India after Naxalbari. Bernard D'Mello

committees). In the face of police retaliation, the Navnirman agitation metamorphosed into one demanding the resignation of Patel and his ministry, and the dissolution of the state assembly. The Congress (O) and Jan Sangh, taking advantage of the volatile situation, raised the question of the electorate’s “right to recall” elected representatives, and with Desai undertaking a “fast unto death,” Mrs. Gandhi’s government at the center had no other option but to “advise” the president to dissolve the Gujarat state assembly. In the state elections that followed, a coalition of Congress (O), Jan Sangh and other opposition parties came to power.

      In Bihar, from 1967 to 1972, no party or alliance of parties was able to form a stable government. Like in Gujarat, corrupt, opportunistic defections turned the tables, more so after Congress (Requisition)’s huge electoral victory in the 1971 general elections. The 1972 state assembly elections gave Mrs. Gandhi’s party a majority even though it secured a mere one-third of the vote, but with a relatively strong, combined opposition of mainly Samyukta Socialist Party and Jan Sangh MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), political instability persisted. An alliance of the Samyukta Socialist Party and Jan Sangh student wings had won the Patna University student elections in 1973, with many of the socialist student leaders from the Yadav, Kurmi, and Koeri (backward) castes. In March 1974 these students launched what became the JP movement in Bihar, when they invited the elderly (72-year-old) Sarvodaya socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), to lead them. JP, a former prominent socialist politician, quickly renewed his links with his former socialist comrades and launched a political program that, he claimed, would take the state from raj niti (ruler-oriented policies) to lok niti (people-oriented policies). He got the students and youth to form Chhatra Sangharsh Samitis (student struggle committees) and Jana Sangharsh Samitis (people’s struggle committees) and demanded the dismissal of the Congress state government. The political opposition, especially the socialist parties and the Jan Sangh, the latter, opportunistically, soon began to ride high on the JP bandwagon.

      Indeed, in June 1974, when JP declared that the Bihar movement was for sampoorna kranti (total revolution), though these opposition parties didn’t want any kind of revolution, their sole purpose being the overthrow of the Congress government and the installation of themselves in power, they began spreading the line, “give us the reins of government and the rest [JP’s sampoorna kranti] will follow.” Soon JP reckoned that his idea of sampoorna kranti had gripped the national imagination, just like Mrs. Gandhi’s earlier slogan garibi hatao had, and he decided to launch his movement at the national level. Addressing a public rally at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi on 25 June 1975, with the other opposition leaders on the dais, JP demanded the resignation of Mrs. Gandhi, called on the police and the army not to obey any “illegal orders of the government,” and appealed to the Indian public to join a nationwide non-cooperation movement from June 29.

      An apprehensive Mrs. Gandhi reacted at breakneck speed; like Jawaharlal Nehru, her threshold of tolerance and accommodation of opposition was low, set as it was by the interests of Indian big business. Around midnight June 25–26, the president was made to sign the proclamation of internal Emergency,⁹⁴ and the cabinet ex post facto was made to approve of it early next morning. When the nation came to know of it, “not a dog barked,” as the then Defence Minister Bansi Lal was reported to have boasted. “Even I was astonished,” observed Mrs. Gandhi, “… there was not a murmur at all.”⁹⁵ It was indeed an eye-opener that the arrests of the top leaders of all the opposition parties and of Jayaprakash Narayan didn’t provoke spontaneous strikes, demonstrations, and/or uprooting of rails, as used to happen when prominent leaders of the national movement were treated like this by the colonial authorities. The ban on twenty-six parties and detention of some 140,000 political prisoners were to follow.⁹⁶

      There were expectations that the JP movement would go on even with JP incarcerated, but such expectations and hopes were belied. Where was the mettle of the regime’s opponents? The Naxalite movement had by then almost been decimated by the state’s brutal repression, and what remained had split into many factions. The establishment opposition claimed to be fighting for democracy, but Mrs. Gandhi didn’t even need any large-scale deployment of the police, for most of her establishment opponents now chose to be mere passive adversaries. So she didn’t need to create any new repressive machinery, for the run-of-the-mill bureaucrats and police officers did what they were told to do, even as decision-making was concentrated in the hands of a few loyalists, as it was before. The regime’s establishment opponents, just like in British colonial times, by and large “sought a negotiated settlement with the government.” Indeed, in December 1976, bigwigs of the Congress (O), the Jan Sangh, the Socialist Party, and the Bharatiya Lok Dal tacitly approved what the widely respected socialist intellectual C. G. K. Reddy called a “‘pure and simple surrender document.’”⁹⁷

      At no time during the Emergency was there any real threat to Mrs. Gandhi’s authoritarian regime, even though it did some horrible things, like the nasbandi (forced sterilization) campaigns and the “beautification” drives, in both of which Muslims were the first targets. Government medical personnel accompanied by contingents of police personnel entering a village or an urban locality invariably targeted the Muslims first in the forced vasectomies they conducted. Even Muslim youth who had barely entered adolescence were sterilized. And the “beautification” drives began in Muslim settlements, in Delhi, at Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid area. The hypocrisy of it all reached such levels that the word secularism was inserted into the Preamble to the Indian Constitution by the 42nd Amendment, which was passed by Parliament in November 1976. Indeed, before this amendment, India was described in the Constitution’s Preamble as a “Sovereign Democratic Republic” and after the amendment, as a “Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic.” Was there a better way to discredit secularism and socialism?

      JP’s most fatal political error was his embrace of the semi-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its political party, the Jan Sangh, and its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Till then, the RSS, one of whose presumed cadre had assassinated M. K. Gandhi, was a political pariah at least as far as progressive political circles were concerned, but JP even went to the extent of declaring that if the RSS was fascist, then he too was a fascist. The RSS and its various wings took full advantage of JP’s endorsement, even going on to claim that it played a leading role in India’s “Second Freedom Struggle” during the Emergency when the reality “was the abject attitude of RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras, in his letters to Indira Gandhi from Yeravada jail in Poona [now Pune]. Deoras promised that his organization would be at the disposal of the government ‘for national uplift’ if the ban on the RSS were lifted and its members freed from jail.”⁹⁸

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