India After Independence: 1947-2000 (46 page)

It is significant that the only major institution she built up was that of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat (PMO), which she had inherited from Shastri and which became an independent bureaucratic source of policy, advice and initiative and decision-making, thus severely undermining the autonomous role of the cabinet members.

Nevertheless, despite all the concentration of power in her hands, it would be wrong to say that Indira Gandhi was undemocratic or tried or even wanted to impose an authoritarian regime. Except for the period 1975-77, she functioned within the parliamentary framework and played an important role in India remaining on the democratic path. She accepted, even when she did not like it, the authority of the judiciary. She did not tinker with the Press, even when it subjected her to calumnies, or with academic freedom, even when a large number of academic intellectuals had become severe critics of her. Even the Emergency was imposed in accord with the provisions of the Constitution. Moreover, it was she who lifted the Emergency, announced and held elections, gracefully accepted the verdict of the vote and gave up power—a feat rarely, if at all, performed by dictators.

An example of Indira Gandhi’s failure to build up institutions was in respect of the Congress party. She had hardly any capacity or even time for party organization, but was not willing to share the task with others. Even though she replenished the party’s social support base, she failed to reorganize and revitalize it after the 1969 split. As a result, it was unable to keep contact with the people except during the elections; and as an organization it gradually decayed, especially at the local and state levels. She ruled supreme in the party—she virtually nominated the party president, members of its Working Committee, heads of its state units and other party organizations. There was also hardly any inner-party democracy and debate on issues, not to speak of criticism of the central leadership. The culture of sycophancy prevailed even after the death of Sanjay Gandhi. However, despite her total supremacy, Indira Gandhi could not prevent the prevalence of intense factionalism in the party at the local and state levels. And, many a time, sycophants turned into rebels and party-splitters when frustrated in their hopes.

Once again, political and tactical skill enabled Indira Gandhi to manage and control the party but she could not accomplish the strategic task of reinvigorating it or building it up as an organization. She did succeed in reaching out to the people and establishing direct contact with them, but only through populist measures and only during electoral campaigns and mass meetings. This could enable her and the party to have dominance in the legislatures and over the government, but it did not make it possible for the party to exercise political hegemony among the people
outside the legislatures or keep for long the support gained at the polls. Consequently, through most of her prime ministerial period she was troubled and harassed by popular movements and agitations.

Even though providing some succour and benefits to the poor and oppressed, Indira Gandhi failed to fulfil her promise of bringing about radical socio-economic change or combining economic growth with social justice. In spite of her long tenure, the economy and society did not move much towards greater social and economic equality. In fact, quite the reverse; India of 1984 was more not less inequitable than India of 1966.

This incapacity to move India in a greater egalitarian direction was further intensified by her failure to reshape Congress into a popular instrument of political education and mobilization and an agent of social and political transformation. Congress continued to harbour strongly conservative as also radical elements. While the poor and the deprived gave her and Congress massive electoral support in 1971, 1972 and 1980, the composition and structure of the party continued unchanged and perhaps even worsened with the induction of black money and criminals into parties and politics.

A giant of a person, with many strengths and many weaknesses, Indira Gandhi strode the Indian political stage after independence longer than any other leader—longer than even her father—and she was fully justified in telling a friend a few days before her assassination: ‘Whatever happens to me—I feel I have paid all my debts.’
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And India and its people were surely richer for her having done so.

Rajiv, son of Indira Gandhi and grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, became prime minister of India on the night of 31 October 1985. That morning, Indira had begun to walk from her home to her office to keep an appointment for a television interview with Peter Ustinov. Instead, she met her fate in the person of two Sikh guards who shot at her to take revenge for her storming of the Golden Temple to flush out Sikh terrorists in June 1984. By the afternoon, Indira was declared dead and, while Rajiv was away in West Bengal, senior Congress leaders had (with the concurrence of the President, Giani Zail Singh, who had rushed back from Yemen) decided to ask Rajiv to become prime minister. A reluctant Rajiv, persuading an even more reluctant Sonia, his Italian-born wife, accepted this decision which would ultimately lead to his tragic death six and a half years later at the hands of a Tamil terrorist human suicide-bomber.

Rajiv Gandhi, a pilot with Indian Airlines for fourteen years, had kept studiously aloof from politics till the death of his younger brother, Sanjay, in an air crash in June 1980. After Sanjay’s death, Indira persuaded him to help her and in June 1981 he formally entered politics by getting elected to the Lok Sabha from Amethi, the constituency in U.P. vacated by Sanjay’s death. He was placed in charge of organizing the Asian Games in New Delhi in 1982, and by all accounts did a commendable job. In February 1983, he became one of the seven new general secretaries of the Congress, with the responsibility of rejuvenating the Congress at the grassroots, the urgency of the task having been brought home by losses in provincial elections. But the gradual apprenticeship to politics was cut short and he was catapulted into the driving seat. With elections due in a few months, Congress leaders naturally wanted someone who could rally the people. Rajiv, in their judgement, was most likely to harness the sympathy wave generated by Indira’s martyrdom.

In the event, they turned out to be correct, and the Congress won by its largest ever majority in the general elections held from 24-27 December 1984, a little earlier than scheduled. If the seats won in the
polls held later in Punjab and Assam are counted, the party garnered 415 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats. Rajiv himself won by a huge margin from Amethi in U.P., in the process defeating conclusively Sanjay’s wife, Maneka, who wanted to establish her claim to Sanjay’s legacy. The Congress election campaign had focused on the threat to India’s unity and integrity and, since Indira’s death was seen by people as proof of the threat, the response was enormous. The huge majority also meant high, even unreal, expectations, which Rajiv himself once described as ‘scary’.
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In fact, Rajiv was faced with major crises from the outset. He had hardly any time to come to terms with the personal grief of his mother’s violent death. As the dignitaries from across the world were arriving in Delhi for Indira Gandhi’s funeral, a horrific massacre of Sikhs in revenge for her assassination was taking place in the city, especially on its outskirts in the ‘re-settlement colonies’ where the poorer sections lived. From 31 October, the day of Indira’s death, to 3 November, many Sikhs were attacked, their businesses and houses looted and burnt, and around 2,800 killed.
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The perpetrators were the poor, usually slum-dwellers, who looked upon Indira as their leader and sympathizer, and were disoriented by her violent death. It has also been alleged that Congress party workers and even some local level leaders were involved in assisting and guiding the crowd, and that the police at the local level turned a blind eye to what was going on. This allegation has sometimes been enlarged into a broader charge that the Congress, with directions from the top, organized the massacre, a charge that is obviously unfounded and has been impossible to prove. It is also true that thousands of Sikhs were sheltered and protected by Hindu friends and neighbours. The government’s delay in bringing the situation under control can only be explained by the confusion following Indira’s assassination, with the swearing-in of the new prime minister, the responsibility of arranging the funeral, which was attended by thousands of people, and looking after the foreign guests. It also took a while for the full import of the scale of the massacre to be communicated and understood at the higher levels of the government. On 3 November, the day of the funeral, Rajiv visited some of the affected areas in the morning, and later the army was called in and the violence suppressed. Many voluntary agencies, whose personnel were generally Hindu, worked for months to bring relief to the families of victims. Similar violence, though on a smaller scale, broke out in some other North Indian cities, especially Kanpur and Bokaro.

Within two weeks of his becoming prime minister, there occurred the Bhopal gas leak tragedy, in which around 2,000 people, mostly poor slum-dwellers, lost their lives and many thousands more were taken ill because of poisonous emissions from a chemicals factory run by Union Carbide, a multinational company. The legal battle for compensation dragged on for years in Indian and US courts, and the final settlement was not a generous one, and was further bogged down in bureaucratic delays due to difficulties of identifying the sufferers.

Despite these travails, Rajiv’s administration took off on a positive note, and a number of policy initiatives were launched. At the political level, he set in motion the process that culminated in the Punjab and Assam accords, which have been discussed elsewhere in the book. But perhaps his most well-known initiative was the setting up of six ‘technology missions’, something that for many Indians epitomized the new, modern and technological approach of the youthful prime minister. The idea was to apply science and technology to six areas of underdevelopment in which a scientific approach would be useful in solving problems. These target-oriented projects were designated as ‘technology missions’ and in most cases the arrival of the millennium was set as the target date, the idea being that India must enter the new millennium as a modern nation. The most important of these was the drinking water mission, whose aim was to provide drinking water to all Indian villages, only one-fifth of which had potable water supplies. The idea was to use satellites and the disciplines of geology, civil engineering and biochemistry for identifying, extracting and cleansing water supplies. The literacy mission was aimed at attacking the serious problem of mass illiteracy which almost forty years after independence afflicted almost sixty per cent of the population. This was to be achieved by making use of and extending the television network in rural areas, as well as by using video and audio cassettes and other methods. In fact, this was probably in the long run the most significant of the missions, as the Total Literacy Campaign that it spawned made a major dent in many regions and brought the whole issue to the centre of political debate. The third mission was targetted at the immunization of pregnant women and children, again an idea that has caught on and is pursued with greater vigour today with the mass campaign for immunization of children against polio being a recent example. The fourth mission was to promote the ‘White Revolution’, or milk production, by improving the milk yield and health of cows and buffaloes, and this was remarkably successful. India imported a large quantity of edible oils, which added considerably to her foreign exchange deficit, and the fifth mission was charged with the task of expanding edible oil production. The aim of the sixth mission was to bring one telephone to every village in the country by the end of the century.

The man who inspired and helped implement the technology-mission approach was Sam Pitroda, a young US-trained Indian telecommunications expert who had made a fortune in the US from telephone switching systems. He had convinced Mrs Gandhi of the need to set up C-Dot or the Centre for the Development of Telematics, and he now became Rajiv’s adviser on technology missions, and Telecom Commission chairman.

A big push was also given by Rajiv to India’s computerization programme, which was already being formulated under Mrs Gandhi. Import duties on components were reduced so that domestic producers could enhance production, foreign manufacturers were allowed to enter
the home market so that quality and competitive prices were ensured, and use of computers in offices and schools was encouraged. Realizing that the future was at stake, Rajiv ignored much ill-informed debate about utility of computers in a labour-surplus society, and went ahead with the policy that has stood the country in very good stead, with computer software emerging as a major foreign exchange earner. India had missed out on the industrial revolution because of its colonial status, and it was imperative that she take part in the information and communication revolution (this was a view held by many farsighted Indians, and Rajiv shared it and put his weight behind the effort to make it come real). Efforts at liberalization of controls in the economy as a whole, increase of exports, reduction of import duties, etc. were also made, and these have been discussed elsewhere in the book.

Much lip service had been paid to the need for doing something to strengthen local self-government institutions. It was Rajiv and his government that took the initiative to deepen and strengthen panchayati institutions by generating debate and bringing forward legislation to make panchayat elections mandatory by giving them a constitutional sanction. This necessitated a constitutional amendment and it was Rajiv’s great regret that the opposition parties, for no good reason, blocked the passage of the bills in the Rajya Sabha where the Congress did not have a majority. (See
chapter 5
, section on local government.) As striking as the objective was the process. Between December 1987 and June 1988, Rajiv met 400 district collectors or officers in charge of districts. In July 1988 there was a meeting with chief secretaries, the highest officers of states, in January 1989 a Panchayati Raj sammelan of 8,000 delegates, followed by a conference on Panchayati Raj for Women in May. The All India Congress Committee discussed and supported the proposals in May 1989, and a meeting of chief ministers of states was held thereafter. Rajiv could claim with some justice, as he did, that ‘never before has a government at the highest level taken so carefully into account the views of so many tens of thousands of people at every level about democracy and development at the grassroots.’
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Another measure directed at the rural poor was the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana or Employment Plan which aimed at providing employment to at least one member of every rural poor family for 50-100 days in the year. Inaugurated to mark the birth centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru (born in 1889), the central government promised to meet 80 per cent of the cost of the scheme. The new education policy, too, had its focus on the rural areas and the poor, with its main planks being the literacy campaign, Operation Blackboard (which aimed at providing basic amenities to schools) and distance education. The much reviled Navodaya Vidyalayas, a favourite whipping boy of Rajiv baiters, and cited
ad nauseum
as proof of the elitist nature of Rajiv’s education policy, were in fact aimed at providing quality education to the children of poor rural families who were to be chosen by merit for free education and stay in the residential schools to be set up in every district.

The National Perspective Plan for Women was drafted in 1988, and among its important proposals was the reservation of 30 per cent of elected seats for women in all panchayat bodies, which was included in the Panchayati Raj legislation. It also recommended that 50 per cent of grassroots functionaries should be women. The plan addressed issues of women’s health and education as well. Legislation strengthening the punishment for dowry-related offences was also passed in 1986.

The protection of the environment was a project close to Rajiv’s heart as it had been to his mother’s, and among other things he launched a massive effort to clean the river Ganga, the holiest of Indian rivers, which had become shamefully polluted in many parts. He created a new Ministry for Environment and environmental clearance for big projects was made mandatory. At the Non-Aligned Movement’s ninth summit, he placed before it the proposal for a Planet Protection Fund to help developing countries access advanced technology for the protection of the environment.

While it became quite fashionable in certain elite circles to berate the cultural policy of the Rajiv government as catering to the West by holding very expensive festivals of India in many western countries, it was forgotten that at the same time seven zonal cultural centres were set up in different parts of the country to shift the focus of state patronage of the arts away from the capital and encourage local and regional cultural forms. Also, whatever their criticism (there is some truth in the charge of over-enthusiasm leading to precious cultural property being transported abroad and suffering damage, though whether this was a special feature of Rajiv’s regime is suspect) the festivals did succeed in placing India on the world cultural map. If one of the legitimate functions of a government is to enhance the standing of the country it governs on the world stage, then the festivals of India fulfilled that function.

There appeared to be a serious effort to clean up the political and bureaucratic system, by introducing greater openness, accountability, and taking legislative and other measures to dissuade offenders. Among these was the Anti-Defection Act, drafted after discussions with opposition parties and passed in 1985, which laid down that one-third of the members of a political party in the parliament would have to change loyalties for it to be recognized as a split in a party. Any other defections would invite expulsion from the House. This was meant to check the tendency of horse-trading and shifting party loyalties that was becoming a bane of the Indian political system. Lok Adalats, and the Consumer Protection Act were part of the same stream. Greater freedom to government media, especially the increasingly popular television, and encouragement to programmes critical of government and intended to keep ministers and bureaucrats on their toes, carried the prime minister’s personal imprint.
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V. P. Singh’s much advertised raids on business houses, which Rajiv supported, certainly in the beginning, also helped provide the ambience that gave Rajiv the Mr Clean label.