Saturday 30 October 2021

'THE LEGACY': 20: 'IRON LADY' INDIRA GANDHI AND 'IRON MAN OF BIHAR KRISHNA BALLABH SAHAY (31/10/2021)

 









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 ‘difficultin 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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