Varun Gandhi’s vile communal outburst while campaigning in Pilibhit has all of a sudden conjured the spectre of his father Sanjay Gandhi from the dark days of the Emergency regime more than three decades ago. Not surprisingly, parallels are being drawn between the uncouth bluster of the younger Gandhi and the overbearing ways of Sanjay and his Youth Congress goons. Yet, apart from this surface similarity in sheer loutishness of father and son, it may be interesting to examine whether Sanjay despite belonging to the Congress party had an intrinsic communal streak in him and if Varun is being a chip of the old block in an ideological sense as well.
Unlike Varun who belongs to a party like the BJP, which actively promotes an ultranationalist Hindu agenda with obvious bias against minorities, particularly Muslims, Sanjay Gandhi’s roots in a self-proclaimed secular party such as the Congress prevented him from indulging in overt communal propaganda. There are also old friends of Sanjay like Dumpy Akbar Ahmed who swear that he “did not have a communal bone in his body”. Significantly, Dumpy is the only Sanjay crony who stood by his widow Maneka after she was hounded out of the Gandhi household by Indira Gandhi to facilitate the succession of her elder son Rajiv in the wake of Sanjay’s death in a plane crash in the summer of 1980.
“For God’s sake Varun was just three months old when Sanjay died, so how can you blame the father? It is the bloody BJP which has brainwashed the boy,” Dumpy told me on the phone from Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh where he is the BSP candidate. It is an interesting testimonial from the political maverick who recently got into trouble with BSP leader Mayawati for his provocative antics inside Parliament including the brandishing of an intifada outfit to promote the cause of Muslims from Azamgarh being investigated by the Delhi police in connection with their encounter with terrorists in Batala House.
However, regardless of this clean chit from Sanjay Gandhi’s Muslim buddy from Doon School, there is no denying that at least two of his chief lieutenants Jagmohan and Bansi Lal during the Emergency had displayed clear communal agendas against the Muslim minority. Jagmohan, the controversial DDA vice-chairman during the Emergency had particularly targeted Turkman Gate and other Muslim dominated residential and commercial areas around the famous Jama Masjid in Old Delhi in a demolition drive ostensibly to beautify the area as a heritage zone. This had the full backing of Sanjay who is believed to have personally supervised the demolitions.
While researching my book on Delhi under the Emergency, I was told by several local Muslim leaders like Mir Mustaq Ahmed, Chaudhury Elaichiwalla, Kaimuddin that there appeared to be a concerted bid by the Emergency administration to scatter the concentration of Muslim residents and businessmen around Jama Masjid. Some Muslim residents of the area went to the extent of quoting Jagmohan that he would not allow a Pakistan to be formed in the heart of the capital city.
While the DDA vice-chairman would later vehemently deny that he made any such threat, the confirmation of such a communal slant in the demolition drive around Jama Masjid came from his own successor M N Buch who quoted Sanjay Gandhi in an opinion piece many years later.
“I still remember my days with the Delhi Development Authority shortly after the Emergency was lifted and the Janata government came to power. We had constructed shops in the Meena Bazar area of Jama Masjid and the Payenwala area of Dariba in Delhi to rehabilitate the shopkeepers who had been uprooted from there during the Emergency. The majority of them were Muslims. Sanjay Gandhi told me that we were making a mistake because removal of the shopkeepers during the Emergency had eradicated a potential nest of Pakistani supporters. I was horrified to hear this from the mouth of Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandson....” Buch wrote in an article published on October 6, 2002.
Significantly, Jagmohan went on to become governor of Kashmir where he continued his communal agenda pitching Kashmiri pundits against local Muslims, toppling the Farooq Abdullah regime and laying the ground for the violent militancy and extremism that would engulf the sensitive border state in the following decades.
It is not surprising that he ultimately joined the BJP and was a leading light during the latter’s strident Hindutva phase.
Haryana strongman Bansi Lal’s communal agenda is not so well recorded. But he is believed to have personally instigated the forcible sterilisation at police gunpoint of virtually all the males in the Muslim village of Uttawara in the Mewat area of the state. Describing in horrific detail, Suman Dubey, journalist and close friend of Rajiv Gandhi wrote “The Mewat area is largely populated by the Meo Muslims and it was a long cherished belief in Bansi Lal’s warped mind that the Meos wanted to create an oasis-like Pakistan in the area”.
More than thirty years later, it is difficult to say if he had not died prematurely whether Sanjay Gandhi’s penchant towards communalism would have blown into Hindu fascism as promoted by his son Varun drawing legitimacy from his BJP badge. Yet there is good reason to believe that his obsession to impose a political and social straitjacket on India in the guise of firm administration inevitably breeds impatience and hostility towards diverse sections of civil society, particularly minorities.
There is a tremendous resonance of such tendencies with the Hindutva agenda of the Sangh Parivar although historically Sanjay Gandhi and the RSS were bitter enemies.
It may therefore not be entirely coincidental that Sanjay’s widow Maneka ultimately found her way into the BJP. After all, one of the main reasons which her mother-in-law cited for denying Maneka a political post in the Congress was her links to Madhya Pradesh RSS leader Sardar Angre to whom she later sold her magazine Surya. There has not been much speculation about her ideological preferences till now since she has limited herself to the less controversial espousal of animal rights and a vegetarian diet.
Varun, on the other hand, has eagerly thrust himself forward into the role of a zealot perhaps knowing well that he would have the blessings of his father. At the same time, the widespread outrage across the nation at the divisive venom spouted by the young man is an uncanny reminder of Sanjay’s own denouement along with that of the Emergency regime in 1977. It is a comforting thought that both the cultural plurality of this country and the democratic process remain virile enough from being hijacked by successive generations of fascists
About the author:
Ajoy Bose has co-authored ‘For Reasons of State: Delhi under Emergency’ (Orient paperbacks and Vision Books, 1977)