Questioning Indira: Cong history,edited & unedited by Cong

The sweeping assessment of the two decades,1964-84,has as its centre-piece,the persona of Indira Gandhi,fleshed out in 19 essays. That it has the editorial imprimatur of the party is beyond doubt: the chairman of the Editorial Board is Finance Minister and party veteran Pranab Mukherjee; the board’s convenor is Commerce and Industries Minister Anand Sharma and the editor is historian Aditya Mukherjee.

The book isn’t out but an advance copy has been accessed by The Sunday Express.

The questioning analysis in the book deals with the Sikh separatist phase and its handling by the Congress. This was a phenomenon that grew in the 1980s and eventually went on to claim the life of Indira Gandhi.

Quite revealing is the second chapter called,Indira Gandhi: A Review,written by veteran journalist and a columnist for The Indian Express,Inder Malhotra.

Referring to “their (the Congress’s) years in wilderness” (the period between 1977 and 1980),Malhotra writes: “Zail Singh,in complete collaboration with Sanjay (Gandhi),picked up a relatively obscure,young and fundamentalist lay preacher named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale with a view to building him up as a rival to the Akali leadership.”

Strikingly,the evaluation goes on to say: “It is inconceiveable that they could have done so without Indira Gandhi’s consent. Sanjay and Zail Singh believed that by advocating extremist causes the young preacher would embarrass the Akali Dal. Precisely,the reverse happened. Bhindranwale soon turned into a classic Frankenstein’s monster and embarked upon devouring his creators.”

The same essay underlines: “Indira Gandhi knew that when she had sanctioned military action at the Golden Temple,she had also signed her own death warrant.”

Later on,in the book,in a chapter called The Punjab Crisis,academic Mohinder Singh,who is now a member of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions,NCMEI,tracks the period just after her assassination.

He mentions how “enflaming passions against the Sikhs” resulted in a scenario where “while certain amount of anger against the Sikhs and the resultant violence was understandable,what surprised everyone was the systematic attacks on Sikh establishments and Sikh dominated colonies right in the national capital.”

Interestingly,while the current period is not covered by this volume,Mohinder Singh in his essay,makes a point about the swearing-in of a Sikh as Congress Prime Minister in 2004 as being part of this same cycle of events.

He writes: “From November 1984,when the Sikhs were hiding their identity and taking shelter in safe havens,to May 2004 when Dr Manmohan Singh,a turbaned Sikh,was elected to the highest office of the PM of the world’s largest democracy — what should the Sikhs do? Rather than being carried away by the past they would do well to take a leaf from the Diary of Anne Frank.”

There is a quote from the Diary followed by Manmohan Singh’s speech in Parliament on August 11,2005 when he described the anti-Sikh riots as a “great human tragedy and a national shame”.

The Anne Frank quote is telling: “Who knows,maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about the goodness,and that’s the reason,the only reason,we will have to suffer. We can never be just Dutch or,just English,or whatever,we will always be Jews as well. And we will have to keep on being Jews,but then,we’ll want to be.”

There is then an invocation of what the Guru Granth Saheb has to offer,by way of dispelling one’s sense of “duality” and letting oneself “be lovingly absorbed in the Lord.”

Perhaps anxious that the period in question has led people to question the Congress’s secular credentials vis a vis their role in 1984,volume editor Aditya Mukherjee writes: “The tendency to paint the Congress with a communal brush because of Operation Blue Star is to miss the wood for the trees… while some Congressmen like Zail Singh may have played ball with the Sikh communalists with disastrous consequences,the Congress was not a Sikh communal organisation. Nor was there anything in the Congress politics and ideology which was anti-Sikh (unlike say the BJP whose raison d’etre is being anti- Muslim and anti-Christian.)”

Mukherjee also makes a strong case in defence of Indira herself as never being anti-Sikh,saying “she paid with her life by taking on this challenge frontally”. A reference is made to her decision of having “insisted on keeping Sikh guards in her personal security even when warned against it. It is to be noted that she did not do it as a public act to make a point but a private decision that threatened her own life.”

The Foreword of this volume,written by the Congress president Sonia Gandhi,underlines the importance of the period it covers: “This volume captures an important period in the history of our country,following the demise of Pt Nehru in whose passing,an age came to an end. His succession by Lal Bahadur Shastri,whose sudden death in 1966 created a void… This volume traces the journey of the party and captures the remarkable leadership of Indira who remained resolute even in the face of adversity.”