The Emergency's True Legacy: How JP's Naivety Empowered the RSS

The Wire

3 days ago

Fifty years ago, on June 25, 1975, when the Emergency was promulgated, Natwar Singh, a self-appointed Principal Acolyte of the Nehru-Gandhi clan, was India's deputy high commissioner in London. Indira Gandhi's decision to experiment with an authoritarian format left him (and many other liberal souls) flummoxed, and, consequently he sought answers from H.Y. Sharada Prasad, information adviser in the PMO and a born wise man. Natwar Singh lamented that while he could deal competently with India's traditional critics in Britain, he was at a loss when it came to responding to the numerous admirers of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi who could not understand the turn India had taken towards a soft dictatorship.Sharada Prasad must have had a ringside view of the developments that led to the June 25 denouement. He took nearly a month before responding, on July 20, gently telling Natwar Singh to make a distinction between 'the minutiae' and 'the essence.' And, as Sharada Prasad most clear-sightedly noted, the essence was that Jayaprakash Narayan's crusade against the government had crossed a red-line when he, wittingly or unwittingly, allowed Nanaji Deshmukh of the RSS to take over as commanding officer of the 'movement.'Sharada Prasad concluded his letter to Natwar Singh with a penetrating observation: '.. the entire operation was necessary to save our political structure. When we speak of our political structure or aims, the leftists speak only of socialism, the Anglo-US-European liberals only of pluralistic democracy, neither group gives much importance to secularism. Secularism is the base of Indian democracy. The cardinal mistake of JP and company was to hand over the controls to RSS and no man in his senses can ever say that an RSS-led opposition front can preserve a system based upon religious tolerance and equality.'How prophetic.Fifty years later, the sarsanghchalak, Mohan Bhagwat, enjoys Z-plus security cover. He is allowed to do his pravachans in Vigyan Bhavan, and otherwise is serenaded as the second most powerful person in the country. Thanks to JP, the RSS, the very organisation that created the eco-system for Nathuram Ghose to fire those fatal shots at the Mahatma, has worked its way to a 'respectable' place in our national imagination. Not just respect, it now has clout, patronage and veto power in our national affairs.Any historian doing an audit 50 years later of this sage of the Emergency era is obliged to ask: how could a man like JP, so learned and so well steeped in an understanding of global forces and ideas battling it out on the boulevards in Europe, fail to foresee how his 'total revolution' cookie would crumble? He had no foot-soldiers, no cavalry, no artillery of his own, no tank divisions; he mistook a motley crowd of various 'vahinis' that had staged tableaus of streets protests and chaos in Patna and Ahmedabad as the vanguard of a revolution. The only outfit that had disciplined cadres was the RSS, and, inevitably, it acquired an operational stranglehold on the 'movement.'Not only did Jayaprakash Narayan choose to be oblivious of history abroad, he even jettisoned his own understanding of the Indian realities and the nature of the RSS's spots. He insisted that he had tried to 'decommunalise them by allowing them to join our movement for total revolution. Any impartial observer would agree that this has been a significant contribution of this movement to the ideal of religious tolerance or secularism as it is called. I have thus tried to strengthen the foundation of secularism by bringing Jana Sangh and the RSS into the secular fold of total revolution.' Those clever men in Nagpur have not since stopped laughing at the saint's touching naiveté.Even though Indira Gandhi and her Emergency were disposed of by the voters in the 1977 Lok Sabha polls, a lasting consequence was that the Janata crowd had developed a soft corner for the RSS. A trenchant critic like Madhu Limaye thought that the 'coming together of a large number of RSS workers and other supporters of the JP movement under the roof of Mrs. Indira Gandhi's jails had promoted better understanding among the RSS cadres and other people.' But when Limaye and others tried to bring the RSS and other pro-JP organizations under one roof, Nagpur's response was a resounding 'no deal.' The Jana Sangh segment of the Janata Party never surrendered its separate identity, its own allegiance and its mysterious loyalty to the RSS, even if this meant the premature collapse of the Morarji Desai government and the return to power of Indira.It is no secret that Janata Party warlords found Jayaprakash Narayan utterly dispensable the moment they entered their ministerial offices atop Raisina Hill. And when the inevitable squabbles began and JP tried to instil some sense among the factional bosses, Prime Minister Morarji Desai ticked him off for wanting to poke his nose in the Janata Party's internal matters. So much for JP's moral authority. The prophet was without a country, doomed to be biggest loser in the Emergency Saga.On the other hand, the RSS, has continued to build on its JP-induced respectability and can draw satisfaction at the distance the 'Hindutva' crowd has come. Its frontal outfits, especially the Jana Sangh and now the BJP, continue to pretend to be inspired and guided by the saintly 'Jayaprakash ji' while putting in practices and protocols that constitute the very anti-thesis of what he stood for. JP would, no doubt, be horrified to see the Hindutva forces' strident march on our national stage.History has already dealt a rough hand to Indira Gandhi for embarking on a dangerous road 50 years ago; what she did during those dark days could be rolled back by the masses. History will deal an equally rough, if not rougher, hand to Jayaprakash Narayan for rehabilitating the RSS as a normal political force. Fifty years later, Indira Gandhi's excesses pale in comparison to JP's cardinal sin. The RSS is the only winner of that battle five decades ago.Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.