The Emergency by Coomi Kapoor

Author:Coomi Kapoor [Kapoor, Coomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, General, History
ISBN: 9789352141197
Google: ABbLCQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00YXVEUOO
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2015-06-14T18:30:00+00:00

To Mrs Gandhi, loyalty was far more important than competence. Her suspicion of most of the people who surrounded her is revealed in an interesting anecdote related by Tandon. The Russian ambassador remarked politely to Mrs Gandhi in reference to I.K. Gujral’s appointment as ambassador to the USSR that the Soviet Union was very happy to have someone who had the PM’s trust and confidence posted as envoy. Mrs Gandhi snapped back, ‘Trust and confidence! I do not have trust and confidence in anyone.’22

Her suspicious nature led to her callously discarding her one-time advisers and favourites. When she first came to power, Dinesh Singh, her deputy minister for external affairs, wielded great influence, but he fell out of favour after he tried to insinuate that he had a special relationship with her. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister D.P. Misra guided her in the early years of her prime ministership, but she started distancing herself from him after the 1972 assembly polls. Uma Shankar Dikshit was a favourite as minister for home affairs for a while but was dropped by the end of 1974. P.N. Haksar, who earlier worked in the foreign service as deputy high commissioner, joined her secretariat in 1967 and left his indelible stamp on her administration. She described Haksar in 1966 in glowing terms to Sanjay, ‘He is a man of extraordinary common sense and competence.’23 Haksar ensured that the powers of the government were centralized in the PM’s secretariat, and all ministries took their orders from the PM’s office. Mrs Gandhi’s political and administrative triumphs, including her decisive electoral victory of 1971, and the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, were due in part to Haksar’s able guidance. Nevertheless, he too fell from grace in 1973 once he came into conflict with Sanjay. One confidant she did not discard was Mohan Kumaramangalam, formerly a CPI theoretician who later joined the Congress as a minister. He converted Mrs Gandhi to his philosophy that the bureaucracy and judiciary should share the same thinking as the government of the day so that progressive policies could be implemented. Kumaramangalam died in a plane crash in mid-1973.

At the time the Emergency was imposed, the triumvirate consisting of West Bengal Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Congress president D.K. Barooah and Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee boss Rajni Patel was the current favourite. The three described themselves as progressive liberals and were in the thick of confabulations at the PM’s house. The blue-blooded Ray considered himself a close family friend and felt he was entitled to instruct the PM on legal and administrative issues. Barooah, a complete yes-man, was seen as a bit of a clown, but a useful one. He once confessed, ‘I do not take any decision—big or small. I do whatever the prime minister tells me.’24 Patel was adept at raising funds in India’s commercial capital. He was regarded as the party’s bagman. He preached socialism but worked on the understanding that favours were bestowed in return for donations of large sums of money.

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