"Where were you during the emergency?" In the last one week, I have been asked this question by many diplomats, Indian and foreign, who were not born when the lights went out of our surroundings in more ways than one on June 25, 1975.
Since reams have been expended in the last fortnight on the 40th anniversary of what was undoubtedly the blackest day for my generation, in its emotive and less cynical early twenties at that time, this column shall confine primarily to some vignettes from the world of diplomacy during and soon after the Emergency.
Almost the entire focus of recent Emergency recollections has been on the domestic front, and little has been written on what transpired abroad at that time or on the Emergency's fallout on diplomacy. Some of the events of that time, however, provide insights into the way forceful and charismatic leaders have an impact on external affairs.
For years, speculation has swirled around the Soviet leader who met Indira Gandhi in Moscow in November 1978. She was still out of power, but had been elected to the Lok Sabha in a by-poll from Chikmagalur, partially offsetting the impact of her stunning defeat from Rae Bareli in the historic election held under the Emergency. When the story of her mysterious rendezvous in Moscow broke 37 years ago, initial accounts suggested that Leonid Brezhnev, the general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had received her.
For some time, the talk was that the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, had met Indira. Pranab Mukherjee was the only person to have accompanied her to Moscow. In the first part of his autobiographical trilogy, The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, published in November last year as president, Mukherjee refers only to "the Soviet dignitary" who met Indira.
When these two Congress Party leaders returned to New Delhi, writes Mukherjee, the media "wanted me to disclose the name of the Soviet leader. Nobody believed me when I pleaded ignorance." It can now be said on authority that it was Andrei Gromyko, the longest-serving foreign minister of his time, who had received Indira at Moscow airport.
When Indira Gandhi was in London in early November on her first foreign visit after losing power and suffering the ignominy of losing her own Lok Sabha seat, she received a phone call from her trusted aide, R.K. Dhawan, who told her that Gromyko would meet her if she travelled to the Soviet Union from the United Kingdom instead of returning directly to New Delhi.
Indira was sure-footed in conducting external affairs even at the worst time of her political career. During these days when conduct of foreign policy is excessively focused on publicity and overtly aimed at creating a personality cult, one can only marvel at how Indira managed to pull off the secret meeting with Gromyko.
Although a mid-sized delegation of loyal Congressmen had travelled abroad with Indira, only Sonia Gandhi, Mukherjee and his wife, Geeta, stayed at the Claridges with the defeated prime minister, already on a comeback trail. Indira closely followed the public discourse on her UK visit. The British media were virulently against her, understandably so after the events associated with the Emergency.
In his book, Mukherjee has quoted from some of the acerbic editorials reflecting the popular British view that the London visit should not provide a route for her rehabilitation on the global stage. But Mukherjee is modestly silent in the memoirs about his own important role during that trip and the responsibilities Indira thrust on the rising leader from Bengal.
Every morning at the Claridges, Mukherjee scanned British dailies and marked news items for Indira's attention, among other things. Sonia clipped them, the norm in the pre-internet era, and put them up for her mother-in-law. At Heathrow, Indira had an arrival press conference: reporters were openly hostile to the woman who had choked India's civil liberties.
One reporter asked Indira for her assessment of the Emergency and of the disastrous poll outcome for the Congress Party in its wake. She was disarming in her candour. The exact quotes have been hard to trace, but she replied to the effect that she and her party managed to alienate every section of the Indian society and that the Emergency succeeded in turning everyone "against us." The mood at the press conference lightened but the British media's hostility to Indira did not abate.
Indira's passport had been impounded after the Emergency, but the Shah Commission inquiring into the political and administrative excesses during two years from June 1975 allowed her to travel to the UK alone for the purpose of interacting with the Indo-British Friendship Society. Indira was also scheduled to inaugurate a steel mill built in Wales by Swraj Paul, who stuck with her through thick and thin.
She had arrived in London on a diplomatic passport but restrictions on her travel made it illegal for her to visit the Soviet Union as proposed by Dhawan. Mukherjee has never travelled abroad to date on personal work. Since each of his overseas trips has been on official business, he has always had a diplomatic passport from the day he became a member of parliament.
On this occasion, however, the Janata government gave Mukherjee an ordinary passport although he was entitled to a diplomatic travel document as an MP. Indira shared complete details of what Dhawan said only with Sonia. But she told Mukherjee that she wanted to stop in Moscow on her return journey and asked him to join her, the only member of her delegation who was invited to do so. Sonia went off to Italy from the UK.
Unknown to the rest of the delegation, these three people at the Claridges plotted to bypass the Shah Commission's travel restrictions. They came up with an innovative solution to circumvent the rules without breaking them. Indira and Mukherjee cancelled their return tickets to Delhi on Air India. They rebooked themselves on an Aeroflot flight from London, which meant they would have to change planes at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.
An airport stopover is not a visit, so Indira was not violating the restriction on her not to visit any country on this trip other than the UK. The Soviets, too, stuck to the letter of the law and she was not taken out of the airport. Gromyko came to a special lounge at Sheremetyevo to meet Indira alone while Mukherjee remained in another lounge with Soviet officials.
The Soviet Union's willingness to host Indira after her political career had reached its nadir may have remained a secret forever if a Communist Party of India leader from Uttar Pradesh had not been on the Aeroflot flight which ferried Indira and Mukherjee from London to Moscow. That Indira's airport rendezvous was with Gromyko was not known to anyone, not even to Mukherjee at that time.
Emergency excesses by officers of the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police Service such as Jagmohan and P.S. Bhinder are well documented. For young diplomats who may not consider delving into the archives of the ministry of external affairs for this purpose and for aspirants to a career in diplomacy, the circular by the then foreign secretary, Kewal Singh, after the imposition of Emergency to Indian ambassadors and high commissioners across the world is illuminating.
It asked Indian Foreign Service officers who disagreed with Indira's methods to "retire immediately." Comments criticizing the Emergency even in the privacy of their rooms were prohibited. Worst of all, Singh demanded that IFS officers spy on their colleagues and subordinates and report on them. The circular was probably the lowest point in the history of the IFS.
An unsung hero of the Emergency, that too a Nehru-Gandhi family insider who was in diplomacy during the Emergency, deserves mention. Fori Nehru, the Hungarian-Jewish wife of Braj Kumar Nehru who was high commissioner in London when Emergency was declared, never minced her words about its excesses in conversations with the then prime minister.
According to B.K. Nehru's autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Second, Fori was one of the few Nehru-Gandhi insiders to tell Indira that young boys and elderly men were being compulsorily sterilized as part of the dreaded family planning programme at that time. B.K. Nehru wrote: "To this, Indira's answer was to take her head in her hands and say 'What am I to do? What am I to do? They tell me nothing.'" If B.K. Nehru is to be believed, Rajiv Gandhi, who was not in politics then, was "disgusted and depressed" by the Emergency excesses of his brother, Sanjay.
