The Role Of The Cold War In Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

The Role Of The Cold War In Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

Indira Gandhi declared the emergency in 1975, plonk in the middle of the most intense phase of the cold war. Détente was going so badly for the Americans that stand up comedians in Washington were comparing it to a wife swapping party “from where you return alone.”

After the Vietnam debacle, Washington was going to exert every muscle not to allow Moscow to build upon the strategic asset it had created for itself in New Delhi during the 1971 Bangladesh war.

In fact, the Congress split of 1969 was itself an advantage for Moscow. Mrs. Gandhi had discarded the conservative, pro capital big wigs, more comfortable with Congress stalwarts like Morarji Desai whom she had defeated in the Parliamentary party contest to become Prime Minister in 1966.

Not only was a former card carrying communist (from Eton and Oxford too), Mohan Kumaramangalam part author of the split, he had worked out an arrangement with the General Secretary of the CPI, S.A. Dange described as a policy of “Unite and Struggle”. We shall, said Dange, unite with the Congress’s progressive policies but “struggle” against its “anti people” deviations.

This was a pronounced leftward lurch and it was going to be resisted by a coalition of the Right, both internal and external. Indeed, as early as 1967, within a year of her coming to power, Mrs. Gandhi was given notice: she lost elections in eight states to parties of the opposition. This groundswell would obviously suit the purposes of the Congress old guard discarded by Mrs. Gandhi.

The most succinct observation on Mrs. Gandhi’s ideological leanings came from the correspondent of the Times London, Peter Hazelhurst: “She is a little to the Left of self interest.”

Her ideological inconsistency becomes apparent if one reverts to her earliest days in 1959 as President of the Congress. She dismissed the world’s first communist government which had come to power through the ballot box in Kerala. That she took American help to unsettle Kerala to justify the state government’s dismissal was revealed by US ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker in an oral interview kept in the Columbia University archives. Whatever doubts there might have been about the Bunker revelations, were cleared later by Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his memoirs.

During her Prime Ministership in 1976, the Congress party raised a storm against the US having installed a nuclear device on Nanda Devi peak to spy on China. The controversy had many twists. A joint CIA and Intelligence Bureau effort to install the device in 1965 (Lal Bahadur Shastri was Prime Minister then) had failed because of bad weather. Worse, two plutonium laden capsules had been lost. According to the Intelligence estimates the plutonium was enough for half a Hiroshima bomb.

In the course of an interview, Chester Bowles, US ambassador during Indira Gandhi’s first innings, took my breath away. He couldn’t understand Congress protest. “After all Indira had asked me to complete in 1966 the project which had been aborted in 1965.”

Well, this is how the Congress’s attitude towards the super powers varied from time to time. But for the West the spectacle of Mrs. Gandhi and Dange in a warm embrace was alarming because of the context. The West had taken a series of knocks – Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua were all communist. Additionally Communist leaders Enrico Berlinguer, Georges Marchais, Santiago Carrillo in Italy, France and Spain respectively were a headache for the West. Given this state of play, India was too priceless a trophy to be easily lost to Moscow’s sphere of influence.

The obstacle in the way of a counteroffensive was Mrs. Gandhi’s personality. She had evolved into a charismatic and, therefore, invincible leader. Proprietor of the Indian Express, Ramnath Goenka and Nanaji Deshmukh, fell into deep thought.

The Indian mind reveres renunciation. It occurred to the head hunters that once a top ranking Socialist leader, Jayaprakash Narayan had renounced political power. He was keeping himself busy with Gandhiji’s ashrams and such unlikely causes as Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan or Land Gift movement. JP agreed to lead the movement provided it remained peaceful.

The youth were in agitation across the globe against the excesses of the Vietnam War – Grosvenor Square, London, barricades in Paris, police shooting down of students at the Kent state university in Ohio, US. Soon thereafter the Navnirman Andolan, youth agitation in Gujarat erupted on a seemingly flimsy issue of hostel fees. After visiting Gujarat, JP was prevailed upon to launch a similar movement against corruption and bad governance in Bihar. It was a tepid agenda livened up only by the media dedicated to the task of keeping up the pressure on New Delhi, boosting notions of a “total revolution” one day, asking police and the bureaucracy not to obey “bad” orders another, and so on. The immediate target of the “movement” was a hapless Chief Minister, Abdul Ghafoor, quite bewildered by his own eminence. Why was he in the eye of a storm? He had sunken cheeks and a drooping frame, draped in a much worn Sherwani. By way of hospitality for visiting scribes, he would fetch a bottle of old smuggler Scotch whisky from his wardrobe full of smudged clothes which were clearly waiting for laundry. He was a simple man, not a plausible enough crook to invite a national movement for his ouster.

JP, who had invited me to stay in his house in Patna’s Kadam Kuan, listened to my stories even about the CM with a kindly smile. He was a trusting man and totally non judgemental about the wide range of political interests who had clambered onto his movement.

The movement was carried mostly by RSS cadres, with a sprinkling of socialists, Gandhians and Congress (O), mostly those who had been shown the door by Mrs. Gandhi in 1969. This exactly was the rough outline of the group which morphed into a coalition in the course of the movement. The coalition came to power in 1977 as the Janata Party.

Supposing the Allahabad High Court had not disqualified Mrs. Gandhi, how would events have shaped? If Sanjay Gandhi, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Muhammad Yunus and others had not forced her hand on the Emergency, how would the Mrs. Gandhi-JP standoff have concluded?

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People Versus Established Order: Contradiction Sharpens In New York And Elsewhere

People Versus Established Order: Contradiction Sharpens In New York And Elsewhere

Saeed Naqvi

Does the stunning victory of a 28 year old Latino bartender in New York this week over a 10 term Democratic lawmaker bear any resemblance to AAP’s victory under a political novice, Arvind Kejriwal in February 2015. He thrashed Narendra Modi’s resurgent BJP and a Congress Chief Minister entering her fourth term? Ofcourse, there are a thousand differences in detail but these are dwarfed by a basic similarity – popular resentment with establishments everywhere. It is a wave sweeping all electoral democracies across the globe. I have just seen the toppling of the Italian ruling class in Rome. Wherever they can, establishments are fighting back tooth and nail. Kejriwal’s endless travails are part of this counterpunch.

The winner in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was, in her last job, mixing cocktails in a Manhattan bar, sometimes on 18 hour shifts to help avoid foreclosure of her mother’s property. But more meaningful for her career was her stint as Bernie Sanders’ campaigner during the 2016 elections. Little wonder she stands on a similar, leftist platform, demanding universal health care, ending tuition fees at public colleges and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Still recovering from the shock defeat happens to be Joe Cowley for whom the Democratic Party had built many castles in the air. The same party had dug its heels in so firmly for Hillary Clinton as the Presidential candidate that every argument pointing to Bernie Sanders’ chances of victory over Trump were discarded.

I was in Washington for the campaign, surrounded by Clinton enthusiasts who would not answer a straightforward question:

“Popular disgust with the Washington establishment was unmistakable. Given this reality, by what logic do you see Clinton as a winner: she is the very epitome of the Washington establishment.”

Alexandria’s victory places her in line as the youngest woman in Congress after the November elections. This could well be the thin end of the wedge, gradually opening up spaces for younger and more radical candidates.

Considering that Trumpism too is consolidating itself on white working and middle class grievances, the divisions in American society may become more shrill. Once they rise to a crescendo, the clashing of Cymbals will be deafening even though the talk of a civil war is rank exaggeration.

A considerable segment of the Democratic Party, which refrained from radicalism during the 2016 campaign, appears to have sensed the ground realities, almost anticipating the New York result. Democrats like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren signed onto Bernie Sanders bill for universal Health Care, something they had avoided two years ago when Sanders first introduced the Bill. The platform is picking up.

The New York outcome has clearly set the cat among the pigeons in establishment circles and not just in the US. Another resounding punch will be administered on the establishment’s chin when Andrez Manuel Lopez Obrador nicknamed AMLO, almost as far Left as the late Chavez in Venezuela, triumphs in the Mexican elections on Sunday. The sharp anti US edge to this result can safely be attributed to Trump’s open disdain for the southern neighbour.

A Bloomberg banner headline reads: “Listen, Trump: Firebrand Lopez Obrador Set to Win Landslide in Mexico.”

There is, however, a welcoming warmth to this turn in world affairs in progressive circles in Europe, not the least of it in the higher echelons of Britain’s Labour Party.

Last week I attended a meeting in support of Democracy and Human Rights in Mexico organized in the House of Commons by Laura Alvarez Corbyn, the Labour leader’s Mexican wife. Jeremy Corbyn sat through the meeting, signaling his support for progressive causes.

Is the Democratic Party in the US learning lessons from real life? Until the New York result there was no evidence of any change of heart in the party’s higher reaches. In fact, a year ago, a Fox News poll establishing Bernie Sanders’ exceptional popularity was largely ignored. The poll showed Sanders a +28 rating above all US politicians on both ends of the political spectrum. Trust The Guardian, London, being the only newspaper to pick up the issue. The paper’s Trevor Timm wrote:

“One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the Establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swathes of the country.”

On current showing, the British Establishment demonstrates greater suppleness. A few months ago The Economist welcomed Corbyn, a socialist in the Michael Foot mould, as Britain’s next Prime Minister. That the Economist, a pillar of the Western establishment should acquiesce in Corbyn’s impending Premiership, could not have been honeyed music to Blairites in the Labour party, like Lord Peter Mandelson who is committed to “undermining Corbyn”. This kind of cussedness is counterproductive and this becomes clear when a Labour back bencher retorts:

“Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister implementing policies that actually benefit the people terrifies the Establishment. It is no surprise that Mandelson has found space in his busy schedule on an Oligarch’s Yacht to attempt to undermine Jeremy.”

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Meaning Of Latest Turn In Kashmir Lies Outside The State

Meaning Of Latest Turn In Kashmir Lies Outside The State

                                                                            Saeed Naqvi

Two policemen leading the mob which ultimately lynched a Muslim in Hapur is, ofcourse, part of familiar communalism which has to be revved upon to a higher pitch in order to prepare the ground for the General Elections in 2019. The animal to be protected is not the cow, but power.

For this ultimate goal, incidents like the one in Hapur and the more ghoulish ones before it, hundreds of them, are all essential to maintain conditions of edgy, combustible intolerance. Nothing else seems to be working. Why not continue playing the game one knows best?

An accumulation of such incidents, even their simultaneous eruption on a large scale, amplified by the media, can whip up majoritarianism wherever Muslims are visible and where the majoritarian current has not been weakened by caste polarization. This applies much more to what the British called the “cow belt” but which is more accurately described as the “Hindi belt” – UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh plus Maharashtra and Gujarat.

The 2019 Kurukshetra has to be organized, mobilized, galvanized, whipped up (with the media in tow) only by anchoring communalism to a higher purpose. In other words, “nationalism” has to be invoked. Cow and Love Jihad cannot be given the elevation of nationalism. Mere communalism results in finger pointing at the state apparatus; nationalism justifies the deployment of this apparatus. Whether this deployment is for a national or the nationalist’s cause is open to question.

Cow and Love Jihad cannot be posited as harbingers of national danger. They are not issues endangering national security.

This is where the new turn in Kashmir comes in. Polarization on a massive scale is the electoral requirement now that 2019 looms. This polarization would have been implausible with the BJP in chummy proximity to the PDP’s Mehbooba Mufti in Kashmir.

By sliding away from Mehbooba in the state assembly, the BJP has turned its back on the Muslims of the valley, ofcourse. It has also, in effect, freed millions of Hindutva cadres across Bharat Varsha to blow conch shells heralding the great 2019 epic.

The tearing hurry in which the Partition of India was affected may have been one reason why our founding fathers were unable to visualize what we face today. Progressive intellectuals may dismiss The Guilty Men of India’s Partition by Ram Manohar Lohia and The Tragic Story of India’s Partition by the late H.V. Sheshadri, Gen. Secretary of the RSS until 2000. But would they dismiss with equal contempt Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom, particularly the crucial 30 pages which were kept in the custody of the National Archives until 1988? The Maulana is worthy of being read again today.

By the act of Partition and the sleight of hand in Kashmir, India trapped itself into a triangle. This truth has to be continuously repeated because the Indian mind is in the drill to chant a mantra faster than it is to understand a shloka. The three sides of this triangle are actually three axes which are New Delhi-Kashmir; India-Pakistan; Hindu-Muslim. These three axes are, in effect, one comprehensive complex of issues. As in a geometrical theorem, the triangle has to be addressed as a whole. It cannot be sorted out axis by axis, one side after another.

If Ram Madhav, the BJP’s point man for Kashmir, marches off to Srinagar with a carte blanche from the High Command to solve the problem at any cost, there is nothing he can achieve without bringing Pakistan into the bargain. Activation of these two axes will have an impact on the third, Hindu-Muslim axis. This would entail the communal temperature coming down considerably. Will that serve the electoral aims of the party in power in New Delhi?

Ofcourse, it will not, and here, to complicate matters, another triangle comes into play. Since the 80s and 90s the primary triangle has become entangled with a very durable caste triangle. The caste pyramid or triangle instead of being left to social forces, time and attrition to equalize at its own pace, was aggravated by the sudden eruption of caste politics in North India in the wake of the Mandal Commission. Communal politics is the upper caste strategy to manage the caste upheaval from below. The upper caste or the ruling class formations project Muslims and other minorities as the “other” to keep the Hindu flock together, the Pyramid in some state of repair. The lower castes, likewise, would like to co opt the Muslim as an enabler in their bid for power and equality.

The Hindu ruling class in its Hindutva Avatar is averse to vertical or horizontal fragmentation. A federal India, corresponding to its regional diversity is anathema to the votaries of Hindu Rashtra. The preservation of this unitary Bharat is an article of faith with those controlling the Delhi Durbar. To mobilize masses towards this end requires a constant harping on an external enemy in cahoots with the enemy within.

The enemy within can be manipulated along the two internal axes of the triangle: New Delhi-Kashmir and Hindu-Muslim. The India-Pakistan axis, essential to complete the triangle cannot be played according to New Delhi’s will alone. External stakeholders include China, Russia, Central Asia and the US. As Charlie Chaplin, having fallen into a drum, his feet and neck protruding in an awkward loop, takes his hat off in an attempted bow, and announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are stuck!”

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