India After Gandhi (81 page)

The ink had hardly dried on the Simla Agreement when Bhutto reneged on this (admittedly informal) promise. On 14 July he spoke for three hours in the National Assembly of Pakistan, his text covering sixty-nine pages of closely printed foolscap paper. He talked of how he had fought ‘for the concept of one Pakistan from the age of 15’. He blamed Mujib, Yahya, and everyone but himself for the ‘unfortunate and tragic separation of East Pakistan’. Then he came to the topic that still divided Pakistan and India – the future of Jammu and Kashmir. As the victor in war, said Bhutto, ‘India had all the cards in her hands’ – yet he had still forged an equal agreement from an unequal beginning. The Simla accord was a success, he argued, because Pakistan would get back its POWs and land held by Indian forces, and because it did ‘not compromise on the right of self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir’. He offered the ‘solemn commitment of the people of Pakistan, that if tomorrow the people of Kashmir start a freedom movement, if tomorrow Sheikh Abdullah or Maulvi Farooq or others start a people’s movement, we will be with them’.
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The Indians complained that Bhutto had gone back on his word.
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They should perhaps have thought of how they had themselves felt in the last days of 1962. The Chinese had then inflicted a humiliation on the nation, affecting both leaders and citizens of all shades and stripes. That is also how the Pakistanis felt in 1972, having suffered a comparable defeat at the hands of the Indians. In truth, they felt even worse, for while the Chinese had merely seized some (mostly useless) territory
from India, the Indians had, by assisting in the creation of Bangladesh, blown a big hole in the founding ideology of the Pakistani nation. To this there could be only one effective answer – to assist in the separation of Kashmir from India, thus to blow an equally big hole in the founding idea of Indian secularism.

Indira is India, India is Indira.

D. K. B
AROOAH
, Congress president, circa 1974

O
N
15
AUGUST
1972 India celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Independence. A special midnight sitting was held in the Lok Sabha where the prime ministerre called the struggle for freedom from the 1857 rebellion to the present, marking the major landmarks along the way. The Indian quest, said Mrs Gandhi, ‘has been friendship with all, submission to none’.
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The next morning she addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. ‘India is stronger today than it was twenty-five years ago’, said the prime minister. ‘Our democracy has found roots, our thinking is clear, our goals are determined, our paths are planned to achieve the goals and our unity is more solid today than ever before.’ ‘Nations march ahead’, insisted Mrs Gandhi, ‘not by looking at others but with self-confidence, determination and unity.’
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It is noteworthy that Mrs Gandhi’s speech did not touch on economics. Since Independence, the Indian economy had grown at a rate of 3–4 per cent per year. The output of the factory sector increased by some 250 per cent, the rise being more marked in heavy industry as compared to consumer goods. A new class of entrepreneurs sprung up, who located units away from the old centres of industry. The state augmented infrastructural facilities: 56 million kilowatt hours of power were generated in 1971 (as against6.6million in 1950), while the extent of surfaced roads more than doubled, and the freight carried by the railways almosttripled.
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These developments helped rural producers as well as urban ones.
Where irrigation was available – through dams or tube wells – farmers increased their production of both cereals and crops such as cotton, chillies and vegetables. Previously isolated villages were now integrated with the outside world. New roads allowed vehicles to take out crops and bring in commodities; they also transported villagers to the city and back, exposing them to new ideas. Within the village there was a slow spread of innovations such as the bicycle, the telephone and, above all, the school.
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These aggregate improvements masked significant regional variations. The Green Revolution had touched less than one-tenth of the districts in rural India. Most areas of farming were still rain-fed. Thus, despite the rise in industrial growth and agricultural production, there was still widespread destitution in the countryside. The year before the prime minister’s anniversary speech, two economists in Poona, V. M. Dandekar and Nilakantha Rath, published a major study entitled, simply,
Poverty in India
. Drawing on countrywide surveys, this concluded that 40 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population did not enjoy even a ‘minimum level of living’ – defined as a per capita annual expenditure of Rs324 in the villages and Rs489 in the cities. The incidence of poverty had increased over the decade. At the beginning of the 1960s 33 per cent of the rural and 49 per cent of the urban population lived below this ‘poverty line’. In or around 1970, estimated Dandekar and Rath, some 223 million Indians were poor, just over 40 per cent of the total population of about 530 million.

Other economists made other estimates: some put the percentage of the really poor even higher than Dandekar and Rath, others said it was slightly lower. The economists disputed exactly how many poor people there were in India, but all agreed that there were too many – close to 200 million by even the most conservative reckoning. These studies found that the poor in rural India spent roughly 80 per cent of their income on food and another 10 per cent on fuel, leaving a mere 10 per cent for clothing and otheritems.
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Another very great failure was education. There had been an enormous growth in the number of colleges offering instruction in the sciences and the humanities. An even greater expansion was in professional courses, such as engineering and medicine. But basic education had done poorly. There were more illiterates in 1972 than there had been in 1947. While thousands of new schools opened, there had been scarcely any attempt to bring literacy to the millions of adults who could
not read or write. And even among those who entered school only a small proportion graduated; the drop-out rates were alarmingly high, especially for girls and children in low-caste families.
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A few months after Mrs Gandhi’s Red Fort address the economist Jagdish Bhagwati spoke to a rather more select audience in the southern city of Hyderabad. Independent India presented itself as a mixed economy, partaking of both socialism and capitalism. But, argued Bhagwati, it had failed on both counts. It had grown too slowly to qualify as a ‘capitalist’ economy, and by its failure to eradicate illiteracy or reduce inequalities had forfeited any claims to being ‘socialist’.
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The prime minister claimed that democracy had struck ‘roots’ in India. In some crucial ways it certainly had. Five general elections had been successfully conducted, plus close to a hundred elections in states the size of European countries. In addition to free elections there was also the unrestricted movement of people and ideas, the last expressed most vigorously in a very free press.

In other respects the democratic foundations of the nation were not so secure. The All-India Congress Committee had once elected representatives from the states, these in turn sent up by Congress bodies at the
taluk
and district levels. More significantly, the chief ministers of Congress-ruled states were chosen by the local legislators alone. However, after the Congress split in 1969, Mrs Gandhi was able to place her own candidates in key positions. This centralizing process was confirmed after her spectacular victory in the elections of 1971. Later in the year she sacked, in quick succession, the chief ministers of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, replacing them with her own favourites. As one journal remarked, it mattered little who would be the new man in Andhra. For ‘he that ascends the
gaddi
[seat of power] will have to look for his survival to the lady in Delhi rather than to the Legislators in Hyderabad or the Constituents in Andhra at large.’
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After the elections of 1971 the prime minister’s second son, Sanjay, became more visible in public life. Expelled from his first Indian school, and graduating with difficulty from the second, he had served a brief apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in the UK before returning home to start a car factory of his own. While he looked for land for that project
he took his first steps in politics. In May 1971 he was sent by his mother to inaugurate the Congress campaign in the Delhi municipal polls. The next month he gave an interview to a widely read weekly, where he struck his questioner as not ‘particularly keen on discussion or prolonged dialogue. He seems to be keen on results . . .’ Sanjay also offered the opinion that ‘the Indian youth are lily-livered. They have no guts. In their thinking they are dovetailed to the mental framework of their parents.’
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The prime minister’s first born son, Rajiv, was attained pilot working for Indian Airlines. She worried more about Sanjay, writing to a colleague in February 1971 that ‘Rajiv has a job but Sanjay doesn’t and is also involved in an expensive venture. He is so much like I was at that age – rough edges and all – that my heart aches for the suffering he may have to bear.’
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As it happened, Sanjay’s car project was cleared with undue haste. Eighteen applications were received for a licence to make small cars; only that of the prime minister’s son was approved, despite his having no past experience in this regard. The Congress chief minister of Haryana, Bansi Lal, gave Sanjay’s Maruti car company 300 acres of land at a giveaway price.
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Questions were asked by opposition MPs in Parliament. These Mrs Gandhi dismissed, but even her closest adviser, P. N. Haksar, expressed reservations. According to one report, he ‘advised the Prime Minister to dump [the] Maruti project and extricate herself from her son Sanjay’s doings’.
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The advice was disregarded; Sanjay came to be seen more and more by his mother’s side, while Haksar’s own influence declined within the Secretariat.

By 1972 the Congress was subject to a creeping nepotism, and to galloping corruption as well. In June 1971 Haksar drew the prime minister’s attention to the ‘deeply entrenched and institutionalized corruption’ in Congress-ruled Rajasthan.
¹³
Ministers were in collusion with civil servants, taking cuts on government projects. At the central level too, such practices were growing. One Union minister from Assam had mysteriously acquired a great deal of property; another from Madhya Pradesh was alleged to be working hand-in-glove with a French arms dealer, promising contracts in exchange for commissions.
¹⁴

On the social front, one indicator of India’s distinction was that it had a woman prime minister. What, however, of Indian women in general? While Mrs Gandhi was winning elections and a war, the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) had commissioned seventy-five separate studies on the status of women – with regard to the law, the economy, employment, education, health, and so forth.
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The results were not altogether uplifting. In many ways, the processes of modernization promoted since Independence had increased the gender divide. For instance it was chiefly men who had taken advantage of the improvement in health facilities. This aggravated the sex ratio, which, in 1971, stood at 931 women for 1,000 men. Again, the proportion of women in the industrial labour force had declined, from 31.53 per cent in 1961 to 17.35 per cent in 1971. Factories had once recruited couples, but technical improvements had rendered redundant unskilled jobs previously undertaken by women.

The vast majority of women laboured away in the countryside. Among families of peasant cultivators there were 50 women workers to every 100 male ones; among families that owned no land this figure rose to 78. The most hazardous operations were often the preserve of women, such as the transplantation of rice, which left them vulnerable to intestinal and parasitical infections. To these hazards were added the burdens of child-rearing and fuel and fodder collection, tasks reserved for women and girls alone.
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The literacy rate was dismal in general and dire for women: 39.5 per cent of males could read and write in 1971, but only 18.4 per cent of females. A mere 4 percent of women in rural Bihar were literate. The poverty in states such as Bihar and Orissa had led to the mass migration of males in search of work, placing even greater burden son the women.

The ICSSR reported that ‘what is possible for women in theory, is seldom within their reach in fact’. Their studies indicated ‘that society has failed to frame new norms and institutions to enable women to fulfil the multiple roles expected of them in India today. The majority do not enjoy the rights and the opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution. Increasing dowry and other phenomena, which lower women’s status further, indicate a regression from the norms developed during the Freedom Movement’.

Table 21.1 – Number of girls per 100 boys enrolled in
educational establishments, 1947 and 1971