Time Capsule

How India arrived at its present moment in history. An extract

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shobita Punja and Toby Sinclair

While Indira Gandhi’s popularity was on a spectacular high, objective conditions in India were changing rapidly. Food prices were rising, there were severe shortage, unemployment was growing, and there were growing criticisms of the corruption of Congress leaders. These became the focus of what is known as the JP movement—named after Jayaprakash Narayan—which grew out of popular protests against Indira Gandhi and the Congress first in Gujarat and then in Bihar. In Bihar—JP’s home state—which was backward and poor, students and youth took to the streets against inflation, growing unemployment, corruption, and a repressive state administration. JP emerged from his self-imposed political retirement to lead the movement. The movement, based on an ‘uneasy coalition’ of various discontented sections of society, moved from strength to strength during 1973-74: it formed Janta sarkars that took over power grids, ration shops, collected funds, created local bureaucracies, courts, and even armies. It appealed to the citizens to withhold taxes and resign from public sector jobs. JP aimed at what he termed a ‘total revolution’. The movement withstood severe state repression. The JP movement enjoyed an almost natural synergy with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh (RSS) and the Sangh Parivar (family of Hindu right-wing organization). JP conveniently abandoned his socialist past and rhetoric to embrace the RSS. He even declared publicly that if the RSS was fascist so was he. The JP movement grew out of a deep socio-economic crisis that Indira Gandhi had failed to resolve. Its popularity was based on the Congress’s alienation from four sections of society—the smaller gentry, students, farmers, and the working class. The smaller gentry had reasons to be disillusioned by the policies of Indira Gandhi: 1971-72, procurement prices had fallen and so had food grain production; there was also the looming shadow of leftist rhetoric emphasizing expropriation and collectivization. Farmers thus chose not to cooperate with procurement agents, hoarded grain, and sold it on the black market. The agrarian crisis and farmers’ protests should also be located in the macro context of agriculture growing by 12.6 per cent between 1960 and 1969 while industry in the same period grew by 55.4 per cent. In the 1960s, the agrarian sector also experienced greater impoverishment—people spending less than Rs 15 a month grew from 38 per cent in 1960-61 to 54 per cent in 1967-68. Organized labour also had reasons to be disaffected. In the 1960s, while the gross national product (GNP) and inflation increased, wages declined by 6 per cent. Strikes became common and the biggest one was the railway strike