contesting the Lok Sabha elections as well as Rae Bareli and Amethi, Indira
and Sanjay Gandhi’s constituencies and supervised the cash handouts to
voters. Evidence of this outrage is reportedly available from Marxists’ quarters.
They quietly put signs on the boxes containing the money and witnessed
Varadachary personally carrying them to the constituencies for distribution.
44It had occurred to no one to try and locate the ‘tin boxes’, thus ‘signed’, and frame charges against the culprits. Nobody spared a thought about the number of tin boxes one would require to carry Rs 9 crore, presuming that all currency notes would be of 100-rupee denomination. Higher denomination notes of 1,000 rupees could not be used for normal transactions in those days. Could any individual, let alone the Chairman of SBI, handle so many boxes? There had to be at least ninety such tin boxes, if one is to make a rough calculation. The same story stated that, ‘Apart from this it is reported that Pranab Mukherjee’s unjustified visit to Copenhagen where a number of other top bank officials had also been holidaying, was paid for by the State Bank for reasons which can be fathomed only by a proper enquiry.’
This was the level of propaganda some of us faced. And this wasn’t the last time I had to face the brunt of unfounded allegations.
I do not quote from media reports with any sense of malice or anger. I quote the reports only to highlight the atmosphere that prevailed in those days. Mere allegations were sufficient to write people off. Anger and venom had replaced cold logic and the need for proof. The general mood of the people was frenzied. They had not approved of the Emergency and thought that everything, and every individual, associated with it should be discarded ruthlessly. Sanity and rationality were replaced by strong emotional resentment.
With Barooah’s resignation as Congress President, Swaran Singh took over as the interim President. It was decided that an AICC meeting should be convened to elect the new Congress President and the ten members of the CWC. In its meeting on 22 April 1977, the CWC advanced the date of the AICC meeting from 13-15 May to 4-5 May, and the venue was shifted from Bangalore to Delhi. The following agenda was set: (a) Election of the Congress President; (b) Election of ten members of the CWC; and (c) Election of seven members of the Central Election Committee (CEC).
The hardcore anti-Indira group notwithstanding, there were others too who were unfavourably disposed, though they had not overtly adopted a hard line against her. It was in this context that the question of choosing the new Congress President came up. Various names were suggested and discussed: Swaran Singh, Siddhartha babu, Karan Singh, Y.B. Chavan, Mir Qasim, P.V. Narasimha Rao and C. Subramaniam. I was then working with A.P. Sharma, C.M. Stephen, R. Gundu Rao and Vasant Sathe, and we took an active role against Barooah. We usually moved in a group and took direction from Kamalapati Tripathi and Indira Gandhi herself.
Indira Gandhi mooted the name of K. Brahmananda Reddy for President. Chavan, Tripathi, Mir Qasim, Subramaniam and other senior leaders supported her choice. Reddy was a senior Congress leader with vast experience at the centre as well as the state level. In addition to this, he hailed from South India, where the Congress had fared well in the Lok Sabha elections. In fact, out of the 154 Congress members in the Lok Sabha, about 100 were from South India.
Suddenly, the neo-radical group led by people like D.K. Barooah and Chandrajit Yadav put up Siddhartha babu as a candidate.
Finally, there were four candidates in the field: K. Brahmananda Reddy, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Dr Karan Singh and Neki Ram Sharma.45 A slew of people, including myself, contested for the ten CWC seats and the seven CEC seats. Though Indira Gandhi, Y.B. Chavan and other senior leaders agreed on a common candidate for the office of the President, they refrained from interfering with candidate selection for the CWC and CEC. We had discussed this issue with Kamalapati Tripathi but even he would not give us any direction. Therefore, the elections to the CWC and the CEC were a free-for-all.
The result of the presidential election came first. K. Brahmananda Reddy was elected by an overwhelming majority, getting 317 votes. Siddhartha Shankar Ray got 160 votes while Karan Singh and Neki Ram Sharma got 16 and 3 votes respectively.
The results of the elections to the CWC and CEC could not be announced till the following morning as counting took longer. While the polling for the Congress President was decisively in favour of Indira Gandhi’s nominee, the results of the CWC and CEC elections were mixed. Later, she admitted to me that we should have conducted the CWC election in a more organized manner instead of allowing it to be a free-for-all.
From our side, Zail Singh and I were miserably defeated. A distinguished loser in the other camp was Purabi Mukherjee. Those elected to the CWC were: Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, V.P. Nayak, K.C. Pant, P.V. Narasimha Rao, M. Chandrasekar, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, Chandrajit Yadav, A.P. Sharma, C.M. Stephen and Muhammed Ali. The Congress President nominated the following to the CWC: Indira Gandhi, Y.B. Chavan, Kamalapati Tripathi, C. Subramaniam, Swaran Singh, Virendra Verma, P.V. Raju, Buta Singh, Dr Ram Subhag Singh and Mir Qasim.
Only three of the ten elected CWC members were with us when the split occurred: P.V. Narasimha Rao, A.P. Sharma and M. Chandrasekar. However, among the nominated members, we
had Mir Qasim, Kamalapati Tripathi and Buta Singh, apart from Indira Gandhi. Hence, out of the twenty members of the CWC, our group constituted seven. After the elections in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra in March 1978, three elected members of the CWC came to our side—Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, C.M. Stephen and Virendra Verma—taking our number to ten.
The future of state governments, largely controlled by the Congress, became uncertain. A few chief ministers, such as Siddhartha Shankar Ray, congratulated the newly elected Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, and assured him of their fullest cooperation. Some, like Kazi Lhendup Dorjee of Sikkim and P.K. Thungan of Arunachal Pradesh, joined the Janata Party and converted the state unit of the Congress into the state unit of the Janata Party. Siddhartha babu’s telegram (of 24 March) and letter to Prime Minister Morarji Desai created a great deal of confusion. Some newspapers reported Ray as having said that he wanted to wash his hands off the Emergency and the measures taken during it. This was debated in the West Bengal assembly on 6 April. Ray gave a spirited reponse and denied the newspaper report. He read out the telegram he had sent to Morarji Desai: