BackEnd of the road for both calf and cow
Indira Gandhi and her son had lost the election that took place after Emergency was lifted
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In June 1975, I was posted as first secretary (economic) in the Indian mission to the European Economic Community (EEC) in Brussels. On the morning of 25 June, Mrs K.B. Lall, the wife of the ambassador, rang up to say that all top leaders of the opposition had been arrested. I could not believe my ears. Surely, she must have misunderstood or misheard.
I rushed to the office and called up the information secretary in the Indian embassy, M. Hamid Ansari (now vice-president). I told him I had heard some garbled nonsense about what was happening back home. He invited me over to learn the truth. Pulling out reams of teletype, he let me into every detail of the tragic happenings. Mrs Lall was quite right. The Emergency was on.
Ambassador Lall, my great guru, and I had arrived almost simultaneously in Brussels two years earlier to tackle the problems our exports would face given that the UK had joined the EEC and a few months hence we would lose our Commonwealth preferences in the British market as soon as the EEC’s common external tariff began applying to the island nation.
The essence of the problem was that since the EEC was mesmerized by the prospects opened by then US president Richard Nixon’s visit the previous year to China, we had to find a unique selling point, or USP, to give ourselves a special position with the Community.
This was further complicated as the EEC was attempting to carve a zone of economic influence with the ACP—Africa, Caribbean, Pacific—that would give these countries virtual duty-free access to the European market, which was denied to us. We were being given the short straw because the Community saw us as neither fish, flesh nor herring.
Seizing on the provision in Article 1 of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that had set up the EEC, which stipulated that only “democratic" nations could be members of the Community, ambassador Lall pressed home the point that if we had been a European country, we would have qualified for membership unlike all those non-European nations with which Brussels was seeking to build a special relationship.
The argument resulted in the Community agreeing to allow primary commodities exported by India to the EEC into its scheme under the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)’s Generalized System of Preferences (which was expressly limited to industrial products) and a thoroughly revised version of the original draft which laid the foundations of what has since become a thriving relationship between India and the European Union. But, in exchange, we had to agree to not press for the word “democracy" to find a place even in the preamble to the Commercial Cooperation Agreement.
That evening, there was a reception at the Philippines mission. In ambassador Lall’s absence, I was chargé d’affaires. Miserable over what was happening at home, I went along to represent undemocratic India, to be met there by mocking EEC counterparts who asked me how we would have amended the agreement if they had agreed to call us a democracy.
Normally, I am pretty combative. But on that occasion, I was crestfallen and let the snide remark pass. I had no answer.
The paranoia spread through the Emergency was brought home to me when I called an Indian Foreign Service colleague in Germany from a vacation in Austria, and uttered an obscenity about the Emergency. Totally alarmed, he asked me to shut up, saying the phones were tapped. How a phone line from Austria to Germany could be tapped in India was not the germane point. Fear was that pervasive.
On home leave in India towards the end of 1975, I found everyone seized up. It was not the India I knew, much more like the dictatorships in which I had served. It was unnerving.
I was transferred to Baghdad from Brussels. My ambassador there was an enthusiastic proponent of the Emergency (or at least pretended to be). I had to keep my seething anger to myself but shared it with several junior colleagues. We formed a kind of secret cabal that became more and more blatant after the Emergency was withdrawn and we were headed to the elections. The results were coming in as I drove myself to a dinner in a local restaurant hosted by our loyalist ambassador. On the way, I gathered from the car radio the news that both Mrs Indira Gandhi and her son had been defeated. The chief guest at the dinner was a Tamilian. I was able to whisper to him in Tamil, “Both the cow and the calf are gone!"
Next day came the story of the triumphant Raj Narain getting on to the bonnet of his car at Delhi’s Palam airport and singing, “Mummy, Mummy, car gayi/car gayi, sarkar gayi!" Sweet revenge, indeed.
Aiyar is a Rajya Sabha member, a veteran Congress party leader and a former Union minister.
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