India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  60Mohammad Yunus, Persons, Passions and Politics (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980), pp. 251–2.

  61Satya Samachar, 12 June 1976, in ‘Emergency File’, Haridev Sharma Papers, NMML.

  62There 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.

  63Illustrated Weekly of India, 15 August 1976.

  64Mehta, The Sanjay Story, p. 112.

  65Ibid., pp. 117–29; Tarlo, Unsettling Memories, pp. 80–2, 98, 140, 150–1.

  66Lee I. Schlesinger, ‘The Emergency in an Indian Village’, Asian Survey, vol. 17, no. 7, July 1977.

  67Satya Samachar, 26 September 1976; news bulletin of Lok Sangharsh Samiti dated 23 November 1976, both in ‘Emergency File’, Hari Dev Sharma Papers, NMML.

  68Basu, Underground Literature, p. 36; Gangadharan et al., Inquisition, pp. 130–3.

  69The 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.

  70The Times, 26 August 1976.

  71John Grigg, ‘Tryst with Despotism’, Spectator, 21 August 1976.

  72See the correspondence between Alexander and Mrs Gandhi in File 78, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.

  73Levin’s articles are reproduced in full in Rao and Rao, eds., The Press She Could not Whip, pp. 124–31, 268–76.

  74Dhar, Indira Gandhi, p. 344.

  75Henderson, Experiment with Untruth, p. 153; Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement: Inside Story of the Emergency in India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 55.

  76A. M. Rosenthal, ‘Father and Daughter: A Remembrance’, New York Times, 1 November 1984.

  77See Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (1934; 4th edn London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949).

  23. LIFE WITHOUT THE CONGRESS

  1S. 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.

  2Ibid., pp. 74–6, 107–11.

  3Illustrated Weekly of India, 6 March 1977.

  4Ajit Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution: A Political Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2004), pp. 282–3.

  5Pillai, The Incredible Elections, pp. 196, 198, 237, 244–5, 247.

  6Inder 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.

  7Reports in Pillai, The Incredible Elections, pp. 419–22.

  8S. L. M. Prachand, The Popular Upsurge and the Fall of Congress (Chandigarh: Abhishek Publications, 1977).

  9Cf. Theodore P. Wright, Jr., ‘Muslims and the 1977 Indian Election: A Watershed?’, Asian Survey, vol. 17, no. 12, December 1977.

  10Indira Gandhi to Fory Nehru, 17 April 1977, copy in Pupul Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.

  11Khushwant Singh, writing in his ‘Editor’s Page’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 27 March 1977.

  12Janardhan Thakur, All the Janata Men (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979), p. 148.

  13See Himmat, 30 June 1978.

  14New 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.

  15Ajit Bhattacharjea, ‘Janata’s Foreign Policy’, Himmat, 30 December 1977.

  16Cf. press clippings on Carter’s visit in File 77, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.

  17Report in The Times, 7 November 1977.

  18As recalled in ‘When Zia Complimented Vajpayee’, New Indian Express, 21 February 1999.

  19Cf. report in Himmat, 4 November 1977.

  20Himmat, 20 January 1978.

  21K. A. Abbas, Janata in a Jam? (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1978), p. 84.

  22Ajit Roy, ‘West Bengal: Not a Negative Vote’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 July 1977.

  23Sunil 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).

  24Narendra 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.

  25The Guardian, 12 November 1977.

  26D. D. Thakur, My Life and Years in Kashmiri Politics (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2005), p. 277.

  27Shamim Ahmed Shamim, ‘Kashmir’, Seminar, April 1978. Cf. also Mir Qasim, My Life and Times (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1992), pp. 154–5.

  28Gilbert Etienne, India’s Changing Rural Scene, 1963–1979 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  29Useful 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).

  30Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban–Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 4.

  31Cf. ibid. and Ashok Mitra, Terms of Trade and Class Relations (London: Frank Cass, 1977).

  32Neerja 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.

  33Kalpana Sharma, ‘Bihar – the Ungovernable State?’, and Rajiv Shankar, ‘Why Bihar Remains Poor’, both in Himmat, 6 October 1978.

  34Sachidananda, ‘Bihar’s Experience’, Seminar, November 1979.

  35Arun Sinha, ‘Class War, Not “Atrocities” against Harijans’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 December 1977; Pravin Sheth, ‘In the Countryside’, Seminar, November 1979.

  36Atyachar Virodh Samiti, ‘The Marathwada Riots: A Report’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 May 1979.

  37Owen M. Lynch, ‘Rioting as Rational Action: An Interpretation of the April 1978 Riots in Agra’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 November 1981.

  38Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), pp. 253–4, 263–4.

  39Madhu Limaye, Janata Party Experiment: An Insider’s Account of Opposition Politics, vol. 1 (Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1994), p. 451.

  40New York Times, 30 October 1977.

  41Cf. Himmat, 10 March 1978.

  42Cf. James Manor, ‘Pragmatic Progressives in Regional Politics: The Case of Devaraj Urs’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, February 1980.

  43Ramesh Chandran, ‘The Battle for Chikmaglur’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 5 November 1978.

  44Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 463–4.

  45This 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.

  46Editorial in Opinion, 16 October 1979.

  47Indira Gandhi to Fory Nehru, 17 April 1977, in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai. In her own biograph
y (Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 303), she quotes this letter but leaves out the crucial last sentence.

  48Himmat, 20 July 1979.

  49Jag Parvesh Chandra, Verdict on Janata (New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Co., 1979), pp. 26, 96; Thakur, All the Janata Men, pp. 148–50.

  50Himmat, issues of 6 January and 10 February 1978.

  51Sharad Karkhanis, quoted in Gandhi, The Morarji Papers, pp. 97–8.

  52Austin, Working the Democratic Constitution, pp. 403–4.

  53Illustrated Weekly of India, 6 March 1977.

  54This 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.

  55Radha 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).

  56For 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’.

  57This 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 Committee, based in Hyderabad. Dr Sitarama Kakarala of the National Law School in Bangalore is currently completing a book on the last-named group.

  58Anil 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.

  59Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 1977–99 (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2000).

  24. DEMOCRACY IN DISARRAY

  1Walter Schwarz, ‘Two-Party Democracy Faces a Test Run’, Guardian, 14 May 1977.

  2Clipping from the New York Times, 4 April 1977; letter to S. K. De, dated 17 June 1977, both in Temp Mss 577/81, Horace Alexander Papers, Friends House, Euston.

  3Horace Alexander to Indira Gandhi, 8 April 1977, ibid.

  4These 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.

  5Prabhas Joshi, ‘And Not Even a Dog Barked’, Tehelka, 2 July 2005; India Today, 1–15 January 1980.

  6See Mervyn Jones, Chances: An Autobiography (London: Verso, 1987), p. 271.

  7Moin Shakir, ‘Election Participation of Minorities and Indian Political System’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, February 1980.

  8Nalini Singh, ‘Elections as They Really Are’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 May 1980.

  9Bashiruddin Ahmad, ‘Trends and Options’, Seminar, April 1980.

  10Typescript of interview with Bobby Harrypersadh, dated 31 May 1980, in Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.

  11India Today, 16–31 May 1980.

  12The Hindu, 24 June 1980.

  13The Tribune, 27 October 1980, copy in Pupul Jayakar Papers, Mumbai.

  14India Today, 16–31 August, 1980.

  15M. V. Kamath, ‘Why Rajiv Gandhi?’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 31 May 1981.

  16India Today, 1–15 December 1981.

  17These paragraphs on the Festival of India are based on the clippings and correspondence in Mss Eur F215/232, OIOC.

  18Rajni Bakshi, The Long Haul: The Bombay Textile Workers Strike (Bombay: BUILD Documentation Centre, 1986); Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004). The strike, in effect, killed the city’s textile industry, with most units being declared ‘sick’ by the owners or the state. These mill lands are now the subject of much controversy in Bombay, with citizens asking that they be used for working-class housing or for parks, and property speculators hoping to turn them into luxury apartments and shopping malls.

  19Jan Myrdal, India Waits (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984).

  20Mahasweta Devi, ‘Contract Labour or Bonded Labour?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6 June 1981.

  21Darryl D’Monte, ‘In Santhal Parganas with Sibu Soren’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 8 April 1979, and ‘The Jharkhand Movement’ (in two parts), Times of India, 13 and 14 March 1979. For wider historical overviews of the Jharkhand question, see Sajal Basu, Jharkhand Movement: Ethnicity and Culture of Silence (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1984); Susan B. C. Devalle, Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkhand (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); Nirmal Sengupta, ed., Jharkhand: Fourth World Dynamics (Delhi: Authors Guild, 1982).

  22See Shankar Guha Niyogi, ‘Chattisgarh and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India: Seminar Papers (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union, 1982).

  23Bertil Lintner, Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1990), pp. 83–4 and passim.

  24‘Report of a Fact-Finding Team’, chapter 21 in Luingam Luithui and Nandita Haksar, eds, Nagaland File: A Question of Human Rights (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1984).

  25Personal communication from P. Sainath, who was covering Andhra Pradesh politics at the time.

  26Times of India, 30 March 1982; Sunday, 16 January 1983.

  27See interview with NTR in Sunday, 12 December 1982.

  28Times of India, 10 January 1983.

  29M. Ramchandra Rao, ‘NTR – Victim of His Own Charisma?’, Janata, 24 April 1983.

  30Indian Express, 15 September 1983.

  31Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 3; Alaka Sarmah, Immigration and Assam Politics (Delhi: Ajanta Books, 1999); Anindita Dasgupta, ‘Denial and Resistance: Sylhet Partition Refugees in Assam’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 10, no. 3, 2001.

  32Amalendu Guha, ‘Little Nationalism Turned Chauvinist: Assam’s Anti-Foreigner Upsurge 1979–80’, Economic and Political Weekly, annual issue, October 1980.

  33Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. chapter 5; Tilotomma Misra, ‘Assam and the National Question’, in Nationality Question in India; Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000), chapters 4 and 5.

  34Chaitanya Kalbagh, ‘The North-East: India’s Bangladesh?’, India Today, 1–15 May 1980.

  35Economic Times, 3 November 1980.

  36Quoted in the Times of India, 30 July 1980.

  37See T. S. Murty, Assam, the Difficult Years: A Study of Political Developments in 1979–83 (New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1983).

  38Devdutt, ‘Assam Agitation: It Is not the End of the Tunnel’, The Financial Express, 8 October 1980.

  39A wide-ranging and still valuable collection of essays on Sikh political history is Paul Wallace and Surendra Chopra, eds, Political Dynamics of Punjab (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1981).

  40There are various versions of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. I have here used the text as authenticated by Sant Harcharan Singh Longowal and printed in White Paper on the Punjab Agitation (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1984), pp. 67–90.

  41This account of the Punjab
dispute draws upon the following books and articles: Robin Jeffrey, What’s Happening to India: Punjab, Ethnic Conflict and the Test for Federalism, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); Chand Joshi, Bhindranwale: Myth and Reality (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1984); Anup Chand Kapur, The Punjab Crisis (Delhi: S. Chand and Co, 1985); Ram Narayan Kumar, The Sikh Unrest and the Indian State (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1997); Mark Tully and Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (London: Pan Books, 1985); Satinder Singh, Khalistan: An Academic Analysis (New Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982); Harjot Oberoi, ‘Sikh Fundamentalism: Translating History into Theory’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds, Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Hamish Telford, ‘The Political Economy of Punjab: Creating Space for Sikh Militancy’, Asian Survey, vol. 32, no. 11, November 1992.

  42Cf. the suggestive analysis of Bhindranwale’s sermons in Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The Logic of Religious Violence: The Case of the Punjab’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, new series, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988.

  43Ayesha Kagal, quoted in Paul Wallace, ‘Religious and Ethnic Politics: Political Mobilization in Punjab’, in Francine R. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao, eds, Dominance and State Power in India: Decline of a Social Order, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 451.

  44See profile of Bhindranwale in India Today, 1–15 October 1981; Murray J. Leaf, Song of Hope: The Green Revolution in a Panjab Village (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), chapter 7, ‘Religion’.

  45Clipping in Mss Eur F230/36, OIOC.

  46Indian Express, 21 September 1981.

  47The verdicts, respectively, of Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, p. 71, and Joshi, Bhindranwale, p. 90.

  48For an insightful contemporary account of the pressures on the Akalis to become more extreme, see Gopal Singh, ‘Socio-economic Bases of the Punjab Crisis’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January 1984.