On 26 June, Indira Gandhi introduced a State of Emergency which led immediately to the arrest of several hundred opposition leaders and to the imposition of a draconian press censorship on the country’s normally vigorous bourgeois press. Emboldened by the feeble response to these measures, Indira Gandhi induced the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Indian Parliament) not merely to ratify the State of Emergency but to abolish retroactively the electoral offences of which she had been found guilty on 11 June. A notable feature of Indira Gandhi’s constitutional coup was the smoothness of its execution and the responsiveness of the state machine to the orders it was receiving. In fact the events following 26 June, however unexpected, had been well prepared by the whole preceding development and notably by a great expansion in the size and role of the state repressive apparatus. Although the international press was silent on the fact, there were already tens of thousands of political prisoners in Indian jails on 26 June. These had been jailed following the Naxalite revolts of the late sixties and early seventies, the attack on the cpm in West Bengal and the brutal suppression of the railway workers’ strike in March 1974. The latter was indeed, in the words of the introduction to Explosion in a Subcontinent, ‘an ominous further step towards establishing a Bonapartist régime in India’.footnote1 Moreover the failure of the Indian Left, and in particular the divided forces of Indian Communism, to wage an effective campaign
The immediate events that precipitated Indira Gandhi’s coup were the judgment against her in the Allahabad court for electoral malpractices, and the defeat of Congress in the Gujarat elections earlier in June after a personal intervention by the Prime Minister. These events were exploited to the full by the motley opposition which joined together the communalist Jan Sangh, the Moraji Desai Congress and the reactionary mystagogue J. P. Narayan. Beneath these opposition forces was a surge of spontaneous social revolts against high prices, hoarding, smuggling and corruption. The demagogy of the opposition was fed by the manifest failure of successive Congress administrations to galvanize Indian capitalism and enable it to offer some hope to the many millioned peoples of the subcontinent.footnote2 The repercussions of the world capitalist recession on the Indian economy have intensified the intractable problems confronted by India’s rulers and have reduced the scope for open political competition between different representatives of the ruling class. But the relative weakness of Indian capitalism by no means implies that the Indian bourgeoisie is a weak or inconsiderable force. Indira Gandhi’s bold move to acquire an unfettered leadership of this class reflects the narrowing options facing Indian capitalism and the political weakness of the worker and peasant masses, but not any lack of political initiative.footnote3 The Indian ruling class is paying a minimal price for its failures because it faces no serious socialist antagonist, capable of mobilizing those masses against their oppressors and exploiters. The bourgeois opposition to Indira Gandhi was able to gain its momentum because of the passivity of the Left and its complicity with some of the worst aspects of the traditional order in India. Despite its present defeat this opposition still represents an alternative bourgeois combination should Indira Gandhi follow too closely the path of the late Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. By contrast, no section of the Left now presents such an alternative despite the considerable resources that have been at its disposal and despite the extremity of the economic and social crisis in India. Yet at the time of Independence Indian Communism was a mass political force, capable of challenging Congress dominance in a number of important areas. In the interview that follows K. Damodaran traces the historical development of the cpi and gives an account of the splits which were to overtake it in the sixties.