Indira Gandhi’s soft-spoken, attractive personality masked her iron will and autocratic ambition, and most of her Congress contemporaries underestimated her drive and tenacity. During her first year in office, she visited Washington, D.C., where she won substantial support for India’s weakened economy, and her subsequent visit to Moscow reflected the continuation of her father’s policy of nonalignment. Trying to defuse Sikh agitation, moreover, and as a reward for Sikh military service in the Kashmir war, she granted the long-standing Sikh demand of a Punjabi suba (state), which required partition of the existing state of Punjab but left its newly designed capital of Chandigarh as shared administrative headquarters of the new states of Punjab, with a Sikh majority, and Haryana, with a slight Hindu majority.

Several years of poor summer monsoon rains had conspired with wartime spending to undermine India’s economy, and Prime Minister Gandhi’s subsequent decision to devalue the rupee cost her party considerable losses at the polls in India’s fourth general elections, in 1967. Although the Congress Party, with 283 seats (of 520) in the Lok Sabha, was still considerably larger than any of the various left- and right-wing opposition parties—none of which had gained more than 44 seats—her overall majority in the chamber was reduced from some 200 (which she had inherited) to fewer than 50. The Congress Party, moreover, lost most of the more than 3,400 elective seats in the state assemblies, and Gandhi felt obliged to invite Morarji Desai into her cabinet as deputy prime minister and finance minister. As leader of Gujarat’s wealthy banking and business elite, Desai was considered a pillar of economic stability, whose presence in New Delhi, it was hoped, would swiftly restore confidence in the Congress government.

India’s first Muslim president, Zakir Husain, was also elected in 1967, but his death two years later opened a wider rift in Congress leadership and gave Gandhi the opportunity of taking more power into her own hands, as she began rejecting the advice and support of her father’s closest colleagues of the old guard, including Desai, whom she forced out of her cabinet. For president, she backed her own candidate, Vice President V.V. (Varahagiri Venkata) Giri, against the majority of her party’s leadership, who favored the Lok Sabha speaker Neelam Sanjiva Reddy; she proved to be a skillful political manager for Giri, who was easily elected. Because of this, the old guard of the Congress Party expelled Gandhi for “indiscipline,” but, refusing to be intimidated, she rallied most of the elected members of parliament to her “New Congress” standard and led a left-wing national coalition of communist and provincial Sikh and Dravidian parties from Punjab and Tamil Nadu, respectively. Desai led the old guard, a minority of Congress members who remained as the prime minister’s opposition in the Lok Sabha but who could not thwart any of her major legislation, including a constitutional amendment to abolish former princely pensions in 1970. Gandhi called new elections at the end of 1970, and—sweeping the polls the following March with the promise “Eliminate poverty!”—her party won 350 seats in a Lok Sabha of 515.

The Bangladesh war

In December 1970 Pakistan held general elections, its first since independence. The Awami League, headed by East Pakistan’s popular Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman (Sheikh Mujib), won a clear majority of seats in the new assembly, but West Pakistan’s chief martial law administrator and president, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, refused to honour the democratic choice of his country’s majority. At the end of March 1971, after failed negotiations in which Mujib demanded virtual independence for East Pakistan, Yahya Khan ordered a military massacre in Dhaka (Dacca) and other locations in East Pakistan. Though Mujib was arrested and flown to prison in West Pakistan, he called on his followers in the east to rise up and proclaim their independence as Bangladesh (“Land of the Bengalis”). Some 10 million refugees fled across the border from East Pakistan to India in the ensuing eight months of martial rule and sporadic firing by West Pakistan’s army. Soon after the monsoon stopped, India’s army moved up to the Bangladesh border and by early December had advanced virtually unopposed to Dhaka, which was surrendered in mid-December. Mujib, released by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—who had taken over from the disgraced Yahya Khan—flew home to a hero’s welcome, and in January 1972 he became the first prime minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

India’s stunning victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh war was achieved in part because of Soviet military support and diplomatic assurances. The Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, signed in mid-1971 by India with the Soviet Union, gave India the arms it used in the war. With the birth of Bangladesh, India’s already dominant position in South Asia was enhanced, and its foreign policy, which remained officially nonaligned, tilted further toward the Soviet Union.

In a last-ditch but futile effort to support Pakistan, a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was sent to the Bay of Bengal, ostensibly to evacuate civilians from Dhaka, but the war ended before any such assistance could be rendered. Many Indians viewed the aircraft carrier’s presence so close to their own shores as provocative “nuclear weapons rattling.” By 1972 India had launched a nuclear program of its own, detonating its first plutonium-armed device under the sands of northwestern Rajasthan state in May 1974. The atomic explosion was felt in Pakistan’s neighbouring Sindh province and triggered that country’s resolve to produce a bomb of its own as swiftly as possible. Pakistan subsequently forged stronger ties with China and with Muslim countries to the west but found itself further diminished as a potential challenge to Indian hegemony over South Asia.

Emergency rule

The Bangladesh war raised Prime Minister Gandhi to virtual “mother goddess” stature at home. She was viewed as a brilliant military strategist and diplomat, and her popularity was never greater than in the years immediately after that brief December war. By late 1974, however, Gandhi’s golden image had tarnished, for, despite her campaign rhetoric, poverty was hardly abolished in India. Quite the contrary, with skyrocketing international oil prices and consumer-goods inflation at home, India’s unemployed and landless as well as its large fixed-income labouring population found themselves sinking deeper into starvation’s grip and impossible debt. Student strikes and mass protest marches rocked Bihar and Gujarat, as Narayan and Desai joined forces in leading a new Janata Morcha (“People’s Front”) movement against government corruption and Gandhi’s allegedly inept leadership. The mass movement gathered momentum throughout the first half of 1975 and reached its climax that June, when the Congress Party lost a crucial by-election in Gujarat and Gandhi herself was found guilty by the High Court in Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) of several counts of election malpractice during the last campaign for her Lok Sabha seat. The mandatory penalty for that crime was exclusion from holding any elective office for six years from the date of conviction.

Opposition leaders threatened a civil disobedience campaign to force the prime minister to resign, and many of her oldest cabinet colleagues and Congress Party advisers urged her to step down pending an appeal to India’s Supreme Court. Following instead the advice of her ambitious and energetic younger son, Sanjay, on June 26, 1975, Gandhi persuaded President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a national emergency, which empowered her to do whatever she considered best for the country for at least six months. The elite Central Reserve Police force, the prime minister’s palace guard, was ordered to arrest Desai and the ailing and aged Narayan, as well as hundreds of others who had worked with her father and Mohandas Gandhi in helping India to win its freedom from British rule. She then blacked out the entire region of Delhi in which the press was published and appointed Sanjay as her trusted personal censor of all future news leaders and editorials. Her minister of information and broadcasting, Inder K. Gujral, immediately resigned rather than accept orders from Sanjay, who held no elective office at the time but who clearly was becoming one of the most powerful persons in India. “India is Indira, and Indira is India,” was the call of Congress Party sycophants, and soon the country was plastered with her poster image. Practically every leader of India’s political opposition was jailed or kept under house arrest for almost two years, and some of India’s most prominent journalists, lawyers, educators, and political activists were muzzled or imprisoned.

Gandhi announced her Twenty-Point Program soon after the emergency was proclaimed, and most points were aimed at reducing inflation and energizing the economy by punishing tax evaders, black marketers, smugglers, and other real criminals. Prices did come down, production indexes rose dramatically, and even the monsoon proved cooperative by bringing abundant rains on time for two years in a row. At the same time, however, popular discontent was fostered by some of the emergency acts, such as a freeze on wage increases, pressure for increased worker discipline, and a birth-control program initiated by Sanjay that mandated sterilization for families with more than two children. It was perhaps because of the economic gains that the prime minister decided early in 1977 to call general elections, but she may also have believed what she read about herself in her controlled press or feared a military coup had she simply refused to seek a civil mandate for her policies. Most political prisoners were released, and Narayan immediately joined Desai in quickly revitalizing the Janata movement, whose campaign warned Indians that the elections might be their last chance to choose between “democracy and dictatorship.” In the elections, held in February, Indira lost her Lok Sabha seat, and Sanjay lost his bid for one. Most of their loyal followers also lost their electoral contests, and the Congress Party was reduced to just 153 seats, 92 of which were from four of the southern states. The Janata Party’s 295 seats (of a total 542) gave it only a modest majority, but opposition candidates together represented more than two-thirds of the Lok Sabha membership.

The Janata interlude and the return of Indira Gandhi

At the age of 80, Desai took the post of prime minister. Although Narayan was too sick to accept any office, there were others in the Janata Party, especially Charan Singh, of the Jat (peasant) caste, who considered themselves at least as worthy of becoming prime minister as Desai, and the petty squabbling over power and all the perks of high office kept the new leaders in Delhi so preoccupied that little time or vital energy was left with which to address the nation’s crying problems and needs. Freedom did return, however, including laissez-faire in all its worst forms, and inflation soon escalated, as did smuggling, black-marketing, and every form of corruption endemic to any poor country with underpaid bureaucrats and undereducated police. Even the rains failed Desai, whose high-spending regime soon used up the substantial surplus in food grains that Gandhi had amassed in new storage facilities.

Politically, perhaps the worst error made by Desai was to insist on punishing Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, both of whom were accused of many crimes, none of which would be easy to prove in any Indian court. In November 1978 Indira Gandhi had again been elected to the Lok Sabha, but this time as a member of the Congress (I) Party (the I stood for Indira), which she and her supporters had formed that year. She was expelled from the Lok Sabha the following month and then briefly imprisoned, but this action brought a strong backlash of sympathy for her from millions of Indians, many of whom a year earlier had feared her as a tyrant.

No major legislation was introduced by the new government, which in a year of inaction seemed incapable of solving any of India’s problems and lost the confidence of most of the populace. In mid-July 1979, Desai resigned rather than face a no-confidence motion that had been tabled in the Lok Sabha and would easily have passed. Charan Singh was then selected prime minister, but just a few weeks later he too resigned. Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, who had been elected president in 1977, called for new elections and dissolved parliament in the winter of 1979.

In January 1980 India’s seventh general election returned Indira Gandhi to power over New Delhi’s central government. The Congress (I) Party, which had run on the slogan “Elect a government that works,” won 351 of the 525 contested Lok Sabha seats, as against 31 for Janata. Sanjay Gandhi also won election to the Lok Sabha and resumed his former post as head of the Congress’s youth wing (the Youth Congress). Though he remained outside his mother’s cabinet, he personally selected half of the Congress’s successful Lok Sabha candidates, and it appeared that he was being groomed as her successor. In June 1980, however, Sanjay Gandhi was killed in the crash of a new stunt plane he was flying. Indira Gandhi, who seemed never fully to recover from the loss of Sanjay, immediately recruited her elder son, Rajiv, into political life. Rajiv had been a pilot until his younger brother’s death but took up politics at his mother’s insistence.