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From Telegraph, 17 Feb., 2005
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Not in the accepted sense of the wordÂ
Even three decades after the Emergency, India continues to miss its political relevance, just as it did during the crisis, writes N.J. Nanporia
In evil hour
<b>Thirty years after the event, reactions to the Emergency continue to be shaped by political bias, platitudes like âmurder of democracyâ and an overwhelming sense of political correctness. </b>Not long ago, Rahul Gandhi âadmittedâ that âexcessesâ had occurred, an admission that hardly made sense because no one has denied that people were arrested, that censorship was imposed or that a wide variety of oppressive acts were perpetrated, some under the directions of Sanjay Gandhi. <b>Sonia Gandhi herself is on record saying that she regretted the Emergency, all of which reinforced the view that the 1975 crisis is not something to be understood but to be condemned. </b>The Prasar Bharatiâs decision to drop the film on Jayaprakash Narayan hasnât helped matters either.
<b>But neither apologies nor admissions can ever provide a key to what the Emergency was about.</b> It can only be found by focussing on the one individual who matters â Indira Gandhi herself. <b>And also by asking the only question that matters â what were her motives and what moved her to do what she did?</b>
<b>Shortly after the Allahabad judgment in 1975, Indira Gandhi said that she was ânot a politician in the accepted sense of the wordâ. </b>Though she had her share of egotism, this was not a display of defensive arrogance. Nor was she implying here that she occupied a position of exceptional privilege and that the normal rules of public conduct did not apply to her. <b>It was an unintended and indirect disclosure of a subject that governed her turbulent career since the 1969 split â her disgust for and absolute rejection of politicking.</b>
As a member of the Congress working committee in 1955 and later of the central parliamentary board; as president of the Congress in 1959 (when she played a persuasive role in the bifurcation of bilingual Bombay and the dismissal of the communist government in Kerala); as her fatherâs political hostess; and in 1964, as Lal Bahadur Shastriâs minister of information and broadcasting, Indira Gandhi was exposed to the full blast of politicking. <b>At this point, we have another of her revealing comments, âThe nation is in a hurry and we cannot afford to lose time.â Combine her strong aversion to politicking with her sense of time draining away, and arguably we have the first intimation of the approaching tragedy.</b>
<b>During this time, the Congress was also running out of the energy that had sustained it as a movement. There was a mismatch, unseen by the party, between the old guard that was firmly in the saddle and the new challenges that confronted it. </b>There was, additionally, a sense of a mission having been accomplished and lost moorings. <b>War with Pakistan and the partyâs internal dissent induced organizational paralysis and an inability to redefine itself.</b> These could not have been acceptable to someone of Indira Gandhiâs temperament, though she was, undoubtedly, aware that her own elevation to prime ministership under the auspices of K. Kamaraj was itself a prime example of politicking. Of course the atrophied old guard hadnât the remotest clue to what Indira Gandhi was about to do. Confined within the stagnating limits of syndicate culture, it was unable to realize that she could read its motivations and calculations like an open book.
<b>Her conclusions are not difficult to guess. The syndicate culture was incompatible with her idea of national achievement and the urgency of the task. All those associated with the syndicate were victims of a mindset that couldnât conceive of a politician having any concern other than those held by it. </b>There was a complete lack of comprehension about a prime minister who refused to be a run-of-the-mill politician. The old guard came to regard her as a pliable instrument in its hands.
On her part, Indira Gandhi realized that she could survive only by mastering the techniques of politicking. She did this with the panache and determination. She beat the syndicate at its own game. Her expulsion from the syndicate marked her out as someone with a bold, uncompromising and dynamic approach to national affairs.
Psychologically and symbolically, for her, this was one way of disinheriting the politicking politicians. Yet, tragically, this was the only kind of politicians available, given the system that had bred them. Indira Gandhi also realized that her convictions could not be translated into an understandable public ideology or into terms the Constitution would find acceptable. An appreciation of this persuaded her to repeatedly try and reach out to what she called the âmassesâ. With them, she felt a rapport that was impossible to replicate with anyone else in the political jungle. Jayaprakash Narayan spoke of âtotal revolutionâ, signalling a break with the past. For Indira Gandhi, the revolution was primarily in her mind, while for Narayan, it was out there physically, which unfortunately was also a recipe for chaos and indiscipline. In the event, neither could make a headway against factionalism, violence, corruption, the pursuit of power, regionalism and so on. Collectively, these represented âparliamentary democracyâ, but actually, it was the âgreatest demagoguery in the world.â
Indira Gandhi helped popularize the legend of a ruthless person, frequently hiring people and firing them, thus lending credibility to the Janata campaign against the âpersonality cultâ. Yet, even in her increasing isolation, she kept hoping to find some empathy that would elude her forever. <b>JP too was frustrated and, confronted by the crisis, pushed himself to the limits â as the romantic idealist is apt to do â calling out to students to agitate, to the armed forces to revolt, and to civil servants to disobey orders that were not to their liking. The infamous railway strike and 92 derailments followed. </b>Under total revolution, all the ills of the system, all that Indira Gandhi wanted to uproot, came to be magnified.
Prakash Tandon struck a note of sanity and balance when he said: âFor years we wished an end to chaos and willingly promised to forgo some rights for some order and an end to how a whole town of ten million could be held to ransom by whoever chose to call a strike for whatever cause. A question we should ask is whether Mrs Gandhi was carrying, somehow, unknown to her, the cumulative will of a democratic people looking for a catharsis, long tired of incompetent governments.â Indira Gandhi did what her father could never have done â critically question a system imposed on India for the sole reason that it was favoured by the departing colonialists.
<b>As for the Shah commission and the legal trivialities into which it sunk, it should be said that the commission was more keen to pursue Indira Gandhi than on ensuring an inquiry into the origins of the Emergency.</b> So much so that it is pointless to ask whether it was competent to investigate the circumstances or the way in which the Emergency was declared. In the end, Indira Gandhi realized that she had all the right reasons for doing the wrong thing in conditions in which she could never succeed. All she could do was administer what she called âshock treatmentâ, which, nevertheless, left the system largely unchanged.
On the sidelines were those who expediently applauded Indira Gandhi without the slightest understanding of her motives, but became her harshest critics post-Emergency. There were others sincerely associated with her but who remained entirely innocent about what was going on. And then there were the would-be Emergency heroes, so remote from reality and so full of their egotistic concerns that they waited eagerly to be arrested, only to be ignored by an unimpressed Emergency authority. We are indebted to them for injecting some comedy into an otherwise tragic affair.
As for Indira Gandhi, she remained the way she had started, a person whose image was writ large on the national and international scene, but whose core remained private and intense. The statement that âonly a political illiterate could disapprove of the Emergencyâ is well worth pondering over.
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