Politics, economics, social contracts:Why rerun of anger of '75 is unlikely

Hindustan Times

6 hours ago

'History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims,' Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their seminal 1845 book, The Holy Family.
This is actually a good framework to look at the Emergency, 50 years after its imposition. The prelude, duration and aftermath of the Emergency have a lot of historical events across different realms that are worthy of being remembered and discussed in detail even today. However, it is useful to ask a simple, perhaps counter-intuitive, question to provoke a discussion on the issue : what led to the Emergency when it happened and can a similar thing happen today?
If one were to give a simplistic account of what led to the Emergency, it can be done as follows: There was a surge of popular and militant protests against the Indira Gandhi government and her party's governments in various states. The reasons were primarily economic. When the Allahabad high court annulled Gandhi's election citing impropriety, which threatened the possibility of her continuing in office, she decided to put democracy in suspended animation. Ironic as it may sound, Parliament continued to function and the government pushed through whatever legislation it wanted, as the Congress had an overwhelming majority, not just in Parliament, but even in many state legislatures. The latter had to sign off on the flurry of constitutional amendments during this period to make them kosher.
Two more questions are worth asking in the aftermath of the Emergency : have there not been episodes of popular anger on other occasions, like there was during the Emergency? And, what has been the State's response to these outbursts? Answering both questions requires making a distinction between the behaviour of the political elite and the people at large.
The question concerning the political elite is easier to answer. The 1977 parliamentary elections that followed the Emergency established an important fact in the landscape of India's political competition: The Congress could be dislodged from power at the national level democratically. However, they also proved that it would take more than anti-Congress politics to provide a stable government. The Janata Party government, after all, was more a circus of warring factions than some radical political programme in action – contrary to what some glorious accounts of the resistance to the Emergency often suggest.
Political scientists prefer to classify Indian politics into four eras of party systems: The first of absolute Congress dominance (1947-67), the second of the Congress losing control in states but largely retaining its position at the Centre (1967-89), the third of coalition politics (1989-2014) and the fourth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerging as the new hegemon (2014 onwards). It needs to be underlined that the BJP's current electoral dominance does not come close to the Congress's popular support until the Indira Gandhi years, and the 1984 elections which followed her assassination. In the last three general elections, the BJP won a decent majority in one, a comfortable one in the second, and failed to win one in the third. To be sure, these performances are still stupendous in comparison with the contemporary political landscape and tower over those of other parties in the last three decades, largely owing to tailwinds of ideological advantage and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charisma. Similarly, the BJP is far from having a majority of its own in many states.
This appears to be the biggest reason why the BJP and its leadership have retained democratic sobriety and continue to court political elites from other parties even today. The BJP's tendency to share power rather than concentrate it completely, as is seen in political arrangements in states such as Maharashtra or Bihar clearly show that today's Caesarism – to borrow the term historian Srinath Raghavan uses to describe the concentration of political power and charisma in Indira Gandhi – is nowhere close to that in the 1970s. This sharing of power – despite the current Caesarian order – takes away any incentive for the political elite to seek an outright rebellion against the regime of the day.
What about the economy? The Indian economy today is hardly a landscape of prosperity and opulence. Low poverty numbers notwithstanding, an overwhelming share of the Indian population is struggling to make ends meet and depends on various kinds of government hand-outs to avoid running into crisis and acute deprivation. However, it is equally important to accept that things are drastically different from what they were in the 1970s. The idealism around a planned economic transformation had dissipated and the Indian economy was battling supply constraints of various kinds then: Food, foreign exchange and industrial goods. These constraints would become extremely severe when there was a bad agricultural harvest or an exogenous shock to the economy. The prelude to the Emergency saw both of these. While the people at large, including the relatively privileged class, had no option but to struggle with unemployment and persistent shortages, capital (as a class) was extremely circumspect about the intentions of a Prime Minister who had pulled off things such as bank nationalisation and was talking about building socialism as a national agenda.
Today's economic problem of quality employment generation and inequality notwithstanding, the Indian economy is almost completely immune from supply side shortages, has buried the ghosts of macroeconomic instability, and perfected a dialectic between capital and the State (at its various tiers) where the former is free to pursue profits in return for willingness to provide political finance. Labour, on the other hand, has been given the palliative of welfare in order to enable it to deal with the chronic pain due to lack of gainful employment and the heartburn of inequality. While this arrangement is far from perfect, it has significantly raised the threshold of economic misery that can trigger an all-out rebellion.
None of this is to say that there are no popular and elite-driven conflicts with the State. But they are more in the realm of reworking social or ethnic contracts rather than a wider class conflict. It is the latter that was the primary fuel for mass unrest in the 1970s; even though it was intelligently deployed by all kinds of vested interests towards their political projects including those of caste and ethnicity, in the period before the Emergency.
The biggest reason we do not have mass anger and protests driven by it – akin to what led to the Emergency – is that present-day politicians, fishing for ethnic and social mobilisations, do not have the bait of class anger to get their way. This is partly a result of the Indian State's improved economic fortunes from 50 years ago, but also a reflection of the fact that the Opposition and the government speak the same language, as far as class is concerned. The Emergency in 1975 was triggered primarily by the poverty of the country and a despotic leader crushing all protests against it. Today's placid phase in politics is more a reflection of a poverty of the political opposition's politics. The people at large know that when it comes to a class struggle, the Opposition has very little to differentiate itself, and there is no point in hitting the barricades in its pursuit.