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Magazine
IN THE PAST
Looking back at the Emergency
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Bipan Chandra promises to help the reader come to some judgment as to what the Emergency was all about. If, at the end of it, the reader remains confused, he is not to be blamed, says HARISH KHARE.
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Indira Gandhi... no "fascist" says Chandra.
THE 1975-1977 "Emergency" has been the proverbial bee in our collective bonnet. The other day during the no-confidence motion debate in the Lok Sabha, the country was again rudely reminded of those unhappy years. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s most aggressive ideologue, Lal Krishen Advani argued that a party (the Congress(I)) that had imposed "emergency" could hardly accuse others (the Vajpayee government) of subverting the democratic institutions; he invited an intervention and a retort from Sonia Gandhi that she had proof that those very people (read the Sangh Parivar's brave soldiers) who claim to have "resisted" the authorities relapse had in fact written letters of apology to her mother-in-law, the author and the executioner of the Emergency Interregnum. The exchange provoked partisan booing and cheering, and was eventually lost in procedural wrangle. But it was a reminder — disquieting reminder, all the same — that nothing had changed and that the partisans remained convinced of the correctness of their views as well as remained unwilling to see any merit in the other side's arguments.
Bipan Chandra's book does not help resolve our historical ambivalence. A historian has to help us understand events and episodes in our past in order to enable us to come to terms with those developments, make judgments as to whether what happened was "good" or "bad", morally defensible or reprehensible, since on such judgments the later generations rely to make policy and political choices. By undertaking to make an assessment of the Emergency, without practically no new archival material and relying on tools of "careful reasoning", Bipan Chandra promises to help the reader come to some judgment as to what the Emergency was all about. If, at the end of it, the reader remains confused, he is not to be blamed.
As Bipan Chandra tells it, neither Indira Gandhi nor Jayaprakash Narayan (J.P.) were "fascist", though both had the potential to become one or at least become totalitarian. Rather apologetically he notes: "I have not brought out the non-fascist, though authoritarian, character of the Emergency as also the negative character of the J.P. movement with a view to absolve Mrs. Gandhi of blame."
In Bipan Chandra's perspective, J.P. had stumbled upon a misguided mission. J.P.'s agenda was "mere truism"; he was a prisoner at times of "woolly thinking" and at other times of "hazy, naive, and unrealistic thinking". The "total revolution", a concept that J.P. preached, was "at best a romantic notion or a matter of mere rhetoric", " vague and indicative only of good intentions"; J.P.'s economic ideas were "utopian", characterised by " a lack of coherent and concrete programme". In other words, a harbinger of anarchy and disorder. Yet the historian does not feel provoked enough to indict him for failing to understand what forces the destructive potential of mobs and crowds. The only flaw that invites Bipan Chandra's disapproval is J.P.'s gullibility in letting the Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangh (RSS) take over the "movement". Once the RSS is located as the prime mischief-maker, then Mrs G's temptation for authoritarian sin becomes understandable, if not excusable.
Perhaps because of a preoccupation with the personalities of the two political antagonists — Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan — the larger systemic crisis of the Indian State does not get adequate attention. By 1973-1974, the Nehruvian model of State-led economic development had run its course; what was more, the "Congress System" was beginning to crumble as newly empowered middle castes and communities could not be accommodated and felt constrained to carve out political space for themselves outside the Congress(I). After 25 years of a republican experiment, the "burden of democracy" was beginning to be felt rather heavily. The Indian State needed to be re-jigged. Even if J.P. had not blundered into uncorking a "movement", some other event or individual would have provided the spark for re-working the paradigm with or without a spell of anarchy, which no body could necessarily, hope to calibrate. It is here that Bipan Chandra's narrative offers useful lessons for political leaders and rulers: they must understand that their excessive partisanship would have consequences, which may not always be amenable to reasonable sorting.
If history has to indict, as it must, J.P. for embarking upon a path for which he was neither organisationally nor politically nor even intellectually equipped, then what was Indira Gandhi's excuse for resorting to an extreme solution? Here Bipan's answer, again, is unsatisfactory as he falls for the familiar dynasty formulation i.e. The "Leader" was misguided by others into making mistakes. In this case, it was Sanjay Gandhi, the activist son, whose whims and fancies were already under attack from his mother's political rivals. Bipan divides the Emergency into two phases, "The Initial Years" when Indira Gandhi was in control and was undertaking the requisite course-correction; the Later Phase is characterised by Sanjay Gandhi's ascendancy and the bad behaviour of the bad boys he kept for company. The assumption is that Indira Gandhi was too helpless to rein in her rampant son: "What is surprising, and to an extent inexplicable, is why someone as sensitive, imaginative and politically-shrewd as Mrs Gandhi failed to perceive the gravity of the situation and didn't provide a healing touch, especially when the poor, her major political power base, were being alienated".
In fact, Bipan Chandra had, in earlier pages, conceded that Sanjay Gandhi could not become Sanjay the Terrible without the blessing, knowledge and encouragement of an indulgent mother.
He writes: "The (Sanjay) caucus could manipulate even Mrs. Gandhi by regulating access to her; it was Dhawan, for instance, who in general decided whom she would see. Very often she was kept ignorant of the orders issued from her house in her name or of what was happening in the country and in the administration. It must, however, be said that Mrs. Gandhi cooperated in this respect, for she did not permit people to talk to her about the activities of her son or his coterie." (p.196) The suggestion, therefore, that somehow that the mother and the son were on different, even conflicting, political trips is not adequately sustained.
Yet anther flaw in Bipan Chandra's narratives needs to be noted. The Opposition's politics of entirely personalised attacks on the mother and son duo before, during and after Emergency, brought about a fundamental change in the post-Independence polity: the Congress(I) lost its independent identity and instead became — and was treated as — an outfit of the Nehru-Gandhi family; this consecration continues to make demands on our time and attention, as unwittingly underlined by Sonia Gandhi's intervention in the no-confidence motion debate.
In the Name of Democracy: J.P. Movement and the Emergency, Bipan Chandra, Penguin paperback, p. 384, Rs. 350.
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