India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Meanwhile, to the north, a famine loomed in Bihar. The tribal areas were worst hit; in Monghyr district, the adivasis were reduced to eating roots. There were acute shortages of water and fodder. The poor had looted grain here and there; the upper classes in the countryside now lived in fear of amore generalizedrebellion.74
To striking students and starving peasants was added amore curious group of dissidents – Hindu holy men, or sadhus. The Hindu orthodoxy had long called for an end to the killing of the sacred cow; now, with the help of the Jana Sangh, the call had been converted into asocial movement.
On 6 November a huge procession was taken through the streets of the capital. Among the 100,000 marchers were many sadhus brandishing tridents and spears. The march culminated in a public meeting outside Parliament House, where the first speaker was Swami Karpatri (of Anti-Hindu Code Bill fame).The crowd were further warmed up by Swami Rameshwaranand, a Jana Sangh MP recently suspended from the Lok Sabha for unruly behaviour. He asked the sadhus to gherao (surround) Parliament. The ‘excited crowd made a beeline for the building, shouting “Swami Rameshwaranand kijai”’. At this point the Jana Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee appealed to the swami to withdraw his call. It was too late. As the sadhus surged towards Parliament’s gates, they were turned back by mounted police. A ding-dong battle ensued: tear-gas and rubber bullets on the one side, sticks and stones on the other. As thick columns of smoke rose over the Houses of Parliament, the crowd retreated, only to vent its anger on what lay in its way. The security kiosk of All-India Radio was gutted, and the house of K. Kamaraj, the Congress president, set on fire. Also destroyed were an estimated 250 cars, 100 scooters and 10 buses. By the evening the army was patrolling the streets, for the first time since the dark days of 1947.
An agitation led by holy men, commented one journal acidly, had resulted in an ‘orgy of violence, vandalism and hooliganism’. A. B. Vajpayee issued a statement deploring the fact that ‘the undesirable elements, who resorted to violent activities in the demonstration against cow-slaughter, had done a great harm to the pious cause’.75
XIII
There was a line of thinking, widely prevalent in the West, which held that only the personality and example of Jawaharlal Nehru had kept India united and democratic. The quick changes of guard since his death, the successive droughts, the countless small rebellions and the major war with Pakistan – these, taken together, seemed only to confirm these fears. In December 1965 the Sydney Morning Herald worried for the future of democracy in India. The paper saw a ‘sweeping upsurge of nationalistic spirit’ in the country, which was ‘in danger of turning into chauvinism, with increasing bitterness towards the Western powers’. This intolerance seemed also to be directed inwards: ‘What many foreign observers are finding particularly perturbing is that free expression of liberal views by Indians seems to be in danger.’76
The same year, 1965, the writer Ronald Segal published a major study titled ‘The Crisis of India’. On a tour of the country he found it on ‘the economic precipice’, with the ‘ground . . . crumbling beneath her . Meanwhile, ‘her international stock was low and falling’. With poverty, scarcity, regional conflicts and corruption all rampant, India reminded Segal at times of Weimar Germany, at other times of Kuomintang China. He held little hope of democracy surviving. Among the ‘authoritarian alternatives’ on offer were ‘Communism on the left’ and ‘militant communalism on the right’, one or other of which was likely to prevail before too many years had passed.77
Also despairing of the country’s future was Reverend Michael Scott. A friend who met him in May 1966 found him
very depressed, not about his failure in regard to the Naga settlement, but about India in general. His view is that the older and abler generation is now dying off and being replaced by little, corrupt and wholly inefficient men. He has a strong feeling that sooner or later India is going to disintegrate and that the whole thing may sink into a Vietnam-type morass into which Britain and America may be drawn.78
When the monsoon failed again in 1966, the predictions were of mass starvation rather than of the break-up of India or the abrogation of democracy. To many Western environmentalists, India seemed to provide striking proof of Malthus’s prophecy that human population growth would one day outstrip food supply. The respected Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that while he had ‘understood the population explosion intellectually for along time’, he ‘came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago’. As his taxi crawled through the streets, he saw around him ‘people eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People. People. People.’79
The same year Ehrlich was writing this, two other American biologists were finishing a book which argued that ‘today, India is the first of the hungry nations to stand at the brink of famine and disaster’. Tomorrow, ‘the famines will come’, and ‘riding alongside will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government will be too weak to control’. They predicted 1975 as the year by which ‘civil disorder, anarchy, military dictatorships, runaway inflation, transportation breakdowns and chaotic unrest will be the order of the day’.80
In truth, even some knowledgeable Indian observers had begun to fear for the fate of their country. In the first week of November 1966 a traditionally pro-Congress paper published a leading article entitled ‘The Grimmest Situation in 19 Years’. The student strikes and the food scarcities were attributed to a ‘virtual breakdown of authority’. The article predicted that ‘the wave of violence will grow in intensity’, with ‘many other parts of the country being turned into Bihars’. ‘The future of the country is dark for many reasons’, said the Hindustan Times, ‘all of them directly attributable to 19 years of Congress rule.’81
19
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LEFTWARD TURNS
Never, never underestimate a politician’s need to survive . . . I will not make the mistake of underestimating the political instinct of a Kashmiri, who is, additionally, Jawaharlal Nehru s daughter.
Anonymous Indian columnist, May 1966
I
THE GENERAL ELECTION SCHEDULED for early 1967 would be the fourth since Independence, and the first since Jawaharlal Nehru’s death. In the last weeks of 1966, an American magazine sent a reporter to assess the lie of the land. He was struck by ‘the bizarre range of India’s seething problems of religious fanaticism, language barriers, regional feuds’. Adding to the unrest were food shortages and inflation, and ‘a continuing population explosion [which] impedes almost all progress’. These varied forms of violence had ‘raised speculation that the elections [of 1967] may not be held’. The reporter thought it possible that ‘the breakdown of law and order will be so complete that the Army will take power, as happened in neighbouring Pakistan and Burma’. And there was a more dismal prospect still – namely, that the ‘collapse of the present regime [in India] would add a grim new element to the job the US has taken on in Vietnam – the effort to assure political stability and economic strength in Asia.’1
To the average Western visitor, India was – and remains – a strange, even overwhelming, place. This particular journalist was on his first – and so far as one can tell, last – visit. But as it happened, his prognosis was endorsed by another who doubtless knew India much better, having already lived there for six years at the time.
This was Neville Maxwell of the London Times,who in the first weeks of 1967 wrote a series of articles on ‘India’s Disintegrating Democracy’. As Maxwell saw it, ‘famine is threatening, the administration is strained and universally believed to be corrupt, the government and the governing party have lost public confidence and belief in themselves as well’. These various crises had created an ‘emotional readiness for the rejection of Parliamentary democracy’. The ‘politically sophisticated
Maxwell’s own view was that ‘the crisis is upon India’ – he could discern ‘the already fraying fabric of the nation itself’, with the states ‘already beginning to act like sub-nations’. His conclusion was unequivocal: that while Indians would soon vote in ‘the fourth – and surely last – general election’, ‘the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed’.
The imminent collapse of democracy in India, thought Maxwell, would provoke a frantic search for ‘an alternative antidote for the society’s troubles’. As he saw it, ‘in India, as present trends continue, within the ever-closing vice of food and population, maintenance of an ordered structure of society is going to slip out of reach of an ordered structure of civil government and the army will be the only alternative source of authority and order. That it will be drawn into a civil role seems inevitable, the only doubt is how?’
Maxwell thought that ‘a mounting tide of public disorder, fed perhaps by pockets of famine’ , would lead to calls for a strengthening of the office of the president, who would be asked ‘to assert a stabilizing authority over the centre and the country’. Backing him would be the army, which would come to exercise ‘more and more civil authority’. In this scenario, the president would become ‘either the actual source of political authority, or a figure-head for a group composed possibly of army officers and a few politicians’. 2
II
There are some fine ethnographic accounts of the 1967 Indian general election, field studies of different constituencies by scholars familiar with their culture and social composition. These show that elections were no longer a top-dressing on inhospitable soil; they had been fully indigenized, made part of Indian life, a festival with its own unique set of rituals, enacted every five years. The energy and intensity of this particular iteration was manifest in the large turnout at rallies and leaders speeches, and in the colourful posters and slogans used to glorify parties or debunk their opponents. The rivalries were intense, at the state as well as the national level. Opposing the ruling Congress were parties to its left, such as the various communist and socialist fragments; and parties to the right, such as Jana Sangh and Swatantra. In some states the Congress’s competition came from regional groupings – such as the Akali Dal in the Punjab and the DMK in Madras.
As these ethnographies reveal, twenty years of economic development had deepened and complicated the process of political competition. Often, rival candidates had cut their teeth running schools, colleges and co-operatives before contesting a legislative or parliamentary election. Those institutions were vehicles of prestige and patronage, their control valuable in itself and a means of mobilizing voter support.3
The election of 1967 is the first I have any personal memories of. What I remember best is this slogan, shouted with vigour along the streets of the small sub-Himalayan town in which I lived: ‘Jana Sangh ko vote do, bidi peena chhod do/ Bidi mein tambaku hai, Kangresswala daku hai’.
The Congress Party was full of thieves, and the cheroot contained that dangerous substance, tobacco: by rejecting both and embracing the Jana Sangh – the leading opposition party in town – the voter would purify himself as well as the government. Such was the slogan’s message, which apparently resonated with many citizens. So found a survey of voters in thirteen states, conducted by the country’s pioneer pollster, E. P. W. da Costa of the Indian Institute of Public Opinion. Conducted just before the polls, this survey found that the Congress had ‘lost a great deal of its charisma’; it approached the election ‘for the first time, as a political loser not as a guaranteed victor’.
The survey suggested that while the Congress would retain power in the centre, it would drop its vote share by 2–3 percentage points and lose perhaps fifty seats in the Lok Sabha. But it would lose even more heavily in the states. According to da Costa, non-Congress governments would be formed in the states of Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Rajas-than, and perhaps also in Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.
Why had support for the Congress declined? The survey found that the minorities, once a loyal vote bank, were disenchanted with the party, as were large sections of the young and the less educated. On the other side, the opposition was more united than before. In most states, non-Congress parties had made seat adjustments – which meant that, unlike in the past, the Congress could not so easily benefit from a three- or four-way division of the vote.
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Table 19.1 – Performance of the Congress in Indian elections, 1952–67
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LOK SABHA STATE ASSEMBLIES
Percentage of total Percentage of total
Year Votes Seats Votes Seats
1952 45.0 74.4 42.0 68.4
1957 47.8 75.1 45.5 65.1
1962 44.5 71.8 44.0 60.5
1967 40.7 54.5 40.0 48.5
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As da Costa saw it, this fourth general election would inaugurate a ‘second Non-Violent Revolution in India’s recent history’. The first was begun by Mahatma Gandhi in 1919, and culminated in Independence in 1947. Since then, the Congress had held power in the centre as well as all the states, except for a very brief spell in Kerala. Now, this election would signal ‘the disintegration of the monolithic exercise of power by the Congress Party’. Da Costa’s conclusion is worth quoting: ‘To the candidates this is, perhaps, a struggle for power; to the political scientist it is, as nearly half a century ago, the beginning of a break with the past. It is by no means yet a revolt; but it may in time be a revolution.’4
Poll predictions are notorious for being unreliable – in India perhaps even more than elsewhere. But when the actual results came in, da Costa must have felt vindicated. In the Lok Sabha the Congress’s seat tally had dropped from 361 to 283, while its losses in the state assemblies were even greater. The party’s decline is summed up in Table 19.1.
III
The most humiliating defeat suffered by the Congress was in the southern state of Madras. Here, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) swept the polls, winning 138 seats out of a total of 234 in the Assembly. The Congress won a mere 50. The DMK leader C. N. Annadurai was sworn in as chief minister.
Madras had long been a Congress stronghold; many national leaders, past and present, hailed from the state. Now, even the venerable K. Kamaraj was washed away in the landslide. He lost in his home town, Virudhunagar, to a 28-year-old student activist named P. Srinivasan. When the news reached Madras, jubilant DMK cadres found a namesake of the victor, placed him on a horse and paraded him through the city. Of the Congress president’s defeat, a respected weekly wrote that ‘in terms of political prestige, here and abroad, it was beyond any doubt, the worst blow ever suffered by Mr. Kamaraj’s party, before or after independence’.5
The Congress had a fairly good record in the state; its administration was known to be clean and efficient. Some commentators thought that the DMK rode to victory on the back of the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965. However, that movement itself was made possible by patient organizational work over the past decade. The DMK had fanned out into the towns and villages, creating local clubs and party branches. Crucial here were its links with the hugely popular Tamil film industry. One of its main leaders, M. Karunanidhi, was a successful scriptwriter. More important, it had the support – moral as well as material – of the great popular film hero M. G. Ramachandran (MGR).
Originally from Kerala, but born to a family of plantation labourers in Sri Lanka, MGR had a fanatical following in the Tamil countryside. In his films he vanquished the forces of evil, these variously represented by policemen, landlords, foreigners and the state. The movies he starred in played to packed houses, with viewers seeing them over and over again. Many of his most devoted fans were women.
All across Madras, MGR manrams (fan clubs) had been established. These discussed his films and also
A month before the 1967 elections, MGR was shot and wounded by a rival film star named M. R. Radha (the two, apparently, had fallen out over what men in general, and Indian film stars in particular, usually fall out over). Photographs of the wounded hero were abundantly used in the election campaign. MGR himself decided to stand – he won his seat in a canter, and his party did the same.6
In power, the DMK practised what one scholar has called an ‘assertive and paternalist populism’. Where the Congress brought large industrial projects to the state, the DMK focused on schemes that might win it immediate support. Thus it increased the percentage of government jobs reserved for the lower castes who were its own chief source of support. Greater control was exercised over the trade in cereals, and food subsidies granted to the urban poor. Meanwhile, to foster regional pride, the government organized an international conference on Tamil culture and language, in which scholars from twenty countries participated, and where the chief minister expressed the hope that Tamil would become the link language for the whole of India.7