Indira Gandhi endgame: What impelled her to call elections?

Indian Express

12 hours ago

Prodipto Ghosh has vivid recollection of the evening of January 18, 1977. He was listening to the radio when he heard Indira Gandhi announce that fresh general elections will be held in March that year.
The then 28-year-old additional district magistrate (ADM) in South Delhi, Ghosh had gone through a tumultuous period during the Emergency, uneasy about several detentions he had to carry out. That evening's broadcast came as a huge relief to him – also as a surprise, since at the local administration level, no one had any inkling of Mrs Gandhi's move.
In the higher echelons of power though, the buzz of the Emergency being relaxed had been doing the rounds. Kuldip Nayar, who was then an editor with The Indian Express, had just two days ago broken a story in the paper, published under the headline 'Lok Sabha elections likely in March'. 'The Indian Express took a massive risk by publishing it,' remembers Devsagar Singh, 76, who was the university beat reporter at the Express at that time. Nayar, who had got a tip-off from a Punjab Police officer, was aware of the consequence – that he might be again sent to jail.
Once Mrs Gandhi called the Lok Sabha polls, Devsagar recalls, the Express newsroom rejoiced.
Like Ghosh, even 50 years later, a crucial mystery remains as to why Mrs Gandhi called the elections when she did. Over the years, several scholars have proposed various theories.
Historian Srinath Raghavan, who recently came out with the book Indira Gandhi and the years that transformed India, points to two assessment reports prepared for Mrs Gandhi between June and October 1976 outlining the Emergency's impact during the previous year. 'The thrust of both these reports was to suggest that the first year of the (Emergency's) anniversary has gone off well – popular unrest and protests have come to a halt, economy has been stabilised, inflation is kept in check, the 20 point programme has given hope to the poor in rural India, and that political opposition continues to remain in disarray,' says Raghavan.
However, the reports also suggested that the benefits of the Emergency might be tapering off due to some of its more coercive programmes such as the forced sterilisation campaign. The October 1976 report in particular, , Raghavan says, flagged that the Congress was losing support in Uttar Pradesh among its traditional voters, including the poor and minorities, due to the sterilisation drive.
'In the broader context of things, the Prime Minister had come to internalise that the benefits of the Emergency might be slowly wearing off and, before things turned adverse, it was better to go into elections,' Raghavan states.
Others suggest that the only reason Mrs Gandhi declared fresh elections was because she was confident she would win. In his book India after Gandhi, historian Ramachandra Guha notes that the gossip in Delhi coffee houses then was that the PM's intelligence chief had assured her of being re-elected with a clear majority.
Guha also cites the criticism Mrs Gandhi drew from western observers as a reason. What particularly stung was criticism by those who had known her father Jawaharlal Nehru, and made comparisons between the two.
British socialist politician Fenner Brockaway, for instance, writing in The Times, deplored the conversion of 'the world's greatest democracy' into 'a repressive dictatorship'. He appealed to Mrs Gandhi to end the denial of freedom and liberty in memory of her father. Another British writer, John Grigg, recalled Nehru's commitment to free press and elections. 'Nehru's tryst with destiny seems to have been turned into a tryst with despotism – and by his own daughter,' he wrote in The Spectator.
Raghavan also says Mrs Gandhi was disturbed by the negative reportage in the international press. In his book, he cites a letter that she wrote to the Indian High Commissioner in London, in which she rebuked the British press for 'maligning' her and her son Sanjay Gandhi. However, Raghavan doesn't believe the negative press affected her much. 'The objective fact is that neither the British government nor the American government actually put any pressure on her to end the Emergency.'
Historian Gyan Prakash, however, believes that Mrs Gandhi was conscious of her international image. 'The Emergency had broken many of the ties she had, including friendship with American writer Dorothy Norman, as one can see from their exchange of letters,' he says.
Mrs Gandhi's secretary P N Dhar, writing several years later, offered another explanation — that, being the PM, she had started yearning for the public connect she had established. 'She was nostalgic about the way people reacted to her in the 1971 campaign and she longed again to hear the applause of the multitudes,' Dhar wrote.
Arguing along similar lines, Prakash says: 'Indira Gandhi, in the end, wanted legitimacy to her role and thought that the elections would legitimise her power, including the Emergency… If one thinks of Indira Gandhi's long career, it is true that the way she had ruled was to try and secure popular support for her power. She was not prepared to rule as an authoritarian figure in the long run.'
Given that Gandhi's private papers have yet to be made accessible, there is no conclusive way to know what persuaded her to begin the process of ending the Emergency. However, as she spoke on the radio on January 18, 1977, her opponents were being released from jails across the country. The following day, the leaders of four Opposition parties — Morarji Desai's Congress (O), Jana Sangh, Bharatiya Lok Dal and Socialist Party — met at Desai's residence in Delhi. The next day Desai announced to the press that they would fight the elections under a common party and its symbol. On January 23, the Janata (People's) Party was launched in the presence of Jayaprakash Narayan or JP.
The speed with which the Opposition parties merged to form the Janata Party stunned Mrs Gandhi. She had calculated that there would not be sufficient time for these parties to fulfill legal and technical requirements meant for creation of a new party. 'JP had been trying to bring everyone together since 1974 itself,' says Abhishek Choudhary, who authored the book Vajpayee: the Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977. In 1977, however, they were desperate, and scared that unless they presented themselves as a united force, they would be defeated.
Choudhary states that despite being united, the Opposition was far from sure of victory. What shifted the mood in the Opposition camp was the resignation of Jagjivan Ram from the Congress. One of the country's tallest Dalit leaders, Jagjivan, popularly known as 'Babuji', was a Congress stalwart whose defection dealt a blow to the party and boosted the Opposition's morale. The newspapers called it the moment when the 'J-bomb' exploded.
Much has been written about the election rallies that turned increasingly fiery and eventful in the ensuing days. So was the day of the results. Journalist Coomi Kapoor, who was a reporter at the Express at the time, recalls, in her memoir on The Emergency, the evening of March 20, 1977, when the poll results started pouring in. Outside the Express office, she notes, there was a billboard where the latest results were put up manually. Each time a fresh Janata Party win was shown on the board, wild cheers erupted. Coins were showered on the man updating the results. 'Some people were doing the bhangra, while others were laughing and joking, 'Mummy meri car gayi', 'Beta meri sarkaar gayi',' writes Kapoor.
By late evening, when the Express announced that Gandhi was trailing in her Rae Bareli constituency, the crowd burst firecrackers. 'Old-timers said they had not witnessed such public exuberance since Independence Day in 1947,' Kapoor adds.
The election outcome saw the Janata Party emerging as the victor, which set the stage for the formation of the country's first non-Congress government. Most of the ministers lost their seats. Next day, at an early-morning Cabinet meeting held by Mrs Gandhi, the Emergency was revoked.
Adrija Roychowdhury leads the research section at Indianexpress.com. She writes long features on history, culture and politics. She uses a unique form of journalism to make academic research available and appealing to a wide audience. She has mastered skills of archival research, conducting interviews with historians and social scientists, oral history interviews and secondary research.
During her free time she loves to read, especially historical fiction.
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