspapers added their own interpretation.’ (This was disingenuous – the interpretation of the newspapers was the only one possible in the circumstances.) She suggested that even if he was incorruptible perhaps his associates were not. That was why some of his ideas, ‘which appear rather utopian to me, could perhaps work if the whole population consisted of Jayaprakashs’. Mrs Gandhi also challenged his claim to be the nation’s moral conscience. As she wrote, ‘May I also, in all humility, put to you that it is possible that others, who may not be your followers, are equally concerned about the country, about the people’s welfare, and about the need to cleanse public life of weakness and corruption.’

  The exchange was concluded by JP six weeks after it began. He had hoped, he said, that she would have the grace to clarify publicly that in making those remarks in Bhubaneshwar she was not casting aspersions on his probity or character. That she would not do this hurt him; as he putit, ‘I am only a private citizen but I do have my self-respect.’ What seemed clear was that ‘misunderstanding is growing and not lessening by correspondence between us’.41

  It was time to return to the movement. In August JP toured the Bihar countryside to a rapturous reception. ‘JP is driven in procession . . . cheering onlookers line the roads’, wrote the journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea in his diary. Arches every hundred yards or so. The cars inch through the crowd to the podium – JP helped up the steps, pausing at every one.’ After his tour, Narayan called for a conference of all opposition parties – the CPI excluded – to ‘channel the enthusiasm among the people into the nation-wide people’s movement’. The Bihar struggle, wrote JP, had ‘acquired an all-India importance and the country’s fate has come to be bound up with its success and failure’. He appealed to trade unions, peasant organizations and professional bodies to come aboard.42

  At least one opposition party was already present in the JP movement – the Jana Sangh. Its student wing, the ABVP, had been there from the beginning, and older cadres were now moving into key roles. A Gandhian associate of JP wrote to him in alarm that ‘the leadership of the movement, at least at local levels, is passing into the hands of the Jana Sangh’. He also worried that ‘the common man has yet to be educated into the ways and values of our movement, whose appeal to him continues to be more negative than constructive’.43

  A more detailed critique of JP’s movement was offered by R. K. Patil, a former ICS officer who had later become an admired social worker in rural Maharashtra. At JP’s invitation, Patil spent two weeks in Bihar, travelling through the state and talking to a wide cross-section of people. In along (and remarkable) letter he wrote to Narayan – dated 4October 1974 -he conceded that ‘there can be no doubt about the tremendous popular enthusiasm generated by the movement’. He saw ‘unprecedented crowds attending your meetings in pin-drop silence’. However, when they were on their own these crowds were less disciplined, as in the attacks on the state assembly and the forcible prevention of the Bihar governor from delivering his annual address.

  Patil wondered whether the modes of protest being adopted in Bihar conformed strictly to Gandhian standards. But he went further, asking the question: ‘What is the scope for Satyagraha and direct action in a formal democracy like ours . . .?’ By demanding the dismissal of a duly elected assembly, argued Patil, ‘the Bihar agitation is both unconstitutional and undemocratic’. True, the electoral process had to be reformed, made more transparent and purged of the influence of power and money. Yet once an election was held its verdict had to be honoured. For ‘there is no other way of ascertaining the general opinion of the people in a Nation-State, except through free and fair elections’.

  Patil wrote, in conclusion, that he was ‘well aware of the patent drawbacks of the Government presided over by Indira Gandhi’.But he still wasn’t certain that it was wise to substitute for the law of “Government by Discussion”, the law of “Government by Public Street Opinion”’. ‘Today you are a force for good’, wrote Patil to JP, ‘but History records that the crowds can produce a Robespierre also. Hence perhaps my instinctive aversion to the Bihar type agitation.’44

  On 1 November 1974 Mrs Gandhi and JP had a long meeting in New Delhi. The prime minister agreed to dismiss the Bihar ministry on condition that the movement drop its demand for the dissolution of other state assemblies. The compromise was rejected. The meeting was acrimonious, although it ended on a poignant note, with JP handing over to Mrs Gandhi the letters written by her mother, Kamala Nehru, to Narayan’s recently deceased wife,Prabhavati.45

  Three days later Narayan was manhandled by the police while on his way to a public meeting in Patna. While warding off a baton, he stumbled to the ground; the picture was splashed across the newspapers the next day. He was an old man as well as a sick one (he suffered from diabetes), and although the injuries were slight the indignity provoked much outrage. The Bihar administration was com
pared to its colonial predecessor – as one journal somewhat hyperbolically wrote, JP was, for the first time in free India, a victim of police repression.’46

  VI

  In September 1974 the Republic of India acquired a chunk of territory that previously constituted the quasi-independent state of Sikkim. While Sikkim had its own flag and currency, and was ruled by its hereditary monarch – known as the Chogyal – it was economically and militarily dependent on New Delhi. In 1973 some citizens of the kingdom had begun asking for a representative assembly. The Chogyal asked the government of India for help in taming the rebellion. Instead, New Delhi stoked it further. When an assembly was proposed and elections held, the pro-India party won all but one seat. The Chogyal was forced to abdicate, and the Indian Constitution was amended to make Sikkim an ‘associate state’, with representation in Parliament.47

  Sikkim was a very beautiful state, and also shared a border with China. At another time, the prime minister would have drawn comfort from this augmentation of the nation’s territory. As it happened, the Sikkim annexation provided Mrs Gandhi with only a temporary diversion from her battle with Jayaprakash Narayan. For by the end of 1974 the Bihar movement was poised to become a truly national one. Letters of support for JP were streaming in from all over the country, as in a communication from an advocate in Andhra Pradesh which saluted JP for ‘breaking new ground at an age where people retire’, and professed ‘admiration and respect at the movement you are directing’.48 Prominent politicians would come visiting Bihar, and promise to take the ideas of the struggle back to their own states. In the last week of November JP convened a meeting of opposition parties in New Delhi, where he expressed the view that the lesson of Bihar was that one needed ‘radical changes all round, on institutional as well as moral planes, involving drastic changes in Government policies in the centre as well as in the States’.49