Looking back, the programmes of Sanjay Gandhi were not unreasonable.
New Delhi: Forty summers ago, on 23 June, an aircraft accident changed the trajectory of India’s politics. Sanjay Gandhi, the hated face of Emergency, who had transformed from a privileged yuvaraj to a street fighter during the Janata government days and had been instrumental in Congress returning to power in less than three years after the 1977 drubbing, had taken a wrong somersault while doing aerobatic flying over high security zone of Lutyens’ Delhi and crashed into the trees adjoining the Kushak Nala. In death, as in his life, he had defied rules. His penchant for fast driving and rash flying had taken its toll. He went in his hour of triumph: not only had Congress been resurrected at the Centre but it had won the state Assembly polls which were held after the dismissal of the Janata governments in 1980. Uttar Pradesh Congress legislators had elected him as CLP leader and he was entitled to be the Chief Minister of India’s largest state—his mother asked him to forego the post and stay in New Delhi to work as a general secretary of AICC instead. Indira Gandhi had been grooming him as her successor and wanted his presence in the Prime Minister’s House. (He nominated Vishwanath Pratap Singh for the job in Lucknow for which he had been elected.)
In the years after 1971, when he entered politics to organise poll campaign for Congress in New Delhi constituency, the fulcrum of power within Congress shifted to him. It peaked after the 12 June 1975 verdict of the Allahabad High Court, unseating Indira Gandhi, which ultimately led to the imposition of Emergency. He was initially made an invitee to the Youth Congress national council. This made the youth wing more visible than the parent party and in November 1976 Indira Gandhi acknowledged this at the Guwahati AICC: “The youth have stolen our thunder.” When elections were announced in January 1977 there were reports that 100 Sanjay candidates may be put up. This led to the “J-Bomb” exploding on 2 February 1977, when Jagjivan Ram, H.N. Bahuguna, Nandini Satpathy et al walked out and set up Congress for Democracy (CFD), which set the tone for the events that followed in March, when Congress was routed. The government which succeeded was led by Morarji Desai, who had lost out in the PM race to Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1964 and to Indira Gandhi in 1966 and 1967. It had Jan Sangh (predecessor of BJP), socialists, former Congressites and a potpourri of disparate political elements whose only reason for coming together was that they were opposed to Indira Congress. Cases were filed against mother and son. Sanjay Gandhi was arrested on several occasions and even convicted in one case. His arrests became a rallying point for his party men. He showed his political acumen when he shook hands with Raj Narain, the man whose petition had unseated Indira Gandhi at the Allahabad court and who had defeated her in her bastion, Rae Bareli in 1977. Sanjay’s parlays with Raj Narain led to the split in Janata Party and fall of Morarji Desai. Sanjay extended support to the man who, as Home Minister, had sent him and his mother to jail, and made Charan Singh Prime Minister with outside support of Congress. When Charan Singh refused to withdraw the cases, Sanjay withdrew support and thus way was paved for fresh Lok Sabha polls in December 1979, which saw the resurrection of the Congress and the return of Indira Gandhi as PM.
In the aftermath of the recent excesses in the implementation of the Covid lockdown by over-enthusiastic and perhaps insensitive officials, it is not difficult to imagine how perhaps things went wrong with some good intentioned actions of Sanjay Gandhi 45 years ago. Family planning (population control) was a priority for the Union government since 1949. The inverted red triangle symbol of the campaign was a common sight across India since the 1950s. Various methods were tried: condoms, insertion of loop, contraceptive pills, etc., but population growth was at an alarming proportion. Under IMF-World Bank pressure, India then opted for sterilizations. This was much before the advent of Sanjay Gandhi as a champion of the cause in 1975. Writing in the 29 June 1980 issue of the M.J. Akbar-edited India’s then numero uno English weekly, Sunday, Dom Moraes, who worked as advisor to United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA) recalls his meeting with Indira Gandhi in 1975, prior to the Emergency, when he discussed with her cases of excesses by officials and private organisations who were engaged in sterilizations. Moraes, as a UNFPA man, reported to the PM that the motivators were misusing the incentives by pocketing it themselves and to boost numbers were carrying out sterilizations unscientifically and even on young persons who otherwise should not be in the programme.
One of the first activities undertaken by Sanjay after he joined Youth Congress was to promote sterilizations, which, by then, was already an ongoing programme and whose dark side had been taken note of by UNFPA. A target oriented person, he set targets. For example, addressing a rally in Rae Bareli he said that he wanted each worker to get one sterilization done, plant one tree, clean one mohalla and campaign against the practice of dowry. (Sanjay’s Five Point Programme had afforestation, cleanliness, literacy and anti-dowry campaign apart from population control.) Many officers and non-party elements who entered Congress in those days took the sterilization programme (with its inadequacies, as reported by Moraes from UNFPA) more seriously—the controversial Rukshana Sultana for example took a “target” of 8,000 and reported 13,000 as “achieved”. Censorship of media and the intrinsic propensity for chamchagiri in Congress came in the way of news of these excesses reaching the top. Then Congress MP from Chandni Chowk, Subhadra Joshi (who had, at the instance of Mahatma Gandhi, mentored Indira Gandhi’s work on communal harmony during partition riots and who had defeated Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lok Sabha polls from Balrampur in 1962), had written a letter to the PM listing Rukshana’s excesses. But this was ignored.
Looking back, the programmes of Sanjay Gandhi were not unreasonable. Excesses in sterilization have been highlighted. Also, the demolition of slums and the excesses in Turkman Gate have been his Achilles’ heel. The slum dwellers were resettled and given 22.5 square yard plots free of cost. The resettlement colonies at Inderpuri, Inderlok, Mongolpuri and Khichripur today have four-storied structures. The slum dwellers of 1975 are wealthy lakhpatis today.
The vibrant middle class, which is India’s asset today, can trace its roots to the self-employment schemes of Sanjay Gandhi. What is called MSME—micro, small and medium enterprise—began with Sanjay Gandhi urging the youth to stop looking for jobs and to become entrepreneurs. Industrial parks and attendant bank loans were provided. The DDA self-financing (SFS) housing—which began with a pilot project in Saket and then spread to outskirts of Vasant Vihar and ultimately colonies like Vasant Kunj—has provision for a scooter-garage for the flats, as the middle class of 1976 was supposed to only own two-wheelers. Advent of the Maruti car (which came after Sanjay’s death, as a government project, his endeavour having been stillborn) and the mushrooming of self-employed entrepreneurs saw the DDA-SFS dwellers own not only one, but multiple cars per family. So much so that parking skirmishes are a common feature in these DDA colonies today.
NOIDA—New Okhla Industrial Development Area—which is a bustling sub-city in NCR with the nomenclature Gautam Budh Nagar, was another project pushed by Sanjay, who prodded Chief Minister Narayan Dutt Tiwari. Small families have now become a norm and the children of the poor, now equipped with education, are backbone of India’s IT industry. This may not have been possible had the slogan not been changed from “Do ya teen bus” to “Hum do hamare do” by Sanjay Gandhi.
Congress under Sonia Gandhi has forgotten the man who resurrected it in its darkest hour. After Sanjay’s death an unsavoury conflict followed in the household of Indira Gandhi and ultimately his widow Maneka walked out of the family home with her infant son Feroze Varun in 1983. Mother and son are BJP MPs now. After walking out of PM House, Maneka had initially joined Janata Party at a rally presided over by Chandrashekhar in Amethi in 1987. Perhaps accommodation by Raj Narain in 1979, by Chandrashekhar in 1987 and by the BJP later of the successors of Sanjay Gandhi is a vindication of his acceptance as more than being a blip in India’s political horizon when he passed away after living 32 summers, in 1980.