On 24th January 1966, Srimati Indira Gandhi took the oath of
office and secrecy as the Prime Minister of India. She was catapulted to this
post by a group of senior Congress leaders led by K. Kamraj known as the
‘Syndicate’. The ‘Syndicate’ abhorred a powerful leader like Morarji Desai to
the position of the Prime Minister, as it would have become difficult for them
to manoeuvre the political platform at the national level. K. B. Sahay was opposed
to such a move. He favoured a strong leader in place of Lal Bahadur Shastri,
after his unfortunate demise, as it was the need of the hour.
However, his voice fell on deaf ears. K. B. Sahay’s lukewarm
support and his intentional ‘failure’ to procure votes for Mrs Indira Gandhi
from the Bihar Parliamentary delegations were marked by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Nonetheless,
after winning over the leadership issue, Indira Gandhi went ahead luring the
old guards to her fold. Jagjivan Ram visited Krishna Ballabh Babu as Mrs
Gandhi’s emissary to seek his support with an offer of a prominent position in
the Union Cabinet. But K. B. Sahay refused to buzz. Mrs Gandhi followed this by
an attempt to split Bihar Congress with an offer of Chief Ministership of Bihar
to Satyendranath Sinha, the Education Minister and number two in Krishna
Ballabh Sahay’s cabinet. Satyendranath Sinha turned down the offer (Source: Wikipedia).
Thus Mrs Gandhi was now on the lookout for an opportune moment to humble the
Bihar Chief Minister. ‘Human intervention’ having failed, Mrs Indira Gandhi saw
an ‘opportunity in natural calamity’ when monsoon failed Bihar in 1965 and
again in 1966 and the State found itself staring at a probable famine
condition.
Monsoon failure for the second successive year in 1966 and the
resultant crop failure placed the State under dire famine conditions. K. B.
Sahay was alert to the approaching catastrophe as early as August 1966 when he
wrote to the Central Government for assistance to overcome the famine. In
response to State Government’s request, the Programme Advisor of the Planning
Commission arrived in Bihar in August to assess the situation. Upon his return
from Bihar, the programme advisor reported in his assessment that “the crop prospect for Bihar was
only about 20 per cent below the average and not more than 10% of the sowing
area was under flood”. The assessment by the Member, Planning
Commission was intended at pleasing the PM rather than being an exercise in
objective analysis of the ground realities. Buckling of institutions in the
face of a dictatorial leader is not new in India. Such examples have multiplied
over the years.
On 4th September 1966, the State Food Commissioner
described the drought as “one
of the worst……in living memory”. On September 9, 1966, the central government
ministers for food and agriculture, C. Subramanyam, who visited the State
reportedly ‘told the Lok-Sabha…..that the food situation continued to be
‘difficult’ in the States of Assam, Bihar, Kerala and West
Bengal’. On October 11, 1966, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, then a union
minister was informed, during his visit to Bihar, that if the central
government did not come to the aid of state government, ‘the situation
might go out of control.’
When the monsoon failed even in the ‘Hathiya nakshatra’, K. B. Sahay
sounded the alarm bell for central assistance. He “described the State’s food
situation as ‘precarious’ and said it would start deteriorating from November
onwards when each month will be worse than the previous one”.
He added that “Bihar
was in dire need of food aid to save the people of the State from starvation”
(‘The Indian Nation, 1 October 1966) On October 11, 1967, Rajendra Mishra,
President, BPCC, reported that “Bihar
was on the brink of a famine”. On October 14, 1966, Dr Ram Subhag Singh, a Union
Minister from Bihar, after touring Shahabad district, was quoted as saying, ‘It
is all so pitiable. Brave men had tears in their eyes- a sight never seen
before in the district.’ Ram
Subhag Singh further “described
the situation pitiable as the whole countryside looked like the desolate wastes
of the Rann of Kutch in mid-summer”.
It was in the
backdrop of the appalling drought conditions that the then Union Finance
Minister Sachindra Chaudhary visited Bihar to make an assessment of the
situation and recommend suitable central aid. Sachindra Chaudhary’s assessment
of the drought conditions which he announced in a Press conference in Patna on
26th October was startling, to say the least. He “made
it plain that it was the responsibility of the Bihar Government to step up food
production to meet the crisis.” He urged the state
government to “streamline its administrative machinery for relief
operations”. On his return to New Delhi, Sachindra
Chaudhary also gave –‘his
view that the estimates of the crop damage and relief requirements assessed by
the State Government were on a higher side, which he felt (had) ‘obviously been
done to secure as much food and financial help from the Centre as possible.’ (Times of India, November 1, 1966)
This was a reckless statement from a spineless leader who owed his
position at the pleasure of Mrs Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi was getting more and more
accustomed to listening to only pleasing voices, as a group of spineless
sycophant leaders always surrounded her, ready to do her bidding. Hence such a statement
was expected of Sachindra Chaudhary who forgot that he had a responsibility as
the Finance Minister of India. Sachindra
Chaudhary refused to accept the fact that ‘there was a significant
food shortage in the state of Bihar in all the 17
districts, with 9 districts, namely Patna, Gaya, Shahabad, Darbhanga,
Hazaribagh, Ranchi, Palamau, Dhanbad, and Singhbum producing less than 50 % of
normal output. Five of these districts produced less than 30 % of normal’.
While the Union Finance Minister Sachindra Chaudhary asked K. B. Sahay to
streamline relief operations, he refused to accept the fact that in absence of
adequate food supplies from the Central Government, food grain prices were
soaring in Bihar making the situation even more difficult, notwithstanding the massive
crackdown on the black marketers by the K. B. Sahay’s administration.
Sachindra
Chaudhary had simply shut his eyes to the severity of the drought conditions
and the resultant famine in Bihar though the world was looking at India with
magnanimity and nations like Canada and Brazil came forward with an offer of
help in the aftermath of the tightening of PL-480 food grains supplied by the
USA due to the differences between then US President Lyndon Johnson and Indira
Gandhi over the India Government’s response in Vietnam.
With no central assistance in the offing, the situation went
from bad to worse. To further precipitate the matter, black-marketing and
hoarding of food grains led to the creation of crisis even before the
appearance of the real crisis. Krishna Ballabh Babu and his administration handled
the situation deftly and took strict action against hoarders and
black-marketers. This created ripples of dissent. The two leading newspapers of
Bihar in those days,-‘The Indian Nation” and ‘Searchlight”, adopted vigorously
critical positions towards the government of K. B. Sahay. Noted social
scientist Paul R. Brass who carried out an extensive study on Bihar famines of
1966-67 observes that “I
have not been able to determine to what extent the reporting done by these two
papers at the time reflected the professional desires of the journalists and
editors to cover faithfully and report accurately the developing famine
conditions and to what extent it reflected links between the journalists and
editors with dissident Congressmen”.
Matters further deteriorated when students threw in their hats
to the simmering discontent. The firing on students’ agitation on 5th
January 1967 was the final nail in the coffin of Krishna Ballabh Babu’s
chief-ministership. The firing was vehemently opposed by Congress leaders of
the State. This led to bickering within Congress, as many among them owed
allegiance to Mrs Indira Gandhi. Krishna Ballabh Babu refused to order a
judicial enquiry into the Patna firing on the ground that this will affect the
morale of his administration and the police forces. From November 1966 onward and until the election
campaign went in full swing and fully absorbed the state and central
politicians, Bihar Famine became a convenient excuse for all the malaise in
Bihar and K. B. Sahay and his administration became the favourite punching bag
for all the ills that gripped the State. In retrospect we all know that a human
tragedy was politicized by an insensitive central government for petty
political gains-a fact acknowledged in all subsequent studies and Sachindra
Chaudhary, I am afraid to say, became a stooge in this crass display of
political one-upmanship.
Thus the ‘Iron Man of Bihar’ Krishna Ballabh Babu sacrificed his
position on the altar of political brinkmanship but never buckled under the ‘Iron
Lady’. Congress lost power in Bihar in 1967 and Krishna Ballabh Sahay bowed out
as the Chief Minister of Bihar. In retrospect, the manner the Bihar
famine was politicized by Mrs Indira Gandhi to bring down her party Government
was simply unparalleled in the history of democratic India. Drawing political
mileage of a human tragedy was Mrs Indira Gandhi’s style of leadership who
never relished the rise of a regional satrap. Thirty-seven years after her
exit, Congress finds itself in a situation where the fountainhead of leadership
has dried up and there is no leader worth the following left in the party. The
party is tottering to a complete annihilation and extinction. Credit goes to
Mrs Indira Gandhi for presiding over the liquidation of this historic organisation.
(Courtesy: (i) Democracy, News
Media, and Famine Prevention: Amartya Sen and The Bihar Famine of 1966-67, by
Thomas L. Myhrvold-Hanssen, June 2003 (ii) “The Political Uses of Crisis- The Bihar Famine of
1966-67 by Paul R. Brass, Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Published by
Association of Asian Studies)
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