The Age of Awakening by Amit Kapoor & Chirag Yadav

Author:Amit Kapoor & Chirag Yadav [Kapoor, Amit & Yadav, Chirag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353053871
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

CRASH AND BURN

A remarkable fact about India is its inclusive and accommodating nature of democracy that its founders inscribed into the very fabric of its society. Religious tolerance and cultural pluralism were intended to be the defining hallmarks of the Indian democracy. This myth survived to a certain extent in the first three decades in an independent India. But, by the beginning of the 1980s, it was beginning to fall apart.

Communal violence had been flaring up across the country. Hindus were turning on Muslims, Sikhs on Hindus, upper castes on Dalits, and almost everyone on the tribals. 1 The states of Punjab, Assam and Kashmir were the worst affected. These issues were a direct result of the manner in which Indira Gandhi had severely undermined state and local autonomy in a bid to centralize power. She had an unflattering history of disposing unfriendly chief ministers by imposing President’s Rule, which allowed her direct control at the regional level. 2 Such actions had fuelled discontent on regional and communal lines. As the seventies drew to a close, the anguished regional and religious minorities across the country were demanding more power and self-determination.

But it is often realized that the attention span of the Indian electorate is very short. Indira had been forgiven for all her fallacies and the voters truly believed that she was their sole saviour. On her part, Indira was campaigning hard for her comeback. She travelled over 40,000 miles in her 62-day campaign, addressing an average of up to twenty meetings per day. In the end, the Congress captured 351 seats out of a total of 542 Lok Sabha seats.

Sanjay Gandhi, who ran from the Amethi constituency in Uttar Pradesh, was also among the elected MPs. Indira Gandhi stood for her old constituency of Raebareli and also from Medak in Andhra Pradesh. She won both seats by a comfortable majority. So she resigned from Raebareli and instated a family member, Arun Nehru, in her place.

While the electorate had forgiven Indira for her previous transgressions in office, her spell in the wilderness after the 1977 defeat was also erased from history. Soon after she came to power, the special courts that had been appointed to investigate her actions during the Emergency were dissolved. Cases pending against Sanjay were also conveniently dropped. The Janata government, which was in power in nine states, were also dissolved one by one and President’s Rule was imposed.

Everything seemed to be working out for Indira until tragedy struck soon after she took office. On the morning of 23 June 1980, Sanjay Gandhi left for the Delhi Flying Club to take his new Pitts S-2A for a joyride. He invited one of the flying instructors at the club, Captain Subhash Saxena, to accompany him. Since he was aware of Sanjay’s inexperience in flying the plane, he initially refused to do so. However, he relented after some persuasion. When they were up in the air, Sanjay made a steep dive, probably with an intention to pull up in an aerobatic loop.

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