Abstract
At the very outset, it has to be mentioned that, contrary to the title, the volume under review is only superficially about the Congress and Indira Gandhi. At a more substantive level, it is about the Indian society and polity during the crucial decades under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. The volume is less about the organization and the leader and more about the times. To its credit, it does bring out the flavour and the complexities of the crucial decades from the 1960s to the 1980s and what the Indian society went through during this period.
Quite unsurprisingly, Indira Gandhi is the central character of the book. She was the most popular and the controversial leader of the times. Three events—Bangladesh war, the Emergency and the Punjab crisis—are integrally tied up with the politics and personality of Indira Gandhi and she clearly left her stamp on all three of them. The volume, apart from an interesting and insightful essay by Inder Malhotra (‘Indira Gandhi: An Overview’, pp. 37–61), offers rich empirical details on all the three events.
Jawaharlal Nehru left behind a reasonably stable polity and a struggling economy. The 1950s was a decade of paradoxes. Many preconditions to a vibrant and growing economy (political stability, social tranquillity and consensual politics) existed. Yet nothing like the ‘take off’ occurred in this period. It was clear that the two centuries of colonialism continued to cast its shadow even after the formal end of colonialism. The inbuilt ‘depressors’ created by colonialism continued to take their toll. Nehru laid the foundations of a new order, but the edifice was yet to be built. It was precisely during this period that the Indian society encountered some of the most important and lasting challenges.
These challenges came from a range of directions and constituted powerful barriers that needed to be overcome if the Nehruvian blueprint for the Indian transformation had to be realized. The volume lists out the areas of continuity and change from the earlier period. To be precise, the blueprint remained the same. A change in the leadership did not lead to any questioning of the road map charted out by Nehru. In this sense, it can be said that Nehru continued to be a guiding figure even after his death. The stamp of Nehru was quite visible on the normative structure of the priorities set before the Indian state.
What however changed was the context. The 1960s was a different decade altogether. Not only was there a new leader, but these were different times also. The popularity of the Congress declined dramatically. Nehruvian consensus began to show signs of cracks within. Three wars (in 1962, 1965 and 1971) took their toll on the economy and society. Two successive years of bad monsoon leading to famines created tremendous food scarcity, which had its impact on the foreign policy as well. Shortage of food created dependence on the US, which was keen on extracting its pound of flesh for providing humanitarian help. It appeared that the policy of non-alignment with the tilt towards the USSR might become quite unsustainable in this context.
Back home, movements for Punjabi Suba and the anti-Hindi agitation in Madras raised questions about India’s ability to combine its plurality with cohesion. For once, it appeared that India’s remarkable plurality—linguistic, cultural and religious—may not be able to sustain the cohesion required for national unity. In other words, on all fronts, the picture was far from harmonious and compatible with national priorities set out by the leaders.
How serious were these challenges and how did the leadership cope with them? These two questions constitute the core of the volume under review. Broadly speaking, all the major values, practised during the national movement and upheld by the Indian Constitution, came under stress. The road map of India’s transformation focused on secularism, national unity and democracy as the major building blocks in India’s modernization. All of them received serious challenges during this period. The threat to secularism came from an aggressive Hindu communalism. It is commonly believed that Hindu communalism in independent India started developing since the 1980s in the form of the Ayodhya movement. But important beginnings had been made during the preceding decades. Rakesh Batabyal’s essay (‘The Hindu Communal Challenge, 1964–84’, pp. 417–87) demonstrates, ably and comprehensively, how new insecurities had begun developing since the 1960s, relating to people’s collective identities and accompanying fears about losing them. These insecurities increasingly took the form of Hindu (and also Muslim) communalism. It is these insecurities that fed into an aggressive Ayodhya movement since the 1980s onwards, which took its toll on the Indian society. The Congress tried to create a national consensus among the intellectuals against communalism. But these efforts did not succeed partly because the organization and its leader Indira Gandhi, had lost legitimacy among the intellectuals during, and because of, the Emergency.
The fact of the intellectuals (and also the Left) having moved away from the Congress had some unfortunate consequences. When the Congress under Indira Gandhi tried to handle the Punjab and the Assam crises, it began to be seen as an aspect of communalism. Such was the distrust of Indian state under Indira Gandhi among the intellectuals, that her approach towards communalism was criticized, not for being ineffective or misplaced, but for being basically communal. Therefore, the state under Indira Gandhi began to be seen as the major agency that was responsible for spreading communalism. Hindu communalism reached its high point after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Sikhs were targeted and brutally killed in fairly organized pogroms. Batabyal writes almost prophetically: ‘By 1984, it was Hindu communalism, which was on the ascendance’ (p. 459).
If the threat to secularism came from Hindu communalism, the challenge to national unity and nationalism came from multiple sources—Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast and Punjab in the 1980s. A national unity that was built on anti-imperialism during the national movement began to look fragile. It appeared that the idea of an Indian nation had either not been internalized by the people, or had penetrated very superficially among the psyche of the people. Moreover, it was not clear what precisely was the vantage point—religion, culture, region—from where the Indian nation was being questioned. The three seemed to coalesce. In all the three cases (handled very comprehensively by Mohinder Singh, ‘The Punjab Crisis’, pp. 511–42; David Devadas, ‘Jammu & Kashmir’, pp. 543–82 and B.G. Verghese, ‘The Challenge of the Northeast: 1964–1984’, pp. 583–613), it seemed that the counter-communities that were being formed were regional, cultural and religious at the same time.
Does the volume offer a satisfactory explanation for why this happened? All the three essays tend to be more descriptive, and very richly so, but generally refrain from providing a comprehensive explanation. The explanatory statements are few and far between. The essays generally refer to wrong policy decisions, unevenness of development, adoption of culture-blind economic policies, excessive centralization of polity with its inability to address regional aspirations, political ambitions emanating from the regions and, in combination with religious identity, assuming violent and ruthless proportions, and many more. In the absence of concrete solutions, political claims and demands were often met by reliance on populism and promises. The promises often remained unfulfilled, thereby exacerbating the very problems they were meant to solve.
The biggest challenge to Indian democracy developed in the 1970s from twin sources—the JP movement and the Emergency. The conventional wisdom on the subject has followed an either/or strategy, in which out of the two (JP movement led by Jay Prakash Narayan and the Emergency led by Indira Gandhi) one has been endorsed and the other damned. Arguing against this orthodoxy, Bipan Chandra (‘JP Movement and the Emergency’, pp. 479–510) has demonstrated that the threat to democracy actually came from both the sources. Both had the potentials of undermining Indian democracy. This threat was successfully negotiated. Indira Gandhi suppressed the JP movement and the Indian people defeated the Emergency. In the end, democracy was rescued from both the potential threats.
The volume in its totality is essentially the story of the multiple transitions taking place in the Indian economy and polity from the 1960s till the 1980s. These transitions have been far from smooth and have brought their own problems to the surface. Many essays in the volume deal with issues that have revolved around this transition. They have also raised some very crucial and fundamental questions regarding the basic character of the Indian society. The volume, to its credit, does not impose a single neat answer on the questions raised and retains the possibility of multiple answers to the questions posed.
In the end, we must explicitly raise a question that has maintained a subterranean existence in the volume under review, and is dispersed through its pages. Is it possible to offer a core explanation for all the turbulence, instability and the restlessness experienced by the Indian society during these decades? More importantly, is a ‘rational scrutiny’ of all these developments possible? Or should one leave it to the messiness, incoherence, muddle and confusion of human life, in general? Should we resist the temptation of seeking any ‘neatness’ in our search for answers to important questions?
Any attempt to address these questions must begin with by recognizing that it may be possible for economy, polity and social structure to flow into separate, unconnected and unspecific directions. Is it for instance possible for a society to be collectivist-industrializing in its mode of production, democratically feudal (or feudally democratic) in politics, lasses fairish in culture, and tribally local-particularistic in religion? The above combination may appear logically incongruent, but it should not be entirely unimaginable that such a messy state of affairs can prevail in a society for a period of time, before all things fall into place and some kind of connected symmetry develops. If that is the case—and there seems little justification in denying this possibility—then it is very clear that any attempt at a ‘rational scrutiny’ of Indian society must rule out an inherent interconnectedness of the various domains, and must open up to the possibility of the autonomy of the parts, and their very complex relationship with each other and with the whole. For such a line of enquiry, an entirely new and different set of questions will be required.
As was said at the beginning, the volume under review is only superficially about Congress and Indira Gandhi. At a deeper level, it is about the transitions in Indian society during the three decades (1960s to 1980s) and the possible lines of enquiry that need to be pursued in order to make sense of it. The volume contains very rich data to provide sufficient information on all the major issues that gripped Indian society. More importantly, it also endeavours to generate and advance a lively debate on what holds the Indian society together and how the Indian society functions.