The Indian National Congress has made relentless efforts for decades to project Indira Gandhi as a legend and martyr. They have tried aggressively to equate her to Ma Durga and raised slogans like ‘India is Indira’ and ‘Indira is India’, which have stuck around till today. However, it is also true that for most of the years during which she enjoyed direct power she ran one of the most exhaustive corruption rackets in the history of India.
In 1970, when the older, original Congressmen led by Kumaraswami Kamaraj dismissed her from the original Congress, her faction came to be known as Congress (R). Elections were around the corner and to gather popular support, along with her team she coined the campaign catchphrase – ‘woh kehte hai Indira hataao, hum kehte hai garibi hatao’.
While this is genius electioneering and won her the elections, the truth lies in the fact that the policy decisions taken in lieu of the ‘garibi hatao’ effort are unprecedented when it comes to cheating the country, lies, amount of money looted, manipulation, deceit, and outright misuse of government machinery for personal gain. I will back this up with facts – had the policy manoeuvres been truly well-intended, they (Indira’s government and successive Congress governments) would have come closer to alleviating poverty, albeit over a period of time. However, the fact that the poverty ratio in India did not fall at all after 1947 until 1983. Around the mid-1970s, India ranked 102nd among the nations of the world in terms of per-capita income.
The ‘garibi hatao’ campaign first began by the stunted bank nationalisation policy. Economists over the years have maintained that without accompanying measures to kick-start growth, it only remained a powerful political tool. Before 1969, banks were fiefdoms of big businesses and by nationalising them, Indira channelised them to make them her own, personal fiefdom. Let me explain, if Indira Gandhi’s aim was to help the poor, she could have just ordered the banks to lend to them at lower rates with less collateral, offered government collaterals and government guarantees in cases of default. But her true motive behind the bank nationalisation was to bankrupt the opposition and cut off supply of funds, thus checkmating her political detractors. So, she justified her policies to be so pro-poor and described how she was a lone tigress standing up to big corporations — this created a wave of public affection towards her efforts.
Her economic policies were such a failure that inflation stood at 34.7% in 1974. At one point, the government attempted to lower market demand by freezing wages – an entirely anti-working class, anti-poor move. She kept looking to expand the public sector with more and more strict regulation on the private sector, and almost completely rejected foreign-aid because it was coming at the cost of economic reforms, which would dilute her hold on the exchequer.
There was so much policy and ideological confusion that in 1973, the Indira government even took over the wholesale trade of foodgrains. The country panicked. Food stocks ‘disappeared’ and food trucks were looted. These shortages resulted in the need to import massive quantities of food grains, by which cost of food went up which hit the poor the most. Widespread labour and rural unrest against her began to grow and in a haste, she reversed the foodgrain-trade policy.
While these are first order effects of her miscalculated policies, let us consider the second and third order effects – under the garb of ‘garibi hatao’, she implemented the draconian licence-raj blackmail system even more aggressively. The permit-licence-quota-Raj was used so liberally to procure vast under-the-table funds that the period after 1969 was characterised by one member of the Indian parliament as the era of “briefcase politics” — a phrase used to describe the transfer of huge amounts of black money in the form of cash into the coffers of the Congress. Folks have also recounted instances when representatives of trade and industry were called up by LN Mishra — the foreign trade minister in Indira’s cabinet — to Delhi and asked to deliver specified amounts of money. Those who declined were threatened with possible raids by people of the Revenue Intelligence and Enforcement Directorate – both of which were operating under the Cabinet Secretariat and were in Indira’s total control.
In Bombay financial circles, stories started circulating of the amounts secured by the foreign trade minister under such threats. Others who came forward willingly with whatever was asked for, received concessions beyond their imagination to expand their business and amass further resources. Indira’s biographer Krishan Bhatia has also opined that donations had become more like extortions, “the money that Indira’s senior cabinet colleagues collected for the parliamentary elections in 1971 and state elections the following year allegedly amounted to millions of rupees and usually changed hands on the basis of a quid pro quo. At times, ministers deliberately talked about non-existent government plans to nationalise or regulate a particular industry or trade with the intention of creating nervousness among the people concerned. This naturally encouraged the flow of contributions, especially as the apparent threat ceased once the interest concerned had paid up.”
It is very clear from a multitude of first-hand accounts of the time that while the people of India remained in abject poverty, almost all government policies were formed either for political gain for the Congress or for the Nehru-Gandhi family’s personal profiteering. Basically, ‘garibi hatao’ became just a meaningless promise for the poor. In reality, it was more like ‘Congress aur Nehru-Gandhi parivaar ki garibi hatao’. Even after subsequent Congress governments, this attitude of pressuring industrialists and businessmen to extort money remained ongoing.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a couple of days ago that in his third term, India will be amongst the top three economies of the world. When he came to power as Prime Minister in 2014, India was at the tenth spot – in 2023, it is at the fifth spot. It is quite clear that the rise in trajectory of India’s economic strength is not only consistent, but unparalleled during the Modi-era: and only good, clean, well-intentioned economic policy making with a non-corrupt government at the helm is to be credited.
This is Part III of a multi-part series. A look at the other parts:
Part I: Opinion | Indian Prime Ministers and Cases of Corruption: Rajiv Gandhi’s Indefensible Defence Deals
Part II: Opinion | Indian Prime Ministers and Cases of Corruption: Nehru and the Birth of Scams
Part IV: Opinion | Indian Prime Ministers and Cases of Corruption: Indira’s Dhritrashtra Syndrome & Emergency Excesses
Priyam Gandhi-Mody is an author of three bestselling books, including ‘A Nation to Protect’. Her fourth book is expected to be released in October 2023. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Comments
0 comment