Why Emergency was a result of Indira Gandhi's troubled past
Forty years ago, this very day, independent India witnessed its darkest phase when Emergency was imposed in the country. At the stroke of midnight on June 25, 1975, when the world slept, India woke to life without freedom. The first institution in the line of fire was the fourth estate, which unfortunately, to quote LK Advani, when told to bend was more than willing to crawl. This was followed by a series of measures aimed at suppressing political opponents. More than one lakh Opposition leaders and critics were detained without trial. The next 18 months saw the power being solely concentrated in the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay.
This act of absolute obsession with power, along with her resolute handling of the Bangladesh war three-and-a-half years before that, made Indira come across as a strong, assertive and self-willed woman, to the extent of being autocratic. But was the evil act of imposing Emergency the result of an assertive Indira? A close look at her life tells another story.
Yes, Indira cultivated the image of a strong leader in public. But in private, she was meek, insecure and submissive. The most appropriate manifestation had been the way she dealt with her wayward son, Sanjay Gandhi, whose mistakes she defended and often tried to cover up. She tolerated him even when he allegedly abused her in presence of outsiders.
But then Indira was always like that - assertive and demure, beautiful and ugly. Even for someone who, during her US visit in the late 1960s, made President Lyndon Johnson so weak on his knees that he overstayed at a private party hosted by the Indian ambassador, tossing glass after glass of bourbon on the rocks while talking to the then Indian prime minister. And later when she refused to dance with him at the White House on the grounds that it would hurt her image back home, the US president wanted to see that “no harm [came] to the girl”, and sanctioned three million tonnes of wheat and nine million dollars of aid to India. She was convinced for a long time about being “ugly and stupid”, as she was called by her aunt Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit when she was young. Writes Katherine Frank in her biography on Indira, “Tall for her age and thin, with a large nose and skin she felt was too dark, Indira was devastated by her aunt’s ‘annihilating words’. She was already shy and insecure. After Nan (Vijaya Lakshmi) Pandit delivered this brutal assessment, Indira became a silent, moody adolescent.”
The genesis of Emergency could be found in her troubled childhood. Indira lived her younger years on the margins, so much so that her cousin BK Nehru, who grew up in Allahabad with her in the 1920s, had no recollection of her. To this the "Iron Lady" conceded that she “was right there, but no one ever noticed me”. The only person Indira was close to was her mother, who for all her elegance and beauty, had few admirers in the "Anglicised" and "sophisticated" Nehru household, dominated by Jawaharlal Nehru’s sisters. This was revealed by none other than her cousin Nayantara Sahgal, who wrote in her biography, Indira Gandhi: Tryst with Power, how Indira went into a shell after her mother’s death. She quoted Indira as saying: “I saw her [Kamala] being hurt and I was determined not to be hurt.”
So, when Indira grew up into an adult, she abhorred two things: one, of being isolated in the world at large; two, the company of the "educated" and the "sophisticated" class. And the genesis of Emergency can be seen in these two aspects of Indira’s life.
Soon after the death of her mother, Feroze Gandhi entered Indira’s life. For someone who thought she had been ignored all her life, she just couldn’t let go this support system, even if it meant turning a rebel, which she did to marry him. The marriage, however, didn’t work and she developed a guilt complex while watching her two kids, especially the younger one Sanjay, growing up without a father. Indira could see her own image, her own plight in Sanjay’s. Writes Coomi Kapoor in her book, The Emergency: “Sanjay adored his father, Feroze, even if he saw him rarely. He resented the fact that his mother in 1947 moved out of her husband’s home to act as her father Pandit Nehru’s official hostess in Delhi. Sanjay believed that his father had been abandoned and that the neglect of his well-being had led to his heavy drinking and early death from a heart attack.”
This explains why Sanjay, despite being a trouble-maker from the very beginning, would get away unpunished. In his book, The Sanjay Story, Vinod Mehta calls him an “outstandingly mediocre” and a “loner”, who was obsessed with cars. Keeping his love for cars in mind, he was sent to apprentice at the Rolls-Royce plant in England. But he remained an errant student. When his supervisor reminded him of a series of mistakes on his part, Sanjay retorted bluntly, “You people mucked up my country for 300 years, so what’s the big deal if I muck up Rolls-Royce?”
Sanjay finally quit the "job" midway, and Indira helped him set up a Maruti plant in 1970 by securing hundreds of acres of fertile land and displacing scores of farmers without a murmur. Sanjay promised to produce 50,000 small cars within a year. Five years later, he couldn’t deliver even one! It was only when Sanjay realised that he won’t be able to make cars, he jumped full-time into politics. And the kind of person he was, temperamental, short-sighted and eternally restless, it was just a matter of time for democracy and its solemn institutions to be put to test.
To add to this was Indira’s distrust for the educated, brought up as she was in the stifling "classy" environs of Anand Bhawan. This explains the rise of people RK Dhawan, Bansi Lal, Yashpal Kapoor and Dhirendra Brahmachari, among others. She packed the party with those seen as loyalists; integrity and efficiency were hardly any assets in the political circle. In this scenario, the country needed a mere spark to find its democratic institutions completely obliterated. The Allahabad High Court judgment provided that opportunity. And Indira undid in one stroke what her father had strived to build over the years, if not decades.