From the India Today Archives (1980): Institutions in the time of Janata Party

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today edition dated August 15, 1980)
“In JP’s memory,” says the dedication of this book “and the memory of those exhilarating months, January-March 1977.” Arun Shourie is not a sentimental scribe. But he knows how, through the sustained and trenchantly expressed anger and scorn of his 300 pages, the echoes of JP’s final appeal to the electorate are hauntingly audible, and induce reactions beyond the indignation and disgust provoked by those who went about invoking JP’s name.
About the middle of the book, Shourie strikes a personal note that reveals the deep sadness behind all his anger. “I grew up in the 1950s,” he writes. “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the idol of my youth. He was with us until 15 years ago.” Here follows a brief listing of what has been witnessed since. And he concludes, “Think of that noble man labouring for years on end in a prison cell, writing the Discovery of India and think of all this…”
JP’s final appeal to the electorate in 1977 was originally drafted for him by Shourie, and is the opening piece in this collection. A footnote: “March 1977. As the January-March 1977 election campaign was drawing to a close, I was sent to Patna to draft JP’s final appeal to the Indian electorate. I reached JP’s house on a Wednesday. As was to be the case every Monday, Wednesday and Friday till he died, JP was chained to his tormentor—the dialyser.
Siddharaj Dhadda, the Sarvodaya leader, was at Kadam Kuan. Through him I obtained JP’s approval for the broad lines of the statement. I was to prepare the draft and meet him the next morning. I returned the next morning and first read the draft to Siddharaj. He suggested an addition. We then went up to the verandah where JP was seated.
I still remember reading the draft out to him, and his moist and kind eyes. He changed one word: ‘if the judiciary is crushed’ was to read: ‘if the judiciary is robbed of all effectiveness.’ ‘Bahut sundar likha hai’, he said. ‘Par koi chapega bhi?’ The statement was published on March 14 and 15, 1977. I reproduce it as it reflected JP’s aspirations, his wishes on the eve of the 1977 election. It now reads like a parody. Such has been the legacy of those who rode to power on his name.”
Corruption: The disillusionment started within a month of the new government taking office. For many, Shourie found, the Janata Party was but a linear projection of trends within the Congress itself over the previous 30 years. The landed interests, for instance, that had by the ‘60s come to completely dominate the Congress at the provincial level, now proceeded through the Janata Party to make a spectacular breakthrough to the Centre also.
Meanwhile, what happened to the resolve that every member of the new party who holds office, must publicly declare his assets and income, and those of his close kinsfolk, at regular intervals? One has to be very naive indeed to express any puzzlement on this score today. Corruption, as Shourie points out, is no longer a dirty word; but politics is. This semantic perversion is a measure of what we have allowed to happen to the quality of our public life.
Corruption, provided it is of sizeable proportions, compels admiration rather than horror. Pratap Singh Kairon and Bakshi Gulam Mohammad had to quit on account of indictments on corruption charges. Fifteen years later, more severe indictments could not keep public men out of office in either the Congress or the Janata governments.
Police atrocities: The most harrowing pages in this deeply disturbing book are devoted to the unrelieved barbarity with which we treat under-trials in the country, and to what are euphemistically called ‘encounters’ with alleged Naxalites, which were in truth cold-blooded murders.
In May and October 1977, committees appointed by JP and headed by V.M. Tarkunde investigated the deaths of hundreds of young men and women in alleged encounters in Andhra Pradesh and in Punjab. The reports assembled details of evidence from individuals who had seen the victims being taken into custody by the police or had seen them while in police custody, and in some instances, had seen the victims being killed.
In regard to the killings in Andhra, the case for a commission of inquiry was so strong that Morarji Desai agreed to appoint one; but the bureaucrats managed, behind his back, to get the commission appointed by the state Government instead of the Centre; and as the inquiry started, the police and administrative agencies resorted to all manner of obstruction, including a decision by the state Government that the inquiry would be held in camera, whereupon non-official organisations such as the Citizens for Democracy withdrew, and the judge was obliged to abandon the inquiry in mid-course.
In Punjab, Badal refused to go beyond the magisterial inquiries that had originally been held more as a cover-up than in any effort to discover the truth. While the state Governments in Andhra and Punjab were thus preventing the discovery of truth about how a large number of citizens had perished at the hands of the guardians of the law, the Janata Party was in power in Delhi.
So it was also, and apparently unconcerned, while the incredible enormities relating to the number and plight of the under-trials in the country’s jails were being brought to light. K.F. Rustomji’s visits to two particularly wretched jails and the impressions he recorded in his tour notes as a member of the Police Commission and published in the Express, led to a public-spirited and compassionate advocate filing a writ in the Supreme Court on behalf of the detenus. The Court, disregarding the fact that the advocate had not been authorised by any of the detenus, ordered their release and summoned the records of others similarly detained. Their number, all over the country is about 85,000.
Nihilist phase: The book is a conspectus of the iniquities that we have allowed to triumph in our public life. If the book had an index, it could serve as an inventory of the crimes and the follies that our democracy has had to live with. This is important, particularly in view of the effort being made to obliterate all traces of the more shameful episodes in our recent history. The Shah Commission’s three reports have been withdrawn from circulation.
The Gupta Commission’s report is no longer available from any official or non-official outlets. What are available are documents like the judgment of Justice Chawla quashing the case against Mrs Gandhi for her refusal to take an oath or make a statement before the Shah Commission.
Shourie has subjected, Justice Chawla’s pronouncements to a scathing analysis such as few judicial verdicts have ever been subjected to. It was indeed a remarkable judgment, which contained gems such as this: “Even when the law imposes a duty to answer, but does not further add that the answers shall be truthful, there is no legal duty to tell the truth.”
Shourie’s distinction as a political commentator is the white heat at which his mastery of facts in all their detail combines with his wrath against our thriving political malefactors and his contempt for ‘the dithering old men (who) cannot even settle on a procedure to deal with the criminals who so recently hurled them into prison.’ He functions miles away from the kind of mush that passes for political analysis in most of our newspapers. What is however even more notable in Shourie is the wisdom and the insight that illumine page after page of his comments.
What then shall we do? Shourie’s answer is clear: “We should stop deluding ourselves. We should recognise that we are passing through a nihilist phase in which institutions, values, standards are all being ground to dust. We should recognise how very far things have already gone and what the end will inevitably be. We must recognise that the situation now cannot be retrieved by passing chits to MPs, by whispering suggestions to ministers, by issuing statements. The task now is not of issuing statements and holding seminars, but, as the Mahatma wrote at another crucial moment in our history, ‘of self-purification, introspection, quiet organisation’.”
Subscribe to India Today Magazine