Author: V Krishna Ananth
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: March 21, 2008
URL: http://newindpress.com/newspages.asp?page=m&Title=Main+Article&
March 21, 1977, was indeed an important day
in the history of independent India. The last of the results to the general
elections, held during the previous week, were out quite early in the morning
that day. And Indira Gandhi, her son Sanjay Gandhi, V.C. Shukla, Bansi Lal,
Pranab Mukherjee, Om Mehta and such others who had presided over the semifascist
Emergency regime had lost the elections. And late in the night on March 21,
1977, Indira Gandhi presided over a cabinet meeting that resolved to recommend
withdrawal of the Emergency. This was conveyed to the acting President, B.D.
Jatti, soon after and the Emergency proclamation was thus withdrawn. Indira
Gandhi finally resigned as Prime Minister on March 22, 1977.
There are two points to be made right at the
outset. One is that the Emergency remained throughout the period when the
elections were held and in that sense the citizens in general and the political
workers in particular were vulnerable to being hounded by the regime in the
same way dissent was dealt with since June 25, 1975. The notorious MISA and
the pre-publication censoring of newspapers remained as law of the land even
when the elections were held. And the proclamation withdrawing the emergency
was issued only after Indira Gandhi and her party was voted out of power by
the people of India.
And this leads to the second and more important
point. That the people, in large numbers, whom Indira Gandhi and her followers
thought had endorsed all that she did during the Emergency, waited for the
moment when they could convey their contempt for the Emergency and the regime
in such an unequivocal fashion.
The voters in Rae Bareili, a constituency
that was rural in most parts, rejected Indira Gandhi in the most emphatic
manner. Indira Gandhi had lost from Rae Bareli by a margin of 55,202 votes!
And Sanjay Gandhi, who tried his luck from neighbouring Amethi too was humbled
by Ravindra P Singh, a political novice. The margin of victory in Amethi was
75,844 votes. The Congress party was swept aside everywhere in the North.
And all of Indira Gandhi's men were defeated.
Indira Gandhi's Congress party drew a blank
from Bihar (with 54 Lok Sabha seats), Himachal Pradesh (with 4 seats), Punjab
(with 13 seats) Uttar Pradesh (with 85 seats) and Delhi (with 7 seats). The
party won just one seat each in Haryana (out of the 10), Madhya Pradesh (out
of 40) and Rajasthan (out of 25). In West Bengal, the Congress won just 3
out of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies, 4 out of the 21 seats from Orissa,
10 seats out of the 25 from Gujarat and 20 out of the 48 from Maharashtra.
In all, the Congress strength in the Lok Sabha stood at 154 (in the House
of 542), the lowest in the party's history till then. It is another matter
that, interestingly, this is higher than the Congress party's strength after
May 2004!
Well. Indira Gandhi did not anticipate the
debacle when she announced her desire to hold elections in March 1977. The
announcement on January 18, 1977, came as a shock to everyone. She had, after
all, obtained Parliamentary sanction to extend the life of the Fifth Lok Sabha
(until March 1978) by way of a resolution moved in the House in November 1976.
While her apologists hold that the announcement on January 18, 1977 revealed
the democratic core in Indira Gandhi and that she was uncomfortable all the
while with the Emergency and the role that Sanjay Gandhi and his band were
playing, there are some others who thought that her intention was to legitimize
Sanjay Gandhi's position in the dispensation and that the best way to do that
was by ensuring that he held a formal position.
Sanjay Gandhi's abrasive behaviour and his
contempt for some of Indira's confidants such as Sidharth Sankar Ray, Devraj
Urs and the former communists in the Congress as well as towards the CPI had
caused some discomfort in Indira Gandhi's mind. This, however, was not all
that pervasive. That Mrs Gandhi was pleased with Sanjay's emergence was evident
at the Guwahati session of the Congress. She did everything to promote her
son in the same way as her father had promoted her. Similarly, if a formal
role for Sanjay was all that she intended, she could have ensured a by-election
from anywhere in the country for Sanjay to contest and enter the Lok Sabha.
The point is that Indira Gandhi was impressed,
time and again, by her son and his aides that there was absolutely no resistance
to the Emergency. She was also convinced by her aides, including P.N. Dhar,
her secretary in the Prime Minister's Secretariat, that the Emergency measures
had ensured a fall in prices and restored the people's confidence in the dispensation
(that had been lost in the couple of years before the midnight declaration
on June 25, 1975) and that it was ideal in the moral and the practical sense
to hold elections soon. More than all the reasoning, Indira Gandhi had made
her own assessment of the opposition leaders.
She was aware of the confabulations among
those who were released on parole (on health grounds) and the irritants that
were thrown up every time they discussed unity among them. She had the information
to suggest that the opposition continued to be in disarray and that the semblance
of unity they had established during the couple of weeks between June 11,
1975 and June 25, 1975 had given way to mutual distrust. She was also aware
that a section of the opposition, particularly Charan Singh and Asoka Mehta,
were even willing to surrender.
The fact is that Indira Gandhi believed that
the opposition was splintered and that elections would only accentuate the
divide among them. And by winning the elections she could legitimise the Emergency
and all that happened as part of it before the international community and
also formalise Sanjay Gandhi's position. That, perhaps was the reason why
she chose to announce the dissolution of the Lok Sabha on January 18, 1977)
and more specifically that she did that unilaterally in the same way as when
the Emergency was proclaimed.
The ordinary voter, however, was convinced
that she must not be allowed to bulldoze democracy. And that was why the Emergency
was withdrawn on March 21, 1977. In other words, things did not happen the
way Indira Gandhi had wanted.