Ofcourse there was an Indian, regional and global context in which
Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency on June 25, 1975?
The
70s were a decade of fierce contest between the West and the Soviet
Union. The Cold War was going badly for the West - Vietnam, Angola,
Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua had all returned Communist governments.
The
June 14, 1976 cover of Time magazine had a menacing photograph of
Italian Communist leader, Enrico Berlinguer with a headline in thick,
red fonts: The Red Threat. Franco and Salazar had died, leaving Spain
and Portugal exposed to the blandishments of the Left. Secretary general
of the French communist party, George Marchais was a formidable force.
Baath
socialists in Baghdad and Damascus, pro-Soviet regimes in Algeria and
Libya - all tended to give the balance of advantage to Moscow, even
though the US had scored a major victory by having Anwar Saadat sign the
peace accord with Israel in 1979.
Stand-alone comedians in
Washington continued to titillate the audience on detente which, at that
stage was going badly. A standard joke was: “Détente is like going to a
wife swapping party and returning home alone.â€
The US had learnt
its lessons in Africa, West Asia and Latin America. In many countries
listed above there were either nascent or full blown communist movements
or anti American regimes like the ones in Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli
and Algiers.
The Shah of Iran’s Secret Police, Savak, dreamed up a
plan to eliminate the Left - Khalq, Parcham and a latent Shola e Javed -
from around the establishment in Kabul. Accidental death of a trade
union leader, Mir Akbar Khaibar, resulted in the plan being exposed.
Communists, Aslam Watanjar and Abdul Qadir of the Afghan armed forces,
acted pre-emptively. They trained their tanks on President Daud and his
close supporters who were killed in the palace. Nur Muhammad Taraki of
Khalq became prime minister. This happened in April 1978. In Islamabad,
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s judicial assassination inaugurated the era of Zia
ul Haq’s Islamism. The Ayatullahs came to power in Tehran in 1979.
Where
was India in all of this? It turns out that the intense east-west
contest of the 70s may well have begun in India. In 1969, Indira Gandhi
split the congress along ideological lines. The right wing, business
friendly party bosses, the Congress (O), searched for and found
like-minded groups they could coalesce with - Jana Sangh (which later
became the BJP), RSS, (BJP’s ideological mentors), Socialists (in their
anti communism, close to all the groups listed above), and the
professional Gandhians, Hindu and austere.
This coalition
acquired urgency because Indira Gandhi had begun to lean directly on the
Communist Party boss, S.A. Dange. Colleagues like Mohan Kumaramangalam,
P.N. Haksar were strong leftist influences on her.
Global moves,
counter moves were on. Henry Kissinger was plotting a Washington,
Beijing, Moscow triangle. Just then the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship
and Cooperation was signed. With Soviet help, India liberated
Bangladesh.
On the one hand, India was now in a vice-like grip of
the Soviet Union, on the other, Secretary General of the Communist
party in Bihar, Jagannath Sarkar, had taken up the land question with
sufficient success to worry the Congress.
Between the Deendayal
Upadhyay Institute in Jhandewalan, Gandhi Peace Foundation and Ram Nath
Goenka’s apartment in the Indian Express building, a scheme was hatched
to resurrect Jaya Prakash Narayan as a counterpoint to Indira Gandhi who
seemed invincible after the Bangladesh operations.
Anti Vietnam
war youth movements at Grosvenor Square, London, the barricades in Paris
building upto the Kent State university shooting in 1970 which killed
four anti Vietnam (Kampuchea) war protestors, were far away to infect
youth movement in India. And yet, by 1973 a powerful youth movement was
taking shape in Gujarat ignited by students. They were protesting
against inadequate hostel facilities. Mysteriously, the dissolution of
the state assembly became a prime demand. The Congress (O) leader
Morarji Desai went on indefinite hunger strike. The assembly was
dissolved. Agitationists had tasted blood.
JP, ofcourse, had
visited Gujarat to pick up tricks he might employ in the Bihar agitation
which initially targeted the country’s most innocuous chief minister,
Abdul Ghafoor. JP invited Morarji Desai to be chairman of the Sangharsh
Samiti (Action committee). The senior most RSS leader Nanaji Deshmukh,
was its convener.
It was Naanji Deshmukh and his RSS cadres on
whose shoulders the Bihar movement was carried. JP had very kindly
invited me to stay with him in his family house in Kadam Kuan. I
therefore had a ringside seat on the JP movement.
Peter
Hazlehurst of The Times, London, described Indira Gandhi’s politics in a
pithy phrase: she is a little left of self interest.
It was her dependence on the left and the Soviet Union, that the JP movement sought to bring under strain.
Relentless
pressure was kept up, first by a successful Railway strike in May 1974
led by the firebrand George Fernandez. The Allahabad High Court
judgement of June 12, 1975 unseated her from parliament for misuse of
office during her election to parliament.
On June 25, an unnerved Indira Gandhi, imposed the Emergency.
When
elections were held in 1977, the electorate trounced Indira Gandhi. The
coalition woven by JP during the Bihar movement came to power in Delhi
as the Janata Party under Morarji Desai. Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K.
Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi became ministers. Indian politics had taken a
turn it was not going to recover from in a hurry.
(A senior
commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be
reached on [email protected]. The views expressed are personal.)
