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“1968” India as History

This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,

This is not that dawn of which there was expectation;

This is not that dawn with longing for which

The friends set out, (convinced) that somewhere

they would be met with,

Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place,

Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,

Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

—FAIZ AHMED FAIZ, “DAWN OF FREEDOM,” AUGUST 1947, TRANSLATED BY VICTOR G. KIERNAN.¹

The keepers of the past cannot be the builders of the future.

—PAUL A. BARAN, “ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BACKWARDNESS,” 1952²

The extremes of violent state repression of the Naxalite movement in its first phase suggest that the colonial state, especially its repressive apparatus, remained firmly embedded in its successor in independent India. Independence in 1947 was, above all, a mere transfer of power. The threat to liberal-political democracy was from the establishment and the ruling classes, not from the Naxalite movement. “1968” India—when the spirit of revolutionary humanism came to the fore but was striven to be extinguished by extraordinary state repression—must, however, be grasped, and this can best be done by comprehending it as history. Certainly, those times, from the latter half of the 1960s right through the 1970s, have long passed, so nobody can influence their shape and outcome, but they are still breathing as history, and with an idea of where India has gone since then, it is possible to write more wisely about them. It would be more difficult to write wisely about India in the present, because for that it would be necessary to figure out where India is proceeding. This would be the challenge in this book, to sense where India is making its way so that one can write wisely about its present and thereby possibly be of some help to a collective socialist endeavor to influence its shape and outcome. As Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface to his book, The Present as History:³

Everyone knows that the present will someday be history. I believe that the most important task of the social scientist is to try and comprehend it as history now, while it is still the present and while we still have the power to influence its shape and outcome.

Like the present, “1968” India is an historical problem. It can be understood by making use of history. The Indian establishment, the ruling classes, the wretched of the Indian earth, and those who couldn’t remain unmoved by what was happening, all of them did what they did, not merely because they were compelled by history, the unique conditions existing on the ground at the time, and the context, to do what they did. History and the existing conditions and context certainly determined the range of possible outcomes, but the actual outcome was the result of the respective moves of the principal opponents and how each of them responded to the course of events then unfolding.

In sharp contrast to such an approach, the historian and writer Ramachandra Guha, in his account of the history of India as an independent nation, explains what happened by attributing much of it to the volitions and the personalities of key figures in the establishment. For instance, Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, is depicted as an authentic liberal who, more than any other personality at the helm until his death in 1964, is said to have shaped the “democratic” foundations of the Indian political system. All was supposedly more-or-less well with Indian democracy until an authoritarian personality, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, took office as India’s third prime minister. She is said to have ultimately let down “the world’s largest democracy,” indeed, even subverting it from June 26, 1975, to January 18, 1977, during the Emergency,⁴ but “government by the people” bounced back into shape soon after!⁵

Guha, nevertheless, is restrained; some other liberal writers really go overboard, for instance, Salman Rushdie, in his novel Midnight’s Children, pillorying Mrs. Gandhi as the witch-like Widow “responsible for everything that’s wrong in India.” Her son Sanjay, who is depicted as a villain called “Labia Lips,” accuses his mother of having caused his father’s death by “cruelly and selfishly neglecting him.” The case of Rushdie assumes relevance because he has claimed that Midnight’s Children is “‘imaginatively true,’” “actually about history and the ways in which memory recovers and recreates the past.” Of course, a post-modernist narrative claiming to be “imaginatively true,” without a shred of corroboration, accusing Mrs. Gandhi of being responsible for her husband’s death, this by making up what her son is claimed to have charged her with, is all part of a larger plot to depict her as the culprit responsible for the mess that India was in.⁶ As the eminent historian Ranajit Guha said, more generally, of the liberal critics of Mrs. Gandhi at the time—they even engaged in “character-assassination in order to cover up their own failure to understand and explain the Emergency,” peddling “the myth that all had been well with Indian democracy until an authoritarian personality subverted it on 26 June 1975.”⁷

The Emergency—when the Opposition was jailed, the press gagged, the constitution emasculated, and elections suspended—is widely regarded as an exception in India’s otherwise excellent “democratic record.” Liberals apart, even influential left historians, Professor Bipan Chandra, for example, bought this story. What was essentially a class project—the Gandhi-Nehru-supported-by-the-big-bourgeoisie-led national movement (Chandra characterizes it as a “bourgeois democratic movement”)—was depicted as the national project, never mind the democratic and anti-colonial proclivities of the many autonomous peasant uprisings before and after 1885 that were also part of the independence struggle. To this left historian, the “bourgeois democratic movement,” led by Gandhi and his protégé Nehru and supported by the Indian bourgeoisie, was all that mattered, for the capitalist class, he claims, was independent, anti-imperialist, very modern and liberal, and it was these characteristics that, over time, shaped the political culture and economy of independent India.⁸ Indeed, for the period after the transfer of power, even when it had become evident that the socioeconomic and state structures of the past had remained largely intact, Professors Bipan Chandra, and his former students turned colleagues, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, remained captivated by what they identified as the progressive sections of the bourgeoisie, and with Nehru and the Nehruvian model of development. Their largely uncritical glorification, bordering on hero worship, of Nehru makes it difficult for the discerning reader to distinguish them from conventional Congress nationalist historians.⁹

Clearly a section of left intellectuals was deceived by the then establishment’s marketing (dressing up) of what was in fact a class project as the national project. The world looks very different when one examines it from below. “1968” India was packed with contradictions that came into the open in the political struggles of the underdogs to resolve them and in the severe repression of those campaigns by the Indian state.

I came of political age at this time, and so I don’t think I can be dispassionate in my analyses of them. But I will try to throw some light on the main social issues of the time, making no pretense to comprehensiveness. Essentially, there are two distinct parts to what I am about to deal with, one, the various fountainheads of resistance and struggle, and two, the sources of the repression. The two cannot but be viewed in interaction with each other, for both are embedded in the history I am setting out. The distinction might however prove fruitful to grasp right at the start. I will try to explain important developments, and figure out the social forces of the past from which they emerged. I believe that if one looks reality in the face, the chances of adequately explaining it are better. For instance, that the principal architect of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi, could come back to power, in 1980, in a matter of three years, indeed, legitimately via a massive popular mandate, when in 1977 her opponents triumphantly rode into office on the back of public indignation against her Emergency, says something important about the shallow democratic consciousness of the Indian establishment and ruling classes.

THE CHARACTER OF THE ESTABLISHMENT

The declaration of the state of Emergency in June 1975 brought, as one commentator put it,

19 months of terror during which there were wholesale arrests without any redress; all conceivable opponents of the regime were jailed; prison conditions became more savage still; many more ‘ordinary’ prisoners were chained, assaulted, maimed; some vanished, and not even their corpses were found.¹⁰ ‘Black laws’ were passed; men of all ages, young and old, in towns and villages were forcibly sterilized; without warning, strong-arm squads marched into urban bustees, demolished homes, shops and workshops, pushed the people into trucks and deported them to distant barren sites. At the same time, strikes and meetings were banned; … wages were effectively cut and bonuses withdrawn.… And none of this was allowed to be reported; press censorship and a strict monopoly of official news manufacture were imposed.¹¹

And, as another narrator, with an emphasis on the economy put it,

rapid industrial growth, increasing exports and foreign investment, and benefits for urban bourgeois classes and rural agricultural entrepreneurs, with the costs being paid by a repressed industrial laboring class, an urban lumpenproletariat and the lower echelons of the peasantry and landless agricultural workers in the countryside, all kept firmly in tow through an increasingly powerful police establishment …, with the whole process enveloped in continual gasconades of leftist rhetoric from a rightist central government.¹²

It must be stressed that all these happenings were in keeping with the class character of a regime that permitted capital untrammeled power over labor. At the time, J. R. D. Tata, board chairman of one of India’s top large business houses, told a U.S. journalist that “things had gone too far. You can’t imagine what we’ve been through here—strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn’t walk out of my office into the street. The parliamentary system is not suited to our needs.”¹³

The substance of the state repression was, however, in place even before the declaration of the Emergency; the latter only greatly enhanced the degree of it. Consider the ordeal of Primila Lewis, a ’68er, who along with her British husband, then the head of the Indian branch of Oxford University Press, had rented a farmhouse in the Mehrauli tehsil (an administrative subdivision of the district) just south of New Delhi in 1971, much before the Emergency began. There, she was to find, much to her dismay, that her neighbors, pillars of the establishment, high-level diplomats, senior bureaucrats and military officers, top industrialists and politicians, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself, were provided land and other facilities for their “model farms” dirt cheap by the Delhi Development Authority. They were, in effect, absentee landlords who practiced a modern-day version of slavery in the treatment of their farm-workers. All the labor laws on the statute, including the Minimum Wages Act, were being violated with impunity. Impelled by a sense of natural justice, and with courage, Primila helped organize the Mehrauli Agricultural Workers’ Union.¹⁴

A mere suggestion that the “modern” gentry implement the provisions of labor law on their farms was enough of a provocation, for none of these modern-day slave owners seemed to have an iota of democratic consciousness. Did the wretched low-caste, migrant farm-workers, driven by poverty from their villages in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, have any rights at all? The union, the “modern” gentry decided, had to be stamped out, not a difficult task, given the fact that the government, through the police, the bureaucracy and the judiciary as its handmaidens, had no commitment to implement the law that it had itself enacted. As for Primila, having unequivocally declared that she was on the side of the farm-workers, she was to be treated just like the laborers she had helped organize, with an added dose of personal vendetta for disowning her own class, for becoming, what the establishment deemed, a “Naxalite.”

Strictly speaking, a Naxalite is one who has been part of an organized armed struggle not merely to overthrow the established government and regime but also to upturn the existing class-caste structure, to bring about a “New Democratic” revolution. But, in the prevailing context of rebellion, even a left-winger who was part of a collective endeavor that challenged the prevailing political authority with a view to overthrowing the existing government, or indeed, even one who took on the existing political authority without any intention of replacing it, was also deemed a “Naxalite,” if s/he proved sufficiently sincere, courageous, and uncompromising. Like Primila, and mattering little whether they were deemed Naxalites or not, there were thousands of such ’68ers in the India of those times.

HUG THE TREES, SAVE THE VALLEY

The ’68ers include even those “crusading Gandhians” and “ecological Marxists” whom the ecologist Madhav Gadgil and the social historian Ramachandra Guha associate with “that most celebrated of ‘forest conflicts,’ indeed, ‘ecological conflicts,’ the Chipko (Hug the Trees) movement that began in April 1973.”¹⁵ Guha’s The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, first published in 1989, views the Chipko Movement in a broader historical perspective, locating its historical roots in the forest policy of the colonial period, designed to meet the demand for teak wood for shipbuilding and railway tracks. This policy led to deep, widespread resentment in the wake of violation of the customary rights of the peasants to the forests, and concomitant peasant struggles, provoked, to a significant extent, by such usurpation and alienation. In the Kumaun and Tehri Garhwal areas of Uttarakhand in the central foothills of the Himalayas, the Chipko movement’s links with the earlier struggles against enclosure of the forests essentially derived from a basic continuity of the National Forest Policy of 1952 with its counterpart of 1894. Guha, however, makes no mention of the extensive strategic network of roads that was put in place in Uttarakhand after India’s 1962 China war, which surely made the region more accessible for resource extraction. Chipko nevertheless captured metaphorically, and indeed, quite imaginatively, the image of protesting women hindering commercial logging by thrusting themselves between the trees and the logger’s saws.

What is also interesting in Guha’s account is his contrast of the three strands of the movement, the ones separately led by two Gandhians, Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, with the latter stressing reforestation of barren hillsides and the setting up of micro-hydel (hydroelectric) projects. There was also the Marxist-oriented Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini (USV), the movement’s third strand, emphasizing that the human–nature relationship can only be transfigured into one which is ecologically harmonious if human relationships are transformed from exploitative to egalitarian associations. Among the prominent USV activists were the historian Shekhar Pathak, left-wing lawyers Shamsher Singh Bist and P. C. Tewari, and the Dalit student leader Pradeep Tamta. These activists differed from the Gandhians in some respects. They hailed from Kumaun, not Garhwal; they came from the student movement, not the Sarvodaya movement; and unlike the Gandhians, they were actively involved in the movement for a separate hill state, this to overcome decades of “over-exploitation” by the plains. Nevertheless, they had enormous respect for the Gandhians, particularly for Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and in their own activities, they eschewed violence. In the 1970s they organized struggles against deforestation, targeting forest contractors and the state, while in the 1980s, they led a major campaign against alcoholism, focusing on violence against women by drunken men.¹⁶

Chipko and an earlier satyagraha (non-violent resistance) in the early 1920s at Mulshi (close to Pune in the Sahyadri hills in Maharashtra)—where the business house of the Tatas had proposed to construct a series of dams—may be said to have inspired the activists of the environmental movements and campaigns of the “1968” period and beyond. Considering the 1970s, and part of the 80s when the spirit of “1968” was still alive, and eschewing comprehensiveness, the following are some of the better known ecological movements/campaigns:

• the campaign to “Save Silent Valley,” a tropical forest in Palakkad district of Kerala, which began in 1973, in the wake of a planned hydroelectric project there, and in which the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad took an active part;

• the movement to “save the Bhagirathi” and stop the proposed Tehri Baandh (dam) project on that river in the Garhwal Himalaya in Uttarakhand;

• the movement to save the Narmada led by the Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti (Narmada Valley reawakening committee) in Madhya Pradesh and the Narmada Ghati Dharangrasth Samiti (committee for the dam-affected people of the Narmada Valley) in Maharashtra, which became the Narmada Bachao Andolan, as also, initially, the struggle led by the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini (student-youth struggle forum) in Gujarat, where the terminal dam, the Sardar Sarovar, was to come up, entailing the submersion of a number of villages there;

• the movement to protect the forests and safeguard tribal livelihoods in the wake of planned mining of bauxite deposits in the forested Gandhamardhan Hills in Balangir and Sambalpur districts in Orissa (Odisha from 2011); and,

• peasant and fisher folk opposition to the setting up of a missile test range in the Baliapal-Bhograi area in Baleshwar district of Orissa.

Preceding the development projects underlying these ecological movements, there were the large dam projects of the 1950s: the Bhakra Nangal Project on the Sutlej River in the Himachal region; the Damodar River Valley Project spread over parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal; the Hirakud Dam, near Sambalpur in Orissa, on the Mahanadi River; and the Nagarjunasagar Project on the Krishna River where it formed the boundary between the Nalgonda and Krishna districts in the then Andhra region. These were all designated the “temples of modern India” in Jawaharlal Nehru’s proclamations. Their victims, thousands of poor households displaced along with loss of their livelihoods, and without any resettlement and rehabilitation worth the name, were made to suffer all this adversity in the “national interest.” Identifying these victims and placing them alongside the principal beneficiaries of these projects gives a solid clue to the nature of the ruling classes and their political representatives in the Congress Party of those times. Ecological conflicts were a long time coming in independent India, and it was “1968” that brought them on the political agenda, with Satyagraha once more a significant part of the political lexicon of protest.

The forms of protest under the rubric of Satyagraha in almost all the campaigns/movements resisting environmental degradation have been the pradarshan, a collective show of strength of the likely victims; the dharna (a sit-down strike) attempting to stop work on the project; the gherao, involving the surrounding of an official and heckling him/her until the person is forced to accede to the demands or the police intervenes and rescues him/her; raasta roko (road blockade), which disrupts transportation channels; the jail bharo (fill the jails), in which the protestors court arrest by breaking a law that in times of unrest prohibits large gatherings; and the bhook hartal (hunger strike), in which a charismatic figure undertakes a “fast-unto-death” to compel the authorities to yield to campaign demands.¹⁷ These six protest forms didn’t originate in Gandhi’s Satyagraha, and neither were they the main instruments of protest only in the environmental conflicts. Widely undertaken by the left in the struggles of workers, they proved efficacious only when they threatened to precipitate a (local) crisis of the state, which is what radical mass protest managed to do, even when it adopted some of these non-violent forms, only to bring on violent suppression by the state.

“NOTION OF WITNESS”

In India, violence and non-violence are usually contrasted as mutually exclusive Marxist and Gandhian ways of confronting oppression. This is far from the truth. At the heart of all radical political activity is organizing and convincing people, not only of the need to fight against oppression, but of the need for a new society free of oppression. Most of this political activity involves, among other essential attributes, non-violent defiance, albeit in a more committed manner. At the heart of the philosophy of non-violent resistance is the “notion of witness.” A small number of highly committed persons, by force of example, involving a great deal of sacrifice, and taking huge risks, teach a large number of people and, in the process, change the political consciousness of these people and win them over in the collective struggle for freedom and justice.

But just like the colonial state perceived the just peasant uprisings of the nineteenth century as pathologies—disease metaphors (contagion, contamination) were common and the insurgencies were deemed criminal—so also the independent Indian state viewed the Naxalite movement. A radical ’68er, Mary Tyler—a British schoolteacher who was arrested in 1970 in Singhbhum district of Bihar and spent five years in prison as an “undertrial,” the charges against her never proven in court—consigns the criminal imputations to the historical dustbin when she movingly articulates the political core of being a Naxalite:¹⁸

Amalendu’s crime, Kalpana’s crime, is the crime of all those who cannot remain unmoved and inactive in an India where a child crawls in the dust with a begging bowl; where a poor girl can be sold as a rich man’s plaything; where an old woman must half-starve in order to buy social acceptance from the powers-that-be in her village; where countless people die of sheer neglect; where many are hungry while food is hoarded for profit; where usurers and tricksters extort the fruits of labour from those who do the work; where the honest suffer while the villainous prosper; where justice is the exception and injustice is the rule; and where the total physical and mental energy of millions of people is spent on the struggle for mere survival. It is the crime of those who know that a radical change is necessary, so that the skill, creativity, ingenuity and diligence of the Indian people can be given full scope to work in building a different kind of India, a truly independent India, a better India.

More generally, “1968” and its political “children,” the ‘68ers, are metaphors that stand for a period and its rebels when there was what Trotsky might have called a “crisis in the affairs of the ruling order”—serious division within the ranks of the dominant classes over major strategic policies, and massive reverberations, including Spring Thunder, from the exploited and the oppressed. Sadly, soldiers of the Indian Army and ordinary cops of the paramilitary and armed police continued to take and carry out orders that directed them to use force against the rebels. But even though, overwhelmingly, the means of coercion remained firmly in the hands of the duly constituted authorities of the Indian state, the whiff of revolution nevertheless lingered in the air.

Consider the early political set of circumstances affecting Sushil Roy, later in his life a politburo member of the CPI(Maoist), who, after being incarcerated and treated callously in jail for almost a decade, passed away in July 2014 at the age of 76. Active in the communist movement since the early 1960s, Roy joined the CPM in 1964 after the split in the CPI, energetic in the working-class front, and hoping that the new party would take the revolutionary road. The mid-1960s were years of successive droughts, severe shortages of food-grains and other necessities such as edible oil and kerosene, high inflation in the midst of industrial stagnation, with declining real wages only partially and belatedly compensated if one worked in a factory in which the workers had an effective union.

Roy participated in the 1966 food uprising, in the pitched battles with the police in Kolkata and its suburbs, when hunger stalked the land, and in the “street fights” of the ’68 period. Those tumultuous years were also the times of “Tomaar naam, Aamar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam,” the expression of wholehearted solidarity with the people of Vietnam in their struggle against U.S. imperialism. Indeed, one of the first acts of the CPM when it came to power in a coalition government with the Bangla Congress and other parties in March 1967 was to rename Harrington Road in what was then Calcutta after the Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, thereby changing the address of the United States Consulate there to 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani! But then Naxalbari happened in May 1967, only to be crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state, as we have seen in the previous chapter, exposing the parliamentary left’s, especially the CPM’s, politics of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. It led to a rejection by the revolutionary left of the cultural, moral, and political values that the establishment left had imbibed, since 1951, from the dominant classes.

Sushil Roy was deeply moved by the Spring Thunder of Naxalbari, even hailing its line—“Naxalbari Ek Hi Raasta” (Naxalbari is the only way). At a general body meeting where the CPM bosses were in command, he asked why the party, even as it has made “people’s democratic revolution” its “word of worship,” refused to make any preparations—ideological, political, organizational, and military—to bring it about. A founding politburo member of the CPM, chairing that meeting, was said to be so annoyed that he asked Roy to get out. For the latter, this was a blessing in disguise, for the episode marked a new beginning. Roy went on to become a professional revolutionary, joining Dakshin Desh, the precursor of the Maoist Communist Centre.

Roy was a communist, but more generally, communist or not, ’68ers looked forward to a society wherein the basic needs of everyone for food, clothing, and shelter, potable water and sanitation, healthcare, education, and cultural enjoyment would be met. It was clear to them that all these needs could be fulfilled with Indian society’s inherent strengths, resources, and capacities; the creativity, ingenuity, and productivity of common people. To begin with, the movement would have to take on the establishment and the ruling classes, which were the greatest hindrance to such a process of development. The ’68ers dreamt of a just and humane society, but what distinguished the Naxalites among them was not only that they had a strategic goal for the long haul—New Democracy leading on to socialism—but that they were organizing the wretched of the Indian earth to achieve that goal, for they believed very seriously in their dream. And Dalits, defined more inclusively, were at the core of this damned of the Indian earth.

BLACK PANTHERS, DALIT PANTHERS

In 1972, in the wake of two widely publicized outrages against Scheduled Caste persons—the official caste designation of the Ati-Shudra Dalits—in the state of Maharashtra, the Marathi Dalit–Buddhist writer Raja Dhale, bitterly condemning the social order that was responsible for such atrocities, went on to characterize the 25th jubilee of independence as a black anniversary.¹⁹ Predictably, the caste-Hindu establishment castigated Dhale as an anti-national and demanded that the government take action against him for “showing disrespect to the national flag.” The Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal forcefully came to Dhale’s defense in an interview published in the Marathi daily, Navakal: “Is a national emblem like a flag more valuable than human beings? In a society as ridden with discrimination and divisions as Indian society is, what is the significance of a common national emblem?”²⁰

Earlier that year, in May, the militant Dalit protest organization and movement, Dalit Panthers, was founded by Namdeo Dhasal and the poet/writer J. V. Pawar. Dhasal’s defense of Dhale led the latter to join the Panthers. The Dalit Panthers were inspired by the African-American Black Panther Party. The latter, founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, played an important part in the black liberation struggle, this despite the dirty tactics of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation that did them in. Dhasal issued a Manifesto of the Dalit Panthers,²¹ which defined Dalits as

(m)embers of scheduled castes and tribes, neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion … [and identified its friends as] (r)evolutionary parties set to break down the caste system and class rule. [These are] (l)eft parties that are left in the true sense.… [Well aware of the consequences, the Manifesto unambiguously states that] (t)he struggle for the emancipation of the dalits needs a complete revolution … [and as part of its program, it is clear that] dalits must live, not outside the village in a separate settlement, but in the village itself.

Left radicalism was in the political DNA of some of the young Dalit writers and poets, mixed as this was with anger and disgust at the opportunistic tactics of the mainstream Dalit politicians of the Republican Party of India (RPI), co-opted as they were by the Congress Party. The mainstream communist parties, the CPI and the CPM, seemed to have failed to sense the deep frustration of the Dalits, this most deeply socially oppressed section of Indian society. Indeed, liberal-political democracy in a country like India, without the abolition of the caste system, and thus without a polity of equal citizens in a “fraternity” (comradeship) of the people, has been rotten. The bitterness and resentment that the “semi-feudal” caste order aroused in its inflamed victims found expression in the militant protests of tens of thousands of volatile Dalits, a potential reservoir for radical change. The Panthers’ successful call for the boycott of a by-election to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament) from the constituency of Central Bombay in January 1974 unnerved the political establishment. The RPI leadership, on its part, resolved to crush the Panthers wherever they were, its task made easier by the Congress government-directed police force that mercilessly suppressed militant Panther protest with brute force.²²

The harsh, yet candid, social realism of Namdeo Dhasal’s poems, in unembellished form, are an expression of the feelings of this most oppressed and downtrodden section of Indian society. Here is an excerpt.²³

Dog, leashed dog,

He howls and barks from time to time.

This is his constitutional right.

He lives on stale crumbs.

His mind is calloused with enduring injustice.

If at a rebellious moment it becomes unbearable

And he jerks at his leash, tries to break his chain,

Then he is shot.

—NAMDEO DHASAL, excerpt from “Song of the Republic and the Dog,” translated by Vidya Dixit, Gail Omvedt, Jayant Karve, Eleanor Zelliot, and Bharat Patankar

Article 17 of the Indian Constitution states: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.” The intent of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who was the chairperson of the drafting committee of the constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950, was to put an end to Untouchability, but the Establishment’s cultivated amnesia about this proviso brushed aside his “liberty, equality, fraternity” ideals. Potable water from the common wells in villages has been denied to the former Untouchables; restaurants refuse to serve them food in the cutlery meant for everyone else; they have been denied entry into temples; their representatives, if any, in the village panchayats have been made to sit separately from the rest; largely, Scheduled-Caste households have been made to live outside the boundaries of the village proper, in separate settlements; indeed, even in Mumbai, the country’s most bourgeois metropolitan city, there have been separate Scheduled Caste residential pockets, Maharwadas, Mangwadas, and Golpithas. Moreover, Scheduled Caste children were discriminated against in the schools; and bonded and other forms of forced labor have continued to prevail.²⁴

In 1969, the Elayaperumal Committee Report testified to these and other discriminatory caste-Hindu practices, but even the Prime Minister, Mrs. Gandhi, who swore by the Nehruvian “socialistic pattern of society,” ignored its findings, and the report gathered dust in filing cabinets. And worse, in Kilvenmani, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits—men, women, some with infants, and children—were forcibly herded into a hut and burned to death by hired hoodlums of the landlords on the night of December 24, 1968, because they had struck work for higher wages. The memory of it, the inhumanity, the cruelty, moves one to tears.

The Panthers came on the Maharashtrian scene with great force and promise, but then, in the face of severe repression, and disputes over the uneasy marriage of the ideas of Ambedkar and Marx, split into factions, two in 1974 itself, barely surviving, with one foot in the grave.²⁵ Far off, in the state of Bihar, the Naxalite movement had forced the state’s politicians to reconsider agrarian reforms, but the upper-caste landlords, riding high in the aftermath of the crushing of that movement, were in no mood to cede ground to the downtrodden. State propaganda that grossly exaggerated the achievements of Mrs. Gandhi’s 20-point program during the Emergency had, however, created a stir among the underdogs, enhancing expectations of debt redemption, occupancy rights of sharecroppers, and higher wages for landless laborers in rural Bihar. Moreover, the Naxalite movement, crushed though it was by then, had emboldened the oppressed.

This brought on landlord retaliation in the aftermath of the Emergency and the coming of the Janata Party to power in the March 1977 general elections. Perceiving the Congress Party to have failed them, the landlords, who generally managed the “vote banks,” had switched sides. A spate of atrocities against Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class (that is, backward caste) landless laborers and poor peasants followed, the socioeconomic identity of the victims confirming the Panthers’ inclusive characterization of the oppressed and the downtrodden as Dalits, including women.

OFF THE GROUND—WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS

“1968” also witnessed women’s solidarity irrespective of caste or class, and I need to mention the militancy of middle-class women in the wake of the Mathura rape case that sparked off autonomous women’s movements in independent India. Two policemen had raped a young, unlettered, poor tribal girl, who worked as a domestic help, on the night of March 26, 1972, inside a police station in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, but the accused were acquitted by the Supreme Court. The SC judgment, Tuka Ram and another vs. State of Maharashtra, dated 15 September 1978, reversed the decision of the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court on the grounds that Mathura had raised no alarm, and further, that there were no visible marks of injury on her person, suggesting that she had passively consented to sexual intercourse, and such consent was not vitiated by fear of death or hurt.

Thus, according to the Supreme Court, relying on Section 375(c) of the Indian Penal Code, Mathura was not raped. One might ask, a “forlorn young girl … from a poor, humble background and [with] hardly any education … [i]n the dead hours of the night … in a police station … forbiddingly fearsome … stupefied and stunned … [could] her passive submission, even if such was the case, … amount to consent either in fact or in law”?²⁶ For the first time women mobilized across the lines of class, caste, and political affiliation—in a public outcry and widespread protests, which forced amendments to various sections related to Indian rape law. The latter was by then more than a century old, desperately crying out for amendments in the light of past experience with its working. The campaign against rape, and, more generally, against women’s oppression and patriarchy, brought a number of women’s rights advocates and women’s organizations to the fore across the country.

LIMITS OF WORKER MILITANCY

Such budding comradeship among women apart, “1968” didn’t bring forth any across-the-board “fraternity” (comradeship) of the exploited that could have relieved the distress of the working class. The year 1973–74 was unbearable. This was when the prices of food-grains, edible oil and kerosene, the most basic of commodities in the consumption basket of workers, hit the roof. The twenty-day strike in the Indian Railways that began on May 8, 1974, was historic in more ways than one. The Indian Railways was the country’s largest employer, and the strike encompassed the entire rail network, affecting the very “lifeline” of the Indian economy. The strike thus raised the anxiety levels of Indian big business and, consequently, brought on massive state retaliation. The army and the paramilitary forces were deployed on a war footing; 15,000 union-activist workers were served dismissal notices; 50,000 participants were arrested. The Defence of India Rules (DIR) of 1971 (framed under the Defence of India Act, 1971) and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), otherwise meant to be applied in the event of an external national threat, were put into operation by the state against its own citizens.²⁷

Unlike in the past, the railway workers, especially those who had organized themselves independently in the “category” (some of them craft) unions, like the locomotive workers, had begun to militantly challenge the “status quo in the Indian Railways’ system of industrial relations,” epitomized by the accommodating attitude of the two main (recognized) unions—the Congress Party–controlled National Federation of Indian Railwaymen and, to a lesser extent, the “socialist”-steered All-India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF). These apex unions had, over the last two decades, been thoroughly co-opted by railroad management.²⁸

So, it was the railway workers themselves, in the face of grievances that remained poorly addressed over two decades, who became the “conscious agents of their own interests,” thereby creating the momentum for the strike that the AIRF had to lead, to restore its credibility among the workers. What made the strike almost historic was the fact that the railway workers took it upon themselves and showed their potential to “break the bounds of the kind of token action beloved of the institutionalized social-democratic labor movement.” The latter, it should be noted, was led by a union structure and supported by parties that ideally wanted a “monopoly on negotiating the terms of labour’s contract with capital.”

Though the strike was historic, the workers couldn’t break this structure, the vision of which was “openly articulated by unions such as the HMS (Hind Mazdoor Sabha) and HMKP (Hind Mazdoor Kisan Panchayat) and implicit in the practice of the AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress) and CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions),” the former two, the trade union wings of the then two socialist parties, and the latter two, those of the two “social-democratic” communist parties.²⁹ The railway workers could have achieved a breakthrough if the rest of the Indian working class had joined them in solidarity—sincerely, courageously, and uncompromisingly. But given the organizational and political weaknesses of the labor movement, the rest of the Indian working class did not join hands with the railway workers in a manner befitting a militancy that was the need of the hour, and hence the full potential of the strike was not realized.³⁰

The organizational and political weaknesses of the labor movement stem from two structural factors: the peculiar differentiation of the Indian working class and the huge reserve army of labor. The Indian working class is differentiated on three counts, according to (a) the correspondence or not of the wage with the value of labor power,³¹ (b) the caste, tribal/ethnic origins, and religion of the worker, and (c) the gender-based division of labor stemming from patriarchy. Working-class solidarity remains weak to the extent that the trade-union movement fails to struggle to secure the needs of the most exploited and most discriminated sections of the working class.

Regarding (a), based on whether or not there is a correspondence between the actual wage and the norm of a family wage, or at least a “need-based minimum wage” (the latter, formulated at the 15th Indian Labour Conference in 1956), Dev Nathan, a radical ’68er, has identified four sections of the Indian working class. These are (i) workers who get more than the family wage; (ii) workers who get a wage that corresponds to the family wage; (iii) workers who get less than the family wage, but enough to meet their immediate costs of subsistence, though insufficient for the “reproduction” of labor power, that is, for what is required for sustaining a family, and have to therefore draw upon other productive resources at their command (for example, land in the village) or informal economic activity of non-working-class members of their families; and (iv) workers who are pauperized, those who get a wage which is not even sufficient to meet the immediate costs of subsistence, and do not have any other productive resource, even a tiny plot of land in the village, to fall back upon.

The miners of Chhattisgarh and Chotanagpur working as contract laborers; the bidi workers of Nipani (in Karnataka) and Nizamabad (in Telangana) working on piece rates; the power-loom weavers of Bhiwandi (in Maharashtra) and Belgaum (in Karnataka); quarry, brick-kiln, and construction workers in different parts of the country; and numerous other workers outside agriculture, many of them perennial migrants, are all part of either (iii) or (iv), which together form the bulk of the Indian working class. And, going down the wage hierarchy, the security of employment worsens, working hours get prolonged, unionization is much lower or even absent, extra-economic coercion and/or patron-client relations of dependence and obligation to employers are more prevalent, and labor laws are violated with impunity.³²

Importantly, Dev Nathan finds little mobility between regular and casual/contract employment, and also between low-wage and high-wage jobs. This is mainly due to caste, ethnic, religious, and gender-based discrimination, with Hindu, upper-caste men dominating the regular, high-wage jobs and a preponderance of Dalits, Muslims, and adivasis in the casual/contract, low-wage, and dirty/heavy/onerous jobs. Most of the manual sewerage workers, for instance, are Dalits. They go unprotected into dark holes of filth and rotting garbage, clearing blockages mostly with their bare hands. Women workers are predominantly in low-wage jobs, as casual and contract workers, and in subsistence production, which makes it possible to keep the wage below the value of labor power for male workers in (iii) and (iv). In other words, where one finds oneself in the hierarchy of labor powers is considerably determined by the extent of caste, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination one faces, and this is reinforced by one’s access to the required education and training, which is also significantly determined by the degree of social discrimination one encounters. Nevertheless, Dev Nathan also remarks that it was from among the educated and trained workers—the ones who had regular, high-wage jobs—that the revolutionary cadres of working class origin came into the Naxalite movement.

“SHORT-LIVED DALLI–RAJHARA SPRING”

Organizing the unorganized sections of the working class has been one of the most difficult and demanding duties radicals have had to confront. Shankar Guha Niyogi was the organizing secretary of the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS) of the Dalli–Rajhara miners. Discriminated against, these contract workers were confined to a labor camp, separated from the main township administered by the public-sector Bhilai Steel Plant. Ruled by a contractor “mafia,” many of the contract workers were tribal persons who had to struggle even to uphold their very dignity as human beings. What remained etched in their collective memory was the fact that they had been fired upon and twelve of their comrades died in that police firing, this on 3 June 1977, barely three months after the Emergency was lifted, signifying that for the damned of the Indian earth, Emergency or no Emergency, fierce repression of their struggles was going to continue to be the norm. They had given their labor and their working lives to the well-being of the Bhilai Steel Plant, but unlike the regular workforce, they were deemed expendable. They had no entitlements.³³

Even as there is no evidence to vouch for the Naxalite part of it, the tale goes that Niyogi, a skilled coke-oven operator in Bhilai Steel Plant, in the 1960s was attracted to revolutionary politics amidst the Spring Thunder of 1967, went on to join the CPI(ML) and was driven underground, but eventually left the party, coming to Dhanitela, near Dalli-Rajhara, to work and organize openly in the quartzite mines over there, where he met and married a tribal co-worker, Aso. He was arrested and jailed under MISA during the Emergency, and upon his release, the miners of Dalli-Rajhara solicited his support, and it was here that the CMSS was formed in 1977.

There followed a series of struggles, these in the face of the “wrath of the powerful mining and labour contractors,”³⁴ and the intransigence of the management of the Bhilai Steel Plant. The demands ranged from enhancing the wage rate of the contract laborers to getting the newly formed labor cooperatives to replace the labor contractors, and even abolishing the contract labor system in what was perennial work. Besides, there was the union’s innovative opposition to the management’s plan to mechanize the mine and retrench most of the workers. The CMSS presented a feasible alternative in the form of a blueprint for semi-mechanization without any retrenchment.

Further, what was distinctive about the CMSS was the involvement of women workers in the struggles, with women office-bearers, rare in Indian trade unions. The CMSS went on to form its own political front, the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), in 1982, which extended the struggles beyond issues of the workplace, with the Mahila Mukti Morcha (women’s liberation front) a significant part of it. The participation of women workers helped rein in the scourge of sexual exploitation by the contractors, as well as the alcoholism of male workers, which had led to the proliferation of a “lumpen-degenerate culture in the streets and wife-beating and destitution in the homes.”³⁵ The CMSS built a “Shahid Hospital,” which doctors like Binayak Sen, Ashish Kundu, and Saibal Jana helped get off the ground. It established eleven schools, for the Bhilai Steel Plant didn’t care to run any schools in the camp area, and it reportedly also undertook an adult educational program. Its abiding slogan was Sangharsh aur Nirman—Sangharsh ke liye nirman, nirman ke liye sangharsh (“Build a future for the struggle, struggle to build a future”).³⁶

Some CMM-affiliated unions became a force to reckon with in the Bhilai-Durg-Rajnandgaon and adjoining industrial areas where a new generation of industrialists, aggressive parvenus, had rapidly come by huge fortunes, for instance, in the Simplex group of companies. Niyogi was a marked man; on 28 September 1991, he was assassinated by unidentified assailants who pumped six bullets at point-blank range into his body while he was asleep at home. His funeral was attended by over 50,000 people, giving him a hero’s farewell and vowing to carry on the struggle for a better world.

Complicity of some of the parvenu industrialists in the assassination and involvement of the district administration in the cover-up were widely believed but could not be established in the higher courts. Niyogi had spent more than a year in jail under the preventive detention provisions of MISA, which was repealed in 1977, only to reappear again in the form of the National Security Act, 1980, and he was also detained under the preventive detention provisions of this law. He never faced trial though, nor was he ever convicted of any offense; his real “crime” “was political and in an extended sense philosophical.” Remembered widely in radical left circles, he continues to exist as “‘the froth on the waves’ of people’s struggles,”³⁷ that which remains of each wave when it reaches the shore.

VAST REINFORCEMENT OF POTENTIAL WORKERS

The struggles must go on, though, for the churn to endure. The challenges for radical labor organizers are immense, as we have seen, more so because capital exploits the employed workforce with a vast reinforcement of potential workers at its disposal, what Marx called the reserve army of labor or the relative surplus population. In India this is the enormous pool of the unemployed and the underemployed, along with the petty commodity producers and service providers among the self-employed.

The reserve army of labor presents capital with a pool of labor available for hire; equally, it also forces “discipline” and “efficiency” on those who are already employed. The threat of unemployment and underemployment hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of all those who work for a wage under capitalism, and this is the real source of capitalist efficiency, the real means of increasing the rate of exploitation of the active army of labor. As Marx put it in chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” in Capital, Volume 1:

The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.…

… The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works [my emphasis]. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.

Marx categorized the reserve army in normal times into three components—the floating, the latent, and the stagnant—and added on those engaged in illegal activity, more generally, the lumpenproletariat. Leaving aside the lumpenproletariat, for which we do not have reliable estimates, let us estimate the size of each of these components of the reserve army of labor in the Indian context in 1973.

The floating component is composed of workers who are chronically unemployed. But then, with no social security, many of these persons will not be able to survive if they remained unemployed. They desperately do what they can to earn a living, so the actual number of such chronically unemployed persons has been much lower, 1.61 percent of the “usual status” labor force of 240.1 million persons in March 1973, in absolute numbers, 3.9 million persons.³⁸

The latent component of the reserve army of labor in the Indian context includes those who work for subsistence on own-account (as petty commodity producers/service providers) in the workforce, including in agriculture itself, as well as the other members of their families who chip in as unpaid workers, the proportion of which goes up in times of economic distress. In March 1973, the proportion of the self-employed in the usual status labor force was 61.4 percent of the usual status workforce of 236.2 million persons, in absolute numbers, 145.1 million persons. Roughly 50 percent of this number were petty commodity producers/service providers, 72.5 million persons,³⁹ constituting the latent component of the reserve army of labor in March 1973.

The stagnant component of the reserve army of labor is composed of those regular and casual workers who only manage to find extremely irregular employment (at best they are intermittent workers). In the Indian context, a significant proportion of casual wage laborers, including agricultural laborers, would be in that category. In 1972–73, 59 percent of the 50.24 million casual workers in rural areas and 61.6 percent of the 4.85 million casual workers in urban areas were intermittently unemployed and either sought or were available for work, in all, 32.6 million persons. Besides these casual wage workers, 4.2 million regular wage/salary workers, farm and non-farm, despite being designated as “regular”—that is, received their wages/salaries on a weekly or monthly basis—sought work or were available for work. The sum of these two categories of wage workers, 32.6 million persons plus 4.2 million persons, 36.8 million persons, constituted the stagnant component of the reserve army of labor in March 1973.

With a 3.9 million “floating” reserve, a 72.5 million “latent” reserve, and a 36.8 million “stagnant” reserve, the size of India’s reserve army of labor in March 1973 was 113.2 million persons.⁴⁰ The active army of wage/salary-based labor in the same year was 54.4 million persons, the sum of employed casual wage and regular wage/salary earning “usual status” workers who were not seeking nor available for work. Thus the size of the reserve army of labor was 2.1 times that of the active army of wage/salary-based labor, and the former constituted the “pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour work[ed],” serving to restrain the rise of real wages. Inclusion of the petty commodity producers/service providers as part of the reserve army of labor is necessary because they are subjected to appropriation (by mercantile, credit and semi-feudal capital) of the profit, interest, and rent (in the case of tenancy in agriculture) respectively in the value added by their economic activity, and are left to extract their own “wages,” which, invariably, turn out to be a pittance. Moreover, they suffer considerable underemployment and are therefore available for employment as wage laborers, though many of them may have given up seeking such work.

Now on the assumption that each person in the reserve army supports one dependent, then the size of the reserve army and its dependents would have been 226.4 million persons, 39.4 percent of the country’s population in March 1973. By adding to this absolute number the number of “usual status” employed casual wage workers who were neither seeking nor available for work and their dependents (2 × 22.5 = 45.0 million persons, again assuming one dependent per casual wage-worker), the total becomes 271.2 million persons, or 47.2 percent of the population. In essence, no sharp divide between the casual wage worker and the petty commodity producer is posited. The only major difference is that a significant part of the business risk is borne by the latter.

Looked at in the light of a Planning Commission estimate of the head-count ratio of poverty for 1972–73 of 51.5 percent of the population,⁴¹ this suggests that, in 1973, those who were robbed of access to a minimum nutritional diet in terms of calorie intake extended far beyond the reserve army of labor and its dependents, and even beyond the range of the employed casual wage workers not intermittently unemployed and their dependents.

Overall, with a labor market pivoted upon a reserve army of labor 2.1 times the active wage/salary-earning army of labor, the sharp class polarization that one encountered—islands of wealth, luxury, and civilization in a vast sea of poverty, misery, and degradation—was a ramification only to be expected. There were a relatively small number of owners/controllers of Indian big businesses and multinational corporate affiliates, beneficiaries of the skewed distribution of surplus value, at the apex of a steep social-class hierarchy, at the bottom of which were the massive reserve army of labor and the remaining casual wage workers. In between, at different distances from the apex and the base of the social-class pyramid, were the political entrepreneurs, the semi-capitalist landowners, the SME capitalists, the merchant and moneylending classes, the administrative, professional, scientific & technological sections of the middle class, the labor contractors/jobbers who recruit and manage gangs of unregistered wage workers, and the regular wage workers.

One aspect of India’s underdevelopment has been its backwardness—a low level of development of the forces of production (the material means of production and labor-power) in significant parts of the economy, with these spheres dominated by mercantile, credit, and “semi-feudal” capital. Indeed, there has been a political and commercial alliance between the “semi-feudal” landowning classes and mercantile-cum-credit capital that has preserved the status and prerogatives of both. This, and the preservation of the large mass of oppressed peasants and other petty commodity producers/service providers, has been at the core of India’s underdeveloped capitalism. Importantly, this state of affairs has been concomitant with backward capitalist political, ideological, and cultural traits.

The huge reserve army of labor not only circumscribes the wage and other demands of the regular and casual wage workers, but also moderates the producer prices of the petty commodity producers/service providers in the overcrowded and intensely competitive supply-side of the markets in which the latter find themselves. Thus, without mincing words, it is possible to surmise that here was an underdeveloped capitalist system that enabled labor exploitation of criminal proportions, utterly denying the rights of hundreds of millions of human beings to even a bare subsistence.

SCOUNDRELS IN PATRIOTIC GARB

But, even while reflecting on the Indian system’s principal economic “crime,” there is a need to get back to the dreadful political crimes being committed, when MISA and DIR gave the government extraordinary powers to deal with not merely external threats but also what it perceived to be internal intimidation affecting its stability, just like the government in colonial India did. The Defence of India Act of 1971 was derived from its namesake of 1915, which, incidentally, came from its namesake of 1858 in the wake of the Great Rebellion of 1857–58. The provisions of the 1915 Act were extended in the widely detested Rowlatt Acts of 1919, and then again in 1939, and in 1962, in the wake of India’s China war. The Defence of India Act of 1971 came into force when India openly went to war with Pakistan on December 3, 1971.

Covertly, the war broke out soon after the Pakistani Army cracked down on the Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan on the night of 25/26 March 1971—not merely on the Awami League led by Mujibur Rahman, the pro-Moscow National Awami Party led by Muzaffar Ahmad, and the pro-Moscow “communists,” but also, and significantly, on the so-called pro-China National Awami Party led by Maulana Bhashani (the “Red Maulana”) and the revolutionary left that had emerged within and without the latter. Indeed, at least for a while, it was the revolutionary left that went on to make significant gains in the rural areas politically, that is, when the Awami League, soon after the Pakistani Army crackdown, fled to safety in India alongside the massive stream of refugees. At that point, the revolutionary left took the lead, making it very hard for the Pakistani Army to control the 64,000 odd villages of East Bengal.⁴²

Could the revolutionary left in East Bengal have turned the Bengali nationalist struggle into a People’s War? Most unlikely, unless one chooses to persist with one’s revolutionary illusions, for the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, in the face of brutal state repression, even if it were to have imagined a united communist Bengal, could not have begun the practice of such politics. Moreover, in East Bengal, it was not the Red Maulana’s Awami National Party but Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League that had the backing of the Bengali industrial and mercantile capitalists, kulaks, bureaucrats, the Bengali elite in the Pakistani Army, paramilitary and police who had split from their respective units, and opportunist sections of the intelligentsia. The Awami League also had close relations with the Indian establishment, which very quickly got into the act of intervention, followed by outright invasion aimed at turning East Bengal into an Indian protectorate. The Indian Army’s and the Mukti Bahini’s victory in East Bengal came on December 16, 1971.

Could Washington have restrained New Delhi from Indian Army intervention in East Pakistan? Article IX of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 that India entered into with the Soviet Union provided an assurance that the latter would back India in the event of external threat or actual breach of Indian security. And, as events were to unfold, the policy of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1973 squashed any lingering doubts that Washington wouldn’t adjust to the new geopolitical advantage that India had gained. And, if there was any specter of a united communist Bengal in the intelligence agencies of Washington and New Delhi, this was laid to rest by an Indo-Bangladeshi counter-revolutionary alliance in late-1973 which brought the Indian Eastern Frontier Rifles to closely coordinate its operations on the Indo-Bangladesh border with that of the Rakkhi Bahini (the counterpart of India’s Central Reserve Police Force) in the newly formed Bangladesh, unleashing a terror that even seemed to have surpassed that of the Pakistani military regime of Yahya Khan.⁴³

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” so the saying goes, but in this case it seemed like the first—Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took full credit for the victory in the war with Pakistan and the “liberation” of East Bengal, which created Bangladesh. Sections of the Indian establishment, particularly the Jan Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee, hailed her as Durga, the invincible goddess of Hindu mythology, and she sought to make political capital out of what the Indian Army and East Bengali nationalist fighters had accomplished, quickly calling fresh elections in thirteen Indian states, some of which the Opposition parties governed. Such expressions of aggressive nationalism should have been a warning of what was to unfold. Her Congress Party won all these states very comfortably, except in West Bengal, where her party’s landslide came because of “terror, intimidation and fraud.”⁴⁴

POLITICAL BARBARISM

Organizations for the protection of civil liberties and democratic rights (CL&DR) in independent India—the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) and the Organization for the Protection of Democratic Rights (OPDR), both formed in Andhra Pradesh in 1973, as also the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) in West Bengal, which emerged in 1972—arose alongside the Naxalite movement and in the setting of the undeclared (pre-Emergency) emergency repression unleashed by the state and its hired hoodlums. The APCLC and OPDR came in the wake of efforts by radical intellectuals, ’68ers, to protect the rights of the poor peasants, landless laborers, and their Naxalite organizers in the face of the brutal state repression of the movement in Srikakulam and parts of Telangana that began in 1968-69, as we have seen in chapter 1.

The roots of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) can be traced to the People’s Union for Civil Liberties & Democratic Rights (PUCL&DR), which was formed in 1976, mainly conceived by the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan and a retired chief justice of the Bombay High Court, V. M. Tarkunde, to oppose the repression of civil liberties during the Emergency. After the lifting of the Emergency and with the Janata Party in power, which brought some of the PUCL&DR’s political associates into office as part of the new government, the PUCL&DR was rendered relatively inactive until it was revived as the PUCL when Mrs. Gandhi rode back to power in 1980.

The PUDR began in 1977 as the Delhi unit of the PUCL&DR, but after the latter was revived at the national level as the PUCL in 1980, the PUDR began functioning as an independent organization from February 1981. The APDR, APCLC, the CPDR (the Mumbai-based Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, also formed after the lifting of the Emergency), and PUDR, all owed their leadership and main cadre to Marxist rebels, ’68ers largely sympathetic to Maoism, who viewed their legal struggle to win civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights as a constituent part of the revolutionary process. Along with PUCL, these organizations believed that the winning of civil and political rights are an essential part of the struggle for the realization of social, economic, and cultural rights.

What was the CL&DR movement up against when it started off in the early 1970s? An example is what APDR ran into in 1972, this in its own words:⁴⁵

[The] orgy of slaughter and brutal repression [during the] last two years all over India was unknown even in the days of British Raj. Reckless abuse of power [by the executive] in the name of maintaining law and order … (v)arious detention laws of the British regime … brought back under old and new names [for instance, DIR and MISA], thousands … detained under these draconian measures … many others … implicated in cases under false charges and thrown behind (bars) … (p)ersons released on bail … rearrested within the very premises of the court under newly fabricated charges⁴⁶ … (the) (e)xtent of arrest(s) due to political reason(s) … so great … [the] number of prisoners … far surpass(ing) the capacity of the jail(s) …[with the] worst possible food … frightening sanitary condition(s) … facilities for (medical) treatment only in name … incurable and infectious diseases … playing havoc with the lives of the hapless prisoners … [and] no response from the government even after repeated appeals …

[P]ersons … detained due to political reasons … far from being recognized as political prisoners … refused even the minimum facilities … assured for all categories of political prisoners by the jail code … rights to have a weekly interview … not being allowed … [The authorities] (f)ollowing in the footsteps of the former British rulers, … deported [prisoners] to … far-off places from West Bengal … their relatives … getting no information about their wards … [B]arbarous torture [was] inflicted upon prisoners under the plea of extorting confession during their detention in police custody … [A] shameful record … of indiscriminate killings … slaughter … continuing outside [reference is made to mass killing outside the jails in] Barasat, Diamond Harbour, Burdwan, Kalna, Baranagore, Howrah, Bantra, Bhawani Dutta Lane … [A]lso … unarmed helpless prisoners in their hundreds … [were] … beaten or shot to death … under different pretexts in jails and police custody … [reference is made to mass killings in jails such as inside the] DumDum, Alipore, Berhampore, Midnapore, Bahkipur (Patna), Hazaribag, Gaya, Bhagalpur [prisons].

The executive organ[s] of the state … in complete defiance of all constitutional provisions, on their own … implement[ed] sentences of death, which can be decided upon by the judiciary only … [with the) judicial authority … surprisingly silent about [such] matters. [If a revolutionary, in the course of] translating his [her] ideal into reality … oversteps the law … [g]overnment … [has] the right to take legal action against him [her] … but in doing so, government too, by the same logic, cannot overstep the … limits of law.

The brutalization of the repressive apparatus of the state and the criminalization of politics and the adoption of Reichstag fire tactics to eliminate the left in West Bengal were evident much before the formal declaration of Emergency, whose immediate provocation, among other matters, was an Allahabad High Court judgment that declared Mrs. Gandhi’s election to Parliament in 1971 null and void because of certain electoral malpractices in her campaign. As mentioned, practically all the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution were suspended, including habeas corpus, with an “operational moratorium on the autonomy of the country’s democratic institutions.” Preventive detention, which was hitherto liberally used against the radical left, was now applied to imprison all of Mrs. Gandhi’s political opponents, indeed, even some of her prominent intellectual critics.⁴⁷ There were now no judicial curbs on executive power and, de facto, the status of Parliament was reduced to that of a rubber stamp.

What really distinguished the Emergency from the period immediately preceding it was that during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi and the regime she headed broke the establishment “rule” under which it was permissible to violate the CL&DR, including the fundamental rights, of the Naxalites and the wretched of the Indian earth whom they had organized, but not those of the politicians and intellectuals of the establishment. If there were some 40,000 political prisoners in jail or in police custody in 1973, come the Emergency, that number touched 140,000, what with the ban now extending to twenty-six parties, beyond the usual Marxist-Leninist ones. The Shah Commission’s findings on the “excesses” committed during the Emergency and the Bhargava Commission set up to investigate “encounter” deaths in Andhra Pradesh—seventy-seven of which had been reported to have taken place—exposed the rot that had set in, but those indicted or accused of criminal conduct went on to make successful careers. Indeed, beyond the investigations, the then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, had, on more than one occasion, claimed that he had “wiped out” the Naxalites.

“Police encounter”—a term used by the Indian police, paramilitary, military, and other security forces to explain the death of an individual whom they have cold-bloodedly killed—is, in reality, a planned extra-judicial killing not authorized by the law or by a court of law, in most cases, staged by planting weapons alongside the dead body to indicate the reason why the person was killed. A first information report is lodged against the dead person reiterating the police version of events. Truly, independent India did not make a break from its colonial past. Just as the British colonialists had put in place a repressive legal structure to deal with the militant section of the nationalist struggle for independence and called it “terrorist,” maintaining all kinds of repressive sections on the statute book to repress it, the post-Independence Indian state continued in the same vein as far as the Naxalite movement was concerned, and also with respect to the nationalist movements in Kashmir and the northeast.

While the Bhargava Commission was prevented from completing its assigned task, one recalls with horror the encounter killings in Andhra Pradesh, a few of which were investigated in detail by a committee (set up by Jayaprakash Narayan, as president of the Citizens for Democracy) headed by V. M. Tarkunde, and published as a report entitled Encounters Are Murders, due mainly to the painstaking work done by the eminent human rights lawyer and activist, K. G. Kannabiran, as member-secretary, and a group of committed civil liberties activists. But the accused, allegedly responsible for the killing of young Naxalites/Maoists in cold blood, claiming falsely that the latter were killed in encounters (that had never taken place), were never tried and punished for murder. The principle of ministerial and collective responsibility of the cabinet was never respected. Consequently, the old adage that “impunity breeds contempt for the law” began to apply; the wielders of repressive political power had nothing but scorn for the legal code. What resulted was an ambience of “cultivated ignorance” in the sphere of “governance” that brushed off extra-judicial killings as mere aberrations.

Kannabiran hits the nail on the head when he pins all this down to failure to restructure the old institutions of the state in terms of the new Constitution of independent India. The colonial value system continued to prevail “despite an avowedly democratic Constitution” put in place on January 26, 1950. The establishment view was that crime could not be investigated nor security preserved if the law were followed; indeed, crime could only be investigated and security safeguarded by breaking or circumventing the law! Kannabiran cites case law to show that the Supreme Court drew support and inspiration from what a colonial court had decreed in a case wherein the accused was a revolutionary of the Anushilan Samiti, a political outfit that advocated revolutionary violence as a means for ending British colonial rule in India. This was to the effect that “illegality [i.e. torture] in procuring evidence does not vitiate the trial,” thus persisting with colonial jurisprudence.⁴⁸

Indeed, in true colonial form, the “conspiracy” provisions of the Indian Penal Code, mainly Sections 121 and 121A, promulgated by the colonial state in Act 45 of 1860, were used to strangle the CPI(ML) by holding the leaders of the Naxalite movement on a tight leash, in the Parvathipuram Conspiracy Case related to the Srikakulam armed struggle.⁴⁹ Many of the accused were killed in so-called encounters after the charge-sheet had been filed. Such viciousness reminds one of the first Lahore Conspiracy Case, initiated in 1915, under the Defence of India Act, against members of the Ghadar Party, a most merciless lawsuit by the colonial state, in which out of those of the “conspirators” tried in a special tribunal convened in Lahore (such tribunals were also convened in Benares, Mandalay and Singapore), forty-six were executed and 194 given life sentences.⁵⁰ Then there was the Cawnpore (now spelt Kanpur) Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 in which communist leaders M. N. Roy, Muzaffar Ahmed, Shaukat Usmani, Singaravelu Chettiar, S. A. Dange, Nalini Gupta, and others were charged with conspiring to “deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India … by a violent revolution,” this just a year before the formal launch of the hitherto émigré CPI in India in 1925. Also, following the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in July-August 1928 and publication of its “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies”⁵¹ in December of that year, the Meerut Conspiracy Case was initiated in March 1929. What brought on this case was colonial fear of the spread of communist ideas in India.

In a truly colonial manner, so was the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case, filed in August 1974, in which writers and poets of the Revolutionary Writers Association (RWA; Viplava Rachayitala Sangham in Telugu, known as Virasam)—T. Madhusudan Rao, K. V. Ramana Reddy, Varavara Rao, Cherabanda Raju, M. T. Khan, and M. V. Ranganatham—were charged, alongside Maoist revolutionaries K. G. Sathyamurthy and Kondapalli Seetharamiah, among others. Here were writers and poets accused of sedition and “waging war against the state,” the sedition charges under 124A of the Indian Penal Code, inserted by Act 27 of 1870. The spectacular growth of RWA after its formation in 1970 into a literary-political movement had obviously unnerved the Andhra Pradesh government, for the trial went on for fourteen and a half years, and with some of the alleged offenses deemed non-bailable, one of India’s finest radical-left poets, Cherabanda Raju, died in jail, his contemporary, Varavara Rao suffering several years of incarceration.⁵² The “continuation of British Indian traditions was responsible for the characteristically very colonial response” of the state in independent India in not only subjecting radical politics to conspiracy charges, but also in the Supreme Court’s approach to the Emergency and MISA.⁵³

UNABATED COLONIAL POLICY

Even the successors of the elite nationalist leadership of the anti-colonial movement were least concerned about dismantling and replacing certain colonial political structures and institutions. Moreover, India’s defeat in its China war of 1962 had precipitated a huge crisis of confidence. Indian “patriots” of all hues felt deeply humiliated. The Nehru government had been aiding Tibetan separatism, claiming Aksai Chin, and demanding complete adherence to the McMahon Line. New Delhi was bent upon sticking to its former colonial master’s policy with regard to the boundaries dispute with Beijing.

In 1958, it not only refused to negotiate a settlement of the border dispute, but engaged in military provocations, ultimately leaving the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) no other option. In 1962, the PLA, after defeating the Indian Army in “India’s China War,” and with India still refusing to negotiate, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and withdrew to 20 km north of the McMahon Line (even though China then considered that line illegal), and in Ladakh too, to where they were stationed before the start of hostilities. As Neville Maxwell put it:⁵⁴

The Chinese withdrawal to their original lines after a victory in the field was the first time in recorded history that a great power has not exploited military success by demanding more.

This really exposed the myth of Chinese aggression; in Maxwell’s view, all China wanted (and wants) was a negotiated settlement that would guarantee stability at its borders. But Nehru just stuck to the old colonial claims, that Aksai Chin was part of the Ladakh region of India for centuries, and so on. In the face of defeat, however, his hegemonic position in the Indian establishment suffered a jolt; in the non-aligned movement too, there was a loss of face. Nehru passed away on May 27, 1964, and the man who succeeded him as prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died of a heart attack less than two years after he took office. In the contest for the office of the prime minister that followed, with the backing of the Congress President K. Kamaraj, Mrs. Gandhi took office on January 24, 1966.

Soon thereafter, on March 1, 1966, the Mizo National Front (MNF) in India’s Northeast, formed in October 1961 under the leadership of Laldenga, rose in revolt and made a declaration of independence. The MNF had been seeking the integration of the Mizo people and the liberation of their homeland, the then Mizo Hills district of Assam, from India. The Indian government retaliated with vicious air raids. On March 2, the government of India invoked the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, designating the Mizo Hills as a “Disturbed Area.” On March 4, Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets strafed Aizawl, the main town, using machine guns, following this up the next day with an extensive airstrike that went on for five hours. As a Mizo Hills MLA in the Assam Legislative Assembly was to remark in the House: “The use of air force for taking Aizawl was excessive because you cannot pinpoint from the air who is loyal and who is not loyal, who is an MNF and who is somebody pledging allegiance to the Mizo Union, the ruling party in the Mizo district.”⁵⁵ But the government of India even went to the extent of denying that the aerial bombing of Aizawl on March 4 and 5, 1966, had taken place, let alone apologizing to the Mizo people for this inhuman act. This was the first time that the government of India resorted to air strikes on its own civilian population. Mrs. Gandhi could not have made a more callous beginning as prime minister.

With the “colonial” deeply embedded in the so-called post-colonial, one should refrain from holding Mrs. Gandhi as prime minister individually responsible for such inhumanity. Indeed, in May 1975, again when Mrs. Gandhi was the prime minister, the Indian state “annexed” the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, which was a British dependency and had become a protectorate under India in 1950. The official claim has been that this was a “voluntary” merger, but in all likelihood it was the result of New Delhi taking opportunistic advantage of a “mobilization” of the majority community of Sikkimese of Nepalese origin under a “feudal” Sikkimese leader of Lepcha origin who was implacably opposed to the Chogyal (Sikkim’s traditional ruler).⁵⁶ All her pomposity and bluster notwithstanding, Mrs. Gandhi was really a captive of the colonial deep in the marrow of the “post-colonial” regime she was heading.

GREEN REVOLUTION—BYPASSING LAND REFORM

In the economy, the balance of payments was particularly strained with increasing food imports adding to the hard currency strain from the huge military hardware imports that were already underway over the previous couple of years. The international trade account was already stressed by the huge imports of plant and equipment and spares thereof that the second and third five-year plans had entailed. Under “advice” from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the rupee underwent a huge devaluation in 1966, further exacerbating inflationary and industrial recessionary tendencies.

The land reform was expected to lead to significant growth of agricultural output, but it was now being realized in establishment circles that, beyond a point, such reform was not politically feasible in India. The landlords, especially the large ones, were, after all, an important constituent of the political establishment. The agrarian class structure, even after the land reform of the 1950s and 60s, was still outmoded, a serious impediment to the modernization of agriculture and to rapid rural development. Nevertheless, with the abolition of the intermediary tenures of the Zamindari era—what historians have called “subinfeudation”⁵⁷—this on payment of compensation, about 20 million erstwhile tenants became landowners. However, most of them were not genuine cultivators tilling the land. They lived off the labor of the actual tillers, either their tenants-at-will or their hired laborers. Indeed, many such tenants-at-will, those who came from the lower castes, may have gotten evicted. Vast areas of wasteland were vested in the state. However, the large “home farms,” the workable core of the estates of the Zamindars, cultivated by tenants-at-will, remained intact, with no measures even to limit their sizes. As Elizabeth Whitcombe puts it, what was left with the Zamindars was “a tenth of the Zamindari, but [with] ten times more income” after the adoption of green-revolution techniques, and with “their brothers and sons in the civil service and industry, the army and the police sending regular remittances to swell the family accounts in pre-Mutiny fashion.…”⁵⁸

As regards the reform of tenancy, despite progressive guidelines laid down in the five-year plans, and some states enacting laws laying down the maximum permissible rate of rent, security of tenure, and so on, rents continued to remain at “semi-feudal” levels, insecurity of tenure persisted, and, in many cases, tenants were evicted on the plea of “personal cultivation” by the landowners. Moreover, tenancies were “‘pushed underground and converted into work contracts…. (M)ost of the leases, particularly crop-sharing arrangements, [were] oral and informal…. (T)he objective of ensuring fair rent and security of tenure … [remained] unattained in large parts of the country. [Indeed,] (h)ighly exploitative tenancy in the form of crop-sharing still … [prevailed] in large parts of the country.’”⁵⁹

Land ceiling laws were enacted by the states by 1961, but “(a)ll the laws provided for a large number of exemptions.… (A)ll prudent landowners took steps in good time to distribute the surplus land among their relatives, friends and dependents, and in some cases they arranged paper transactions to show distribution among fictitious persons…. Only about one million hectares of land could be declared surplus … [which worked] out to be less than one percent of the total arable land in the country…. [Consolidation of fragmented holdings] often helped the landowner in getting rid of his tenants.”

… “Thus the overall assessment [was] … that programmes of land reform adopted since Independence had failed to bring about the required changes in the agrarian structure.”⁶⁰ Moreover, the close interrelation between the agrarian class structure and the Hindu caste hierarchy remained intact, albeit, with some positional changes. The ranks of landowners, formerly invariably upper-caste, were now composed of some of the former tenants, middle and backward castes. The cultivators were from the ranks of the middle and backward castes, while the landless laborers were from the lowest castes, mostly Dalits. All the tall talk of “land to the tiller” was hogwash.⁶¹ If really meant, it would have connoted giving ownership rights to the poor peasants (tenants at the subsistence level) and landless laborers, and not permitting those who did not till the land with their own personal labor to own it. This would have then resulted in the transfer of ownership of land from the upper-caste landowners, who are averse to manual labor, to the real tillers of the soil.⁶²

There was thus no basis to assume that a genuine land reform could be carried out without class struggle and the winning of that struggle by the exploited and the oppressed.⁶³ Overall, the post-1956 official land reforms led merely to a partial amalgamation of the old rural landowning classes-castes into a new, broader stratum of rich landowners, those not setting their hands to the plough. This included an upper section of the former tenants, all of whom, despite the various markets, were yet to rid themselves of various retrograde elements of semi-feudal culture and behavior. Yet the establishment, in the design of rural policy, kept up the pretense of an undifferentiated “village community”; it claimed to want land reforms, but without the class struggle that would inevitably accompany such a program, if it were a real one. For the peasants who took Gandhi’s articulated vision of a Ram Rajya (the mythical just rule of the Hindu god, Ram) in independent India seriously, their dreams were prematurely shattered.

The story of Indra Lohar was brought to public attention in 1973 by Ashok Mitra, in his column “Calcutta Diary,” in the Economic & Political Weekly. Lohar, a petty sharecropper under oral lease, who despite the then more recent amendments of the West Bengal Land Reforms Act to plug loopholes, was dispossessed of the small piece of land he tilled and found to his horror a chronic denial of justice by the administration, the police, and the courts. Mitra’s prose sketches a profoundly depressing portrait of deliberate and callous discrimination against the poor sharecropper, and the fact that this detrimental outcome was the almost inevitable result of the disparity in political power and economic resources between the landlord and his sharecropper tenant, made worse by the absence of a “living, pulsating organised movement of the peasantry [which] could have made a difference.”⁶⁴

“Spring Thunder,” Phase I, had been crushed by then; nevertheless, it had unnerved not merely the agrarian ruling class of large landowners, but also Indian big business, the multinationals, and the entire political establishment. A technical fix was already underway, not merely in India, to contain “Communist revolution” wherever it was brewing or might ferment. The Malayan communist insurgency of 1948–60, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, originally against the Japanese occupation, but which continued against the Filipino government during 1946–54, and the anti-French war of resistance in Indochina during 1946–54, in all of which peasants constituted the main guerrilla base, ultimately led to the weaving of Green Revolution into the fabric of American foreign policy.⁶⁵

As far as India was concerned, the Telangana peasant uprising of 1946–51 had unsettled the establishment. Poverty estimates (headcount ratios) from 1951 onward, based on consumption data of the National Sample Survey Rounds, didn’t seem to show any time trend, but the numbers were very high in some years. For the period July 1954–March 1955, 64 percent and 46 percent of the rural and urban populations, respectively, were below the poverty line. In July 1966–June 1967 and July 1967–June 1968, likewise, the headcount ratios of poverty were 64 percent and 52 percent-53 percent of the rural and urban populations, respectively.⁶⁶

In 1960, the Ford Foundation got the Indian government to initiate an Intensive Agricultural Districts Programme (IADP), an initial pilot run of Green Revolution techniques. In the meantime, it was food aid under Public Law 480 that was in place, which “bought time for more long-term solutions to be found to the problems of hunger and social unrest in the Third World,”⁶⁷ including India. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was founded with American aid in 1962 in the Philippines to focus on developing high-yielding varieties of rice, Asia’s major food crop. The CIMMYT (in English, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre), though formally founded in 1966 with American aid, was already existed in the form of an American-aided program that began in 1943, and which the wheat specialist Norman Borlaug joined the following year, going on to be awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, raising eyebrows, for his was not the usual chemistry prize that such work in biochemistry might have merited.⁶⁸

It was the new seeds from CIMMYT and IRRI alongside American aid for IADP that was the launch pad for the Green Revolution in India. Moreover, from 1966, U.S. deliveries of food under PL480 were subject to conditions. Emphasis had to be placed on the Green Revolution and population control, and the pecuniary interests of U.S. multinational corporations, especially in fertilizers and pesticides. The successive droughts of the mid-1960s had led to severe food shortages and the Indian government was enthusiastic and obliging. By 1969–70, around 37 percent and 12 percent of the total wheat and rice acreages respectively comprised high-yielding varieties.⁶⁹

Political expediency, however, temporarily shelved the rightward shift that Washington wanted. Following the poor performance of the Congress Party in the general and state elections of 1967, during the subsequent sharp factional squabbles within the party, and with the party split in 1969, Indira Gandhi found it politically advantageous to take a leftward turn. Her government began to claim application of the principles underlying Articles 39(b) and (c) of the Constitution in framing certain laws,⁷⁰ this with political rhetoric that mouthed Nehruvian expressions such as “socialistic pattern of society” and her own coining of “garibi hatao” (remove poverty). Maneuvering to her own advantage, she spearheaded a motion to bring in the Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Ordinance, 1969, and nationalize the fourteen largest commercial banks with effect from the midnight of 19 July 1969, soon introducing a bill to that effect, placed in and passed by Parliament. Her party, the so-called Congress (Requisition), then spearheaded the passing of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices bill in Parliament in December 1969 (just a month after the split in the Congress Party), the Indian Patents Act in 1970, the 26th Constitutional Amendment of 1971 to abolish the Privy Purses of the erstwhile royal families of the former princely states, and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act in 1973.

With control over bank credit passing into the hands of the public sector, the Green Revolution could now be adequately financed without a hitch. After all, the supply of subsidized high-yielding seed, fertilizer, pesticide, irrigation water, and agricultural machinery, including tube-wells and pump-sets, needed liberal bank financing, and to reduce the bank-default and commercial-farming risks, agricultural pricing policy had to ensure that the government’s procurement prices were well above ruling market prices. Indeed, the procurement price now acted as a floor price in the speculative trade. The heydays of the landlords, rich peasants/capitalist farmers, both of the kulak variety, and agribusiness traders had truly arrived. The output of food grains more than doubled over the next decade and a half, from 1970 onward.

With the growth of public sector industry and infrastructure sustained by drawing on the proceeds of indirect taxation and deficit financing, and the private sector in industry and agriculture liberally funded by the public-sector banks and other financial institutions, it was the terms of trade between agriculture and industry that remained the bone of contention between the landlords/rich peasants/capitalist farmers on the one hand and Indian big business and the MNCs on the other. It was this relative price that crucially affected the economic positions of these ruling classes in Indian society, as well as the process of accumulation and economic growth. A shift in the terms of trade in favor of agriculture in the initial years of the Green Revolution as a result of government intervention forced both the urban working class and the poor peasants and landless laborers to allocate a large proportion of their money earnings to food commodities, which led to a progressive shrinkage in their demand for industrial products, particularly mass consumption goods, thereby adversely affecting the pecuniary interests of Indian big business and the MNCs.⁷¹

This contradiction notwithstanding, the Green Revolution strategy, after an initial period of intra-ruling-class bickering over this relative price, seems to have cemented their political coalition with a fair degree of stability and durability, for the powers-that-be found a way for the landlords/rich peasants/capitalist farmers to get their high prices and subsidized industrial inputs even as Indian big business and the MNCs got their low-cost credit finance, duty drawbacks, and subsidized agricultural inputs. The whole program of industrial development was crucially predicated upon significant improvements in agricultural output per acre that would, other things equal, dampen food inflation and thereby check the rise of the industrial wage rate. But the pecuniary interests of those who were in the saddle in agriculture, the rural landed classes and the big traders of agricultural commodities, also had to be accommodated, for they were the main organizers of the rural vote banks and financiers of establishment politics in the countryside.

With the Naxalite movement crushed and the Green Revolution off the ground, the “crisis in the affairs of the ruling order” had been successfully warded off, at least for the present. Indeed, from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s, the real agricultural wage rate rose significantly, accompanied by significant increases in government expenditure on rural development. Together, this led to a decline in the incidence of absolute poverty in the rural areas over the same period,⁷² although the absolute numbers of the poor went on increasing, and malnutrition and ill health remained endemic. The Green Revolution thus didn’t turn Red, but the peasant question nevertheless became even more germane, for with incomplete proletarianization, the numbers of the poor peasants and other petty commodity producers/service providers swelled.

I am reminded of the way one of my best teachers, the late Professor Nirmal Kumar Chandra, introduced the peasant question and there’s no better way I know of to pose that concern. “How can the mass of peasantry be drawn into a revolutionary movement spearheaded by the socialists, representing above all the proletariat?” And he goes on: “The difficulty, at bottom, stems from the fact … that the peasant possesses ‘two souls,’ one of the proprietor, and the other of a worker.”⁷³ What immediately came to mind when I read this was another difficulty, this in the Indian context. Here this combination of the proprietor and the worker—the Indian peasant—is imbued with caste consciousness, which drives him/her to strive to give up the use of family labor in tilling the soil and in other manual tasks.

How then will the Indian peasant, especially the poor and middle one, develop solidarity with the landless laborer, who, moreover, is most probably a Dalit? As I have hinted at earlier, in the Indian case, the institution of caste impedes class solidarity and class consciousness, and as far as the rich peasant goes, it induces him to behave like the landlord. The Naxalites are yet to resolve such matters in their political practice even as they continue to learn from their actions. The movement cannot be written off though, however much the establishment might wish that one day it will, this in the face of concerted state repression over the last five decades. Public memory of the aborted/defeated peasant/plebeian struggles of the colonial and post-colonial periods, and contemporary conditions on the ground, seem to compel present-day peasants and proletarians to plod on.

LONG TRADITION OF PEASANT INSURGENCY

The historian Ranajit Guha, in his 1983 classic, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, has done much to understand the rebel political consciousness of the peasant insurgents in India during the period 1783–1900. As Guha puts it: “One of the direct consequences” of the British colonialist creation of “a highly centralised state … that brought into focus the refractory moments of semi-feudalism in the countryside in a manner unprecedented in Indian history” was “the fusion of the landlord’s and the moneylender’s authority with that of the sarkar” (the government), and this is “what provided insurgency with the objective conditions of its development and transmission.”⁷⁴ So also was Kathleen Gough’s historical perspective on peasant resistance and struggles in colonial and post-colonial India. In a 1974 essay on Indian peasant uprisings, she wrote:⁷⁵

Indian peasants have a long tradition of armed uprisings, reaching back at least to the initial British conquest and the last decades of Mughal government. For more than 200 years peasants in all the major regions have risen repeatedly against landlords, revenue agents and other bureaucrats, moneylenders, police and military forces. During this period there have been at least 77 revolts, the smallest of which probably engaged several thousand peasants in active support or in combat. About 30 of these revolts must have affected tens of thousands of peasants, and about 12, several hundreds of thousands. The uprisings were responses to deprivation of unusually severe character, always economic, and often also involving physical brutality or ethnic persecution.

… [T]he fact that at least 34 of those I considered were solely or partly by Hindus, causes me to doubt that the caste system has seriously impeded peasant rebellion in times of trouble.

…

… The revolts … amply illustrated the remarkable organising abilities of the peasantry, their potential discipline and solidarity, their determined militancy in opposing imperialism and exploitative class relations, their inventiveness and potential military prowess and their aspirations for a more democratic and egalitarian society [my emphasis].

The peasantry had been affected adversely in multiple ways (listed below)⁷⁶ during colonial rule, and thus the armed struggles involving peasant partisans against those who exacted their surpluses were warranted. These included:

(i)	Ruinous taxation during the early decades of East India Company rule before and after the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1793; the revenue used to maintain and expand the colonial system and pay for the imports of commodities for Britain, mainly Indian textiles that were earlier paid for in bullion.77
(ii)	The land settlements created “bourgeois” private property in land. However, the landlords were deemed to be the owners of the land only if they paid the heavy incidence of tax on the assessed rent collected,78 of course, with their tenants’ “rights” highly circumscribed. Later, the British colonialists gave up much of the potential revenue from the land tax, settling for a much lower incidence of that tax than the Mughals had exacted, thus to secure the landlords’ support for their rule. Tenancy reform laws79 eventually came into force in the face of peasant struggles. The peasants’ surplus was, however, by now appropriated by other “agents” besides the landlords—moneylenders, non-cultivating intermediary tenants, merchants, and lawyers.
(iii)	There were encroachments on tribal hilly and forested territories and tribal oppression by planters, British and Indian, the colonial government, and landlords, merchants, and moneylenders from the plains.
(iv)	The process of de-(proto)industrialization in the nineteenth century drove craftspersons deprived of their traditional livelihoods back upon the land as tenants or landless laborers or into the lumpenproletariat.
(v)	Peasants got increasingly drawn into the cash nexus with merchants, moneylenders, landlords, and revenue officials, more so with the turn to the cultivation of indigo, opium, cotton, oilseeds, jute, pepper, and other exportable crops in the plains, and tea, coffee, cinnamon, and later, rubber plantations in the highlands. The railways connected the port cities with the hinterland and thus brought British manufactured goods, cloth, for instance, within reach of even the peasant whose produce, as raw material, was exploited by British industry.
(vi)	Speculation and investment in land by merchants, moneylenders, landlords, bureaucrats, and rich peasants/farmers, the increasing commercialization of agriculture, and the growth of absentee landlordism led to an impairment of patron-client relations between landlords and tenants/landless laborers.
(vii)	The famines of the colonial period were its most brutal feature, beginning with the Bengal famine of 1770 and culminating again with the Bengal famine of 1943 (the latter reawakened collective memory of the former devastation), in between twelve serious famines before the Great Rebellion of 1857, and yet more devastating ones thereafter, the most severe in 1896-97. Using B. M. Bhatia’s figures,80 Gough has estimated 20.7 million famine deaths in India between 1866 and 1943.
(vii)	From the 1920s onward, with a growing population in the midst of stagnant per-capita net material product, and with modern industry incapable of absorbing even a fraction of the growing reserve army of labor, rural misery unfolded on an unprecedented scale. Such extreme distress was also a consequence of extreme fragmentation of land-holdings,81 intense competition for sharecropping and other tenancies leading to rack-renting, chronic rural indebtedness, and greater prevalence of debt bondage. What was being witnessed over the longterm was a reduction in the proportion of rich and middle peasant households with a corresponding increase in the proportion of poor and landless peasant households.

Rightly, Gough includes the Great Rebellion of 1857 among the seventy-seven peasant revolts, for as Eric Stokes, in his posthumously (1986) published The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, argues: the sepoys were “peasants in uniform” and the revolt was that of a “peasant army breaking loose from its foreign master,” challenging British colonialism. However, it cannot be said that the assortment of people who rebelled in 1857 also supported the peasant revolts. Nevertheless, despite the disgruntled talukdars (landlords)—who had been marginalized and squeezed out by the British colonialists—assuming local leadership of the rebellion in their areas of influence, for instance, in Awadh, peasants often did take the initiative, as Rudrangshu Mukherjee, in his Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (2007), argues.⁸²

The rebel peasants were conscious, anti-colonial political actors, and yet, leaders of the British Indian Association, and later, those of the Indian National Congress, condemned the revolt. Jawaharlal Nehru referred to the “feudal character” of the revolt, as did the British communist Rajni Palme Dutt, who called the revolt “the last attempt of the decaying feudal forces, of the former rulers of the country, to turn back the tide of foreign domination,” even as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, living witnesses to those times, had respectively characterized it as “a national revolt” and a “great rebellion.”⁸³

Another great peasant rebellion of the colonial period, the last one, which was being waged even as the elite nationalist leadership of the Congress Party and the Muslim League were negotiating the terms of the “transfer of power,” was the 1946–51 armed struggle of the peasantry in Telangana under communist leadership. As the eminent historian Ranajit Guha characterizes this armed peasant struggle:⁸⁴

Starting off as a movement against eviction and extortion it assumed, by 1946, under communist leadership, the size and character of a peasant war aimed at the destruction of the princely state of Hyderabad ruled by the Nizam, the largest and most powerful of all the many feudal principalities lovingly fostered by the raj. The struggle, limited at first to 150 villages, had already involved ten times as many by the summer of 1947 when India became independent. A number of liberated zones complete with people’s courts and people’s militia had already emerged out of the guerrilla war by 1948 when the new regime headed by Nehru and Patel (Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first home minister) sent in its army with the twin objectives of annexing the Nizam’s territories and liquidating the peasant rebels [my emphasis]. The outcome of this “police action” was the rewarding of the Nizam with a vast pecuniary compensation for the loss of his dynastic kingdom and with elevation to the status of a titular head of state (Rajpramukh) in the new republic when its constitution was inaugurated in 1950. Neither the oppressive officials who had acted as the instruments of the Nizam’s despotism nor the landlords and moneylenders who constituted its social base, came to any harm. On the contrary, a feudal restoration was actively promoted by the Indian army and in its wake the armed constabulary wherever they established themselves in any of the liberated zones. Encouraged and supported by them the landlords and moneylenders flocked back to the villages from which they had fled for their lives and seized again the lands, grain and other property which the peasants had expropriated. The sons of the soil who had fought for the end of feudal rule and for democracy in Hyderabad, who had effectively undermined the Nizam’s authority long before the Congress party leaders were to recognize in him a potential threat to the Indian republic, had their efforts rewarded by a reign of terror imposed on five Telangana districts where the revolt had made the most headway.

It is also necessary to mention the Tebhaga movement in Bengal—initiated in 1946 and led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant front of the CPI—which demanded that the sharecropper, the bargadar, has the right to two-thirds of the produce, leaving only one-third of it for the landlord, the jotedar. The “Great Rebellion” of 1857, Telangana, 1946–48, and Tebhaga, as well as the many other peasant revolts of the colonial period that Kathleen Gough lists, might then be seen as precursors of “Spring Thunder,” Phase One, and its following phases. Spring Thunder, like the many peasant struggles of the past, at its core, is a battle for democracy. The Indian republic is a rotten liberal political democracy, and the roots of this decay can be traced back to the time of its birth and to the colonial period.

ABORTED DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

By the mid-1940s, people’s democracies seemed a distinct possibility in the countries where socialist or national liberation struggles were being waged, especially in mainland China, where the forces of the Communist Party of China played a stellar role in the anti-Japanese resistance in the period 1937–45, thereby shifting nationalist opinion progressively in its favor. But also in the national liberation struggles in Vietnam and Indonesia. Moreover, from 1918 onward, British imperialism seemed to be in relative decline, economically, politically, and militarily, and by the end of the Second World War, the United States had emerged as the foremost imperialist power.

India, despite the ideological and political weakness of the CPI and the near absence of revolutionary leadership within it, could also have taken the militant people’s democratic path to liberation. As Ranajit Guha argues, British imperialism, which then had the world’s largest colonial empire,

recognized the writing on the wall in the Quit India movement, in the militant nationalist (though wrong-headed) response to [Subhas Chandra] Bose’s Indian National Army [he took help from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II to try to rid India of British Rule], in the massive strikes of workers, students and poor middle-class employees in the cities, in the emergence of a democratic peasant movement under communist leadership, and most ominously perhaps in the mutiny of the Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy [RIN] and spreading disaffection among the Indian ranks in the army and police forces [my emphasis]. Faced thus with the prospect of an armed anti-imperialist upsurge the British government decided to defuse the charge by decolonizing which, in the Indian context, was nothing but a pre-emptive strike against what could have exploded as a full-scale liberation war the size of the vast subcontinent. Hence decolonization was achieved, appropriately enough, not by the destruction of the old colonial state and seizure of power by the people, but by a “transfer of power” from the British to the Indian elite representing big landlord and big business interests which had many links with imperialism and shared with it a common fear of revolutionary developments in the country [my emphasis]. Consequently, the post-colonial state, the product of a legal transaction between the dominant elite groups of Britain and India, found it easy to continue, even as a sovereign republic, much of what was undemocratic—and a good deal was—in the political institutions and political culture of the raj.⁸⁵

It must be emphasized that all the post-war unrest and rebellion referred to above took place independently of the Congress Party and often in defiance of it. Indeed, even Gandhi condemned the Hindu-Muslim unity of the RIN revolt and the massive militant people’s support it got; he referred to this solidarity as an “unholy” alliance/combination that, in his view, “would have delivered India to the rabble.” He reportedly even went on to say, “I would not want to live up to 125 years to witness that consummation. I would rather perish in the flames.”⁸⁶ One only has to recall his “repudiation of all responsibility for the “Quit India” movement, his condemnation of sabotage and underground activities associated with it, and his instruction to underground workers to surrender.”⁸⁷ There seems to have been, at the time, “a certain convergence of interests of … Indian and British capitalists … reinforced in the face of the rising militancy of the Indian working class and peasantry, the unrest among the armed forces and the rise in the influence of the Left political forces in the country.” Indeed, there was an “overall meeting of minds between the imperialist rulers and the Congress leaders about the growing threat from the Left.”⁸⁸ As “far as the oppressed people were concerned, Congress and Muslim League were on the same side of the barricade as the raj.”

Cooptation of elite nationalists was an important part of British colonialist strategy ever since the aftermath of the Great Rebellion of 1857, and these “nationalists” were willing collaborators in the face of militant struggles of peasants and tribal people that targeted both colonialism and the collective power of the sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar. Of course, the terms of such collaboration/cooption were always under contention. The Government of India Act of 1858, passed by the British Parliament, disbanded Company rule and brought India directly under British sovereignty. Soon to come was the Indian Councils Act of 1861, under which legislative councils with a few non-official Indian members were formed, followed by the same Acts of 1892 and 1909 extending the influence of locally elected⁸⁹ provincial councils, and then the Government of India Act of 1935. Taken together, these can be seen as part of a concerted colonialist strategy of progressively devolving power to elite nationalists in the provincial echelons of what was officially claimed to be an emerging federal structure. For the colonialists, the involvement of Indians was a must, with those deemed “politically dangerous” easily disqualified from electoral candidature, and the provincial governors were bestowed with enormous powers. They could jettison any bill that was passed by the legislature, and take over the province from an elected majority ministry on law and order grounds, for the center was strictly under imperial control. The ground was firmly laid for the rotten liberal-political democracy to come.

The vast numbers of ordinary people who had, right from the 1920s, supported/participated in the nationalist elite-led part of the movement for independence were betrayed. But they didn’t realize it, for there was no revolutionary leadership, politically and ideologically mature, to guide them. The people thus “cherished illusions about the goals of the political representatives” of Indian big business, Congress, and Muslim League leaders, elite nationalists, “who were out to strike a bargain with imperialism.” Indeed, “within less than a year [following 1946] a qualitative change in the situation was brought about by the skilful moves of the raj and its collaborators.” And, in “less than two months and a half this vast subcontinent was partitioned, boundaries demarcated, assets divided and two new dominions brought into existence!” It can also be said that all these imperialist maneuvers were put through “because Congress and Muslim League were willing participants in it.”⁹⁰

Clearly the Indian nation in the making was not a uniform and homogenous entity—the dominant and the exploited classes in the nation had conflicting interests and needs. The nation was largely imagined and depicted by elite nationalists in an iconography that was Hindu, these nationalists representing the interests and rights of non-Muslim big business but camouflaging the same as the nation’s interests and rights. In reality, what was being created was the ground for a dependent “independent” nation with sections of that big business already forging ties with U.S. monopoly capital. Elite nationalism was undermining the nation, for independence was to be brought about via a gentle decolonization, the two dominant arguments in the aftermath of the Second World War being the British colonialists’ “change of heart” and the efficacy of non-violent opposition. Gandhi was adept at playing the “dual role of saint for the masses and champion for big business,” as the discerning American journalist Edgar Snow is said to have pithily remarked.

Gandhi and the Congress Party’s role and attitude in one of the freedom movement’s most significant high points, in 1945–46, have already been touched upon. In the three other high points, mass movements against British rule, the ones initiated by the Congress Party with Gandhi in the lead, complete control over the masses was a precondition. In the first of these, the Non-Cooperation Movement (1921–22), mass rage and fervor had already been aroused earlier by the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and Khilafat, and when violence erupted in Chauri Chaura, the movement was called off, and the masses fell in line, for they looked up to Gandhi the saint, indeed, Gandhi alone, for guidance. The Congress Party and Gandhi insisted on, in his words, “peaceful rebellion” in the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–34 with breaks in between) too, with no-rent campaigns against the landlords, dependent allies of the colonialists, simply not permitted, for despite the stated goal of “complete independence,” in reality, it was intended to be a controlled mobilization for forcing constitutional concessions. Incidences of violence, including those in Chittagong,⁹¹ Peshawar, and Sholapur, did not however lead to its suspension, for, in the courting of arrest, the Congress leaders were out of the way of the masses. But unlike the Hindu-Muslim unity of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation years of 1919–21, Muslim participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement was low, this because of inter-religious communal strife in the 1920s.

Mass anger and disgust against British rule was at a peak in 1942, and so the “Quit India” movement was violent right from the beginning, more so because the Congress leadership was forced out of the way of the masses by the pre-emptive arrests, because of which the Congress organization couldn’t intervene to condemn, denounce, and put an end to violent rebellion. It was only when Gandhi was released from jail in May 1944 that he began to severely condemn the underground movement and called upon the rebels to surrender. But by then the movement had gone through three phases of militancy—the first, violent protests in the cities, the second, the shift of militancy to the countryside, with underground activity, including the use of revolutionary terror, especially in the United Provinces and Bihar, and the third, the running of parallel governments in places like Satara in Maharashtra, Midnapore in Bengal, and Talchar in Orissa. Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress Party always condemned militant actions, especially peasant, tribal, and urban bouts of violence, strikes, and, of course, revolutionary terror.

With the brutal crushing of the Quit India Movement, in the context of the Second World War and what then seemed like an imminent Japanese invasion of India, and earlier, the post-1905 armed struggles in Bengal, the Ghadar movement, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the Chittagong uprising, and the RIN revolt of February 1946, independence was not to be the precursor of a democratic revolution. As the historian Indivar Kamtekar put it: “Independence” was a handing over “at one stroke” of the entire territory and state apparatus of the Raj “to the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League” in a “single negotiated transaction.” The courageous soldiers and officers of the Indian National Army were refused admission into the ranks of what became the Indian armed forces. And, no one, not even Marxist historians, bothered to ask about the fate of the 20,000 mutineers of the RIN.⁹²

The elite nationalist leaders simply substituted themselves to take the place of the British colonialists in office, primarily to secure their own power and privileges and to transfer to Indian big business the unfair advantages that were a legacy of the colonial period, all within the framework of dependence on the dominant imperialist powers. U.S. imperialism had, after all, been pressuring its British counterpart to dismantle its empire and this was exactly what was to transpire. Very soon, the elite nationalist leaders were to prove their utter insensitivity to mass misery. The poor peasants in the Telangana countryside in the late 1940s, fighting for New Democracy, were humiliated, beaten, and tortured by the Indian Army, sent in by the elite nationalists to bring back the landlords and the moneylenders, and thereby restore the status quo. Driven to the wall, it was not easy for these unlettered peasants to turn into revolutionary fighters—this could never have been the first time around.

In power after independence, the elite nationalists of the Congress Party promoted a historiography of a heroic past, largely the part of the independence struggle they had led, and even historians calling themselves Marxists joined the bandwagon. The state embarked on a multiplication of its offices, privileges and pelf—“development administration” was the new kid in town and on the block—with the elite nationalist patrons directing the process from the top downward. During a crisis of legitimacy, however, adept maneuvering in a parliamentary democracy based on universal adult franchise didn’t come easy, as was evident in the two years preceding the Emergency.

POPULAR UPHEAVALS PRECEDING THE EMERGENCY

Despite Mrs. Gandhi’s huge electoral victories in the parliamentary and state assembly elections of 1971 and 1972, these following the 1969 split in the Congress Party, two states, Gujarat and Bihar, were headed for popular flareups.⁹³ In Gujarat, the home state of Mrs. Gandhi’s main political opponent, Morarji Desai, the state Congress committee opted for Desai’s Congress (Organization), Congress (O) hereafter, but after the 1971 elections, Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress (Requisition) increasingly attracted opportunist defectors from its rival. Feudal allegiance to Mrs. Gandhi was all that seemed to count, with each contending faction within her party claiming to be more loyal than the others. Political degeneration took hold, and, very soon, public cynicism about the garibi hatao (remove poverty) program ran high, even as the Congress (Requisition) rode comfortably to power in the 1972 state assembly elections in Gujarat.

In the internal scramble for power that followed, backed by the Congress “High Command” and the state’s rich peasantry and wealthy agricultural commodity merchants, an astute manipulator, Chimanbhai Patel, became the state’s chief minister in July 1973. Protests by engineering students over inflated hostel-mess bills in the wake of rising food prices soon turned into a popular, state-wide, anti-price rise agitation, led locally by Navnirman Yuvak Samitis (youth for reconstruction 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

SEEING THE LONGER PROCESS