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Indira eventually lost the War

The year 1971 was a great year for Indira Gandhi.

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Saba Naqvi

The year 1971 was a great year for Indira Gandhi. She had, by then, become the champion of the poor, having abolished the privy purses of former feudals, nationalised banks and come up with the ‘Garibi Hatao’ slogan (In those days, she said the motley and diverse crew of the Opposition only knew “Indira Hatao”). Sounds familiar?

By the end of that year, even a Jana Sangh MP such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee would compare Indira Gandhi to a goddess. This happened after the Army intervened in the West and East Pakistan conflict, and India played a major role in the formation of Bangladesh.

Indira Gandhi was both a heroine of the poor, and of the war. 

The Congress, led by her, swept through simultaneous state elections that took place in 1972 (the party had already swept the national elections of 1971). Yet the seeds of Indira’s destruction also lay in this grand victory. The Congress, by then had become a party under a ‘supreme leader’ as opposed to an elastic coalition of interests with multiple power centres. 

The 1971 War was a righteous war against the great injustice the Pakistan army inflicted on the East that would become Bangladesh. But there would be a price to pay and a few years down the line, so jolted and besieged was Indira that she imposed Emergency, India’s darkest tryst with dictatorship. The Indian economy was badly hit by the costs of War. The years 1973 and 1974 witnessed some of the highest inflation of 23-30 per cent. The monsoon failed in 1972-73 and the agricultural sector was distressed, even as the industrial growth was low.

Political forces harnessed the dissatisfaction that raged in huge protests. Students were at the forefront of protests, which first came up against the spiralling prices. Then it was about the overall discontent. And, finally,  searching for an alternative to her. In Bihar, the movement found a leader in the old socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, also called JP, who demanded dismissal of the Congress government and sounded a call for what he called ‘total revolution’. 

The backdrop to this period of unrest was also the great general strike in the Indian Railways, then led by the late George Fernandes, who was a trade union activist but would, decades later, play a big role in enabling a coalition for the BJP, led by Vajpayee.

Back then, all alliances were driven by anti-Congress sentiment as today they are driven by anti-BJPism. The socialists, the Jana Sangh and the Congress (O) began, all ideologically divergent forces began to search for an alternative to Indira Gandhi. The prime minister, meanwhile, clung to power and, pushed to a corner, imposed Emergency on June 25, 1975.

She led the country to a victorious war but also to the brink.

Today, after the Pulwana terror attack, there are cries for war in TV channels and a section of our people. The beauty of the 2016 surgical strikes carried out by India after the attack on an Army camp at Uri in Kashmir was that they gave Pakistan the excuse of plausible deniability. The Pakistanis just claimed that nothing happened.

The 1999 Kargil War too was a contained fight in a remote geographical zone where the Army bravely fought off those who transgressed into out-territory in the high mountains. The world was clearly on our side and again Pakistan had no leg to stand on.

But today, as we head toward a General Election, were India to strike first in an overt operation in any territory inside Pakistan, it would be war that would invite retaliation. In the short term, the BJP may win the next General Election with a thumping majority but they may win with a slender lead and some sensible coalition formation anyway.

We may feel good at the idea of vengeance but escalation into war extracts a terrible price on soldiers, nations and people.

Yes, we are the stronger nation but Pakistan is a nation that lies in the realm of “great game” territory and hence has powerful friends in China and the US (that needs Pakistan more than us for the Af-Pak region) and in Saudi Arabia that has found in Pakistan the greatest agency to promote its intolerant vision of Islam (never mind the hugs given to the Saudi Crown Prince by the Indian Prime Minister).

We have also since Pulwama, lost our moral high ground at the despicable treatment of Kashmiri students, most notably in Dehradun. When the world’s most populous democracy allows communal segregation of a people, the world takes note. In these cruel and vindictive acts, we nullify the ideas that lie at the birth of India and endorse an ideology that believes some people are not equal citizens.

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