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BOOK REVIEW
Indian democracy
imperiled
In the Name of Democracy, by
Bipan Chandra
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
 The years 1974-1977 were Indian democracy's most
testing and turbulent times. Hacks had been sharpening
their knives to prove the unsuitability of liberal
democracy to an underdeveloped and impoverished India,
using the "bread versus freedom" analogy of Singaporean
strongman Lee Kuan Yew. They felt vindicated in the wake
of Jayaprakash Narayan's extra-constitutional struggle
(JP Movement) to dislodge prime minister Indira Gandhi
and the latter's decision to suspend political and
economic rights through a state of internal emergency.
Of course, the epitaph writers were wrong and India's
democratic "political miracle" (W H Morris-Jones)
continues to this day.
However, there is no
doubt that the JP Movement and emergency gave Indian
democracy a close shave without cutting the skin.
Veteran historian Bipan Chandra's new book sheds light
on the totalitarian-fascist potential in these two
watershed developments that could have overturned
consensual form of government for good. "Not all popular
mass movements lead to or strengthen democracy ... [and]
regimes which claimed to be defending democracy have
themselves ended up as dictatorships." (p 3)
During 1972-1974, deep economic recession,
unemployment and inflation created a groundswell of
discontent, agitation and anger all over India, laying
the socio-economic carpet for upheaval. The Congress
party had been declining as an organization and was
unprepared to deal with the snowballing crisis. Growing
corruption in large areas of public life and belief that
higher echelons of the ruling party and administration
were responsible for the rot gained ground. Indira
Gandhi's refusal to acknowledge corruption as a serious
socio-political malady compounded matters and eroded her
phenomenal standing and charisma.
If the urban
middle classes were upset about rising costs of living,
rich peasants were getting alienated from the Congress
rapidly, no longer seeing it as an effective instrument
for serving their group interests. Big business houses
went on an "investment strike" to protest Gandhi's
radical leftism, thereby exacerbating the economic
downturn. Opposition parties' desperation and reliance
on massive extra-legal agitational politics to remove
elected ministries and dissolve tenured legislatures
also contributed to the atmosphere of turmoil.
Trouble broke out first in Gujarat in early
1974, with large-scale rioting and the burning and
looting of shops. For more than 10 weeks, the state was
in a condition of near anarchy. Though urban workers and
rural landless poor kept out of the fracas, disaffected
urban middle classes and students managed to bring
government functioning to a standstill. From Gujarat,
the tensions spread to Bihar, where the city of Patna
was "under almost complete control of the mobs" and the
state itself "gave the appearance of a vast armed camp".
(p 40) Jayaprakash Narayan suddenly emerged from
reclusive Gandhian social work to take charge of the
anti-government rallies in Bihar. Believing that the
youth were historical agents of social change, J P
announced that the moment for "total revolution" had
come.
J P's holistic agenda for revolution
included all-round changes to the pattern of education,
elimination of corruption, checking moral decline in
politics, basic electoral reforms, building up "people's
power" and "saving democracy from authoritarian trends".
Most of these grandiose objectives remained non-starters
and J P soon narrowed down the focus of the movement to
the removal of Indira Gandhi from office, even though
general elections were not due until 1976. The prime
minister believed that having secured political power
via democratic and constitutional means in the 1971
elections, she had every right to continue ruling.
Eyeing the opportunity of piggybacking on J P's moral
image, opposition parties joined the chorus for Gandhi's
ouster without waiting for the people's verdict in 1976.
Lacking the strong mass base and mobilizing cadre of
workers that parties like Jan Sangh, Congress (O),
Bharatiya Lok Dal and Akali Dal could muster, J P also
accepted this marriage of convenience.
Despite
the strategic alliances, the J P Movement ran out of
steam by early 1975. "Students had lost their enthusiasm
... their luster and credibility in the public eye had
also begun to fade." (p 54) Indira Gandhi sensed the
opportunity and openly challenged J P to fight her in
the constitutional arena, ie the elections of 1976. With
the movement at an impasse, J P accepted the gauntlet
thrown at him and started organizing for an electoral
battle. Just as unrest and agitation were being directed
into the conventional channels of the system, the
Allahabad High Court delivered in June 1975 a
super-controversial verdict that Gandhi's 1971 election
victory as an MP was invalid due to two minor technical
offenses under electoral law.
The movement's
strategy took a markedly radical turn as opposition
allies converted J P to the coup d'etat school of
thought and went on the rampage, demanding immediate
resignation of the prime minister. Gandhi's popularity
among the rural poor and urban workers was undisturbed
by the pandemonium of the last two years and her chances
of getting re-elected in 1976 were still bright. Morarji
Desai, the opposition leader, saw the Allahabad court
decision as a shortcut to power and said, "One must
strike the iron when it is hot ... it's increasingly
difficult to defeat her in a general election." (p 88) A
gigantic civil disobedience campaign was unleashed by J
P, calling not only the people but also the armed
forces, police and government servants to disobey orders
from a "dictatorial and fascist" regime.
The
culmination of the remove Indira roar was J P's plan to
gherao (encircle) the premier's residence in
Delhi with hundreds of thousands of his supporters who
would permit none to enter or leave the house. Gandhi
viewed the last threat as taken straight out of
Mussolini's march on Rome, a serious danger to democracy
that would require the army's intervention to disperse
the surging crowds. In fact, "One reason she imposed the
emergency was because she did not want to rely on the
army for dealing with the civil disobedience movement."
(p 80) On June 26, 1975, in a lightning response,
internal emergency was proclaimed under article 352 of
the Indian constitution. J P and a slew of opposition
leaders were arrested, strict press censorship imposed
and all fundamental rights suspended. Defending the
emergency as indispensable for state survival, Gandhi
argued, "Some rights have to suffer a little if it is in
the cause of strengthening and survival of our country."
(p 79)
So furious was the government onslaught
and so feeble the resistance to the emergency from civil
society that the backbone of the movement was broken in
a few months and J P was left ruing that his "world lay
in shambles". Chandra highlights the weaknesses inherent
in J P as a mass leader that led to the demise of his
total revolution. J P was "unable either to diagnose the
ills of the Indian polity or suggest effective remedies
for them" and merely heaped all the blame on Congress
and Indira Gandhi. Chandra employs adjectives such as
naivete, confusion, woolly thinking, hazy, unrealistic,
romantic, rhetorical, generality, Utopian, inchoate,
commonplace, abstract, exaggeration, hyperbole,
inconsistent, anomalous, arbitrary, opportunistic,
nebulous etc for J P's schemes. Needless to add, the
movement was "undemocratic" and "unconstitutional" in
its composition, aims and methods. Having a social base
in right-wing forces, it was "capable of creating a
space for those of its constituents that were
authoritarian or fascist". (p 154)
The monster
that the JP Movement failed to uncork was more than
compensated by the emergency. As many as 110,000 persons
were arbitrarily detained for the 19 months of Gandhi's
undemocratic governance. "People were arrested on the
slightest suspicion or on the basis of rumors." (p 157)
Parliament was emasculated to rubber-stamp government
decrees, ordinances and constitutional amendments. The
rise of Gandhi's younger son, Sanjay, and his Youth
Congress musclemen sent signals that India was on the
way to becoming a police state. Sanjay's coterie grabbed
decision-making authority without holding any
representative office and assaulted the parliamentary
system severely by proposing, inter alia, that Gandhi be
made president for life.
The first year of the
emergency was, in hindsight, not that harmful for Indira
Gandhi or the country. Poorer Indians still trusted the
premier and intellectuals noted that they were under an
authoritarian, not totalitarian, government. Arun
Shourie, the famous journalist, called it "the mildest
possible dictatorship" compared to China, the USSR or
some of the banana republics. By mid-1976, though, the
glow had begun to fade both among the masses and the
intellectuals. Denial of civil liberties began to pinch
common people and Gandhi herself admitted ex post facto,
"The emergency did get a little bit out of hand because
people started misusing power at different levels." (p
188)
Temporary authoritarianism was being
transformed into a long-term dictatorship, thanks to
Sanjay's growing clout. It was in his Youth Congress
that the fascist potential of the emergency lay.
Forcible sterilization drives, heavy-handed slum
clearances to "beautify and de-congest" Delhi, banning
of industrial strikes, linking worker bonuses to
productivity, concessions to big capitalists, attacks on
progressives, and "disciplining" of the poor - all
pointed to a steep slide towards Nazification of the
country. Most interestingly, J P confessed to be
"pleasantly surprised" by Sanjay's anti-communist
tirades. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), backbone
of the JP Movement's mass mobilization, welcomed the
"emergence of Sanjay Gandhi as a youth leader" and
offered to lend its manpower to the government "for the
upliftment of our country". (p 217) The slide of Indian
polity towards fascism seemed well begun.
Confounding all speculation in January 1977,
Indira Gandhi revoked the emergency and called for fresh
elections, saving Indian democracy in the process. Why
she abandoned Sanjay's advice to perpetuate the
emergency is, to this day, hotly debated. Chandra lists
four possible explanations. First, she wrongly assumed
that since economic conditions were improving and
democracy "mattered little to the masses", they would
vote for her again, overlooking the excesses of the
emergency. Second, she realized that the emergency was
getting discredited and elections alone were an
indispensable text of legitimacy. Third, she "could
never forget that she was the daughter of Jawaharlal
Nehru" and had an underlying commitment to liberal
democracy. Fourth, she discovered Sanjay's clandestine
contacts with foreign embassies, particularly the
Americans, and feared the combination of internal
fascism and foreign influence would be disastrous (a la
Chile in 1973 and Bangladesh in 1975).
Chandra concludes that both the JP
Movement and the emergency threatened Indian democracy.
New Delhi in 1976 may not have been Berlin under Hitler,
but the emergency was obviously "flirting with
totalitarianism". The JP Movement, especially its RSS
component, was positively hostile to parliamentary
democracy. Its vanguard in the petit-bourgeoisie
contained the "classic base of potential fascism". (p
274) Chandra warns of the consequences of an "unthinking
mass movement" like JP's as well as the perils of
strong-state ideologies and Rasputins like Sanjay
Gandhi. The lessons learnt for India from 1974-1977 are
that violent or coercive protests pose threats to the
functioning of democracy, just as insensitive
suppression of normal political agitation is
undemocratic.
Debating the
acceptable limits of popular protest in a parliamentary
democracy and humanizing a great personality like
Jayaprakash Narayan, Bipan Chandra has once again come
up with a classic of contemporary political history.
In the Name of Democracy, by Bipan
Chandra. JP Movement and the Emergency Penguin Books
India, 2003. ISBN: 0-14-302967-3. Price: US$26.25, 374
pages.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
on our sales and syndication policies.)
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