The bureaucracy

The importance of political loyalty as an internal organizing principle of India's bureaucratic apparatus—the Indian Administrative ServiceFootnote ⁹—emerged in the early 1970s. Eradicating poverty, Mrs Gandhi used to say, required a ‘committed bureaucracy’. Loyalty to the ruling party gradually became a—if not the—central element in determining the career prospects of civil servants, especially as far as the most senior positions were concerned.

The years from 1975 to 1980 marked a fundamental break in the Indian Administrative Service's history for several reasons. First, hardly any civil servant resigned during the emergency regime (1975–77),Footnote ¹⁰ while abject decisions were regularly implemented. More importantly, the more a civil servant showed himself ready to implement whatever the High Command (i.e. Indira and Sanjay Gandhi) ordered, the more they were rewarded. A notable example was the then vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority, Jagmohan, who, thanks to his ‘services’ to the ‘beautification’ of Delhi and ‘family planning’ campaigns—two of the programmes initiated by Sanjay Gandhi—became, after Mrs Gandhi's return to power in 1980, lieutenant governor of Delhi (1980–81), then lieutenant governor of Goa, Daman, and Diu (1981–82), and finally governor of Jammu and Kashmir (1984–89).Footnote ¹¹ Numerous other examples could easily be provided.

Second, the high number of ‘political’ transfers and the concentration of power in the hands of those bureaucrats who were close to the Gandhi family—along with the concerns resulting from the suppression of the democratic rule in 1975–77—spread a climate of fear throughout the public administration. Thus, those bureaucrats who were not eager to pander to the political establishment, in most cases, obeyed out of fear.Footnote ¹²

Third, the climate of fear that had prevailed during the emergency gave way to a ‘witch-hunting climate’Footnote ¹³ during the Janata phase (1977–79). Bureaucrats who had been close to the Gandhi family were in most cases transferred or put on leave or even had their salaries suspended. The same happened to those who were perceived to be close to the Congress Party. In still other cases, officers were transferred just because they were not close enough to the new ruling party and room had to be made for those who were. The Jana Sangh was particularly successful at recruiting its followers into the Indian Administrative Service's ranks,Footnote ¹⁴ but Charan Singh also spared no effort to change its composition as much as he could.Footnote ¹⁵ Apparently Mrs Gandhi's concept of a ‘committed bureaucracy’ had made an impact on her opponents too.

Fourth, the witch-hunting did not end with the collapse of the Janata government. In fact, it started again with renewed vigour after Mrs Gandhi's return to power in 1980. The first victims were those whose positions had been strengthened during the Janata phase, thanks to their political connections. Then came those who had conformed with the basic principle of any bureaucratic apparatus—political neutrality—and had agreed to comply with the Janata government. Then, those who were close to senior politicians who had chosen not to follow Mrs Gandhi in the new Congress (I) had to be sidelined, especially to make room for Sanjay's friends and collaborators.Footnote ¹⁶ After the latter's death in June 1980, the top layer of the administration was reshuffled once again—a ‘de-Sanjayisation’ took placeFootnote ¹⁷—in order to bring it more in line with the changed political circumstances. In short, what emerged was a ‘spoils system’.

The overall result of these developments was that the subjugation of the bureaucracy to political leaders became the accepted norm regulating the administrative apparatus. This had several important consequences. First, the bureaucracy stopped being a reliable source of information for the central government. When the director general of Civil Aviation wrote to the secretary of Civil Aviation informing him that Sanjay Gandhi was violating air safety regulations, the former was asked to proceed on leave.Footnote ¹⁸ Episodes like this reinforced the well-founded belief that the only information that the political leadership would welcome was good news. Since the Congress Party had stopped functioning as a reliable source of information, the subjugation of the bureaucracy to the political powers further isolated the central government and the political apparatus.

Second, not only did less information reach political leaders, but the reliability of this information became more and more questionable. This was due to the development of vertical chains linking bureaucrats in the states to politicians in New Delhi,Footnote ¹⁹ which was not entirely new. What was new was that this paralleled an analogous trend within the Congress (I),Footnote ²⁰ namely the development of factionalism between different levels of the polity. Bureaucrats became an instrument that politicians used to weaken factional enemies. Probably the clearest example of this took place in Punjab. Before being elected as president of India, Zail Singh used and abused his power as India's home minister to weaken his arch-rival, Badal Singh, who was then Punjab Congress (I)'s chief minister. During the period of President's RuleFootnote ²¹ in 1980, ‘mass transfers’ of officers were ordered by the Centre, which allowed Zail Singh to run the Punjab administration ‘by proxy’.Footnote ²² As a consequence, bureaucrats began to base their communication with the Centre on political and factional calculations. Given that political and personal considerations became the key element in determining one's career prospects, ambitious bureaucrats did not hesitate to convey false information in order to strengthen their position and/or weaken their rivals (and eventually those of their political masters). For example, shortly before the Asiad Games were held in Delhi in late 1982, Mrs Gandhi was told by the then sports secretary that there were no sport facilities close to the Delhi border, even though such facilities did exist. They had been built in previous years under the supervision of S. K. Mishra. Mrs Gandhi eventually had to fly there by helicopter in order to establish whether such facilities existed or not.Footnote ²³

Third, the climate of fear pervading the administration resulted in a near-halt of administrative activity. Not only were actions not taken that could be interpreted as hostile to the ruling family or to its close associates, but officers, not knowing when and where they might be treading on the toes of someone who was politically connected, were afraid to take responsibility even in marginal cases.Footnote ²⁴ For example, in Madhya Pradesh in late 1982, a district collector was ordered to give up his charge for not withdrawing a case against a Congress (I) worker, who turned out to be part of the district's 20-Point Programme Implementation Committee and therefore somehow associated to Mrs Gandhi.Footnote ²⁵ Many more examples could be found in all the major national newspapers. Moreover, given that orders from politicians, especially if they were politically inconvenient, were issued orally, and given that such orders were often in conflict with each other, meant that officers faced the invidious situation of not knowing which orders to follow and which to disregard.Footnote ²⁶

Fourth, the growing influence of the politicians over bureaucrats caused a defensive reaction. Officers at all levels began to look for protection. The easiest way to find it was to align with the ruling party. However, this was a short-term strategy which was likely to jeopardize future career prospects, since there were growing signs that the Congress (I) would not rule forever. Furthermore, the anarchic condition of the ruling Congress (I) made political alignment more risky than ever before, since the equilibrium of power within the party changed rapidly and without following a discernible path. A wiser way to seek protection was to adopt an approach of total submission to whatever party was ruling—a strategy that was adopted on a very large scale—or to ‘unionize’ on the basis of larger categories such as language, caste, religion, and so on. In this way punitive transfers could be seen as being targeted against a particular community, which would act as a sort of internal lobby and limit somewhat the arbitrariness in the management of the administrative personnel.

Fifth, the submission of the bureaucracy to the will of politicians gradually transformed it into a fund-raising apparatus. Following Mrs Gandhi's ban on political donation by private corporations in the early 1970s, politicians belonging to any party were virtually obliged to resort to illicit funds (black money) to provide their parties with the financial resources they needed.Footnote ²⁷ One of the preferential channels through which this could be done was by filling the bureaucracy with civil servants who either willingly closed their eyes to corrupt practices or were keen to supplement their sources of income. The chief minister in Karnataka, Gundu Rao, is one of the best examples of this transformation of the bureaucratic apparatus into a fund-gathering machine.Footnote ²⁸ The compression of the salaries of those in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy since 1950, as part of the ‘socialist’ agenda, and the increasing availability of expensive middle class status symbols (e.g. colour televisions and video-recorders) along with the declining appeal of an ‘idealistic’ commitment to the nation-building effort, contributed to the endemic spread of corruption in the administration.

To sum up, one of the effects of the emergence of a competitive party system at the national level, although for a very brief period of time, was the transformation of the bureaucratic apparatus into a personal instrument in the hands of powerful—and, in some cases, even not-so-powerful—politicians. Needless to say, this was particularly true for the prime minister, who was able to direct the state apparatuses to pursue her personal and political goals. In fact, the politicization of the Indian Administrative Service was just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually all public institutions were subject to heavy pressures to act according to the political leadership's wishes. For example, the Election Commission indefinitely postponed the Garwal constituency (Uttar Pradesh) by-electionFootnote ²⁹ because the central government wanted to impede H. N. Bahuguna, a powerful Brahmin leader with a strong following among Muslims, from re-entering parliament after he had resigned in protest at Sanjay Gandhi's ‘autocratic’ management of the allocation of the Congress (I)'s tickets. The reason given by the Election Commission was that law and order could not be ensured. Curiously enough, the same objections were not raised one year later, when elections in Assam were duly held despite the complete breakdown of law and order in that state, and despite numerous police reports that literally begged for a postponement of the elections.Footnote ³⁰ (Bahuguna eventually managed to get elected to the Lok Sabha the following year anyway.)

In August 1984, the governor of Andhra Pradesh, Ram Lal, dismissed the recently elected chief minister, N. T. Rama Rao,Footnote ³¹ despite the fact that he enjoyed a comfortable majority in the State Assembly, and nominated the former finance minister, Bhaskara Rao, in his place.Footnote ³² The Congress (I) Party supported the new government from ‘outside’. A huge amount of money—between 20 and 30 million rupeesFootnote ³³—was allegedly sent by the Congress (I) High Command to Andhra in order to ‘convince’ some of Rama Rao's followers to support the new chief minister. In order to ‘insulate’ his legislators from temptations, Rama Rao decided to bring all of them to Delhi to appeal to the president, Zail Singh. However, he was denied the authorization to arrange a charter flight and train reservations were mysteriously cancelled (by the state-owned Indian Railways) so that legislators had to be squeezed into the regular, unreserved coaches. The train journey, which normally took about 24 hours, lasted two-and-a-half days.

In short, what emerged in the wake of the emergency was a ‘combination of an American-style ‘spoils system’ with the security of tenure of the mandarin system'—a disastrous mix indeed.Footnote ³⁴ The bureaucracy split into three groups: ‘the “wives” (those officers who were attached to one party), the “nuns” (officers who remained unattached to any party), and the “prostitutes” (who attached themselves to whichever party was in power and switched whenever there is a change of government)’, with the number of ‘prostitutes’ being ‘quite high’.Footnote ³⁵ The bureaucratic apparatus was subjugated to the political system to a significant extent. As a consequence, it began to work according to distorted logic and rules, which seriously compromised its ability to function as one of the key institutions of a democratic polity, not to mention the resultant decline in efficiency and accountability.

The judiciary

Mrs Gandhi's relationship with the judiciary had been turbulent throughout her political career. In the wake of her left turn in 1969, the prime minister included the judiciary in the list of those who had ‘vested interests’ in maintaining the status quo and were thus hindering her projects of social transformation.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the strained relationship between the executiveFootnote ³⁷ and the judiciary had begun in Nehru's years, when a vicious circle was established in which ‘the parliament [could] pass a legislation, the courts [could] determine its constitutionality, the parliament [could] try to circumvent the courts by amending the constitution, the courts [could] pronounce that parliament [had] limited powers of amendment, parliament [could]. . .and so on and on’.Footnote ³⁸

During Mrs Gandhi's years as prime minister the conflict intensified. In policy terms, it meant that the implementation of land reforms and other progressive measurers were hindered by the Supreme Court's interpretation of the constitution, which gave the Fundamental Rights priority over the Directive Principle of State Policies, which were supposedly the source of inspiration for Mrs Gandhi's developmental strategy.Footnote ³⁹ In institutional terms, the supremacy of the Directive Principles was translated into unlimited amending power for parliament; by contrast, the defence of Fundamental Rights moved the Supreme Court to formulate the ‘basic structure’ doctrine, elucidated for the first time in the Kesavananda case on 24 April 1973, according to which certain fundamental features of the constitution could not be changed. The very next day, the government appointed Justice A. N. Ray—who had been part of the dissenting minority—as chief justice of India, over three more senior colleagues,Footnote ⁴⁰ all of whom had been part of the majority which delivered the ruling.

The appointment of Justice Ray inaugurated a new phase in the relationship between the government and the judiciary. Supersessions and transfers of the judges of the Supreme Court and the state-level High Courts became a more or less accepted tool used by the central government to put pressure on the judiciary.Footnote ⁴¹ While the conflict between the executive and the judiciary was of long standing, this represented a vastly greater intrusion of political considerations into the workings of the Supreme Court and High Courts. The new appointment policy was even candidly defended in the parliament, as a way to get a ‘committed judiciary’ which, along with a ‘committed bureaucracy’, was said to be a pre-condition for the proper implementation of anti-poverty initiatives.Footnote ⁴² Needless to say, it was during the emergency—the proclamation of which was part of the ongoing battle between the judiciary and the executive—that most of the abuses occurred.Footnote ⁴³ Furthermore, a great many of the provisions included in the amendments of the constitution passed during the emergency were aimed at curbing the judiciary's independence and the power of judicial review.

The Janata phase (1977–79), which entailed restoring the equilibrium between the institutions through the repeal of the most authoritarian pieces of emergency legislation—first and foremost the 42^nd Amendment—created the conditions for a temporary truce in the constitutional dispute between the judiciary and the executive. What turned out to be crucial from this point of view was the majority obtained by the non-Congress parties in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house). In fact, it took almost five years for Mrs Gandhi to regain a nearly two-thirds majority there, which was necessary for amending the constitution. Moreover, in the summer of 1980, after her return to power, the Supreme Court in the Minerva Mills case reaffirmed the ‘basic structure’ doctrine.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even though the government repeatedly said that it did not accept the doctrine,Footnote ⁴⁵ and despite the fact that it actively sought to get the Supreme Court to review its ruling,Footnote ⁴⁶ in the post-emergency political conditions, it would have been quite difficult for Mrs Gandhi to pass through constitutional amendments which restored the unlimited amending power of parliament.

That did not mean that government–judiciary relations were easy. The main bone of contention remained the transfer of High Court judges and, more generally, the intrusion of politics into the functioning of the judiciary. Just a week after Mrs Gandhi's return to power, the law minister, P. Shiv Shankar, told the Lok Sabha that the government was going to have ‘fresh look’ at the policy of appointing state-level High Court judges.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Cabinet issued a press noteFootnote ⁴⁸ in early 1983 in which the government set out the guidelines for their appointment. According to these guidelines, the chief justice and one-third of the judges of each High Court were to be from outside the state. While in principle this would have fostered uniformity in the judicial process and limited the biases derived from local pressures on judges who had spent most of their lives in the same state, in actual terms the guidelines paved the way for the systematic humiliation and denigration of those judges the government did not find ‘completely pliant and congenial’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was particularly so after 1981, when the Supreme Court ruled in the High Court Judges case that the consent of the judge to be transferred was not necessary. During the following five years, the government transferred 30 High Court chief justices.Footnote ⁵⁰

Transfers were not the only weapon in the government's arsenal. Two other ‘popular’ measures to put pressure on the judiciary were the unduly long delays in the confirmation of additional judges and in the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and the High Courts, and the granting of rewards to ‘committed’ (to the ruling family) judges. For example, the judge who freed Mrs Gandhi from jail in 1977, R. Dayal, was made commissioner to Sick Mills in December 1980, with the status of joint secretary, a post carrying twice the salary of a temporary additional district judge (which he was in 1977).Footnote ⁵¹ Another example was the appointment of Baharul Islam, a former Congress member of the Rajya Sabha, to the Supreme Court in December 1980, despite the fact that he had already retired.Footnote ⁵² Islam later contested a Lok Sabha seat on a Congress (I) ticket from Assam.

To sum up, Mrs Gandhi's relationship with the judiciary in the early 1980s was in complete continuity with her earlier terms as prime minister. The judiciary's independence was seen as a potential restraint on her power. Therefore, she systematically sought to make the judiciary work on the basis of political considerations, so that, in the last resort, it would be subjected to the executive. Indeed, it was Mrs Gandhi herself who explained to the chief justice of India, Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud, the logic underpinning the appointment of Supreme Court judges: ‘I am a political leader. I have to carry my people with me. I cannot displease my own people. My difficulties are political difficulties.’Footnote ⁵³

Mrs Gandhi was successful only to a certain extent. Indeed, at the time of her death, ‘an uneasy truce over transfers’Footnote ⁵⁴ and over constitutional supremacy had been reached. The conflict would resurface after the collapse of the one-party-dominant system in 1989, this time with the Supreme Court acting from a much stronger position.Footnote ⁵⁵

The parliament and the presidency

The proclamation of the emergency regime made apparent the fragility of India's institutions—it had been imposed in accordance with constitutional provisions; it had been authorized by the president of the Republic; the cabinet had approved it; parliament had ratified it; most of the press submitted to censorship; and the bureaucracy obediently implemented the most extreme decisions of the authorities. This was particularly true for the president and the parliament which, in theory, were supposed to work as a constitutional restraint on the executive's attempts to abuse its power, but in practice legitimated the suspension of democratic rule. Relations between the presidency, parliament, and the government have generally been heavily unbalanced in favour of the latter. This was true during Nehru's years and even more so during Mrs Gandhi's premiership. The imbalance stemmed from the high degree of politicization to which these institutions had been subjected since the early 1950s, especially after Mrs Gandhi's appointment as prime minister. As the emergency clearly demonstrated, both institutions functioned by following political rather than constitutional considerations and were not capable of exercising any degree of autonomy. This led these institutions to become politically irrelevant.

While the presidency is somehow bound to be a relativelyFootnote ⁵⁶ marginal institution in parliamentary democracies, parliament is supposed to be the centre of a country's political life. However, parliament—more than other institutions—is influenced by the configuration of the party system. Therefore, paradoxically, the firm control over the Lok Sabha enjoyed by all prime ministers until 1989—with the exception of Charan Singh and, to a lesser extent, Morarji Desai—created the conditions for the parliament to become marginal in India's democratic life and paved the way for the concentration of power in the executive's hands. Parliament came to play a merely procedural role.

Mrs Gandhi came to see the parliament as ‘something to be tolerated’,Footnote ⁵⁷ and several examples show the scant respect she had for it. Throughout her last term in office, she resorted to legislation by ordinance—therefore excluding parliament from the policy-making process—on a regular basis.Footnote ⁵⁸ She explicitly refused to discuss certain public issues in parliament.Footnote ⁵⁹ The government began to modify tariffs and state-controlled prices not only without informing parliament, but also immediately before the beginning of the Budget Sessions.Footnote ⁶⁰ The partisanship of the Lok Sabha speaker, Balram Jakhar, led to some rather bizarre interpretations of the procedural regulations of the lower chamber, for example, the episode when Zail Singh explicitly praised Adolf Hitler, which was later expunged from the records.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, Mrs Gandhi stopped appearing in the Lok Sabha to report on her official visits abroad, as when she returned from the United States in the summer of 1982 and instead sent in the external affairs minister, Narasimha Rao, who had remained in India taking care of domestic affairs, to report to parliament.Footnote ⁶² Quite naturally, MPs began to consider themselves more as administrative clerks than as legislators. Many of them did not bother to turn up, even when they had put up questions for oral replies,Footnote ⁶³ and as a result parliamentary sessions became shorter and shorter.Footnote ⁶⁴ Many more examples could be provided.

Before 1989, the president of India played a significant role on only two occasions.Footnote ⁶⁵ The first occurred in 1951 when President Rajendra Prasad asserted himself in an attempt to block legislation on Hindu personal law,Footnote ⁶⁶ and the second in July 1979, when President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy discretionally refused to give Jagjivan Ram the opportunity to demonstrate a parliamentary majority and called instead for fresh elections. Apart from these instances, the role of the presidents had been largely ceremonial, with the partial exception of President Zail Singh who came very close to dismissing Rajiv Gandhi's government for ‘irresponsibility and corruption’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Presidents usually kept a low profile and avoided public controversies. In many cases, especially during Indira Gandhi's premierships, this was translated into complete subservience to the prime minister. The most striking example occurred in 1975, when President Fakhruddin Ahmed agreed—albeit probably reluctantly—to sign the proclamation of the emergency, even though the cabinet had not been informed beforehand.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly, during the emergency he did not object to any of the draconian legislative measures adopted by the government. The same can be said about parliament, which not only ratified the proclamation of the emergency and the subsequent extension of that parliament's life,Footnote ⁶⁹ but agreed to subvert the democratic character of the constitution by passing a whole set of authoritarian constitutional amendments.

In the early 1980s the situation did not change much. Relations between President Sanjiva Reddy and Mrs Gandhi were usually cordial, despite past animosity.Footnote ⁷⁰ The president consented to sign whatever piece of legislation or ordinance was brought before him, including the much-discussed dissolution of nine state assemblies and the National Security Ordinance.

The election of Zail Singh to the presidency in 1982 made relations with the prime minister even smoother. The latter was universally reputed to be one of the most loyal politicians to the Gandhi family, as well as one of the most inept. His election heralded the president coming to play a mere administrative role in government. In fact, when in late March 1984 Mrs Gandhi carried out a major reshuffle of governors, Zail Singh came to know about the changes only when his secretariat brought him the files for signature.Footnote ⁷¹

Assam

This is not the place to discuss the Assam crisis in detail. There are several accounts of the events which deal with this very complex issue.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Our scope here is to see how the lack of an institutional framework for the management of the crisis gave the central government complete flexibility in dealing with the Assam agitation. It is my contention that the complete breakdown of governance which followed the centre's decision to impose state elections in early 1983 and the subsequent deaths of several thousands of people were completely avoidable, and that the crisis degenerated because there were no institutional mechanisms to guide both parties towards an acceptable solution. This is not to say that relations between the northeast region and the rest of the country were not a very sensitive issue. Indeed, the extreme socio-economic complexity of the area and the very delicate equilibrium within the region, combined with its particular geopolitical location, has constituted a continuous challenge for New Delhi. It is certainly not a coincidence that most of the special provisions included in article 371 of the constitution—which allows the central government to grant special concessions to certain states or regions—were created with this region in mind; and it is certainly no coincidence either that the northeast was the area from which the highest number of states was carved out after the states’ reorganization in the 1950s. Therefore, I am not suggesting that the underlying issues were easily resolved; indeed, I am not even sure if they were solvable at all.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Instead, I am pointing out that the actual crisis which broke out in the early 1980s could have been avoided had a mechanism for an institutional bargaining process existed or had Mrs Gandhi been willing to bargain with someone who did not have among their goals the future electoral prospects of the Congress (I).

The bone of contention in Assam was the revision of the state electoral rolls, which contained many non-Indian citizens (most of whom had migrated from East Pakistan/Bangladesh in the previous decades) and who thus had no right to vote. By all accounts, most of these non-Indian voters were Congress supporters. The Assamese, through a series of organizations led by the All Assam Student Union, wanted the electoral rolls to be revised and illegal immigrants to be deported out of Assam, in order to ward off the political subjugation of the Assamese. Indeed, Mrs Gandhi herself, shortly before the 1980 general elections, said that free elections were not possible in Assam, unless the electoral rolls were revised.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ However, after she came back to power, she apparently changed her mind.

The talks were conducted in an extremely informal fashion. Sometimes it was the home minister who bargained with the leader of the All Assam Student Union.Footnote ¹⁵⁰At other times it was the external affairs minister.Footnote ¹⁵¹ At still other times, it was the finance ministerFootnote ¹⁵² or the prime minister herself or the chief minister of Manipur or the Gandhi Peace Foundation that led the negotiations.Footnote ¹⁵³ A great deal of confusion resulted from the several rounds of talks and no solution could be found. In the meanwhile, several Congress (I) governments—which had a majority thanks to major defections from the Janata Party—were appointed, only to be rapidly followed by long periods of President's Rule.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Furthermore, the leaders of the agitation were repeatedly arrested, which resulted in even more confusion around the negotiating table. In any case, the framework of informal federalism could not work because the parties involved in the negotiation had diverging political goals. To put it in very simple terms, the All Assam Student Union was asking the government for two things: first, to delete several thousands Congress (I) voters from the electoral rolls; and, second, to guarantee them an ‘honourable’ way out of the agitation that they had promoted and led. Neither of these two things was acceptable to Mrs Gandhi.

The prime minister sought a different way out of the impasse. A democratically elected Congress (I) government, in her eyes, would have been a more suitable interlocutor in the framework of informal federalism, hence her decision to call for fresh elections on the basis of the unrevised electoral rolls. The government justified this decision—which ultimately led to the most violent elections since independenceFootnote ¹⁵⁵—on two grounds. First, there was a constitutional obligation to hold elections before March 1983, since five years had passed since the previous legislative assembly had been elected. In order for the postponement of the elections to be constitutionally permissible, an amendment allowing the government to prolong President's Rule beyond one year was needed. Indeed, a bill was introduced in the parliamentFootnote ¹⁵⁶ and the opposition parties agreed to give their consent in the Rajya Sabha, where the Congress (I) did not yet have a two-thirds majority.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ However, the Congress (I) decided instead to withdraw the bill and go ahead with the elections, despite the fact that the Army had estimated that no fewer than 120 battalions would be needed to ensure acceptable law and order during the elections—to put things into perspective, the whole Central Reserve Police Force amounted to just 76 battalions.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Moreover, according to intelligence reports, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on the one side, and Mrs Gandhi on the other, utilized an explicitly communalist idiom, which contributed to inflaming feelings and radicalizing the situation.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Second, the government justified the decision to hold elections on the basis of the unrevised electoral rolls by saying that there was no time to do alter them, since the decision to have an election had only been taken on 7 January 1983, about five weeks before they were due to be held. Revising the electoral rolls could take from six weeks to six months, depending on the method used.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ However, it is absolutely not credible that the Election Commission was taken by surprise by the government communication of 7 January. The requirement to hold an election by March 1983 had been known since the election of the legislative assembly five years before. The imposition of President's Rule—which could last no more than a year—and the dissolution of the legislative assembly in March 1982 should have served as a reminder to the Election Commission, but apparently it did not. In addition, in the preceding year, several statements by a series of institutional actors left no doubt about the constitutional obligation to hold elections. Bishma Narain Singh, a cabinet minister at the time, recalled that ‘everyone’ knew that elections would be held in March 1983.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Preparations for the elections had begun in May 1982 and detailed reports had been sent to the prime minister regarding the number of officials and polling boots needed, and similar technical matters.Footnote ¹⁶² Despite all this, the chief of the Election Commission, R. K. Trivedi, apparently did not realize that elections were about to be held. It seems more credible that the electoral rolls were intentionally left unrevised.Footnote ¹⁶³

To make things worse, after the imposition of President's Rule in March 1982, the central government resorted to increasing repression. Shortly before the elections, Rajesh Pilot, at that time a Congress (I) official in charge of the Party's electoral campaign in neighbouring Tripura, spelled out the Congress (I)'s strategy towards Assam to the journalist, Shekhar Gupta. Pilot said that people wanted elections and a ‘political government’. Therefore, the central government was planning to arrest some 5,000 agitators in the run-up to the election period. In this way, the agitators would be ‘finished politically’ and normalcy could be restored in Assam.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The plan was actually implemented and the entire leadership of the All Assam Student Union was arrested on the very day the elections were announced.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ A consequence of the crackdown, which was probably unintended, was to hand the leadership of the Assam movement to its most extremist elements. Further, the entire operation was accompanied by an ‘invasion’ of central personnel into Assam. Given the reluctance of state officials—out of fear and/or their political beliefs—to organize the elections, several thousand officials had to be ‘imported’ from outside the state. The same happened with the security apparatus. The local police were definitely unhappy about repressing the Assam movement (another similarity with the Punjab agitation). In some cases, clashes erupted between the police and the Central Reserve Police Force which led to some casualties.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ On top of this, the central government imposed censorship in the state, thus creating the rather paradoxical situation that in order to promote the democratic process, the government suppressed the most fundamental civil liberties.

Most parties boycotted the elections—the only exceptions, beside the Congress (I), were the parties of the Left. The Congress (I) eventually won 91 out of 126 seats. In several constituencies the turnout was lower than 1 per cent. About 3,000 people died in the days preceding the elections.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The new chief minister, Hiteswar Saikia, an ethnic Assamese who belonged to the Ahom (upper) caste (like most of the leadership of the agitation) promoted a set of policies aimed at accommodating different tribal groups and, according to press reports, actively tried to split the All Assam Student Union on communal lines,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ a strategy that was partially successful. Eventually, a weaker All Assam Student Union and, more importantly, another government at the centre—not so keen on maintaining its political hold on the state and able to conceive of centre-state relations outside the informal federalist framework—led to the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. The subsequent state elections were won decisively by the Gana Assam Parishad. However, Assam's problems were not resolved, as the rise of the United Liberation Front of Assam and the following decades of guerrilla warfare clearly demonstrate.

Punjab

Let us now turn our attention to the second crisis which haunted Mrs Gandhi's government from the very beginning to the very end of her final term in office.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ It is my contention that the Punjab problem was both completely avoidable and easily manageable, had Mrs Gandhi been prepared to negotiate with actors who did not share her political objectives. To put it differently, although deeper socio-economic factors did play a role—especially in terms of providing Sikh militants with a growing following among the educated unemployedFootnote ¹⁷⁰—the crisis emerged, degenerated, and could not be solved for entirely political reasons.

The anti-Indira wave which swept North India in the wake of the end of the emergency regime hit Punjab too. The party of the Sikhs, the Akali Dal,Footnote ¹⁷¹ formed a government in alliance with the Janata Party. In the changed national party system that the anti-emergency wave had brought about, regional parties and state governments occupied significant political space. In this context, the Akali Dal renewed their demands on the central government by slightly modifying the so-called Anandpur Saheb Resolution.Footnote ¹⁷² The Sikhs demanded that the letter of the constitution be respected as far as federal relations were concerned, thus asking for less intervention by the centre in the states’ affairs. The Akalis also listed a series of administrative demands. The most significant were: handing over the city of Chandigarh to Punjab,Footnote ¹⁷³ along with some areas dominated by Punjabi-speakers in neighbouring states; a greater share of some of its river waters; and for the right of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandakh Committee to administer Sikh temples—and their finances—outside Punjab. Some religious and symbolic demands, such as the granting of the status of ‘holy city’ to Amritsar, provided the ‘ideological’ framework of the resolution. The prime minister, Morarji Desai, was not sympathetic towards these demands, to put it mildly.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ However, the Akalis, although their demands were not accommodated, were given the autonomy that they had so eagerly sought in the previous decade.

The routing of the Congress Party in North India in the 1977 election was not without consequences in Punjab. It is now widely accepted that, shortly after the establishment of an Akali Dal-Janata government, Sanjay Gandhi and Zail Singh began to look for a ‘Sikh leader who was more Sikh than the Akalis’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Their choice was a hitherto unknown Sikh preacher, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Apparently Sanjay and Zail Singh thought they could manipulate the Sant into breaking the tenuous unity of the Akali Dal. With this in mind, they financed and promoted him. During the 1980 general elections, Bhindranwale even campaigned for the Congress (I) Party in at least three constituencies.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Punjab was among the states that were brought under President's Rule in February 1980, after Mrs Gandhi's return to power. In the following elections, the Akali Dal, badly divided into a number of warring factions, suffered a resounding defeat. The Congress (I) came back to power and Mrs Gandhi installed Darbara Singh as chief minister. Zail Singh, who had by then been appointed as Union minister of home affairs, was definitely not pleased to see his arch rival at the head of his state's government. However, he still had an ace in the hole with which he could make his rival's life tough. Bhindranwale was therefore not left to pursue his own destiny. On the contrary, the central government's backing guaranteed him almost complete impunity. In the next few months Bhindranwale and his followers began systematically to kill those who were on the Sant's blacklist—policemen, journalists, civil servants who had been identified as enemy of the Sikhs—and, a few months later, to kill Hindus at random. Punjab was brought to the edge of a civil war. The imposition of President's Rule in late October 1983 did nothing to bring the situation under control.

In the meantime, the Akali Dal leaders had launched an agitation, parallel and partially overlapping with the Sant's campaign, for the implementation of the Anandpur Saheb resolution. The negotiating process with the government was extremely complicated and was influenced by a great many factors. The actual issues at stake—in particular, the share of the river waters, the fate of Chandigarh, and control over places of worship—were less important than the events that unfolded at the time. The negotiations were influenced by a series of state elections. Talks in April 1982 failed because Mrs Gandhi was not willing to concede anything to the Akalis on the eve of elections in neighbouring Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. The breakdown of talks was usually followed by various initiatives on the part of the Akalis, which in turn forced Mrs Gandhi to reopen the negotiations, but then the Delhi and the Jammu and Kashmir elections came along, and Mrs Gandhi's political priorities changed—and so it continued.

The talks were also influenced by a set of initiatives undertaken by both the Akalis and the government, which had the net effect of raising tensions to barely manageable levels. For example, the Akalis publicly threatened to disrupt the Asiad Games in Delhi, which were a top political priority for the central government (and, perhaps more importantly, Rajiv Gandhi's first important task after his entry into politics). The central government reacted by ordering the Haryana government not to let any Sikh cross the Delhi border. All sorts of abuses—including forced shavingsFootnote ¹⁷⁷—ensued.

The anarchic situation within the Congress (I) and petty intraparty political games also prevented any progress being made. On several occasions the Punjab state unit of the Party actively undermined the talks by spreading false information about the nature of the agreements reached or by misleading both Mrs Gandhi and the Akalis about the other's intentions.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In one instance, Zail Singh secretly called the leader of the Akali agitation, Sant Longowal, to tell him to reject Mrs Gandhi's proposal to include Swaran Singh, which obviously did not contribute to building a positive climate for the upcoming round of talks.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ At another time, Mrs Gandhi decided that the details of the accord reached with the Akalis regarding river waters had to be approved by parliament, but the account she presented in the Lok Sabha differed significantly from the accord that she had reached with the Akalis, who then decided to abandon negotiations.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The systematic humiliation of the moderate Akalis enabled Mrs Gandhi to reduce their influence in Punjab politics but it also handed the leadership of the Sikhs to Bhindranwale on a plate.

The institutional set up in Punjab broke down completely. Not only had the administration been virtually paralysed by the Darbara Singh–Zail Singh dispute, but the imposition of President's Rule had created even more confusion, alternative centres of power, and mutual vetoes. More dramatically, the police in the state were becoming more and more reluctant to use their powers as increasing numbers of policemen had either became admirers of Bhindranwale or were afraid to take the necessary action, thus rendering the enactment of draconian provisions like the Terrorist Affected Areas Act quite useless. As in Assam, the Central Reserve Police Force clashed with the Punjabi police on several occasions.

The talks failed because Mrs Gandhi acted as if the Akali Dal shared her political goals—or, to use the terminology that I have adopted, she was proceeding on the basis of informal federalism. In political terms, the Akalis were seeking ‘a victory’Footnote ¹⁸¹ which would enable them to restore their credibility as the party of the Sikhs and eventually isolate Bhindranwale. But crucially, Mrs Gandhi was not willing to concede a political victory to a non-Congress (I) party at any cost. As in Assam, her adversaries in Punjab had to be ‘finished politically’. The defeat of the Congress (I) in a series of by-elections in May 1984—only a few months from the coming general elections—convinced Mrs Gandhi that a growing section of Indian society—especially the middle class—expected her to undertake strong action. Operation Bluestar, the army's assault on the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, followed.

The constitutional revolt

Meanwhile, the fragmentation of India's party system along regional lines accelerated. In the course of 1983 it received a decisive boost from the victory of N. T. Rama Rao's Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, Ramakrishna Hegde's Janata Party in Karnataka, and Farooq Abdullah's National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir. Five of the major states were now ruled by non-Congress parties (the other two were West Bengal and Tamil Nadu). Feeling stronger than ever before, they joined hands to confront the centre in a concerted way. They sought to build a confederal national alternative to the Congress (I) Party, and non-Congress chief ministers mounted a ‘constitutional revolt’,Footnote ¹⁸² the main objective of which was to demand the institutionalization of federal relations, in lieu of the informal federalism of the previous decades.

In one of N. T. Rama Rao's very first public declarations, he demanded the creation of a commission to study centre-state relations.Footnote ¹⁸³ Indeed, the demand for a substantial decentralization of power—along the lines suggested by the Anandpur Saheb resolution—had been included in the Telugu Desam Party's election manifesto. Bolder initiatives were undertaken in the following months. In late March 1983, Hegde hosted a meeting of the chief ministers from the South in Bangalore—the Congress (I)'s chief minister of Kerala, K. Karunakaran, declined the invitation, labelling the initiative ‘seditious’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Alongside many rhetorical declarations, the meeting issued a set of recommendations to the central government. The chief ministers asked for the establishment of a commission on federal relations, suggested the amendment of articles 256 and 257 of the constitution in order to give more powers to the states, and demanded the repeal of the provision which obliged the states to seek the president's (in practice, the prime minister's) assent to enact laws on certain state-reserved subjects. They also asked for a fairer and less discretionary distribution of central resources. For example, they claimed that Andhra Pradesh's first steel project had been starved of funds since the January 1983 elections, and that that Kerala—controlled by the Congress (I)—was receiving bigger allocations of rice than Tamil Nadu, despite the latter's larger population.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Shortly after the meeting, Rama Rao explained that he saw the initiative as a ‘nucleus for a bigger body’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ What he had in mind was the creation of a council of all chief ministers that would function as a forum for discussing centre-state relations in an institutional setting.

The Congress (I) reacted vehemently to the meeting of the southern chief ministers, claiming that the initiative was ‘extra-constitutional’ and ‘highly dangerous’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ However, it did accept one of the recommendations, namely to establish a commission for the study of centre-state relations (the abovementioned Sarkaria Commission). However, according to Granville Austin, Mrs Gandhi tried to limit the freedom of manoeuvre of its chairman, Justice Sarkaria, by asking him to conduct his study ‘within the constitution’, by not allowing him to influence the composition of the Commission,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ and by delaying the beginning of the enquiry by about ten months.

The establishment of the Commission did not satisfy the opposition parties’ demand for the institutionalization of centre-state relations. Another meeting was held in late May in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, and still another one in Srinagar shortly after Farooq Abdullah's victory in Jammu and Kashmir. In addition, Hegde hosted a seminar on federal relations in Bangalore in August 1983, which was attended by many prominent academics, civil servants, and commentators. The papers of the conference formed the basis for a discussion held in Srinagar in October 1983. Here the opposition leaders issued quite a detailed statement in which about ten articles of the constitution were highlighted as the means by which the Union government exercised wide discretionary powers and imposed its dominance upon the states.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In particular, they questioned the legitimacy of President's Rule—according to the Sarkaria Commission only 26 out of 75 impositions of article 356 had been ‘inevitable’Footnote ¹⁹⁰—and other emergency provisions; they asked for a revision of the constitutional distribution of powers and for the creation of institutional mechanisms that would ensure the states’ exclusive right to legislate in areas reserved for them in the constitution; they strongly argued for the formation of an Interstate Council (as envisaged by article 263 of the constitution, which had not yet been implemented); they asked for a provision which would make it mandatory for the central government to obtain a state's assent before deploying the army within its boundaries; and they questioned the overall structure of financial relations.

The Srinagar meeting, as pointed out by the Communist chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, claimed to speak for Congress (I)-ruled states too.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Indeed, that most chief ministers were not content with the framework of informal federalism was confirmed by Justice Sarkaria himself, who stated that some Congress (I) chief ministers, although scared of coming out with this in public, actually backed many of the opposition-sponsored reforms.Footnote ¹⁹²

The opposition leaders who mounted such an unprecedented challenge to the centre were not forgiven by Mrs Gandhi. Within months, most of the protagonists of the ‘constitutional revolt’ had been somehow punished. The first victim was Farooq Abdullah.

Apparently Mrs Gandhi had decided to remove him from power ‘at any cost’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Three techniques were used to destabilize his National Conference government. First, the Congress (I) state unit deliberately tried to ‘create a law and order situation’ to convince the governor to impose the Governor's RuleFootnote ¹⁹⁴ (as direct rule from New Delhi is called in Jammu and Kashmir).Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Second, Mrs Gandhi repeatedly accused Farooq of being a secessionist and in a secret alliance with Muslim fundamentalists inside and outside India. The central government linked him with virtually any law and order problem in the country, especially in Punjab, and insistently portrayed him as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Third, the Congress (I) contacted potential defectors from the National Conference and tried to ‘convince’ them to join Ghul Shah's (Farooq's brother-in-law) newly formed party, the Awami National Conference. The standard offer was ‘Rs. 2 lakhs (200,000) in cash plus a Ministership’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The fact that all 13 defectors did indeed obtain ministerial posts in Ghul Shah's cabinet, once Farooq had been toppled, confirmed the claim. However, until Mrs Gandhi decided to substitute B. K. Nehru with Jagmohan as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, the only results the Congress (I) obtained were to escalate tensions in the Kashmir Valley and to increase the hitherto limited consensus among Islamist organizations such as the Jamat-e-Islami.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The insurrection which exploded in the Valley in the late 1980s reflected both these outcomes.

At the National Development Council in the summer of 1984, the non-Congress (I) chief ministers of Tripura, West Bengal, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh presented a joint statement protesting against Farooq Abdullah's dismissal. However, Mrs Gandhi would not allow them to raise the issue. As Rama Rao tried to read his statement, ‘there were interruptions by the Buta Singhs and the Bhajan Lals’. The chief ministers finally walked out, instructing their officials to remain seated. However, Mrs Gandhi ordered them to leave along with their chief ministers, ‘as if these states had ceased to belong to the Union’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Within two weeks, Rs. 325 crore (3.25 billion), which West Bengal was supposed to receive in line with the Finance Commission's recommendations, was cancelled.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Two weeks later, N. T. Rama Rao was dismissed in yet another unconstitutional move.

The Congress (I)'s plot to get rid of him was very similar to that of Farooq's removal. They began with the state-level Congressmen drawing up a list of potential defectors. They then tried to convince them to defect, offering money and ministerships. Newspapers reported that about Rs. 20–30 million were sent from New Delhi to tempt legislators.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Efforts intensified during Rama Rao's stay in the United States for medical treatment in July 1984. In this period Mrs Gandhi even paid a surprise visit to her constituency (Medak) in Andhra Pradesh.Footnote ²⁰¹ Apparently, despite the large sums invested, the Congress (I)'s search for defectors was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the Party convinced the governor, Ram Lal, to dismiss Rama Rao anyway and swear in former finance minister, Bhaskara Rao, in his place.Footnote ²⁰² The Congress (I) thought that this fait accompli would inspire many more to defect from the Telugu Desam Party. However, they had not anticipated the strong popular reaction against Rama Rao's dismissal. He was still very popular and the Congress (I)'s move only reinforced the feeling that Telugu pride was being trampled on by New Delhi. Most of the Telugu Desam Party legislators were aware enough not to fall into the Congress (I)'s trap. And thanks to Rama Rao's decision to bring them all to neighbouring Karnataka, they were less exposed to the Congress (I)'s offers. Eventually, Rama Rao was sworn in again in mid-September.

A very similar plot was planned in Karnataka—a Congress (I) member's attempts to bribe a potential defector were even recorded on tape Footnote ²⁰³—but the attempt to topple Hedge's government failed. A few months earlier, in May 1984, the Sikkim Janata Parishad chief minister, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, had been dismissed, after the state Congress (I) unit had ‘encouraged’ defections.Footnote ²⁰⁴ These machinations to reimpose a one-party-dominant system, which would sustain a framework of informal federalism, gave the Congress (I) control of more than half of the legislative assemblies of the states, which was necessary to amend the articles of the constitution concerning the election of the president of the Republic.

An unintended result was the collapse of support for the Congress (I) in those states where Mrs Gandhi had resorted to unconstitutional means. In the December 1984 general elections, just after her assassination and in the midst of wave of a sympathy for her son and successor, Rajiv, Andhra Pradesh elected only six Congress (I) legislators (in 1980 there had been 41) and 30 belonging to the Telugu Desam Party, which became the single largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha after the sympathy votes triggered a landslide victory for Congress (I). In the state elections in the following years, the trend was confirmed. Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Assam, and Karnataka all chose non-Congress (I) governments. The Congress system was finished.

In subsequent years, parallel to the process of regionalization and fragmentation of the national party system, the demand for institutionalization of federal institutions was partially responded to. The anti-defection lawFootnote ²⁰⁵ enacted in 1985 made the toppling of state governments a much more difficult endeavour; the establishment of the inter-state council in the early 1990s provided a forum for expressing state grievances; and in 1994 a Supreme Court ruling made the imposition of President's Rule much more difficult.