India After Gandhi (86 page)

These foreign friends of India’s freedom were old enough to have seen how close Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan had once been. They were appalled that Nehru’s daughter had jailed JP, and hoped that an appeal to history would take him out of prison. So did that great group of pacifists, the Quakers, who did not put their name to the
Times
advertisement but tried the back-channels of reconciliation instead. The group had an old and honourable connection with India. Quakers such as Agatha Harrison and Horace Alexander had played crucial intermediary roles between British colonialists and Indian nationalists. More recently, they had worked with JP in attempting reconciliation between India and Pakistan and between the Naga rebels and the government in New Delhi.

In August, a month after the emergency was declared, the sociologist Joe Elder was sent by his fellow Quakers on a fact-finding mission to India. He met many people; JP’s followers, Congress politicians and the prime minister. He found himself ‘decreasingly prone to condemn one
side or the other’.JP had erred in launching a mass movement without a cadre of disciplined, non-violent volunteers. His ideas had ‘struck many as naive, untested, or unconvincing’. His movement’s credibility was weakened by the presence within it of extremists of left and right. On the other hand, the prime minister had clearly over-reacted in imposing the emergency. This had created fear in the minds of the people, and undermined the democratic process and democratic institutions.
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As Elder’s account suggests, the emergency was a script jointly authored by JP and Mrs Gandhi. Both had shown too little faith in representative institutions: JP by asking for the premature dismissal of elected governments, Mrs Gandhi by jailing legally elected members of Parliament and legislative assemblies. Neither properly appreciated the role of the state in a modern democracy. JP wished simply for the state to disappear, for the police and army to ‘disobey immoral orders’. On the other hand, Mrs Gandhi sought to make the state’s functionaries ultimately dependent on the will of a single person at the helm.

The clash was made poignant by the fact that the adversaries had once been friends, bound by ties of history and tradition and by intimate personal relationships stretching across generations. One does not know how Mrs Gandhi felt about jailing JP. We do know that her staff had deeply ambivalent feelings. The prime minister’s Information Adviser, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, was an old patriot and freedom-fighter himself. He had been jailed in 1942, in the same Quit India campaign that first made JP a national figure. Unlike Joe Elder, he could not bring himself to admit that the prime minister had over-reacted. Yet, as he wrote to a friend, he grieved that a man like JP, ‘at a moment of crucial ethical importance, decide[d] that RSS and CPM are more acceptable than the Congress. This is an excursion in reasoning that I have not been able to understand, much less excuse. I can only console myself with the thought that he would not have been so desperate if [his wife] Prabhavatiji had been alive.’
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Also unhappy about JP’s incarceration was the economist P. N. Dhar, who had succeeded P. N. Haksar as the prime minister’s principal secretary. He sent several emissaries to JP to see whether a conciliation could be effected, with prisoners released and the emergency lifted, in time for the next parliamentary elections, due in early 1976. The emissaries found JP willing to negotiate. A flood in his native Bihar had made him impatient to go and work among the sufferers. Talk that his irresponsibility had caused the emergency had reached his ears. He said
he had no desire to revive the popular movement, but when elections were called would ask for a combined front to oppose the Congress, and canvass for its candidates.
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JP was keen that his old friend Sheikh Abdullah, now also a part of the Indian establishment as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, be the mediator between him and Mrs Gandhi. He had read a report quoting the Sheikh as saying that he was in favour of ‘conciliation at All-India level’, and that the prime minister was ‘more than keen to end the emergency’. JP now wrote to Abdullah offering him his ‘full co-operation’ in any move he might make to resolve the differences between the opposition and the government. That said, the letter betrayed signs of wounds still not healed, as in JP’s reference to himself being portrayed as ‘the villain of the piece, the arch-conspirator, the culprit number one’, and in his concluding challenge that ‘the first test of [the prime minister’s] keenness [to end the emergency] will be whether this letter is allowed to be delivered to you and whether you are permitted to see me’.
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The prime minister failed the test. The letter was not passed on to the Sheikh, and the moves to effect a reconciliation died with it. However, in November 1975 JP’s health took a turn for the worse. With his kidneys failing, he was taken to a hospital in Chandigarh and, when the doctors there proved unequal to the task, released on parole and shifted to the Jaslok Hospital in Bombay, to be placed under the care of the nephrologist M. K. Mani. The government’s action was hastened by the realization that all hell might break loose if JP were to die in jail.
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Although JP lay in a Bombay bed, chained to a dialysis machine, there was no general parole of political prisoners. An estimated 36,000 people were in jail under MISA, detained without trial. These were rather ecumenically spread across the states of the Union, 1,078 from Andhra Pradesh, 2,360 from Bihar and so on down the letters of the alphabet, until one reached 7,049 from Uttar Pradesh and 5,320 from West Bengal.
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These victims of political vengeance were housed, fed and clothed like common criminals – in fact, made to share their cells with them (prompting the witticism that Mrs Gandhi’s much vaunted socialism was at least practised in the jails). Older prisoners looked nostalgically back to the days of the Raj, when the jails had been cleaner and the jailers altogether more humane. It seemed that women prisoners were singled out for special treatment. The Rajmatas of Gwalior and Jaipur were now
living in conditions of unaccustomed austerity and filth. The socialist Mrinal Gore, more used to the simple life, was asked to share a toilet with the woman in the adjoining cell – who happened to be a leper. In the cell opposite was a lady lunatic who wore no clothes and shrieked day and night.
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Writing to a friend in January 1963, Indira Gandhi complained that democracy ‘not only throws up the mediocre person but gives strength to the most vocal howsoever they may lack knowledge and understand-ing’.
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Three years later, when she had just become prime minister, Mrs Gandhi told a visiting journalist that ‘the Congress has become moribund’, adding, ‘Sometimes I feel that even the parliamentary system has become moribund.’ Besides, the ‘inertia of our civil service is incredible’; we have a system of dead wood replacing dead wood’. ‘Sometimes I wish’, said the newly elected prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, that ‘we had a real revolution – like France or Russia – at the time of independence.’
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The impatience with democratic procedure had been manifested early, as for instance with the packing of the civil service, the judiciary and the Congress Party with individuals committed to the prime minister. But the process was taken much further with the emergency. Now, with opposition MPs locked away, a series of constitutional amendments were passed to prolong Mrs Gandhi’s rule. The 38th Amendment, passed on 22 July 1975, barred judicial review of the emergency. The 39th Amendment, introduced two weeks later, stated that the election of the prime minister could not be challenged by the Supreme Court, but only by a body constituted by Parliament. This came just in time to help Mrs Gandhi in her election review petition, where the Court now held that there was no case to try, since the new amendment retrospectively rendered her actions during the 1971 elections outside the purview of the law.
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Some months later the Supreme Court did the prime minister a greater favour still. Lawyers representing the thousands jailed under MISA argued that the right of habeas corpus could not be taken away by the state. Judgements in the lower courts seemed to favour this view, but when the case reached the Supreme Court it held that detentions
without trial were legal under the new dispensation. Of the five-member bench only one dissented: this was Justice H. R. Khanna, who pointed out that ‘detention without trial is an anathema to all those who love personal liberty’.
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It was suggested that the judgement was influenced by extralegal considerations – by the hope of three of the judges that they might one day become chief justice, by the fear inspired by the punitive transfers of officials that had commenced with the emergency. In a despairing editorial entitled ‘Fading Hopes in India’, the
New York Times
remarked that ‘the submission of an independent judiciary to an absolutist government is virtually the last step in the destruction of a democratic society’.
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In fact, there were other steps still to be taken. These included the 42nd Amendment, a twenty-page document whose clauses gave unprecedented powers to Parliament. It could now extend its own term -which it immediately did. The amendment gave laws passed by the legislature further immunity from judicial scrutiny, and further strengthened the powers of the centre over the states. All in all, the 42nd Amendment allowed Parliament ‘unfettered power to preserve or destroy the Constitution’.
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In January 1976 the term of the DMK government ended in Tamil Nadu. Rather than call fresh elections, the centre ordered a spell of President’s Rule. Two months later the same medicine was applied to Gujarat, where the Janata Front had lost its majority owing to defections.

Mrs Gandhi, and the Congress, were now supreme all over the land. When the art historians Mildred and W. G. Archer went to meet her in March 1976, the prime minister expressed satisfaction with the progress of the emergency. The new regime, she told them, ‘had made the State Ministers shake in their shoes’. This was long over-due and was excellent’, for ‘too much devolution [was] fatal to India’. ‘I have to keep India together’, insisted Mrs Gandhi. ‘That is an absolute must.’
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Among the casualties of the emergency was the freedom of the press. Within its first week the government had instituted a system of ‘pre-censorship’, whereby editors had to submit, for scrutiny and approval, material deemed to be critical of the government or its functionaries.
Guidelines were issued on what did and did not constitute ‘news’. There could be no reports on processions or strikes, or of political opposition, or of conditions in the jails. Reports of open dissidence were naturally
verboten
, but in fact even stories mildly critical of the administration were not permitted.
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As a newspaper in the Punjab was to recall, items ‘killed’ by the censor included

reports about the closure of shops in Chandigarh’s Bajwara market to protest against the arrest of shopkeepers, the six-year absence of a health officer and observations about the town’s sanitation, especially the open drains; . . . three letters to the editor about pay anomalies and inadequate salary scales of college lectures in Himachal Pradesh; an unsatisfactory bus service; a Chandigarh report about the rise in the price of tomatoes; the death of two persons while patrolling the rail tracks near Amritsar; and a brief item about black-marketing in essential drugs.
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The space had to be filled; and it was, by the words of the prime minister or by stories in praise of her government. (Editors who tried to print the liberty-loving essays of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru instead were quickly brought to book.) ‘Our newspapers, of course, give world news all right’, wrote a reader in Simla to an English friend, ‘but hardly any other news pertaining to the country itself, except the speeches of the PM . . . I have decided to forgo the pleasures of reading a newspaper.’
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In truth, the disgust was shared by the journalists themselves. As a reporter for the Bombay weekly
Blitz
told
his
English friend: ‘My paper is a supporter of the Emergency. But if we only sing the praises of the Government, what will our readers think of us?’
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Jokes tinged with satire were especially forbidden. The Tamil humorist Cho Ramaswamy failed to sneak in a cartoon showing the prime minister and her son Sanjay talking above the caption: ‘A national debate on the Constitutional Amendments’. When a reader asked the question, ‘Who is Indira Gandhi’, Cho answered: ‘She is the granddaughter of Motilal Nehru, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the mother of Sanjay Gandhi’. This, too, was cut. The censors were vigilant, but the odd joke or two escaped their eye. Thus V. Balasubramanyam was able to print an article in the
Eastern Economist
on ‘Livestock Problems in India’, which began with the line: ‘There are at present 580 million sheep in the country’, and an anonymous democrat was able to place an ad in the
Times of India
announcing the ‘death of D. E. M. O’Cracy,
mourned by his wife T. Ruth, his son L. I. Bertie, and his daughters Faith, Hope, and Justice’.
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As the emergency proceeded, the government tightened its hold over the dissemination of information. The independent news agencies, the United News of India (UNI) and the Press Trust of India (PTI), were amalgamated with two lesser agencies into a single state-controlled news service called Samachar. The Press Council, an autonomous watchdog body, was abolished. A law granting immunity to journalists covering Parliament was repealed. And as many as 253 journalists were placed under arrest. These included Kuldip Nayar of the
Indian Express
, K. R. Sunder Rajan of the
Times of India
and K. R. Malkani of the
Motherland.
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