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By Kuldip Nayar
Friday, 06 Nov, 2009
IF all the publicity by the Congress-ruled central and state governments could efface the stigma of misgovernance attached to Indira Gandhi’s rule, it would have happened long ago.
Twenty-five years after her death, the same sources did not have to go through the exercise all over again with crores of rupees going down the drain. The effort failed because there was no introspection, no regret.
Indira Gandhi’s cardinal sin was not the imposition of the emergency but the elimination of morality from politics. She rubbed off the thin line that differentiates right from wrong, the moral from the immoral. Her demolition of values was so thorough that the dividing line stays erased even today.
In the first 19 years after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru and his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, saved the nation from falling prey to power politics. They used their office to serve the nation. But Indira Gandhi was different. She had no qualms about making power an end in itself. She should have resigned on moral grounds when she was disqualified by the Allahabad High Court for a poll offence.
Instead of resigning, she imposed the emergency to overturn the entire system to save her skin. She had parliament pass a law to remove the disqualification bar. She did not think it appropriate to consult even the cabinet which was summoned in the morning to endorse the proclamation which the president had ‘signed’ the night before.
There was no evidence of the breakdown of law and order or a deterioration in economic conditions, a necessity for the imposition of the emergency and suspension of fundamental rights.
Mrs Gandhi was never happy with the press. Her first order was to gag it. The media has still not regained its equilibrium even after 34 years. It has now developed the quality to stay on the right side of every political party that is in power. That is the reason why newspaper articles on her 25th death anniversary hardly mentioned her misdeeds.
Mahatma Gandhi taught the nation to shed fear. Indira Gandhi recreated fear. Whether it was the press, the judiciary or the bureaucracy, they compromised out of fear. The nation was first in a state of shock over her actions. When she split the Congress party in 1969, the people did not realise the implications of her actions. By the time they did, the virus had spread into the body politic.
She decimated what was called the impartial bureaucracy. It caved in under pressure. Desire for self-preservation underlay the government servants’ actions and behaviour. They carried out her orders, without questioning them. Ethical considerations or traditional values could not be grasped. They became a tool of tyranny in her hands.
Indira Gandhi came up with the word ‘commitment’ long before the emergency to assess the loyalty of the bureaucrats. Some of them differed to say that their commitment was to the constitution of India. But they were either ignored at the time of promotion or relegated to an unimportant post. The poison she injected continues to run in the veins of bureaucrats who administer the system at the whim of those who come to power. They change their loyalty and colour when a new regime takes over. Objectivity and independence in decision-making has been the biggest casualty since the days of Indira Gandhi.
The judiciary also felt the pressure of commitment. She went above three supreme court judges to appoint her own person as chief justice. He came in handy when the case of the emergency’s endorsement was before him. The supreme court judgment was 11 to 1. The lone dissenter, the senior-most judge, was not made the chief justice when his turn came.
The biggest damage she did in her 18-year-rule was to the institutions which her father, Nehru, had founded and nourished. She even manoeuvred parliament when she lost the majority in the Lok Sabha in the wake of the party’s split. She weakened the Congress and its ideological stand to such an extent that it paved the way for the BJP to come to power at the centre—something that appeared impossible at one time.
Indira Gandhi certainly began her political life with a remarkable mix of many things — the capacity to listen, to comprehend at different levels, to communicate with the last man. And she was strictly and totally secular in region and religion. These qualities underwent different permutations and combinations in later days.
She would use every trick to win at the polls. Her slogan, ‘You vote for me and I shall oust poverty’ worked. So did moves like the nationalisation of banks and insurance companies. But they brought no comfort to the ordinary person. Poverty continued. Was it a failure of political will or innate conservatism?
Somewhere along the way a new factor entered to restrict her vision. Her son, Sanjay Gandhi, became the extra-constitutional authority. The order, built by him, has not been dismantled and one can see it in governance even today.Indira Gandhi used all methods to break those who opposed her. I wonder if she gets even a footnote in history. If at all it would be because of Operation Bluestar against the Sikhs’ Golden Temple at Amritsar. She had the tanks roll into the precincts of the gurdwara.
Indira Gandhi paid a heavy price. Her Sikh bodyguards killed her to avenge the attack on the Golden Temple. But then the government’s retaliation was criminal. It did not act in 1984 for three days during which 3,000 Sikhs were butchered in Delhi. It is an irony that the Sikhs have recalled the killings this week, the 25th anniversary of the massacre, when the Congress party has held meetings and photo exhibitions to glorify Indira Gandhi who died 25 years ago.
Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister. They both gave India a firm ethical and democratic foundation.
