Sanjay Gandhi
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Sanjay Gandhi (December 14, 1946 –- June 23, 1980) was an Indian politician of Kashmiri and Parsi heritage; he was the younger son of Feroze Gandhi and his wife Indira Gandhi. He was a close political advisor of Indira Gandhi, when she was the Prime Minister. He was accused of abuses during the Emergency and died in a stunt airplane crash shortly after his mother's return to power. He had been elected to the Parliament of India five months before his death.
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[edit] Early life
Sanjay and his elder brother Rajiv Gandhi studied at The Doon School, as well as in England. Sanjay never attended college, but took up an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce. He was very interested in sports cars, and he also obtained a pilot's license. While his brother Rajiv was building a career as an airline pilot independent of politics, Sanjay grew close to his mother, and became involved in political affairs.
[edit] Maruti Udyog controversy
In 1971, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Cabinet proposed the production of a "people's car" - a cheap, affordable and efficient indigenious machine that middle-class citizens could afford. While Sanjay had no experience, design proposal or tie-ups with any corporation, he was awarded the contract and the exclusive production license. The criticism that followed this decision was mostly directed at Indira, but the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and victory over Pakistan drowned out the issue. India's victory and subsequent Congress landslide in the elections only left Indira Gandhi more powerful. The Maruti Udyog Ltd., the nation's premier automobiles corporation of today was founded by Sanjay Gandhi, but the company did not produce any vehicles. A test model put out as a showpiece of progress was criticized. Public perception turned against Sanjay, and many began to speculate of growing corruption.
No official and proper investigation has been carried out, but reports of journalists and investigations carried out by them [citation needed] suggest that Sanjay had created a money-laundering empire, handing out kickbacks for fees paid by large corporations that sought to curry favor with the son of the Prime Minister. According to many, Sanjay conducted a campaign of collecting funds, land, capital and production materials from industrialists, who were regarded as currying favour. This is believed to have resulted in substantial personal profit for Sanjay, as well as new political connections, although he produced no vehicles. Several Congress politicians were also suspected of involvement.
[edit] Alleged role during Emergency
- See also: Indian Emergency
In 1974, the opposition-led protests and strikes had caused a widespread disturbance in many parts of the country and badly affected the government and the economy. Prime Minister Gandhi declared a national emergency, enforced martial law, delayed elections, censored the press and suspending some constitutional freedoms in the name of national security. Non-Congress governments throughout the country were dismissed. Thousands of people, including several freedom fighters like Jaya Prakash Narayan and Jivatram Kripalani who were against the Emergency, both ailing old men, were arrested.
In the extremely hostile political environment just before and soon after the Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi rose in importance as Indira's advisor. With the defections of former loyalists, Sanjay's influence with Indira and the government increased dramatically, although he was never in an official or elected position.
[edit] Involvement in politics and government
It has been suggested that Sanjay's influence with his mother helped to ensure that the Emergency was declared and it is clear that Sanjay only increased his power with the Emergency (1975-1977). Although he had not been elected and held no office, Sanjay began exercising his new-found influence with Cabinet ministers, high-level government officers and police officers. While many Cabinet ministers and officials resigned in protest, Sanjay reportedly appointed their successors.
In one famous example, Inder Kumar Gujral, the future Prime Minister resigned from the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting when Sanjay attempted to direct the affairs of his ministry and give him orders. Gujral is reported to have angrily rebuked Sanjay and refused to take orders from an un-elected person.
[edit] Jama Masjid slum and Family planning controversies
In 1976, Sanjay Gandhi launched a drive to cleanse the city of slums and force their residents to leave the capital. Sanjay reportedly ordered officials of the Delhi Development Authority, headed by his associate Jagmohan, to clear the heavily populated, mostly Muslim slum , near the Turkmen Gate and Jama Masjid in Delhi, forcibly destroying about 10 of shabby huts, and in the process possibly causing the deaths of some people[1].
Sanjay also publicly initiated a widespread family planning program, his "vision" for a contained population growth and a nation without crowding. But this resulted in government officials and police officers forcibly performing vasectomies and in some cases, sterilizing women as well. Officially, men with two children or more had to voluntarily submit to this, but many unmarried young men, political opponents and ignorant, poor men were also believed to have been sterilized. This program is still remembered and criticized in India, and is blamed for creating a public aversion to family planning, which hampered Government programmes for decades.
[edit] Forced Sterlization
It was not that country was in any kind of turmoil requiring the proclamation of emergency. Rather the main reason was Indira's election from Rae Bareli being declared null and void by the Allahabad High Court for electoral malpractices. As per the judgement Indira Gandhi was required to vacate her seat in Parliament and PMship which was not acceptable to her as it would have affected her "after me my son" designs. Barring a few villagers in Haryana (notably Pipli) who revolted against forced FP operations, nobody dared to oppose it. All opposition leaders, including student leaders belonging to opposition outfits were lifted forcibly from their homes at midnight and jailed. Sanjay and his goons, including his keeps Ambika Soni and Amrita Singh's mother were ruling the roost. Psychophancy was all prevading. The CM of Andhra Pradesh was photographed lifting the chappals of Sanjay Gandhi. Dev Kant Baruah, the then Congress President, broke all limits and said "Indira is India and India is Indira". Though I didn't see the British period, but am sure must not have been worse than the emergency period. There were no fundamental rights and it was a complete police raj.
Further, Mr. Jagjivan Ram was the member of the same cabinet that recommended the emergency and remained part of it during emergency period, yet, when emergency was lifted he formed CFD and won 28 seats.
[edit] DDA Controversy
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he Delhi between 1975-77 witnessed many horrors unleashed by Jagmohan, then vice-chairman of Delhi Development Authority, Sanjay Gandhi, Maneka Gandhi, Rukhsana Sultan and others. Be it the demolition and killing near Turkman Gate or the forced sterilisation programme, the city will never forgive them. Sanjay behaved like a crown prince. He would drive his Matador at great speed with Rukhsana in tow. His favourite song was, �Rukhsana yun na ghabrana, tere mere pyar ko kya karega jamana…� I don�t want those days to visit India again.
[edit] More On His Roles During Emergency
During 1959 and 1960, Gandhi ran for and was elected the President of the Indian National Congress. Her term of office was uneventful. She also acted as her father's chief of staff. Nehru was known as a vocal opponent of nepotism, and she did not contest a seat in the 1962 elections.
Nehru died on May 24, 1964, and Gandhi, at the urgings of the new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, contested elections and joined the Government, being immediately appointed Minister for Information and Broadcasting. She went to Madras when the riots over Hindi becoming the national language broke out in non-Hindi speaking states of the south. There she spoke to government officials, soothed the anger of community leaders and supervised reconstruction efforts for the affected areas. Shastri and senior Ministers were embarrassed, owing to their lack of such initiative. Minister Gandhi's actions were probably not directly aimed at Shastri or her own political elevation. She reportedly lacked interest in the day-to-day functioning of her Ministry, but was media-savvy and adept at the art of politics and image-making.
When the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 broke out, Gandhi was vacationing in the border region of Srinagar. Although warned by the Army that Pakistani insurgents had penetrated very close to the city, she refused to relocate to Jammu or Delhi. She rallied local government and welcomed media attention, in effect reassuring the nation. Shastri died in Tashkent, hours after signing the peace agreement with Pakistan's Ayub Khan, mediated by the Soviets. Shastri had been a candidate of consensus, bridging the left-right gap and staving off the popular conservative Morarji Desai. Gandhi was the candidate of the 'Syndicate', regional power brokers of immense influence, who thought that she would be easily led. Searching for explanations for this disastrous miscalculation many years later, the then Congress President Kumaraswami Kamaraj made the strange claim that he had made a personal vow to Nehru to make Gandhi Prime Minister 'at any cost'. At the time, however, he and others had dismissed her as a gungi gudiya - literally, a 'dumb doll'.
With the backing of the Syndicate, in a vote of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Gandhi beat Morarji Desai by 355 votes to 169 to become the third Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that position.
During the 1971 War, the US had sent its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal as a warning to India not to use the genocide in East Pakistan as a pretext to launch a wider attack against West Pakistan, especially over the disputed territory of Kashmir. This move had further alienated India from the First World, and Prime Minister Gandhi now accelerated a previously cautious new direction in national security and foreign policy. India and the USSR had earlier signed the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Cooperation, the resulting political and military support contributing substantially to India's victory in the 1971 war.
But Gandhi now accelerated the national nuclear program, as it was felt that the nuclear threat from China and the intrusive interest of the two major superpowers were not conducive to India's stability and security. She also invited the new Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Shimla for a week-long summit. After the near-failure of the talks, the two heads of state eventually signed the Shimla Agreement, which bound the two countries to resolve the Kashmir dispute by negotiations and peaceful means. It was Gandhi's stubbornness which made even the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister sign the accord according to India's terms in which Zulfikar Bhutto had to write the last few terms in the agreement in his own handwriting.
Indira Gandhi was heavily criticized for not extracting the Pakistan-occupied portion of Kashmir from a humiliated Pakistan, whose 93,000 prisoners of war were under Indian control. But the agreement did remove immediate United Nations and third party interference, and greatly reduced the likelihood of Pakistan launching a major attack in the near future. By not demanding total capitulation on a sensitive issue from Bhutto, she had allowed Pakistan to stabilize and normalize. Trade relations were also normalized, though much contact remained frozen for years.
In 1974, India successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, unofficially codenamed Smiling Buddha, near the desert village of Pokhran in Rajasthan. Describing the test as for "peaceful purposes", India nevertheless became the world's youngest nuclear power.
Innovative agricultural programs and additional government support launched in the 1960s had finally resulted in India's chronic food shortages gradually being transformed into surpluses of wheat, rice, cotton and milk. The country became a food exporter, and diversified its commercial crop production as well, in what has become known as the Green Revolution. At the same time, the White Revolution was an expansion of milk production to combat malnutrition, especially amidst young children.
Gandhi's government faced major problems after her tremendous mandate of 1971. The internal structure of the Congress Party had withered following its numerous splits, leaving it entirely dependent on her leadership for its election fortunes. The Green Revolution was transforming the lives of India's vast underclasses, but not with the speed or in the manner promised under Garibi Hatao. Job growth was not strong enough to curb the widespread unemployment that followed the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the OPEC oil shocks.
Gandhi had already been accused of tendencies towards authoritarianism. Using her strong parliamentary majority, she had amended the Constitution and stripped power from the states granted under the federal system. The Central government had twice imposed President's Rule under Article 356 of the Constitution by deeming states ruled by opposition parties as "lawless and chaotic", thus winning administrative control of those states. Elected officials and the administrative services resented the growing influence of Sanjay Gandhi, who had become Gandhi's close political advisor at the expense of men like P.N. Haksar, Gandhi's chosen strategist during her rise to power. Renowned public figures and former freedom-fighters like Jaya Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Acharya Jivatram Kripalani now toured the North, speaking actively against her Government.
In June 1975 the High Court of Allahabad found the sitting Prime Minister guilty of employing a government servant in her election campaign and Congress Party work. Technically, this constituted election fraud, and the court thus ordered her to be removed from her seat in Parliament and banned from running in elections for six years.
Gandhi appealed the decision; the opposition parties rallied en masse, calling for her resignation. Strikes by unions and protest rallies paralyzed life in many states. J.P. Narayan's Janata coalition even called upon the police to disobey orders if asked to fire on an unarmed public. Public disenchantment combined with hard economic times and an unresponsive government. A huge rally surrounded the Parliament building and Gandhi's residence in Delhi, demanding her to behave responsibly and resign.
Prime Minister Gandhi advised President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a state of emergency, claiming that the strikes and rallies were creating a state of 'internal disturbance'. Ahmed was an old political ally, and in India the President acts upon the advice of an elected Prime Minister alone. Accordingly, a State of Emergency because of internal disorder, under Article 352 of the Constitution, was declared on 26 June 1975.
Even before the Emergency Proclamation was ratified by Parliament, Gandhi called out the police and the army to break up the strikes and protests, ordering the arrest of all opposition leaders that very night. Many of these were men who had first been jailed by the British in the 1930s and 1940s. The power to impose curfews and unlimited powers of detention were granted to police, while all publications were directly censored by the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting. Elections were indefinitely postponed, and non-Congress state governments were dismissed.
The Prime Minister pushed a series of increasingly harsh bills and constitutional amendments through parliament with little discussion or debate. In particular, there was an attempt to amend the Constitution to not only protect a sitting Prime Minister from prosecution, but even to prevent the prosecution of a Prime Minister once he or she had left the post. It was clear that Gandhi was attempting to protect herself from legal prosecution once emergency rule was revoked.
Gandhi further utilized President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, to issue ordinances that did not need to be debated in Parliament, allowing her - and Sanjay - to effectively rule by decree. Inder Kumar Gujral, a future Prime Minister but then Gandhi's Minister for Information and Broadcasting, resigned to protest Sanjay's interference in his Ministry's work.
The Prime Minister's emergency rule lasted nineteen months. During this time, in spite of the controversy involved, the country made significant economic and industrial progress. This was primarily due to the end it put to strikes in factories, colleges, and universities and the disciplining of trade and student unions. In line with the slogan on billboards everywhere Baatein kam, kaam zyada, ("Less talk, more work"), productivity increased and administration was streamlined. Tax evasion was reduced by zealous government officials, although corruption remained. Agricultural and industrial production expanded considerably under Gandhi's 20-point programme; revenues increased, and so did India's financial standing in the international community. Thus much of the urban middle class in particular found it worth their while to contain their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.
Simultaneously, a draconian campaign to stamp out dissent included the arrest and torture of thousands of political activists; the ruthless clearing of slums around Delhi's Jama Masjid ordered by Sanjay and carried out by Jagmohan, which left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and thousands killed, and led to the permanent ghettoisation of the nation's capital; and the family planning program which forcibly imposed vasectomy on thousands of fathers and was often poorly administered, nurturing a public anger against family planning that persists into the 21st century.
In 1977, greatly misjudging her own popularity, Gandhi called elections and was roundly defeated by the Janata Party. Janata, led by her longtime rival, Desai and with Narayan as its spiritual guide, claimed the elections were the last chance for India to choose between "democracy and dictatorship." To the surprise of some - mainly Western - observers, she meekly agreed to step down.
Desai became Prime Minister and Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the establishment choice of 1979, became President of the Republic. Gandhi had lost her seat and found herself without work, income or residence. The Congress Party split, and veteran Gandhi supporters like Jagjivan Ram abandoned her for Janata. The Congress (Gandhi) Party was now a much smaller group in Parliament, although the official opposition. Unable to govern owing to fractious coalition warfare, the Janata government's Home Minister, Choudhary Charan Singh, ordered the arrest of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi on a slew of charges. Her arrest and long-running trial, however, projected the image of a helpless woman being victimized by the Government, and this triggered her political rebirth. The Janata coalition was only united by its hatred of Gandhi (or "that woman" as some called her). Although freedom returned, the government was so bogged down by infighting that almost no attention was paid to her basic needs. She was able to use the situation to her advantage. She began giving speeches again, tacitly apologizing for "mistakes" made during the Emergency, and garnering support from icons like Vinoba Bhave. Desai resigned in June 1979, and Singh was appointed Prime Minister by the President.
Singh attempted to form a government with his Janata (Secular) coalition but lacked a majority. Charan Singh bargained with Gandhi for the support of Congress MPs, causing uproar by his unhesitant coddling of his biggest political opponent. After a short interval, she withdrew her initial support and President Reddy dissolved Parliament, calling fresh elections in 1980. Gandhi's Congress Party was returned to power with a landslide majority. Indira Gandhi was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (for 1983-1984).
Gandhi's later years were bedevilled with problems in Punjab. A local religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was first set up by the local Congress as an alternative to the regional Akali Dal party, but once his activities turned violent he was excoriated as an extremist and a separatist. In September 1981, Bhindranwale was arrested in Amritsar, but was released twenty five days later because of lack of evidence. After his release, he relocated himself from his headquarters at Mehta Chowk to Guru Nanak Niwas within the Golden Temple precincts.
Disturbed by the spread of militancy by Bhindranwale's group, Gandhi gave the Army permission to storm the Golden Temple to flush out Bhindranwale and his followers on June 3, 1984. Many Sikhs were outraged at the perceived desecration of their holiest shrine, which remains controversial in terms of timing and effect to this day.
On October 31, 1984, two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated her in the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence at No. 1, Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. As she was walking to be interviewed by the British actor Peter Ustinov filming a documentary for Irish television, she passed a wicket gate, guarded by Satwant and Beant; when she bent down to greet them in traditional Indian style, they opened fire with their semiautomatic machine pistols. She died on her way to hospital, in her official car, but was not declared dead till many hours later.
Indira Gandhi was cremated on November 3, near Raj Ghat and the place was called Shakti Sthal.
[edit] 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms
After her death, anti-Sikh pogroms engulfed New Delhi and spread across the country, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Many leaders of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee, long accused by neutral observers of a hand in the violence, were tried for incitement to murder and arson some years later; but the cases were all dismissed for lack of evidence.
Initially Sanjay had been her chosen heir; but after his death in a flying accident, his mother persuaded a reluctant Rajiv Gandhi to quit his job as a pilot and enter politics in February 1981. He became Prime Minister on her death; in May 1991, he too was assassinated, this time at the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militants. Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, a native Italian, led a novel Congress-led coalition to a surprise electoral victory in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, over Atal Behari Vajpayee and his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from power.
Sonia Gandhi declined the opportunity to assume the office of Prime Minister but remains in control of the Congress political apparatus; Dr. Manmohan Singh, finance minister 1992-97, now heads the nation. Rajiv's children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, have also entered politics. Sanjay Gandhi's widow, Maneka Gandhi, who fell out with Indira after Sanjay's death and was famously thrown out of the Prime Minister's house, as well as Sanjay's son, Varun Gandhi, are active in politics as members of the main opposition BJP party.
Though frequently called The Nehru-Gandhi Family, Indira Gandhi was in no way related to Mohandas Gandhi. Though the Mahatma was a family friend, the Gandhi in her name comes from her marriage to Feroze Gandhi.
[edit] 1977-1980: Disgrace and return
- See also: Janata Party
Prime Minister Gandhi opted for fresh elections in 1977 (one year overdue), released her opponents and ended the emergency. But when she and her Congress Party was defeated in a massive landslide by the Janata Party coalition, Sanjay recommended a re-imposition of Emergency which Gandhi decided against. The new Janata Government promptly appointed tribunals to look into Emergency abuses. As Home Minister, Charan Singh ordered the arrest of Indira and Sanjay. Newspapers published reports of Sanjay's abuses: vasectomies, tortures, murders and graft. It was during this time that Sanjay Gandhi was largely demonized in the eyes of the public.
The arrest of Indira Gandhi began to be viewed as unfair and they were soon released for lack of evidence. The Janata coalition begin to crumble and the tribunals collapsed. In 1979, Prime Minister Morarji Desai resigned. His successor was Choudhary Charan Singh, who upon failing to secure support from a majority of MPs who had earlier formed the Janata coalition, turned to Indira Gandhi for support. She promised him that support, but a few months later withdrew it, forcing new elections and the end of Janata's time in power.
Vigorously attacking the confusion in the years of the crumbling Janata government, Indira exploited her heroine-Goddess image of the 1971 war and the tough ruler of the early Emergency years. She tactfully apologized for "mistakes" during Emergency, and made allies out of key political foes. The people of India were tired of the chaos and inefficiency of the Janata administration, which had failed to address any of their basic problems. In January of 1980, Indira and her Congress (I) Party returned to power in a landslide. Sanjay was elected to a parliamentary seat from Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh.
[edit] Personal life and family
It has been controversially suggested that Sanjay exercised a deep emotional control over his mother, which was often misused. Some, including Khushwant Singh, have claimed that he tapped his widowed mother's apparent loneliness to build his influence and control over political affairs and national policy. Sanjay Gandhi had married a young Punjabi woman, Maneka. They had a tumultous marriage and allegations of Sanjay's infidelities are reportedly documented. The marriage endured, however, and they had a son, Varun Gandhi.
Sanjay's relationship with his elder brother was especially worse, as Rajiv was deeply affected by his mother's situation after her political defeat in 1977. According to accounts provided in Frank's biography of Indira, Rajiv directly blamed Sanjay for her condition, affirming his destructive influence upon his mother and the government.
[edit] Death
Sanjay Gandhi died in an air crash on June 23, 1980 near Safdarjung Airport in New Delhi.
[edit] References
- ^ "Twelve reported killed in New Delhi Clash", The New York Times, April 20, 1976
- Ved Mehta, A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982) ISBN 0-19-503118-0
- Katherine Frank, Indira: the life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (2002) ISBN 0-395-73097-X
