Emergency, Regime Change and Iran

No amount of foreign interference can justify the arrest of Opposition leaders, but the inimical West did make Indira vulnerable to regime-change threats after Bangladesh liberation and nuclear test

   Source: Congress party's post on X

The brouhaha over the fiftieth anniversary of the Emergency brings up certain unpleasant questions: Have we really analysed why Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency? Was the “foreign hand” (her favourite expression those days) going to succeed in deposing her? Since then, have we got used to the foreign hand so completely that nobody bothers to research the impact of foreign interference against the Indira Gandhi government? The interference was real, however excessive her response might have been. The response was indeed excessive. No amount of foreign interference can justify the arrests of all the Opposition leaders or all the atrocities unleashed in the guise of Emergency.

 

Yet, it needs to be retold that Indira Gandhi was a victim of foreign interference. Like all the leaders who stood up to western hegemony, Indira too was felled, politically and then physically. It is inconceivable now that a High Court would entertain an election petition, cross examine witnesses, conduct a trial and then hold the Prime Minister guilty of election malpractices over discrepancies between the date and notification of the resignation of her Officer on Special Duty Yashpal Kapoor. All the other charges read like a litany of a loser’s lament --- like the district magistrate and superintendent of police getting involved in the preparations for the PM’s rally and the use of Airforce aircraft for her transport, etc.

 

It is strange to believe that Indira after coming back to power in 1980 never tried to really investigate or expose the conspiracy, if any, to depose her, though she kept on provoking the West by talking about a foreign hand. She had won the 1971 elections on a Left Wing platform trumping the combined Right Wing forces with 352 seats, proving that her splinter group --- Indian National Congress (Requisitionists) --- is the real one. She tackled a refugee situation of well over 10 million who were running away from a genocide of 3 million people, mostly Hindus, in East Pakistan. She was snubbed by US President Nixon, pushing her to seek “peace, cooperation and friendship” with the Soviet Union.

 

Later that year she went to war changing the global map, creating a new sovereign nation --- something only colonial powers and victors of WWII had done hitherto. She went further. She tested a nuclear device thereby ensuring India’s sovereignty. In May 1974 when Buddha Smiled at the Pokhran test range in Rajasthan, Indira made India the first nation outside the charmed P5 circle to possess nuclear capabilities. She was obviously a prime target --- the leader of a miserably poor, post-colonial nation, that too a woman, trying to punch way above her weight. 

 

In fact, much before all this, a leader of an Opposition party (the party of feudal lords and princelings) was hobnobbing with the CIA. Frances Stonor Saunders in her brilliant book Who Paid the Piper; the CIA and the Cultural Cold War refers to Minoo Masani as ‘the’ leader of the Opposition party in India, who was closely linked to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert CIA operation. The bhishmapitamah of the Indian Opposition, its moral force, Jayaprakash Narain, was the chairman of the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom, and when the CIA connection got exposed some time in 1967 he wrote, “It is inconceivable for me how anyone who believed in freedom, in the open society, in the moral correspondence between means and ends, could have thought it proper to accept funds from an agency of international espionage…” (as quoted by Saunders in her book). 

 

This was the backdrop of the competitive politics in India when Indira rose to become an unchallenged leader of the masses liberating Bangladesh and testing a nuclear device.

 

Then why didn’t she call for early elections in June 1975 when hit by the Allahabad High Court verdict? Why did she squander away all her fiercely-won nationalistic capital by imposing Emergency and destroying her democratic credentials for ever? Did her Soviet friends inform her about an impending coup or removal through lawfare or worse, India imploding? Or did the Soviets for their own geopolitical interests want her to become a dictator? Well, her defeat and that of her son in an election held during the Emergency is proof of how free and fair the elections were. No dictator holds free and fair elections to lose them. Indira obviously believed that there was a regime change attempt being made against her. The Emergency was her response to this attempt, not an endeavour to become a dictator.

 

Now, when Iran is being bombed for its efforts to build a nuclear weapon, India needs to pause and ponder that it was in a similar situation in 1974 --- a post-colonial nation inimical to the West trying to build a nuclear weapon to assert its sovereignty and status as a regional power. The Iran-Israel conflict is a reenactment of the continuing India-Pakistan conflict. A civilisational nation plundered and subjugated by the West for centuries is being pitted against a post-war creation of colonial powers (sure, Balfour Declaration goes back to 1917). All Western arguments over freedom, democracy and nuclear non-proliferation fail miserably when applied to the deeds of the last born darling of the British empire, Pakistan.

 

Iran still does not have a nuclear weapon, Pakistan has about 170, but it is not a threat and Iran is. Both are Islamic nations, and both have nurtured proxy terrorist outfits, and both have been inflicting a thousand debilitating cuts on its neighbours. However, Iranian semi-state actors haven’t got caught like Kasab in Mumbai in 2008 or identified like the three Pahalgam terrorists who killed tourists checking their religion in April this year. Why semi-state actors, a serving Pak army officer Col R. Sadatullah of Special Communications Organisation bought the Voice over Internet Protocol connections for the Mumbai attackers to talk to their Pak army handlers.

 

Yet, Pakistan is an honourable western ally to be feted, fed and cheered by the President of the United States of America. And in turn a self-promoted Field Marshal would nominate that very President for the Nobel Peace Prize. Irony dies a miserable death every day in Islamabad and Washington DC. The nomination came in while the US was bombing the three nuclear facilities in Iran. At least Obama got the peace prize before he set out to drop 26,000 bombs in seven countries.