A dissolved people

By Jawed Naqvi

June 26 is a black letter day in India's post colonial history. It marks the suspension of civil liberties, imprisonment of opposition leaders and clamping of press censorship by Indira Gandhi in 1975.

The elections produced two diverse results that continue to haunt Indian politics. They consolidated the control of the Hindu right on the levers of power and they gave the communists an as yet unbroken opportunity to dabble in bourgeois politics. - Photo on file

Her perverse experiment ended when she called elections after 21 months of unbridled dictatorship. She suffered a humiliating defeat in the polls but regained power in 1980 till she was tragically killed by her own bodyguards four years later.

Did India's tryst with emergency rule end with the 1977 elections? There are enough reasons to believe it did not. The laws are more draconian and anti-people today. A law in Chhattisgarh, almost like the one that Faiz Ahmed Faiz worried about, can have you locked up for harbouring a mere thought that could be deemed to affect public order.

The media, accused of crawling when Indira Gandhi asked them to bend, seems to have been co-opted in a not so subtle way so as to turn it into a veritable adjunct of the state. The combination of a rightward-leaning state and a mostly pliant rather than questioning media easily makes the Gandhi emergency look benign.

Many seeds of the country's ongoing strife were purposely planted by the ideological right even as the rest of the country, oblivious of the subterfuge, celebrated the apparent return of people's power in 1977. The very first thing that the new government did was to ban history textbooks written for schools by India's best scholars, including Bipan Chandra and Romila Thapar.

Public memory they say is short and indeed few would remember the ominous legacy of a Bengali rightwing maverick called Pratap Chander Chunder, who became the education minister in the new government. It must be said unequivocally that the subsequent rightwing violence in Ayodhya, Gujarat and elsewhere in the country could be directly traced to the new, pugnacious way in which India's middle classes have begun to conjure up the country's past.

This and similar assaults on the country's intellectual prowess were only the first step in turning the discourse decisively to the right. With it the nation's quest, which had been embedded in the country's egalitarian romance, was handed to private speculators.

As the new secular-communal political paradigm claimed the limelight the real intent of the state surfaced dramatically. The emerging system carried the secular scimitar in one hand and a communal whip in the other. The embodiment of this can be seen typically in India's best-known cousins - both Indira Gandhi's grandsons.

Rahul Gandhi representing the Congress swears that his religion is the Indian flag. His vitriolic cousin Varun Gandhi, holding the torch for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, claims his religion is militant Hinduism. Both have contributed to the waning of India's robust questioning spirit. Both have shepherded their flock to a fatalistic acceptance of free markets as their messiah and corporate takeover of the country's body politic as the panacea against galloping poverty.

(Early signs that the exultations of democracy in India were skin deep even though Mrs Gandhi was routed came when some of us went to Delhi's Jama Masjid to celebrate the election results. Our euphoria was quickly disabused as we watched in dismay a police constable kicking and abusing a rickshaw driver for refusing to give the law keeper a free ride. In other words, visit a police station if you want to see how democracy works in India.)

The elections produced two diverse results that continue to haunt Indian politics. They consolidated the control of the Hindu right on the levers of power and they gave the communists an as yet unbroken opportunity to dabble in bourgeois politics. It is not an exaggeration that in the balance of the power prevailing today the right has expanded enormously while the left has been abbreviated in its own lair in West Bengal and in Kerala. The dismal show is sometimes blamed on the parliamentary communists' penchant for seeking to uncritically emulate China's flirtation with transnational capitalism.

Fortunately, in the 35th year since Mrs Gandhi's emergency uncorked the genie, the domination of the Hindu right is not complete in India, and probably can never be. Yet as an ideology it has gained acceptance beyond the groups and parties that were or are part of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its many offshoots, BJP being one of them.

It is not wise to see the emergency without referring to Indira Gandhi's international liaisons, particularly her Cold War nexus with Moscow. That was why the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India supported her dictatorship. That was why the then pro-China Communist Party of India-Marxists and also the ultra left groups opposed it. But her main detractors were pro-West groups, led by the Hindu right.

While domestic politics in India has had international ramifications the reverse is equally true. The emergency was symptomatic of one such. As one trenchant critic of the government pointed out it was not a coincidence that in 1975, one year after India first dipped her toe into the nuclear sea, Mrs Gandhi declared the emergency.

What followed the 1998 Pokharan II tests carried similar forebodings for Indian democracy, although the nuclear adventure was placed mostly in an international context. The bolder writers were even then hinting at cells being set up to monitor anti-national activity. Harassment of artists, writers, actors and singers began to touch new heights. Some of the assaults came from private vigilantes, but the government's own involvement was not unknown.

It may be a coincidence that India's Home Minister P. Chidambaram will be in Pakistan on June 26 when his Indian critics will be observing the day to slam his policies. He will be in Islamabad as part of a Saarc ministerial meeting. Representing South Asia's most experienced democracy at a meeting that will probably deal with curtailing civil liberties (in the name of fighting terrorism) will sadly not require too much adjustment for the Indian visitor.

One hopes that his ministry's recent Bushism - to the effect that those who criticise the government's militarist approach towards left extremists, for example, are themselves terrorists - would be rejected as an approach to fighting terrorism in the region.

But democracies are often the most deceptive of political systems that insidiously work against their people. After the East Germans workers revolted on June 17, 1953, the secretary of the Writers' Union had flyers distributed claiming that the people had frivolously thrown away the government's confidence and that they could only regain it through redoubled work.

It was thus that Bertolt Brecht, though himself a partisan, remarked in disgust: "But wouldn't it be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected another?"

The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi.


jawednaqvi@gmail.com