52Time, 3 January 1972; James Reston, ‘India’s Victory a Triumph for Moscow’, New York Times, undated (?20 December 1971) clipping in Subject File 217, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
53Thought, 29 January 1972.
54Quoted in C. M. Naim, Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics (Karachi: City Press, 1999), p. 139.
55See ‘India After Bangla Desh: A Symposium’, Gandhi Marg, vol. 16, no. 2, 1972.
56Letter of 8 December 1971, in Carol Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1995), p. 303.
57A. B. Vajpayee quoted in Thought, 20 May 1972.
58Ranajit Roy, The Agony of West Bengal: A Study in Union–State Relations, 3rd edn (Calcutta: New Age Publishers, 1973), pp. 3–4; Sajal Basu, West Bengal – the Violent Years (Calcutta: Prachi Publications, 1974), p. 78.
59‘Message to Mrs Gandhi from Sir Alec Douglas-Home’, 20 March 1972, in Subject File 179, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
60As quoted in S. R. Sen to I. G. Patel, letter dated 2 March 1972, in Subject File 225, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
61Untitled note in Subject File 236, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
62Sajjad Zaheer to P. N. Haksar, 23 March 1972, in Subject File 243, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML (emphasis in original). Mazhar Ali Khan was the father of the student radical, and later prolific author, Tariq Ali.
63A. Raghavan, ‘Five Days that Changed History’, Blitz, 8 July 1972.
64Note by Dhar dated 12 March 1972, in Subject File 235, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
65The text of the Simla Agreement is reproduced in Appadorai, Select Documents, pp. 443–5.
66The text of the speech is to be found in Subject File 93, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
67Notes in ibid.
21. THE RIVALS
1See Indira Gandhi, India: The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi Prime Minister of India (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), pp. 215–16.
2As reported in The Hindu, 16 August 1972.
3A. Vaidyanathan, ‘The Indian Economy since Independence (1947–70), in Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
4This paragraph summarizes several longitudinal studies of rural India, as in G. Parthasarathy, ‘A South Indian Village after Two Decades’, Economic Weekly, 12 January 1963; Kumudini Dandekar and Vaijayanti Bhate, ‘Socio-Economic Change During Three Five-Year Plans’, Artha Vijnana, vol. 17, no. 4, 1975; Robert W. Bradnock, ‘Agricultural Development in Tamil Nadu: Two Decades of Land Use Changes at Village Level’, in Tim P. Bayliss-Smith and Sudhir Wanmali, eds, Understanding Green Revolutions: Agrarian Change and Development Planning in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
5These studies are usefully summarized in M. L. Dantwala, Poverty in India: Then and Now (Madras: Macmillan India, 1971); and M. Mukherjee, N. Bhattacharya and G. S. Chatterjee, ‘Poverty in India: Measurement and Amelioration’, in Vadilal Dagli, ed., Twenty-Five Years of Independence – A Survey of Indian Economy (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1973). The Dandekar–Rath study was first published in the Economic and Political Weekly in January 1971.
6J. P. Naik, ‘Education’, in S. C. Dube, ed., India since Independence: Social Report on India, 1947–1972 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977); Amrik Singh, ‘Twenty-five Years of Indian Education; An Assessment’, in Jag Mohan, ed., Twenty-five Years of Indian Independence (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973).
7‘Indian Economic Policy and Performance: A Framework for a Progressive Society’ (1973), reprinted in Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Essays in Development Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
8Anon., ‘Mummy Knows Best’, Thought, 2 October 1971.
9Thought, 5 May 1971; D. R. Rajagopal, ‘Sanjay Gandhi’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 11 July 1971.
10Letter of 2 February 1971, Indira Gandhi Correspondence, P. N. Haksar Papers, NMML.
11The Current, 28 July 1973.
12The Star, 12 August 1973, clipping in Subject File 93, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
13Note of 29 June 1971, ibid.
14See notes and correspondence in Subject Files 242 and 243, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
15Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on the synthesis report of those studies: Status of Women in India (New Delhi: Indian Council of Social Science Research, 1974). Much of the data quoted there, and here, are taken from the 1971 Census of India.
16D. R. Gadgil, Women in the Working Force in India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1965); Bina Agarwal, ‘Women, Poverty and Agricultural Growth in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1985–6.
17Radha 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), chapter 6.
18See, for more details, P. G. K. Pannikar and C. R. Soman, Health Status of Kerala (Trivandrum: Centre for Development Studies, 1984).
19Ronald J. Herring, ‘Abolition of Landlordism in Kerala: A Redistribution of Privilege’, Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Agriculture, June 1980; P. Radhakrishnan, ‘Land Reforms and Changes in Land System: Study of a Kerala Village’, Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Agriculture, September 1982.
20See Lok Sabha Debates, 30 November 1971.
21Justice K. S. Hegde, ‘Perspectives of the Indian Constitution’, Rajendra Prasad Memorial Lecture, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Bombay, March 1972, copy in Subject File 220, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
22See the letter from Indira Gandhi to Jayaprakash Narayan of 9 June 1973 and his reply of 27 June 1973, both in Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, NMML.
23A. G. Noorani, ‘Crisis in India’s Judiciary’, Imprint, January 1974.
24Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 152–3 etc.
25Thought, 1 January 1972.
26Thought, 8 July 1972.
27The Current, 8 July 1972; Thought, 23 September 1972.
28The minutes of these talks are unavailable, but for some clues of what might have been discussed see the material in Subject Files 183 and 235, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
29These paragraphs on Nagaland in the early 1970s are based on reports in the Kohima weekly Citizens Voice, issues of which are in Box VIII, Pawsey Papers, CSAS.
30Thought, 2 March 1974.
31See Ajit Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution: A Political Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2004), pp. 193ff.
32The previous three paragraphs draw upon Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Revolution, Reform, or Protest? A Study of the Bihar Movement’, in three parts, Economic and Political Weekly, 9, 16 and 23 April 1977.
33The correspondence between Narayan and Mrs Gandhi, very rich and largely unexplored by biographers of either party, is in the Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, NMML. The correspondence between JP and Nehru – also less intensely mined than it might have been – is scattered between this collection and the Brahmanand Papers, also at the NMML.
34Quoted in Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution, pp. 205–6.
35See reports in Subject File 272, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
36English translation of speech in Everyman’s Weekly, 22 June 1974.
37See Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1967). I offer this comparison knowing that it will be dismissed both by Marxists, who will see JP as a lily-livered reformist in comparison with the builder of the Chinese revolution, and by the Gandhians, who will profess shock at the lumping together of a man of non-violence with one known to have been responsible for so many deaths.
38Anon., ‘Railway Strike in Retros
pect’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 January 1975.
39S. Nihal Singh, Indira’s India: A Political Notebook (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1978), pp. 215–16.
40George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 170–80; Thought, 25 May 1974; Aziz Ahmad (Foreign Minister of Pakistan) to Horace Alexander, 15 June 1974, in Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
41These paragraphs are based on the letters between Mrs Gandhi and JP in the Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, NMML.
42Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution, pp. 211f.; Everyman’s Weekly, 21 September 1974.
43See correspondence between Acharya Ramamurti and JP in Subject File 273, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
44Letter of 14 October 1974, in Subject File 277, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, NMML. Patil’s letter – to which JP’s reply, if there was one, is untraceable – is reminiscent of the warnings uttered along these lines in the Constituent Assembly by his great fellow Maharashtrian, B. R. Ambedkar.
45Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution, pp. 216–17.
46Everyman’s Weekly, 16 and 23 November 1974.
47See B. S. Das, The Sikkim Saga (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983).
48Letter to JP dated 18 July 1974 from M. Shah, Adoni, Kurnool Dist., A. P., in Subject File 273, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
49See statements in Subject File 272, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
50For a sampling of the former view, see the pages of the Everyman’s Weekly for 1974–5; for the latter, see the Illustrated Weekly of India for the same period.
51Katherine Frank, Indira: A Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 368; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World was Going our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 322–3.
52Unless otherwise indicated, the rest of this section is based on reports and comments in the Indian Express, 1 February to 21 March 1975.
53Anon., ‘The South Poses a Problem for JP’, Everyman’s Weekly, 4 May 1975.
54Granville Austin, Working the Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 314–16.
55Indian Express, 20 March 1975.
56Unless otherwise stated, the rest of this section is based on reports in the Indian Express, 10 to 28 June 1975.
57Prashant Bhushan, The Case that Shook India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), pp. 98ff.
58Ibid., p. 94.
59Quoted in Dom Moraes, Indira Gandhi (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980), p. 220.
60Danial Latifi, ‘Indira Gandhi Case Revisited’, undated typescript in Subject File 225, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML.
22. AUTUMN OF THE MATRIARCH
1Indira Gandhi, Democracy and Discipline: Speeches of Shrimati Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1975), pp. 1–2.
2The note is reproduced in Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), pp. 202–3.
3K. R. Malkani, The Midnight Knock (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), p. 37.
4Gandhi, Democracy and Discipline, pp. 18–19, 61 etc. This volume prints eleven interviews given in the first three months of the emergency – almost one a week – by a prime minister never known to be over-fond of the press.
5See D. V. Gandhi, comp., Era of Discipline: Documents on Contemporary Reality (New Delhi: Samachar Bharati, 1976), p. 254.
6Indira Gandhi, Consolidating National Gains: Speeches of Shrimati Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1976), p. 29. The speech was originally delivered in Hindi; I have used the official translation.
7Joe Elder, ‘Report on Visit to India, August 11–22, 1975’, in File 78, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.
8Sharada Prasad to S. K. De, 16 September 1975, ibid.
9P. N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 307–11.
10Narayan to Sheikh Abdullah, 23 September 1975, reprinted in M. G. Devasahayam, India’s Second Freedom – An Untold Saga (New Delhi: Siddharth Publications, 2004), pp. 351–4.
11For the circumstances of JP’s release, see ibid., chapters 29 and 30.
12See table reproduced in K. Gangadharan, P. J. Koshy, and C. N. Radhakrishnan, The Inquisition: Revelations before the Shah Commission (New Delhi: Path Publishers, 1978), p. 260.
13Note of 14 January 1976, in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML.
14Indira Gandhi to Verrier Elwin, 14 January 1963, letter in the possession of the Elwin family, Shillong.
15See Ved Mehta, Portrait of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), pp. 545–6.
16Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 319–24.
17Ibid., pp. 334–41.
18New York Times, 30 April 1976.
19Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, pp. 373–4. Cf. also Nani Palkhivala, ‘Reshaping the Constitution’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 4 July 1976.
20‘Notes on a Meeting with Indira Gandhi, 1, Safdarjung Road, 14th March 1976’, in Mss Eur F236/269, OIOC.
21See the detailed list of forbidden subjects printed in Sajal Basu, ed., Underground Literature During Indian Emergency (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1978), pp. 102–14.
22Prakash Ananda, A History of the Tribune (New Delhi: The Tribune Trust, 1986), pp. 165–6.
23Ram Krishan Sharma to Penderel Moon, 25 November 1975, in Mss Eur F230/36, OIOC.
24Report in the Guardian, 2 August 1976.
25John Dayal and Ajay Bose, The Shah Commission Begins (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), p. 208; Michael Henderson, Experiment with Untruth: India under Emergency (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1977), p. 89.
26G. S. Bhargava, The Press in India: An Overview (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2005), p. 53 etc.
27Dayal and Bose, Shah Commission, pp. 280–93; Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 89.
28See K. K. Birla, Indira Gandhi: Reminiscences (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1987), pp. 50–1.
29Bhargava, The Press in India, pp. 65–6.
30Quoted in Ved Mehta, The New India (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), pp. 63–4.
31Report 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.
32Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p. 182.
33Report by J. Anthony Lukacs in the New York Times, reproduced in Rao and Rao, eds., The Press She Could not Whip, pp. 186–98.
34See Basu, Underground Literature, pp. 7–11.
35P. G. Mavalankar, ‘No, Sir’: An Independent MP Speaks During the Emergency (Ahmedabad: Sannistha Prakashan, 1979), pp. 20–5, 29–30 etc.
36The Economist, 24 January 1976. This is almost certainly an over-estimate, and based on the figures supplied by the underground newspaper Satya Samachar.
37Satya Samachar, 20 September 1976, in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML.
38Translated 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).
39Basu, Underground Literature, pp. 27, 29, 65; Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 21.
40These 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, A Prison Diary (Mysore: Karnataka State Human Rights Committee, 1977).
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41Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 27.
42I 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.
44Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1976.
45Letters in The Times, 3 and 14 July 1976.
46‘Indira Gandhi’s Year of Failure’, editorial in the Observer, 27 June 1975.
47The 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).
48The 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.
49Ibid., pp. 108–10; Dhar, Indira Gandhi, pp. 325–9.
50Illustrated Weekly of India, 25 January 1976.
51Illustrated Weekly of India, 15 August, 14 October and 7 and 14 November 1976.
52Dayal and Bose, Shah Commission, pp. 189, 229; Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 139.
53Janardhan 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.
54Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 81.
55Cf. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’ (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 80–2, 98, and map after p. 148.
56Jagmohan, Island of Truth (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), pp. 9–10, 182–3 etc.
57Mehta, 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.
58Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, p. 140.
59This account of the Turkman Gate incident is principally based on John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, 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 of Truth, pp. 144–9.
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