India After Gandhi (93 page)

This dramatic gesture brought Indira Gandhi decisively back to the centre of the political stage. As one of her opponents later recalled, her visit to Belchi served several purposes. It helped damn the Janata Government as being indifferent to the fate of the poor and the Harijans. The ride refurbished Indira Gandhi’s image as a friend of the poor and the lowly. It also showed to the average member of the Congress Party that Indira Gandhi was a woman of action and she alone could be trusted to lead the fight back to power.’
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The visit to Belchi was her own initiative, but Mrs Gandhi’s revival was also helped by a less inspired initiative of the government in power. In the first week of October 1977 the home minister, Charan Singh, decided that he must arrest the former prime minister. Acting on his instructions, the Central Bureau of Intelligence prepared a charge sheet
accusing her of corruption. Armed with this piece of paper, the police went to Mrs Gandhi’s house and took her into custody. Their plan was to drive her to a rest house in the neighbouring state of Haryana. On the way they were forced to stop at a railway crossing. Mrs Gandhi got out and sat down on a culvert. Her lawyers, meanwhile, told the police their warrant did not permit them to take their client out of Delhi. An argument ensued, conducted in the presence of many interested bystanders. Eventually the police conceded the point, and the party drove back to the capital.

Mrs Gandhi was kept overnight by the police, but when they produced her before a magistrate the next morning, he threw out the charge sheet as flimsy and insubstantial. The bungled ‘arrest’ redounded badly on the Janata government, and helped redeem the reputation of their hated opponent. She began making combative speeches against the new regime, singling out the increase in crime and inflation (running at double-digit levels), and the profiteering of hoarders and black-marketeers. The deposed prime minister, commented the
New York Times
in the last week of October, ‘has been speaking more and more boldly lately, trying to assume once more the posture of anationalleader’.
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Mrs Gandhi’s resurgence alarmed Janata, as well as many leaders in her own party. Some Congress ministers had already testified against her before the Shah Commission. In January 1978 the Congress formally split into two factions, those who stayed with Mrs Gandhi forming the ‘Congress (Indira)’. The next month this party easily won state elections in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The former prime minister had been the chief campaigner; as the results showed, at least in the south her image as a saviour of the poor, the adivasi, the Scheduled Castes and women was firmly intact.
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Mrs Gandhi now began looking around for a safe seat via which to re-enter Parliament. Eventually she chose the constituency of Chikmaglur, in the coffee belt of Karnataka. The state’s chief minister, Devaraj Urs, had a high reputation for efficiency; among his achievements was the bestowing of ownership rights to hundreds of thousands of tenant-cultivators. The work of Urs and her own, largely unimpaired, standing in south India persuaded Mrs Gandhi to seek election at the other end of the country from her native Uttar Pradesh.
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Standing against the former prime minister was a former (and much respected) chief minister of Karnataka, Veerendra Patil. Leading Patil’s campaign was Mrs Gandhi’s old emergency-era adversary George
Fernandes, now minister for industries in the Janata government. ‘I will not stir out of the constituency till the polling is over,’ declared Fernandes to a reporter. ‘We must defeat her.’ Mrs Gandhi took the challenge seriously; as the same journalist reported, she ‘smiles graciously at the women and children, accepts garlands at hundreds of roadside meetings, makes detours to visit numerous places of worship, calls on saints of all denominations’.
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In the event, Mrs Gandhi won easily. No sooner had she re-entered the Lok Sabha than she had to face a ‘privilege motion’ against her. A Parliamentary Committee, stacked with Janata members, reported that back in 1974, when she was prime minister, Mrs Gandhi had obstructed an inquiry into Sanjay’s Maruti factory, and deliberately misled Parliament while doing so. Her punishment was left to the ‘wisdom of the House’. The Janata majority decided that she must be sent to jail for a week. The spell in prison, ruled the election commissioner, meant that she would have to resign her seat. This precipitated another by-election in Chikmaglur; once again Mrs Gandhi contested, and won.
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Janata’s attempts to humiliate the former prime minister were seriously misjudged. The stoicism with which Mrs Gandhi bore her sufferings was much admired, and the two brief arrests allowed her to acquire a halo of martyrdom. Admittedly, the men now in power had been victimized during the emergency, but that they chose to focus on taking revenge against an individual when they should really have been running a government spoke of a certain narrowness of vision.

Behind the attempts to arrest the former prime minister lay personal rivalries within the Janata camp. The home minister, Charan Singh, was not reconciled to being number two in the Cabinet. His move against Mrs Gandhi was a move to steal the thunder from Morarji Desai. He opened another flank in the same battle when he wrote to the prime minister complaining about the growing influence of Desai’s son Kanti. Kanti lived with his father, and handled his appointments. Unflattering comparisons were made with the role once played by Sanjay Gandhi.

Through the first half of 1978 Charan Singh and Morarji Desai, home minister and prime minister respectively, exchanged a series of angry letters. Eventually, in June 1978, Desai was compelled to sack
Singh from the Cabinet, along withhis chief lieutenant Raj Narain. Others within Janata tried to broker a peace, but to no avail. In December, Singh emerged from months of seclusion to organize a massive farmers’ rally in the capital. Some 200,000 peasants, mostly from northern India, and many from Charan Singh’s own Jat caste, came to Delhi in their tractors and lorries to hear their leader speak.

This show of strength forced Desai to recall Charan Singh to the Cabinet. In February 1979 he was appointed finance minister. He was now also one of two deputy prime ministers, the other being Jagjivan Ram. Singh’s first budget offered sops to farmers, as in an increased fertilizer and irrigation subsidy. But the patch-up proved short lived. One important Janata constituent, the Socialist Party, mostly sided with Singh; another, the Jana Sangh, decided to back Desai. Deepening the rift was the question of ‘dual membership’, the growing feeling that the Jana Sangh members of the Janata Party owed their primary allegiance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Back in March 1977, Atal Behari Vajpayee had proclaimed that his old party was ‘dead and buried’. But the feeling persisted that it was the RSS that directed the actions of Janata MPs and ministers who had a Jana Sangh background. They were asked to disavow their ties with the RSS, which they refused to do on the grounds that the Sangh was merely a ‘cultural’ body.

In the third week of July 1979 the Socialists chose to sit in a separate group in Parliament. This catalysed a split in Janata, a loss of majority for Morarji Desai’s government and his own resignation. In his bid to construct afresh majority, Desai wooed one Congress faction while Jagjivan Ram wooed another. The third leader in the fray, Charan Singh, now constructed an opportunistic alliance with his old nemesis Indira Gandhi. With the help of a letter of support from the Congress Party, Charan Singh was able to convince the president that he enjoyed majority support in the House. He was sworn in just in time to deliver the prime minister’s annual Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, the first farmer to do so.
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The disintegration of the Janata Party proceeded against a background of despairing letters written by Jayaprakash Narayan to his protégés. In October 1979 JP died, a broken man.The liberal editor A. D. Gorwala paid tribute to Narayan as ‘the great moral force of the country, the touchstone of right and wrong’. His ‘last great effort’, wrote Gorwala, was the formation and victory of the Janata Party, whose ‘narrow, stupid partisan men . . . absorbed in their own self-interest and
self-importance, failed himbadly’.
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Those self-absorbed men – Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, jagjivan Ram – all came to JP’s funeral in Patna, as, more strikingly, did Sanjay Gandhi and his mother. ‘Poor oldj. P.!’, wrote Mrs Gandhi to a friend afterwards. ‘What a confused mind he had leading to such a frustrated life!’ She attributed his twists and turns to ‘Gandhian hypocrisy’, to the vow of celibacy extracted from him when he married the Mahatma’s disciple Prabhavati. ‘That and jealousy of my father probably conditioned the rest of hislife’, she remarked, adding: ‘It is nonsense to say that he did not want office. One part of him did, very much so. He was torn between that and the desire to be regarded as a martyr and a saint.’
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There is a certain spitefulness in this assessment, and also a certain loftiness of tone. For Mrs Gandhi was having the last laugh, with regard not just to her old friend turned rival but also to the party he had created. Back in July, when Morarji Desai had resigned and his successor was being chosen, the journal
Himmat
presciently remarked that ‘Mrs Gandhi is the only one who would like to have amid-term poll -and would gain from it in the present climate. It is in her interest to have Mr Charan Singh installed as Prime Minister but only for two to three months.’
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Charan Singh was sworn in as prime minister in the last week of July 1979; a month later the Congress (I) informed the president that they were withdrawing support. It took the president a further month to explore and reject the alternatives. When he decided that amid-term poll was the only solution, the Election Commission still needed time to prepare for it. So Charan Singh stayed on as prime minister until the end of the year, two full months more than
Himmat
had given him.

The Janata Party came to power on a wave of hyperbole, with talk of a second freedom from authoritarian rule and a resounding restoration of democracy. Almost from its first weeks in office, the party seemed determined to squander this goodwill. It was soon noticed that in both the centre and the states janata ministers were grabbing the best government bungalows, raiding the Public Works Department for air-conditioners and carpets, organizing lavish parties and weddings for their relatives, running up huge telephone and electricity bills, travelling
abroad at the slightest pretext (or on no pretext at all).
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Even traditionally anti-Congress journals were writing about the ‘death of idealism’ within Janata, of how it had so quickly become a ‘political party of the traditional type’, its members ‘interested more and more in positions and perquisites and less and less in affecting society’. It was being said that while it had taken the Congress thirty years to abandon its principles, Janata had lost them within a year of its formation.
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Looking back on the three years of the Janata regime, one analyst remembered it as ‘a chronicle of confused and complex party squabbles, intra-party rivalries, shifting alliances, defections, charges and countercharges of incompetence and the corruption and humiliation of persons who had come to power after the defeat of Mrs Gandhi’.
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Most Indians who lived through those years would make the same assessment, if more succinctly; the Janata Party, they would say, were merely a bunch of jokers. It takes a distinguished foreign observer to remind us that, beyond the fighting and squabbling, the Janata government made a notable contribution to Indian democracy. This, in the words of Gran-ville Austin, was its ‘remarkable success in repairing the Constitution from the Emergency’s depredations, in reviving open parliamentary practice through its consultative style when repairing the Constitution, and in restoring the judiciary’s independence’.
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The initiative here was taken by Morarji Desai. In an interview on the eve of the 1977 election, he remarked that during the emergency, democracy itself had been ‘vasectomised’. If his party won, they would ‘work for the removal of fear which has enveloped the people’. Then they would undertake ‘to rectify the Constitution’. Morarji was clear that ‘we will have to ensure that Emergency like this can never be imposed. No Government should be able to do so.’
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After Janata’s victory, the job of repairing the constitution was supervised by the hard-working law minister Shanti Bhushan. The key amendment to be overturned was the 42nd. To replace its ‘defiling’ provisions, two fresh amendments were drafted, which reverted the term of Parliament and state assemblies to five years, restored the right of the Supreme Court to adjudicate on all election matters (that of the prime minister included), limited the period of President’s Rule in the states, made mandatory the publication of parliamentary and legislative proceedings and made the promulgation of a state of emergency much more difficult. Any such act had now to be approved by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, had to be renewed every six months after a fresh
vote on it, and had to be in response to an ‘armed rebellion’ (rather than a mere ‘internal disturbance’, as was previously the case). These changes were intended to curb the arbitrary powers of the executive and to restore the rights of the courts; in effect, to restore the constitution to what it was before Mrs Gandhi’s emergency-era amendments.

The drafting of these amendments took time, because of the demands of legal precision and the need to ensure the kind of cross-party support that would make their passing in both Houses of Parliament possible. As these restorations were being debated, the press was reporting avidly on the Shah Commission, while a string of books and memoirs documenting the excesses of the emergency were being published. In this climate of opinion, even the Congress was in no mood to defend the changes in the constitution that its leaders had wrought. That damage was now undone by the freshly drafted 44th Amendment. When this was passed by a comfortable majority on 7 December 1978, among those voting for it were those two old enemies, Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi.
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