On 25 June 1975, the prime minister Indira Gandhi declared Emergency, marking the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Indian democracy. During this period, the country witnessed censures on the press, forced sterilisation of over six million citizens, large-scale demolition of slums, mass arrests of political leaders, and an authoritarian regime that exercised excessive control over the country’s executive and judiciary. At the forefront of this subversion of public institutions and suppression of rights were Indira and her son, Sanjay, who personally oversaw the sterilisation programme. Yet, this period was also marked by the Indian business and intellectual elite eulogising the Gandhis despite the terror they wreaked upon the nation.
In his first book, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, the journalist Kapil Satish Komireddi writes a critical political history of post-Independence India, and how decades of rule under a corrupt Congress establishment led to the rise of Narendra Modi and the Hindutva nation. Komireddi divided the book in two parts—“Antecedents” and
“India under Modi”—to show how the actions of political leaders such as Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi contributed to the Hindu nationalism currently prevailing in India. In the following excerpt, he discusses how the Emergency and Indira’s rule have often been falsely characterised as the “summit of Indian ‘socialism,’” and why that is far from the truth. “Socialism, like much else, was a meaningless catchword camouflaging the gangsterisation of Indian politics,” Komireddi writes. “Divide and rule, the doctrine imputed to the British by Indian nationalists, was now the animating philosophy of the party that succeeded them.”
A substantial segment of what passed for the nation’s intellectual gentry either caved before or collaborated with Sanjay. Distinguished pundits who should have been the defenders of democracy tripped over themselves to cheer its chief cremator. [The writer] Ayub Syed: “He has electrified the nation with his fearless call for breaking fresh ground.” [The journalist] Russi Karanjia: “In contrast with the Niagara of nonsense that falls from the lips of our politicians, Sanjay Gandhi is a young man of few, very few words. To him words spell works, action, performance.” [The writer] Khushwant Singh: “Despite his receding hairline he is an incredibly handsome young man.” If the religious pluralism of this pro-Sanjay triune—a Muslim, a Parsi, a Sikh—was a testament to the health of Indian secularism, the doggerel flowing from its pens was sufficiently obsequious to make even Corneliu Vadim Tudor, balladeer in Ceausescu’s court, blush with embarrassment.
Indira’s rule is periodised today as the summit of Indian “socialism.” This is bizarre. There was no redistribution of wealth during the Emergency—only the usurpation of power. True, the prime minister and her son pronounced themselves tribunes of the poor. But the faction that most sedulously supported the tyranny of the pair—and was most lavishly recompensed for the support—was composed almost entirely of India’s gilded elite. Big business energetically backed the Gandhis. Naval Tata, India’s most eminent industrialist, queued up with his wife to “pay our respects” to Sanjay when the princeling held court in Bombay. When a travelling American journalist asked a member of the Oberoi family, India’s top hoteliers, for her opinion of the Emergency rule, she replied: “Oh, it’s wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just puts them in jail.” The Emergency budget was the most pro-business to date. And it wasn’t by accident that, while the government deactivated the articles of the Constitution concerning free expression and liberty, it preserved the provisions protecting property rights.
In one of the most unexpectedly courageous speeches in parliament—which functioned as a rubber-stamp—Krishan Kant, a Congress backbencher, dismantled the myth of “socialist” Indira: “No privileges of the privileged classes are being touched,” he said on the floor of the house. “They have been reassured. There is going to be no nationalisation of textile and sugar industries … On the other hand, the Emergency will come down on the workers, on students, the intelligentsia, and the fixed-income groups. I would like to ask my friends if this is really a swing to the left or whether it is not in fact a swing to the right?”
Indians who happened to be socialists were branded enemies of the state and dispatched post-haste to the torture chamber. When the trade unionist George Fernandes made a patriotic “appeal” from hiding “to the people in the north to get rid of this dictatorship if they want to preserve the unity of this country, because a situation is bound to arise where people from the south are going to say that we are part of a democratic India, we are not a part of an India that is ruled by a dictator from Kashmir,” his brother, Lawrence, was picked up by the police and brutally tortured for weeks.
Socialism, like much else, was a meaningless catchword camouflaging the gangsterisation of Indian politics, initiated by Sanjay, at the very highest levels. Until his takeover, the prime minister’s closest advisers were led by a cast of generally scrupulous Kashmiris. With Sanjay in command, the upper and middle ranks of Congress became saturated with racketeers and ruffians, mostly from Punjab, with a chilling penchant for “getting things done.” “They are the kind of people,” an Indian insider told the journalist J Anthony Lukas in 1976, “you always find near the top of an authoritarian regime: cool, pragmatic men uninhibited by many scruples.” One of these henchmen was inducted into the cabinet as defence minister. Others continued to thrive in Indian politics long after their benefactor had left the scene. Zail Singh, a Punjabi politician who distinguished himself by once sprinting to pick up Sanjay’s sandals when they slipped from the crown prince’s feet, went on to serve as India’s president. Kamal Nath, one of Sanjay’s conscripts, was in 2018 inaugurated as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Pranab Mukherjee, brought in from Bengal to the chancellery by Sanjay, retired as president of India in 2017.
The Congress leadership, consumed with the solitary obsession of self-perpetuation, extended Indira’s term in office and began seriously toying with the idea of discarding parliamentary democracy and adopting a presidential form of government. Potentially combustible exigencies that could sunder the union in the long run were given only passing attention. In Punjab, Sanjay and Indira patronised an illiterate Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. His extremism, they believed, would neuter the Akali Dal, an ethno-religious party. Instead, their sponsorship of the obscurantist sant, generating a climate ripe for radicalism, spawned a crisis that destroyed Punjab and devoured Indira. But concerned above all with keeping power, the pair was incapable of turning down a fix that was quick. Divide and rule, the doctrine imputed to the British by Indian nationalists, was now the animating philosophy of the party that succeeded them.
Sanjay, appointed leader of the youth wing of Congress, was on the threshold of taking over the party—one of the largest political machines in the world—when Indira abruptly revoked the Emergency and announced fresh elections. Her decision to call the vote has posthumously been ascribed to some vestigial commitment to democracy lurking in her Nehru blood. In reality, she was driven to it by the report of a Delhi think tank that assured her easy victory. Re-election would instantly purge the taint of dictatorship attached to her name in the West. Her intelligence officers endorsed the think tank’s message. Sanjay was sceptical, but Indira was sold.
The opposition—socialists, conservatives, capitalists, religious nationalists—scrambled to form a united front against Congress. Even the most upbeat among them did not really believe that their unwieldy coalition stood a chance. But as Indians delivered their verdict at the ballot booth in 1977, thirty years of uninterrupted rule by the Congress party came to a crashing end. Indira lost her own seat. Sanjay lost his deposit. Just as Pakistan’s [second president and army chief] Ayub [Khan] had been misled by his terrified minions into misreading India, so Indira was duped into misestimating the Indian electorate. She had expelled Krishan Kant from Congress for warning her in parliament that “when you stifle the flow of information to the people in this country, you are blocking the channel of information to yourself.”
This is an edited excerpt from KS Komireddi’s book, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications.