The unexorcised ghost of Sanjay Gandhi

By Harish Khare

The polity has not yet found a reassuring remedy against abuse of authority... The only answer is not to let democratic forces defer to any new orthodoxy.

IN ANOTHER two weeks we should be recalling the ``internal emergency'' promulgated a quarter of a century ago this month when a 29-year-old young man almost single-handedly, with some help from a doting prime ministerial mother, managed to derail the democratic process. A quarter of a century must appear to be very long ago in this televised age of instant history and its frivolous chroniclers; but the surviving partisans of that disagreeable interregnum cannot be expected to let the occasion pass without making an attempt to rewrite the history of this particular unhappy episode in our Republic's life. Historians would have to slug it out among themselves as to the true nature, provocation, genesis, raison d'etre and record of that deliberate experiment in an entirely anti-democratic governance.

And though the equation between the Indian state and the civil society have changed drastically to the advantage of the democratic forces, and though it is possible to argue confidently that June 1975 cannot be replicated ever again, we need to remember the ugliness of that past because the ``emergency'' dragon has not yet been slain and can resuscitate itself. What is more, the dramatis personae of the Emergency era - the Jagmohans, the Maneka Gandhis, the George Fernandes - continue to strut around, even if in different masquerades. In particular, two political habits and four systemic susceptibilities dating back to that era still survive.

The Emergency was a manifestation of the authoritarian temptation. That temptation has survived its most boorish practitioner; there is in fact a bit of dormant Sanjay Gandhi in each one of us, threatening to rear its autocratic head. Recourse to Article 352 is not the only manifestation of the authoritarian itch. This itch breaks out when authority is sought to be abused, and when there is a willful indifference to the injunction of fairness and balance. Be it a Mulayam Singh as Chief Minister using muscle power to rein in a Mayawati, or a Governor Pande allowing his prejudices to dictate exercise of gubernatorial authority, or a Lal Kishen Advani misusing Article 356 to get rid of a politically unfriendly regime in Bihar, the pattern is of a piece with Sanjay Gandhi's constitutional lumpenisation.

The second unhealthy habit that got cultivated during the Emergency and remains unkicked is the lure of majoritarian politics. When the correct history of those days gets written it will be recorded that the dominant and most influential segment of the sangh parivar leadership had countenanced Sanjay Gandhi's coercive family planning campaign; as far as the RSS establishment was concerned Sanjay Gandhi was the first ``leader'' with guts to target the Muslim slums and bastis. From their jail cells the RSS leaders watched in admiration as the Indian state's coercive ire got unwittingly directed at the Muslims. That Sanjay Gandhi tradition of indifference to the minorities's sensitivities was carried forward gloriously in the 1984 election when the ``bharat mata in danger'' warcry mesmerised an electorate already traumatised by Indira Gandhi's assassination and the anti-Sikh riots. The BJP, under Mr. Advani, merely finessed on that Sanjay Gandhi tradition, a cultivated habit that produced the denouement on December 6, 1992.

These two viruses tend to become all the more debilitating because four systemic susceptibilities of the Emergency era remain uncorrected. First, the role of the prime ministerial family as a source, if not a centre, of influence, power and extra-constitutional authority. It has been fashionable to put the onus of the excesses during the Emergency on the unwholesome influence Sanjay Gandhi and his lumpen cronies came to wield; it has been political correct to believe that the danger disappeared with Sanjay Gandhi. The unvarnished history negates this comfortable assumption. During the second half of Indira Gandhi's second prime ministerial innings, Rajiv Gandhi himself came to be a centre of unhealthy power; and it was Rajiv Gandhi, along with his cronies such as Arun Nehru and Arun Singh, who was responsible for the dismissal of the Farooq Abdullah Government in Jammu and Kashmir and the N. T. Rama Rao Government in Andhra Pradesh in gross abuse of extra-constitutional authority.

During Mr. P. V. Narasimha Rao's stay at Race Course Road, his sons gave in to the temptation of filthy lucre; and though both Mr. Deve Gowda and Mr. I. K. Gujral had shortlived tenancy at the prime ministerial residence, their respective sons were believed to be at it. The present incumbent, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, is no exception; even foster families can be a source of undesirable desires. And the Sanjay Gandhi habit has been wantonly cultivated in the various States, notwithstanding the elaborate paraphernalia of democratic scrutiny.

The second systemic susceptibility that survives from the Emergency era is the petty tyrants' itch to rewrite the Constitution to immunise ``stable governance'' against the vagaries of politics. The BJP regime, which pretends to have been in opposition to Indira Gandhi-Sanjay Gandhi, has most unapologetically taken a leaf out of the Emergency book; most ironically, its apologists have cited precisely this precedent of the Swaran Singh Committee - an inevitable byproduct of the arrogant mindset spawned by Sanjay Gandhi's internal emergency.

The third systemic weakness that produced ``emergency'' was the obsession with a ``charismatic'' leadership. After the 1971 electoral victory, and especially after the Bangladesh War, both Indira Gandhi and her followers, as well as her critics, came to endow the Prime Minister with the magical qualities of a shaman. This accent on the charisma of the leader was naturally at the expense of institutional vibrancy and democratic resilience; it produced any number of distortions inside and outside the Congress(I). This obsession with ``charisma'' continues to play havoc inside the Congress(I); what is more, even the BJP has fallen victim to the charismatic leader syndrome. Indeed, the entire political landscape is strewn with potential and pretentious ``charismatic'' leaders - from Mr. Bal Thackeray to Mr. Chandrababu Naidu to Mr. Laloo Prasad Yadav and Ms. Jayalalitha; each one of them capable of jettisoning democratic governance at the first chance.

The fourth and last systemic weakness that remains uncured is the inclination to disregard the rules of the game. The June 1975 denouement was a definite response to a definite situation, created by the excesses of indignation and righteousness pitted against the excesses of the ``law''. Our leaders have not yet fully learnt that democratic protests unleash their own momentum, and ``leaders'' are not always in control, and that they cannot necessarily calibrate violence. Presumably ``strong'' leaders become prisoner of group dynamics, invariably cranked up by the lumpenest elements in the crowd. This is what happened to ``JP'' in 1975 and to Mr. Advani at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. Be it the promoters of the sampurn kranti or the market managers of the ``Ayodhya movement'', the bottomline has been an unconscious legitimisation of the use of violence in the service of our grievances and ``causes''. If a Ashok Singhal could fulminate against the ``pseudo-secular'' Constitution, why grudge a Syed Geelani for not wanting to have faith in the Indian Constitution; if Mr. Advani has to insist that the charges against him in the ``Ayodhya'' case are of a different kind, then who is to prevent a Rabri Devi from refusing to heed the moral injunction of a chargesheet in a case of excessive zeal of the ``law'' in Patna.

A quarter of a century later the ghost of Sanjay Gandhi continues to hover over New Delhi. The polity has not yet found a reassuring remedy against abuse of authority and position by the Government of the day or those opposed to it. The only answer is not to let democratic voices and forces defer to any new orthodoxy, whosoever be its high priest. At the same time, the collective quest must be to work for a fair play between forces, arguments, personalities, even egos, that should produce a natural, healthy and wholesome equilibrium in the polity, sooner than later.

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