Was the 1977 election result a rejection of Emergency? The answer isn't simple

Indian Express

6 hours ago

We can expect the 50th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's Emergency to be marked with special events. The ruling party, whose stalwarts were at the receiving end of Mrs Gandhi's ire in the 21-month dictatorial interregnum will, predictably, go to town recalling the dirty deeds of the then Prime Minister and her wayward son, Sanjay. He was virtually the country's de facto ruler in that dark period.
The BJP, for obvious political reasons, keeps the memory of the Emergency alive. Congress, on the other hand, likes to behave as if it never happened. A larger consensus on Mrs Gandhi's actions to cling to power in the wake of her election being set aside by the Allahabad High Court has eluded the political class to this day.
Fear, an all-enveloping fear, was the currency of the Emergency. As Jagannath Rao Joshi, the Kannadiga Jana Sangh stalwart with dancing eyes and an always smiling visage, loved to put it, 'Emergency is like a rabid dog, nobody knows who it will bite next… That is the key to fear.'
Go back to the news pages of the time. You will find no dearth of notables, especially the so-called left-liberals, rationalising the frontal assault on the Constitution, blaming the Opposition for bringing it on itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Emergency was a culmination of a series of events, which severely undermined the institutional structures of the constitutional system.
Mrs Gandhi had sponsored the official Congress candidate for President, N Sanjiva Reddy, only to ensure the victory of her hand-picked nominee, V V Giri. Till then at least, such a betrayal was unheard of in a democracy. Her megaphones pressed for a 'committed judiciary'.
She used the levers of power to intimidate and blackmail several party stalwarts during the 1969 Congress split. Some of them were either forced to stay neutral — recall Mohan Lal Sukhadia, the tallest Congress leader of Rajasthan at the time — or felt obliged to throw their lot in with her. She benefited immensely from the Machiavellian counsel of her key advisors, who had endeared themselves to her when she was politically inexperienced and clueless.
Among them was P N Haksar who, as her principal secretary, rendered her great assistance in neutralising the Syndicate challenge. Outside the government was Romesh Thapar, another Oxbridge-type progressive-leftist who had the PM's ear, holding her hand till weeks after the imposition of the Emergency. Haksar and Thapar need special mention because both would be mercilessly cast aside when Sanjay Gandhi came to rule the roost and shed his mother's leftist-liberal baggage.
Aside from stifling the voice of the Opposition that felt doubly buoyed by the voiding of her election, the Emergency yielded precious little for Mrs Gandhi. She could have brazenly continued as PM. Instead, a morally wounded Mrs Gandhi used the sledgehammer of Emergency to quell the challenge from a motley group of leaders whose appeal was confined essentially to a few urban centres.
A couple of weeks after the Emergency, most senior Opposition leaders were jailed and a few thousand RSS-Jana Sangh activists were detained. Finding little dissonance in society at large, she is said to have commented, 'kucch to hua nahi, chutt-putt incidents ke ilava'. Such was the enormity of her crime against the nascent republic that she had feared the worst, not reckoning with the reality that the poor and hungry masses everywhere have little time for such exotic concepts as freedom and fundamental rights.
For evidence, scan the Western world, where native populations in country after country are supporting authoritarian leaders even as they look with an unconcealed hostility towards the immigrants who are supposedly the cause of their plight.
Mrs Gandhi had been cleverly marketed as the messiah of the poor in a country where nearly two-thirds of the population lived below the poverty line. Bank nationalisation and the abolition of privy purses were painted as part of 'garibi hatao' whereas the wicked Opposition was concerned only with 'Indira hatao'.
She could have merrily persisted with the Emergency indefinitely but for her need to quell the trenchant rebukes emanating from Western capitals and media. As a senior Delhi Jana Sangh leader would often say to me in Tihar jail, 'Arre Viren ji, aap to abhi jawan ho, aap kyon yahan padey ho… hum ko to yeh yahan hi maregi.' Misled by the surface calm in the country, her advisers thought a disorganised and demoralised Opposition would pose no threat.
However, her gravest mistake was not to have foreseen the popular anger in the countryside, especially in the north and the west, against Sanjay's forced nasbandi programme. Rumours and fears of 'impotence' from sterilisation magnified the anti-government mood in the hinterland. The Muslim voter went against Congress in the 1977 poll, sealing the fate of the mother-son duo.
Make no mistake: The mandate was anti-nasbandi, not anti-Emergency. Otherwise, a relatively more literate south would not have helped Congress still win 150-odd seats: There was hardly any forced sterilisation south of the Vindhyas.
The spectacular return of Mrs Gandhi along with Sanjay and his young stormtroopers in the 1980 elections ought to have removed any doubt that constitutional norms and proprieties hold value for ordinary voters. The collective will is a reflection of our lowest common denominator, of our overriding socio-economic concerns. And that is true not only of India but a host of other Western democracies, including, nay especially, the US.
The writer is a senior journalist who has worked with The Financial Express and The Indian Express