How Indira Gandhi changed the character of the Congress

From a party with grassroots membership, it came to resemble a shoe company, where the proprietor appoints dealers and sub-dealers; Indira was frightened of shadows and took decisions through her kitchen cabinet, which led to growing concern over her political morality, writes LC Jain, former planning commission member, in his posthumous book Civil Disobedience

Book excerpt

After Nehru’s death, Indira saw her carefully crafted plan to capture the Prime Ministership suddenly slipping from her fingers.  The powerful group of Congress leaders known as the Syndicate — which was led by Kamaraj, and which included state bosses like SK Patil (Bombay), S Nijalingappa (Mysore), Atulya Ghosh (West Bengal) and N Sanjeeva Reddy (Andhra Pradesh) — moved fast. The group chose Lal Bahadur Shastri.

She made a desperate bid to stall Shastri’s election. According to Malliah, Indira rushed a letter to Kamaraj before the Working Committee was to meet, arguing that it would not be appropriate to engage in the selection of a successor to Nehru while the nation was in mourning. The official mourning was for thirteen days.

Kamaraj smelt a rat. Was ‘mourning’ the true reason or was it a ruse for her to gain time to be able to mobilise support in her favour? Kamaraj’s suspicion was soon confirmed when it was learnt that her close associates Krishna Menon and KD Malviya had drafted the letter. Both of them, known for their staunch Leftist views, were Nehru loyalists who had shifted loyalties to Indira and were desperate to see her become Prime Minister.  Interestingly, the person who carried the letter was told that Kamaraj himself must sign the receipt and that it should not be given to any of the staff or anybody else.

When the letter arrived, Kamaraj adjourned the meeting. He spoke only to Malliah, in Tamil, telling him he was going to Teen Murti House. The condolence was on the upper floors. With Indira’s letter in his pocket, he sat there with everybody else. Then, after a while, he got up to leave. After he came down one or two stairs, Indira came running behind him and asked, “Did you get my letter?” He patted his pocket and said that he had got it, and kept going down the stairs.

Then she stopped him again and said, “What are you going to do about it?” He turned to her and said, “He was your father. So your sorrow cannot be surpassed. But we are all orphans, he was our father also. We share the sentiments. But as a party, we have a duty that his successor is chosen swiftly, otherwise there will be speculation within the country and abroad as to what is happening to India. And we cannot allow that. Therefore, we are going to go ahead with our decision.”

She was completely flummoxed. He came back to the waiting group and told them exactly what had happened. Within minutes they came out and announced the decision to the waiting media. The news spread all over that it was Shastri. She felt that the game was lost. But they did not want to hurt her. After Shastri’s name was announced, Kamaraj invited him and said, “I have only one suggestion; please include Indira.” Shastri said, “Yes.” He phoned her but she declined. She said, “No, I do not want to be in the Cabinet,” ostensibly because she was mourning.

But the bureaucracy then became active. They told her that Teen Murti House would have to be vacated and prepared for Shastri. But Shastri said, “Do not disturb Indira.  Find some other house.” So they found 6, Janpath. But the next day, the team from the Works and Housing Ministry went to Teen Murti and started making an inventory of furniture, crockery and so on. Indira found it very offensive, but they told her that the rule was that up to a month she could stay in that house, after which she would have to vacate.

A huge worry came on her head that she would have to leave the house that was a symbol of authority. She confided in Umashankar Dixit, father-in-law of Sheila Dixit, a veteran Congressman, a staunch Nehru loyalist, and on the board of the Congress paper, the National Herald. She said she was preparing to go to England where her two sons were studying. But even here there were questions of protocol: how would she travel, and would the High Commission be able to provide minimum courtesy and so on.

So Umashankar Dixit came to see Malliah. They had camaraderie from having been in jail in Bangalore during Quit India in 1942. Malliah said, “I anticipated all this, which is why we asked her to be minister. She can then travel anywhere, and the embassies will look after her. We can also give her a good house to live in.”  Dixit went and persuaded Indira that that was the only course. It was then that she said, “OK”, but that she must get the Information and Broadcasting Minisitry. He came back and Kamaraj and Shastri said, “No problem, she can have a ministry of her choice.”

When her appointment was announced, they had to finalise the Warrant of Precedence. She was placed at number four in the Cabinet hierarchy. Gulzari Lal Nanda who was always pro-tem Prime Minister was number two. She said, “I cannot be number four. I must be number two.” So poor Dixit came running back. I was in Malliah’s house at that time. He asked me to wait in the garden while he spoke to Dixit. Malliah told him that she had been misguided. “Number four is very lucky. Shastri was number four, and he became Prime Minister!” Dixit asked Malliah to tell her himself. So they both went and persuaded her, she agreed and the announcement was made.

Breaking off from the old guard
Within a year Shastri died, and the so-called Syndicate swung into action again. This time the contest was between Morarji and Indira, and they decided to back Indira… Immediately the Leftist papers Patriot and Link carried an editorial that the Syndicate had chosen her because they thought that she would be a stooge. This was seen to be the handiwork of KD Malviya to provoke her — by getting these labels circulated that the Syndicate thought she was a Goongi Gudiya (dumb doll) so that she would react and hit back.

This happened very soon. As per custom, the next step was for Indira to draw up a list of her ministers which she took to the Congress President before going to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Kamaraj got a call from her that she was coming. She arrived and took out the list and gave it to him as a piece of folded paper.

Before he could unfold the paper, she said, “There is going to be no change in this.” He immediately said, “Will you have some tea?” She said, “Yes.” So he asked his Man Friday, Niranjan, to get tea. After tea, he gave back the folded paper to her. She said, “Are you not going to read it?” He said, “Not necessary when you have carefully drawn it up and no changes are to be made.”  The tie snapped at that very moment.

The ties with the old guard of the party formally snapped in the Congress session in Bangalore in 1969, where the party was divided by her.

In one stroke, the character of the Congress changed, from a party with grassroots membership to what I call the Bata Shoe Company, where the proprietor appoints dealers who appoints sub-dealers. One of the first things that she did when she formed her own Congress was that the membership of the Congress organisation was abolished.

They said they would have a fresh membership because the Syndicate still controlled the organisational wing of the party. And since then, till now, the Congress has no membership. A party has to begin with the membership of the people it wants to represent, then they elect office-bearers, and so on.  For that, the first thing required is an enrolment book, of which party workers and leaders were given copies and told to enroll members.

Many of them would fake it; just pay someone Rs5,000 and have all kinds of names put there from a telephone directory. But in this case, it did not matter since Indira was frightened of shadows and had abolished membership. She took decisions through nominations, and through her kitchen cabinet.

The most crucial step which enabled Indira to gain absolute control over all the organs of the state without being accountable was undermining of the Prime Minister’s office. The PMO was the official channel for the rest of the government apparatus for communications to and from the PM. It was defanged and made toothless.

The command was shifted from PMO to PMH (Prime Minister’s house) manned only by a few PA’s such as RK Dhawan. The purpose was that the PAs would readily take orders from Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay was crowned by Indira as the virtual head of the command at PMH who issued orders to all state organs including senior bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, the army and the para-military forces.

Maruti dealerships from PM’s home
I had a first hand experience of the new power centre. In 1967, I had set up an economic and technical consultancy organisation called the Industrial Development Services (IDS). One friend who helped to set it up was HL Anand, the eminent lawyer (later Judge of the Delhi High Court).  He was also legal adviser to the Nehru Trust and to Indira.  One day, in 1972, he was asked by Indira to advise Sanjay on his Maruti project. In turn, HL Anand invited Sanjay to meet me at my office located within HL Anand’s chamber in the Allahabad Bank building.

Sanjay wanted IDS to prepare a feasibility report for Maruti. I introduced him to our team of engineers. Sanjay explained the project. He emphasised the low price at which he intended to sell Maruti. We told him that the price at which Maruti would be sold was not our domain. What we would look at was the cost at which the Maruti of his design could be produced.

We started work on the project after we got PN Mathur, the chief of the Railways Research & Development Organisation who had just retired, as overall adviser. Our technical team paid several visits to the Maruti site and had several discussions with Sanjay and his colleagues. One day the team reported to me that while Maruti was merely at a blueprint stage, they found a number of business persons arriving there with cash and cheques to apply for dealership. They were uneasy about these transactions taking place at the PM’s residence where Sanjay was also residing.

Some of Sanjay’s own team-mates were also uneasy about it and shared their worry with the visiting IDS technical team.
A dear friend, Pitamber Pant, the eminent planner widely respected for introducing Perspective Planning in Yojana Bhawan under Nehru’s chairmanship, was suffering from an acute kidney ailment and like JP he too was on dialysis at the All-India Institute of Mecical Sciences (AIIMS). Devaki and I visited him. “I don’t want to live with the aid of this (dialysis) machine,” said Pitamber. Two days later he was gone.

Over 1,000 of Pitamber’s friends and admirers gathered at his official residence in King George’s Avenue for the last rites. One of them was PN Haksar, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and one of her key advisers. At one point we talked to each other. I shared with him a concern that was uppermost in mind that day: what the IDS engineers who were helping Sanjay with a feasibility report for Maruti had told me only the day before that Sanjay was accepting applications and money from scores of traders at his house which was the same as the official residence of the Prime Minister. They wanted to be appointed as sales agents for Maruti which was still at a blueprint stage. It did not smell right. I feared that these transactions at the PM’s residence could bring a bad name to Indira.

I suggested to Haksar that while Sanjay should get an opportunity to build the car, there was a risk to the reputation of the Prime Minister if Sanjay lived in the PM’S official residence during this period. I suggested that he could live separately. Haskar at once grabbed the significance of my message and said, “I see.”

Haksar conveyed the gist of our talk to Indira Gandhi suggesting that during the building of Maruti it was advisable that Sanjay shift from the PM’s house to a private residence.  Indira was livid. She shouted at Haksar, “Since when have you become my personal adviser? Sanjay will continue to stay here in this house with me.”  Soon Haksar got orders to leave the post of Principal Secretary to the PM and join the Planning Commission. I got a call from PN Dhar, saying, “Aapne to Haksar saheb ko marva diya” (You have got Haksar saheb into trouble). That she could treat Haksar like this was a shock for everyone. (Later, after Emergency was declared, Pandit Brothers, a well-known store run by Haksar’s uncle in Connaught Place was raided and his uncle arrested.)

This was the mood of growing public concern about her political morality — the exposures about Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti, setting the police upon officers collecting information about his affairs, resisting the demand in Parliament and outside for a commission to enquire into LN Mishra’s licensing scandals — that formed the backdrop to the growing unrest around the country, and which set the stage for that fateful evening with JP at our house in January 1975.

Excerpted with permission from Civil Disobedience by LC Jain, published by The Book Review Literary Trust.