Will the history repeat itself?

It was on a tidal wave of goodwill that the newly formed Janata Party came to power after defeating Indira Gandhi humiliatingly in the post-Emergency polls in 1977. Indeed, there was no dearth of Janata’s jubilant supporters that hailed the changeover as a “revolution by the ballot-box”. If really so, then it must be the only revolution to have been devoured by its children. To careful observers of the scene, the possibility of self-destruction by the Janata was evident even when it was being applauded for having ended the nightmare of the Emergency and restored democracy.

People started saying that instead of prosecuting Gandhi, the Janata was “persecuting” her. At that time, one of the eight commissions was investigating the charge against her of having “stolen” some chickens from the government guesthouse in a northeastern state! As eminent journalist and author Arun Shourie, totally opposed to Gandhi, wrote, “by the time the Shah Commission’s report was submitted, it had become an embarrassment for the Janata, not for her”.

This indeed was the greatest irony in the rather short life-story of the Janata Party. It was determined to destroy Gandhi politically, forever. It succeeded instead in helping, indeed hastening, her spectacular return to power.

Too many wrong things had happened during the Janata raj that robbed it of its popularity. There was an increase in lawlessness and people were fed up with soaring prices. However, the most heartrending development was a shocking increase in atrocities against Dalits. These were by no means unknown during Gandhi’s reign. But the sudden increase in their frequency and the escalation of the savagery were phenomenal, obviously because the “intermediate castes”, the Janata’s power base, were vastly more hostile to the Dalits than the “forward castes”.
The Dalits were agitating in various parts of the country, but the atrocity that brought immeasurable shame on the Janata was the one at a remote Bihar village named Belchi, where nine Dalits were burnt alive and many Dalit women raped. Why? For, Indira Gandhi, hitherto shell-shocked and politically inactive, decided to go there. Unable to drive through the massive slush on the route, she asked for and got a lift on the back of an elephant that a villager was leading somewhere. The victims of the barbarity gave a tremendous welcome to the only political leader who had bothered to come to them to offer sympathy and support