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Indian Institutions in the Early 1980s: The pre-history of the great transformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

DIEGO MAIORANO
DIEGO MAIORANO*
Affiliation:
University of Liège, Belgium Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1989 India's political system underwent a process of profound change which affected the entire institutional setup of the country. Power was radically redistributed—it began to flow from the central government to the states, and from the Prime Minister's Office to the other institutions of the state. By analysing the severe institutional crisis which occurred during Mrs Gandhi's final term in office, this paper seeks to show how state institutions worked on the eve of such a redrawing of India's institutional setup. In addition, an effort is made to link the working of India's institutions to the configuration of the party system, thus stressing the importance of political dynamics in the functioning of parliamentary democracies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1389 - 1434
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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19 Known as ‘the Centre’.

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48 The note is reproduced in Noorani, ‘The Prime Minister and the Judiciary’, p. 108.

49 From the Bar Council of India's reply to the government press note, reproduced in ibid, p. 109.

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52 Ibid.

53 Mrs Gandhi quoted in Noorani, ‘The Prime Minister and the Judiciary’, p. 111.

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55 Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Redoing the Constitutional Design’.

56 The word ‘relatively’ needs to be stressed here. Especially in times of political crisis, the president of a republic can—and indeed must—play a decisive role, as happened in India during the period of political instability post-1989, or as happened in this author's country (Italy) during the severe political and economic crisis of late 2011.

57 Indian Express, 26 November 1980.

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68 This made the proclamation of the emergency illegal.

69 MPs’ fear of arrest surely played a role.

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75 As we will see below, the second half of Mrs Gandhi's final term in office was marked by a major insurgency in Punjab. The Akali Dal was the political soul of this insurgency.

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80 Maiorano, ‘Mrs Gandhi's Final Term’.

81 Minister of Finance, Budget Speech Before the Lok Sabha, 1981.

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84 Times of India, 8 September 1982.

85 The central government backed another piece of legislation introduced in the Orissa Legislative Assembly—controlled by the Congress (I)—which threatened to subject newspapers to the will of the state government; see Chittaranjan Alva, ‘What the Bihar Press Bill Means’, Social Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 12, 1982.

86 Times of India, 12 November 1982.

87 Indian Express, 14 August 1982.

88 India Today, 16 June 1983.

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90 Maiorano, ‘Mrs Gandhi's Final Term’.

91 The following brief summary of the debate is largely drawn from Noorani, A. G., The Presidential System—The Indian Debate, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1989Google Scholar, and Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution.

92 Indian Express, 19 October 1979.

93 It later turned out that the author of the paper was A. R. Antulay, Congress (I) chief minister of Maharashtra in the early 1980s.

94 Indian Express, 4 June 1980 and 8 June 1980.

95 Indian Express, 10 June 1980.

96 Indian Express, 22 June 1980.

97 Indian Express, 8 December 1980 and 29 January 1981.

98 The Hindu, 2 March 1981.

99 Indian Express, 15 December 1980.

100 Indian Express, 29 April 1984; Times of India 27 August 1984; India Today, 16 June 1984.

101 Mrs Gandhi in Indian Express, 28 January 1981.

102 Reproduced in Noorani, The Presidential System, Appendix III.

103 Times of India, 29 April 1984.

104 Indian Express, 4 May 1984.

105 Blitz, 2 June 1984.

106 India Today, 16 May 1984.

107 We have seen above how Baharul Islam was appointed to the Supreme Court.

108 Indian Express, 27 August 1984.

109 India Today, 16 June 1984.

110 Indian Express, 28 August 1984.

111 Indian Express, 31 August 1984.

112 India Today, 16 August 1984.

113 He made the same proposition at the Press Club of Calcutta a few days before Mrs Gandhi's assassination. The full text of his address is reproduced in Noorani, The Presidential System, Appendix IV.

114 Economic and Political Weekly, 20 October 1984.

115 Indeed, this is the view of most of the observers with whom this author spoke in Delhi in late 2010 to early 2011. Interviewees included Sir Mark Tully, Prem Shankar Jha, Inder Malhotra, George Verghese, and Subhash Agrawal. Politicians who were close to Mrs Gandhi also denied that there was any plan to change the constitution on the eve of the elections. Interviews with Vasant Sathe, Bishma Narain Singh, and Natwar Singh.

116 Shourie, Arun, Mrs Gandhi's Second Reign, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1983, p. 224Google Scholar.

117 Constitution, article 80. These were K. Ramamurthi, a Congress (I) member from Tamil Nadu, and Gulam Rasool Kar, a Congress (I) member from Jammu and Kashmir.

118 Indian Express, 14 June 1980.

119 Namely, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.

120 In Sikkim, President's Rule was imposed shortly thereafter.

121 See Wallack, Jessica, ‘India's Parliament as a Representative Institution’, India Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Redoing the Constitutional Design’; Verney, D. Douglas, ‘From Quasi-Federation to Quasi-Confederacy? The Transformation of India's Party System’, Publius, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 For example, Singh, Mahendra P. and Verney, Douglas V., ‘Challenges to India's Centralized Parliamentary Federalism’, Publius, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

123 For some references, see Bagchi, Amaresh, ‘Rethinking Federalism: Changing Power Relations between the Center and the States’, Publius, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or Verney, Douglas V., ‘Federalism, Federative Systems, and Federations: The United States, Canada, and India’, Publius, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995Google Scholar.

124 Arora, Balveer, ‘Adapting Federalism to India: Multilevel and Asymmetrical Innovations’, in Arora, Balveer and Verney, Douglas V. (eds), Multiple Identities in a Single State—Indian Federalism in Comparative Perspective, Konark Publishers, New Delhi, 1995Google Scholar.

125 For a detailed account of Indian federal institutions, see Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution. See also Ved Marwah, ‘Use and Abuse of Emergency Powers: The Indian Experience’, in Arora and Verney (eds), Multiple Identities, and the Sarkaria Commission Report (hereafter SCR). The report is available on the Interstate Council's website: < http://interstatecouncil.nic.in >, [accessed 4 October 2013]. The Sarkaria Commission was appointed in mid-1983 to investigate the state of centre-state relations.

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129 The so-called licence-Raj refers to the series of authorisations that were needed to operate a private business in India.

130 Bagchi, ‘Rethinking Federalism’.

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133 Ibid, Chapter 11.

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135 Arora, ‘Adapting Federalism to India’.

136 Article 356 confers on the president the right to declare ‘President's Rule’ (i.e. direct rule from the centre) in one of the states of the Indian Union, if the governor of that state—a centrally appointed position—is satisfied that the ‘government of the State cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of [the] Constitution’.

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145 In 1982 the Congress (I) failed to secure an absolute majority in all the states that went to the polls (Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, and West Bengal). In 1983, it won in the municipality of Delhi and in Assam (in the latter case, most opposition parties boycotted the polls) but lost in Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka.

146 Indian Express, 19 February 1980. The precedent had been set by the Janata Party in 1977 when it dismissed nine Congress-led state assemblies, on the grounds that as Mrs Gandhi at the centre had been badly rejected by the people, her Party could not legitimately govern in the states. The Supreme Court had endorsed this view. In the Janata Party's defence, one could argue that the post-emergency context was completely different from that of early 1980.

147 For example, Weiner, Myron, Sons of the Soils—Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978Google Scholar; and Baruah, Sanjib, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999Google Scholar.

148 Manor, ‘Centre-State Relations’.

149 Indian Express, 4 December 1979.

150 Indian Express, 26 February 1980.

151 Indian Express, 22 October 1980.

152 Times of India, 9 March 1982.

153 Indian Express, 28 January 1980.

154 President's Rule was imposed from December 1979 to December 1980; from June 1981 to January 1982; and from March 1982 to February 1983.

155 India Today, 1 May 1983.

156 Times of India, 3 November 1982.

157 Economic and Political Weekly, 29 November 1983.

158 India Today, 1 May 1983.

159 India Today, 1 March 1983.

160 India Today, 16 May 1983.

161 Interview, New Delhi, 16 January 2011.

162 India Today, 16 May 1983.

163 I am not suggesting that revising the electoral rolls would have solved all the problems in Assam or that detecting foreigners would have been easy or even feasible. Rather, I am arguing that revising the electoral rolls, or at least trying to do so, would have eased the tension and perhaps the 1983 bloodbath could have been avoided.

164 Reported in Baruah, India Against Itself, p. 131.

165 Indian Express, 8 January 1983.

166 India Today, 16 May 1983.

167 Baruah, India Against Itself, p. 133.

168 India Today, 1 May 1983.

169 Two very detailed accounts of the Punjab crisis are: Tully, Mark and Jacob, Satish, Amritsar—Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle, Jonathan Cape, London, 1985Google Scholar; Nayar, Kuldip and Singh, Khushwant, Tragedy of Punjab—Operation Bluestar and After, Vision Books, New Delhi, 1984Google Scholar.

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171 Or, to be more precise, the party of the Sikhs belonging to the Jat caste cluster.

172 The first version of the resolution was drafted in 1973. The 1982 version of the resolution, which was ‘officially’ endorsed by Sant Longowal, is reproduced in Nayar and Singh, Tragedy of Punjab, Annexure A.

173 This had been promised by Mrs Gandhi as early as 1969, when Sant Fateh Singh, an Akali Dal faction leader, threatened to burn himself to death if Chandigarh was not handed over to Punjab. See Tully and Jacob, Amritsar, p. 51.

174 Jeffrey, Robin, What's Happening to India?—Punjab, Ethnic Conflict, Mrs Gandhi's Death and the Test for Federalism, MacMillan, London, 1986Google Scholar, Chapter 8.

175 Mark Tully, interview, New Delhi, 10 December 2010.

176 Frankel, Francine, India's Political Economy 1947–2004, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 671Google Scholar.

177 India Today, 1 December 1982 and 16 December 1982.

178 Prem Shankar Jha, interview, New Delhi, 2 December 2010.

179 Nayar and Singh, Tragedy of Punjab, p. 45.

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183 The Hindu, 24 January 1983.

184 Economic and Political Weekly, 26 March 1983.

185 India Today, 1 April 1983.

186 The Hindu, 6 April 1983.

187 Indian Express, 1 April 1983.

188 Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, p. 542. The other members of the Commission were former cabinet secretary and IAS member, B. Sivaraman, and former member of the Planning Commission, S. R. Sen.

189 Collection of statements presented at the Srinagar Meeting, 5–7 October 1983, printed as Centre-State Relations, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1984.

190 SCR, Chapter 6.

191 Manor, ‘Centre-State Relations’.

192 Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution, p. 627.

193 Arun Nehru, quoted in Malhotra, Indira Gandhi, p. 297.

194 ‘Notes on the present situation in J&K discussed with the PM on 5th jan 1984’, B. K. Nehru Papers, Subject File 80, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (hereafter NMML). B. K. Nehru's view that the Congress (I) deliberately created chaos in order to destabilize the government is shared by many observers, such as Tavleen Singh, quoted in Schofield, Victoria, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, I. B. Tauris, London, 2003, p. 146Google Scholar, or Arun Shourie in India Today, 16 September 1983 and 1 September 1983.

195 In practical terms, little changes.

196 ‘Notes on the present situation in J&K discussed with the PM on 5th jan 1984’, B. K. Nehru Papers, Subject File 80, NMML.

197 Sten Widmalm, ‘The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Jammu and Kashmir’, Asian Survey, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1997, p. 150.

198 Ashok Mitra in the Illustrated Weekly of India, 5 January 1986.

199 Economic and Political Weekly, 8 September 1984.

200 Krishna K. Tummala, ‘Democracy Triumphant in India: The Case of Andhra Pradesh’, Asian Survey, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1986, p. 391.

201 Indian Express, 19 July 1984.

202 The Hindu, 16 August 1984.

203 Raghavan and Manor, Broadening and Deepening Democracy, Chapter 7.

204 The Congress (I) government in Sikkim lasted about two weeks, after which President's Rule was imposed.

205 That is, the 52nd Amendment to the constitution.

206 Illustrated Weekly of India, 8 June 1984.