Mantra Without A Method

A View of the World
_____SHASHI THAROOR

The Emergency crystallised a truth about Indira Gandhi: she was skilled at the acquisition and maintainence of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision beyond the expedient campaign slogans: Garibi Hatao was a mantra without a method

In my last column, I wrote of how, for many Indians of my generation, the Emergency was the seminal event of their political maturation. I told of my own journey from defending it to disowning it, though, fortunately, neither my defence nor my dissent paralleled the extremes of someone like the Congress’ pliant president, D. K. Borooah. This unprincipled sycophant gave the world the inane slogan ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’ and notoriously declared that ‘‘India can do without an Opposition; the Opposition is irrelevant to the history of India’’. But, as soon as his leader was defenestrated by the electorate in 1977, the ineffable Borooah turned his coat and bleated his claims to be an Indira-hating democrat.

One must not be too unkind to Borooah, who, soon thereafter, left this vale of tears. He was merely the most egregious of many unprincipled sycophants — a breed unavoidably spawned in an atmosphere of tyranny — many of whom have continued to flourish in our forgiving, even amnesiac, political culture since then.

But the one point about the Emergency I have not seen made enough in recent weeks (and I have made many points about it myself in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium which I shall not repeat here), is a simple, yet basic one: it didn’t work. It crystallised a fundamental truth about Indira Gandhi: she was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or programme beyond the expedient campaign slogans: ‘Garibi Hatao’ was a mantra without a method. If she had actually used the Emergency to hatao garibi, much might have been forgiven. Instead, her experiment with autocracy, as I wrote in my last column, had the opposite effect.

Indira Gandhi’s genuine convictions, as one observer put it, were ‘‘somewhere to the left of self-interest’’. Her action was grounded in self-interest (following her unseating by an honest, if overly-fastidious, High Court judge in Allahabad for electoral malpractices that were, by most standards, minor); her rhetoric, as usual, veered left. During the two inglorious years preceding the Emergency, the country had seemed on the verge of a catastrophe. Prices, unemployment and corruption rose; her standing in the nation fell. Mounting protests, led by the saintly Jayaprakash Narayan, brought down one Congress State Government (in Gujarat) and threatened others. As anarchy loomed, her judicial conviction, even on a technicality, seemed to leave Indira Gandhi no option but to resign in disgrace.

Instead, she struck back. Democracy, Indira Gandhi argued, had failed in India: it had disintegrated into an expensive luxury, with effects that were divisive to the nation and detrimental to its development. Events had reached a point where the choice was a clear one: democracy for the elite few or social justice for the downtrodden many. With such a choice before them, Indira Gandhi declared that the Government had no doubt where to cast its lot. Declaring a state of Emergency, Indira Gandhi arrested opponents, censored the press and postponed elections. As a compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a 20-point programme for the upliftment of the common man. (No one found it humorous enough to remark, as Clemenceau had done of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that ‘‘even the good Lord only had 10’’.) Its provisions ranged from rural improvement schemes and the abolition of bonded labour to mass education and urban renewal. The new emphasis would not be on the individual’s rights against the State, but on the community’s duties toward it. Effective official action would be easier than before. One Government official put it bluntly: ‘‘We are tired of being the workshop of failed democracy. The time has come to exchange some of our vaunted individual rights for some economic development.’’

One can quarrel about the premises of this argument, but the simple truth is that it did not work that way. Eighteen of the 20 points remained largely unimplemented; meanwhile, Indira’s thuggish younger son, Sanjay, emphasising the other two, ordered brutally-insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilisations. Most of the atrocities committed at the time had little to do with social justice: the mandatory resettlement of Delhi slum-dwellers in a cruel exercise of heartless cosmetology; forced vasectomies by officials anxious to meet targets for fear of losing their jobs; the lack of accountability of the bureaucracy and the police to the public or the courts; the harsh treatment of labour (strikes were banned under the Emergency, but lockouts were not); the misuse of detention powers by vengeful and corrupt policemen; and the loss of judicial redress for arbitrary imprisonment. None of these did anything for India’s economic development.

Of course, in several Ministries, there was a sudden shortage of chairs when the customary 40 per cent absenteeism rate suddenly fell to practically zero. But there was little evidence that the occupants of the chairs were any more productive after occupying them, nor any proof that a performance orientation is easier to obtain under autocratic conditions than democratic ones (if anything, tyranny makes bureaucrats less accountable). The status stayed quo.

The indictment of Indira’s Emergency is threefold: one, that it was not really necessary but was proclaimed and institutionalised for purely partisan purposes; two, the abuses of authoritarianism far outweighed the failings of democracy; and three, the ‘‘gains of the Emergency’’ were not as considerable as claimed and were ebbing away as the initial shock of its imposition wore off. The backlash of the people began even as Borooah spouted his meretricious slogan.

In a country as diverse and plural as India, a wide range of demands is always going to arise that will have to be recognised, accommodated, and, to some extent, satisfied if the polity (and the nation) is to survive. Emergency rule cannot provide the answer to such demands. Only democracy can. Let us never lose it again.

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