Very early on the morning of 15 August 1975, as he was getting ready for the Independence Day celebrations at Red Fort, my father HY Sharada Prasad, who was information advisor to prime minister Indira Gandhi, received an urgent call on his RAX phone from Dhaka.
The senior official informed him that T54 Tanks of the Bengal Lancers and 105 mm armoured guns of the First Armoured Division and the 535th Infantry Division had begun moving towards the Dhanmondi 32 residence of president Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.
My father rushed to his South Block office to deal with the crisis.
Despite repeated warnings from Indira Gandhi’s government to President Sheikh Mujibur Rehman about conspiracies, the Prime Minister’s Secretariat was still shocked when he was assassinated.
Even Indira Gandhi, who was always in total control of herself, was somewhat shaken. Kangana Ranaut’s movie erroneously depicts her as being terrified and trying to go into hiding.
In December 1974, Rameshwar Nath Kao, founder of India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing, (R&AW) visited Dhaka and informed Sheikh Mujib of the conspiracies against him.
But in his megalomania, Mujib replied: “I am the Banga Bandhu. These are all my children. They all adore me and revere me”.
Again, in both March 1975 and June 1975, RN Kao and his agents, dressed as paan sellers, visited Dhaka to tighten president Mujib’s security. Kao provided Mujib the names and ranks of the coup conspirators.
But not only did Mujib refuse to believe that any of his countrymen would want to assassinate him, but he also complained that the increased security prevented him from going out to concerts and movies.
Kao nevertheless made arrangements to station aircraft in Dhaka to fly the Sheikh and his family to India.
Again between 5th and 7th August 1975, RN Kao and Samar Sen, India’s high commissioner to Bangladesh, visited Begum Fajilatunnesa Mujib, and told her to shift her family from their 32 Dhanmondi residence to a safe house which they had got ready near the president’s residence.
But Begum Fajilatunnesa Mujib replied that she did not want to disrupt her young family.
As my father and Indira Gandhi were driving along together to Red Fort for her Independence Day address to the nation, she turned to my father and stated pointedly: “You were vehemently opposing my imposing Emergency. Now you realise why I was compelled to declare the Emergency. India was next”.
When Salvador Allende of Chile was assassinated in 1973, Fidel Castro of Cuba, who was en- route to Vietnam, diverted his plane to New Delhi to warn Indira Gandhi in person: “You are next”. Leonid Brezhnev too cautioned her within a few hours that she was next.
The timing of the Bangladesh coup, allegedly backed by the CIA of USA, on India’s Independence Day, was intended to send a strong signal to India.
In February 1977, after she had announced elections, Indira Gandhi confided to the prominent US editor Norman Cousins that one of the many reasons why she was compelled to declare the Emergency was because what subsequently happened to Sheikh Mujibur Rehman on 15 August 1975 would have first happened to her, adding that sometimes she wondered if it might have been better if she had met the same fate as Mujib.
Indira Gandhi had intended to announce relaxation of several of the Emergency measures; my father had drafted her speech.
She intended to announce the release of most political prisoners and the lifting of prior press censorship, retaining only crackdowns on economic and financial offences, smuggling, hoarding of commodities, etc.
She also intended to announce a partial lifting of the ban on the RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and kindred organisations, on the condition that they would work together with her in national interest.
However, the very pointed timing of Mujib’s assassination on Pakistan’s and India’s Independence Days meant that these announcements had to be abandoned on the spot.
My father hurriedly rewrote her speech in the car. Even as she began her Red Fort address, my father kept frantically scribbling subsequent paragraphs for her to read out, as they anxiously awaited further news from Bangladesh.
She too improvised large portions of her speech, thinking on her feet.
It was a masterly performance by Indira Gandhi from the ramparts of Red Fort. She was never a great orator with rhetorical flourishes, but her simple, direct, sincere style struck a chord with the masses that she was a fierce tigress who would go all out to protect her cubs.
In her exhausted, tense, high-strung voice, Indira Gandhi tried to convince the common masses that she was the only person who could prevent the dismemberment and disintegration of India.
She began her 38-minute speech in Hindi by mentioning that this was the first live televised Independence Day address; satellite television had just come to India for educational purposes. At the outset, she praised India’s space scientists for launching the satellite Aryabhatta.
She then attacked an opposition politician, without naming him, who had referred to the national flag as a mere piece of cloth, launching into an extempore explanation of the significance of the
Tiranga Jhanda, detailing its history and what it was intended to symbolise.
Carefully avoiding any mention of Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as of the NATO Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, she emphasised: “We do not belong to this or that bloc. Nor do we belong to any third bloc. We go ahead keeping only the interests of India. I want to make it clear that we have never allowed any other country to interfere with our affairs. We are not letting it happen now, and we will not let it happen ever.”
Without naming Jaya Prakash Narayan and the RSS, she attacked the indiscipline and lawlessness generated by the Gujarat and Bihar agitations. She had intended to announce a partial lifting of the ban on the RSS, as well as other fundamentalist religious organisations, including Islamic ones, on the condition that they would work together with her on agreed national objectives.
She elaborated: “Like freedom, democracy does not mean that everybody is free to following his individual path…People can opt for themselves policies, they can follow a certain line of thinking, they can raise their voice of protest…But this has to be done within a certain set of rules…They cannot adopt a course that would cause pain to others or weaken the country or allow alien influences to condition our policies and tamper with our course”.
She indirectly referred to staunch socialists tying up with Hindutva fundamentalist organisations such as the RSS for the sole purpose of ousting her: “This different course did not represent any particular policy because people subscribing to different points of view had joined hands together. These people did not see eye to eye with each other either regarding the country’s foreign policy or its policy at home…And yet they joined together. It cannot be claimed therefore that the agitation started on the basis of some policy”.
She continued: “They decided to launch all over the country the Gujarat and Bihar type movements aimed particularly against the central government. The opposition consisted of many parties including the factions who did not believe either in democracy or in non-violence…You can very well visualise what would have happened to the country had such an agitation been allowed to be launched…Would it not have added to the misery of the people? Would it not have weakened the country?”
According to my father HY Sharada Prasad, one of the major reasons why Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency was that Jaya Prakash Narayan had totally come under the control of Nanaji Deshmukh of the RSS.
Since the 1940s JP had been even more vociferous than Nehru and Indira Gandhi in his condemnation of the RSS. The RSS leaders too repeatedly referred to JP as a Pakistani.
Indira Gandhi was horrified that JP had abandoned the principles of a lifetime in allying with his most bitter enemy for the sole purpose of overthrowing her.
She regarded Nanaji Deshmukh as one of her most formidable enemies. His vision for India was diametrically opposite hers, and she referred to him as ‘the Chanakya of our time’.
Indira Gandhi had cautioned JP, who was the closest friend of her father Jawaharlal Nehru, that the RSS was exploiting him in order to emerge from the political wilderness.
She continued in her Independence Day speech: “We therefore had to take certain stringent measures after careful thought. We took these measures with a heavy heart, but we were helpless. We were not happy to declare Emergency, but we had to under compulsion of circumstances…But every dark cloud has a silver lining. Stringent measures were taken just as bitter pills have to be administered to a patient in the interest of his health…We should use this opportunity to cleanse the political, economic, and other aspects of national life and bring some charm and freshness to it…”
A couple of days after she declared the Emergency, Indira Gandhi had sent a hand-written note to Jaya Prakash Narayan, apologising for having had to arrest him. She continued in her speech: “It is our earnest endeavour to look after those of the opposition who do not happen to be outside. I have written to the chief ministers to instruct their officers to ensure that no injustice or excess is done…” She then spoke impromptu, harshly condemning police excesses.
She then read out verbatim several paragraphs written by my father describing the measures she had taken to control inflation and increase agricultural output and industrial production. And her plans to increase both rural and urban employment.
Under pressure from Sanjay Gandhi, who fancied himself as the next Lee Kuan Yew, Indira Gandhi had been planning for several months to liberalise the economy, turning it rightwards.
Her principal secretary Prithvi Nath Dhar, a distinguished economist who had been director of the Institute of Economic Growth and a founder of the Delhi School of Economics, had prepared a plan to lift restrictions on private sector businesses, and to liberalise the licence-permit Raj.
However, in early 1975 this draft paper got leaked to some of her Congress party colleagues, who opposed it vociferously, and insisted that she stick to socialism.
Indira Gandhi had intended to execute a fait accompli over the objections of her cabinet colleagues by announcing numerous economic reforms in her Red Fort speech.
However, the chaotic geopolitical uncertainty caused by the coup in Bangladesh made her decide on the spot to avoid drastic changes and stick to the tried and tested policies. She did not want to give the impression that she was bending to western pressures.
Deviating from my father’s handwritten text, she decided on the spot to instead emphasise the importance of socialism, declaring: “Real democracy will come when socialism and secularism are fully established…Some people, who in the recent past, kept raising slogans of democracy, did not believe in socialism, and were in fact indulging in communalism”.
Recently there have been numerous heated debates about Indira Gandhi inserting the terms Secular and Socialist into the preamble of the constitution during the Emergency.
But these were Indira Gandhi fulfilling her old promises to Jaya Prakash Narayan.
It is little remembered today that in 1948 JP and his Congress Socialist Party had drafted their own version of the nation’s constitution, parallel to the efforts of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and Benegal Narsing Rau.
JP had emphasised that the central role of both Socialism and Secularism in his draft constitution, whose preamble read: “We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to form a Sovereign Democratic Republic and to establish a Democratic Socialist Order, wherein social justice will prevail and all citizens will lead comfortable, free and cultured life, and enjoy equality of status and opportunity and liberty of thought, expression, faith and worship, do hereby, through our chosen representatives assembled in the Constituent Assembly, adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.”
In a long explanatory section of his draft constitution, Jaya Prakash Narayan had insisted that India be declared a secular state, writing: “…In the Middle Ages society was dominated by religion, and so the state assumed a theocratic character in some countries. The state was, thus, made subservient to the church, and heretics were made to suffer inquisitions and persecutions…But the religious bond failed to stop internecine feudal wars, while crusades added to human misery. At the beginning of the modern age religious uniformity was regarded as essential for political and national unity. This idea forced nations to suffer civil wars and massacres and had ultimately to be discarded as unsound and dangerous. Political life is being increasingly differentiated from religion and has assumed a secular character. Today in some European countries, like Great Britain, the state church is no doubt allowed to exist but mainly because it has ceased to count in matters of the state. Religious political parties are also to be found in some European Countries, but their role has invariably been reactionary in character…Though in the past Indian society was largely dominated by religion, the Indian state remained largely secular in character…. What we need most are the recognition of the territorial character of the state and complete differentiation of politics from religion…Even Gandhiji, essentially a man of religion, has begun to insist on the secular character of the state…Secularisation of politics is urgently needed and must be declared as our ideal…The constitution must, therefore, lay down that ‘the state is secular’.”
However, the constitution drafting committee headed by BR Ambedkar did not incorporate the recommendations of Jaya Prakash Narayan.
A distressed JP wrote: “Its (drafting committee) deliberations have been dominated by cool and sedate lawyers who give no evidence that they comprehend the significance of the turmoiled birth of a nation. There have been no passionate controversies raised in the Assembly, nor have we witnessed there the din and dust of any stubborn fight of interests and ideologies; nor even the flash and spark of a collision of personalities. Thus, the Assembly has carried on its hum-drum work for a year, inspired not by the revolutionary mood and aspirations of the people, but by the natural conservatism and timidity of worthy diwans and legal luminaries.”
In 1952 Jawaharlal Nehru invited his closest friend JP to join his cabinet as deputy prime minister, and to be his successor as premier.
JP insisted on numerous fundamental policy changes, mainly that the constitution be amended to formally declare India to be a democratic socialist republic, and to incorporate several provisions of the constitution which he had drafted.
JP also demanded the nationalisation of banking, insurance, and mining, as well as the abolition of privy purses.
These demands of JP were not acceptable to Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nehru therefore began grooming Lal Bahadur Shastri as his successor, in place of his first choice, JP.
During the Congress party crisis in 1969, when the conservative right-wing Syndicate attempted to oust Indira Gandhi, JP advised her to portray herself as a progressive pro-poor liberal socialist.
JP rallied socialists in various political parties, including the Young Turks in the Congress led by his political heir Chandra Shekhar, to support Indira Gandhi, especially in the presidential elections which saw VV Giri defeat the official candidate of the Congress party, Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy.
In return, JP asked Indira Gandhi to implement the policy demands that he had made to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952-1954.
She partially fulfilled JPs policy demands by nationalising banks and abolishing privy purses.
JP got his protege, the distinguished economist professor Prithvi Nath Dhar, to formulate Indira Gandhi’s pro-poor socialist policies. An impressed Indira Gandhi appointed PN Dhar as her secretary, as deputy to Parmeshwar Narayan Haksar.
But since she was running a minority government after the Congress party split in 1969, Indira Gandhi was unable to amend the constitution to incorporate socialism and secularism.
As JP’s agitation against Indira Gandhi picked up steam in 1973, JP reminded her that she had not fulfilled her promise to him to incorporate socialism and secularism in the constitution.
Indira Gandhi was preparing to liberalise economic policies, moving from a socialist framework towards a more market-oriented approach. This plan was known only to PN Haksar, PN Dhar, and my father.
In June 1973 she wrote to JP: “You have spoken about the competing rights of democracy and socialism. It has been our endeavour throughout our struggle for freedom and during these 25 years as an independent nation to reconcile the two. I am perhaps more confident than you that we can achieve this reconciliation. Democracy, the independence of the judiciary, and fundamental rights are not in danger. They would be threatened if we were to allow our faith to be eclipsed by defeatism, and if we help alliances of the extreme right and left.”
JP replied to her a few days later : “Coming to your remarks about my statements about the competing rights of democracy and socialism, I would again submit that ‘we’ should cease to think in terms of ‘ourselves’ being in power forever…You say that ‘It has been our endeavour throughout our struggle for freedom and during these 25 years as an independent nation to reconcile the two. I am perhaps more confident than you that we can achieve this reconciliation’….Suppose I grant you that, what guarantee is there that another government with other ideas of democracy and socialism will also be able to reconcile the two?”
Because of the coup in Bangladesh, supposedly backed by the CIA, Indira Gandhi decided on the spot to avoid the political uncertainty which might have been caused by her announcing economic reforms. Most of the senior politicians of her Congress party were staunchly against rightward economic policies.
Playing safe, she deviated from my father’s handwritten text and spoke extempore about the importance of socialism and secularism.
These impromptu statements of hers were somewhat rambling and incoherent. But they provided an indication of her intentions to amend the constitution, which were both in her interests as well as of JP’s.
She had foreseen that the RSS would come to power, riding on JP’s coattails, and therefore that it would be necessary for her to secure the nation’s future by explicitly inserting Secularism in the constitution.
Recognising how the masses of Bangladesh had turned against Mujib because of his dictatorial ways, she decided to address the charges of her usurping power.
She also took a subtle dig at Sanjay Gandhi’s coterie, who were misusing their unconstitutional powers, but whose prisoner she had become.
She further sought to distance herself from excesses which were being committed.
Speaking impromptu, she declared: “Some people accuse me of concentrating all power in my hands…But the orders that I may give have to pass down to ministers and then on to big and small officers at various levels and finally to patwaries in the villages or even lower level officers…In the process, the orders are sometimes implemented, and sometimes not…At times some people inadvertently modify these orders. At other times they get altered deliberately. Some people exploit orders to their advantage. While some others are always busy preventing their implementation. All these things happen, and this is the one main reason why we couldn’t implement some of our major policies”.
She then continued: “I meet not thousands but millions of people. There would hardly be any person in the world who would meet such a large number of people coming to me almost every day from all corners of the country…I receive many reports every day, but the country is so vast that it is not possible to get all the information. Some information comes late, and some does not come at all…I have to see that the programmes of eradication of poverty move vigorously ahead, despite attempts by powerful elements to obstruct them…I have to ensure that the streets, the villages, and the cities remain clean and beautiful…There are many big and small tasks for me to complete”.
To sum up, the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had long term adverse consequences for India, in addition to fomenting anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh.
It compelled Indira Gandhi to continue the Emergency, and Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie began their excesses.
It compelled Indira Gandhi to abandon her plans to liberalise the economy.
It gave a handle to the Hindutva forces to attack her for introducing the terms Socialist and Secular in the preamble to the constitution.
In her Independence Day speech on 15 August 1975, prime minister Indira Gandhi intended to announce several measures relaxing the Emergency, such as releasing political prisoners, partially lifting the ban on the RSS, and ending press censorship.
But the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh, which was intended to send a strong signal to India, compelled her to abandon her plans and to continue with the Emergency.
She also emphasised the importance of Socialism and Secularism in India. She had promised Jaya Prakash Narayan in 1969 that she would include the terms Socialism and Secularism in the Constitution.
Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad is a computer scientist and author. He writes on technology and historical events in post-independent India. He is Associate Editor at gfiles.
