'Villain Indira' vs 'hero RSS' binary is Sangh Parivar myth. Truth is more complicated

The Print

01-07-2025

The BJP and Sangh Parivar's eagerness to mark this day is not surprising. The Emergency and its aftermath were turning points in the RSS-led Sangh Parivar's political trajectory that led to it being catapulted to power in New Delhi. Nothing suits the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) better than positioning Indira Gandhi as the dictatorial 'villain' against whom it waged a 'heroic' battle.
The BJP-led government has announced 25 June, the date when the Emergency came into effect in 1975, as 'Samvidhan Hatya Diwas'. The BJP has held a series of programmes denouncing Indira Gandhi. A book, The Emergency Diaries, which propagates how Prime Minister Narendra Modi was affected by the Emergency, has been launched. Modi has divested himself of self-righteous statements about democracy being 'arrested' in 1975.
Fifty years after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, the ruling BJP is piously declaring how it fought a valiant battle for 'democracy' against 'great dictator' Indira Gandhi.
But so called 'villainous Indira' vs so-called 'heroic RSS' is a cunningly crafted binary, a fictional morality play, a mythification of history, a fairy tale that is not borne out by a careful analysis of how the Emergency came about and what role the RSS played in the events before 25 June 1975.
The 'Indira-Hatao' plank
As Indira Gandhi's biographer—my book Indira: India's Most Powerful Prime Minister was published in 2017—I had the opportunity to closely research the events leading up to 25 June 1975.
The assiduously orchestrated and zealously propagated Sangh Parivar version of a power-hungry Indira Gandhi clamping down on democracy protestors to keep herself in power is part of a much more complicated story.
In the run-up to the Emergency, there was a concerted attempt by the RSS and its allies to bring down an elected government through street power, mass agitations, threats of sabotage, paralysing essential services, and even inciting the armed forces to mutiny.
True, Indira Gandhi was no beacon of democracy after 1971. Hailed as a 'goddess' after India's victory in the Bangladesh war, she had developed an overweening personality cult and a deeply narcissistic sense of her own power. She tended to see any challenge to her leadership as somehow illegitimate. She had gone from the darling of the masses in the 1971 'Garibi Hatao' election campaign to a monarchical figure who viewed the people as subjects and had turned the entire Congress party into a personalised instrument at her command.
But nor was the role played by the then Bharatiya Jana Sangh ( the political front of the RSS and precursor to the BJP) and the RSS, either constitutional or democratic. In fact the Jana Sangh-RSS role needs to be assessed objectively. The Jana Sangh-RSS played a highly Machiavellian, destructive, and anarchist role and attempted to bring down the extremely popular Indira Gandhi (elected by a massive majority) through decidedly unconstitutional and undemocratic means.
The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and backed and run by the RSS, was a political flop throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Tainted by its 'Hindutva' ideological association with the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi (Nathuram Godse, a member of RSS), the Jana Sangh-RSS were regarded as politically 'untouchable'. It was consigned to the margins of the national mainstream for decades.
The most prominent figure of the Jana Sangh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a star in Parliament. He made blistering speeches from 1957 onwards, but the Jana Sangh remained marooned in the political wilderness, trapped in an acute image crisis it could not shake off. The RSS had stayed aloof from the Gandhian freedom struggle; it had no 'freedom fighter' credentials. Vajpayee himself was saddled with reports that he had once sided with the British during the Quit India movement.
In the general elections of 1952, 1957, and 1962, the Jana Sangh was wiped out. The 'Hindu' party was able to win only 3, 4, and 14 seats, respectively. In these years, the Jana Sangh was buried by Jawaharlal Nehru's colossal presence.
The breakthrough for the Jana Sangh came in the elections of 1967, the thunderclap election in which, after Nehru died in 1964, the once-towering Nehruvian Congress slumped to a wafer-thin majority of only 283 seats. In 1967, the Jana Sangh won 35 seats. This election came to be described as one that saw the disappearance of the 'Congress system'.
The Jana Sangh was ecstatic with its 1967 result. But its hopes of expansion were rapidly dashed in 1971 when the Indira Gandhi-led Congress swept to a massive 352-seat win, once again crushing the Jana Sangh to 22 seats. It was a defeat that led to Vajpayee stepping down as party president.
The anti-Congress 'Indira Hatao' plank, which the Jana Sangh-RSS had deployed in the 1971 elections, crumbled. In assembly polls of 1972, the Jana Sangh was pummeled, losing state after state. The 'Hindu' party was reduced to a dwarf, buried by the second generation of Nehru-Gandhis.
To make matters worse, Deendayal Upadhyaya, the moving force behind the Jana Sangh's organisation, died in 1968, leaving the RSS-backed party with a leadership void as it lurched from defeat to defeat.
The early 1970s thus saw the Jana Sangh-RSS frustrated and panic-stricken. It was chafing at its defeats, agitated that once again, Nehru's daughter Indira, would consign it to oblivion. Unsettled by the magnitude of Indira Gandhi's win, the Jana Sangh-RSS restlessly looked for ways to claw its way back to some relevance.
When the monsoon failed for three consecutive years—1972, 1973 and 1974—the first 'oil shock' or massive four-fold rise in petrol prices hit in 1973, food shortages and price rise rampaged through the country. India was plunged into a full-blown economic crisis, and public discontent began to grow. A desperate-for-power Jana Sangh-RSS sensed an opportunity.
In 1973, MS Golwalkar, the somewhat mystical, non-political RSS sarsanghchalak, died and was replaced by MD 'Balasaheb' Deoras. The hard-nosed Deoras was a more politically attuned figure keen to push the RSS and Sangh Parivar into a more populist, political and activist role. In 1974, the RSS student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Jana Sangh-RSS led violent 'Nav Nirman' protests in Gujarat. The Jana Sangh, along with socialists and the anti-Indira Congress (O), pushed to oust the chief minister of Gujarat and get the Gujarat assembly dissolved, and succeeded.
The anti-Indira movement then spread to Bihar. The ABVP also played a leading role in the Bihar student protests, which began at this time. The Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti, a forum created for the Bihar students' agitation, was dominated by ABVP activists. In Bihar, the Jana Sangh and allies pushed to dissolve the Vidhan Sabha through coercive tactics.
The RSS had already reached out to the veteran socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, or 'JP', through RSS men like Nanaji Deshmukh. JP allied with the Jana Sangh-RSS in his quest for 'total revolution.' This enabled the RSS, for the first time, to find space in national politics. In JP, the RSS found a 'respectable' leader who could be its bridge to joining the political mainstream.
In 1974, the Jana Sangh was already giving open calls for widespread street action. 'Our response cannot be confined to a parliamentary level,' Vajpayee said in 1974 at a Jana Sangh conference in Hyderabad. 'The war has to be fought in the streets, in the chambers and legislatures, in the corridors of power, in all sensitive power centres of the establishment.'
'Anti-Congress parties are obstructing development…their aim is to paralyse the government,' Indira Gandhi said at the time.
N. Govindacharya, an RSS pracharak who would later go on to become a key figure in the BJP, was based in Patna in these years. He played a central role in organising mass protests in Bihar through the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti and mobilising RSS cadres.
The anti-Indira movement coalesced around the figure of JP, but the bulk of the foot soldiers were made up of the ABVP and RSS. Socialists and Congress (O) were also part of the agitation, but their numbers were nowhere near equal to the huge organisational breadth of the massive RSS network. The anti-Indira groups caused so much violence, so many bandhs and protests across Bihar, that The Hindu wrote in an editorial in 1974: 'Should Mr Narayan usher in what is disorder and disrespect for law and order and the democratic set up as a whole?'
Between 1972 and 1975, mayhem reigned across north India. There were strikes, gheraos, bandhs, violence, processions and student agitations. In all these movements, RSS and ABVP activists played a crucial role.
The 1974 railway strike, involving two million workers, was led by a socialist, the fire-breathing trade unionist George Fernandes. But even he made his intentions clear when he openly declared that he aimed to organise a strike that would 'bring down Indira Gandhi's government.' The strike brought the railways to a standstill. George Fernandes would later go on to ally with the BJP.
Then West Bengal Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, an old friend of Indira Gandhi, wrote her a letter in early 1975 asking that lists of RSS workers be compiled, as he suspected they were the main force behind the disturbances. 'A secret telex message should go to every chief minister to prepare a list of all prominent Ananda Marga and RSS members in his state,' Ray wrote to Gandhi.
So intense were the disturbances that on 2 January 1975, then railway minister LN Mishra was killed in a bomb blast in Samastipur railway station. Allegations were made against the secretive Ananda Marga group. There was an attempt on the life of the then Chief Justice, AN Ray, when hand grenades were thrown into his car. After these incidents, Indira Gandhi became convinced that there was a conspiracy against her government and that her life was in danger from the protestors. Her anxieties grew that India faced mass violence.
In a scathing line, which reveals her views on the Jana Sangh-RSS, Indira Gandhi had said: 'If the Jana Sangh comes to power, it will not need any Emergency. They will chop off heads.'
The methods used by the anti-government protestors in the early 1970s, 'are frankly coercive and undemocratic,' wrote The Pioneer. 'Trying to oust the (Bihar) Ministry, gherao the legislature, spreading disaffection among the police…and attempting to start a 'no tax' campaign may trigger off violence on an epochal scale,' the paper wrote in an editorial.
'The anti-Indira Gandhi movement used extra-constitutional and disruptive methods of protest, based on a rejection of democratic procedures,' writes PN Dhar in his detailed book Indira Gandhi, The 'Emergency', and Indian Democracy. The hardcore of this violent, undemocratic movement was the Jana Sangh-RSS. The number of RSS members arrested bears this out: 1,05,000 RSS activists were detained by the RSS's own admission.
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Flattering the 'dictator'
The declaration of the Emergency and the torments of those years have been justifiably pilloried. Indira Gandhi converted India into a spooky, stalled democracy, bullied the judiciary, and dragooned institutions into subordination.
But those who led turbulent movements against her, who pushed India into strikes, civil unrest, killings, and mass protests, were not exactly democracy's angels. The Jana Sangh-RSS was intent on overthrowing an elected government and seizing power in any way they could from an immensely popular leader they could not defeat in elections.
After being jailed by Indira Gandhi, the RSS suddenly changed tack completely and began to eat humble pie. Deoras, imprisoned in Yerawada Central Jail, wrote several letters praising Indira Gandhi and promising cooperation with government programmes. These letters do not show him as Gandhi's implacable ideological opponent. Rather, Deoras comes across as an admirer—fawning, obsequious, and eager to offer the RSS' services to the Indira Gandhi government. There is no mention in these letters about democratic rights. On 22 August 1975, Deoras writes to Gandhi:
'From the jail I listened with rapt attention to your broadcast message relayed from AIR and addressed to the nation on August 15, 1975. Your speech was suitable for the occasion and well balanced.'
This is my humble prayer to you that you shall kindly keep the above in view and shall lift the ban on RSS. If you think it proper, my meeting with you will be a source of pleasure to me.'
On 10 November, in another letter, Deoras writes that if RSS workers are set free, lakhs of volunteers will be utilised for 'national upliftment.'
The RSS's view of Indira Gandhi was shot through with both admiration and wariness, what the historian Christophe Jafrelot calls 'both stigmatisation and emulation'. While the RSS strained every nerve to oust her from office in the 1970s, it became an admirer of the 'strong state' post-1975. Deoras even tried to meet Gandhi when he was released after 18 months, but she refused.
Interestingly, after Indira Gandhi returned as Prime Minister in 1980, she herself flirted with Hindu politics, visiting dozens of temples and shrines and performing yagnas and Lakshachandi paath.
In the Moradabad riots of 1980, she was accused of pandering to Hindu sentiments, and in 1983, she attended the inauguration of the Bharat Mata Mandir in Haridwar. In the Jammu & Kashmir assembly polls of 1983, she (by now under tremendous pressure from pro-Khalistan Sikh militancy in Punjab) played the 'Hindu nationalism' card by accusing her opponents of being secessionists. Indira Gandhi saw the RSS as her prime opponent, but in her later years, with the growing profile of the RSS, she recognised the importance of the Hindu vote bank.
Sangh Parivar mythmaking
The Jana Sangh-RSS opposition to Indira Gandhi in the run-up to the Emergency was not exactly a 'principled' struggle. It was a brazen quest for power and using street agitations and chaos to somehow force her out of office. However, once she cracked down on RSS, it showed a ready eagerness for compromise.
Anarchist, unconstitutional methods were used. JP even called on the people to 'de-recognise' the Indira government, not pay tax and called on the armed forces not to obey government orders they considered wrong. The Jana Sangh-RSS and allies pushed the country to the brink, yet once the Emergency was declared and opposition leaders imprisoned, the movement quickly fizzled out precisely because it lacked strong convictions.
Today, the BJP is propagating that a noble-minded RSS fought for 'democracy' against a 'dictator.' Not really.
The RSS simply wanted to overthrow an elected Prime Minister using whatever means it could, and later had no moral compunctions in compromising, flattering, and pleading with the same 'dictator' who imprisoned them.
The 'Indira the Emergency dictator' vs 'RSS-democrats' binary is Sangh Parivar mythmaking. The truth is more complicated. Indira Gandhi was an authoritarian leader who suspended the Constitution, but the RSS-led Sangh Parivar was not and has never been a crusader for democratic values. By leading and participating in an unconstitutional violent movement that tried to pull down a democratically elected government, the RSS was a wholehearted participant in 'Samvidhan-Hatya'.
Sagarika Ghose is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)