India After Gandhi (89 page)

Jagmohan’s operations focused on the old city, where Mughal monuments and mosques nested cheek-by-jowl with damp houses and dark streets. On the morning of 13 April 1976 a bulldozer moved into the Turkman Gate area, behind Asaf Ali Road, the street that divides Old Delhi from New. In two days it had demolished a slum of recent origin, housing forty families. Then it moved towards a set of
pucca
houses of uncertain antiquity. The residents contacted their MP, a Congress Party member and old associate of Mrs Gandhi named Sub-hadra Joshi. Mrs Joshi in turn contacted the officials of the DDA; Jagmohan himself was appealed to.

The negotiations stalled the operations temporarily, but in a couple of days they had resumed. Three bulldozers were at work, acting, they said, on Jagmohan’s orders. They had demolished more than a hundred houses when, acting in desperation, a group of women and children squatted on the road and defied the bulldozers to run over them. When they refused to move, the DDA called for the police. In sympathy with the protesters, shops in the vicinity began to close.

The police tried to shift the squatters with sticks and, when that failed, with tear-gas. The retaliation came in the form of stones. The fighting escalated and spread into the narrow lanes. The numbers of the mob grew; the police progressed from using tear-gas to using bullets. It took the better part of a day before order was restored. Estimates of the number who died in the fighting range from 10 to 200. Curfew was imposed in the Old City; it was a full month before it was lifted.
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The offices of India’s leading newspapers are on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, less than a mile away from Turkman Gate. Yet in the conditions of the emergency none could write about the incident. However, the underground picked it up and played it up. The news reached Sheikh Abdullah, who was ‘terribly distressed’ by the shootings. He complained to the prime minister, who agreed that he could visit the area. Accompanied by a leading Congress politician, Abdullah toured the Old City, speaking to people about their recent experiences.
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There he learnt that aside from the natural reluctance to leave their houses, the protesters had been hurt by being subject to the first of Sanjay Gandhi’s five points – family planning. In June1976 the underground newspaper
Satya Samachar
reported that the Sheikh had told a group of Congress MPs that ‘the whole trouble began when young, old and even invalid people were dragged off to the sterilization camps. Nobody has any quarrel with the economic policies of the Prime Minister, but the way in which they are being implemented, I am sure, will lead to an explosion.’
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In fairness, Sanjay Gandhi was not the only person concerned about his country’s large and still growing population. The Malthusian spectre had long haunted India, as the pages of this book should have made clear already. Western journalists feared large-scale famine; Western biologists had written off the country altogether. Many Indians also worried that a rising population would put paid to the other achievements of their nation. Between 1857 and 1947 gross national product stagnated; there were periods in which it even declined. After Independence, GNP grew at 3 per cent per annum. However, with the high increase in human numbers, the per capita income grew at a mere 1 per cent a year.

The debates on India’s population size dated from the earliest days of Independence. Social workers had set up a Family Planning Association
of India in 1949. The Planning Commission had spoken of the importance of family planning since its inception in 1950–1. However, culture and economics worked in favour of large families. The biases in educational development meant that girls were still valued more as child-bearers than as wage-earners. The continuing dependence on agriculture placed a premium on children. Indian Muslims and Catholics were enjoined by their clergy to abjure family planning. And Hindu couples greatly preferred sons to daughters, trying and trying again until they had one.

In 1901 the population of India stood at about 240 million; by 1971 it had reached close to 550 million. In this period, birth rates had fallen slightly, from nearly 50 births per 1,000 Indians to about 40. However, the decline in death rates had been far steeper, from 42 per 1,000 at the turn of the century down to 15 by the 1970s. Advances in medical care and more nutritious food allowed all Indians, including infants previously liable to early death, to live longer. But since the birth rate and average family size did not decline at a comparable rate, the population continued to rise.
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It is difficult precisely to date Sanjay Gandhi’s own interest in family planning. His
Surge
interview of August 1975 does not mention the subject at all. Yet a year later, the
Illustrated Weekly of India
was speaking of how ‘Sanjay has given a big impetus to the Family Planning Programme throughout the country’. He claimed that if his programme was implemented, ‘50 per cent of our problems will be solved’. He expressed himself in favour of compulsory sterilization, for which facilities should be provided ‘right down to the village level’.
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Of Sanjay Gandhi’s five points, writes his biographer, the other four were humdrum, unglamorous, ‘hardly the stuff to build charismatic leadership credentials on’. But ‘family planning was. Here was a Herculean project, the solving of which, everyone acknowledged, was vital if the nation hoped to survive, let alone prosper’. And so, ‘family planning became the lynchpin of Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency activities’.
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In his tours around India, Sanjay Gandhi catalysed a competitive process between the states of the Union. Sanjay would tell one chief minister of what another had claimed to have done – ‘60,000 operations in two weeks’ – and encourage him to exceed it. These targets were passed down to district officials, who were rewarded if they met or exceeded them and transferred otherwise. The process led to widespread coercion. Lower government officials had to submit to the surgeon’s
knife before arrears of pay were cleared. Truck drivers would not have their licences renewed if they could not produce a sterilization certificate. Slum dwellers would not be allotted a plot for resettlement unless they did likewise.
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The hand of the state fell heavily in the towns, but the villagers were not spared either. An anthropologist doing fieldwork in Maharashtra’s Satara district reported that the emergency had little impact in its first year. A few homes were built for the landless under the twenty-point programme. A few slogans were painted denouncing the dictatorship. Then, in September 1976 – shortly after Sanjay Gandhi’s visit to the state – a campaign for compulsory sterilization began in the villages. Local officials prepared lists of ‘eligible men’, that is, of those who already had three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders. Those who had undergone a vasectomy were too embarrassed to talk about it.
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As with slum demolition, here too there was resistance. In September 1976 an underground newspaper reported a ‘wave of protests’ against family planning in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. There were clashes between health officials and shopkeepers refusing to be sterilized. Resistance was reported from many towns in UP – Sultanpur, Kanpur, Bareilly.There was great resentment among school teachers, who had been asked to conduct house-to-house surveys in pursuance of the sterilization campaign. As many as 150 teachers were arrested for defying orders.

The worst incident, the Turkman Gate of family planning so to speak, took place in the town of Muzaffarnagar, seventy miles northwest of Delhi. The district magistrate here was notorious for his zeal, and for his communalism – under his orders, the chiefly Hindu police had gone with particular relish for Muslim artisans and labourers. On 18 October a scuffle broke out between officials promoting sterilization and their potential victims. Their pent-up anger released, the mob torched the health clinics and threw bottles and stones. The police were called in, and resorted very quickly to firing, in which more than fifty people died. A delegation of opposition MPs rushed to the town but were prohibited from speaking to the residents. However, reports leaked into the foreign press, and the prime minister was constrained to admit in Parliament that there had been an ‘incident’ in Muzaffarnagar.
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An incidental victim of Sanjay Gandhi’s family planning drive was
the great popular singer Kishore Kumar. Other film stars and musicians agreed to perform in a programme to raise money forsterilization, but Kishore refused. As a consequence, his songs were banned from Vividh Bharati, the AIR channel that exclusively broadcast film music. The Film Censor Board was instructed to hold up the release of movies in which Kishore acted or sang. Sanjay’s men also warned record companies against selling Kishore’s songs. It was an act of petty vindictiveness in keeping with the times.
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That the prime minister chose, at a time of crucial political importance, to rely on Sanjay Gandhi rather than P. N. Haksar and company – this was an excursion in reasoning that even her close friends found difficult to understand. Various theories were offered – that it was the manifestation of the guilt of a working mother and single parent, that she was paranoid about assassination and hence could trust only her family, that Sanjay knew her darkest secrets and hence had a hold over her, that she was grateful for his support when the emergency was declared. However appealing to the biographer, to the historian such speculation is nearly useless. For what matters here is not intent but consequence – not why Mrs Gandhi chose to rely so much on her younger son but on what this reliance meant for India and Indians.

It is tempting to view Mrs Gandhi’s political career as being divided into two phases, with the emergency and Sanjay Gandhi providing the dividing line. Before Sanjay, it might be said, she won elections, created Bangladesh, reformed the Congress Party and made bold attempts to reorganize the economy. Under Sanjay’s malign influence she turned her back on these larger social goals and became obsessed with the preservation of herself and herfamily.
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However, when one views the prime minister’s career in the round, Sanjay and the emergency should be said to mark not a radical departure from past practice, but a deepening of it. From the time of the Congress split, Mrs Gandhi had worked to place loyal individuals in position of authority, and to make public institutions an instrument of her will. Institutions such as the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the presidency and the Congress Party had been eroded well before the emergency. Sanjay’s
arrival took the process further – some would argue much further. It also vulgarized and corrupted it, and made it more violent. But the process itself antedated his entry into Indian politics.

By June 1975 Mrs Gandhi had been prime minister of India for a little less than a decade. When one compares her tenure with that of her father, one is struck by a striking paradox – that Nehru’s halting yet honest attempts to promote a democratic ethos in a hierarchical society were undone by his own daughter, and in decisive and dramatic ways. The grievously mistaken dismissal of the communist government in Kerala aside, Nehru took seriously the idea of an opposition. But Mrs Gandhi paid other political parties scant respect. She attended Parliament less regularly than Nehru, and spoke much less when in it. Nehru forged abiding friendships with politicians of other parties – something quite inconceivable in the case of Mrs Gandhi. Then there was the contrast with how they treated their own party. In Nehru’s time the Congress was a decentralized and largely democratic organization. Even had he been so inclined, he would not have been able to impose a chief minister against the will of a state’s own politicians.

The contrast is reinforced when one considers the other, non-political aspects of democratic life in India. Nehru respected the freedom of the press, and allowed it to flourish. Nehru respected the autonomy of the bureaucracy and the judiciary: there are no known cases of his having intervened to favour or act against a particular official.

At least from the time of the Congress split in 1969, Mrs Gandhi had begun to depart from the political traditions of India’s founding premier. The departures became more marked over the years, and became fully apparent only with the enactment of the emergency and the repression that followed. For partisan reasons of their own, opposition politicians could not posit a contrast between the first and third prime ministers of India. Because they had once opposed Nehru, and because the Congress was now led by his daughter, they could scarcely praise one and diminish the other.

Unbound by such constraints, Western writers who knew both leaders could see quite clearly how Indira Gandhi had departed from Jawaharlal Nehru. A year into the emergency, two British friends of Nehru made the contrast the focus of their criticisms of the regime. Writing in the
Times
, Fenner Brockway deplored the conversion of ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ into a ‘repressive dictatorship’. Himself ‘a son of India’, Brockway ‘appeal[ed] to Mrs Gandhi in memory of the
principles of her distinguished father, to end these denials of freedom and liberty’.
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Writing in the Spectator, John Grigg recalled Nehru’s commitment to free elections and a free press. India’s first prime minister was ‘a true patriot because he was a true democrat . . . During his long premiership he made many mistakes but on the vital libertarian issue he never broke faith with the Indian people.’ But now, noted Grigg sadly, ‘Nehru’s tryst with destiny seems to have been turned into atryst with despotism – and by his own daughter.’ Mrs Gandhi ‘should have been the proudest upholder of India’s democratic experiment, which was proving to the whole world that people did not have to be rich or educated to enjoy civil liberties’. Yet by her actions she had ‘spuriously confirmed’ the view of ‘old-fashioned imperialists’ that ‘only authoritarian methods can work in a country like India’. Grigg asked the prime minister to free herself from her son’s influence and return to the values of her father’s generation. Indeed, he implore[d] her – at whatever cost in power, “face”, and mother-love – to restore the freedoms she has taken away’. To do so, he wrote, ‘would be the hardest act of her career but it would also be the bravest and best’.
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