The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders: Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Indira Gandhi

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Author: Leslie Derfler

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The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders

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PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS The Dreyfus Affair (2002) Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1911 (1998) Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842–1882 (1991) An Age of Conflict (1990) President and Parliament: A Short History of the French Presidency (1984) Alexandre Millerand: The Socialist Years (1977) Socialism Since Marx (1973) The Third French Republic, 1870–1940 (1966) The Dreyfus Affair: Tragedy of Errors (1963)

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The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Indira Gandhi Leslie Derfler

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THE FALL AND RISE OF POLITICAL LEADERS

Copyright © Leslie Derfler, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10704–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derfler, Leslie. The fall and rise of political leaders : Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Indira Gandhi / Leslie Derfler. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10704–5 (alk. paper) 1. Political leadership—Case studies. 2. Palme, Olof, 1927–1986. 3. Sweden—Politics and government—1950–1973. 4. Sweden—Politics and government—1973– 5. Obasanjo, Olusegun. 6. Nigeria—Politics and government—1960– 7. Gandhi, Indira, 1917–1984. 8. India—Politics and government—1947– I. Title. JC330.3.D47 2011 303.3⬘40922—dc22

2010019395

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Again, for Gunilla

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Contents

Preface

ix

Permissions

xv

1 Olof Palme: “Moral Duty Is Discontent on a Large Scale”: Creation 2

Olof Palme: Termination

1 29

3 Olof Palme: Interment

35

4 Olof Palme: Resurrection

55

5 Olusegun Obasanjo: “Look At What Has Become of This Country”: Creation

71

6 Olusegun Obasanjo: Termination

97

7 Olusegun Obasanjo: Interment

103

8 Olusegun Obasanjo: Resurrection

127

9 Indira Gandhi: “Like a Tigress”: Creation

145

10

Indira Gandhi: Termination

167

11

Indira Gandhi: Interment

191

12

Indira Gandhi: Resurrection

209

Conclusions

227

Notes

235

Works Cited

257

Index

265

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Preface

In war one dies only once. In politics, one dies only to rise again. Talleyrand

T

he political history of the twentieth century takes into account several former heads of government who achieved the pinnacle of political power, fell from or relinquished power, and then— after a period in the political “wilderness”—regained it. Included among them are Winston Churchill (Great Britain), Charles de Gaulle (France), Indira Gandhi (India), Juan Perón (Argentina), Olof Palme (Sweden), Yitzhak Rabin (Israel), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), and Pierre Elliot Trudeau (Canada).1 While the careers of all are known to scholars, three that are less well known to English-language readers, Palme’s, Obasanjo’s, and Gandhi’s, are those explored here. Not many Americans (or, for that matter, Swedes) know of the U.S. guarantee given to Sweden during the Cold War to come to that country’s aid in the event of a Soviet invasion—and Palme’s willingness to let that guarantee wither and die. Nor is there any biography of Obasanjo informing us of his two presidencies and his efforts (largely failed) to reform Nigerian institutions. Nor are many aware of the part played by Gandhi’s younger son in her fall from power—the massive slum clearance and sterilization projects that culminated in her electoral defeat—and in her subsequent rise back to it. I have also selected these three because of their geographical diversity and because additional information about them has become available. Each of the three sections will open with a sketch of the subject’s earlier career: the climb to and exercise of power. (This part will be subtitled “creation.”) The next part will discuss the “fall” in terms of deterioration, calamity, condemnation, and removal—or renunciation (and be subtitled “termination”). The two remaining parts describe the time spent out of office (“interment”) and the return to political power (“resurrection”).

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By placing greater emphasis than that customarily accorded by biographers not on their stay in, but on the time spent out of, office, on the “interment” that preceded their political “resurrection,” I will seek answers to such questions as the following: What did these heads of government do after their fall from power—because of electoral defeats or simple decisions to resign—and before they recovered it? Had they abandoned the idea of staging a political comeback? How did their “interments” affect their political outlooks? What lessons, if any, were learned from the “fall”? What accounted for their return to high political office, their “resurrections”? To what extent did mistakes made by their successors facilitate their reentry? I will conclude by comparing the political “rise,” “fall,” “interments,” and “resurrections” of the three in an attempt to unearth explanations for their political revivals and for the course of action taken once leadership was regained. Most leaders have been the subject of numerous biographies, although, surprisingly, there is none in English of Palme and only one (incomplete) of Obasanjo. However, they minimize the time spent and activities undertaken during the months or years out of office and before their return to it: in opposition, exile, or (very little if any) in retirement. Nor is there any comparative biography that places emphasis on the space between a “fall” and a subsequent “rise.” Yet much of what happened during this period, both in terms of the abilities displayed by each as well as the shortcomings of their successors, helps explain their “resurrections.” In addition, it may be precisely these years out of high office that is of greatest interest to the biographer more concerned with the subject’s story than with the political impact generated by the subject’s career; that is, more concerned with the “life” than with the “times.” Certainly, these years would contain the meat and drink of the narrative historian’s tale and may appeal to the interests of an audience wider than that of scholars alone: Palme’s socialism and hostility to superpower domination, which does much to explain an obsession with neutrality as prime minister that verged on the ideological, even to the extent of allowing Sweden’s secret Cold War lifeline to the West to deteriorate; Obasanjo’s lifelong gratitude toward the military for enabling him to escape the poverty of his childhood and making a career available; the extent to which Mrs. Gandhi’s devotion to her son inf luenced her willingness to accept the “excesses” carried out by her government under the cover of a declared “national Emergency”, and so on. I started out with a quest for commonalities among the eight, and believe I found a few. But as I learned about their lives, I came to

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xi

appreciate the importance of such things as an African head of government’s (Obasanjo’s) rejection of tribal domination and allegiance to the nation; a mother’s (Mrs. Gandhi’s) guilt for preferring to fulfill her father’s (Nehru’s, or—as she saw it—the nation’s) requirements rather than those of her husband and children, as helping to explain both her “fall” and subsequent “restoration.” Because these things cannot be quantified or even measured, they contribute little to theoretical concept building. Still, I think they count, perhaps for a lot. The more I learned, the greater appeared the role of the unforeseen, the contingent, the uniqueness of the events. Consequently, the three examples offered, those of Palme, Obasanjo, and Gandhi, describing their respective rise to and fall from power, interim period in the political wilderness, and return to high office, not only provide material making for a more general level of analysis but reaffirm the individuality of the passage from rise to resurrection. This book is designed both for general readers and scholars, and I have cited sources for most direct quotations and interpretations. Each account makes use of the latest renditions, which are based on recently made available archival and documentary sources. For instance, every reference to Sweden and the Cold War written more than a decade ago describes that nation as committed to neutrality. They describe the country’s long-time prime minister, Olof Palme, as defending that neutral stand, as seeking to build bridges from the West to the Soviet Union, and as harshly criticizing America’s Vietnam policy and welcoming its draft evaders. We now know that Sweden was very much enmeshed in the Western defense system and that the United States promised to come to Sweden’s aid in the event of Soviet aggression in return for Sweden’s willingness to allow American submarines armed with Polaris missiles off the Swedish coast. Palme did his best to conceal this cooperation, even refusing to inform his successor and much of the military of it, and then allowing it to lapse. The country’s alliance with the United States and NATO was not officially acknowledged until almost the end of the century. What the book is not is a history of India in Indira Gandhi’s lifetime, or of Sweden during Palme’s, or Nigeria during Obasanjo’s, although historical background is included to provide the necessary context. Nor does it display any explicit methodological apparatus, reveal references to the literature on regime change, or offer much in the way of structural analysis. It is rather the biographical dimension on which emphasis is placed; on the individual lives, particularly as they affected the respective rise, falls, and returns. Because the three leaders

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selected are less well known, and because it anticipates the “interment” and the “resurrection” that follow, the “creation” segment required greater length than anticipated. It was Palme’s socialism and endorsement of Third World liberation movements, for example, that did much to explain his fierce commitment to neutrality as prime minister. In 1976, a conservative coalition brought an end to thirty-four years of Social Democratic governments in Sweden and ousted Palme from office. The issues were nuclear energy, which Palme then supported, and a controversial employees’ investment fund giving workers rights of ownership and managerial decision making in private firms. Because he presented his views with a certain rhetorical aggressiveness, both his domestic and international activities, most notoriously his fierce advocacy of neutrality, Palme attracted widespread attention. During his six-year “interment,” he became even more of a global player. Palme helped engineer a resurgence of the so-called Socialist International. He served on international commissions created to report on development assistance to Third World countries and on issues of disarmament. He also mediated on behalf of the UN in the war between Iraq and Iran. As with other heads of government who suffered electoral defeat, his return to office in the wake of his party’s 1982 victory was made possible by the fragmentation and disunity of his opponents. His assassination four years later left the nation stunned and in shock. On October 1, 1979, General Obasanjo, the military head of Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, voluntarily handed over power to an elected civilian government, the first Nigerian military ruler to do so. From impoverished beginnings, he had emerged as the general who put an end to rebellion in the breakaway region of Biafra and came to power after a military coup in 1976. When succeeding governments returned to the economic mismanagement and massive corruption that Obasanjo had tried to limit, he criticized their regimes, particularly that of the sixteen-year dictatorship of Sani Abacha, in interviews and in a controversial book. In addition, he remained a deeply impassioned spokesman for the blacks and coloreds of southern Africa and worked on numerous policy research committees to bring an end to apartheid and to prepare leadership skills for a new generation of Africans. Arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the Abacha regime, Obasanjo was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released after the dictator’s death, he successfully ran for the presidency in 1999. Despite charges of fraud and vote rigging, he was returned to office four years later but failed to resolve the problems faced by Nigeria.

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xiii

The disastrous events that followed Mrs. Gandhi’s proclamation of a state of emergency, when civil rights were suspended, censorship was imposed, and massive numbers of arrests took place, eclipsed her earlier accomplishments and drove her from power. There is much evidence to suggest that many of the excesses were the work of her favored and beloved son, whom—like a tigress—she fiercely defended. During her two years out of office, the efforts of the ruling Janata coalition to persecute and humiliate her created the image of a lone and defenseless woman standing up to a cold and imperious regime. Building on her martyrdom and demonstrating inexhaustible stamina campaigning for reelection, Mrs. Gandhi returned to power in 1980 and remained widely regarded as the new moderator of a land broken into numerous ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. I am grateful to the following people for providing information and references: Robert Dalsjö; Nils Bruzelius; Peter and Anette Åkesson; the Swedish defense official who prefers to remain anonymous; the reference librarian at the Stockholm Arbetarrörelsen Arkiv och Bibliotek (Labor Movement Archives and Library), its secretary, Lale Svensson and archivist, Stellan Andersson. For reading sample draft chapters, I owe thanks to Heather Fraser, Ben Lowe and the anonymous reader of an early draft; for the ceaseless support shown during the time spent in writing the book, my wife, Gunilla Derf ler; for office help, Zella Linn; for securing sources unavailable at the library of Florida Atlantic University, the staff of its interlibrary loan department and university librarian Darlene Parrish; for their insights and provision of sources: Linda Most, Robin Tinsley, Antonia Aristizabal, Myles Kantor, and my other students, from whom I learned much; and, of course, the authors of the excellent biographies that made this study possible. I also owe much to the Plagrave Macmillan editors, Robyn Curtis, Erin Ivy, and Ciara Vincent, and to the team at Newgen Imaging Systems, whose efforts produced a better book. It hardly needs to be added that in view of the wide range of personalities and places considered, errors have surely emerged, and that I alone am responsible for them.

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Permissions

Photographs will be found at the beginning of each “Creation” chapter. The newspaper photograph of Olof Palme, taken in 1963 when he was named as minister without portfolio, is in the public domain. The source is Wikimedia Commons: http:www.sr.se/press/proginfo/0342/filer/P1barn. jpg. The photograph of Indira Gandhi, at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. (1966) is in the public domain. The credit line is U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–134157. The photograph of Olusegun Obasanjo together with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld taken by Helene C. Stikkel, is a work of a U.S. military Department of Defense employee, taken during the course of an employee’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. Source: DefenseImagery.mil, 010510-D-2987S-007.

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CHAPTER 1

Olof Palme: “Moral Duty Is Discontent on a Large Scale”: Creation

Image 1.1 The thirty-six year old Palme is still smiling after been named a minister in the Erlander government in 1963. Rolf Petterson, 1963. Sveriges Radio

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2

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Creation Late in September of 1951, Olof Palme, a young, recently degreed law student was traveling with his friend on a train to Stockholm. Having immersed himself in the student movement, Palme was secretary of the National Union of Swedish Students and especially active in the union’s committee on international affairs. He had made something of a name for himself by initiating a program that provided scholarships to Swedish universities for black South African students who had been denied financial aid in their own country. After graduation, he preferred to continue working for the union rather than practicing law and, in so doing, contributed occasional articles to the review Tiden (Times), in which he pointed to the necessity of “democratizing” higher education. The costs, he complained, were too high; and only the sons and daughters of the “traditional bourgeois” could take advantage of it. A random meeting of two men on this train was to forever change the course of Palme’s life. It was here that Palme met Tage Erlander, the nation’s Social Democratic prime minister who, like his predecessors, regularly made use of public transportation. Nostalgic about his own student days, Erlander invited the two young men to join him for a meal in the Rosenbad, the administrative building in Stockholm that housed the government’s executive offices. Impressed by Palme’s administrative credentials and command of foreign languages, Erlander was to respond favorably when two years later, in his new role as head of the Confederation of Swedish Student Unions, Palme came to see him to request government funding for a national student parliament.1 After having completed his required military service and while retaining his union post, Palme performed as a translator in army intelligence. Then, in 1954, he began to work full time for Prime Minister Erlander and, in so doing, began his rise to power. For the first half dozen years of his long tenure as head of the Swedish government, Erlander had lacked an efficient and close assistant. None had been found satisfactory. Ragnar Edenman, an undersecretary in the ministry of education who had met Palme during the preparations for the student parliament, brought the twenty- six-year old student union chair to Erlander’s attention. Edenman did not know whether Palme was enrolled in Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (SAP), but the prime minister had made it clear that the position he had in mind did not require party membership; he would “handle the politics.” What he needed was someone “quick, clever, and good at foreign languages.” 2

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Olof Palme: Moral Duty Is Discontent

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Recalling their earlier meeting, Erlander asked Palme to visit at the prime minister’s country house, ostensibly to talk about the latter’s travels in Asia, undertaken in his capacity as head of the student union. The real reason was to see whether Palme was qualified to help him reduce his workload. At the time, Erlander had only a typist and a night watchman working directly under him. The prime minister of Sweden had no political advisor, speech writer, press spokesman, chauffeur, or full-time security. When not using public transportation, he requested the loan of a car and driver from the postal service. As time passed and Palme made himself indispensable to the older man, his duties came to include the drafting of speeches, interpreting, and preparing for Erlander’s trips abroad.3 Although party membership was not required for the job, Palme nevertheless qualified. The previous autumn, he had enrolled as a member of the SAP’s Engelbrekt section, the well-to- do Stockholm neighborhood where he still lived in his mother’s home at Östermalmsgatan 36. Previously, as an avowed socialist, he had supported but had not joined the party. The term “social democratic” was widely adopted during the 1880s by North European workers’ parties to reveal both their Marxist inspiration and their ties to organized labor. (Related parties in such Latin countries as France and Italy simply preferred the term “socialist.”) And after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, when the most radical socialist elements broke with their respective parties to support the new Leninist movement in Russia, “democratic socialist” was widely used to distinguish these socialists from revolutionary communists. (Lenin had insisted on the “communist” nomenclature precisely to separate his followers from socialists who rallied to their respective country’s war effort in 1914.) In contrast to their communist counterparts, social democrats relied on parliamentary mechanisms to fight for universal suffrage and such labor legislation as the eight-hour workday. In Sweden, after the turn of the century and the introduction of compulsory military service, a third demand was added: disarmament and neutrality. Palme later acknowledged that his was not a dramatic conversion: “I came to socialism by a gradual and continuous process based on study and ref lection.” There was, he insisted, no “road to Damascus” revelation, and he remained suspicious of those “for whom socialism is revealed as a sort of mystical union, a metaphysical lightning f lash suddenly glimpsed.” He denied that his adoption of socialism revealed any sign of revolt against a family steeped in an enlightened yet conservative outlook.4 Subsequent reading and much travel on behalf of the student organization he belonged to had only strengthened his decision.

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Not everyone was so admiring. Palme’s upper class background continued to elicit comment—and bewilderment—on the Right. His father had directed a life insurance company, and the family lived in a large three- story house (today the Romanian embassy) in a fashionable district of Stockholm. The household employed a cook, maids, and a nanny for young Olof. He had attended a prestigious private school; earned a B.A. at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he had won a year’s scholarship; and studied law at the University of Stockholm. The conservative Svensk Tidskrift, in a laboriously detailed portrait, called him the administration’s “grey eminence,” adding, “how he became so lost is not completely clear.” The image depicted in the popular daily Expressen was no less f lattering: “Often he seems scornful, but whether this is genuine or a studied pose remains to be determined.” The newspaper similarly saw him as “imbecilic” for leaving his bourgeois origins.5 Critics on the Right saw him as a traitor to his class and accordingly voiced their disappointment. How could a talented man from such an esteemed and aff luent family change sides and become a socialist “in heart and soul?” The question was also raised in the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament) by conservative politicians, and they wondered why they had been unable to keep such a talented young man in their own ranks.6 Like her husband, Lisbet Beck-Friis, the quiet brunette whom he had met at Lund University and married in the spring of 1956, came from a similar upper class background. The sociology major had also broken with her conservative origins, planned to work with deprived children in the nation’s health services, and was a committed social democrat. Given his closeness to the prime minister, Palme was undoubtedly privy to one of the most startling and best-kept secrets of the foreign policy initiatives taken by Erlander. Despite oft-repeated official claims of absolute neutrality in the Cold War, Sweden had established military ties with the United States and NATO and cooperated extensively on matters of mutual military preparedness in the event of Soviet aggression. The country’s “lifeline” to the West was to have profound implications for Palme’s future political career. On April 1, 1960, the U.S. National Security Council held its 439th meeting, with President Eisenhower officiating. The main item on the agenda was a new policy document: U.S. Policy Toward Scandinavia. It provided a unilateral security guarantee to Sweden, the response to a series of concrete measures taken in the 1950s by Sweden “to facilitate wartime military cooperation with primarily the United Kingdom, the

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United States, Norway, and Denmark.” 7 After some reconsiderations and discussion, the document was approved by the American president on November 10. The guarantee provided that in the event of Soviet aggression, the United States would be prepared to come to the assistance of Sweden, unilaterally if Sweden were attacked alone, as part of a NATO or UN response to the aggression in the event of general war. 8 At the time, according to the British political scientist Simon Moores, Washington was concerned with the growth of neutralist sentiment in Norway and Denmark—despite their membership in NATO—as well as with their defensive shortcomings, particularly “Norway’s decision to maintain its no bases policy,” its “reject[ion] of stationing Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs) and [its] opposition to atomic storage sites on Norwegian soil.” 9 Washington also wanted to defend Sweden in order to ensure the security of the Fleet Ballistic Submarines’ deployment area off the Swedish coast. These American submarines carried Polaris missiles, capable of reaching targets within the USSR and so constituted a retaliatory strike force that could survive a Soviet surprise attack.10 Sweden was also given access to advanced U.S. weapons systems, although not to nuclear weapons. In return, Sweden permitted the deployment of the submarines in its territorial waters and extended several of its airport runways, rendering them capable of accommodating American B-52 bombers returning from retaliatory raids on the Soviet Union. Because a strong Swedish air force was considered necessary to keep Soviet anti- submarine aircraft from operating in missile launch areas, the Americans provided help in the development of the JA 37 Viggen jet fighter. On their part, Swedish scientists at the Royal Institute of Technology contributed to enhancing the target performance of the Polaris missiles.11 Neither the American nor the Swedish governments publicly disclosed the existence of the guarantee. (Eisenhower sought to avoid a leak from the twenty-two-member National Security Council.)12 Because this “lifeline” to the West ran counter to the Erlander government’s avowed neutrality policy, a policy favored by the Left but contested by conservatives who sought an open alliance with the West and membership in NATO, the subject was also kept secret from the Swedish public. And knowledge of it was limited to a handful of cabinet members and high-ranking military officials. Palme was perhaps one of the small circle briefed, most likely at the outset, but more likely as a select cabinet member in 1963, when he joined the government. The briefing was held because an air force colonel, arrested as a Soviet spy, had informed

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Moscow of Sweden’s secret ties to the West. Although rumors of them circulated and suspicions were raised, these ties remained largely unknown until 1994. At the end of the Cold War in 1989–1990, Swedish scholars and journalists began to explore the archives and learn of the secret contacts with NATO countries. Scattered and unsubstantiated stories led to the creation of a Commission on Neutrality Policy, which issued its report in 1994 confirming the cooperation undertaken.13 At the time, however, the Erlander government declared its opposition to any alliance, continued to insist that Sweden was following a policy of strict neutrality, and criticized its domestic opposition for suggesting military preparations—which, in reality, fell far short of what the government itself had secretly undertaken. Had Erlander prolonged his stay in office until Palme was mature enough to succeed him? Having appreciated the younger man’s potential soon after hiring him, the prime minister had taken steps to get him elected to the Riksdag. In 1957, he wrote to a respected social democrat in Småland, commending Palme as possessing “a political acuity that I have seldom seen in others . . . his special gift clearly lies in politics.” He was promoted to chief assistant secretary in 1961. Soon there was talk of making him party secretary. And in 1963, at age thirty- six, he would be named minister without portfolio (responsible for administrative coordination.)14 The ebullient Erlander called Palme “the most gifted personality we have been blessed with since Wigforss” (the economics minister responsible for much of the welfare legislation enacted in the 1930s). Describing the 1950s in his memoirs, the prime minister was to write that “Palme was equally responsible [with himself ] for the party’s ideological development, for its plans to enlarge the public sector and create the ‘strong society,’ the successor to Hansson’s ‘People’s Home.’ ”15 As a minister (MP) and a colleague of the prime minister, Palme was involved in the practical details of formulating and applying specific government programs. Still, he never abandoned a vision of his ideal society, and a taste for theoretical abstraction marked his speeches and published articles. References to such economists as Galbraith and Keynes, to such philosophers as Kolakowski and Sartre, and to such poets and dramatists as Goethe and Brecht were sprinkled among them. He feared that his party was insufficiently forceful with regard to its stated goals of solidarity and equality, and he deplored the time and energy wasted on such issues as religion and the monarchy that he considered irrelevant to them. When the reputed writer Vilhelm Moberg

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in a literary journal accused Social Democrats of lacking ideas, Palme replied that “Moberg behaves in the society of 1959 as if nothing happened since his membership in a youth club in 1914 [and] when he calls for struggle against the state church and the monarchy, Moberg raises false issues.”16 Not an apologist for reality but rather a critic of it, Palme accepted as his own the maxim put forward by the socialist writer Artur Lundkvist: “Moral duty is discontent on a large scale.” Nevertheless, his conservative and liberal critics found him unprincipled and arrogant, an arriviste cloaked in certainties. As one of the first Swedish political figures to appear on television and unfamiliar with how to make use of it, his demeanor seemed to confirm the judgment of his opponents. An excessive zeal in debates and a marked tendency to grimace aroused the irritation of viewers. The image projected was that of smug superiority. Later, Palme tried to blame it on nervousness, but even Erlander was forced to admit that the young man showed an aggressiveness that was new and foreign to Swedish political life. Economically, for Sweden as for many other industrialized countries, the late 1950s and the 1960s was a golden age. Both productivity and real wages rose, as did leisure time, leaving people optimistic about the future. Only the threat of a labor shortage (in a nation with fewer people than New York City) posed a problem, but immigration from neighboring Nordic countries, especially from Finland but also from southern Europe, ensured continued growth.17 Increased government revenues permitted enlargement of the welfare state that the Social Democratic Party had built with prewar social legislation. It included compensation for job injury and sickness, old age, and (later) unemployment. The SAP came to power in Sweden for the first time in 1917. Industrialization had led to the growth of a labor movement, and the extension of the franchise gave workers political representation through the Social Democratic Party founded twenty- eight years earlier. Allied with the liberals, it formed a left-wing government, which secured a woman’s right to vote and the eight-hour day in 1919 and 1920, respectively. Then, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the rise of communist parties elsewhere, Swedish politics split into competing blocs: on the one side, the two socialist parties, the SAP and the Communists; on the other, nonsocialist parties referred to by their left-wing opponents as “bourgeois.” These included the conservatives; the liberals (later called the Folkpartiet, or Peoples Party—after

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having been joined by organized freethinkers and libertarians in the 1930s); and an agrarian, or Farmers’ Party—renamed the Center after 1957. (Later, such smaller parties as the Greens, Christian Democrats, and a right-wing populist New Democratic Party would come into existence.) The Social Democrats set the pace of reform ever since, although other parties—in a political context further inclined to the Left than in the United States—were involved as well. Indeed, a characteristic of Swedish politics was—and is—a desire to find consensus solutions, generally after extensive studies by commissions of inquiry during which various political parties and interest groups have the chance to present their views. Between the two world wars, beginning in 1932, the SAP came to and would remain in power for an almost unbroken forty-four years— although not always alone or with a majority. In a Riksdag parliamentary debate in 1928, party leader Albin Hansson had used the term that was to symbolize party policy. He spoke of the folkhem, the “People’s Home,” in which the inhabitants of the country were to care about each other. The goal envisaged was a more egalitarian society and a socially secure welfare state designed to meet the needs created by unemployment, sickness, and old age. And it was to be achieved by reforms rather than by revolution. Both to pay for the welfare legislation enacted and to secure full employment during a time of economic depression, party economists— the so- called “Stockholm school”—resorted to deficit financing. This recourse to what would later be called economic “pump priming” was carried out independently of Keynesian inf luence. The debt incurred was to be repaid with the taxes coming from newly employed workers. The downside? An increase in inf lation, although mild by later standards; and dissatisfaction with, but a general willingness to endure, rising taxes. By the late 1930s, unemployment in Sweden had virtually disappeared, leaving admiring foreign observers to describe the country as following a “middle way” between free-market capitalism and totalitarian fascism or communism as the means by which economic depression could be overcome. Although the public sector expanded, industry and commerce remained almost entirely in private hands. The path taken in the 1930s was suspended during World War II because of rising military expenses and supply problems but resumed after the German defeat. During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, when having emerged intact because of the country’s neutrality, Swedish industry enjoyed a head start on other nations. A new comprehensive law on old- age pensions, as well as legislation providing for child

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allowances, health insurance, education, and tax reorganization all favored a wider distribution of wealth. At the end of the 1950s and with real poverty having vanished, many nonsocialists believed that the era of reforms was winding to a close. Liberal Party chief Bertil Ohlin complained that the high tax policies of the SAP, which he called “the party of decline,” had ravaged personal budgets, and he asked that people be given greater opportunities to decide on how to organize their lives. For Erlander and Palme, however, the work of social democracy was not over, and the next phase of social transformation had already begun. Inf luenced by Galbraith’s Age of Affluence, Palme identified education and housing as future targets for reform and continued to advance in party ranks. In November 1965, two years after he had entered the government, Erlander promoted him to minister of communication and transportation, providing additional ballast for his role as crown prince, as heir to the throne. Few doubted that he would succeed Erlander and consequently be named the next prime minister.18 One of Palme’s first tasks in his new post was to take responsibility for planning the changeover from driving on the left, in effect for over two centuries, to driving on the right. The question had been put to a referendum ten years before and was defeated. But by the mid-sixties, most Swedes had come to the conclusion that the country must conform to continental usage. The change became effective at 5:00 a.m. on September 3, 1967 and would cost 600 million kronor to implement. Palme was in charge of 8,000 police and conscripts, in addition to 19,000 volunteers placed at pedestrian crossings, ready to help. The most thorough preparations had taken place: everything from retraining seeing-eye dogs and relocating bus doors to informing soon-to-be released prisoners of the changeover had been thought of. For critics, however, all this provided yet another example of the long-time one-party rule and spirit of conformity that had allegedly made Sweden a “neo-totalitarian” society, or at the very least, a “nannystate.” Still, the planning proved highly effective: in the first fourteen days after the changeover, only 284 road accidents causing injuries and sixteen deaths had occurred, a smaller number than that which had taken place during the two-week period before the change. It was a triumph for the new minister and contributed to his rise in public esteem.19 Unintentionally attracting media attention to himself, Palme became identified with the alleged Swedish sexual revolution of the 1960s as censorship laws were scrapped, and a few sleazy sex clubs opened their doors. A film that included Palme giving a political interview also

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featured nude scenes from the controversial movie Jag är nyfiken gul (“I Am Curious Yellow”). All this furthered an impression, particularly in the United States, of Sweden as a hotbed of dissipation. At home, the film was condemned as pornographic and prompted some of his more puritanical opponents to demand his resignation. Swedish society, however, remained remarkably open—and no less so than at the governmental level. Those wanting to get in touch with their member of parliament had only to look up the number in the phone book and dial. Palme told how someone once rang him one night at 3:00 a.m. The caller asked whether he was speaking to the minister of transportation. When Palme said yes, he was asked when the next train was leaving from Eslöv to Lomma. And for an entire year after he became prime minister, Palme’s home number remained listed in the published directory. 20 The SAP celebrated its sixty-fifth anniversary in 1964. With eyes on the future, the party called its program, “Toward New Audacious Goals.” At the Young Socialist Congress, held in the Stockholm Town Hall, Palme delivered his celebrated speech, Politik är att vilja (literally, “Politics Is to Want Something.” The title was also to become the title of the first published compilation of his speeches.) Social democratic policy, he insisted, embodies the will to seek change because “change holds out the promise of improvement, nourishes fantasy and the power to act, [and] stimulates dreams and visions.” In so saying, he reaffirmed his belief in the importance of ideology: “While we no longer believe in any absolute solution, change can make utopia a reality.” In another speech delivered in May of that year, Palme cited his party’s recent achievements: high school registration had tripled in the past ten years; a booming economy that had made immigration into Sweden a necessity had created 50,000 new jobs in the hospitality sector alone; and during the previous four years, a million people found new lodging (although critics found the huge suburban apartment blocs cold and lifeless). The government correctly believed that the greater the prosperity, the higher—not the lower—the demand for such public services as schools, health, and transportation. And in no other country did public services increase as rapidly as in Sweden. At the beginning of the 1970s, expenditures on them would take over half of the gross domestic product. 21 The voters showed their approval: the Social Democrats responsible for these programs had remained in office (aside from a few weeks in the summer of 1936) since 1932, either alone or in a governing coalition. Since the fall of 1957, when the six-year alliance with the Farmers Party

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was dissolved, they had governed alone: their leader, Tage Erlander, having served as prime minister uninterruptedly since 1946. As Erlander neared sixty-five years of age, there was much speculation about his departure and his successor. Although the likely choice, Palme claimed to reject the idea. “I don’t have plans,” he told a journalist and then resorted, loftily, to the third person: “One’s only hope is to occupy oneself with issues where one can accomplish interesting things.” Yet he spoke frequently in the Riksdag on behalf of the government on topics that ranged from the question of morning prayers on public radio to the efficiency of icebreakers in northern waters. In defending a democratic socialist agenda, he repeatedly took pains to distinguish it from that advanced by the communists. While not opposed to the idea of nationalization, he insisted that the Social Democrats rejected what communists chose to call socialism. Communism, built on “regimes of terror,” stood in “in f lagrant contradiction with the ideal of liberty, and [was] moreover inefficient and bureaucratic.” 22 Often in his office past midnight and then carrying home documents, his capacity for work had only increased. Chosen to speak for the Social Democrats in a televised debate with Ohlin, he tried to project a less arrogant image. It was apparent that he was being groomed as Erlander’s heir. Then there erupted the controversy over Vietnam. In the mid-1960s, the American war in Vietnam broke into the Swedish political agenda. Responsible for the opposition to the U.S. involvement were the forces associated with the Left. In part, this was because both the socialist and trade union movements saw themselves as transnational, as belonging to organizations that involved themselves in issues debated on regional and international, in contrast to local levels: for example, the Nordic Union and the Socialist International. More to the point, left-wing elements saw the U.S.-led war as a continuation of earlier French colonial struggles to retain Indochina. Solidarity with (North)Vietnam was first—and most energetically—expressed by the Vietcong’s National Liberation Front (FNL) supporters who stood outside the Systembolaget (the state wine and spirit shops) on Saturdays and collected money for the “cause,” sold their “Vietnam Bulletins” on subway steps, obstructed pedestrians in Stockholm’s Hötorget (a large square), and fought with the police. They threw eggs at the American embassy and burned American f lags. One analyst wrote that “in a sense they became a kind of icon of a contemporary lifestyle: [what was called] ‘the FNL movement’ ref lected the times: the student revolt and the ‘68 movement.’ ” Normally staid Swedish political life took on

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a “new activism” as protesters dominated public debate on America’s Vietnam policy for almost a decade. Palme’s fierce opposition to the war was both a cause and a consequence of this activism. 23 Prime Minister Erlander believed that the U.S. position f lew in the face of a basic democratic value: namely, that a major power should not be intervening in the affairs of a smaller one. Both his foreign minister, Torsten Nilsson; and Palme, who as a student activist had denounced France’s struggle to hold on to Indochina, were the two key cabinet members shaping Swedish policy toward the conf lict. In July 1965, as acting head of government while Erlander was on vacation, Palme stated publicly that the Social Democratic Party should side with the oppressed; that is, favor the (North) Vietnamese, although he avoided directly naming the United States. The contradiction between the government’s—and Palme’s—refusal to support the American cause, on the one hand, and the existence of the “lifeline” to the United States was becoming clear but only to high-ranking Social Democratic government officials and top echelons in the military. The existence of plans for joint military cooperation in the event of war remained hidden from the public. 24 Palme’s speech about Vietnam given to a gathering of Christian Social Democrats in Gävle, a town north of Stockholm, came as a shock, not because he was expressing ideas becoming accepted by a broad range of opinion, but because he was going beyond opposition to the war itself– opposition that was putting an end to the consensus among the parties regarding matters of foreign policy. Rather than seeking a resolution to the conf lict, he seemed to prefer an American defeat. Palme later maintained that his remarks were similar to those stated by him in 1953, and that they had been cleared with both the prime and foreign affairs ministers. Again, his theme was that of the right of a people to national independence. “The moral base of democratic socialism,” he insisted, “obliges us to stand on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor, on the side of the wretched and the impoverished against those who exploit them . . . we support the right of all small nations to independence.” Insofar as the Vietnamese were struggling against big landlords, usurers and corruption, he added, the struggle in principle resembled that led by the workers’ movement in Sweden. Only the means differed inasmuch as “we have benefitted from the peaceful transformation of society.” 25 A violent reaction from the Right was to be expected. Supporters of the FNL—and, specifically Olof Palme—were accused of f lirting with

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communism and serving the interests of Peking. (Only in the 1980s did China enforce use of the city’s official name, Beijing.) Big business and the nonsocialist parties feared that a government policy identifying Sweden with the victims of the bombings, rather than one carefully pleading for reconciliation, would undermine confidence in the nation’s foreign policy and, more to the point, result in a loss of trade with the United States. Others agreed that “little Sweden” should abstain from condemning a superpower with which it enjoyed economic and cultural ties. 26 Liberal Party leader Ohlin, totally unaware of his country’s military relations with Washington, argued that it was wrong to criticize the Saigon (South Vietnamese) government when Sweden had relations with it. His soon-to-be successor, Sven Wedén, published four articles depicting Palme’s ideas as dangerous, as leading the Americans to believe that Sweden had joined the Soviet camp, and raised the possibility of U.S.-imposed commercial sanctions. Stung, Palme replied that “one cannot impede the expression of an honestly conceived opinion; [free expression] cannot be pro-rated on the volume and nature of our exports.” Such concerns about exports had inf luenced Swedish policy in two world wars, but most Social Democrats, following the party leadership, came to accept Palme’s statement as a matter of principle, even if disagreeing with all of his views. More than principle accounted for the Social Democratic condemnation of the Vietnam War. The party’s stand ref lected mounting popular sentiment and evoked public support, especially from the younger generation. The SAP feared being outf lanked on the Left, and it was in part the desire to reach out to the many opponents of the war that prompted the government’s 1967 decision to offer sanctuary for American draft evaders. In local elections the previous September, the Social Democrats lost 7 percent of the votes won four years ago, while those of the Communist Party had risen nearly 3 percent. Thus, the charge made by the nonsocialist parties—and by the Americans—that the Social Democrats were exploiting popular unhappiness with the Vietnam War to gain political advantage was far from baseless. A generation of Swedish youth had mobilized, a mobilization not seen since the Spanish Civil War. In February 1967, demonstrators surrounded the U.S. embassy in Stockholm and burned its f lag. 27 A case can therefore be made that it was not only long-held principles of national liberation for indigenous peoples but a growing popular opposition to the Vietnam War that was also pushing Palme to his much-publicized resistance to the American role in it.

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Vietnam again surged to the fore of public attention when on February 21, 1968, the anti-war Swedish Committee for Vietnam (Skf V), organized a torchlight parade in Stockholm. While the Committee repudiated window breaking and egg throwing by those hostile to the American cause, it also acknowledged the democratic intentions of the Johnson administration and called for a negotiated resolution of the conf lict. Yet, like the more radical FNL movement, it opposed the U.S. intervention in what it viewed as a civil war. At the head of the parade was the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow. Disappointed by American policy in Southeast Asia, Palme had accepted an invitation from the committee to take part. As he described the event to French journalist Serge Richard, the thousands of marchers made it difficult for him to make his way to the head of the cortege, where he was expected. Finally, he did so and found himself face to face with the ambassador. Whether surprised by the latter’s presence or not, Palme did not leave his side and was rightly accused by his critics of not wishing to do so. His subsequent speech pointed out that the FNL was more widely representative of Vietnamese opinion than the Saigon junta allied to the United States but was receiving considerably less attention. Palme’s words stirred memories both of his earlier condemnation of the French in Vietnam and his 1965 denunciation of American involvement. Palme asked what right did the Americans have to deny the Vietnamese their right to choose their own government. He reminded his listeners that at the time of the French withdrawal, President Eisenhower had predicted that Ho Chi Minh would win a freely held election. In the past three years, more bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than on Nazi Germany during the last world war, and the minister expressed feelings of “anxiety, sympathy, and despair” at the destruction created. The Americans, he concluded, must unconditionally cease their bombing and recognize the Vietnamese Liberation Front as a partner in any talks.28 Photos of Palme and the ambassador walking side by side and holding torches appeared in 367 U.S. newspapers and hundreds of others around the world. 29 His participation, which emboldened the anti-war movement, had required courage; no other European leader who shared those sentiments had dared such open criticism. Two weeks later, on March 8, Washington recalled the American ambassador from Stockholm to protest Palme’s presence at the demonstration. In Sweden, the conservative parties demanded his resignation, and Dagens Nyheter, which had initially supported him, joined in the reproach. His accusers blamed him for not having invented an excuse to leave when he had found himself face to face with the ambassador. “He could have pretended a

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pain in his legs.” Palme would reply that no pain was called for when he demonstrated against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.30 He was called a “traitor to his country.” Wedén, now the head of the Liberal Party, three years earlier had charged that the USSR was running Swedish foreign policy. Now others said so, too. After the United States recalled its ambassador, Conservative Party leader Gösta Bohman took Palme to task and repeated demands for his resignation. The government and the SAP closed ranks behind the minister, portraying his opponents as “American stooges” and insisting on long-held official proclamations of neutrality in the Cold War. Neutralist ideology, as Robert Dalsjö, a senior advisor in the Secretariat for Strategic Planning in the Swedish Ministry of Defense, later put it—was replacing realism, that is, was replacing the lifeline to the West—as a distinguishing characteristic of Swedish policy. Still, one of the editors of Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter played the event down and even found praise for Palme and also for Erlander, who had defended him. Senator Fulbright, who shared Palme’s views of the war, sent him a letter of support. And in 1969, under a Palme-led government, Sweden would not only recognize North Vietnam, the first country to do so but promise $40 million in aid without making an end to the war a precondition.31 On May 1 1968, Greek actress—and activist—Melina Mercouri accompanied Palme, whose left-wing celebrity status was now assured, in the annual May Day rally. Both denounced the South Vietnamese military governing junta. When Palme stated that “we ourselves define the Swedish policy of neutrality,” everyone understood the reference: neutrality and opposition to the American-led war were not contradictory. From the standpoint of Sweden’s “lifeline” to the West, the most significant consequence of Palme’s anti-American rhetoric lay precisely in this strong reaffirmation of Swedish neutrality. Preparations for the reception of help from the West, and from the United States in particular, began to stagnate and would finally die out in the mid-1980s. This happened not because of Washington’s hostility to the Swedish stand but because of the Swedish government’s reluctance to continue such preparations. Dalsjö’s explanation is worth repeating at length: From the mid-1960s came the “active foreign policy” that bore the hallmark of Olof Palme, charged with morality and often with barbs directed against the United States. In a few years, the image of Sweden was transformed from that of a reticent and pro-Western neutral to that of an outspoken and righteous champion of peoples seeking liberation from colonialism and “U.S. imperialism.” This meant not only that Sweden

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distanced itself politically from the West but also that neutrality policy was given a moral element it had hitherto lacked . . . The air of goodness that the new role endowed had a positive effect on self-perception, and neutrality merged with modernity and the welfare state into something of a national meta-ideology. Being Swedish was to be neutral, being neutral was good, thus it was good to be a Swede.32

Sweden’s policy of neutrality, then, certainly that face of it presented to the public, began to change, as Dalsjö put it, “from expediency to ideology, and cemented a widespread image of neutrality as morally superior and part of Swedishness.” As this attitude gained ground among civilian and military decision makers, preparations for cooperation with the West “slackened,” and fewer people were kept informed about the “real state of affairs.” Admittedly, this slackening did not start with Palme; it had its roots in the reaffirmation of neutrality and denial of ties to the West that Erlander was forced to make in 1959 (before any guarantee had been given), when a domestic political squabble over foreign and security policy had threatened the life of the government should any earlier cooperation with the West be revealed. Erlander also believed it was necessary to reassure the USSR that Sweden would in fact remain neutral in the event of war. But the now morally charged active foreign policy and Palme’s sharp criticism of America’s warfare in Vietnam significantly widened the gap between public proclamations of neutrality and the reality of cooperation with the West. It raised the stakes (of the government’s political survival) should the truth about this reality become known to the public.33 By voluntarily stepping down as party leader (and consequently, as prime minister), Erlander gave Palme his chance. Two-thirds of the delegates to the SAP’s October 1969 Congress unanimously elected him as party leader, which elevated him to the premiership. Erlander had served as both prime minister and party leader, and Palme, having risen to power, carried on the tradition.34 It was a favorable time to become head of government: the Social Democrats basked in their absolute majority held in the Riksdag; there was no sign of the oil crisis that would strike five years later; unemployment was down; and salaries were up. And the new prime minister was determined to pursue an aggressive agenda. Five months after the Vietnam demonstration, Palme spoke in Malmö. His subject was the August 21 decision of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations to send tanks into Prague to reassert

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control of Czechoslovakia. His virulent speech began and ended with the same words previously used with regard to Vietnam: “The aspiration of a people to liberty can never be crushed by violence. It will live and finally triumph.” His opposition to the war remained firm, and it resulted in (his) government’s decision to recognize North Vietnam and to continue granting American draft evaders and deserters political asylum in Sweden. American- Swedish relations sank to a new low.35 The honeymoon generally accorded new heads of government was short lived. In December 1969, 5,000 (relatively well-paid) miners in the north of Sweden went out on strike over the issue of payment for piecework. They lacked confidence in their union, which had negotiated an agreement with the state (the mines in the north were state owned), which consequently made the strike illegal. Palme did not back down and, in so doing, defended the policy of “wage solidarity” favoring the lowest paid workers in the country. When two months later, however, the strike fizzled out, he was much relieved. Not only miners were left dissatisfied: leftists had counted on the new prime minister to hasten the advent of a socialist society that would grant more aid to Vietnam and the Third World. On the other hand, as the only head of government in Western Europe who had taken part in demonstrations against the American-led war in Vietnam, he continued to incur Washington’s animosity. Ignoring his criticisms of the Eastern bloc, much of the American press called him “Red Olof.” President Nixon took an excessively long time to name a new ambassador to Sweden. U.S. dockworkers threatened to avoid handling Swedish products, and patriotic Americans were urged to boycott Saabs and Volvos.36 In the months that followed, Palme visited several European countries to explore Sweden’s ties to the European Community and decide whether they should be expanded. (In 1971, he would lead Sweden’s rejection of the bid for membership in the community as incompatible with neutrality.) He also went to Africa and the United States, where he spoke at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations and despite the complaints of some alumni, received an honorary degree from Kenyon College. However, President Nixon did not meet with him; dockworkers demonstrated with chants of “Palme, Go Home”; and the conservative press rejected his comparison of the American invasion of Cambodia with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet Palme’s published article in Dagens Nyheter on July 29, 1970, on the My Lai massacre was surprisingly moderate in tone. Ordinary boys were driven to acts of inhumanity, he wrote, and any of us might react similarly. The solution lay in not placing oneself in such a situation, and the prime

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minister was becoming convinced that more Americans were turning against the war.37 The American social critic Michael Harrington was much impressed by Palme when he accompanied the Swedish head of government on a visit to Lund University. Palme fielded questions from students, some of whom were radical Marxists critical of their country for “selling out” to capitalist interests. The prime minister cooly replied that the revolutionary parties in the world, “after carrying out their violent upheavals,” would send delegates to Sweden “to find out what to do.” Harrington was taken aback by a head of government taking the time to debate radical students at length, actually win some of them over, and wondered whether he could do the same. Also found impressive by the American was the sight of a prime minister standing in line with his fellow citizens at the airport check-in.38 If domestic policy dominated his life, being head of government foreign affairs remained on Palme’s front burner. This not only ref lected the prime minister’s interests but, in large measure, issued from the international nature of socialist ideals. Like his predecessors, Hjalmar Branting, Rickard Sandler, and Per Albin Hansson, Palme set his stamp on Swedish foreign policy. He worked closely with his foreign minister, and as representative of a new generation soon became a spokesperson for a new internationalism. In reaction to the insularity shown during much of World War II, Palme sought, in the words of two political scientists, to “raze walls and open borders.”39 Fiercely supportive of Swedish neutrality, Palme could not help but recall how some West European states had praised the policy as having contributed to European stability. Now, he said, they criticized Sweden for not entering what is now called the European Union. He acknowledged that his government had displayed “a little Gaullism,” i.e., economic nationalism, but denied charges of isolationism and pointed to the close ties kept with fellow social democratic parties.40 Palme soon recognized how East-West tensions had eased with Willy Brandt’s “Eastern Policy”—the latter’s recognition of the sovereignty of the two German states and the inviolability of the border between them—and especially with the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation, which the Swedish prime minister saw as “the closest we have come, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, to a formal peace treaty.” Whether because of his anti-U.S. Vietnam attitude, his conviction that Cold War tensions had indeed eased, his ideological commitment to neutrality, or a combination of all these

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things, within months of his arrival in power, Palme “resurrected” Erlander’s 1959 statement that categorically rejected preparations or consultations for military cooperation with members of a great-power alliance. This strong reaffirmation of neutrality policy became a standing feature of Swedish defense commission reports until the end of the Cold War.41 Even so, public declarations, whether made by Erlander or Palme, did not mean that a decision was taken to end the relationship with the United States and the West. On the contrary, measures condemned in public were secretly condoned. Navy head Bengt Lundvall related that he was told by Palme to maintain close ties to his American counterparts, “as these were of the greatest importance.” Lundvall, according to Överbefälhavaren, or Chief of Operations (ÖB) Stig Synnergren, was encouraged by Palme and Foreign Minister Sven Andersson to attend a conference of naval chiefs. Synnergren added that Palme had told him: “Now when I am having a row with the Americans, for God’s sake make sure that we have good relations in the military field at least.” Thus, the diplomatic and political conf lict between Sweden and the United States did not initially affect the military relationship: the f low of equipment and technology did not ebb, and high-level military visits continued to take place. It was this contradictory policy that prompted accusations of Palme as “double dealing” when stories of the Western guarantee finally emerged, as being perfectly aware that the same B-52 bombers condemned for attacking North Vietnam could be relied on to come to Sweden’s aid in the event of Soviet aggression. And a painful awareness of the contradiction between stated neutrality and anticipated cooperation was all the more reason to keep the promise of Western support secret.42 Only when the contradiction between “declaratory policy” and the reality of cooperation became so great that disclosure of the “lifeline” would become an embarrassment—and even a threat—to the government’s survival, that it was allowed gradually to die. The Swedish government’s sharp criticism of American policies in Vietnam (and Cuba), and the offense and frustration they generated in Washington, had led to a U.S. ban on high-level visits by (and to) American defense officials. But exceptions “deemed in the American interest,” and “working-level contacts on mutual interest,” were to be maintained. Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and other generals and admirals came to Sweden to consult with their military counterparts.43 Still, what Robert Dalsjö called “declaratory doctrine,” the official public line on neutrality that sharply contrasted with Palme’s

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condemnation of America’s Vietnam policy and his morally charged active foreign policy, was taking its toll. As Dalsjö put it, all this “must have raised the potential for damage even further. One might imagine the consequences had it become publicly known during the early 1970s that the Swedish government secretly counted on the US air force to save it from a Soviet invasion.” Another Swedish scholar could not have made the point more clearly: “Whoever knew enough and could prove it, could in one blow depose the government and perhaps break apart the Social Democratic Party.”44 After 1970, participants in Swedish war games, maneuvers, and lectures showed themselves increasingly unhappy with preparations requiring cooperation with the West. Such training, it was said, amounted to a violation of neutrality policy. In the 1971 war games, America’s role was limited to a possible provider of imports, not as a military partner, and the games omitted any inclusion of nuclear weapons. And as the decade progressed, the circle of those informed of the guarantee, both in the military and the government, shrank considerably. As political and military retirees were replaced by newcomers, they—and even incoming cabinet ministers—were not let in on the secret. The “life-line” was indeed being lost.45 Although the prime minister denied that he was a Marxist, he defended a radical version of social democracy. He clearly wanted to go beyond the social insurance made available by the welfare state. In a speech to the SAP’s 1969 conference, published in the collection, Att vilja gå vidare [Wanting to Go Further], he agreed with Alva Myrdal, who submitted a report to the party arguing that the welfare state should evolve to one embodying greater egalitarianism.46 Nevertheless, Palme warned the congress that the party and its leader must never get too far in front of the public: “Swedish democracy.” he insisted, “is a popular movement which has never been run and never will be led by a single man.” The prime minister recognized that because the party was identified as socialist, many foreigners were led to think of Sweden as a socialist country. While acknowledging its large public sector, he tirelessly pointed out that over ninety percent of the nation’s business firms were privately owned and that there was no significant movement to nationalize them.47 The September 1970 election was Palme’s first as party head and as prime minister. The lack of enthusiasm for his internationalism, the preference of many Swedes that he spend more time on domestic policy, and the SAP’s program calling for greater economic

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equality—and the high taxes required to achieve it—cost the party votes. The social democrats lost their absolute majority, winning only 45 percent of the vote. The government remained in place but was now forced to rely on Communist support in the new Riksdag. Palme had rejected talk of a coalition with the Center Party. Only in “exceptional situations” would he consider it, fearing that such an alliance would replace “free parliamentary debate” between the government and its opposition with deals made in the executive branch of the government. Yet the loss of seats came as a bitter blow. The prime minister acknowledged that voters might have questioned the SAP’s radical approach and its drive for greater economic equality, but he insisted that the party would not abandon its program. “Socialists,” he said, “fight better when at a disadvantage.” Ironically, although seen in the United States as a radical, and although he quickly denounced as a violation of human rights, the coup that resulted in the overthrow of popularly elected Chilean President Salvatore Allende had the Swedish government receiving refugees taking shelter in Santiago’s Swedish embassy; much of Swedish youth continued to find him a member of the establishment.48 Conversely, a growing number of Swedes failed to appreciate Palme’s toleration for American draft evaders—and deserters. Many were “f lower children,” who did not conform to the more subdued temperament of their new homeland. The young American recipients of the country’s generous welfare policies were seen as parasites and—when a gang was found smuggling considerable amounts of LSD into the country—as corrupting Swedish youth. There was also resentment of South European immigrants (“black heads”), despite Palme’s pleas for cooperation and consideration. His excessively informal style, moreover, went beyond even what his fellow citizens were accustomed to. On one occasion, when his car broke down on the road to Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, he hitchhiked the remaining distance. On another, he showed up at a press conference in jeans and a t- shirt.49 Yet it was the Vietnam War that preoccupied Palme. The “Christmas bombings” of the North in 1972 intensified his opposition to it: he saw this resumption of bombing by the Nixon administration as an American-led campaign to destroy the resources enabling the country to survive. Earlier that year, the largest international conference held in Stockholm up to that time, the UN’s Conference on the Human Environment, took place. The views expressed revealed Palme’s fierce

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opposition to what he now called America’s war on the Vietnamese environment. In an earlier speech to the Swedish Social Democratic Youth Organization’s Twentieth Congress, he had called for an end to “the mass destruction, to the environmental war, to the extermination of a people.” Washington wanted to avoid the humiliation of a military setback, but “the greatest humiliation for the people of America would be a military victory for the United States in Vietnam.”50 On hearing the news of the destruction of a hospital, a distraught Palme got on the phone to Brandt and other social democratic leaders, pleading for a multilateral response to the bombing. On the dining room table at Vällingby, late on the night of December 23, he drafted his controversial public Christmas Eve Declaration: One must call things by their name. What’s happening today in Vietnam is a form of torture . . . What is perpetrated there is the torture of human beings, the torture of a nation to humiliate it, to force it to surrender . . . This is why the bombings are a crime. One finds many similarities in modern history—Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka. Violence has triumphed. But the judgment of history is severe for those responsible. There is now another name to add to that list: Hanoi—Christmas 1972.

Palme’s comparisons between American conduct in Vietnam and the Nazi atrocities of World War II enraged the Nixon administration— and much of the United States. The State Department was furious, the American president took it as a gross insult, and another crisis erupted in American- Swedish relations as Washington once more summoned home its ambassador and made it clear that the new Swedish ambassador, Gustav Möller, was no longer welcome.51 Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s foreign policy adviser, was especially upset by the comparison with the worst atrocities of twentieth century. The next day, Palme sent a message to Nixon, perhaps intended to calm the president’s anger but wrongly interpreted as a retreat. The message accused Washington of violating not only a Vietnamese national liberation movement but “the most noble traditions of the American people.” Palme expressed his “deepest anxiety over the human suffering which is continuing in Vietnam.” The war “created sorrow and disappointment . . . feelings which I share with millions of people in Sweden and in other countries.” He feared a potential loss of faith in democracy on the part of young people and begged Nixon to stop the bombings and renew efforts to secure a negotiated peace.52

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Far from condemning U.S. policy makers, conservatives and much of the nonsocialist press in Sweden took aim at Palme. They asked him to withdraw his declaration. He refused, told a press conference that many at home and abroad supported his stand, and pointed to the 1,200 letters of appreciation received from the United States. For his conservative opponents, the declaration was proof of his anti-Americanism. For Palme, the letters of approval were proof of his admiration for the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights. He told Nixon that because 700,000 names were affixed to a petition to stop the bombing, the Swedish people “sanctioned our protest.”53 Still, his stand found no equivalent in any other neutral government—neutrality doesn’t condemn us to remain quiet, he would argue—and his opponents continued to accuse him of disregarding Swedish security interests and of pursuing “a domestic foreign policy,” certainly one incompatible with traditional neutrality. Thus, Palme’s Christmas Declaration marked his third open intervention in the Vietnam War: it had followed the Gävle speech and his walk with the North Vietnamese ambassador in the 1968 protest march. Each had generated both respect and suspicion, admiration and hostility. He himself viewed his public protests as the moments in his life that he was most proud of. Palme had always warned against overestimating the role of the individual in politics, but the attention paid him by the media was acknowledged by Dagens Nyheter in its review of the year 1972: “Sweden has, not the Palme government, but Palme. Almost everything revolves around him, the negative and the positive.” Doubtless, the observation came as no surprise to Gösta Bohman, the Conservative Party chief since 1971. Having scrutinized Palme in countless speeches, articles, and books, he had, Bohman said, been predisposed to that fixation for years.54 Clearly, the prime minister believed in strong leadership and a highly centralized government, which, in turn, required a forceful head. Committed to defending democratic practice, an authoritarian streak—strengthened by occasional displays of arrogance—had nevertheless emerged. Palme’s political program was responsible for a great deal of the bitterness shown by opponents. Despite the SAP’s loss of the absolute majority held since 1968, the prime minister began to implement the legislative agenda drafted by Swedish Social Democracy during that decade. In speeches to political and union groups and to the Riksdag, he referred to his party’s program as “the renovation of the life of labor.”55 Over the years, he said, we built a powerful public sector. And in the years that followed, one reform relentlessly followed another: in

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1974, a law favoring old aged and handicapped workers; in 1975, a law regulating the conditions for dismissal; in 1976, a law enabling workers to share in managerial decision making. There was also the first formulation of the controversial wage earner investment funds. Although drafted in the early 1970s, it was not to be debated and (partially) enacted for another decade and not to be (weakly) implemented until 1983. By the end of that decade, however, a free market ideology had gained ground and brought development of the Swedish model to a standstill. Conservatives had found a new leader who appeared capable of bringing together a more united opposition in the national elections scheduled for that year (1973). Thorbjörn Fälldin, a sheep farmer from the far northern province of Ångermanland and now the chief of the Center Party, was their candidate for prime minister. Coming from a totally different background and holding views widely apart from his, Palme found him difficult to deal with. In the first of several confrontations between the two men, a televised debate held in Malmö, Fälldin accused the SAP of failing to take steps to fight unemployment. More generally, he criticized the Social Democratic government for centralizing and concentrating power. Palme’s reaction was typical: on a visit to Småland, he learned that a dairy cooperative planned to relocate to Kalmar, costing twenty-nine people their jobs. “Equality thanks to decentralization,” the prime minister wryly commented.56 In a May 10, 1973, letter to his two social democratic colleagues, Brandt and Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, Palme took objection to the belief that there were limits on how far the (welfare) state could further material progress and the “quality of life”—and stated his intention to support the proposal that would prove the most contentious of those advanced during the next two decades. He said that he would ask the Riksdag for legislation enabling state administered—but employee controlled—funds to buy shares of private enterprises. The funds, fed by corporate profits and the larger share of state control they made possible, were to ensure the movement of capital to industry and so guarantee high levels of employment. Palme did not deny that the process would give wage earners greater inf luence over the economy, and he hoped that the scheme could become European-wide.57 The draft proposal to implement such funds was to emerge from the economic theorist employed by the trade union movement, Rudolf Meidner, three years later. In the interim, an Employment Security Bill that guaranteed

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wage earners protection against arbitrary dismissal, provided greater hiring of the disabled, and created more rights for shop stewards, was enacted. In the 1972 election, the Center Party won a quarter of the votes, its coalition allies about the same, while the SAP, with only 43.6 percent, won fewer votes than it did three years before and the lowest number since 1932. Each bloc, socialist and nonsocialist, held 175 seats in Parliament, but because Social Democrats and Communists had gained slightly more votes, Palme continued to govern. At the end of the year and in early 1974, the economic crisis resulting from the spiraling rise in fuel costs hit Sweden. Lacking coal or oil of its own and with nuclear energy still in its infancy, the country, at the time, possessed only limited hydroelectric power. The price of energy soared, fuel rationing was imposed, and an economic slowdown loomed. The government’s plan to build fifteen nuclear reactors by 1985 ran counter to the “green revolution” supported by Fälldin, but Palme had little choice but to press ahead with construction. The uncontrollable cost of oil threatened his proposed labor reforms, including implementation of the Employment Security Act, and indeed, government support for the welfare state itself. In his annual televised Christmas speech, the prime minister acknowledged that forceful steps were required to limit the effects of the crisis and the Arab oil embargo that had triggered it, and that alternative energy development challenged labor legislation as priorities in the 1974 party program. Amidst domestic difficulties, what were perceived as international injustices continued to rankle the Palme administration: political and economic democratization as well as the furtherance of national liberation movements remained firmly entrenched government goals. The Swedish prime minister denounced the execution of two opposition democrats by the Franco dictatorship in Spain as “satanic assassination.” To show his support for the democratic opposition in that country, he joined with others to collect funds in the streets of Stockholm, efforts denounced by Conservative leader Bohman as aiding terrorism. As the prime minister surveyed the world scene in the mid-1970s, his hopes for the future seemed to have dimmed. The price now paid for economic growth, he gloomily noted, was “unemployment, environmental destruction, violent structural change, and in many cases a rise in social inequality under the impact of technocracy and the concentration of economic power.” The UN’s Stockholm symposium had acknowledged the need to use the natural resources of the planet wisely and the creation of an environmentally oriented “political organization on an international scale” as an imperative. Both the seemingly endless

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Cold War and what would be called corporate- sponsored globalization threatened future security. Political and military force, Palme commented, was concentrated between “two superpowers that exercise their domination over the world, while capital is internationalized and collected under the control of multi-national high finance.” The United States, organized as “a purely capitalist society [whose] ideals have been gravely corrupted during the course of the war in Vietnam,” remained a target. It believes itself threatened always and everywhere on the globe by poor people aspiring to social and national liberation. However, that liberation, he predicted, “is necessary and inevitable,” something that Washington seemed in capable of understanding. Nor did he spare the Soviet Union. “The other superpower has for over fifty years displayed a system which is consumed by dogmatism and bureaucracy. In areas under its domination, it regards liberation movements with skepticism and suspicion, and in the worst case opposes them with tanks . . . What is certain is that neither capitalism, with the United States as its chief spokesman and followed by West European conservatives . . . nor Leninism, with the Soviet Union as chief of the orchestra and in its train the communist parties of East and West Europe, can realize their social objectives.” And he applauded Europeans “who had finally been able to free [themselves] of these two systems.”58 Both before and during Palme’s tenure as prime minister, Sweden appeared to its many admirers as the incarnation of social welfare at home and peaceful relations with other countries abroad, and they found it wholly understandable that the ruling SAP continued to show interest in social reform. Such legislation as that requiring parental leaves for both mother and father was generally welcomed. At times, however, social democratic ideals conf licted with reality, as when the party sought to reduce the size of the penal system. SAP ministers of justice in the 1970s hoped to lower the prison population from 4,000 to about 500. Then, as the war against drugs reached Sweden, the tide turned, and demands multiplied for severe punishments. As prime minister, Palme, in the best liberal tradition, tried to fend off lengthy prison terms by pointing to the need for reforms of the general conditions leading to substance abuse. He faced opposition not only from conservatives but also from the Far Left.59 Still much concerned with foreign affairs and disarmament issues, the prime minister formulated plans for a nuclear-free zone in Scandinavia and strengthened his country’s commitment to the United Nations. As a member of the UN Security Council in the mid- seventies and following the tradition set by Branting in the League of Nations, Sweden

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pressed for disarmament, human rights, and the setting of norms for international law. Palme continued to speak out against Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia and later gave a eulogy for Salvador Allende. It was precisely because the Chilean president had gained power by means of a democratic election, Palme maintained, that he was found so threatening by his opponents. They could not tolerate the idea that with popular support, Allende had tried to free his country from foreign exploitation and bring about a peaceful transformation of society.60 In 1975, Sven-Erik Larsson, the editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter, accompanied Palme on a trip across Latin America, the first by the head of a Swedish government. On his return, Larsson described his prime minister’s role on the international scene. He was surprised to find how well known Palme had become, not only in Cuba but in such countries as Mexico (where he participated in an international conference on women) and Venezuela. But his extensive travel and multifold international contacts were not universally appreciated. Bohman believed that the prime minister should spend more time at home, although the journal Expressen called those remarks “shabby” and maintained that international contacts proved beneficial for Sweden. Two other events took place in 1975 that yielded great satisfaction. Palme rejoiced in the end of the war in Vietnam, and he pledged that Sweden would contribute to that country’s reconstruction. And a longawaited new and more democratic constitution had become effective on January 1. Henceforth, the Riksdag was to consist of only one chamber, elected by (more rigorous) proportional representation; and to be represented, a party had to win at least 4 percent of the votes cast. No longer would the Communist Party be penalized by the electoral system—and neither Palme nor his successor would enjoy an absolute SAP majority. Moreover, the constitution anticipated the total loss of royal power: it was no longer the king, but the president of parliament, who would name the prime minister. Voting restrictions were eased for immigrants, now permitted to cast ballots in municipal and provincial elections before being naturalized, and several ombudsmen were designated to protect the rights of individual citizens.61 Despite the pessimism shown earlier, Palme could look forward to the coming election, scheduled for 1976. In no way could he have realized that it would result in his fall from power.

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CHAPTER 2


I

ssues relating to nuclear energy, the environment, and radical proposals from the trade union organization calling for employees’ participation both in ownership and management brought an end to the Social Democrats’ forty-four-year hold on power and Palme’s tenure as prime minister. Although Sweden felt repercussions from the international economic crisis of the early 1970s, most notably an increase in unemployment and a subsequent lower standard of living; and although the controversial wage earner funds issue remained on the SAP agenda, the domestic issue that first gripped public attention in the middle of the decade was nuclear energy. Within the party, opinion was divided. Many, including Palme, sought nuclear energy expansion. Others opposed, or at least urged a delay, in the construction of new plants. Social Democrats who favored the development of nuclear energy believed that those who disapproved had exaggerated the safety and health risks. Worried about party unity, Palme was prepared to compromise and promised to sound out opinion. Accordingly, the SAP launched a public information campaign. “Study circles” organized by the Social Democrats—and soon other political parties, along with trade unions and religious groups— explored such issues as energy choices and waste disposal. Whatever the findings, they changed few minds.1 The issue was seized on by Thorbjörn Fälldin, the leader of the Center Party (formerly the Farmers Party, which seeking to modernize its image, effected the name change). Although described as ponderous and slow talking, in contrast to the quick-witted Palme, he had seen his party win 20 percent of the votes in the 1970 election and again become a force to be reckoned with.

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The prime minister was aware that an affiliated cause, the preservation of the environment, had captured the public imagination. His own concern was long standing. The published collection of his speeches, Politik är att vilja, contains two important addresses given in the 1960s on environmentalism. In a speech to the UN General Assembly on October 20, 1970, he discussed both the need to “protect the environment from the encroachments of modern industry” and the threat to it that “calls for the same efforts by everyone, regardless of their geographical location and the level of their development.” Sweden was an early convert to the cause when in the spring of 1971, a spontaneous demonstration took place in Stockholm against cutting down trees in Kungsträdgåden, the royal park in the city center. And, as seen, the UN had acknowledged this awareness by choosing Stockholm as the site of a world conference on the environment in 1972. 2 In early 1975, the SAP leadership came to a decision. It proposed the construction of two additional nuclear reactors but no more after that. To disappointed critics of nuclear energy in the party, Palme pointed out that no source of energy, including oil, was risk free. But he failed to appreciate the new ecological momentum embraced by the Center Party and the extent to which its concerns were shared by much of the nonsocialist press. Nor had he anticipated that the issue would emerge as paramount in the 1976 election. Palme was to regard that year as the most eventful of his life. To begin with, he knew that many Swedes would welcome a change of administration in the belief that perhaps it was time to let nonsocialists show what they could do. Adding to his concern was an awareness that the opposition parties had “found each other.” The Center had entered into an agreement with the Folkpartiet (the Liberal Party), and in taking a stand against nuclear energy, had secured the support of the new Green Party. In addition to the nuclear power question—and as it became more widely known—the other controversial issue facing the voters was the wage earners investment funds. In the 1950s, the labor economist Rudolf Meidner, along with such colleagues as Gösta Rehn, had already made several theoretical contributions to the economic policies of the welfare state. In June of 1976, an LO congress (the Swedish confederation of blue- collar trade unions) supported his plan to have “surplus” profits taxed away to funds under the control of the trade unions. A portion of a company’s profits would be transferred to a “wage earner” fund that would be used by the relevant trade union to purchase shares in that company. In addition, wage

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earner representatives would be placed on the company’s board of directors. The goal envisaged was the gradual transfer of economic power into the hands of salaried employees. In a few decades, proponents believed, much of Swedish industry would consequently be “socialized.” From another perspective, the Meidner Plan constituted an effort to legitimize wage restraint by partially socializing company investments. The proposal understandably led to a great debate, one that would bring to an end to the consensus reached (with few exceptions) by labor and management in the late 1930s. Employers mobilized in protest as did the nonsocialist parties. Astonishingly, the ferocity of their opposition came as a surprise to supporters of the measure, who believed that history was moving in their direction.3 The Plan was more the result of the radicalization of the LO than of any ideological hardening within the SAP. It emerged from years of rank-and-file union militancy, as shown in the wildcat strikes of 1969, especially by the Gothenburg dockers and the far north iron ore miners, a militancy reinforced by the radicalism displayed by the student movement. In 1971, the delegates to an LO congress had complained of excess profits enjoyed by business and attributed them to the “solidaristic” wages policy in force, that is, to the wage restraints agreed to by the unions in return for greater job security. An alternative both to higher wages and higher taxes, it was suggested, lay in the promotion of union involvement in capital formation, profit growth, and company ownership. The plan that emerged, the gradual transfer of company assets from private shareholders to employees, was designed both to counteract the concentration of wealth and to increase the influence of employees over the economy. The latter objective was the more controversial insofar as it could mean the end of private ownership, certainly large-scale ownership, in Sweden, where after a (total) half century of Social Democratic government, most industry still remained in private hands. From the standpoint of those who formulated the plan, it was not simply anti- capitalist; it aimed at rewarding workers for the restraint and sacrifices made over the years by granting them the ultimate ownership of large private firms. The far-reaching proposal required that payouts based on company profits would send increasing amounts of the company’s own capital to the funds. Because profits—the higher, the better—were viewed as necessary in a capitalist economy, it was seen as more desirable to put some of them in a fund, subject to collective control rather than abolish them altogether. Advocates of the plan acknowledged the advantages of high profits: increased investment, greater productivity, and full employment. And to ensure the persistence of capital formation, workers could not

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dispose of their shares: they would be kept as working capital in the firm. Meidner originally conceived of having 20 percent of the profits of firms consisting of at least fifty employees go into the fund. If profits rose, the contributions would increase as well. Proponents of the plan believed, in retrospect and naively, that workers would limit wage demands because higher salaries would eat into their profits, too. Thus, the plan was seen as an alternative to controlling wages through unemployment. Although it bore some resemblance to the profit-sharing schemes considered in other European countries, Meidner and the LO went further: not just profits, but control, too, would be transferred to workers. Once regulated by union- administered funds, moreover, a firm’s decisions could be brought into harmony with social objectives without the community having to step in. However, as with profit- sharing schemes proposed elsewhere in Europe, it was not only management that objected (on the grounds that it would bring an end to capitalism): rank- and-file union members who preferred rewards in the form of higher salaries also resisted. Polls showed a decided lack of enthusiasm, and as the Meidner Plan gained notoriety, opposition to it mounted.4 Social Democrats, including Palme, worried that excessive weight was being given to wage earner (trade union) interests and fearing an electoral backlash, were uneasy. The party, they believed, was being left behind, a rarity in left-wing political history insofar as it was labor that usually provided a brake on a socialist agenda. Thage Peterson, a member of the party executive, acknowledged that “when the LO reached its decision regarding the wage earner’s investment fund, that was the moment that Olof Palme gave up on the election.” The initial “far-reaching” resolution of the LO congress implied that the entire private economy, large as well as small business, would fall into the hands of wage earners.5 In the summer of 1976, Palme had shed his earlier optimism. “I can’t see a way out,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re going to lose the election.” He would read to the party’s executive committee from the opposition’s newspapers, which warned that if the wage earner funds plan was perceived as introducing into Sweden the model of the Eastern bloc, “all hell would break loose.”6 Although willing to discuss—and compromise on—the wage earner funds, Palme refused to abandon his support of nuclear energy: When told about anxious party members who had contacted the leadership to voice their concerns, he shrugged: “We can’t change our views.” In a debate between Palme and Fälldin held in Gothenburg, the latter called for an end to all reliance on nuclear power. In return, Palme wanted to

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know how the Center Party could fill its promise to create 400,000 new jobs if the problem of energy was not solved.7 During the campaign, the governing SAP experienced embarrassments involving the taxes of two of the nation’s most celebrated personalities. One related to the movie director Ingmar Bergman, specifically his financial declaration and the gross intervention of the police. Bergman was arrested on the stage of the Royal Dramatic Theater and charged (unjustly, as it turned out) with tax evasion. In protest, the director left Sweden to work in West Germany. The other involved Astrid Lindgren, the famed children’s writer. She had complained after receiving a tax bill totaling more than her earnings and was told by the finance minister “not to meddle in things she did not understand.” Trying to put the best face on the situation, Palme said that Bergman and Lindgren had both benefitted from the scandals, and that the Right was taking advantage of bureaucratic bungling to push a reactionary agenda. 8 In press conferences where he replied to his critics, Palme answered every question, even the most complex, by himself rather than rely on his ministers. He gave them no chance to speak, although they were ready to do so, and observers felt he should have shown a little generosity and humility. In one such preelection conference on the subject of energy, experts were invited to pose questions, and there were detailed inquiries on water-insoluble hydrocarbons and other petrochemicals. Palme provided all the answers and in detail. At times, however, he could get irritated and indignant if something did not go his way. He would f lare up, and as Peterson noted, “soured the atmosphere.”9 Still, Palme’s record was nothing to be ashamed of. During his tenure as prime minister, the number of new jobs had increased by 159,000 (in a total population of eight million), and unemployment had dropped to only 1.7 percent (down from 2.5 percent in 1973). At a time of worldwide recession, these figures were little short of astonishing. Nevertheless, the public favored change. There was discontent with “bureaucratic interference” in everyday life, with the need for government permission in order to do almost anything. In opinion polls, 41 percent saw the Social Democrats as “bosses, bureaucrats, and top dogs” rather than as “socialists, reformers, and friends of the poor and oppressed.” Widespread frustration and opposition both to nuclear energy and the Meidner Plan left Palme with few illusions of victory. “I have never felt such political loneliness,” he told a journalist.10 A turning point in the campaign was a televised debate between Palme and Fälldin three weeks before the vote. The prime minister failed to deal decisively with the question of the long-term benefits of

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nuclear power, while his opponent, continuing to wage an increasingly populist campaign, made clear his opposition to it. Fifty percent of the voters opposed the expanded use of nuclear energy, and the SAP, hurt by its proposal to build new reactors, was unable to defuse the issue.11 Voter unhappiness with the SAP made an electoral defeat unavoidable in 1976. Although the party received 42.7 percent of votes, only 1 percent less than in 1973, the nonsocialist parties won 50.7 percent: the Social Democrats and the Communists together, 47.6 percent. This amounted to 180 seats for the “bourgeois” bloc, 169 for the two socialist parties. As the results came in that night, Palme sat chain smoking. When it became clear that his party had lost, he muttered, “OK, it looks as though that’s it” and went off to a TV interview.12 The government had to resign, and its forty-four-year reign came to an end. For the first time in his life, Palme, who had worked in the government for twenty-three years, would sit on the opposition benches. His wife hoped that it would mean less pressure and more family time, more time to go to the theater, and more time to spend in the country.13 That the election results boosted business confidence was reflected in a Financial Times report that on the day of his defeat, the Stockholm Stock Exchange reached a record one- day rise in the industrial shares index. For the outgoing head of government, the explanation was clear: “The weak fall which provoked our defeat can be imputed to nuclear energy. The bourgeoisie succeeded, speaking or not on that issue, in attracting votes and winning over the undecided.” Not everyone agreed. Gunnar Nilsson, the new and more moderate chair of the trade union federation, placed emphasis on the employees’ funds issue for having frightened voters away from the SAP. The defeat, he said, revealed that the party and the unions were not united. “More so than before,” he concluded, “we must abandon our independent stand and subordinate ourselves to the interests of the political parties.”14 When late that night, he returned with Lisbet to the house in Vällingby, was Palme thinking of the words used in a speech he gave seven years earlier? “A politician must win in order to accomplish something, to see his will realized. Flags can f lutter, applause ripple. Much greater is the silence at the moment of defeat.”15 For the next six years, Sweden would be ruled by nonsocialist coalition governments, and Palme, when not traveling abroad on behalf of international committees or working for the UN, would lead the opposition to them.

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CHAPTER 3

Olof Palme: Interment

I

f anticipated, the loss had come as a shock. Now out of office for the first time in nearly a half century, party regulars, forgetful of Palme’s warnings, could not understand why or how the defeat happened. Some wept. If many, nevertheless, thought they would soon be back in power, they felt just as confused as their less- optimistic counterparts. And because both sides were unprepared for the first change in government in close to half a century, the transition proved messy. On the Monday morning following the election, undersecretaries, press secretaries, and aides telephoned to ask about their future. Procedures for the changeover had to be learned. According to Peterson, Palme put on “a brave face and a facade of indifference” when he reminded his gloomy colleagues that “up until 1976 Sweden was the only democracy in Europe which had not changed its government during the 1970s. We made it through two elections in the seventies and came close, very close, in the third.” And he added, “It is a matter of no great import to me whether I am prime minister or not.”1 Yet Palme, at least initially, shared these feelings of widespread dismay. Although the speed with which he began his new role as leader of the opposition led party leaders to believe he had already recovered from any mourning, Peterson noticed that he was becoming “more and more withdrawn and depressed.” Certainly his wife’s hopes for more leisure time were dashed. Leading the opposition, it soon became clear, would keep him as busy as when prime minister. And when he became involved with Socialist International (SI) gatherings, with meetings of one peace and disarmament committee after other, and then with what many Swedes saw as the climax of his career, the UN-named mediator in the Iran-Iraq war, there was precious little leisure.

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If both on the eve of the election and again after his defeat, the former prime minister told the party executive that the differences between socialist politics and those of the opposition must be made clear, no opposition strategy had been considered, much less discussed. The demoralized Social Democrats could do little more than console each other. Such a strategy had to be hurriedly put together, and Palme invited Peterson; Ingvar Carlsson, who had held two ministerial posts; and Sten Andersson, who had served as party secretary since 1963, to his home in Vällingby. It was to be the first of many such meetings. Palme believed that the new coalition government would not last long, that there would soon be a crisis, and that “we have to be prepared to take over overnight.” What was needed, he said, was an alternative program, detailed counterproposals to the government’s policies, however slim their chances of success. His three colleagues agreed, as did—when presented to them—the party executive, the parliamentary party, and the LO leaders. As revealed by the stenographic minutes of the parliamentary sessions that followed, the strategy was fully implemented. Page after page dealt with bill after bill submitted by the Social Democratic minority. By March 1977, a content Palme was able to report to the SAP’s executive committee that practical alternatives to the policies of the ruling coalition had been drafted. But not all were enthusiastic about the carefully detailed bills streaming out of the leadership—and invariably voted down by the legislative majority. Gunnar Sträng, the former finance minister who had believed that he, not Palme, should have been the one to succeed Erlander, became more and more critical. On one occasion, he compared the bills to “writings on water only to be washed away.” Palme, too, began to find the alternative draft legislation “excessively detailed” and as lacking vision and a focus on the larger issues, on the real differences separating the parties. He warned of overreaching, of making promises difficult to keep and gradually came to abandon the strategy of providing exorbitantly crafted substitutes. The four men, who formed a sort of inner circle, decided that emphasis should be placed on job creation, equality of opportunity for women, responsibility for the energy supply, and greater support for underpaid workers. Omitted was any reference to the wage earners funds. Nor was consideration given as to how democratic socialists could show moderation and find ways to cooperate with the new government. Also conspicuously absent in these early discussions were strategies for building the future society. “We were wholly focused on regaining power as soon as possible,” recalled Peterson, and he acknowledged that these

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omissions could not be blamed on Palme alone, and that blame should be equally shared. The Center-Right coalition, on its part, soon began to show the ineptitude and divisions that Palme had anticipated. Voters’ expectations that the heavy tax burden would finally be reduced failed to materialize. The Fälldin government did not try to bury the welfare state nor even make major changes in its administration. Whether because of circumstances—the world recession brought on by the oil crisis—or because he lacked the drive and ability of his predecessor, the new prime minister followed the Social Democratic path in trying to manage the economic turmoil of the late 1970s. His administration rejected the conservative program, particularly the reduction in state planning that the new economics minister, Bohman, was urging, and that Margaret Thatcher was preparing to impose in Great Britain and began to implement countercyclical fiscal policies. The government devalued the currency several times, and, for one observer, “bailed out so many lame- duck industries that they effectively nationalized a larger proportion of the Swedish economy than all previous administrations had done.” 2 Nor were there significant cuts in public employment or social spending. Fälldin’s indecision and pleas for caution left his supporters disillusioned. The result was continued low unemployment but also continued inf lation and a rise in the national debt. Thus, despite the persistent dissatisfaction with high taxes, the nonsocialist parties that ruled from 1976 to 1982 left the welfare state wholly intact. (Only when poor economic growth cut into revenues in the late 1980s and early 1990s would the social welfare system come under serious debate.) The explanation resembles that for the Eisenhower government’s decision not to reverse the Democrats’ New Deal legislation or Churchill’s (second) government’s refusal to undo most of the Labour Party’s nationalization policies. They had been widely accepted by their respective publics. The fact that average life expectancy in Sweden was climbing to nearly seventy- seven for men and eighty-two for women (by the mid-1990s), and that the average actual retirement age fell to a low of fifty- eight, made tampering difficult.3 Also remaining intact was the previous government’s stated a neutral yet activist foreign policy, although some changes in nuance can be found. Sweden’s international role, as formulated by the Erlander and Palme administrations, endured insofar as the nonsocialist governments of 1976–1982 continued protesting and denouncing various practices abroad. Nor was there any letup in the stagnation of preparations for the reception of help from the West. Even under nonsocialist governments,

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“the nation’s life-line to the West,” as Dalsjö put it, continued to “wither and disappear.” Although “a handful of officers” included in their war planning the expectation of Western aid, “outside that circle, ignorance grew about the role of the Western factor in Sweden’s strategy . . . and disappeared almost entirely during the 1970s.”4 Whether because of personal animosity, because he did not trust Fälldin, or because he feared the electoral consequences for the SAP if he divulged the ties to the West—or a combination of all these things— Palme chose not to inform his successor of the secret arrangements made with the Americans and the British. Nor did ÖB Synnergren tell the new head of government anything of importance. The military chief later said he had wanted to see whether the Fälldin administration would issue any new directives in this regard—and of course it did not. The new minister of defense, Eric Krönmark, was the only cabinet member informed and told only in “bits and pieces” by his predecessor and by Synnergren. But because his colleagues in the cabinet believed in the dogmas of neutrality, Krönmark dared not bring the matter up with them. He later admitted that “in retrospect it is little short of amazing that the national political leadership during these years were uninformed about the hidden aspects of Sweden’s security policy, and the important measures taken for cooperation with the West.”5 It is also true that politicians on both sides but especially the officials and civil servants loyal to the SAP, either resented a nonsocialist government or found it an “aberration” that could not last. The top military brass shared these sentiments. When Synnergren was later asked whether not informing the top political leaders about this aspect of Swedish security would create unnecessary problems in the event of a crisis, “[he] replied that a real crisis would give rise to a national coalition government with all parties represented. By this he obviously meant that Palme and others who already knew of the lifeline would be back.”6 Participants in Swedish war games assumed that the country would remain neutral in the event of a war between NATO forces and those of the Soviet Union. Officers responsible for planning cooperation with the West later recalled their discomfort after 1978 in formulating such plans because they clashed so sharply with declaratory security policy. In that year, the new supreme commander, Lennart Ljung, closed down much of what remained as preparations for wartime cooperation with the NATO powers. One staff officer later said that because he took the job believing his country was to remain neutral, he was “terrified” when learning of the secret plans for cooperation.

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Because the documents clashed with his worldview, he avoided dealing with them.7 The three coalition leaders disagreed on domestic policy. Bohman and the Liberal leader, Per Ahlmark, appointed minister of labor, could not accept Fälldin’s anti-nuclear commitment. Nor could Ahlmark, as British journalist Chris Mosey observed, easily “reconcile his intellectual liberalism with either Fälldin’s provincial world view or Bohman’s aggressive Conservatism.” And to the disappointment of his “green” supporters, Fälldin himself agreed to the switch on of a new reactor at the Barsebäck plant in the south of the country, twenty-two miles across the sound from Denmark and arguably the most dangerous of all Sweden’s nuclear plants in terms of its vicinity to large population centers. He only called for the creation of an energy commission to review power policy. Palme could not help but gloat at the problems faced by his opponents and their conf licting solutions to them.8 Yet the former prime minister desperately wanted to return to office and in moments of candor admitted to a belief that his party enjoyed a proprietary right of sorts to it. “The others,” he said, referring to the nonsocialist coalition, “occupy our chairs.” His basic view of the need to achieve fundamental change endured. In a restatement of his political credo, he said that “the dissatisfaction created by the real state of society represents the driving force of political work . . . The day I awaken and look out satisfied with the world I will abandon it. I will not have any more to give.” The allegation of the more radical labor unions that Palme scarcely functioned as leader of the opposition does not stand up. It is true that he turned even more energetically than before and in a manner reminiscent of Churchill, to international affairs. Still, he accepted his leadership role seriously and at least initially worked hard, as he had before his party’s electoral defeat and the change in administration, to popularize and implement the SAP agenda. He enthusiastically threw himself into his self- styled mission to reshape the party and cement an opposition strategy. Palme continuously observed—and tried to take advantage of—the infighting engaged in by the coalition government’s cabinet members. He spoke in public to criticize the nonsocialist parties as much after the defeat as before. He chaired meetings of his party’s executive and members of its Riksdag delegation, offering both praise and criticism. At these meetings, he often quoted both supportive and negative comments on the opposition’s policy found in the Swedish press. He kept

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a close rein on party business. Even when out of the country, he would repeatedly telephone his colleagues, “hounding us,” recalled Peterson. It is also true that he began delegating many of his parliamentary duties to Carlsson, who would serve as Palme’s deputy prime minister after the latter’s return to office, while party business was handled by party secretary Sten Andersson. Whether consciously and deliberately interested in doing so or not, while out of office, Palme kept his name in prominence. In 1977, he was asked to join the independent commission on international development questions created that year and chaired by his longtime friend, the former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt. Either referred to as the “Brandt Commission” or the “North- South Commission,” it sought to explain and explore ways of alleviating the economic inequalities between the rich and poor countries. Palme kept no diary or journal, but among his papers in the Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv (Labor Movement Archives) in Stockholm, there are ninety-five boxes of notes for the six years out of office between 1972–1976. Six of the boxes contain material concerned with travel outside of Sweden, and another half dozen with foreign visiting dignitaries, all of which attest to his concern with international developments. Already in a speech to the Broderskapsrörelsen (Swedish Association of Christian Social Democrats) in July 1965, Palme described nationalism in Asia and Africa as possessing an “enormous explosive force” nourished by “the old idea of the equal value of mankind regardless of race and skin color,” and added that the “fundamental values of social democracy made it a duty to be on the side of the oppressed.” The liberation of new states was “inexorable,” he said, and “we must live with it and perhaps also for it.” 9 In 1977, Palme visited Israel; France; West Germany; England; Spain; and Africa, which was of special interest and the object of three trips during that year. Both Erlander and Palme had shown interest in the continent, having previously paid and received visits. The precedent was set by Hjalmar Branting, the first head of the Social Democratic Party, whose papers contain grievances and memos about oppressed colonial African peoples and their fervor for independence. Palme’s own involvement was long standing—and would endure. His first published article, in 1950 in the newspaper Studenten, bears upon Africa; and his last speeches, opposing apartheid and delivered to the Swedish People’s Parliament against Apartheid, were made a week before his murder. He had visited East Africa in 1971, having prepared for it by reading material sent by

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the foreign ministry, together with press clippings; and once there, held extensive talks with Tanzania President Julius Nyerere. Now, six years later, he went to Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, not as a head of government but as leader of a delegation from the SI (he had been named a vice chair in 1976). Palme’s description of his twelve- day journey was published both in Sweden, in Aftonbladet; and in France, in Jeune Afrique. An important aspect of Palme’s socialist beliefs was the stress placed on the totality of human effort in promoting democracy and development. “Conscious, critical and active people,” he had earlier written, “are a prerequisite for progress. It is only when men and women, with their individual capabilities and dreams, can actively inf luence and take part in decisions that democracy takes root.” But the “human factor,” he believed, was long neglected in analyses of African affairs. Referring to then racist South Africa, he had said at the time of his earlier visit, “There passes the frontier of human dignity.” The words had upset editorialists and bourgeois politicians. When he repeated them six years later, few were offended.10 In an article, “The Future of Southern Africa” published in 1976 in the SI’s journal, Socialist Affairs, Palme pointed to the violence, poverty, and unwillingness of the aff luent nations to help in the struggle against apartheid. He denounced the repressive politics of the South African regime over the majority population, that government’s “illegal occupation of Namibia,” and he called on European social democrats both to work for a binding UN resolution prohibiting arms exports to the country and to support both sanctions and liberation movements. The concern shown for the loss of individual liberties was not limited to South Africa: he also appealed to Indira Gandhi to end the state of emergency declared in India.11 Palme could not set aside the issue of apartheid: “Neutrality towards the existing and coming struggle in Southern Africa is impossible. Between the exploiters and the exploited there is no middle ground. We cannot escape the question: Whose allies do we want to be? Which side are we on?”12 His efforts would bear fruit. Within a decade and before any other state, Sweden would achieve its goal for foreign aid, 1 percent of the gross national product (in 1987–1988), and 40 percent of those funds went to states in the front line fighting discrimination in southern Africa.13 In 1987, a year after Palme’s death, the Riksdag completed his work when it passed special legislation to prohibit all trade with South Africa and Namibia, the first time that the country adopted economic sanctions without being requested to do so by the UN Security

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Council. Not surprisingly Palme’s critics were condemning him for a lack of attention to domestic affairs. It was said of Palme that he was “the voice of the Blacks in the world of the Whites,” and he received international recognition for his efforts when Stanford University awarded him a recently created peace prize for his work on behalf of international cooperation and the protection of individual rights and social justice. The $15,000 was chief ly used for a vacation home for the children of Bommersvik, the school built by the Social Democratic Youth League near Södertälje, in central Sweden. During the 1970s, the SI became an important forum of international politics, and Palme, designated a vice president under Brandt, was playing a key role—and developing an even higher international profile. He was energetically involved in broadening the organization’s appeal—and membership. Until the meeting in Geneva in the fall of 1976, following the change in Sweden’s government, the Socialist International was in many respects a European gentleman’s club with a few exotic exceptions. The three prominent social democrats who had headed their respective governments, Palme, Brandt, and Bruno Kreisky (Austria) became close friends. There were many meetings and lengthy exchanges of correspondence. Despite some differences, they agreed that socialism, if it was to endure, could only do so in the form of social democracy, that is, by relying on popular support to gradually convert a capitalist society into a socialist one. They also agreed that social democracy should not remain a European phenomenon alone, that more efforts should be undertaken to establish links with social democratic movements and parties outside Europe and outside of the Socialist International.14 With Brandt and Palme as presiding officers, the SI began to break out of its Western base and turn to the Third World. New parties, representing different cultures and regions, became members. Other nations now attached more importance to the views of the Socialist International on South Africa, Central America, nuclear arms, and other foreign policy issues. Instrumental in broadening the International’s horizons, Palme chaired its investigation into Southern African conditions and spoke about South Africa at a UN session. As Hjalmar Branting in the early 1900s became a personality in an earlier (Second) Socialist International, Palme became one in its successor.15 Like Brandt, Palme believed that “Third World” states should be inf luenced neither by Soviet communism nor American capitalism but rather find their own way. In seeking an independent course, they would discover European social democracy as presenting an alternative, not a

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threat. In any event, it was not to dictate a strategy. Our International, Palme believed, must not become an organization uniquely centered on Europe. Hence his willingness to accept Brandt’s invitation to serve on the North- South Commission, and it was in this capacity that he went to Helsinki in the summer of 1978 to attend an SI conference on disarmament. Palme spoke on economic inequalities among the nations and, ref lecting a growing interest in disarmament issues, on the arms race. In so doing, he cited Alva Myrdahl’s comment that “one cannot buy security.”16 In the 1980s, conservatives everywhere were fond of labeling both the Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Angola and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa as “Soviet-backed.” In empirical terms, the alternate but less dramatic labels, “Swedish backed” or “Nordic backed” would have been equally, or even more, appropriate, especially in the nonmilitary aspects of international support. As seen, Sweden’s South African involvement was embedded in the SAP tradition. A foreign secretary in Erlander’s cabinet, Östen Undén had earlier articulated Swedish criticism of South Africa’s apartheid system. Palme intensively pursued—and went beyond—this criticism, which was a key element in Sweden’s Third World internationalist focus from the early 1960s until Palme’s assassination in 1986. Pierre Schori, a close colleague, served both in the Swedish Foreign Ministry and in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. Schori’s memoir, The Impossible Neutrality, highlights, among other incidents, Palme’s efforts in 1976 to help establish contacts between Henry Kissinger and the Angolan government and—after Palme’s 1977 visit to the region—to strengthen the Western commitment to Southern African liberation.17 Certainly, his efforts bore fruit at home. Years later, after Palme’s death, internationally known figures such as Brandt; Neil Kinnock; and Oliver Tambo, of the African National Congress, noted that Sweden alone, of all the Western nations in the mid-1970s, came out in defense of the young People’s Republic of Angola and early on against apartheid in South Africa. Of the several nonsocialist administrations that governed between Palme’s fall from power in 1976 and his return to office in 1982, the first issued from a coalition of the Center Party, the Liberals (People’s Party), and the Conservatives. Led by Fälldin, the Center Party chief, the government felt the repercussions of the international economic crisis of the 1970s, especially the resulting rise in unemployment and fall in living standards. What was most fervently debated, however, was the issue of nuclear power, and it was becoming clear that Fälldin, who had

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campaigned for an end to the building of nuclear power plants, would be forced to—and had already—compromised. Back from Africa in late 1977, Palme followed the difficulties the government faced in keeping the three-party coalition together. He found no difficulty in criticizing its budgetary proposals. As national productivity fell, prices rose 13 percent, not the 6 percent predicted, and the deficit increased by 33.2 billion kronor, not the 13.7 billion anticipated. The impact of the world recession, moreover, was worsened by the high labor costs allowed by the Social Democrats, which hampered Sweden’s international competitiveness. The nonsocialist administration was forced repeatedly to devalue the krona three times, a total of 26 percent, and come to the aid of hard-pressed industrial establishments. If the advent of a nonsocialist government had led some to think that taxes would be cut and bureaucracy reduced, they were disappointed. But an important explanation for the failure of nonsocialist rule, a failure its opponents described as “one of the direst fiascos in Swedish political history,” was Fälldin himself. The new prime minister had come across as the “honest broker,” but his indecision and insistence on caution—he kept the fiscally conservative Bohman on the tightest leash possible—disappointed his backers. It was becoming obvious that things were to stay as they had been, only with less efficiency. Swedes began to mistrust him and unfavorably compare him with Palme’s urbanity and political professionalism. A second explanation, already referred to, was the inability of the Center, Conservative, and Liberal leaders of the coalition to agree. (During the 1976 campaign, Falldin had promised that if he became prime minister, no new reactors would be loaded, and that all reactors already in use would be shut down by 1985.)18 Palme criticized the government from two different—and contradictory—bases. On the one hand, he attacked Fälldin because the latter had failed to fulfill his electoral pledge to terminate the expansion of nuclear energy; and on the other, he lashed out at the government for slowing down such expansion on the grounds that it threatened job creation. “Any government which so behaved with regard to energy policy,” he said, “lacked the moral right to demand restraint on the part of workers.”19 As it became more difficult for the coalition to solve the nuclear reactor issue, he was forced to compromise with his coalition partners. By October of 1978, the problem of nuclear energy revealed the internal contradictions of the tripartite government. The coalition was breaking apart, giving the SAP a chance to regain power. When Fälldin set aside the loading of two new nuclear reactors and demanded

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a national referendum on the issue, Liberals and Conservatives refused to support him. Ahlmark, the Liberal leader, resigned as party head and was succeeded by fellow Liberal Ola Ullsten, the minister responsible for foreign aid in the Fälldin government. Seeing him as no threat, Palme lent him support. But when Fälldin then walked out of the coalition, Palme said he could not support a Liberal- Conservative administration that Bohman would lead. He could, however, tolerate a minority Liberal government and persuaded his party to support the liberals, whom he described as “honest” and Ullsten as “reko,” a Swedish slang expression meaning “straight” or “all right.” With Social Democratic support, Ullsten thereupon formed a minority government. Although no longer prime minister, Palme rightly saw himself as a power broker, pulling strings. “We allowed the Liberals to come to power,” he later told journalist Chris Mosey, and he let himself be photographed laughing at a young conservative poster reading: “In Liberal Sweden—Olof Palme decides things.” A gloating Palme continued to rub salt in Fälldin’s’s wounds. Nonsocialists were found incompetent: “they had inherited a feast, but had generated crusts.” Although his description of Fälldin’s government as “a long and painful trial” was accurate, he sounded spiteful, which in moderate and staid Sweden was found somewhat shocking. 20 Ullsten’s government was distinguished by the fact that one-third of its ministers were women, and by the new prime minister’s request that the expansion of the eleventh nuclear reactor should be put to a popular vote. These measures won more approval for the new Liberal administration than Palme had thought. Swedes had never cared much for charisma, but their response to Ullsten sent his popularity soaring, and he was able to get several bills through the Riksdag. When the SAP and other opposition parties saw Liberals gaining favor with the voters, they changed tack and began withdrawing their support. But the nuclear problem was proving thorny for the SAP as well. Palme realized he had paid too little attention to the issue when a group of Social Democrats formed an anti-nuclear faction that threatened party unity. His own pro-nuclear energy stand was clear. In 1975, he had said that “no source of energy was free of danger,” that the “risks of nuclear energy are well known” and in contrast to oil, “under control.” The following year, Palme had given a speech favoring all forms of energy development as improving living standards. He feared that “drastic changes” in energy policy (meaning cutting back on nuclear power) would “disrupt important social functions and promote social unrest.” It might lead to “vehement counterreactions.” And for good

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measure, he would add that more energy for industrial development in poorer countries was an absolute necessity. 21 In several interviews given in February 1976 to French journalist Serge Richard, Palme had made the case for nuclear energy. After Canada and Norway, Sweden was the third largest per capita user of electric energy in the world, and demand was increasing at a rate of 5 percent a year. Yet, because the country had no coal or oil of its own, these had to be imported. A new source was necessary. Given the climate, Palme said, solar energy was unfeasible. Wind turbines were environmentally friendly but thus far insufficient, while the use of hydrogen cells lay far in the future. The answer lay in nuclear energy and greater conservation. Palme agreed that more research and public discussion was necessary but rejected nationalization of the nuclear industry in favor of letting local government have greater decision-making power. 22 Then, on March 18, 1979, came news of a dramatic event: the damage caused by the failure of a reactor at the Three Mile Island facility outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It drew much media attention in Sweden and provided opponents of nuclear power with new arguments. Palme feared political consequences, heightened tensions, and a major split within his own party as well. The news arrived just after 10:30 p.m. Swedish time. It seemed as if the situation was under control, but in the following days, it became clear that the event was more alarming than first thought. On March 30, a large radioactive eruption led to government warnings for residents to stay indoors. Twenty-three schools were closed. Pregnant women were advised to leave the area. There were threats of a possible meltdown. Televised reports of people with suitcases f leeing in cars and of old people in retirement homes left behind because the staffs had f led shocked Palme and left him troubled. Within a month, he made a complete U-turn: “If it appears that the risks of nuclear energy are greater than previously thought,” he was quoted as saying, “we must switch off the Swedish reactors.” He supported the leadership’s decision to hold an advisory referendum, although it would take place after the 1979 election. The proposal was accepted by the Riksdag, and it managed temporarily to depoliticize the vexed nuclear issue. Later, he was supposed to have said that if this had not been done, no other issue would have been discussed, that some sections in the party would not have supported us, and that the most important task of a party leader is to hold his party together. 23 Similarly, to reach out to nonsocialists, the Meidner Plan (accepted in principle in 1976) was watered down: only firms with over 500

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employees—of which there were only 200 in Sweden—would be compelled to participate, and employees would be required to contribute 1 percent of their payroll to the fund. Subject to a threatened wage cut, the latter were understandably unenthusiastic. Symbolic of one perennial issue in the election, that of excessive taxation, was Conservative Party chief Gösta Bohman’s outdoor privy at his vacation home. He resented paying taxes to the local council for emptying it when he could do the job himself. Appeals to “the new individualism” prompted his invitation to the press to visit the site and see for themselves, where his efforts were thoroughly photographed. Palme chose unemployment as his chief domestic theme in the 1979 election. One hundred thousand jobs, he said, had been lost since 1976, which pointed to a “drastic need to stimulate investment.” The journalist Dieter Strand of Aftonbladet, who was invited to accompany Palme during the campaign, was nevertheless struck by Palme’s obsession with international issues. During one election lunch, the former prime minister wondered whether he should say in public what he had been thinking, that “the Americans should be given no peace until they do as Brandt did in Auschwitz—get down on their knees in Hanoi.” (He decided against it.) Strand related how local party workers at the table listened in wonderment to his detailed analysis of foreign issues: “This Palme,” one was heard to murmur, “he has seen everything and has been everywhere.” Then another shyly intervened, “To return to our problem with the Gotland ferries . . .” 24 When another reporter asked whether Sweden was not too small for him, Palme dismissed the question as “ridiculous!” He wanted, he said, only one thing: to continue working within the country, where there was so much to change, and to change things not as opposition leader but as leader of the government. And as “a good long- distance runner,” he predicted that he would persevere. 25 The electoral outcome amounted to a virtual tie: a one seat majority for the nonsocialists. The SAP had fallen short by 5,000 votes to change the government. The Conservative Party had gained eighteen seats in the Riksdag but largely at the expense of Fälldin’s hapless Center Party. The Social Democrats gained two seats and the Communists three. The two socialist parties claimed 174 seats, the three nonsocialist parties (the Conservatives—now beginning to call themselves the “Moderates”— the Center; and the People’s (Liberal) Party), 175. After a month-long negotiation behind closed doors, it was announced that Fälldin would head a new three-party center coalition. Palme put the best face on the defeat: gains had been made, and the failure to

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win lay with the non-socialists for “hiding the truth about the Swedish economy.” Best of all, the close result meant there would be no more talk of a change in the Social Democratic leadership. Then, the former prime minister tried to forget politics for a few days and took his family to Crete for a short vacation. Why had his party not done better? Clearly, most Swedes were not yet prepared to abandon the governing coalition. But according to one analyst, Palme’s inclination to maneuver, to “finesse” his opponents, contributed to Social Democratic losses. Swedes were suspicious of politicians possessing charm and a subtle intellect, and Fälldin again became prime minister precisely because he was Palme’s opposite: an even- tempered politician with calloused hands, a former worker, a pipe smoker, and so a man perceived as close to the realities of daily life. Even so, Palme didn’t seem too disappointed. According to a colleague, he already had his eye on 1982. He believed that although the party had done surprisingly well in contrast with the rising conservative tide in other Western democracies, the SAP was not ready in 1979 to take over. “A wind from the right is against us,” he said, “It blows strongly today across Europe, and in one country after another the workers’ movement experiences grave difficulties. But we have held and we will reverse the tendency.” Was he also relieved that he did not have to take responsibility and remained free to criticize? This view seemed borne out during a debate between Social Democratic and government MPs over the economy in the summer of 1980. Fälldin had wanted the SAP to share responsibility for a proposed increase in taxes. Palme vehemently refused, accused Fälldin of deceit, and the talks got nowhere. 26 Even with regard to the issue that had carried it to power, that of nuclear energy, the governing coalition was losing ground. It had gradually discontinued the construction of new nuclear plants and decommissioned some existing ones, but popular support for its anti-nuclear policy was ebbing. With memories of Three Mile Island receding and the continued high costs of power, the public was becoming more supportive of nuclear energy. A March 1980 referendum kept six reactors in use for a quarter century, but they would then be phased out. It also called for more research into new energy sources and placed greater stress on safety measures. (This decision to shut down all nuclear power plants by 2010 proved unrealistic and, in practice, set aside because of the difficulty in finding alternate sources of energy.) And when at the start of the decade, unemployment rose because of an economic

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downturn and an unfavorable trade balance, Social Democrats were anticipating a victory in the 1982 elections. Palme’s long- standing concern with foreign relations and his advocacy of international democracy stemmed from a democratic socialist belief that statesmen had to go beyond their nation state, and that in the long run, differences between national and world politics would disappear. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, he had spoken of “a time . . . when madness seems to have triumphed over reason, and when the right of small states to independence is threatened and violated.” He found the invasion “a brutal aggression, a f lagrant crime against every nation’s right to self determination, a crime against international law.” In words similar to those used in his denunciation of the American involvement in Vietnam, he said, “it [was] impossible to justify military intervention in another country’s internal affair,” and that “a people’s liberation is their own concern.” 27 Other examples of this activism on the global stage, in addition to his anti- apartheid stand, were to be found in the outspoken hostility shown toward two repressive regimes in South America, Argentina, and Chile. Criticism of Palme for his extensive international travel showed no sign of letting up. One newspaper carried a story under the headline, “Palme visits Sweden.” But for the former prime minister, Sweden and the rest of the world formed a whole. “I occupy myself with international policy,” he responded, “because it’s a domain that personally interests me. But above all because it’s an extraordinary part of social democratic policy. The latter would be incomplete if not carried out in the framework of international solidarity. If it is not, it would be our domestic policy itself that would be impoverished.” As if to drive the point home, Palme published an article in Socialist Affairs entitled “Squeezing the Investment.” It described and endorsed a bill proposed by his party to further limit Sweden’s contacts with the apartheid regime in South Africa. 28 In May 1980, together with Kreisky and Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez, the three representing the SI, Palme left for Iran, where the hostage drama was unfolding. After two days of meetings between the socialist neutrals and Iranian officials in Teheran, Palme appeared optimistic, suggesting that the problem could be resolved “rapidly,” provided that neither force nor economic sanctions were used against Iran. Kreisky agreed that new pressures on Iran would “create new problems.” For an American critic, the implication that both parties to the quarrel were at fault allowed the three to show “a comfortable aloofness,” which enabled them “to

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discover that 36 million Iranians” were “prisoners of the hostages” and to ask Washington to release the Iranian funds it had frozen. 29 That autumn, UN Secretary- General Kurt Waldheim designated Palme as the body’s special representative to bring the two sides together in the war that broken out between Iran and Iraq, a war that would endure for nine years. His mission, to secure authorization to establish contacts between the two nations, met with scant success. UN intervention came both too late, as fighting was already underway and too early, as neither side was exhausted enough to stop. The Security Council could only plead for an immediate cease fire and welcome Waldheim’s decision to send the former prime minister to the area on a fruitless quest for a quick end to hostilities and a settlement.30 Between November 1980 and June 1982 and without media attention to provide cover, Palme visited the combat zone five times. He was forced to recognize that conditions did not favor a comprehensive solution, and he and his colleagues turned to partial actions; for example, to attenuate the suffering of both soldiers and civilians. And for a time, no civilian targets were struck. Palme’s mediation efforts helped to open a line of communication between the disputants and eventually pave the way for successful mediation by the secretary- general.31 Iran initially rejected the feelers put out by the exhausted Iraqis (even after the United States and France gave secret aid to Saddam Hussein) but finally accepted the UN-mandated cease fire in August 1988. Again back in Europe, Palme condemned the military takeover in Poland. He denied that it was “an internal affair,” and that he had ever made that argument when human rights were concerned, something which the Helsinki Agreement had made clear. The election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980 prompted a Swedish reaction that approached national hysteria. It seemed that Palme’s fears of a nuclear holocaust were about to be realized. A cruel joke at the time had it that Reagan had mistaken Palme’s call for a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone for the proposed creation of a nuclear free-fire zone, in which a limited nuclear war might be fought in a part of the world that had long been a thorn in America’s side and which no one would miss very much afterwards. The swing to the Right in the United States, combined with the inability of Sweden’s nonsocialist government to cure the country’s economic problems, was ref lected in polls showing a drift to the Social Democrats. And Palme was cheered both by the French election of François Mitterrand and demonstrations in Stockholm against the American intervention in Nicaragua.

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Earlier that year, Palme had organized and chaired an important international commission, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (but which was usually referred to under his name). It gathered representatives from Eastern, Western, and nonaligned countries to discuss measures to ease global tensions and bring about greater disarmament. Active in the 1980s, the “Palme Commission” sought to lessen the chances of war through measures of what it called common security. One proposal called for the creation of a zone in Central Europe, free of all chemical weapons.32 Palme had dealt with disarmament issues in various speeches. In part, this was because the SI focused more than ever on disarmament after Willy Brant and Palme became chair and vice chair, respectively, in the fall of 1976. The issue had always been a major concern to its predecessor, the Second International, even before World War I. (Its 1912 Basle Congress had tried to stave off the coming war.) The SI’s Helsinki Congress in 1978 was devoted entirely to the issue of disarmament, and the UN’s first session on disarmament also took place that year. The threat of a nuclear holocaust, strengthened by a visit that he and others in the group made to Hisoshima, was very real for the former prime minister.33 Hence the usefulness, even more—in his view, the necessity—of recruiting for his commission. Palme preferred to approach people he saw as independent, uncommitted to prevailing doctrines but who possessed political contacts. Former U.S. Defense Minister Robert McNamara refused, but Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, accepted his invitation to join. From the Soviet Union, Gregory Arbetov (who was close to the rising Gorbachev) also signed on. Of the other members, half came from developed countries, half from underdeveloped ones.34 In the summer of 1982, his commission presented its draft report on “Common Security” to the UN’s second special session on disarmament. The report provided a new concept. The ideal of global and total disarmament advocated by the communists, Palme argued, however admirable was not attainable in the near future. Traditional deterrence theory called for a buildup of arms to dissuade an enemy. In contrast to collective security, based on an associated reaction to aggression, common security as defined in the 1982 report stated that the deterrence based on nuclear weapons promoted a climate of fear and reciprocal suspicion. It only led to a balance of terror and was no longer appropriate as a means of avoiding an East-West nuclear conf lict. The new doctrine applied the concept of interdependence in security. It aimed at “greater cooperation in the quest for stability and peace, involving

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the enemy in a common search for an environment that would lead to a relaxation of tension.” The adversary would become a partner, recognition that in a nuclear age, security had to be reached with, not against, one’s opponent. Security policies must be in the interests of both parties, pursued by both and should “favor activities where the possibilities for and advantages of deception are limited.” As one analyst put it, the profound value of what Palme tried to tell the Cold War world was that we can only truly be secure with each other, not against each other.35 In his introduction to the report, Palme acknowledged that victory in a nuclear war was impossible. “What is possible,” he went on, “is the disappearance of humanity . . . and a so- called limited nuclear war will inevitably become a total nuclear war.” The report specifically called for establishment in central Europe of a 300 kilometer-wide nuclear free zone (150 on each side) along the border of East and West Germany and West Germany and Czechoslovakia, reduced defense spending, and a reduced length of military service. Both sides, it stated, were responsible for ensuring security. The (West) German Social Democratic Party (SPD) quickly endorsed the proposal.36 The concept of common security became the basis of disarmament proposals by the left wings of both the British Labour Party and the West German Social Democratic Party (both out of office at the time) and specifically of their opposition to the installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles under NATO command. Opinion surveys in 1983– 1984 showed 86 percent of Germans opposed to the deployment of the missiles. But because of the need to keep close ties to the United States and not dismiss out of hand the Reagan administration’s promotion of the “euromissiles,” the German Social Democrats needed a new security policy that would both unite the party and win popular support, while at the same time maintain ties to the peace campaign. A working group chaired by Egon Bahr, a member of the Palme Commission and the architect of Östpolitik (Brandt’s agreement with East Germany that recognized the inviolability the border between the two countries), accordingly adopted the new approach. “Common security” also facilitated the task of Communist Party reformists in the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev (who read the report) and others tried to introduce the idea to an Asian Pacific setting. But the SPD initiative got a mixed reception from its counterparts in the rest of Europe. The support extended by Swedish Social Democrats, given their country’s declared neutrality, was largely symbolic. French socialists under Mitterrand favored the old “partnership in security,” the

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alliance with the Americans and the introduction of cruise missiles. The unilateral disarmament favored by the left wing of the Labour Party, as well as the opposition role assigned to the party, prevented acceptance of the concept by the party in its entirety. Then the events of 1989 and the collapse of Soviet communism rendered necessity of the concept of “common security” obsolete.37 Both as prime minister and as leader of the opposition, Palme had applied principles of disarmament to Sweden in reaffirming his country’s neutrality—and in providing a moral rationale to allowing the lifeline to the West to wither. Although aware that neutrality requires measures of defense, he told the Social Democratic conference in 1981 that “our party does not advocate unilateral Swedish disarmament” . . . the reduction in arms expenditures begun in the early 1970s continued: they fell from 5 percent of GDP in 1972 to 2.8 percent twenty years later, and the defense slice of the state budget dropped from about 20 percent to 8 percent during that time.38 However important, it was not foreign policy but economic issues that dominated Swedish politics throughout the 1980s. Inflation, an unfavorable trade balance, and unemployment were pervasive worries. Along with high taxes and the perennial problem of the wage earner investment funds, it became clear that they would sway voters in the 1982 parliamentary elections. To cut domestic spending and provide additional revenue, Fälldin had the Riksdag raise taxes, making the value added tax (VAT) the highest in Europe (at 19 percent) and leaving Swedes to wonder whether they hadn’t been better off under the Social Democrats. In what became known as the “Great Revolt of the Taxpayers” in the spring of 1981, Palme engineered the fall of Falldin’s three-party coalition by reaching another agreement with the Center and Liberals. The two parties agreed with the Social Democrats on the need to gradually cut income tax rates. Disappointed that the cuts weren’t greater, Conservatives quit the governing coalition, as Palme doubtless knew they would, and the Liberal Party joined with the Center to form a minority government to which Conservatives gave tacit support. Accordingly, Palme stepped up his attacks on the Conservative Party. Their strategy, he argued, consists of regularly seeking confrontation with us in order to weaken the workers’ movement in every possible way. For five years, they have been almost entirely responsible for managing the economy. They have failed, and Swedish economic development has suffered more than that of other countries. A change of government was necessary, and the Social Democrats were prepared to govern.

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But while taking a hard line, Palme now avoided making personal attacks—a lesson learned, however difficult, during his years out of office. When a leading newspaper suggested evaluating individual members of the government, he rejected the proposal. It was the cabinet in its entirety, he said, that pursued an agenda “which in its entirety is doomed to failure.” Contradicting his own past behavior, he played down the usefulness of applying individual blame, adding, “they are by and large honest people trying the best they can. Some of them are less successful than others in their professional abilities . . . As individuals they have human failings the same as all of us.”39 The new government was not helped when at the end of October 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground off Sweden’s main naval base in the south. When it was learned that the vessel was believed to carry nuclear arms, a wave of anger swept over the nation. The SAP organized protest demonstrations, and the event proved an embarrassment for the Swedish navy. The Kremlin wrote it off as a navigational error, and ultimately the submarine was towed back into international waters and sailed for home. Soviet leader Brezhnev spoke of steps taken to reduce tension but with no concrete results. On his part, Palme called for the Baltic to be nuclear free: “Away with all nuclear-weapon- carrying craft from the Baltic,” and he added, “if the Soviet Union wants to strengthen its credibility there is no better way than by liberating the Baltic from this threat to peace.”40 As economic problems also continued to plague the government, and different solutions to them continued to divide the ruling nonsocialist coalition, prospects for the return to power by the Social Democrats looked brighter.

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CHAPTER 4

Olof Palme: Resurrection

I

n mid-December 1981, Palme summoned his close associates to lay the groundwork for the following September’s election. They found him enthusiastic and well prepared, relying on notes that filled three memo pads. Any anxiety and unease previously shown had given way to eagerness and longing for the contest, for the rallies and the speeches to come. In these meetings, the inner circle went over everything that the former prime minister, who was determined to win, believed could inf luence the voters. Because the election was of special significance to Palme—a victory and return to power as prime minister would be his first as leader of the party—every plank in the Social Democratic platform was scrutinized. Carlsson had prepared a draft program, “The Future of Sweden,” and in reviewing it, Palme emphasized the need to resolve the matter of the wage earners fund once and for all.1 The four agreed to limit themselves, as Peterson put it, to realities, to how people actually felt on a daily basis, most notably in matters of unemployment resulting from plant closings and reductions in social services. One goal given priority was an extension of the qualifying period before unemployment benefits could be claimed. But as the 1982 election neared, the Social Democrats found that it was the wage earner funds issue that was hurting them most at the polls. 2 Two options faced the labor leaders and Social Democrats who supported the Plan: they could plow ahead and hope that voters would eventually accept it, although that course might cost them the election, or they could even further moderate the proposed bill and increase the likelihood of a victory at the polls. They chose the latter course.

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Palme announced three additional limitations: 1) the funds would collect money for only a confined period of time, 2) they could hold a maximum of only 40 percent of any company’s stock, and 3) they would be expected to yield a return of 3 percent on investments. These concessions might take the sting out of the employers’ opposition and enable the SAP to return to office. Even so, although Palme was ready to enter into negotiations with large- scale firms, he held little hope of a successful outcome. While in the early 1970s, there seemed some chance that its opponents would find an amended version of the Meidner Plan acceptable, with the globalization of the economy and the likelihood of greater foreign competition employers now believed they could ill afford the reduction of managerial prerogatives. For example, new constraints set by the funds would make it more difficult to lay off workers. Both their trade associations and the nonsocialist parties maintained their fierce opposition to the funds. Further watering down of the bill, including proposals to permit not only union but all employees to elect the board members who would administer the funds, changed few minds. Employers hammered home their objection to the plan as having fateful and economic consequences for Swedish society.3 In the months preceding the election, Palme continued to offer various solutions designed to make the proposal ever more palatable to business leaders and the public at large. They included more exemptions for small firms as well as popular elections for the funds’ administrators; elections in which all citizens, not just relevant employees, could vote and thus effectively close the door to union domination in managing the funds. Enterprises wishing to invest and so create jobs were to be given advantages in the form of incentives and tax breaks. Anticipating labor’s reluctance to these concessions, Palme hesitated to inform the LO of them, preferring to await a “suitable opportunity.” Not until August were the details conveyed to Gunnar Nilson. As anticipated, they left the labor leader angry and unhappy, but as Palme predicted, he accepted the compromises to accommodate the party.4 The shrillness of the opposition began to prove counterproductive. Inf luential corporate executives warned of a stock market collapse and a f light of capital as the funds were phased in. This dire prognosis left more moderate conservatives embarrassed, and the agitation spurred by industry began to lose its vigor, especially when Palme asked those opposed to the Plan to help work out details and participate in its final formulation. The “extended hand” became the symbol of the SAP campaign, and Social Democratic confidence rose. Palme labeled the

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nonsocialist parties the “hired hands of the bosses.” Yet a few days before the election, three inf luential CEOs sent an open letter to Palme and Gunnar Nilsson explicitly rejecting any negotiations: “Our opposition to the employees funds is definitive. As long as this project [which] “threatens democracy and individual liberty survives, we will fight it.” The words were shrugged off.5 Unhappiness with the nonsocialist governments, particularly their stated intention to impose limits on social legislation, further invigorated Palme’s eagerness to fight back. Their hostility to its expansion revived memories of a successful 1959 attack on conservatives who wanted to limit Social Democratic proposals to expand health benefits. He called the right-wing agenda “class- driven,” aimed at the poorest in society. He could not, he said, grasp why they would do this but told his colleagues that the party “must take advantage of the people’s dissatisfaction and win them to our side.”6 As election day, September 19, 1982, neared, prospects looked bright for the Social Democrats. Disenchantment with the Fälldin government was turning out record crowds at Palme’s rallies. After a final gathering in Gothenburg, he seemed satisfied with his party’s efforts and sure of success. “I’ve given my all,” he was quoted as saying. “I couldn’t have done more.” 7 Peterson gave Palme full credit for the SAP victory, which together with Mitterrand’s France, withstood the conservative tide rising elsewhere in the West. He had shown signs of fatigue and depression in the elections of 1976 and 1979. Now his enthusiasm had allowed him to work around the clock, especially after he sensed the favorable shift in momentum. His Social Democrats won 45.6 percent of the vote, an increase of 2.5 percent over 1979, which provided a gain of twelve seats and a three- seat majority over the three nonsocialist parties. When combined with the Communists’ twenty seats (5.5 percent of the vote), the socialist bloc held a twenty-three seat majority. The election resulted in a new polarization of Swedish politics. The right-wing Conservative Party had won almost a quarter of the votes cast, while the two previous governing parties, the Center and the Liberals—who lost half their parliamentary representation—suffered a setback. Their nonsocialist government that came to power in 1979, faced by persistent economic problems, including a growing budget deficit and higher unemployment, was unable to survive a full three-year term of office. The Social Democrats had seized on the coalition parties’ inability to stay together and blamed them for the country’s deteriorating economic situation. The Conservatives thus became the leading opposition party. Over the

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next few years, they were to mount increasingly powerful attacks on the SAP, which nevertheless managed to remain in power after the next (1985) election as well. “Now we will begin to govern,” said a content and expectant Palme. He had reason to smile. Given the multiparty nature of Swedish politics, his was almost a landslide victory. When the results became clear, he and Lisbet went to greet his exultant partisans and were nearly submerged in bouquets of red roses. 8 Within days, however, Palme became more circumspect. Palme admitted the victory came about more because of dissatisfaction with nonsocialist rule than the appeal of his own platform. The Social Democrats won in spite of the Meidner Plan (supported chiefly by union activists and left-wing intellectuals) and not because of it. The non-socialist parties and the employers who supported them had rejected offers of compromise, but like all wise winners, Palme reached out to his defeated opponents, asking for cooperation. “We want to reason, not to create confrontation,” he said, “to construct society, not put up walls between people.”9 After six years of opposition, the workers movement had reason to be optimistic. Fälldin resigned on September 20, and on October 7, Palme was asked to form a new government. He did so the following day and began taking unpopular measures that alienated his base but were seen as necessary to restore economic growth. The new government at once devalued the Swedish crown by 16 percent in an effort to boost industrial exports. Other Nordic countries had carried out smaller devaluations and complained to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that the Swedes sought an unfair advantage, that the devaluation was greater than what was necessary to restore competitiveness. No formal decision was announced nor were sanctions imposed by the IMF, but it was understood that Sweden had acted contrary to Article IV, which called for the Fund to oversee the compliance of each member.10 Like his predecessor’s government, Palme’s also took steps to alleviate the country’s large budget deficit, most notably by another increase in the value added tax. Simultaneously, pressure was brought to bear on salaried employees who were demanding higher wages to offset resulting price increases. Signs of recovery began to appear both in response to these measures and to the improving international economic scene in 1983–1984.The higher level of taxation and the bitterness it engendered was anticipated. Replying to complaints, the Social Democrats pointed to previous conservative rule and high interest rates as responsible for two-thirds of the deficit and insisted on the need for economic growth and full employment.

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The prime minister reminded his voters that in the election campaign, the SAP had promised only limited reforms, more in the way of restoring previous gains than of taking new initiatives: a watered down version of the Meidner Plan, the shoring up of sickness and unemployment insurance, and restoring the size of the state contribution to municipal services. Although displeased, Palme had resigned himself to making decisions that ran counter to hopes for expanding the welfare state. In an unguarded moment, he had revealed his state of mind when he said that “realities are our most dangerous enemy.” That is, in an age of huge budget deficits, costly reforms, however much desired, were out of the question.11 The employees’ funds issue, however, could not be ignored. Opponents of the measure showed no signs of relenting, and representatives of the three nonsocialist parties met on the island of Öland (in the Baltic) to establish a common strategy. In rejecting the “extended hand,” they put forward a new slogan: “Socialism and the Funds, or a Free Society.” Fälldin said that if put into effect, the Plan would result in a “Soviettype socialism” and the “installation of barbed wire around Sweden.” The director of the Swedish Employers Association compared the plan with the Nazi deprivation of Jewish property rights in the 1930s and asked whether it ran counter to the European Convention of the Rights of Man. Supporters of the funds restated the objectives of the Plan and the arguments used to defend it: to promote collective shareholding by employees, to enable them to participate in managerial decision making, to encourage profitability and investment by broadening the base of economic ownership, and the redistribution of economic rewards. The unions, advocates assured themselves, would see the Plan as a quid pro quo for years of wage restraint. It would also provide a formula for crisis management along social democratic lines. And finally, it would mark an additional stage in the party’s long commitment to reconciling political control over the economy with the free market. Palme still held hopes for possible accord in working to secure consensus on a means to resolve the issue, but, above all, he wanted to defuse it. If he stated publicly that the funds “are not at all revolutionary [but] a good and practical addition to Sweden’s mixed economy,” privately he now regarded them as a millstone around his neck. In late summer of 1983, the two sides, industrialists and their political allies on the one hand and the unions and their Social Democratic supporters on the other, were again asked to negotiate. Neither industrial circles nor the nonsocialist parties showed interest in so doing.

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Despite the unified resistance of the non-socialist parties and the business community, in December, the Social Democrats and the communists who voted with them pushed the Plan through the Riksdag. It bore little resemblance to the original—and more radical—plan conceived by Meidner. The half-hearted legislation finally enacted—intended as a seven-year “experiment” and never renewed—was such that Meidner dismissed the funds it created as “without importance.” And, in fact, they did not affect the economic system in any appreciable way. The revised wage earner funds program came into being on January 1, 1984. Only five funds were established, using such small portions of industrial profits that the effects on power relations within business and industry were negligible. The struggle, in the view of one scholar, demonstrated yet once again that “reforms of the power structure within business and industry do not attract widespread engagement, not even among workers, whereas bourgeois countercampaigns can easily expand into mass movements.”12 The hopes of the 1970s were quietly buried. Only a small number of companies were affected, and the total assets of the five funds amounted only to 7 percent of the value of all the assets on the stock exchange. Shortly before his death, Palme admitted that the funds were devised less to create a new society than to help Sweden out of an economic crisis. Although 80 percent of the labor force belonged to trade unions, neither they nor the SAP solidly supported a notion of ownership that appeared too abstract and too distant. And while white collar workers remained neutral, the ferocity of the opposition waged by employers had been overwhelming: they spent more on a media campaign than all the parties spent on the 1982 election. By the late 1980s, the SAP was turning to the free-market policies already in use elsewhere: greater deregulation and an exchange rate pegged to the European Monetary System. By 1990, the Meidner Plan and the funds it envisaged were virtually forgotten. The idea that it was possible to establish some form of national collective control over investment was abandoned. The great reform offensive was over. Now the issue was whether the welfare state itself could survive in the new interdependent European—and world economy.13 His government showed no sign of losing its majority, but Palme experienced several cabinet crises that shook its morale and left its opponents rejoicing. Aftonbladet published a story about the involvement of his minister of justice in a financial scandal, and although not guilty of any illegal act, the minister resigned. After only two months in office, his

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minister of defense, who disliked big city life and the week-long separation from his family, also resigned. The minister of industry, a union official, faced problems with miners in north Sweden and with journalists and was bitterly criticized. Palme’s choice of another union official as foreign minister proved embarrassing. At a dinner with newspapermen, the minister seemed to doubt the validity of the navy’s claims that foreign (read Soviet) submarines were violating Swedish waters. He was moved to a less sensitive education post. In view of his troubles as party leader and still struggling over the wage earner funds, Palme’s ardor for work noticeably fell. A renewed interest in foreign affairs appeared as a welcome alternative. When convulsed by massive demonstrations against the deployment of American Pershing and Cruise missiles, Europe provided an opportunity for greater action. Palme’s government presented his Disarmament Commission’s published report on “Common Security” both to NATO and the Warsaw Pact in December 1982 as a Swedish “peace initiative.” The reception of both blocs, as well that as of other European nations, was, at best, mixed. The detection of Soviet missile- carrying submarines in Swedish territorial waters had little, if any effect, on Palme’s policy of strict neutrality. In the spring of 1983, the bipartisan committee established by the prime minister to investigate the previous autumn’s submarine incident issued its unanimous report. It claimed that two “hitherto unknown” types of Soviet midget submarines had indeed penetrated Swedish defenses. Palme recalled his country’s ambassador to Moscow for “consultations” and strongly protested to the Soviet’s man in Stockholm. Nevertheless, the reporter for the committee, the young Conservative MP Carl Bildt, on his own initiative left for Washington to meet with U.S. military officials. An angry Palme called the consultation inopportune, a curious response in view of the treaty arrangement with the United States: the lifeline, after all, although allowed to wither, was not yet lost. His official declaration stated that Bildt’s meeting with a superpower showed “a lack of detachment,” given the neutrality policy officially espoused. But even some Social Democrats believed that the government should have responded more vigorously to the Soviet intrusion. His conservative opponents accused the government of seeking to moderate the Swedish reaction to the presence of Soviet submarines with the aim of not irritating the USSR. This, they said, not only broke with traditional bipartisan accord on security issues but amounted to outright appeasement. His “policy of compliance” was condemned as

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unprecedented and had to be brought to an end. Flyers appeared in Stockholm with the slogan “Erlander-landsfader (Erlander-father of the country), Palme-landsförrädare (Palme-traitor to the country). The “European Workers’ Party,” a paranoiac right-wing group created by the American millionaire, Lyndon LaRouche, to fight communism, put up posters showing a caricature of Palme with the caption, “Against Vermin, Use DDT.” When some military officers announced they had lost confidence in the prime minister, Palme dryly replied the important thing was that he have confidence in them.14 The submarine issue raised the question of whether neutral Sweden could, in fact, defend itself. Palme maintained that it could when he told a meeting of NATO ministers in Copenhagen that “we believe in our own capacity to defend our neutrality and independence.” Although he had told an SAP party conference that “our party does not advocate unilateral Swedish disarmament,” he was very much aware of criticism that since the beginning of the 1970s, Swedish defense had fallen from 5 percent to under 3 percent of the state budget.15 But statements from the prime minister denouncing both nuclear deterrence and the West’s security plans were placing additional stress on the “immutability” of neutrality policy and on the fact that Sweden’s defenses were aimed in all directions. A foreign policy that gained the trust of the USSR was said to be more important than the deterrent effect of the armed forces, and that the government championed or supported a string of disarmament proposals that ran counter to Western interests and policies. As a defense analyst later noted, “critics who strayed from orthodoxy and argued for stronger defense efforts were branded by the government as ‘heretics, security risks or renegades.’ ” It was the government’s ultraorthodox line that prompted Bildt’s (a future prime minister’s) censure for having talked to U.S. intelligence officials.16 At the time he returned to office, Palme’s government was not prepared to formally and totally dissolve the country’s lifeline to the West. In 1982, he was still calling for the maintenance and support of military professional contacts between Sweden and the West. The prime minister had told Per Rudberg, a senior liaison officer, to maintain good contacts with Washington and London, and that he (Palme) was so critical of the West in public “because he has to.”17 The Commission on Neutrality Policy (CNP), which in 1994 issued the report confirming the secret cooperation with the West, acknowledged that “it would have been irreconcilable with the responsibility resting with Sweden’s political and military leadership had no measures been taken to facilitate the reception of assistance from the Western great powers.” Minister of

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Defence Anders Thunborg said that such cooperation meant planning for “the country’s survival as a nation.”18 But by the mid-1980s, preparations for receiving aid from the West, which had been stagnating since the mid-1960s, finally died out. The supreme military commander at the time, Lennart Ljung, ordered the destruction of what was left of the plans and other documents concerning wartime cooperation with NATO. Both he and his successor, Bengt Gustafsson, made sure that newly promoted officers were not informed of the U.S. guarantee and other measures assuring Western aid. Astonishingly, this came at a time when the threat of war increased, as revealed by new incursions of Soviet submarines in Swedish waters. They had previously departed when confronted. Now they played cat and mouse with Swedish naval forces. Why did Palme finally allow the lifeline to disappear? Because he had proclaimed neutrality so loudly and so often, he could no longer risk having it revealed. Simply put, after so strongly committing itself to neutrality for Sweden, the Social Democrats’ credibility would have suffered a devastating blow in the event that news of the ties to the West emerged. With its political standing so threatened, it could not afford to take the chance. A case history of Palme’s contrariety with regard to Swedish neutrality was the situation in the Soviet- controlled Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. After World War II and the establishment of Soviet rule, almost no Social Democrat, including Palme, was heard in support of Baltic demands for freedom. As advocates of Baltic independence were quick to note, the prime minister’s reluctance to speak out was especially conspicuous. This was all the more ironic since Palme’s maternal grandfather had been dean of the Riga Institute of Technology, and his mother was raised in Latvia, where Palme himself spent summers as a child. In contrast, Conservative spokespersons, most notably Jarl Hjarlmarsson and Carl Bildt, and Liberal leaders Bertil Ohlin and Per Ahlmark voiced support for the independence of the three Baltic states from the Soviet Union.19 Paradoxically, Palme had been named an honorary member of the democratic resistance in the Baltics because, as the author of a report critical of the government cuttingly put it, “Baltic democrats mistakenly thought that prime minister’s words about the rights of small peoples also applied to Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.” Palme did, on one occasion, publicly support the struggle for Baltic freedom

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when in February of 1980, as leader of the opposition, he delivered the main speech at the celebration of the Estonian Day of Independence in Stockholm’s Concert Hall. At the time he came out for “national independence” for the Baltic states. Andres Kung, the author of the report, maintained that the prime minister did not want to annoy the Soviet leaders by stating his “real opinions.” They were expressed during a foreign policy debate held March 16, 1983, when Palme accused the members of the Conservative Party (renamed the Moderate Party) of “returning to that crusading spirit aiming to ‘liberate’ Eastern Europe that prevailed in conservative groups in the West during the Cold War,” and accordingly of constituting “a danger to the safety of the Swedish security policy.” Palme repeated these views the next year in a speech to the SAP Party Congress when he said “we are not involved in anti- Sovietism” and went on to warn against painting “devil’s pictures” and resorting to “persecution of the Soviet Union.” His critics gleefully pointed to his condemnation of “damned murders” in different parts of the world and urged him to say similar things about those across the Baltic Sea. But neither he nor other Social Democratic chiefs were inclined to do so. As late as 1988, Foreign Secretary Sten Andersson, in a TV interview on the Rapport program shown November 2, was telling Balts “not to push it too much,” not to be “impatient.” Palme’s critics noted, with irony, that they understood the fears of small nations living in the shadow of a superpower with a history of invading and occupying its neighbors. It was less risky to attack distant oppression in South Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America than communist oppression in neighboring lands. (They did acknowledge, however, that “the first duties of leaders of small countries was to their own people and their freedom and peace.”) Still, young Swedes were shocked to learn of the extensive concessions made by their government during and after World War II to the superpower that seemed strongest around the Baltic Sea at any given time, first Germany and then the Soviet Union. As its attitude toward the Baltic states revealed—and despite any inferences to the contrary— their country possessed no moral superiority in the formulation of foreign policy. Those opposed to upsetting the Soviets took solace in their recognition that like Eastern Europe, the region had lived under authoritarian dictatorships between the world wars, and that some Balts had participated in the persecution of Jews in World War II. As noted by Palme, such support (for Baltic independence) was considered “right wing.”

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With regard to Swedish ties to what was then called the Common Market, Palme’s neutral stand favored economic, not political, integration in the wider European Community. When the community’s council of ministers in February of 1971 outlined a plan for future political and monetary union, the SAP opposed full membership. Instead, the Palme government negotiated a bilateral free trade agreement. Nearly all favored it, and it was ratified in 1972. It would be Ingvar Carlsson, who succeeded Palme in 1986, who would begin the gradual revision of party policy toward Europe, although at the time it was not seen as a step toward membership but as an ad hoc measure in response to international economic development. (Ultimately, in 1991, Sweden would decide to join the European Community, and its membership became a reality three years later in a voter- approved referendum.)20 A visit by Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat to Stockholm generated widespread protest. For Palme, who had gone to Algeria to meet with Arafat in 1974, a global strategy was essential: Sweden was to have contacts in all camps. Hence his invitation to the Palestine Liberation Organization leader to join with him and other Nordic socialists for talks. After the visit, Palme spoke at a special service in the Storkyrkan (Stockholm’s Cathedral). His call for Israel to “recognize the Palestinian people’s right to decide their own future” (at a time when a two- state solution had not yet received widespread support) was met with jeers and boos by supporters of the Jewish state. Palme stood his ground: Israel, he agreed, had the right to exist in secure borders, “but I must recognize the right of Palestinians to decide their future for themselves. It would be absurd to refuse discussions with their representative.” He was hissed and yelled at, especially by young Jews who chanted “Palme-fascist” and “Palme- anti- Semite.” 21 Waves of immigrants from central and southern Europe proved a major domestic concern confronting Sweden in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, most immigrants came from Germany and Austria. In the 1960s, in even greater numbers, they arrived from Yugoslavia and Greece. This was largely the result of legislation enacted in 1954 that ended the requirement that an immigrant had to have a work permit in hand before entering Sweden: the outsider could now come as a tourist and once in the country, obtain one. And unlike the early “guest worker” program in Germany, the immigrant to Sweden could bring his entire family. In the period 1961–1965, 95 percent of 90,000 foreigners had their applications approved for work permits. Anti-immigrant feelings and even racism,

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especially on the part of young Swedish workers, gained strength. The LO, in an effort to limit the unemployment that it saw, in part, as “a consequence of foreign labor immigration,” successfully got the government to halt the “tourist migration.” A new system of regulation was put into effect in 1968: if non-Nordic, an immigrant needed both a work permit and proof of available housing before entering. The law thus restricted non-Nordic labor immigration to that specifically recruited by Swedish firms. Even so, the 1968 legislation never applied to those defined as refugees by the Geneva Convention or to those whom the Swedes chose to admit for “refugee-like” or humanitarian reasons, including military desertion or draft refusal. As a consequence, Chilean intellectuals, Kurds, Vietnamese boat- people, Iranian and Iraqi dissidents, and Lebanese f locked to Sweden. Despite the restrictive legislation of 1968 and because of these exceptions, immigration peaked in 1969 and 1970, with 70,000 annual arrivals (again, in a country of under eight million people). They did not blend in easily, and discontent rose. 22 Palme strongly dismissed the calls for more restrictive laws. His internationalism never appeared stronger than when in a radio address to the nation on Christmas Day 1985 (two months before his assassination), he said that “we are becoming more and more dependent upon contacts and impulses that transcend borders. We can’t build walls facing the surrounding world: walls mean isolation and retrogression.” He acknowledged that although greater contact meant greater stimulation, it also created “abrasion and difficulties.” Even so, “internationalism must not only be something felt at a distance. Sweden’s immigrants . . . want to become part of our community [and] we Swedes must adapt ourselves to [a much] altered reality.” 23 Clearly, these views were not shared by an increasingly larger percentage of the population. The January 1984 Stockholm Disarmament Conference, attended by foreign ministers from thirty-four countries, enabled the prime minister to take center stage as a peacemaker. At the time, ties had deteriorated between the two superpowers as a result of the downing of a Korean airliner by a Soviet fighter. The conference provided the only forum (Palme referred to it as “a symbol of hope”) where the United States and the Soviet Union were still talking. As a result of their meetings, the Soviets conceded—for the first time—the principle of on- site inspections, conceivably a start of the reconciliation process between the two that led to the 1987 signing of a missile agreement by President Reagan

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and Soviet leader Gorbachev. In retrospect, the conference can be seen, as a critic of Palme acknowledged, “as one of the lasting contributions by Palme and Sweden to world peace.” 24 Palme entered the 1985 election campaign on an aggressive program of opposition to the nonsocialist parties. (The SAP Congress held the previous autumn had reelected him as party head for another three-year period, thus enabling Palme to continue serving as prime minister in the event of a victorious election.) Much opposition, polarization, and slowed economic growth in Sweden, as well as the conservative tide in such Western countries as the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany, had worked to discredit social democracy; more specifically, the “Swedish model” of the universal welfare state financed by taxes. The SAP response: less expansion and more consolidation of the welfare state; a retreat from the goal of full employment by continuing some measures of austerity, although never to the extent undertaken in other industrial states in the conservative 1980s. Desperate to save as much of the folkhem as possible, the prime minister argued that “social solidarity was not simply an ethical imperative; it was a prerequisite of a foundation for economic recovery.” 25 The death of Tage Erlander in June brought out 50,000 people in a march honoring the landsfader, and Palme may well have wondered why he could not win the widespread respect and admiration accorded his predecessor. Certainly, as the autumn election neared, those opposed to him resorted to unprecedented personal attacks. An extreme rightwing organization distributed photos of Palme intended for use on dartboards. The health services had distributed posters warning against AIDS carrying the slogan: “AIDS—A Disease that Concerns Us All.” Palme’s adversaries went through Stockholm, painting out “AIDS” and substituting “PALME.” The prime minister shrugged off these attacks: “Denial or confirmation is rarely useful but naturally one feels like it.” 26 And in the election, the Social Democrats lost seven seats and, with them, their independent majority over the nonsocialists. Palme would again have to rely on Communist support in the Riksdag to hold his majority. Palme’s last official acts—and the opposition they raised—were emblematic of his career. A sentimental visit to New Delhi to give a lecture in honor of the assassinated Indira Gandhi gave rise to accusations in the conservative press that he was f leeing problems at home. When Alva Myrdal died in early February 1986, Palme and his wife led the funeral cortege in Stockholm, and in his eulogy he evoked her wish for

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peace. In the week before his own death, he participated in a national day against apartheid and visited Jämtland in far north of Sweden to look into the problems facing the hotel and industrial sectors and meet with people fearful of losing their jobs. In the morning of February 28, Palme played some tennis before leaving for his office in the Rosenbad. There, among other tasks, he drafted the speech to be given at a meeting of the Nordic Council in Copenhagen the following Monday as well as attending to his political correspondence. At six in the evening, anticipating a weekend spent with his family, he left for home alone at 31 Västerlånggatan. No trip or conference was scheduled. Because he believed he did not need his bodyguards, he dismissed them. As noted, it was not unusual for a Swedish prime minister to go with his family unescorted. Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson had died of a heart attack on a streetcar in 1946, and Palme himself had stood in line at airports together with other passengers, waiting to embark without security. He and Lisbet were to meet their son Mårten and his friend to see a movie, and the couple took the metro to the theater on Sveavägen, a main thoroughfare in Stockholm. After the film ended at 11:00 p.m., the couple left the two youths and walked toward Kungsgatan, another main street, to enter the metro for their return home. They passed by the big building of the Skandia Insurance Company where his grandfather and his father had been active. At the intersection with Tunnelsgatan and Sveavägen, a man with a gun came up to Palme and shot him. He died in Sabbatsbergs Hospital, the first European head of government to be assassinated in office in forty- seven years. Palme was a few months short of his fifty-ninth birthday. A nation-wide police search got underway for a thirty-five to forty year- old man with dark hair and a dark overcoat. 27 In the days that followed, right-wingers toasted Palme’s death. They recalled his active support for third-world governments and independence movements; how he had angered Washington when offering political asylum to Americans who refused the draft; again, when he showed sympathy with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and most recently, when he agreed to build ships in Swedish yards for Castro’s Cuba. Epilogue With Palme’s death (and the resignation of Defense Minister Thunborg the year before), what remained of institutional memory of the secret

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ties to the West disappeared. In an interview given to Robert DALJSÖ, Palme’s successor, Ingvar Carlsson confirmed that none of the members of the cabinet that assembled hastily in the early morning after Palme’s death knew about them. Nor did any of the still living veterans from Erlander’s cabinet, who were in the know, step forward to inform the new prime minister. Palme himself had been the key figure: if events had required Sweden to turn to the West, Palme, who had both the knowledge and the authority, was the one suited to make the about face. Even if some ministers had known, putting this knowledge to work in a crisis would have been difficult, as it could be cast as betraying the heritage left by Palme, as perceived by many in the SAP rank and file. Preparations were thus effectively terminated, and the institutional memory of the lifeline was lost, both on the military side and on the political. After 1986, it was still possible in Moscow, Washington, and a few other capitals to find people in positions of power who knew about Sweden’s secret military ties to the West. But not in Stockholm. 28

March 15, the day of the funeral, was overcast. A cold wind chilled the half million people who waited along the route of the funeral procession, a route entirely drenched in the color red. Fifteen heads of state, led by France’s François Mitterrand; seventeen prime ministers, including the Soviet Union’s Nikolai Ryzhkov and India’s Rajiv Gandhi; and fourteen foreign ministers, including U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, attended. 29 The (civil) burial was organized not by the state but by the Social Democratic Party, with the chief funeral orations delivered by the new party leader Ingvar Carlsson and Foreign Minister Andersson. The king of Sweden, seated at the far end of the row of invited guests, had to wait his turn to speak. The UN emblem formed a background to the coffin, and the UN flag, together with two red party flags, flew at the head of the procession, along with one lonely blue and yellow Swedish flag at their side. The UN secretary-general was one of speakers, followed by Rajiv Gandhi and the chair of the Socialist International, Willy Brandt. The symbolism could not have been more clear: the murdered prime minister was carried to his grave by his party, the Socialist International, the UN, and the Third World. The king and the nation state were secondary. Despite the opposition shown him, Palme had dominated Swedish politics for twenty years, both in the government and in opposition. The country felt orphaned and experienced shock and grief. The parties put their quarrels aside, and although long-held attitudes toward the fallen prime minister did not change, they called for the nation to

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rally around democratic values. A common goal was shared: to find the assassin. One hundred and forty inspectors and policemen, led by Hans Holmér, chief of the Stockholm police, were assigned the task of finding the killer. Experts from the West German criminal police lent support. On March 5, a police sketch of a suspect was circulated. Swedes expected a definitive outcome. None came, and although an arrest was made, the suspect was released on grounds of insufficient evidence and acquitted. At one time or another during the course of the investigation, speculation as to the assassin ranged widely.30 A Kurd who resented the refusal by the Swedish government to allow a leader of the Kurdish exile group to enter the country—the view long held by Holmér? A right-wing extremist who saw Palme as a Soviet collaborator? Or a farright militant supported by the CIA? A ruined stock market trader? A Baltic refugee acting on the fortieth anniversary of a misguided 1946 decision by the Social Democratic government to return many Baltic freedom fighters to the USSR to face torture and death? One of several naval officers who worried about Soviet submarines in Swedish waters and had openly questioned Palme’s willingness to defend the country? Extremists on the Left who resented Palme’s 1972 decision to imprison two radical journalists? (They had exposed the secret police organization created by the Social Democrats the previous decade to spy on communists in universities and the workplace.) Still other theories found Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the guilty party because Palme had allowed dissident Kurds (if not all their leaders) into Sweden; Israeli agents in order to place the blame on the Iraquis; the Ayatollah Khomeini regime in Iran because Palme allegedly stopped the Swedish arms corporation, Bofors, from exporting missiles to that country; a member of a South African apartheid- era hit squad angered by the Swede’s efforts to end the practice. No evidence has emerged to verify any of these theories. What some have called “the crime of the century” is still not solved and may never be.

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CHAPTER 5

Olusegun Obasanjo: “Look At What Has Become of This Country”: Creation

Image 5.1 President Obasanjo is escorted by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to the Pentagon parade field for a welcoming ceremony in his honor on May 10, 2001. Photo by Helene C. Stikkel

O

ne day in mid-July 1998, in the so- called presidential wing of Nigeria’s international airport, a former head of state recently released from jail awaited a f light, delayed because there was no jet fuel for the aircraft. The former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, having just emerged from three years in the prisons of the late dictator General

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Sani Abacha, was inclined to be patient as he prepared for a trip outside the country. Freedom was sweet. Abacha had ruled Nigeria with an iron fist—but was now dead—and the air- conditioned waiting room comfortable. Suddenly, there was a power outage. The lights went out, and the cool air gave way to the heavy heat of Lagos. “Look at what has become of this country,” said General Obasanjo, who had ruled Africa’s most populous nation from 1976 to 1979 and gained lasting esteem for having voluntarily stepped down from power and turning the reins over to a civilian government. At last, the general’s f light was called. He was on his way to Botswana and then South Africa, where he had been invited to visit an old friend, Nelson Mandela, on his eightieth birthday. “Perhaps,” Obasanjo said, “I can be a stabilizing inf luence, a conscience for our nation.” But as the plane taxied away, the lights were still out in Lagos, and stability was scarcely imaginable.1 Creation Olusegun Obasanjo (the name in Yoruba means “God repays kindness”) was born in Abeokuta, in southwest Nigeria about sixty miles north of Lagos in the heart of the Yoruba lands—in what is currently known as Ogun State—probably on March 5, 1937. (Successive military dictators would keep dividing Nigeria’s initial three regions and adding states, ultimately reaching the total of thirty-six.) His parents, who were uneducated and who did not document the date of their son’s birth, named him Matthew. He dropped it in high school when a wave of cultural nationalism peaked in the 1950s, restoring lost pride to national values. 2 Abeokuta was the birthplace of three other famous Yorubas. Two, born within a year of Obasanjo and whose fates intertwined with his, were Moshood Abiola, the politician and billionaire publishing and shipping magnate; and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who created Afro-beat music. The third was Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. A sister was the only one of Obasanjo’s siblings to survive infancy. His Baptist, churchgoing parents were farmers, at first successful but later, as Obasanjo reached school age, less so. Falling more and more into grinding poverty, the father ultimately walked away from his family, his relations, and his farm, leaving the mother and two children to fend for themselves. Because his parents wanted him to escape the toil of farming, they had sent him to an elementary school founded by an Anglican church mission. A bright student, Obasanjo enjoyed school from his first days and in 1952 was accepted as a scholarship student into the Baptist Boys School

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in Abeokuta, where he soon began to win academic prizes. Although fees were low, Obasanjo, impoverished to the point of lacking shoes, held several jobs on campus, including cleaning the school yards, to cover tuition and board. His mother and sister often walked the several miles from home to the school to provide what food they could to supplement the poor diet that he and the other students had to put up with.3 Obasanjo showed an interest in engineering, one that had evolved from a childhood dream of becoming an automobile mechanic. While trying to figure out how to pay for a university education and nearly desperate, he saw an announcement for the Nigerian army cadet entrance exams. He applied for and took the required test, largely as practice for future exams, and passed. He also did well in his interview and was offered a place as an army cadet. Although a military career was not envisioned, the army, which would feed, clothe, train, and pay him, solved his problem: he could both continue schooling and escape the poverty he had so far known. Disbelieving friends who found him most unsoldierly and had commented on the incongruity of a small coneshaped head resting on an ample- sized body and had nicknamed him “Olori Oya” (the grass cutter’s head), were assured that with his educational background, he would be trained as an officer. Soon after having enlisted in March 1958 at the age of twenty- one, Obasanjo was sent to the Regular Officers’ Special Training School in Teshie, Ghana, founded to prepare officers for the colonial army in the Britain’s West African colonies. As anticipated, his training in Ghana was both military and academic, and when completed, he was selected to continue in a six-month short course at the Mons Officers’ Cadet School in Aldershot, England, designed to serve older, more mature cadets who did not need a full two years in the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Disappointed by English racism and class consciousness and unsuited to the cold and soggy weather, Obasanjo did not enjoy his stay. The experience convinced him of the hollowness of the colonial claim of British superiority. He saw no basis for the awe in which a colonial power was held or the fear, respect, and obedience, which it demanded from and was so willingly granted by colonized peoples. The young officer felt confident that he could compete favorably with any man, regardless of color, if given the same opportunity. Awarded the rank of temporary captain after serving with the Nigerian contingent of UN peacekeeping forces in the civil war that had broken out in newly independent Zaire (the former Congo), he returned to England for additional courses at the Royal College of

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Military Engineering. On June 22, 1963, the twenty- six year- old Obasanjo married his childhood sweetheart, Oluremi Akinlawon, then enrolled in a management course at a London polytechnic. The following month, he graduated from the engineering officer’s course, winning a citation as “the best Commonwealth student ever” and took up command of a field engineering unit in Kaduna for an eighteen-month tour of duty.4 Problems of ethnicity and regionalization contributed to his country’s instability. Like many African states, Nigeria had neither emerged as a natural entity nor even as a result of arbitrary lines drawn on a map: it was deliberately designed to facilitate British “divide and rule” manipulation. The country was created in large measure by Frederick Lugard and his West African Frontier Force. Lugard built an army of minorities to conquer the Sokoto Caliphate and then used the Caliphate’s institutions to extend his system of indirect rule to the whole state. Some 250 to 300 ethnic groups (the number depends on one’s definition of ethnicity), speaking 500 languages, added linguistic to ethnic divisions, the latter identified on the basis of language and dialects. Thus, the mixture was cobbled together by British rulers who assembled diverse regions and peoples who spoke mutually unintelligible languages. In the predominantly Muslim north, the Hausa and Fulani constituted almost a third of the total population. (The Fulani, originally a cattle herding people from Senegal, invaded what is today northern Nigeria in the fifteenth century and imposed their rule over most of the Hausa. In colonial times Fulani rulers led the long and bitter struggle against the British.) In the southeast and in Lagos, there were the Igbos; and in the southwest, the Yoruba: both largely Christian. Each had ties to adjacent neighboring countries, and each hoped—and still hopes—for eventual self- determination. It is not surprising that there are differences among them in temperament, culture, and even in training (from the British who concentrated on the south and encouraged poorer northerners to embark on military careers). Serious religious differences (between the mostly Muslim north and the largely Christian south) also divide the country. Approximately 50 percent of Nigerians are Christians; 40 percent, Muslim; and 10 percent practice the traditional African religions. Class differences and the divide between civilians and the military exist as well. Nigeria’s diverse linguistic individualities not only played a key part in the nation’s early development but—as in India—enabled Great Britain to colonize Nigeria by playing various ethnic groups against each other.

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By combining myriad ethnicities into contrived borders, thereby forcing allegiances that had no common history, the British arbitrarily created the State of Nigeria in 1914. And when they departed, they left a legacy of regional strife that continues to plague the country.5 The civil war at the end of the 1960s that resulted in a million deaths issued from ethnic and economic differences. Whether it was the British colonial legacy that threatens Nigeria with disintegration; whether ethnic and religious differences; or whether, as Chinua Achebe believes, “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership and not faults of character, climate or anything else,” the nation was and remains sorely divided.6 In the early 1950s, the decolonization process was underway in Nigeria as well as in other African areas. The post-World War II increase in the number of wage earners prompted the formation of powerful unions that worked with radical nationalist groups to organize strikes, marches, and demonstrations to demand better working conditions, better living standards for Nigerians in general—and independence. The British responded with greater representative institutions, and for the first time, in 1951, with constitutional changes that divided the country into three regions, North, West, and East, with Lagos as an autonomous territory. Each region had an executive council enabling Nigerian leaders to share power with the colonial administration. Limited self- government prompted a taste for greater autonomy, and leaders demanded, though not often with one voice, that the British depart and make independence a reality. By April 1958, following an agreement between the country’s political leaders and Great Britain, a precarious Nigerian government had taken control of the armed forces and two years later secured formal independence. Three major parties approximated the three major ethnic groups (Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba). Each had narrow goals, limited to the geographic region that each dominated, with very little commitment to the central government. By 1963, Nigeria became a federal republic divided into the three regions referred to above: that is, a federation rather than a unitary state and with shifting coalitions making for inherent instability. In a few years, the fragile tribal balance of the Nigerian state fell apart, and at the end of July 1966, the republic collapsed in the wake of a military coup. An unfortunate decision by elected representatives to surrender to politically inexperienced soldiers six months earlier seemed to have legitimized such takeovers. Northerners installed themselves in power with Colonel Yakubu Gowan, a thirty-two year- old Hausa, as

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head of state. He became Africa’s youngest political leader, a devout Christian, non- smoker, and teetotaler. Seeking to enlarge his base and demonstrate democratic leanings, he put several civilians in important cabinet posts.7 Obasanjo had no knowledge of the plot to install Gowan, and as a nonnortherner feared for his family’s safety in their Kaduna home when drunken rioting broke out. He and a pregnant Oluremi were forced to seek refuge in the tiny f lat of a junior post office worker before they were finally f lown to safety. The following February (1967) and now a lieutenant- colonel, he moved to Lagos as chief of the Army Engineers. With a lifetime ambition fulfilled, he gave full credit to the army for his success, making it clear that he would not tolerate anyone mocking the institution that had “given him everything.” If they found him overly sensitive and displaying a tendency toward rashness brought on by a quick temper, both superiors and colleagues could appreciate his insistence on maintaining discipline. Soldiers under his command could not readily leave their barracks for the town, nor were they allowed to molest civilians, while English was made the official medium of communication. 8 Regardless of—and to some extent inspired by—the change in government, ethnic rivalries strengthened, and the leaders of the three regions each threatened secession. One such threat was carried out. When violent massacres directed against the Igbo minority broke out, they f led back to their homeland in the Eastern Region and stepped up their demands for separation. In May, eminent Nigerians tried in vain to reconcile Gowon and General Odomegwu Ojukwu, the region’s governor who had repeatedly threatened to create an independent state. The country appeared on the verge of disintegration as the two men personified the feuding of the Northern and Eastern Regions. Later that month, Gowon declared a state of emergency and announced the creation of twelve states out of the former three regions, in an attempt to prevent the domination of the whole country by any one or two. As governor of a shrunken entity renamed the East Central State, Ojukwu rejected the new twelve- state structure and, on May 30, 1967, announced the secession of the Eastern Region from Nigeria, declaring it the Republic of Biafra. Biafran troops led by General Victor Banjo crossed the Niger River to seize control of the midwestern state, launching a three-year civil war that pitted the breakaway region of Biafra against the federal government. The war was to propel Obasanjo to prominence.

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If ethnic politics provided the excuse for the conf lict, the vast oil reserves of the Niger Delta was the prize. Long deprived of its benefits, Igbos believed that control of the oil would ensure the viability of their Biafran state, but the rest of Nigeria refused to part with the oil-rich region. National revenues, the so- called “national cake” which provided the resources for everything from social services to road building, were supposedly distributed on the basis of population, regardless of the source. But minorities in the delta had long complained that they had little to show for the riches literally gushing from their land.9 When the war broke out, Obasanjo, now a full colonel, was commanding the garrison stationed in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city in terms of population and gaining a reputation for incorruptibility. (He had warned family and servants against accepting gifts from army contractors and on finding that his wife had accepted a present from one of them, an incensed Obasanjo paid the contractor for its value and insisted she never accept another.)10 The unexpected Biafran invasion of the midwest in August 1967 had left him and others on the federal side rattled. When ordered by Commander-in- Chief Gowon to take a new command, that of the Third Marine Commando, a unit marked by inefficiency and low morale, he was very much aware of the challenge. Some sympathetic friends jokingly called it a death sentence. By 8:00 a.m. of his first day in command, he had already put in two hours of work, and both his officers and men realized a new era had opened. Within a month of his arrival, Obasanjo had inspected all the troops, met all the officers, and heard their problems. He drew up a new organizational chart and improved morale by having his men paid on time and providing “comfort women” for their use. But he was also willing to arrest and punish unruly soldiers who took victory as a license to kill and rape. By building a strong reserve force and stockpiling ammunition for it, he was able to employ tactics different from those customarily relied on. No longer using a broad sweep to capture several places simultaneously, he took a more methodical, more gradual, but also more realistic approach, and in so doing distinguished himself as a cool, intelligent commander. His role in winning several key battles was readily acknowledged, gaining plaudits from Gowon and the Nigerian chief of staff for his successes. In his memoir of the civil war, My Command, Obasanjo claimed that within six months, he had turned a situation of low morale, desertion, and distrust within [his] division and ultimately within the army into one of high morale, confidence, cooperation, and success. Much of this is probably true in so far as his actions in the war eventually

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led to Obasanjo himself accepting the surrender of the rebel forces in January 1970. The victory came as a result of the remarkably successful “Operation Tailwind” that he devised, a plan that called for a swift advance through Biafran ranks, giving his opponents no chance to regroup.11 The young general won the decisive battle that brought the Nigerian civil war to an end. Eastern Nigeria renounced secession, accepted Gowon’s twelve- state structure, and pledged loyalty to the federal military government. Obasanjo’s success ensured that the unity of the Nigerian state remained intact and made him a war hero and national figure. While serving in the east, Obasanjo met Ken Saro Wiwa, the poet and revolutionary who would figure prominently in Nigerian politics until put to death in 1995. When Obasanjo left the region in 1971, Saro Wiwa presented him with a copy of René Dumont’s False Start in Africa, a book highly critical of Africa’s pursuit of industrial, rather than agrarian, prosperity. The book contributed significantly to the general’s developing views on the importance of agrarian self- sufficiency in Nigeria and throughout Africa.12 In seven months as a field commander, the thirty-three-year old Obasanjo had made a difference in a long and bitter war. He won a national and global reputation as the man who ended a fratricidal combat comparable in ferocity, size, and cost to the Spanish, and even the American, civil wars. He was much feted and the recipient of a citation and numerous tributes. With prominence came hangers- on, numbering among them friends, relations, and opportunists. Oluremi became aware of “a new man” in her husband. The humorous, quiet, self- effacing young officer she knew before the war, she said, had become more confident but also more intolerant and ruthless. He expressed disappointment in the human failings seen on the battlefield and in the willingness of officers to subordinate the national interest when opportunities for amassing wealth emerged. He became cynical, and although there were now four children, less of a family man. He, on his part, complained that she could not handle their new social status, and he accused her of trying to isolate him from relatives and friends.13 As oil revenue f lowed in, the country experienced a postwar boom. That Nigeria’s high quality oil was fetching the highest prices on the world market, however, proved both a blessing and a curse. The newly found money, transforming the nation in the 1970s into the thirtieth most wealthy in the world, established leverage for playing a greater

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diplomatic role in Africa. By creating dependence on imports, those same revenues also created a single-product economy, the gross mismanagement of which was turning Nigeria into a debtor nation.14 Well-placed men took from public funds and became millionaires. At the same time, the problems posed by the military were mounting. Having won a war its public image soared, and officers, both active and retired, were able to exert political and economic inf luence on the life of the nation. Soldiers had become instant heroes. Professionalism sank as officers found ready access to political jobs, which provided easier paths to money than arid military postings. Indiscipline, inf luence peddling, and corruption became the trademarks of a once highly regarded institution. Obasanjo had become inf luential and powerful not only in the army but in Nigerian society, and he took advantage of the power that attracted people to him. He had numerous casual affairs, and in a society where male promiscuity and adultery were often overlooked, he justified his actions by appealing to the age- old African practice of polygamy. “For in all honesty,” his otherwise sympathetic biographer admits, “Obasanjo has a major weakness for women—many of whom he did not treat well (lack of love and companionship, inadequate and irregular financial support, separate homes, long absences, and the typical old- style macho aloofness of his generation of men in Nigeria).”15 If, by early 1974, his (first) marriage had virtually ended, professionally he was doing well. With two other officers, he embarked on an ambitious barracks-building project to accommodate members of the armed forces expected to return to garrison duty in 1976, the year that Gowon had promised a return to elected civilian rule. Obasanjo had left Nigeria in January of that year to attend the Royal College of Defense Studies in London, formerly the Imperial Defense College. The college was designed to prepare selected senior officers and officials for “high responsibilities in the direction and management of defense and security or other related areas of public policy,” and the course work placed emphasis on international and regional issues. The BBC had asked Obasanjo about the role of the military in the newly independent African nations. He spoke in favor of democracy, “a system in which every citizen would be involved in the running of the nation’s affairs,” and he advocated the return of the armed forces to their traditional role of maintaining international security and defending the nation against external aggression. The paper he wrote at the end of the course, on “British Aid to Nigeria,” was critical of the unhealthy trade balance his country suffered with Great Britain and of what he viewed

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as the latter’s continuing neo- colonialist policies. Demonstrating his allegiance to the institution that had nurtured him and made his success possible, he added, “that it will probably not be right to cut out the military for a special political office or political favor just because they happen to have the monopoly of violence.”16 In January 1975, in a major cabinet reshuff ling, Gowon named Obasanjo federal commissioner (minister) for works and housing. The new minister showed deference to the civil servants under him, and the humility he displayed was well received. To ensure the prompt execution of government projects, he put professionals in charge of sensitive projects and ordered departmental heads to carry out their duties promptly. He frequently sounded out his staff for advice, and whether initiatives were his or theirs, such existing projects as highways and bridges were rushed to completion while others, notably housing units, were started. Yet Obasanjo was dismayed both by Gowon’s unwillingness, despite the latter’s initial promise, to show any sign that he was ready to reestablish democratic forms and by the government’s failure, regardless of its stated intention to restore honesty and accountability, to end enormous waste and corruption. Fueled by huge oil revenues, the Gowon regime had embarked on massive structural development. It set about to reorganize the armed forces, implement a national development plan, and repair war damages, while professing to bring an end to corruption. Vast public works projects were undertaken, and emerging skyscrapers changed the landscape in Lagos. Construction went ahead as if revenue sources were limitless. Early in 1975, Gowon visited the island nation of Grenada, and despite mounting poverty at home, in a conspicuous display of unwarranted expenditure came back with a plan to pay the salaries of all the island’s civil servants and grant a huge loan to the insolvent black nation but with no provision for monitoring the distribution of funds. If worthwhile plans at home, such as giving Nigerians a greater voice in businesses held by foreigners, establishing the metric system, driving on the right, creating a new currency, and providing for universal free compulsory education at the primary level were formulated and in some cases initiated, they were poorly implemented, if at all. As noted, despite—or because of—its oil wealth, Nigeria became a food importer. Critics found corruption rampant; governors received kickbacks; and nepotism f lourished. Army officers complained that Gowon had never commanded anything higher than a platoon and lacked administrative experience. His government showed a glaring

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insensitivity to criticism, while the head of state f lew off on repeated trips abroad. The most notorious example of inefficiency was found in the “cement crisis” that aff licted Nigeria’s armada- clogged ports. The government had imported twenty million metric tons of cement, ten times the handling capacity of the nation’s seaports, for such building projects as military barracks, housing, and offices. At one point, 450 ships loaded with cement were unable to berth. Some waited weeks and even months, with the government paying half a million dollars a day in demurrage. Obassanjo and another reform-minded colleague, Brigadier General Murtala Muhammed (Muhammed more forcefully than Obasanjo) spoke out about administration shortcomings and the need for the government to restore public confidence. Gowon would listen, make promises, but took no action. Unable to carry out his own reform program, surrounded by ambitious civil servants and cronies and relishing power, he repeatedly postponed a transition to civilian rule. In the spring of 1975, rumors spread about young officers plotting to stage a coup. At the end of a Federal Executive Council meeting in late July, Obasanjo bought one such rumor to Gowon’s attention. (Existing military law provided that anyone aware of an attempted overthrow of the government but failing to report it to a superior could be accused of treason.) The head of state assured him that he understood the threat and had everything under control.17 On July 28, the coup was underway. Although briefed and able to benefit from the uprising, Obasanjo had not (and never did) participate in one.18 Fearing a dictatorship, the conspirators decided against having a single man to head a new government. Instead, they picked three well thought of brigadiers: Murtala Muhammed, Obasanjo, and Yakubu Danjuma. The coup was well received by a populace that had tired of the Gowon regime and was reeling from a 40 percent inf lation rate (incurred in part because of Gowon’s decision to double wages to appease workers). It was also welcomed by powerful—and corrupt—governors resentful of Gowon and by unhappy wartime commanders left out of his administration, but virtually all saw the head of state as weak, tired, helpless, and desperate. Muhammed, who called for clean government and perceived by the plotters as trusted by the public, headed the new military administration. He named Obasanjo as his deputy and Danjuma as army boss. (The three, promoted to general officer rank, backdated to the date of the coup, is an illustration of the unparalleled speed with which the

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Nigerian military race through the ranks: “The country probably has more generals under 40,” stated one writer, “than any other country, and many never saw or fought a war.”)19 Since Obasanjo was senior to Danjuma, he also ranked second to the head of state militarily. The rest of the cabinet consisted of civilians and army officers and also included Christians, Muslims, traditionalists, radicals, and centrists. Gowon, then attending a conference in Kampala, took the news of his downfall with remarkable calm. He promised to support the new government and then slipped into obscurity in England. Obasanjo justified the coup on the grounds that Gowon had reneged on his promise to restore civilian rule. The officers, he later wrote, had decided to strike “to redeem the name, image, and reputation of the military and halt the drift.” 20 Because it was bloodless, the uprising was seen as a maturation of the military (as if coups were now normal politics). “A cause to be proud,” boasted the New Nigerian of August 1, 1975, and the new administration presented itself as having restored the “dignity” of the military in the face of a corrupt regime. 21 In contrast to their more conservative predecessors, the Muhammed government (and that of Obasanjo, which followed it) pursued a radical and nationalistic agenda. The success anticipated would be based on new oil revenues and relative peace and unity after the devastating civil war. Muhammed at once announced a timetable for establishing an elected civilian government by October 1, 1979, and his policies and actions were designed to make this goal a reality. The MuhammadObasanjo regime (historians hyphenate the names regarding it as a continuum) undertook a reorganization of the federal government. It did so in hopes of gaining popular support by centralizing power and, at the same time, extending state control over civil society as part of efforts to cut back on regionalism. For example, the government placed the universities (now numbering six) under federal control and created six new ones, bringing the number to twelve. 22 Other changes, acclaimed at the time but later seen as prejudicial to democratic practices, had the government take control not only of education but radio and television as well. It established a secret service, the National Security Organization. To cleanse the allegedly bloated and incompetent civil service, it tried to remove some 10,000 employees. But as morale plummeted and complaints mounted that malice and injustice marked the weeding- out process, the practice was later halted. 23 In hopes of erasing memories of regional strife and offer greater diversity of representation, the government further divided the nation

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from twelve states into nineteen, most receiving names from major cities, rivers, and other geographical features, and administrative capitals and military governors were announced for each. Planning took place for a new capital, Abuja, located in the heart of the country, to ease the turmoil in the port of Lagos, the old bustling capital, 300 miles to the southwest. Like Brasilia, similarly located in the middle of nowhere, Abuja was to contain big new buildings situated on broad boulevards. What emerged were nondescript modern office slabs and hotels. No cue was taken from the surrounding villages of mud walls and conical thatched roofs and the bold rocky topography. (A subsequent regime, that of Shehu Shagari, abandoned the gradual approach initially taken, and much of the work was shoddily done by European companies at inf lated prices with huge kickbacks for all involved.) No doubt, in the creation of Ogun State (carved out of the former Western Region) and the choice of Abeokuta, his home town, as its administrative capital, Obasanjo used his inf luence. Still, he tried to avoid situations where he could be accused of partisanship, and friends were appalled that he failed to protect their interests. 24 A wave of reforms undertaken by the government washed over the country. Detainees never charged with any offense were released. Task forces were set up to tackle such problems as hoarding, inf lation, and high rents. To alleviate the clogged ports, ships were diverted to Ghana. Although at a meeting with the press on August 22, Obasanjo spoke of the administration’s intention to maintain a military posture in order to carry out its programs quickly; he pleaded for cooperation, promising an open government; not to run for the benefit of an individual (a swipe at the previous administration); and greater accountability. In a controversial move, the regime acquired controlling shares of the nation’s oldest newspaper, the Daily Times, and later took complete ownership of the New Nigerian, an inf luential organ of the northern establishment. The rationale that was offered stated the government’s need of a voice, but predictably these papers lost their independence, becoming as dull and boring as government-run radio and TV. A new assertive foreign policy, based on Nigeria’s economic strength and placing emphasis on the continent, was adopted. Spurred by inroads into the independence of newly born Angola, Muhammed stated his intention to work for nonracial governments in all of southern Africa. He saw Nigerian independence as meaningless unless the rest of Africa was freed of colonial rule, and Obasanjo echoed these views in a speech given to senior army officers in January 1976. 25 The Muhammed government had not only allowed African liberation groups to open offices

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in Nigeria but welcomed refugees from areas where the struggle for liberation was in progress. It encouraged an anti- apartheid student uprising in Soweto, the black township adjacent to Johannesburg, in 1976, and immediately allowed Soweto students to enter Nigerian universities. It also sponsored efforts to expel South Africa from the International Labor Organization, the International Atomic Energy, and the Olympic Games. Noble intentions notwithstanding, the corruption seemingly endemic to the system proved impossible to eradicate. Bribery, theft, extortion, nepotism, and patronage all endured: above all, the use of political power to advance self-interest. Both the reform program and development foundered (although a second port was built in Lagos). Oil revenues declined because of an international glut and (later) the fall of the dollar in 1978–1979, but despite a foreign debt of a billion dollars, the government was able to leave a reserve for the next administration. 26 The two men had their differences, but the ties between Muhammed and Obasanjo remained close. They could argue, but the respect each gave the other never wavered. Muhammed, more radical and forceful, preferred a “bulldozer approach,” preferring to do as much as possible and at once. Obasanjo, more cautious, foresaw problems, kept control of the budget allocated to him, and invariably assured himself of the support of his two colleagues. When Yoruba officers accused the deputy head of state of trying to ingratiate himself with the northern power brokers both in and outside of the military, Obasanjo disclaimed any ethnic solidarity, going to great lengths to show that his primary identity was his “Nigerianess” and that his “Yorubaness” remained secondary. This did not sit well with his fellow Yorubas, who saw his presence in the government as having provided the opportunity to improve the lot of his ethnic group. His own colleagues, they (correctly) pointed out, paid lip service to the nation but provided help and jobs to their respective communities and, with some justification, found him naive and excessively idealistic. Muhammed had stated that he would hand power over to civilian authorities in 1979. He never got the chance. He was assassinated on February 13 1976, after only six months in office, in a failed coup attempt by another military faction. The plotters resented his plan to cut the size of the army by 100,000 men despite promises of aid to the demobilized soldiers, enabling them to readjust to civilian life. The number of troops had risen to 270,000 at the end of the civil war in 1970, taking

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almost 46 percent of all federal expenditures in 1975. Those officers who doubted the sincerity of the administration feared being ousted and still resented the hasty promotion of the three brigadiers in January 1976, when the troika took power. Because Muhammed had been determined to humanize his office, he had rejected armed security guards or armored cars. His black Mercedes, caught in a typical Lagos traffic jam, was an easy target for an ambush and left a smoldering wreck. Aware that as his deputy, he too was a likely target, Obasanjo took refuge in the home of a Lagos business man and only learned that the coup had failed when the radio no longer played martial music. (He was subsequently accused by critics of having gone into hiding and not resurfacing until the threat was averted.)27 Saddened and disheartened by the death of the colleague he respected, Obasanjo was initially determined not to succeed him and considered abandoning political life. This show of reluctance was sincere: much persuasion by his cabinet colleagues to succeed Muhammed as the first Yoruba head of state was required. You are next in line and had worked closely with the slain president, they told him, and you owe it to Muhammed. When convinced by them that his refusal would only aid the coup makers—the comment of a major general that if he persisted in his refusal, the rebel leader responsible for the assassination should be asked to serve instead touched a raw nerve—he yielded. There seemed no alternative. And since he had worked closely with Muhammed, the character and substance of the reforming regime would be kept. Moreover, as a Yoruba, Obasanjo represented the only one of the three major ethnic blocs that had never produced a civilian or military leader. Much to the dismay of his older daughter, who had begged him not to, Obasanjo accepted. For the hostile Wole Soyinka, the war hero consequently became head of state by default, “not of a banana republic but of the most populous, wealthiest nation on the African continent.” 28 The new president immediately announced that he would continue Muhammed’s reformist agenda and abide by his predecessor’s timetable for democratic elections. On February 14, the evening of the day following his predecessor’s assassination—and in his capacity both as head of state and commander of the armed forces—he gave his maiden speech. Obasanjo related the events that had propelled him to office, his initial refusal, and his change of mind. He repeatedly assured his audience that he would complete the transition (to civilian rule) begun by Muhammed. Listeners found him mild and moderate for a military man and were pleasantly surprised. For one observer, “after the

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mercurial and tempestuous performances of Muhammed, Obasanjo is like a cool interlude” but added that he was determined to be “his own man.” 29 Enabling him to do so was the unique place that he held in a thoroughly politicized military, one dominated by the northern Hausa-Fulanis. He was fully aware of the significance of his position and the need to maintain a delicate balance among Nigeria’s ethnic and religious groups. As both a Yoruba and a Christian—in contrast to the predominantly Muslim makeup of the northerners—and as a military man, Obasanjo bridged very different worlds. The era of the cautious reformer began. Obasanjo had held a government post for only a year, and aside from his military reputation was relatively unknown to the 75 million Nigerians. His early past was hazy; his presence uncomely—the heavy- set earthy president in his traditional thick, yet loose, Yoruba robes was taken as boorish and dull. But friends and colleagues were aware that this gracelessness was deceptive. They knew that with his sharply perceptive mind, he had been the idea man behind the tough-talking Muhammed, and although he lacked the latter’s fiery eloquence, his competence was never doubted. The soft- spoken president, could if necessary, be tough and ruthless; and for one political scientist, his presidency was “one of Africa’s most significant attempts to create a stable democratic government.”30 “His guiding principles,” relates his biographer, “are diligence, temperance, and parsimony.” Brutally frank, he often responded aggressively to attacks on his actions and so gave the impression that he saw himself as infallible. There was a soldier’s brusqueness, sternness, and dictatorial impulse. At times thoughtful and methodical, he could be “stubbornly unconcerned” with the finer points of legality and the propriety of behavior. Warm and kind one minute, mean and vindictive the next, he left the impression of a man struggling both to be ennobled by history and appreciated by his fellow men. The childhood of deprivation may have accounted for an obsession with responsible finances and frugality in government, but as Ojo put it, “in a nation where public service is synonymous with greed, theft and corruption, his ethical crusade and his call for moderation in every aspect of the national life would be mocked relentlessly by a cynical populace.”31 “I am a systems man,” Obasanjo said, alluding to his engineering training, which encouraged a belief that the right institutions, rationally conceived and scrupulously set in place, would constrain destructive behavior. Leadership to him meant tinkering with existing structures to evolve a more dynamic one in which hard work is encouraged and

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rewarded, and indolence, waste, and indiscipline, if subject to enforceable sanctions, discouraged. For his admirers, he believed in a system socially responsible or humane enough to help the disadvantaged to their feet, a system in which the collective resources of a state could be used for the benefit of every citizen. Consequently, Obasanjo ran a more open administration, declaring himself and his colleagues receptive to “constructive” criticism and ideas—opponents could publish their views—but insistent on retaining military control until the promised election took place. National, not regional, concerns would take precedence. “The leader,” he wrote in the memoir of his (first) presidency, “must be able to discern, and discount the underlying motives behind the various recommendations, suggestions and pieces of advice that are placed at his disposal . . . to see . . . beyond the lines if he is not to become a pawn in the hands of those who might so desire. This constitutes what might be referred to as loneliness at the top.” Should he fail to carefully weigh, assess, and balance the advice received, the leader might serve a particular rather than a national interest. To enhance the quality of Nigerian leadership, Obasanjo in 1979 established a Nigerian Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, one inspired by his experience at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London five years earlier.32 Obasanjo faced stereotypical expectations that as a Christian and a Yoruba, he would favor those interests. Less predictably, he sought advice from varied sectors, from Islamic scholars to traditional tribal chiefs. He held regular meetings with professional groups, the armed forces, young people, labor unions, business people, and politicians to explain official policies and to listen to their views and suggestions while vowing to subject all decisions to constructive criticisms. Some of the policies that the administration planned and executed were, in fact, first suggested by well-meaning Nigerians outside the government. 33 The new head of state insisted that he was committed to a democratic agenda, and in his first week in office offered suggestions to the committee he had charged with drafting a constitution. In October 1976, he released the draft constitution submitted to him, and two years later he would create a Federal Electoral Commission to oversee the legislative and executive elections it called for. In preparation for the civilian rule that would take place when he stepped down from office in 1979, he redeployed state military governors to military duties. Obasanjo’s vision of a new Nigerian Constitution, patterned after that called for by Muhammed, moved away from the previous parliamentary

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to a presidential system. It borrowed heavily from the U.S. Constitution in an effort to overcome regional differences and loyalties by having the head of state elected by and responsible to a national constituency. When approved in 1979, this constitution would give birth to Nigeria’s Second Republic.34 That Obasanjo’s conception of democracy did not, however, conform to Western practice was made clear in a TV interview given on October 26, 1975, in which he said that the new constitution would be a consensus document avoiding what he saw as the three major defects of its predecessor: ethnic politics, the concept of winner takes all, and institutionalized opposition. Rather than constant negative competition, a search for consensus should prevail. Insistent that in the face of threatened fragmentation, political struggle was an unaffordable luxury in a developing nation, he placed emphasis on the maintenance of stability and avoidance of the threats to it: ethnic tribalism, military coups, and widespread corruption. “The [popular] word for opposition,” he said, “is the same as for enemy. And what do you do with your enemy? Of course, you crush him.” A moral dimension was added to his reform agenda, which required vagrants to work and called for the abolition of legacies.35 A number of immediate reforms strengthened an inadequate security system by combining three separate organizations. A judicial reform set up a tribunal headed by eminent judges. Illegally acquired wealth was confiscated, corrupt officers were sacked and prosecuted, and a radical demobilization of the swollen armed forces was given new life with rehabilitation centers set up to prepare the released troops for civilian life. Obasanjo aimed at a maximum 150,000-man army, an achievable number provided that economic growth continued. In 1976–1977 alone, 12,000 soldiers were demobilized and went through the newly established facilities.36 Symbolic steps taken included a ban on the use of Mercedes cars, the ultimate sign of wealth in the country, as official government vehicles. They were replaced with more modest Peugot 504s (perhaps the one policy that did not resist attempts at nullification). Other austerity measures prohibited the importation of champagne. The international airport in Lagos was completed and named to commemorate the slain Muhammed, as was a new Nigerian 20 dollar (N20) bank note. Obasanjo governed at a time when Africa and much of the Third World showed a preference for a nationalist ideology—a belief that a strong state could promote rapid economic growth. His administration not only took effective control of major media outlets but

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promoted such white elephant projects as the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, which over the years would incur costs of $8 billion without producing a single bar of steel. The Land Use Decree of 1978 transferred control of land and mineral rights to state and federal governments, thereby increasing the power of the state and setting the federal government ever more firmly on a collision course with residents of the oil-rich Niger Delta. Agriculture, once a mainstay accounting for 75 percent of exports, was stalling. Having found it more profitable to import food than produce it, successive governments had allowed the total land under cultivation to fall by almost a third. 37 With regard to land policy, all transactions required state approval, while reforestation efforts were undertaken to stop the encroachment of the Sahara Desert in the north. Both to divert the emphasis placed on petroleum as the backbone of the Nigerian economy and to increase food production and get people back on farms and so reduce costly food imports, a program called “Operation Feed the Nation” was established. It granted tax breaks to lure large- scale investment into agriculture, eased agricultural credit, abolished duties on farm implements and livestock feed, and subsidized the use of fertilizers. The land use decree, however, met with only partial success, and in his memoir, Obasanjo acknowledged the difficulties faced: “I must admit that the message of farming is generally not a palatable message, especially to the urbanized groups because farming is tedious, difficult, hazardous, comparatively unremunerative, fraught with uncertainties and to a great extent despised.” For these reasons, he added, the program required “encouragement, inducement and all forms of assistance.”38 If in the 1970s, Nigeria remained an underdeveloped, corrupted, mismanaged nation, it was the world’s seventh largest producer of oil. Few Nigerians, however, profited: three- quarters of the nation’s wealth was controlled by 1 percent of the population. The country had concentrated its energies on the promotion of oil exports, not on using the proceeds to develop the national economy and infrastructure. With greater power in the hands of the federal government, Obasanjo set out to develop a responsible economic program. Because multinational corporations were perceived as dominating the oil industry, the government began a program of “indiginization,” a plan to place control of the economy in the hands of Nigerians and to ensure that they were the chief beneficiaries of the nation’s resources. Not, however, a nationalization program, it initially sought to transfer ownership from foreigners to nationals but not to the government.

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When Obasanjo found that foreign investors were circumventing the process by using Nigerians as fronts for their overseas programs, the government took over 120 companies for violating the terms of the program. A National Petroleum Corporation assumed responsibility for the exploration and marketing of crude oil and the building of new refineries, roads, and ports. To prevent another port fiasco, a program for building additional docks and emergency discharges was begun.39 When Obasanjo took office in 1975, inf lation had reached an annual rate of 34 percent. The government launched an austerity program to lower public sector spending and imposed a wage freeze, and in the process, setting up an anti-inf lation task force and declaring a war on hoarding. Within a year, inf lation fell to 20 percent, and economic growth rose from under 3 to 10 percent.40 Despite these efforts, there were no significant changes in production and productivity. For one critic, “food prices remained exorbitant [and] the food supply situation remained precarious.” The area under cultivation actually fell, and food imports increased. “Operation Feed the Nation” served as a prelude to the austerity budgets of 1977–1978 that were designed to stop a mounting balance of payments deficit. Although initially well received, these budgets proved superficial insofar as they targeted urban elites and the working class, not rural producers, and never got beyond impressive launching ceremonies. There were also objections to the $1 billion loan Nigeria was “dragged into taking” by lending nations, a loan, opponents charged, which “threw open the f loodgate of staggering external debt.”41 So, Obasanjo’s agenda contained not only the creation of a new constitution and governmental framework but measures to revive a decaying economic situation in a nation that had ample riches from its oil exports, to heal—or at least reduce—ever-present regional and religious divisions and to strengthen Nigeria’s emerging role on the international scene as Africa’s leading black nation. A Federal National Policy on Education, designed to make education “more relevant to national needs and objectives,”—and by “objectives,” he referred to “the elimination of tribalism, ethnicity, and the ravages that have been wrought by the Biafran War”—was established.42 National unity was also served by the Primary Education Act in 1976, which sought to provide free compulsory elementary education. The government took control of and expanded the number of teacher training colleges, while designating Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba as official languages of business in addition to English and requiring Nigerian children to study one indigenous language in addition to their own.

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When it tried to equip two universities with facilities for nuclear science and technology, however, it was forced to acknowledge that money was wasted on frivolous travel, overinvoicing, and mismanagement. The government also established a national census along with the compulsory registration of births and deaths. A basic health service, which included the sending of mobile medical units and new teaching hospitals in strategic locations, was set up.43 With some pride, Obasanjo later described the July 1975–October 1979 era as “a period that marked a watershed . . . in the political and socioeconomic life of Nigeria.” The implementation of democracy, defined as “popular participation of all adults in the election process [and] takes institutional pluralism for granted,” satisfied a long standing ideological goal. For Obasanjo, it also undertook a functional mission in a pluralistic society like Nigeria’s, where regional pressures remained strong. “In the Nigerian situation,” he wrote, “democracy is the only integrative glue that can bind the different sub-national groups together into a nation with common destinies, equal status, a common identity on a permanent basis. It preserves harmony within communities through consensus and agreement [and] thereby integrates societies.”44 The military, he never tired of repeating, served a political purpose in a country like Nigeria. “As the last bastion of defense of national unity and integration,” he insisted, “it must not be destroyed as an institution.” Rather, it must be strengthened and “made to internalize a culture and a tradition of civilian supremacy in its ethics and ethos.” Aware that in large measure the loss of confidence in the military issued from Gowon’s failure to return to civilian rule in 1976, Obasanjo was determined to redeem its credibility and reputation. But above all, the armed forces provided needed insurance against national disintegration, as a means by which national unity could be established and maintained in a pluralistic democracy. Like most in the military, he regarded the army as a national institution and his own service in it as one of nation building. He even envisioned a role for soldiers to play in keeping discipline in the nation’s schools.45 If national unity loomed as the guiding principle in Obasanjo’s administrative reforms, attempts to strengthen it were necessarily based on the realization that “in a country so diverse in traditions, culture, religion, other ways of life, we cannot have and in fact it would have been wrong to expect, uniformity.” Hence, the traditional or emirate councils allowed by new local governments, provided such a tradition existed, and the provision of federal funds in support of institutions

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that recognized and guaranteed local differences. Still, traditional rulers would serve only in an advisory capacity and local governments used largely as instruments of development.46 Only in the religious sphere was an exception made to giving meaningful consideration to regional inf luence, and it was made in the name of national unity. Obasanjo took a liberal view of religion and clashed with Muslims over the attempt by northerners to extend the scope of Sharia law under the new constitution. Nor did he favor the interests of his own church: he had grown up together with Muslim cousins and could not believe its teaching that non-Baptists were doomed to hell. In India, where he had seen devout Hindus, he had concluded that all religions were basically similar, and when religious differences threatened to disrupt meetings of the constituent assembly, he warned of consequences for the nation.47 Sometimes the passion for installing a sense of and feeling for national unity appeared excessive. Critics noted what Chinua Achebe called Obasanjo’s “penchant for populist rhetoric” and the “outlet” it found in the “indiginized” wordings and rhythm of a new national anthem and national pledge—and its compulsory recitation by infants and adults. Achebe described an official presidential visit in 1978 to the University of Nigeria. The assembled academic community in the University’s Continuing Education Center respectfully rose on his entry. The president made a totally unexpected demand when he asked them to recite the national pledge. A few ambiguous mumbles followed and then stony silence. “You see,” said Obasanjo, bristling with hostility, “you do not even know the national pledge.” Achebe observed that “true patriotism” emerges only when the nation is ruled justly, if the welfare of all the people rather than the advantage of the few becomes the cornerstone of public policy.48 The concern with eliminating, or at best reducing, the corruption that was ingrained as a way of life for many Nigerians, became a passion for Obasanjo. He told of his eye doctor asking to see him, and an appointment was accordingly scheduled. The reason, it turned out, was to solicit Obasanjo’s support for awarding a government contract to a firm the doctor had an interest in. With the perplexed doctor standing by, the outraged president phoned the military governor of the doctor’s state to report the incident and asked to be informed of the disciplinary action the governor planned to take. (The doctor preferred an early retirement.) When reminded that such behavior was widespread, Obasanjo replied that a cleansing process must begin at some time, and when he learned that no rules applied to the solicitation of government

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contracts by former civil servants, he pushed through a measure requiring them to endure a three-year wait after leaving government employment.49 This ruling was breached more than it was adhered to. In foreign policy, Nigeria strengthened its leadership role in anti- colonial and anti- apartheid struggles and in establishing a regional economic union for west Africa. The Obasanjo administration, like its predecessor, made the continent the centerpiece of its foreign policy, especially when vigorously defending liberation movements in the struggle for the decolonization of southern Africa. Committed to securing the independence of indigenous populations seen as oppressed, Obasanjo openly challenged the West, especially in regard to Angola, Rhodesia, and South Africa. For Olayiwola Abegunrin, a historian of Nigerian foreign policy, both he and Muhammed before him were “the most committed African nationalists and Pan-African leaders” that the country has ever produced.50 Nigeria’s role in African and international affairs expanded greatly during Obasanjo’s tenure. The country’s oil wealth, coupled with its possession of the largest population in Africa, allowed the new president to believe that it should provide a leading force in continental affairs. Oil became the major weapon of Nigerian foreign policy, and Obasanjo made it clear that he was willing to sacrifice development within Nigeria by refusing to cooperate with foreign industries that continued to invest in southern Africa. As a reprisal for the sale of oil to Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government, Obasanjo nationalized some Nigerian assets of British Petroleum (BP) and Barclays Bank in 1978 and threatened further measures.51 Earlier, in 1976, when Britain refused to extradite Gowon, then in exile, the Obasanjo government decided to diversify its reserves held in sterling, which hurt the British currency.52 His administration also mediated in such regional conf licts as the civil war in Chad and campaigned for greater representation for Africa in UN bodies. Continuing the activist foreign policy initiated by Muhammed, Obasanjo was determined to use oil revenues to finance development projects in various African countries and accordingly set up a Nigerian Trust Fund in 1978 to implement the program. Oil would serve as leverage against western investors in southern Africa in a manner similar to that used by Arab states against the West over the Palestine question. The country became the leading African opponent of white-ruled regimes in southern Africa (Obasanjo would be one of the few prominent people to visit Nelson Mandela in jail) and maintained Muhammed’s policy of allowing the leaders of liberation movements in Namibia and Rhodesia

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to operate out of Lagos. The two Nigerian heads of state echoed the declaration made earlier by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah when they called Nigeria’s independence meaningless if the entire African continent was not set free from colonial rule. Obasanjo restated this in a major foreign policy address to a senior army officers training seminar on June 17, 1976. The country, he said, would no longer “sit on the fence on important issues under the alibi of nonalignment.”53 Perhaps the most sensational decision taken was that to confront Washington in the run-up to Angola’s independence. When in the mid1970s, the United States and South Africa supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), Nigeria opposed what it saw as an effort to install a puppet government. It strongly backed the rival Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and its use of Cuban and Soviet forces as the legitimate voice of the Angolan people and mobilized much of the rest of Africa behind that stand. Nigeria provided military and material support to the MPLA, contributing to its triumph when it formed the first government of the newly independent country. Because this marked a setback for a U.S. foreign policy objective, many Nigerians believed that Muhammed’s assassination was linked to Washington’s determination to eliminate what it saw as a threat from Nigeria. Obasanjo continued to make clear his opposition to any foreign intervention in Angola. At an African Union summit in Khartoum in July 1978, he told the Soviets “and their friends” that having been invited to Angola in order to assist in the liberation struggle and the consolidation of national independence, they should not overstay their welcome. Angolans were not about to throw off one colonial yoke for another.54 Twice in late 1976, Obasanjo not only rejected Secretary of State Kissinger’s proposed Anglo-American peace plan for settling the Rhodesian crisis but refused to allow him to visit Lagos during his shuttle diplomacy concerning southern Africa. The head of state believed that before its “chief architect” could be invited, a redesigned U.S. policy had to ref lect “the broad interests of Africa.” Only with friendly overtures from the Carter administration, including a state visit in 1978, did tensions between the two countries begin to ease, and the American president’s visit was seen as the “high water mark” of Nigeria’s arrival on the international scene. The overtures came as an acknowledgment of Nigeria’s new “African superpower” status—which most certainly arose from Nigeria’s emergence as an oil power.55 To show Nigerian opposition to the newly installed Thatcher government’s decision to lift the economic sanctions imposed by Great Britain

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and the international community on Rhodesia in the late 1960s—and to protest London’s decision to sell North Sea oil to apartheid South Africa—the Obasanjo administration announced that it would discriminate against British firms in awarding multimillion dollar government contracts. Accordingly, a number of British construction companies were dropped from Nigerian bidders’ lists. When Thatcher remained unmoved, Nigeria on July 31, 1979, nationalized the remaining holdings in the BP operating company. To ensure that the action would be effective, Obasanjo moved his remaining foreign reserves in pound sterling to prevent them from being frozen in retaliation, and the president believed that his action led to a change in the British stand. Together with pressure from the Commonwealth and the Organization of African States, the Nigerian action resulted in a reversal of Thatcher’s Rhodesian policy. This combined effort forced Britain to join in an all-party conference, which opened the way to the country’s (renamed Zimbabwe) independence. Not surprisingly, the New York Times described Nigeria during Obasanjo’s rule as “the leading African opponent of white-ruled regimes in southern Africa.”56 With the Angolan and Zimbabwean struggles for independence won, the Obasanjo government stepped up its efforts to change the regime in South Africa. The apartheid administration and its racist policies became constant targets of Nigerian verbal attacks and diplomatic harassment. At a UN- sponsored world conference for action against apartheid held in Lagos in August 1977, delegates from 112 countries showed up to put a global spotlight on the evils of apartheid. In his opening speech, Obasanjo made it clear there would be no compromise with the regime and warned against doing business with governments and labor organizations having ties to South Africa.57 The activities of Obasanjo’s military administration thus created a significant landmark in the political, economic, and social history of Nigeria. His decision to hand over the reins of power to an elected civilian government in October 1979, the first head of state in the continent to do so, would make him unique in the history of Africa.

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CHAPTER 6

Olusegun Obasanjo: Termination

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igeria’s new constitution was adopted in 1979. It implemented a series of political reforms that for the first time included a guarantee of human rights. Now divided into nineteen states, the nation was to remain a federation but one defined within the constitution itself as “the distinctive desire of the people of Nigeria to promote national unity, foster national loyalty, and give every Nigerian a sense of belonging to the nation.”1 It was to be led by a popularly elected president working with a cabinet drawn from different parts of the country. A federal legislature called the National Assembly would consist of two chambers, a Senate and a House of Representatives. All offices were limited to a four-year term, with the president granted the right to seek reelection only once. The previous September, Obasanjo had lifted the long-held state of emergency and the ban on political parties. He now had to oversee, as he later put it, “the freest and fairest elections of the century,” and the impatient politicians who had eagerly looked forward to the return to civilian rule could get the electoral bandwagon rolling. 2 Obasanjo had kept his word: he had promised to implement a fouryear program for a peaceful transition to civilian rule with a predetermined timetable. He had sought, despite a dip in oil revenues that resulted in unpopular budget cuts, to ensure ample foreign exchange reserves for an incoming civilian government, which would allow it needed f lexibility and the wherewithal to ensure against future coups. The promised elections were held in the summer of 1979. A northerner, the Hausa-Fulani candidate Shehu Shagari, on July 6 defeated his Yoruba rival, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Obasanjo’s support of Shagari over Awolowo, a fellow Yoruba, cost the outgoing head of state the

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support of many within his ethnic group, and at a farewell dinner honoring the departing president, Shagari pointed out that it was “rare in the history of developing countries for those in power to organize their own retirement from government and welcome, even entertain, their successors.”3 Shagari was scheduled to inaugurate Nigeria’s second civilian presidency on October 1. However, problems with the election surfaced. The new president had won without securing the necessary margins as specified in the new constitution, and because he had nevertheless accepted the outcome, Obasanjo fell further out of favor amongst his own ethnic group. (Even today, the Yoruba community distrusts him because of his role in Shagari’s election and his perceived ties to the north, ties secured by yielding power to a northerner.) Although the elections went well, relative to Nigeria’s turbulent traditions, there were cries of corruption from the losers. Awolowo charged that votes were rigged, charges denied by Obasanjo, who retorted that the loser, “a tribal chauvinist . . . who had lost all sense of realism” believed that he was entitled by birthright to get political power.4 The charges and countercharges reveal the great irony in Obasanjo’s career. While his actions earned him the respect of many non-Yorubas and democratic international observers, Yorubas, who had long believed themselves discriminated against, felt disenfranchised by the outcome of the 1979 vote and blamed the former president. Their anger fueled existing resentment stemming from his government’s bloody crackdown on Yoruba students who had protested tuition hikes. They also blamed him for the persecution of a celebrated anti- establishment singer. In 1977, soldiers had burned down the house of the African music superstar Fela Anikulapo Kuti, a Yoruba and vocal critic of the government, who had been arrested by the army and police as many as 200 times for his relentless condemnation of military misrule. His music, AfroBeat, had become increasingly bitter and political, as reflected in such songs as “Army Arrangement” (about Nigeria’s rigged politics), “ITT” (“International, Thief, Thief ” about Abiola, who had directed the corporation’s Nigerian branch), and “Colonial Mentality” (about African dictators). Because a military policeman directing traffic nearby had been assaulted by Fela, the enraged soldiers had taken the law into their own hands and attacked his house. In the course of the raid, they threw Fela’s seventy-seven year- old mother out of a second story window, and she later died of her injuries. Afterwards, Fela wrote a popular song about the incident, “Coffin for the Head of State,” lashing out at Obasanjo and his “big fat stomach.” In a 1999 interview, Obasanjo acknowledged that

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as head of state, he was ultimately responsible, but that he had called for an investigation and seen to it that the guilty were punished.5 Awolowo based his complaints on a section of the new constitution concerning elections, which aimed at cutting back on regionalism. In order to attain the presidency, the winner had both to receive a popular majority and win no less than a quarter of the votes cast in at least twothirds of the nineteen states. Two-thirds of nineteen amounted to twelve and two-thirds. But Shagari had won only twelve states. The election commission nevertheless declared Shagari the victor and the Obasanjo government approved, which for the critical Wole Soyinka signaled its “complicity” in handing power over to Shagari. A last-minute interpretation by the judiciary, supported by the military, ratified the decision.6 Soyinka noted that one state, Gongola, had not yet announced its voting results, which, he said, had been deliberately withheld until a decision was announced, and that all this was done “with the connivance of the outgoing military regime [Obasanjo’s] who lived in mortal fear . . . of a political figure such as Obafemi Awolowo, the head of a rival party, emerging as leader.” 7 Cries of corruption arose not only because Shagari belonged to the same party as Obasanjo, but that he was granted victory because he was favored by the military. A cloud hung over Obasanjo’s proud transition. 8 The hostility between Awolowo and Obasanjo was of long duration and may even have reached back to Obasanjo’s school days. In his memoir, Obasanjo described Awolowo as having labored in vain for thirtyfive years to attain the same top executive level as he, Obasanjo, had reached at a much younger age. The ex-president portrayed himself as a barefoot primary school pupil when Awolowo, then head of government in the old Western Region, came to inspect the premises. Obasanjo reputedly never forgave Awolowo for refusing him a scholarship (won, curiously enough, by the future billionaire and politician, Moshood Abiola). When head of state, Muhammed had expressed “disgust and anger” on hearing of what he called Awolowo’s “subversive activities” and asked Obasanjo to reprimand the chief. For Obasanjo, the problem lay not merely in Awolowo’s “lifelong ambition to be his country’s chief executive” but more to the point, in his “tribal chauvinism [which] was surely not a catalyst for easy attainment of national political leadership in a pluralistic nation like Nigeria.” In a fierce defense of national unity, Obasanjo spoke critically of his fellow Yorubas, “whom [Awolowo] claimed to be working for while assiduously working for himself, [and who] would continue to be the dregs of Nigerian politics and eat the crumbs from the national political table unless and

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until their general attitude encompasses Nigeria.” 9 Clearly, there was no love lost between the two men, and Awolowo’s supporters believed that because of Obasanjo’s “hatred” of their chief, he had awarded the election to Shagari.10 At the second annual congress of his party, Awolowo protested the handling of the election. Irked by his comments, Obasanjo objected to his criticisms in an open letter. Awolowo replied in a letter of his own, also published in the press and further charging Obasanjo with leading his “military administration” to “manipulate” Shagari’s election. In what was becoming a press war, the followers of Awolowo published yet another letter decrying the “perfidy” of the government’s Federal Electoral Commission (which had named Shagari the winner), Obasanjo’s “determination to exclude all parties other than his own [National Party of Nigeria (NPN)] from power,” and to install Shagari “at all costs.” In the memoir published three years after Awolowo’s death, Not My Will, Obasanjo gave his version of events. He admitted that the 1979 elections were not perfect but were the best Nigeria had since 1959 and credited the new constitution with having prevented a “tribal baron” from hijacking the leadership through the votes of his tribesmen alone. Obasanjo pointed out that Shagari received 5.6 million votes to Awolowo’s 4.8 million, and that while Awolowo received 25 percent of the total votes cast in six of the nineteen states, Shagari had 25 percent of the total cast in twelve states. To demonstrate the good faith of the electoral commission, he reproduced a letter from Awolowo to Fatai Williams, its head, warmly congratulating Williams on his appointment as chief justice. Awolowo was compared to a child who, having failed an exam, blamed his teacher.11 Despite high expectations, little had changed. New politicians with new political outlooks had not emerged. The same people as in the First Republic dominated the political parties (which now had new names), parties put together by men with money who saw power as an avenue to economic gain. Both the process and the constitution, charged a critic, ensured the entrenchment of the propertied political class.12 If by disengaging itself from power as promised, the Obasanjo regime had restored the image of the military, personal credentials still counted the most, and appeals to ethnic and religious cleavages remained as frequent as ever. Although the NPN claimed national support, it was, as Soyinka insisted, controlled by northern politicians. During his term of office and although a southerner and a Yoruba, Obasanjo had allowed them free reign and contrasted his National Party of Nigeria favorably with

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Awolowo’s United Party of Nigeria (UPN), decrying the latter as a oneman tribalistic southern movement. For Soyinka, Obasanjo’s motives for his support of the NPN and his “blatant manipulation” of Shagari as his successor were complex. He had, the writer noted, “a curious romance with the northern hegemony (or) perhaps it was more a fear.” Soyinka went on to say that observers noted “this trait of insecurity” in a military head of state but acknowledged that over the years, Obasanjo would evolve. “Obasanjo,” Soyinka wrote in 2006, “now admits he was a naive tool in the deep scheming of that northern clique,” and the writer praised him (excessively, as it turned out) for trying to forge a southern front against the notorious (northern) “mafia” and even for attending meetings of a purely ethnic organization openly dedicated to promoting Yoruba political interests.13 With the elections over, Obasanjo’s final act as head of state was to hand over power in a formal ceremony on October 1, 1979. It took place publicly, on parade grounds, intentionally designed to show the supremacy of an elected civilian administration over the unelected military, that is, to demonstrate the superiority of democratic forms.14 Shagari became the first president of Nigeria’s Second Republic as Obasanjo embarked on a celebratory return to his home state, where he owned land and had made preparations to retire as a farmer. Other African heads of state, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Léopold Senghor of Senegal, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa would also retire gracefully, but Obasanjo was the first to do so. His voluntary withdrawal astounded African democrats who (with good reason) distrusted the military in politics. Despite his faults, he possessed what one observer (again, excessively) called “a moral reserve to restrain political urges for assuming power at any cost.” Obasanjo’s advice to his peers? “There is life my friend, beyond the State House.”15 While convinced that it was the lack of consensus among civilian rulers that had brought the military into politics, he believed that “the best military administration cannot be a substitute for a popularly and democratically elected government,” and that only good government could keep the military from power. Unquestionably, the most breakdowns of law and order in Nigerian history came under military regimes. If he assured himself that he had above all served the cause of national unity, he also believed that so long as leaders represented the people in their entirety, traditional institutions were not antithetical to democracy, and that no one style of democracy could fit all. Looking back on his administration, Obasanjo took pride in what he saw as a multifaceted legacy: to

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preserve and strengthen Nigerian unity; fight corruption; lay the foundation of a green revolution while expanding industry and widening trade; indigenize foreign firms in Nigeria; ensure the fair distribution and meaningful use of land; extend the network of telecommunications; advance education by establishing more secondary schools and teachers colleges; and stand for African freedom: in Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.16 At age forty-two, Obasanjo walked away from the presidential palace of the continent’s most populous (one of every five Africans was a Nigerian) and potentially richest country to raise chickens, pigs, and bananas. Having also retired from the army but having never taken more than his salary, he joked about being “unemployed and unemployable.” Dismayed at his countrymen’s willingness to let Nigeria’s agricultural base run down, he would set an example and become a farmer himself. He would return to Aboukta, live in a sizable but modestly furnished house, show what could be done with the land, and make no attempt to interfere in Nigerian politics.

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CHAPTER 7

Olusegun Obasanjo: Interment

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n a Monday morning in October 1979, a six-week agricultural preparatory course got underway at the University of Ife, in the city of Ibadan. Both crop growing and animal farming, including mechanical operation and storage, were among the subjects covered. Enrolled in the class was a middle- aged student in the midst of changing careers, taking his first course in the Nigerian university system.1 Fifteen days earlier, the budding farmer had stepped down from his job as Nigeria’s fourth military ruler since independence and placed the nation in the hands of an elected civilian regime. Years earlier, Obasanjo had decided that after handing power over, he would retire to his farm at Ota, forty kilometers north of Lagos. (Legally divorced, although not according to tribal custom, Olureme preferred to remain in the bustling port.) Despite the former president’s intention to leave political life behind, the farm itself soon became an international conference center of sorts. Visiting scholars, statesmen, and world government leaders were greeted by their smiling host, whose image contrasted sharply with that of the short-tempered gruff soldier. Obasanjo bought the farm from an elderly cousin ten years earlier and had been gradually adding land to it. Deciding to build in Nigeria set him apart from most other former military rulers, who had purchased homes abroad. But as a farmer’s son himself, inspired by the many examples of efficient and productive land use seen on his travels, aware that Nigeria needed an agricultural breakthrough, and determined to set an example in agricultural self- sufficiency, Obasanjo looked forward to his new calling. 2 Earning the nickname “the sage of Ota,” he would demonstrate how such modern farm techniques as improved planting material and the use of artificial fertilizers and insecticides (at heavily

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subsidized prices) could make Nigeria—and Africa—agriculturally self- sufficient and even provide food exports for additional revenue.3 When once more a global player on the African and international scene, he would continue to advocate a self- sustaining agricultural base for Nigeria. In August 1989, for example, he became a special adviser for the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, based in Ibadan, and the following year won the African Leadership Forum award for championing African agriculture. Obasanjo took the time to write two volumes of memoirs, My Command (1981), about his part in the civil war against Biafra; and Not My Will (1990), about his presidency. While striving to reach a dispassionate objective tone, both books sought to justify the military and executive activities undertaken. Critics found both memoirs selfserving, as putting in the most favorable light the reforms undertaken by the regimes he served in and presided over; as having exaggerated, for example, the emphasis placed on his initial reluctance to succeed the assassinated Muhammed; and as having insisted, as his sole motive for publication, a pious wish to contribute to making the decade “a period of soul- searching, peace, and progress.”4 In the decade following his retirement, and despite his intention to farm, Obasanjo found himself playing an ever larger national—and international—role. A constant theme was not only the need for Africa to address African problems but for the industrial nations of the world to take greater account of the continent. Increasingly in demand as a spokesman, both for Nigeria and for all Africa, the former president saw as one of the continent’s greatest challenges the creation of a reservoir of potential future leaders. He believed it important to gather, even if only for a few days at a time, those with leadership experience and those, as he put it, at “a stage in their careers where pressures allowed little time for ref lection and interaction.” By 1988, he had established the African Leadership Forum to prepare a younger generation to develop leadership skills and experience—and hopefully save their countries from military rule. As a respected think tank designed to train future African leaders and propose strategies for the continent’s development, the Forum staged periodic thematic conferences that drew people from various African nations. It also provided a vehicle for meetings outside the continent where African issues and issues impinging on Africa received attention.5 In writing of what he called Obasanjo’s “lying memoirs,” Wole Soyinka identified more personal motives for the ex-president’s involvement. His voluntary withdrawal from power “catapults him into international

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notice.” He settled back into civilian life, Soyinka acknowledged, “but not quite, since he begins diligently to lay the groundwork—establishes an African Leadership Forum, and so on—for becoming a respected statesman, mixing with the powerful in international fora and hosting them in turn on his Ota farm.”6 So whether intended for this purpose or not, renewed participation in international affairs, like the publication of memoirs, kept his name in public view. Hopes for the opening of a new era in Nigerian political life quickly dissolved. Most disappointing was the failure of the new government to carry out its promises to diversify the economy, which rather than solve inherited problems, multiplied them. The availability and ease of collecting oil revenues, which thanks to a second oil boom in 1979–1980 had increased dramatically, pushed inf lation to new levels and enabled massive looting of the treasury to take place. For politicians, wrote historian Toyin Falola, “what counted was how much money could be made from state coffers within a limited period.” Rather than benefitting the nation as a whole, the money was used to buy support, recruit loyalists, reward favorites, and punish opponents; and the outcome was “intense social malaise.” Patriotism and national consciousness, Falola concluded, were eroded to the extent that for many, Nigeria was not worth defending and was to be exploited for self-promotion.7 Another writer described the ruling NPN as “a broad, multiethnic (albeit northern- dominated) party, devoid of ideology and preoccupied with the business of distributing Nigerian resources . . . to its ministers, party officials, supporters, contributors, and business allies in a staggering outpouring of public wealth.” A seemingly endless trail of scandals and exposés left the public demoralized and undermined the legitimacy of the Second Republic. The sheer economic drain brought about by fraud and mismanagement left state governments unable to pay civil servants, hospitals devoid of funds for medicines, and services (including schools) shut down by strikes. 8 The NPN was not the only offender: the other four parties, each of which controlled at least two state governments, were also implicated in extensive wrongdoing. Corruption, already prevalent, had become systemic, the standard practice of politicians from every political party and ethnic group. Chinua Achebe agreed that political corruption, although slowed during the Murtala- Obasanjo administrations, had grown “more bold and ravenous with each succeeding regime” and that Nigeria became known for the “scam spams” that clogged international websites. For Wole Soyinka, it was the civilian Shehu Shagari who had turned the

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country into “a police (or poli-thug) state” where oil- swollen government coffers were looted and the importation of basic foodstuffs made necessary. In Nigeria, said Soyinka, the spoils of power are “routinely handed down from villain to villain and extended retroactively to shield past villains . . . It’s not a country,” he charged, “it’s a profession.” Soyinka’s repeated denunciations of the Shagari government’s corruption prompted its decision to send state agents to assassinate the playwright, but disobeying orders, they instead put him on a plane leaving the country.9 When in 1980, some military officers complained to him about his successor, Obasanjo advised patience: a new administration and governmental system needed time to coalesce. But the corruption and mismanagement continued to worsen. Having depleted oil revenues, the government was forced to go on a borrowing spree, seeking a billion dollars from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for projects that appeared at best dubious. Three years later, another group of senior military officers approached the former president, hinting at a coup. Could Obasanjo be persuaded to resume office? He refused, arguing that democracy must be given a chance to establish itself, and that only an election served as the appropriate method to bring about a change of government or policy. Again, he advised patience. Later he would explain his refusal to act: “The dismal performance of the politicians was personally agonizing for me but it could not lead me to becoming the shredder of the constitution I promulgated into law.”10 The NPN machine worked well enough to ensure Shagari’s reelection in 1983, an election marked by massive vote rigging that generated riots leaving over a hundred dead and more than $100 million in destroyed property. Obasanjo now spoke out against the administration in hopes of bringing about change. “Every breach of the law, regulation and practice,” he warned, “encourages another breach and undermines management to the point of paralysis. Strict obedience of the law, regulation, and code of practice by all must be ensured.” The words fell on deaf ears. Shagari promised he would meet with Obasanjo but never did.11 The latter was especially upset about one fallout of the election, which carried a clear implication for political stability: the advocacy of greater decentralization by southern, especially Yoruba, politicians. They saw it as the only way out of perpetual domination of the country by the conservative forces led by Hausa-Fulani politicians in the North. Nigeria, Obasanjo continued to insist, must possess a national, not a tribal or village, perspective, and as a critic of the regime’s Northern hegemonic policies, he called for a more equitable sharing of power and resources.

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Thus post- Obasanjo Nigeria became politically unstable. Not only had Shagari subverted the very democratic process that brought him to office and turned the nation into a police state, but the difficulty his government experienced with the states was enabling regionalism to regain strength. The widespread corruption and incompetence—and the bankruptcy they generated—prevented the federal government, even had it wished to do so, from maintaining the upper hand. By 1983, the nation, much of it still showing dissatisfaction with the election outcome, was reeling from fundamentalist-inspired Muslim uprisings in the North. Nigerians were to experience their fourth successful military coup in December of that year and languish under selfserving military rule for the sixteen years that followed. The new republic that Obasanjo had helped to create survived only five years. Many of the harsh or austere programs that he had initiated to set Nigeria on the road to self- sufficiency were either ignored or overturned, and so rampant was the corruption that people looked to the military as saviors. Once more, Obasanjo’s efforts to persuade the military to leave the government to civilians notwithstanding, the armed forces would step in to restore order. As the 1979 Constitution fell into disrepair, Obasanjo felt personally wounded. “As the head of the administration that promulgated it, I take full responsibility for the 1979 Constitution,” he wrote, “and I still strongly believe that if the operators of that Constitution had behaved differently the Constitution would have worked. I do not blame the failure of the Second Republic on the Constitution. In fact the Constitution takes care of almost all the lessons we learnt from the First Republic.”12 The fate of the republic was sealed when on New Year’s Eve 1983— and to popular acclaim—the military struck again, bringing to power Major General Muhammad Buhari, who promised to salvage the country. Under Buhari and his successors, Nigeria again returned to a prolonged period of military rule, widely regard as the worst phase in its modern history. The new generals, far more authoritarian than their predecessors, would used unlimited force to silence all opposition. Buhari (another Northerner) had played a minor role in the military coup ousting Gowan in July of 1975. He had chaired the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation in the Obasanjo government and returned to the army when civilian rule was reestablished four years later. As the senior military officer among the conspirators, he was selected by them as the new head of state. Buhari had promised to attack political corruption, and at first, he did so ruthlessly. The regime detained

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hundreds suspected of wrongdoing and seized the cash and froze the accounts of others. Military courts issued lengthy sentences but with no attempt made to follow due process. The accused had to prove their innocence, although some powerful suspects (chief ly Northern Muslims) were spared. The press was persecuted, and critics of the regime jailed. But in attempting to repackage the economic policies of the Shagari administration, the Buhari regime conspicuously failed to lower the high cost of food, create new jobs, or escape an overwhelming reliance on oil as a source of national revenue. And when the price of oil fell in the mid-1980s and the country’s foreign debt mounted, Buhari’s solution lay in rigorously enforced austerity. Understandably, the severe cutbacks in goods and services proved unpopular and generated widespread resentment. Not only did southern politicians decry as unjust an administration dominated by northerners, but the regime’s iron-fist methods provoked mounting public antagonism. Corruption, highlighted by the awarding of oil licenses to cronies, returned with a vengeance, and politicians with ill- gotten millions escaped justice. Having lost the confidence of his colleagues, on August 27, 1985, Buhari was deposed in yet another coup, albeit an almost bloodless one, led by General Ibrahim Babangida, chief of the army staff, yet another Northerner and a commander in the civil war. In contrast to the strict disciplinarian Buhari, Babangida came to office acclaimed as a military redeemer, capable of tough economic decisions, able to throttle the robber barons, and foster a more just society. Perceived as something of a liberal who would allow debate, in the first few months of his administration, he pursued a more open agenda. He unleashed the press, released a large number of (never charged) detainees, and reduced the sentences of over fifty former officials. When the following year, he banned forty-nine politicians from public office for life, the regime was applauded for what was perceived as keeping with the Murtala- Obasanjo tradition. Moreover, Babangida professed a commitment to human rights. He was feted by world leaders, including the queen of England, as a determined but progressive African ruler. He convinced many in and out of Nigeria that he was the best possible choice, the enlightened strongman (and later, when compared to a successor, his methods were indeed benign). Having found his predecessors’ position as “military head of state” inadequate, he was the only one of the military rulers who took the title of “president.” As such, he—and not a military deputy—could more easily appoint military service chiefs and members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council.13

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In an interview given years later, Babangida pointed out a truth about military coups, namely that the armed forces were, in fact, responding to one frustration or another, “and anytime there is frustration, we step in. And then there is a demonstration welcoming the redeemers.”14 However cynical and unwelcome, the observation spoke a reality. The general populace and even the most strident pro- democracy activists repeatedly applauded soldiers who overthrew governments they did not support: in 1966 (with General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi—the first military coup), in 1975 (when the Gowon government was deposed), in 1983 (when Shagari’s civilian regime was ousted), in 1985 (when Babangida came to power), and in 1993 (when Sani Abacha, later reviled as Nigeria’s worst dictator, would take control). All too soon, things reverted to what were regarded as Nigerian norms. Although Babangida relaxed the restrictions imposed by his predecessor and proclaimed support for a democratic transition and economic liberalization, his regime soon began to follow Buhari’s example and become increasingly authoritarian. In 1991, the Gulf War crisis brought a $50 billion oil windfall for the government but did not slow the drift toward arbitrary power. When that year, Britain’s Financial Times reported at least $3 billion unaccounted for in Central Bank reports, it expelled the Times correspondent. In the face of a huge foreign debt, the government declared a state of economic emergency and assumed sweeping powers over the economy. It accepted International Monetary Fund recommendations for tight economic controls, which allowed debt rescheduling by Western banks and loans from the World Bank. Still, the devaluation of the naira led to rapid inf lation and wage earner discontent. When the National Labor Council (speaking for the country’s trade unions) voiced criticism, Babangida dissolved its executive branch; and when students protested, he temporarily closed down the country’s universities. A weakened currency, greater unemployment, a fall in living standards, increased corruption, and a rise in drug trafficking all marked the closing years of the Babangida regime. International drug enforcement authorities, including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, found Nigeria a leading shipper of heroin and cocaine, which was clearly impossible without the connivance of highly placed officials.15 As political scientist Richard Joseph noted, the corruption was driven not only by the ambitions of higher-ups but also by the aspirations of a much larger number of clients below, who besieged relations, friends, bosses, and ethnic kin for jobs, contracts, or other illicit largess.16 Bitter clashes provoked by Shia Muslim radicals in northern

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cities in April 1991 were harshly repressed. As promised elections were repeatedly postponed, it became clear that Babangida was not about to relinquish power. Indeed, for his critics, his was worse than the Abacha dictatorship that followed. For a highly respected former inspector general of police, M.D. Yusufu, “Abacha was intimidating people with fear, but one can recover from that. Babangida went all out to corrupt society . . . corruption remains and it is very corrosive to society.”17 The persistent corruption and its toleration by successive military governments strengthened Obasanjo’s anger and determination to weigh in. He went public with his criticism of the ruling military junta. When, in 1989, Babangida invited Obasanjo, among others, to attend a government- sponsored meeting on “structural adjustment,” Obasanjo refused because he found the proposed program “less than honest,” as “almost wip[ing] out our past gains overnight and mortgag[ing] the future of Nigeria in education, health, manufacturing, agriculture and in postponement of debt payment.” The government, he complained, would not accept any alternative to solve the problems of the country, and in a published interview, he criticized Babangida for having repudiated elections when the results were not to his satisfaction.18 In February 1989, Obasanjo published a book that proved highly controversial, Constitution for National Integration and Development.19 It triggered a prolonged and public debate between him and a leading critic, Arthur Nwankwo, a political scientist and publisher who wrote from a Marxist viewpoint and found the book highly objectionable. Nwankwo condemned what he claimed was Obasanjo’s “marked departure” from the constitution that he (Obasanjo) had underwritten in 1979: that for the sake of national unity Nigeria should adopt a one party regime. For Nwankwo, this smacked of fascism. An exchange of (open) letters took place in which charges and countercharges were levied What began as a critique of Obasanjo’s views escalated into a condemnation of his tenure as chief of state and an unfavorable comparison of him with the “more revolutionary” Murtala Muhammed. 20 Obasanjo’s solution, Nwanko pointed out, favored the strengthening of executive, at the expense of legislative, authority and called for “consensus politics [to promote national unity] instead of the politics of opposition and confrontation. (31) In his reply, the former head of state admitted that while a powerful executive is usually associated with “the politics of totalitarianism,” he found it not only a discernible feature of all democratic states but one that was inevitable because “modern politics require a quick and alert

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sense of duty at the level of decision making [and because] the nature of modern government requires a leadership that is continuous and acknowledged, concentrated and co- ordinating, adequately informed and equipped.” The necessity of a strong executive explained Obasanjo’s preference for a presidential system in the 1979 Constitution, and he reminded Nwanko that he had included checks and balances to prevent the possibility of a president acquiring absolute power. (38, 39) “A one party system,” the former president insisted, “was very much in consonance with a possible and logical outcome of our political development.” (65, 67) Such safeguards as the private ownership of all aspects of the mass media and the “thorough- going separation of the party and the government” prevented a one party system—a system that he hoped would evolve and not be legislated—from becoming totalitarian. Far from his constitution breeding the “dead society” predicted by Nwankwo, Obasanjo wondered whether what Nwankwo called an “active society” would not amount to anarchy. (83–84) The imposition of a two party system would divide the nation “along its weakest seams.” He preferred that it come about through an “evolutionary process” as had been the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which at one time lived under one party rule. (103–04) Clearly, the democracy that Obasanjo believed in was not that embodied in the West. Political systems based on African traditions had emerged elsewhere on the continent, especially the tradition of reaching consensus on issues in contrast to the Western winner-take- all approach. Obasanjo was not alone in putting forth the one party state as a more authentically African model: rather than constant negative competition, it would facilitate the search for common ground—like the village gathering of old. Underdeveloped lands, where the challenges were so great, could not afford the luxury of dissent. If opposition should take place, he and other advocates of a one party state maintained, it should do so within the ruling party. A less charitable explanation was given by Chinua Achebe in his novel, A Man of the People. After many years “in the rain,” the prescient Achebe predicted as long ago as the 1960s, ministers were not about to give up the perks of office. Historian Michael Crowder, in a much remarked- on article, agreed that parliamentary democracy had shallow roots in Africa and had broken down. 21 And, admittedly, there were fewer opportunities in underdeveloped countries for politicians to go into business, or law, or an alternate career. Ministers preferred to remain in power, and to do so, not permit opposition, which came to be seen as a threat, even

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as treason. Thus the option of the one party state was chosen, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana leading the way in the decade or so after independence, with the party head in numerous countries serving long terms in office. 22 At its best, then, the one party state was presented as a more authentically African model. At its worst, a transparent cloak for an iron dictatorship with no genuine ideological roots, just naked power. As another analyst noted (although in an entirely different context), in consensus politics, which had vanished not only in Nigeria but also in other African lands after the glow of independence wore off, opposition parties tended to collapse rather than operate as a counterbalance to government power. 23 During a global conference held in Tanzania in May of 1991, Obasanjo told his listeners that the adoption of multiparty systems in African countries would not help solve the problems facing the continent. To work, he insisted, democracy must be indigenous and in Africa promoted on the basis of Africa’s culture and economic development. And then, almost as an afterthought, he added: “Definitely we need to democratize our political process, our economic process, but democracy will not work in poverty. If we still have poverty, democracy will be empty.” 24 Obasanjo had shown himself as deeply impassioned about the plight of the blacks and coloreds of South Africa, and in retirement, his commitment to their cause was played out on a wider field of action when he became a major spokesman for black African liberation. By the mid-1980s, the former head of state was working for numerous policy research committees and advocacy groups. A prime example was the British Commonwealth’s pretentiously named Eminent Persons Group (EPG), membership to which he had been nominated by the presidents of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The EPG was organized in November 1986 to promote constitutional reform in South Africa, where a white population of five million controlled the economy and government and lived apart from the twenty- six million blacks and coloreds who had no voice in national affairs. Consisting of seven members drawn from among the forty-nine Commonwealth nations, the group came into being when the Thatcher government, experiencing high unemployment and fearful of jeopardizing its lucrative export relationship, held out against imposing sanctions on South Africa. The British prime minister had suggested instead that a committee of eminent Commonwealth figures try to initiate a

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dialogue between Pretoria and the country’s black leaders. Although at the time, the EPG failed in its objective to reform South Africa’s racist government, membership in it allowed Obasanjo to refocus on apartheid and on ways to end it. By the following May, as co- chair with Malcolm Fraser of Australia, he led the EPG as the first anti- apartheid organization to involve all major players of all races and in mobilizing international pressure on South Africa. 25 A primary objective was the release of Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned as leader of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC). The first African leader to have visited Mandela in jail, Obasanjo was to see him three more times in Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town in 1986. 26 The two chairs, shuttling back and forth between Pretoria and Lusaka (ANC headquarters in Zambia), tried to convince South African President P.W. Botha to remove his military from the black townships, end arbitrary arrests, release political prisoners, and legalize the ANC. In return, the group would call on black organizations to suspend violence and enter into negotiations with an open agenda. Although they had helped open the first indirect talks between the two sides, after their meeting in June 1986, the two chairs concluded that the Botha government was not ready to negotiate toward fundamental change. Obasanjo, described at the time as “a large, earthy man with an amiable manner and a sharply perceptive mind,” had shown personal courage by going to the Alexandra township “at the height of some of the worst rioting . . . talking to the people, and seeing for himself the actions of the riot police. There was no bluffing him with political bromides after that.” 27 Obasanjo and Fraser terminated their efforts to mediate and submitted the group’s report to the Commonwealth, recommending sanctions against the South African government but without specifying their nature or duration. Continuing to insist that sanctions were the only effective way to force the minority government in Pretoria to abandon apartheid, they published a follow-up to their report in the fall 1986 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. In the article, they expanded on their position and called on the United States and Britain, “the great liberalizing forces over the last 50 years,” to take action and impose sanctions. 28 When the British again wavered and only partially complied with the sanctions asked for, in an open letter to Prime Minister Thatcher, Obasanjo condemned the action, or rather lack of action, taken by the Commonwealth leader. Undoubtedly recalling his own misgivings toward Great Britain in view of the colonial legacy, he asked Mrs. Thatcher whether “the Aryan goose [is] not sauce for the negroid

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gander?” The reference issued from her willingness to enforce sanctions called for against Poland, Afghanistan, and Argentina. He warned that the prime minister’s weak commitment to those imposed on South Africa would leave “the blood of thousands, if not millions, of innocents on [Britain’s] hands and conscience,” and added, “my heart will be heavy, but my hands will be clean. Will yours?” 29 The organization’s reliance on negotiation began to pay off both for blacks and coloreds (and for Obasanjo) when, in 1990, a new South African government ended its ban on political movements and began to talk of a nonracial democratic future—and when Obasanjo was short-listed for the post of UN secretary- general.30 Thus, Obasanjo’s international reputation soared after his voluntary retirement from the military and after relinquishing power to a civilian government. In addition to the various international committees mentioned, he sat on the Independent (Palme) Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues from 1983 to 1989. He served on a committee made up of former heads of state, and government called the Interaction Council in 1983, which promoted international cooperation. As noted, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture appointed him as a special advisor in 1989. In addition, Obasanjo also headed Transparency International, an organization that exposed corruption and set up movements to combat it. Membership in other inf luential bodies further increased his international exposure: he still chaired the African Leadership Forum based in Ota; he sat on the UNESCO Commission for Peace in the Minds of Men; the UN Secretary- General’s Advisory Panel on Africa; the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conf lict; the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation; and he served as peace broker in Angola, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zaire.31 Obasanjo maintained his focus on agriculture as the means by which Nigeria’s—and Africa’s—economy could be sustained. In accepting the African Leadership Forum’s 1990 award for fighting against hunger, he repeated his concern with making the continent self- sufficient in its food needs. His goal: to have bountiful African nations help their neighbors and even begin to export food. “Africa,” he said, “cannot reach the moon,” but it should be at least be able to “reach our mouths and stomachs.”32 Following the initial setback of the Eminent Persons Group in South Africa, Obasanjo continued to travel internationally in support of other African interests. While in the United States in March 1987, he was interviewed at length by The Christian Science Monitor as part of the

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newspaper’s continuing series, “Agenda for the 21st Century.” When asked about Africa’s role in the twenty-first century, Obasanjo maintained that he had long explored the reasons for the continent’s marginalization (although he did not yet use the word). He predicted a revision of Africa’s political structure, consolidated from fifty-four countries down to about “five or six that can really be able to do the planning, the working, and the effective implementation of [Africa’s] development and its cooperation with the rest of the world.” Referring to tribalism, he repeated his long- standing dream of a continent moving away from “the politics of ethnicity to the politics of nationalism . . . and resource creation.” When the interviewer described Obasanjo’s involvement with international affairs and noted that he was often mentioned as a possible successor to Secretary- General Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former president commented, “[it’s] not a thing that you apply for,” although “if it comes my way . . . I would regard it as a duty.”33 Throughout his participation in the Africa Leadership Forum, Obasanjo diagnosed the continent’s problems as stemming from the inability of its leaders to properly counteract the colonial legacy. This was a shrewd calculation because it appealed to African rulers by placing the blame on the peripheral world. At the same time, it gained sympathy from the English- speaking powers from whom aid was sought because it was an African accepting responsibility on behalf of Africa, an African who pointed to the ineptitude of Africans. He placed blame at all levels and in offering domestic and international explanations for Africa’s plight, aimed at getting all sides to work together. Obasanjo’s devotion to democracy—or more precisely, the kind deemed necessary for Africa—had not wavered. Nor had his conviction that the right kind of leadership structure would enable African nations more effectively to police themselves. This, in turn, would improve their chances both of receiving aid from abroad and of being granted the f lexibility of applying it from within. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 persuaded him that a democratic Africa integrated into the expanding trade blocs of Europe was more readily achievable. Yet, at the time of the fall of the Soviet Empire, the continent that contained one-tenth of the global population and where 70 percent lived below the poverty line, had only become more marginalized because of its inherent instability. 34 His efforts on behalf of Africa won him much international respect. In 1991, after an election monitoring mission in Liberia with Former President Jimmy Carter, Obasanjo was nominated for the soon-to- be vacant post of the secretary general of the UN.

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That spring, the UN had begun the process of replacing Perez de Cuellar, whose term as secretary- general was to expire in the fall. There was a strong feeling that his successor should come from the African continent, and several names were circulated, including Obasanjo’s. He had further enhanced his international image by publishing two books on the political and economic situation in Africa, Africa in Perspective: Myths and Realities (1987) and Africa Embattled (1988). Five more would follow in the next few years: A Constitution for National Integration and Development; Elements of Development; Elements of Democracy; Africa, Rise to Challenge; and Hope for Africa. In May 1991, while attending a conference in Tanzania, Carter told the New York Times that the Nigerian was highly qualified for the post and that he believed Washington would not oppose his candidacy. “I don’t think there is an African leader,” Carter said, “with the possible exception of Nelson Mandela, who is better known or respected.” 35 The Organization of African Unity was scheduled to meet in June, and the Nigerian government began a lobbying campaign on Obasanjo’s behalf in an attempt to persuade African heads of state to unanimously accept him as “Africa’s candidate.” The country’s ambassador to the UN noted that, “if we miss this time, Africa will not have another opportunity this century to fight for the UN post.” The incumbent, Perez de Cuellar, was on record as having preferred an African to succeed him. “If the five permanent members of the Security Council refuse an African,” Perez argued, “Africa must feel excluded.”36 An African secretary- general was important to Africa for several reasons. Africa News editorialized that an African as UN head would “raise the continent’s international profile and help shatter racist myths of black inferiority.” Others believed that holding such a powerfully symbolic international position would embolden the continent to further its diplomatic and economic interests and better enable it to secure greater international cooperation in providing solutions to pervasive economic crises. It might even pave the way for a permanent seat for Africa on the Security Council. Given these goals, Obasanjo, in the view of his supporters, was a logical choice for the post: his belief in democracy and human rights, his work in international agencies, and his founding of the African Leadership Forum all demonstrated his strengths and appropriateness for the job.37 Making use of a straw poll, the council members narrowed the field to two choices, both Africans: Zimbabwean Finance Minister Bernard Chidzero and Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Boutros Boutros- Ghali

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(who ultimately won out). Obasanjo had fallen short. While Africans took pleasure in an African nomination, some regretted that the choice was not from one of the black nations. The Lagos press, Yoruban and anti- Obasanjo, having exhumed the record, speculated that his bid had failed because of the revelation of his government’s repression of University of Lagos students in 1978.38 Having been passed over for the post, Obasanjo continued writing and publishing, working with his Leadership Forum, and speaking out internationally. At the forum’s 1992 meeting, he again called for a sharp reduction in military expenditures as part of the effort to solve the problem of poverty across the continent. He also proposed a sharp reduction in interest rates for agricultural loans, and once more emphasized the importance of political stability and the need for greater private sector involvement in Africa’s national economies.39 By 1993, Obasanjo had played no active part in Nigerian politics for almost fifteen years. In that time, the country appeared to have abandoned the democratic hopes launched with the Second Republic. General Babangida had promised to hand power over to a civilian government in 1992 but had, once again, decided to postpone an election to the following year. Frustrated with his empty pledges, Obasanjo spoke out in an interview with a Nigerian magazine to express disappointment about the promised transition and unhappiness with the prevailing state of affairs. “We have an administration in deficit,” he said, “a deficit in budgeting, a deficit in financing, a deficit in honesty, honor and truth.” The statement infuriated Babangida, and he reacted immediately: the government imposed the sweeping anti- sedition law, which threatened the death penalty for any spoken or written words that sought to disrupt the “general fabric” of the country. Babangida’s intentions, Obasanjo commented, did not seem like those of someone preparing a country for a return to civilian government. Nevertheless, on June 12, 1993, the promised election finally took place, the decision to hold it distinguishing Babangida from both his predecessor, Buhari, and, we shall see, his two successors. The self-made Yoruba entrepreneur, the media baron and philanthropist, Moshood Abiola, ran on a social- democratic ticket. Having made his fortune with International Telephone and Telegraph in Nigeria and in various publishing ventures and politically ambitious, Abiola had earlier posed his candidacy for president but was thwarted when the 1983 military coup banned political parties. MKO, as he was known by his initials, emerged as an unlikely champion of democracy and a threat to Nigeria’s

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military dictatorship. His opponent, a political and social lightweight from the state of Kona, was given little chance of success. Skeptical southerners doubted that northern elites would ever yield power, but nevertheless came out to vote in an election marked by a minimum of fraud. Abiola ran an American- style campaign, and apparently (the count was leaked to the press) won a majority of the votes (58 percent) in perhaps the freest and fairest election in the country’s history. He was supported not only by Yorubas in the southwest but also by voters in several northern states and by a minority in the southeast.40 Wole Soyinka, who had railed against the corruption and abuse of Shagari’s civilian government, was euphoric. On that date, he later noted, Nigerians affirmed the nation as “a single entity,” a victory that amounted to “a miracle birth.”41 A f lurry of legal challenges by a shadowy civilian group, eager to perpetuate military rule, won a ruling that prohibited the release of the results. And the Babangida regime alleged legal and administrative problems (a disingenuous appeal to legality inasmuch as the president ruled by decree). The head of state claimed that the process was tainted by corruption, and he annulled the results. A subsequent sequence of rulings by the nation’s corrupt courts agreed, nullifying Abiola’s victory. Massive protests erupted denouncing the theft of the presidency, protests in which Obasanjo and Abiola participated. Yorubas and others saw the annulment of the election as the work of an entrenched military leadership unwilling to cede peace or access to oil wealth. The northern Muslim elite, they charged, had again excluded them from power. Rioting in Lagos and other southern cities resulted in scores killed by security forces.42 Obasanjo’s subsequent reaction to Babingada’s annulment of Abiola’s election dented his image as a champion of democracy. Because, he said, he still feared the threat to national unity posed by Yoruba tribalism, he withdrew his support of the apparent winner. Obasanjo, instead, began to campaign for an interim national government and infuriated his fellow Yorubas when he declared that Abiola was “not the messiah that Nigeria was waiting for.”43 Under pressure from a loosely knit coalition of human rights groups, trade unions, and professional organizations—and even elements of the military—as well as protests from abroad and the suspension of some foreign aid, Babangida gave in and promised a new election. He resigned on August 26, and the military transferred authority to a civilian-led interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan, a lawyer-turnedindustrialist who had served in the Babangida administration but

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who had shown no political bias. A confederate of Babangida, General Sani Abacha was designated to represent military interests in the new government and consequently named as defense minister. When the Shonekan government’s decision to raise fuel prices (to appease foreign creditors) triggered a general strike, Abacha “persuaded” him to resign on November 17, the ninth military coup and the fifth to succeed in Nigeria since independence took place. Abacha became the new head of state and established the regime considered by many to be the most oppressive in Nigerian history Shonekan, who had barely ruled for eighty-two days, had been unable to settle the political furor and fiscal damage caused by the annulment. On the other hand, Abacha was able to seize power by making Abiola and other southern politicians believe that he would hand the reins of office over to them, only to harass, arrest, and chase them into exile once he was securely in control. The day after he took power and despite his pledge of imminent civilian rule, Abacha proclaimed the need for strong authority, dismantled elected organizations, shut down national gatherings and political activity, and closed seventeen independent publications. When he scrapped Babangida’s transitional program and the constitution itself, and dissolved all political parties, it became clear that authoritarianism had hardened into dictatorship. When Abacha took over on November 17, 1993, he had invited Obasanjo and other former leaders, including Shehu Yar’Adua, formerly Obasanjo’s deputy and now a retired general, to his headquarters in Lagos to seek their cooperation and secure advice on nominations to his cabinet. Both men had told Abacha they could not support him until he announced his political transition program for the country, specifying the date that he would give way to a civilian government. Obasanjo insisted that that he name an all- civilian cabinet and that the administration should not exceed eighteen months in office. As reported by the Nigerian news magazine, Newswatch, the stance of the two generals angered Abacha. When he could not get Obasanjo to change his mind, and as both men continued to chastize the government, he had them placed under surveillance.44 On June 12, 1994, the anniversary of the annulled election, Abiola declared himself president and added, “Let the heavens fall!” The Abacha regime at once issued a warrant for his arrest on grounds of disorderly conduct and attempts to overthrow the government. He would remain in prison, often in solitary confinement—and later, under house arrest—until his death in 1999. Three years before that, his senior wife had been gunned down in Lagos, the murder widely believed to

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have been carried out on Abacha’s orders. In the interim, Abacha had launched a regime marked by continued repression and one that would incur hostile world opinion. In reaction to Abiola’s arrest, several human rights activists, including Obasanjo, under an umbrella organization covering some twentyfive human rights and religious groups, called the Campaign for Democracy, quickly began demonstrating. Abiola’s imprisonment led to the greatest opposition against a military government yet seen: oil workers, bank employees, academics, and others critical of the regime launched massive strikes. In response, Abacha arrested union leaders and sealed their offices. He closed three independent media companies and decreed himself immune from the courts. A psychopathic killer and sadist, his program of state terrorism drove even the respected Soyinka into f light. The Nobel laureate had organized a million-man march against the dictatorship and was charged with treason. In exile, he worked to organize overseas resistance.45 A newly formed National Democratic Coalition, whose members consisted of politicians and retired military officers, including Obasanjo, demanded Abacha’s resignation and called for boycotting the elections for a constitutional conference planned by the government later that month. Even former military rulers such as Babangida and Buhari spoke out against the excesses of the dictatorship. Many who did speak out were detained, although Abacha released the union leaders and for the most part kept only the human rights activists in custody. After the protests abated, the government gave itself the unconditional authority to issue any declaration without judicial hindrance, as well as grant itself an open- ended term of military governance. Abacha brought Nigeria into further chaos by having nonconformists beaten, tortured, and starved to make them admit to their “offenses.” Often, those who committed even minor transgressions were shot by firing squads before any right to appeal was granted. Abacha became known as a dictator who detained his adversaries without charging them and then applied the death penalty or life imprisonment. What Obasanjo had written of an earlier regime typified the current one: “In time power came to be concentrated not so much in one party as in one man, coadjuted by a phalanx of sycophants [who] came to be viewed with ill- concealed hostility . . . The result of this political rigidity was to shut off the springs of creativity in our people.”46 Sani Abacha, who had been involved at a senior level in every military coup beginning with the one that overthrew Shagari, was the

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most brazenly corrupt and cruel of all Nigeria’s rulers. Under his regime, foreign policy fell into shambles, the country became a pariah state, and living standards reached their lowest level in the twentieth century. He concentrated power in himself with little regard for rules or protocol. A draconian decree in 1994 allowed Abacha’s agents to detain anyone without reason and deny them access to family members, lawyers, and the judicial process. The assassination of opponents became commonplace. Members of his notorious murder squad, the Strike Force Security, created to humiliate and destroy opponents and critics, were sent for training in North Korea, Libya, and Israel. Yorubas, particularly their leaders, emerged as prime targets. Although Nigerians were not easily intimidated, the image of the foreboding general, invariably behind dark sunglasses, put them in a state of fear.47 It was the oil-rich areas, the economic breadbasket of the country, that suffered the most. Already devastated by pollution, development slowed, and the standard of living further declined. Attesting to environmental ruin were thousands of bare stunted trees and water surfaces everywhere slick with oil. Many of the locals recruited into the oil industry worked in menial positions. With their means of livelihood, farming and fishing, devastated by oil production and their environment degraded by spillage and pollution, local communities resorted to acts of sabotage. Men and boys joined local gangs or militias that siphoned oil from pipelines to sell on the black market and armed themselves with the proceeds. Or they kidnapped for ransom to get money from the oil companies, leaving an undereducated, unemployed pool of youth enraged that the region’s oil had only impoverished them. Companies such as Shell retaliated by buying weapons for the Nigerian police. Forced by protests and fear of work stoppages, the oil companies also began to contribute to welfare in the surrounding areas and donate some money to development. These efforts, however, faded into minutia compared to the pollution of the underground water table, prevalence of oil scum, burning f lares, and rampaging federal troops, who did not hesitate to shoot protesters. Abacha ran Nigeria as his personal fiefdom, siphoning off billions of dollars into overseas bank accounts that he, family members, and cronies controlled. Millions of Nigerians f led into economic and political exile. When a delegate from the United States came to urge democratic reform, the government refused to let him into the country.48 As Soyinka put it, Abacha had turned Nigeria into a “Nigerian Reich,” in which his regime, marked by murders and kidnaps, had made

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it impossible for the victims of oil exploration to unite in demands for reparation for pollution and for their fair share of revenues. People spoke of a nation in ruin, and those who had the means moved their children to foreign lands. Most people could not afford three meals, medicine, or repairs to their homes. The country was left isolated, with a corrupt government unable to check inequality and lawlessness. Productivity fell to its lowest level.49 The most shocking blow against political dissent came when leaders of the minority Ogoni community in southeast Nigeria, including the journalist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, were arrested. Since 1990, the Ogoni movement, located in the key oil-producing area of Nigeria, had waged an increasingly militant campaign against both the government and the Royal Dutch Shell Company to protest environmental degradation and economic neglect. Along with other critics of Abacha, the Oganis challenged the militarization of the Nigerian state, its capture by a regional group, the monopolization of the country’s oil wealth, and the extensive pollution associated with oil drilling on Ogoni lands. Saro-Wiwa and fifteen other dissidents were finally charged by a specially created Civil Disturbances Tribunal in January 1995, and despite calls for lenience by African leaders, including Mandela, executed in November. The hangings generated international condemnation of the Abacha regime, and Nigeria was suspended from the British Commonwealth. But Western industrial nations led by the United States imposed only modest sanctions and excluded oil from them. Abachi figured that the costs were tolerable so long as oil sanctions were politically unfeasible.50 The growing need for oil made Washington all the more willing to tolerate the petro-tyrants who ruled Nigeria, especially after Abacha stated that he was America’s bulwark against Islamic terrorists infesting the North. As conditions worsened, Obasanjo became ever more active on the domestic political scene, organizing meetings between leaders of the eastern and western parts of the country, and again telling Abacha that he must announce a political transition program, which included a handover date. In early March 1995, Abacha stated that he had learned of a plot to unseat him, named Obasanjo as one of twenty-nine conspirators and had him arrested. Included was Yar’Adua, who together with Obasanjo had supervised the 1979 transition to civilian rule and who had a strong following throughout the country. He, too, was a vocal critic of Abacha’s military government. Ignoring protests by human rights groups that the alleged

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coup was a ruse to eliminate the regime’s enemies and silence opposition, a special military tribunal was called into session. International reaction was immediate. Human rights organizations over the world protested. The British House of Commons complained that Obasanjo was guilty only of having pleaded for a return to civilian government. Former U.S. President Carter called for his release and made a detour on his current African trip to meet with Abacha. A State Department spokesman expressed “deep concern” and warned the Nigerian government that “any summary measures against those arrested . . . could be construed as outside the bounds of international norms.” The African-American lobbying group, Trans-Africa, issued a letter saying the organization was “deeply saddened” by Nigeria’s “absolutely military dictatorship” and revealed that its leadership planned to meet with American officials in an attempt to push Washington to take strong measures against the Nigerian government. South African President Nelson Mandela asked the Abacha administration for an explanation, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu arrived as Mandela’s special emissary. Pope John Paul II also protested the arrests.51 After secret hearings for Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, and other suspects began on June 5, 1995, death sentences were handed down both for Yar’Adua and Obasanjo with Obasanjo’s commuted to life imprisonment. Yar’Adua, a multimillionaire tribal chief and Obasanjo’s second in command in the 1975–1979 military government, posed a threat to Abachi because of his wealth and political and military connections. In addition to his opposition to the Abacha regime, Obasanjo’s prestige had made him as a symbol of the nationwide sentiment that questioned the dictator’s authority. Condemnation of Nigeria intensified through July as international journalists traced Nigeria’s descent and speculated on the country’s chances for survival. “Nigeria . . . A Country Being Looted,” ran the headline in The Toronto Star on July 19: “The Pariah of the Commonwealth” was in the London Daily Telegraph the following day. The Clinton administration announced that it was considering stronger economic sanctions. Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president of South Africa, was the first foreign envoy to travel to Nigeria after the convictions were issued. He carried another message from Mandela appealing for freedom for Obasanjo and his fellow victims. Frank Vogl, vice- chairman of Transparency International, in a letter to the New York Times published June 22, asked for international condemnation of the sentences and cited the absurdity of the charges. By late July, there were indications that the international outcry was being heard.

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Nigerian newspapers reported there was every reason to believe that Abacha would be sympathetic to the worldwide pleas for clemency. On July 25, the Nigerian Defence Council met to review the sentences, and on October 10, Obasanjo’s life sentence was reduced to fifteen years and Yar’Adua’s death sentence converted to life imprisonment.52 Now in his sixties, Obasanjo faced the possibility of spending his remaining years in prison. Hailed both as the only military leader in the country’s history to hand over power to a civilian government and a champion of African economic and developmental progress, he had become a martyr. He and the others remained in prison: Abiola in solitary confinement until his death in 1997. (Yar’Adua died the year before after receiving a mysterious injection.) Obasanjo showed himself remarkably resilient. He wrote three books on Christianity and meditation; organized a productive farm on prison wasteland sufficient to provide prisoners with a decent meal every day; jogged every morning; and in spite of efforts to keep him isolated, became an unofficial counselor and spiritual adviser to all who needed help, from murderers awaiting execution to men broken by torture.53 International reaction mounted against the military regime, and in April 1996, a visiting team of UN fact finders was inundated with requests from opposition groups in Nigeria to press for release of the prisoners and a speedy transition to civilian rule. In May, Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation awarded its annual human rights prize to Obasanjo. Former Chancellor Schmidt called for his immediate release in presenting the prize to Stella Obasanjo, the woman Obasanjo had married in 1976 (and who became “first lady” on her husband’s accession to the presidency in 1999). In her acceptance speech given on his behalf, she described him as “a Nigerian prisoner of conscience unjustly incarcerated by those whose conscience is dead.” She reported that his spirit was strong and that he had found strength in the Bible during his enforced isolation.54 Prison officials told a different story. They found Obasanjo a disciplined and cooperative inmate who was “enjoying a favorable climate” and doing well. In reality, he was forbidden (although the order was not enforced) to mix with other inmates and allowed visits only by his wife—and only twice a month. During the three years he was to spend in prison, Obasanjo later said, attempts were made to inject him with a deadly virus. He had refused to let blood be drawn when the authorities ordered a physical exam.55 (His fears, as the example of Yar’Adua revealed, were well founded.)

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A lifelong Christian, Obasanjo said that he “truly found God” while in prison. “Although I was not beaten or physically tortured, I was mentally tortured by isolation . . . I had no access to news or information. I was only allowed to read the Bible, the Koran, and religious books.” But the former president denied that he had experienced a rebirth of religious faith. “Maybe it was a bit sharpened. But I was born a Baptist and brought up a Baptist and I nearly went to seminary. It’s not a road-to-Damascus conversion sort of thing.”56 Still, the book he published after his release and based on intensive study of the Bible, This Animal Called Man, showed a heightened personal faith. “Whatever we do as a nation,” Obasanjo wrote, “we must return to God.”57 The Nigerian economy further declined under the Abacha government as the dictator and his family continued to siphon enormous sums into private bank accounts held abroad. During his reign, Abacha was said to have amassed an estimated $6 billion through stolen monies, establishment of monopolies, and distribution of patronage. Per capita income fell from a high of $1,000 in 1980 to under $250 in 1996, a drop of 75 percent.58 Yet a terrified opposition appeared stif led, and political subservience toward the regime, almost total. All of Nigeria’s political parties (now wholly tamed and restored) designated Abacha as their presidential candidate in 1998. His government had to raise the retirement age of public officers for him to qualify. In 1997, Transparency International, the anticorruption group that Obasanjo had chaired, ranked Nigeria as the most corrupt nation of any surveyed by the organization.59 The instability in state and local government was even more rampant. In addition, genocidal civil war, failed attempts at democratization, and the widespread corruption—which prevented the country from enjoying the prosperity and prestige which its enormous resources promised—led one Nigerian scholar to describe his country as a “crippled giant,” a take- off on the common designation of Nigeria as the “giant of Africa.”60 In view of its position as the continent’s most populous nation (close to 130 million at the turn of the century and projected to reach over 240 million in 2025) and its great oil wealth, the description of “giant” seemed entirely appropriate. 61 Wole Soyinka, the first black African to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, entitled his narrative “The Open Sore of a Continent.”62 By the mid-1990s, Nigeria, according to the World Bank, was also one of the world’s most indebted nations and among the fifteen poorest. Chinua Achebe called Nigeria “one of the most disorderly nations in the world . . . one of the most corrupt,

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insensitive, inefficient places under the sun . . . dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest, and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth.”63 Despite the wealth derived from its oil reserves, the economy shrank by two-thirds, and the chief city, Lagos, had become “an impossible swarming slum.”64 Although in July (1996), the Nigerian government issued a new decree granting those convicted by military tribunals the right of appeal in civil courts, which offered new hope for political prisoners, there was no immediate change in Obasanjo’s status. Amnesty International took on his case, declaring him a prisoner of conscience and calling for a global letter writing campaign, both to Abacha and to the foreign ministers of the world’s governments, with copies sent to the Nigerian press. The previous November, India’s government had presented Obasanjo with the Indira Ghandi Peace Prize for 1995. Once more, Stella Obasanjo accepted the prize for her husband, saying he had been “falsely implicated.”65 In accepting the Liberal International’s Prize for Freedom awarded to Obasanjo in 1997, she said that her husband refused to lose faith in democracy and liberalism and was encouraged by the international recognition that he continued to receive from groups such as Amnesty International, calling them “rays of hope which penetrated his dungeon.” She described the details of the plot against her husband and the false evidence that had been used to convict him.66 But neither she nor anyone else held out much hope for his release.

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CHAPTER 8

Olusegun Obasanjo: Resurrection

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n Monday, June 8, 1998, the fifty-four year- old Abacha, according to the government’s explanation, unexpectedly died of a heart attack in his sleep. Rumors circulated that disgruntled army officers had poisoned him, and one version had it that the deed was carried out by prostitutes especially recruited for the task, quickly f lown in and out by plotting fellow officers. Administration sources later confirmed that “a crony had supplied the dictator with Viagra and three Indian prostitutes.” If it was a coup, it was a coup from God, said Obasanjo.1 The military, observing the chain of command, immediately named General Adulsalami Aubakar, the chief of the defense staff, as new head of state. Abubakar went on television to promise a return to democratic rule through the promulgation of a new constitution and a series of elections, which would culminate with the resurrection of civilian government. Most Nigerians, who had heard all this before, were understandably skeptical. Of the nation’s thirty- eight years of independence, the armed forces had ruled during all but ten and for the last fifteen. Of Nigeria’s eight military leaders, most had pledged a return to democracy, but only Obasanjo had delivered. On June 15, the new government ordered the release of the sixtythree year- old Obasanjo and eight other of the country’s most prominent political prisoners. In an interview given to Jonathan Power, the reporter who had long befriended him and who later wrote a history of Amnesty International, Obasanjo was asked whether the campaign for his release undertaken by this and other human rights organizations had helped to alleviate his suffering. The former president compared the interventions to “constant drops of water on a stone” (the title of Power’s book), but

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acknowledged that they gave well- known prisoners hope insofar as they “wore at the nerves of jailers and senior politicians [and] when change came they were more or less ready for it.” They had also prompted Western governments to keep putting pressure on the dictatorship. But in the end, he concluded with a reaffirmation of his deeply held religious beliefs: “it was probably divine intervention that changed things.” 2 He realized the enormity of the task facing any new government and its need to reverse the decline in his country’s fortunes. Such vital institutions as the civil service, the judiciary, and public education were all seriously undermined. The demoralized armed forces were held in disrepute and the entire political class viewed with disdain. The economy was in a shambles. Because the world had turned its back on Abacha’s repressive regime, not only had Nigeria been ejected from the Commonwealth, but the aid that Obasanjo had worked so hard to bring had dried up, and what had been received was wasted by corruption.3 Subsequent investigations revealed how extensive it was in the Abacha regime. Searches in the homes of close associates produced hoards of cash in foreign currencies. Abacha’s family held a staggering amount of money, and details surfaced of accounts reaching close to $3 billion in such far-f lung places as Brazil, Egypt, and Lebanon, all stolen in four years of dictatorial rule. An outraged public found all its suspicions confirmed.4 Abubakar, who had something of a reputation for professionalism and relative probity, was determined to reverse some of the damage. In reaffirming his commitment to the restoration of democracy, he told the press, “we have learned our lesson,” and added that he doubted whether Nigerians would accept any future military regime.5 A timetable was announced: local elections in December 1998; state elections, the following month; and a presidential election on February 27, 1999, with the handover of power three months after that. On June 19, 1998, Obasanjo walked out of Yola prison. He had been incarcerated three years, three months, and three days. He thanked those who had stood by him, “all [the] Nigerians,” “God,” and “those whom God has used as instruments to effect my release.” Shortly thereafter, he began meeting with Abubakar to discuss the promised transition to democratic rule. He told the New York Times that he believed “General Abubakar understands that an entirely new democratic structure for the nation must be created, and that he cannot wait . . . to hand power over to a civilian president.”

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Abubakar’s interim government provided Obasanjo with a presidential jet to embark on a tour of South Africa, Europe, and America as Nigeria’s ambassador of goodwill. For the Yoruba press, this heightened speculation about sounding out international opinion regarding plans to draft Obasanjo for a presidential run.6 After the airport delay described earlier, the former head of state went to Botswana and then to South Africa to help celebrate Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday, after which he f lew to Europe and the United States for medical attention, rest, and speaking engagements. While in America, he met with a group of Nigerian exiles gathered at a Holiday Inn in Houston. One who heard him speak on issues facing Nigeria initially found him “humorous and folksy” rather than “domineering,” but noted a more serious and ref lective tone when the former president described life in prison and how fortunate he was in contrast to those, like Yar’Adua and Abiola, who had not survived their ordeal. He brought his listeners up to date on what was happening in Nigeria since his release and why democratic institutions had to be installed. When, however, the discussion turned to the fate of the military, the atmosphere changed. Different points of view, especially from Igbo and Yoruba exiles, were expressed. The film director Don Okolo asked whether in view of Obasanjo’s criticism of high-ranking military officers, especially their embezzlement of state funds, he could distinguish himself from them. An angry Obasanjo insisted on his relative poverty: his son, he said, was in Atlanta cared for by former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, while his family was receiving support from retired General Danjuma, his former colleague. Other friends were paying his children’s tuition fees. When another listener asked whether Obasanjo would apologize to Igbos for his role in the Biafran civil war, as had his commander in chief General Gowon when the latter became aware of their plight, Obasanjo replied that he had nothing to apologize for: he had done his duty as a soldier, and his personal behavior had been humane. He would not speak to the request that he discuss past systematic efforts to “undercut and decimate” the previously preeminent Igbo economic and political presence in Nigeria. It also became clear that in the event he posed his candidacy for high office, he could not expect much help from Yorubas who never forgave him for his support of Shagari twenty years before.7 Also while in the United States, Obasanjo published an essay in The New York Review of Books entitled “The Country of Anything Goes.” 8 He described his imprisonment and tried to explain why things went wrong in a country, he said, “which used to take pride in its large,

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educated and cultured population.” He placed blame on dictatorial rule, especially that of Abacha, and described himself as one whom it could not corrupt. He wrote of his arrest, secret military trial, and the false evidence introduced. He revealed his methods for staying healthy and sane while in prison: by refusing any medical treatment that involved injections for fear of poison and relying on both physical and mental exercise as well as daily prayer. In this and in subsequent articles and speeches, Obasanjo told of his conversations with General Abubakar and his belief that the Nigerian people were genuinely committed to democracy, which he believed would come sooner rather than later. By October, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), an alliance of powerful individuals who believed that they could control him, was considering Obasanjo as a probable candidate for the presidency; and the following February, he would be nominated at the party’s convention. The PDP won the support of northern conservatives and retired military officers and was backed by the political machine created by the late Shehu Yar’Adua. The latter had aspired to the presidency under Babingida’s doomed political transition program and had built an organization to promote his planned campaign. Yar’Adua’s party machine was inherited by Atiku Abubakar, the northern Muslim who became Obasanjo’s running mate in the election (not to be confused with the interim president who succeeded Abacha). Although mistrustful, the public cautiously accepted the promised return to a free political life, and in November, Obasanjo stated his intention to run for presidency on the PDP platform. No fewer than twenty-five political parties had rushed to register, but three predominated. The PDP contained most of the seasoned politicians and emerged as the party with the broadest national appeal insofar as it evolved out of a group of thirty-four eminent Nigerians, veteran politicians who had opposed Abacha’s plans to succeed himself. A rival party, the Alliance for Democracy (AD) contained Yoruba dissident politicians and activists associated with Abiola’s cause, including Wole Soyinka and Chief Olu Falae, a finance minister in the Babangida government. The Alliance favored a power shift from north to south and—in contrast to Obasanjo’s emphasis on a strong unitary state— from the center to state and local groups. An All People’s Party (APP) also contained many notables, although their acceptance of politicians close to Abacha and the military cost them support. They, too, drew much of their support from the north. In October 1998, the Independent Electoral Commission, the body designated to oversee the vote, certified nine parties, including these three. From an ideological standpoint, the

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parties did not much differ, and each contained prominent individuals in the military, business, and the professions.9 Why had Obasanjo decided to run? His defenders answered that he was independent minded. More to the point, previous military rulers had visited the former head of state and promised support. Obasanjo himself claimed that having again “found” God while in prison gave him strength to run for the sake of the country, to undertake a “mission” to restore Nigerian unity and defeat separatism. Responding to charges that he was a pawn of the military elite, he argued that his army background made him uniquely qualified to keep the armed forces under control, and this would weigh more with voters than fears that he could not be his own man. Obasanjo also pointed to the credibility won when he had voluntarily handed power over to a civilian government in 1979, and that he had further boosted his democratic credentials by insisting on democratic rule as a precondition for membership in the Organization of African Unity.10 Nigerian ethnic and regional politics were back in full force, which revealed the need to balance northern and southern interests, conf licting Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa demands and those put forward by Christian and Muslim factions. Yorubas were still indignant over “June 12” (the 1993 election won by but denied to Abiola) for which they blamed the northern Muslim elite. They sought a political restoration and searched for support from minorities in the southeast to achieve it. Other Nigerians, particularly those in southern states, also wanted a greater decentralization of authority and more local control over resources. The perennial problem of civilian-military relations and a battered economy strengthened existing divisions, and it became clear that keeping Nigeria together remained Obasanjo’s first priority. As early as July 1998, four months before he declared his intention to run, he had stated his position clearly: “It is a great pity that at every crisis, big or small, people talk of Nigeria breaking up. The enormous challenge facing us now is to get beyond these mutual suspicions.”11 Obasanjo’s arrest and imprisonment had enhanced his stature, and for many, he was the “messiah” that Nigerians had been waiting for. And aware of lingering southern protests over the unjust June 12 annulment, the northern “mafia” believed that it was in its own self-interest to allow a power shift to the south. Both Babangida and Abacha had filled important posts in the military and the government chief ly with northerners. Southerners, who felt deprived, neglected, and marginalized, were determined that the next president come from the south.

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But they knew perfectly well that the northern godfathers would only support a candidate acceptable to themselves, one who posed no threat to the status quo. Yet, precisely because northerners preferred him as their candidate, Obasanjo fell further out of favor with his own Yoruba people. According to Africa News, the strongly pro-Yoruba journal, the southern opposition to his candidacy revisited his first term as military head of state and highlighted charges of early authoritarian behavior seen at odds with his reputation as a Christian and a human rights activist. Long resentful of having been shut out of power, Yoruba leaders simply did not trust Obasanjo, seeing in him a traitor and a northern stooge.12 The Yoruba press reminded its readers that during his tenure as head of a military government, he had detained critics, specifically student and labor leaders, without trial. He had set up a Nigerian Security Organization, an antecedent of Abachi’s State Security Service, to “terrorize” law- abiding citizens whose views were at variance with the positions and policies of the military dictatorship.13 Nor could Yorubas forgive Obasanjo’s violent 1977 crackdown on students protesting tuition hikes or his handing power over to the northerner Shagari in 1979. They remembered the brutal tactics of his soldiers, especially the violence used against Fela, one of the most vocal critics of the military, when they burned down his compound and murdered his mother.14 They remembered, too, Obasanjo’s comment after the 1993 election that “Abiola was not a messiah.” Thus, the former head of state was seen by Yorubas as “detribalized,” as refusing to champion the Yoruba cause, and as a military man backed by generals and such outsiders as Mandela, Jimmy Carter, and Andrew Young. Resentful of his popularity in the north among Muslims and in the east among Igbos, they (rightly) feared that he would be swept into power. His party initials, PDP, were derisively said to stand for “predetermined president.”15 From his farm, on November 3, 1998, Obasanjo formally announced his presidential candidacy. Calling for national unity, he stated that “every Nigerian has a stake in the survival and prosperity of the country [and that] no section or group should be made to feel disenfranchised or alienated.” The following February 16, he won his party’s primary election. During the short ten- day period before the general election of February 27, he said, “it was time for him to return to government . . . to bring Nigeria out of the mess it has been put into” by a succession of corrupt army dictators. “I believe I have something to offer. If someone has something to offer, he should say so and let the electorate decide.”16

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Obasanjo’s competitors for the nomination included the then frontrunner Dr. Alex Ekwueme, the former vice president in the Shagari administration. For his Igbo kinsmen, Ekwueme was a “true civilian” and possessed the required education, experience, and integrity. But he could not gain the confidence of the northern power elite, especially its military wing, which feared that an Igbo might revisit the Biafra secessionist dream. Nor could Ekweume match the organizational and financial resources that the retired generals made available to Obasanjo. When Ekwueme donated N(aira)$2 million and several cars to his party, Obasanjo provided up to N$30 million to his, money donated by “friends”—for the most part, the generals who backed his candidacy. He, in turn, endorsed their selection of Atiku Abubakar, the dominant figure in the Yar’Adua political organization that supported him, as his choice for vice president. At their nominating convention, PDP delegates had debated whether a former military head of state could keep his promise to return as a civilian president in the light of recent military governance, but a majority voted in the affirmative.17 In a desperate attempt to prevent the PDP from winning, the rival APP and AD parties joined forces in an “unholy alliance” in support of Falae, also a Yoruba. But the process of negotiating the alliance left the APP divided and would cost the joint ticket votes.18 In his speeches, Obasanjo expressed anger at what had happened to his country after he stepped down twenty years earlier and promised to crack down on corruption. He would abide by International Monetary Fund demands to privatize state industries, expand foreign investment, restore free education, increase employment, and promote health care but provided few details about how these goals would be achieved other than calling for sacrifices to stimulate economic growth. Greater opportunities were to be granted to women, and families would enjoy the right to send their children to secular secondary schools. Obasanjo had criticized a previous military leader, Gowon, for seeking a return to office in the ill-fated 1993 election. “What did you forget to take from the state house that you have to go back?” he had rhetorically asked him at the time. Anticipating that the same question might be put to him, he answered, “I have not forgotten anything. I do not regret leaving power. What I left behind and [what] should have been taken care of has all been destroyed.” While he campaigned fiercely against bribery, corruption, kickbacks, and consumer scams, Obasanjo repeatedly touted himself as an effective bridge from military to civilian government and tirelessly repeated that precisely because he was close to the military, he could best prevent it from seizing power again.19

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Falae tried to paint the former head of state as “a soldier in disguise, although he himself had lost popularity because of the harsh austerity measures advocated as finance minister. Even at his own electoral rallies, crowds chanted “Obasanjo” in songs and speeches—but usually added, “No more soldier.” 20 They did so because the former president’s background as a general and his continuing friendships with other high-ranking military officers had raised speculation in the press about his motives. Among Obasanjo’s backers were those accused of stealing funds from Nigerian accounts and sending them out of the country. 21 The previously deposed Babangida emerged from his seclusion to contribute large amounts of money to Obasanjo’s campaign, threatening the credibility of Nigeria’s return to civilian rule. Ironically, in his New York Review of Books article, Obasanjo had blamed Nigeria’s decline on the military rule established in 1983 and particularly on “the gradual but steady erosion of moral and ethical standards” that took place during Babangida’s first years in office, the same Babangida who carried out a military coup at the end of 1984 and who had imposed the anti- sedition law used to justify Obasanjo’s arrest. Nigeria had consequently become a nation of “anything goes,” where corruption and fraud became “habits that trickled down to every level of society.” And to compound the inconsistency, it was Babangida who had annulled Abiola’s election in 1993. The APP/AD alliance had miscalculated in anticipating that the success of northern and military interests in pushing through Obasanjo’s nomination over that of Ekwueme would result in a protest vote from Igbos in the east. It had also believed that Obasanjo’s prominent role in the civil war against Biafra would lead Igbos to support his opponent, Falae. Neither came to pass: Igbos did not distinguish between Falae and Obasanjo, both of whom were Yorubas who had refused to support the Biafran cause. 22 Was Obasanjo justified in using the north’s backing as the means to gain the power required to bring about the promised economic reforms? He knew that the persistent northern refusal to share power was responsible for the other regions distancing themselves from the central government. In any event, he relied on PDP veterans, who included inf luential northern generals and even former government officials under Abacha. One backer tried to explain the inconsistency: “You can’t just wave away a whole generation of politicians.” 23 Thus, Obasanjo’s support was strongest in the north, the region that had long dominated Nigerian politics in the post-independence years,

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rather than in his own Yoruba homeland where he remained distrusted, where voters believed it unlikely that he would alter the highly centralized federation created under military rule, and where Falae was to win most of the votes. Still, although he lost in all the Yoruba states and even in his home state of Ogun, he won decisively nationwide. And even many Yorubas had accepted him as a prodigal son. The governor- elect of Oyo state explained: “We believe in Yorubaland that you do not send a bad child to be eaten by a lion . . . whether Obasanjo is good or bad, he is part of the Yoruba race. He is part of us.” 24 If he failed to overcome the hostility of a majority of his own people, who saw him as “a military ruler dressed in civilian clothes,” Obasanjo won because he was the strongest candidate, raised substantial funds, and obtained the support of fellow retired military officers. He amassed 63 percent of the vote on February 27, gaining at least a quarter of the votes in thirty-two of the thirty- six states in addition to Abuja, the federal capital territory. Falae came in a distant second at 37 percent. The former head of state secured a convincing majority in the northern and central states, did poorly only in the four southeastern ones, and so could claim to have secured a national mandate. Not only was he elected (for a four-year term), but his People’s Democratic Party gathered a majority in the National Assembly and in state assemblies and won twenty- one of the thirty- six governor’s seats. 25 If Obasanjo (happily) lost the distinction of being the only military head of state to hand over power to an elected civilian regime, he gained a new one: that of having come to power both by military and democratic means. There were complaints of voter fraud and calls for a formal appeal by the losing parties. Obasanjo admitted abuses but asked Falae to accept the results for the sake of national unity. Carter and other international observers acknowledged problems in some precincts but denied there was sufficient reason to nullify the election, especially in view of Obasanjo’s margin of nearly seven million votes. That both sides engaged in electoral fraud—mutual accusations were leveled—made it difficult to know the extent to which the outcome would have been substantially different. The Independent National Electoral Commission formally declared Obasanjo the winner. The military accepted the result, and Obasanjo promised an honest and development- oriented government. With his inauguration set for May 29, he almost immediately embarked on a world tour to win friends for Nigeria and build international support. He set out to call the attention of the Western powers and other industrial nations to the country’s economic plight and to show gratitude to

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the international community for the moral support shown him during the dark days of the Abacha dictatorship. Above all, Obasanjo sought a reduction in Nigeria’s foreign debt “to help us sustain democracy by sharing with us the burden of debt which may be crushing and destructive to democracy in our land.” He had inherited, he said, a failed state ruined by fifteen years of “greedy, corrupt, and rogue military dictators” and so had to start from scratch. Debt cancellation, or at least the remission of interest, was needed. 26 To opponents who saw him as a traitor to the Yorubas and a northern puppet, Obasanjo countered that he was a national, not a tribal leader. And one election observer agreed that “nobody owns him [because] he has no really strong base of support.” Pearl Robinson, an American foreign policy expert, commented on how he spent time [before his inauguration] going around the world rather than remaining at home, putting together a political alliance. She speculated that he was playing the international card: reinforcing his stature overseas to strengthen himself in the eyes of the northern elite. 27 The three-month trip took him to several countries where former generals had reportedly stashed huge sums into their personal accounts. Although he told The Christian Science Monitor that “the main purpose [of my trip] is to let important centers of the world know what is happening in Nigeria and to galvanize support for investment,” there was speculation that he was also asking about what could be done to retrieve these ill- gotten funds. He reached out to Nigerians living abroad and asked them to reinvest financially in their country. The response to his visits was positive but guarded, with some questioning his priorities and wondering why he did not stay home and work within Nigeria, while others said they understood the need to reestablish his international position as a bulwark to, at best, a complicated power base. 28 As the inauguration approached, he made it clear that he would not shrink from forceful measures: he would do more, he told an interviewer, than “crack the whip” to bring the economy and pervasive corruption under control, and he promised to work with anyone who could help locate and return the money stolen from the country and stashed abroad. He placed emphasis on the importance of agriculture, on the need to make farming interesting and attractive to Nigerians so they need not rely strictly on an oil-based economy. 29 Obasanjo told a Canadian journalist that he would focus on agriculture, even if foreign investment proved generous, because of the limited number of manufacturing and service jobs available. Agriculture, he added, offered a “multiplier effect [which] means you can take the jobs to the people,

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rather than trying to take the people to the jobs in manufacturing and in services.”30 On May 29, Nigeria’s military head of state formally turned power over to the newly elected president. Obasanjo declared the day as “the beginning of a genuine renaissance” for the country. In his inaugural address, he acknowledged the problems it faced, and while pledging to deal with the issues at hand, pleaded for “patience and sacrifice.”31 As he prepared to enter the sprawling fortified presidential home built by Abacha in Abuja, it appeared that for the first time in many years, Nigeria had a chance to end instability and decline. Epilogue With the Obasanjo presidency and a new constitution, Nigeria entered into yet another democratic experiment in a new (Fourth) Republic. (The First had followed independence in 1960 and survived until overthrown in a military coup six years later; the Second began after Obasanjo’s departure in 1979. The embryonic regime under General Ibrahim Babangida’s abortive 1993 transition program is commonly referred to as the Third Republic.) The return to democratic elections in 1999 after years of military rule held much promise. During his two terms—in a contentious election four years later, he would be reelected—Obasanjo used his presidential powers to ally with some of the military men who had supported him and undermine others. In a Newsweek interview after his inauguration, he was asked whether yet another transition to democracy could be seen as real. Obasanjo replied that “this time the world will not condone military intervention. Nigerians will not condone it . . . and now there are people who believe if it takes dying, they are willing to die.” However, he doubted it would come to that. His experience as head of state, his “international connections,” and his ties to the military—“I am at home with the military as I am with civilians. It wasn’t like that before”— rendered the likelihood of another coup unlikely. The need for national reconciliation took priority, but other objectives were made clear: “food first; education second.”32 And although a Yoruba, he would not play an ethnic card. “I am your own,” he told his fellow Yorubas, “but at the same time I am not your own. The Yorubas cannot make a Yorubaman a leader in Nigeria by their own efforts alone.” He had lost their votes, wrote an admirer, but emerged as Nigeria’s own.33 The problems faced, however, were enormous. Obasanjo took control of a government that spent up to half its budget on the salaries of two

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million state and local civil servants, yet the public they served found bribery and connections the best way to achieve results. The armed forces, too, noted an observer, were “a mess,” with up to 75 percent of the army’s equipment broken or missing parts. The navy’s forty-two admirals and commodores outnumbered serviceable ships by a six to one ratio, while an air force of 10,000 possessed fewer than twenty functioning planes. Most egregious, many in the military saw the government as a source available for personal gain.34 Also indicative of the country’s problems was the state of disrepair of its economic facilities, most notably oil, the greatest source of its export wealth. During the Abacha regime, two refineries had fallen into disuse. Despite its possession of one of the largest crude oil deposits in the world, Nigeria was forced to import oil through Abacha’s handpicked agents, who charged highly inf lated prices and made enormous profits. The inevitable result was fuel shortages. If some initial progress was made in clamping down on corruption and in successfully making the case for debt relief, Obasanjo’s government, however much committed to a unified Nigeria, failed to resolve the ethnic and religious stresses threatening to break up the country. Within a year of his election, violence surged with perhaps 10,000 killed in ethnic, political, and religious fighting, the worst since the civil war. The army was repeatedly called in but seemed only to worsen repeated crises. Turmoil in the Niger Delta region continued, and the government appeared helpless in bringing it to an end. Indeed, in Obasanjo’s first Delta emergency in November 1999, government intervention and the deployment of soldiers resulted in a disaster. On October 1, 2001, army troops killed 200 civilians in Benue state in retaliation for the murder of nineteen soldiers. In December of that year, Bola Ige, the attorney general and minister of justice, was assassinated in his bedroom. Yorubas threatened to secede. Political instability in the oil producing delta region disrupted production, and ethnic fighting led Shell and Chevron Texaco to suspend operations. Constant attacks on the oil installations, hostage taking, shootings, and environmental destruction persisted. Fuel shortages resulted in long lines at gas stations. Electrical blackouts and gang wars typified life in Lagos, and Nigerians began to long for the relative stability associated with military rule. Far from changing his views on what had to be done to provide a better future for Nigerians, Obasanjo’s “interment” strengthened previously held beliefs. The country had yet to acknowledge its need for greater agricultural self- sufficiency; tribal and regional loyalties superseded national ties; and unity was far from being achieved. His plans

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to stem corruption ranged from greater government involvement in the distribution of oil wealth to the purging of those in high-ranking positions who were believed to have been involved in skimming government funds. Yet to pursue these people meant pursuing many of those who had paved his way back to office. A self-justified sense of “realism” strengthened as Obasanjo’s years in office unfolded. “You have to be realistic in Nigeria,” he said. “If you want a Utopia, it will not be on this side of eternity.” Yet he remained optimistic. Somehow, he noted, for all their rage and frustration, Nigerians always pull back. “Strikes, riots and pogroms f lare up then subside,” and Obasanjo was noted for his oft- quoted comment that “God is a Nigerian, perhaps meaning that He will never allow Nigeria to go completely to hell.” As put forward by Nigerian specialist Peter Lewis, the president’s performance in the first civilian administration of the new republic, “despite early hopes of economic improvements . . . was lethargic, and policy initiatives on institutional reforms that might have shifted the country’s trajectory were wanting.”35 His second term in office was even more disheartening, and the disappointment generated was foreshadowed by the election that returned him to the presidency in 2003. The vote was described as “utterly fraudulent” in eleven or twelve states with lower levels of fraud in another dozen. Still, the fact remains that Nigeria in April 2003 held its first successful civilian-led election that followed another civilian-led one. Some Nigerians had hoped Obasanjo would follow the example of former South African President Nelson Mandela and retire after a single term. But the president invoked both his supporters—and the “Almighty”—as having convinced him to seek another four years. During his new tenure, the distinction between party and government gradually eroded, and Obasanjo looked forward to the one party rule that he long desired. As his second term wound down, the president showed a reluctance to leave office. His supporters tried but failed to push through a constitutional amendment allowing incumbent presidents and governors to seek third terms. The debate continued throughout much of Obasanjo’s tenure, time that should have been used to prepare for the 2007 elections scheduled for April 14 and 21. Consequently, little effort was made to overhaul voter rolls as well as deal with institutional problems related to holding an election in a country like Nigeria. Having failed to make a third term for himself possible, Obasanjo set out to handpick the next president. Above all, he was determined to stop his rival in a power play, Vice President Atiku Abubakar, from

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getting the PDP nomination, and when the estranged Atiku defected would try, unsuccessfully, to unseat him. In 2003, Atiku, a powerful businessman, was encouraged by northern critics of Obasanjo to seek the post. His attempt—and the president’s determined opposition to it—created “deep dysfunctions” in the ruling PDP. In December 2004, the party’s national chair, an ally of the vice president, had publicly criticized Obasanjo’s failure to mitigate violent sectarian conf lict. The angry president demanded and got the chair’s resignation, and the party’s executive committee replaced him with a presidential loyalist. It also changed party rules to provide for direct presidential control of party officials. This ensured that future PDP congresses would be controlled by Obasanjo supporters, which in turn meant that the PDP of Obasanjo’s second term had been transformed into an instrument of presidential power and supremacy. Those within the party who opposed these changes were left embittered, and regardless of the domination it exercised, divisions within the PDP had considerably widened.36 Obasanjo went further. At the PDP convention in December 2006, he engineered a change in the party’s constitution to make himself its life chair, with control of party finances and the power to call to account any elected party official, including a future president. Thus, he had found a way to continue presidential power even when his term in office came to a formal end. Obasanjo endorsed the nomination of the little-known Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the reluctant and sickly governor of Katsina state in the north, who had not sought the post. (Yar’Adua’s older brother had served as Obasanjo’s deputy when the latter ruled as military head of state in the 1970s.) Critics complained that Obasanjo’s endorsement, which effectively removed other candidates from competing for the party’s nomination, was tantamount to an anointment. Yar’Adua’s running mate was the governor of oil-rich Rayelsa state in the Niger Delta (whose wife was under indictment for money laundering). If the 2003 general elections were “hardly credible,” the 2007 balloting was seen as “blatantly fraudulent.” Obasanjo had avoided an overtly visible role in the bribery-riddled third term effort, but for political scientist Rotimi Suberu, he was “at the forefront of his party’s violent and corrupt 2007 election campaign” and made full use of such vast resources of the Nigerian presidency as control over federally based oil patronage, authority over the police, armed forces, security services, and the INEC.37 Yar-Adua won in an election that Nigerian observers called “a charade.” There was even more vote rigging and violence than in the 2003

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vote. A total of some 700 violent election-related incidents, including the assassinations of two gubernatorial front-runners, took place. For one observer, the election, “so badly run and marred by such widespread rigging, lacked even a pretense of democratic plausibility.” Opposition groups tried to annul the results. The European Union labeled the outcome as “not credible,” and the Human Rights Watch reported that the government and electoral officials had actively colluded in the fraud and violence. The only bright spot lay in the willingness of the opposition to pursue grievances through the courts and not resort to activism on the streets—perhaps because of signs of judicial independence from government inf luence. Yar’Adua, with little experience of the world beyond his northern state of Katsina, was seen by many as Obasanjo’s puppet and his promise to continue existing policies and retain existing personnel as failing to inspire confidence.38 Although steadying the macroeconomy, boosting private sector investment and clearing Nigeria’s $35 billion of debt, Obasanjo left his country in a pitiful state. Basic services for the fast- growing population could not be provided: electricity was patchy and graft rife after an anticorruption war that was largely rhetorical, while the oil-rich Niger Delta zone remained in a state of almost permanent conf lict. Obasanjo, concluded The Economist, was a micromanager who “concentrated power in the presidency and entrenched Nigeria’s ruinous culture of patronage.” In seeking to prolong his stay in political power, he subverted his country’s fragile democracy. Although he had gracefully accepted defeat in his quest for a third term (on the grounds that he alone could complete the reforms initiated as president), calling the decision “a victory for democracy,” Obasanjo sought to manipulate power after his departure from office. He had used the anticorruption police to intimidate such presidential aspirants as Vice President Abubakar and former President Babangida. Then he both imposed his own nominee as his party’s candidate and established personal control over it. His quest for authority was of long duration: when he entered office in 1999, he kept control of the oil portfolio for himself so that all politicians were beholden to him for money. His friends and investors were exempt from the anticorruption commission’s investigations but enemies often were not (although for some because of the absence of incriminating evidence). Even as the economy grew at 5 percent a year (at the time of his departure), most of Nigeria’s 140 million people remained impoverished. Although the eighth-largest oil producer and one of the world’s

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chief exporters, the country imported all the refined oil products it used. After Obasanjo’s eight years in office and despite a surge in oil revenues from Nigeria’s daily production of 2.5 million barrels, state owned refineries were producing less then at the start of his first term. Violence in the oil rich Delta, where as much as 20 percent of Nigeria’s oil exports were stolen or disrupted by the insurgency, was worsening. Obasanjo announced plans for developing the Delta but (in 2006) did not permit discussion of the militants’ demands.39 The infrastructure was crumbling, insufficient energy supplies caused many factories to close, and retired civil servants and local business suppliers remained unpaid. Of Nigeria’s thirty- six governors, thirty- one were under federal investigation, despite some gains by Obasanjo in fighting corruption. As much as $600 billion in ill- gotten gains sat in foreign bank accounts while rural farmers lived on less than a dollar a day. Most Nigerians lacked access to basic medical care, education, and clean water. (While campaigning for the April 2007 elections, two leading presidential candidates f lew to Europe to get treatment for minor ailments.) One “mangled” election after another generated disillusionment, although not so much with democracy as with leaders imposing their will. In early 2000, Nigerians were euphoric: polls revealed that 84 percent had expressed satisfaction with the state of their new democracy. As Obasanjo’s second term came to an end, the figure had fallen to 25 percent.40 Perhaps Obasanjo’s most important legacy was his inf luence on the structure of the Nigerian federal government. Despite the opposition of democratic intellectuals, including those in his own southwest, he strongly favored the preservation of Nigeria’s centralized form of federal government, which furthered the image—and the reality—of authoritarianism. As put forward by several political scientists, however, one must realize that unlike an FDR or a Tony Blair, Obasanjo did not hold office after centuries of democratic development. They could stand for third terms without upsetting a “fragile systemic balance.” He more fitted the context, if not the examples, of a George Washington or a Nelson Mandela, who were the first presidents of new democratic systems—although they showed the need to ensure continuity of their systems by a regular alternation of executives.41 For elections, after all, however f lawed did take place, and Obasanjo did step down (twice) and allow a civilian successor to take office on the date set by law. There was no guarantee that he would do so (and Nigerians could take credit for opposing his extension of power). Even in a free and fair election, thanks to the PDP’s great patronage, the divisions within the opposition, and the negative image displayed by

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General Buhari—who had emerged as a rival candidate—Yar’Adua would probably have won in 2007 (although a runoff with Buhari was likely) and—it warrants emphasis—his victory marked the first time since independence that power was transferred from one civilian administration to another. Put in the largest perspective and in spite of the disappointments, Obasanjo’s long-term legacy is nothing short of historic. Despite the corruption that seems impossible to eradicate, the reestablishment of democracy in 1979 and again in 1999, in both of which Obasanjo played a leading role, resulted in an improved image of Nigeria. Both times, a civilian government replaced a military regime. He negotiated extensive foreign debt forgiveness for his country. He promoted the emergence of technocratic and managerial leaders from over the entire nation, people who sought to implement anticorruption practices, civil service reform, and waste reduction in public contracting. The strong national government promoted ensured that Nigeria remained intact and even exercise continental leadership. Under Obasanjo’s rule, the country’s preeminent role in economic and security matters was greatly enhanced. Without Nigeria, African-led peacekeeping missions in Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone would have been impossible. He helped bring Liberia’s civil war to an end by taking in strongman Charles Taylor and allowing time for Liberians to prepare for elections. And the Nigerian president played a key role in helping to transform the ineffectual Organization of African Unity into the more-promising African Union; promoting the new Union; and securing aid, trade, and debt relief for the continent. He preserved its international credibility by preventing Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, from becoming its head despite the carnage in Dafur. Indeed, he was sometimes ridiculed for neglecting Nigerian concerns. When inspecting the destruction caused by explosions at an army munitions dump that killed as many as 10,000 people in Lagos, Obasanjo was heckled by bystanders.42 But if he won over many critics by distancing himself from his former military allies and by taking steps to combat corruption and restore political freedoms, Obasanjo failed to solve the problems faced by Nigeria. His lament about his country’s future, made after he first stepped down from office, remains valid.

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CHAPTER 9

Indira Gandhi: “Like a Tigress”: Creation

Image 9.1 Prime Minister Gandhi poses for a photograph at the National Press Club during her March 1966 visit to the United States. U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–134157

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n October 3, 1977, in India’s capital of New Delhi, an unmarked car drove up to 12 Willingdon Crescent at about 6 p.m. The bungalow was the home of the former prime minister, Indira Gandhi, voted out of office together with many members of her Congress Party in an overwhelming electoral defeat the previous March. Voters blamed her for the “excesses,” especially the forced sterilizations and massive slum clearance projects, of the “State of Emergency” proclaimed two years earlier. Living with Mrs. Gandhi were her sons Rajiv and Sanjay and their wives, Sonia and Maneka. Sanjay and Maneka were playing badminton on the front lawn as two Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers got out of the car. When Mrs. Gandhi came to the door, they informed her that she was under arrest. She had been expecting this—as indeed had the rest of the country. Having told the officers that she needed time to gather some clothing, she left them standing on the doorstep. When she reemerged almost two hours later, she was wearing an immaculate white sari with a green border. In the interim, a large crowd had gathered, and those nearest the house showered her with rose petals and draped garlands over her. During the time she had kept the two policemen waiting, phone calls had been made: to the press, friends, party stalwarts, and members of Sanjay’s Congress Party Youth Conference, all of whom had f locked to the house. (It was later rumored that Sonia Gandhi’s pasta maker was put to use as a paper shredder.) Cries of “Indira, We will die together,” were heard from the crowd outside. She asked the reporters gathered there to convey her regrets at being unable to keep a scheduled visit to Gujarat State the next day. Before consenting to go with the officers, the former prime minister insisted on being handcuffed. The shaken police begged not to be embarrassed, and she got into the car unmanacled. During all of this, press photographers snapped countless pictures.1 Almost eleven years earlier, on January 19, 1966, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, acceded to the premiership. Called “Madam,” as was customary for women in authority, she won election two more times, dominated Indian politics, and became one of the most powerful women in the world. A goddess for her admirers, she was more a demon for her critics, who accused her of damaging the civil service and the independent judiciary—and of almost destroying the Constitution during her proclaimed state of national emergency. During her years in office, Mrs. Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas Gandhi) had successfully fed India during the drought of 1966, heightened national pride after the victorious 1971 war with Pakistan, and ushered in a technological revolution with the detonation of a nuclear

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Indira Gandhi: “Like a Tigress”

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device in 1974. The disastrous events during the so- called “Emergency” that followed eclipsed these accomplishments: when civil rights were suspended, censorship imposed, and massive arrests took place. After thirty years of continuous rule, her Congress Party was repudiated by the voters, and her political career seemed over. Creation Indira Gandhi was born November 25, 1917, into a leadership role marked both by democratic ideals and an aristocratic style of life. She was next in line in the Nehru legacy consisting of her paternal grandfather; the wealthy lawyer-politician and Western- oriented Molital Nehru; and her father, the first prime minister of an independent India. Jawaharlal’s wife Kamala, Indira’s mother, was a shy religious young woman easily intimidated by the worldly Nehrus. The Nehru women were not well disposed toward her, especially Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Pandit (later the first woman president of the UN’s General Assembly). Madam Pandit ridiculed Kamala as a dehaat, a country bumpkin, not as Westernized as the upper class Nehrus, although all were Kashmiri Brahmins. Linguistic and religious differences divided the Nehrus: Indira’s grandfather and father—and her father’s sisters—spoke and wrote English; her mother and grandmother, Hindi. The men, moreover, were agnostic; the women, superstitious and devout. Her parents’ only child, Indira resented the treatment of her mother, whose death came as a major blow, and resolved never to be so treated. Kamala had introduced her to the Vedas, the literary poems and legends orally transmitted. If her father inf luenced her intellect, her mother bequeathed her values and outlook on the world. 2 Mrs. Gandhi later wrote that as a child, she had wanted to be a boy. Her older son Rajiv told a biographer that in his adult years, his mother had not especially regarded herself as a woman but simply as a human being. Never a feminist, she was very much in the tradition of South Asia dynastic politics where women rose—and often were subsequently slain—as daughters or wives of prominent men: Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka are but two examples. Shy, when a child seen as an “ugly duckling” with a beak nose and hooded eyes, Indira Gandhi became a striking middle- age woman with a dramatic streak of white in her hair, always immaculately groomed and dressed in silk saris.3 Beginning in 1919, Molital, who previously had opposed any illegal action, brought his son into the crusade for Indian independence.

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Jawaharlal Nehru showed himself increasingly radical on the issue and, unlike his father, supported Gandhi’s call for civil disobedience against the British. Casting a wider net, he also became convinced that a free India would emerge when part of a world “in which there is free cooperation of free people, and no class or group exploits another.” The Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British troops were ordered to fire on an unarmed crowd demonstrating peacefully, if illegally, in a sealedoff park, shocked both father and son. They worked tirelessly in the Congress Party to promote the cause of Indian independence. Because the young Nehru rated democracy as the most reliable and effective weapon to fight poverty and unemployment, he believed that every individual counted; dictatorship held no appeal. For his daughter’s critics, her later insistence on taking decree-making power would stand in sharp contrast to these democratic ideals.4 During a youth marked by lengthy separations from a frequently imprisoned father and a perpetually ill mother, Indira attended a variety of schools across India. And as a teenager in Europe and under pressure to live up to Nehru’s expectations, she attended boarding schools in Italy and Switzerland. In view of the lonely childhood that either inspired or hardened her (depending on the biographer), her sense of isolation at the age of eighteen could only have intensified when Kamala died of tuberculosis in 1936.5 She herself was no stranger to British prisons, having visited her father in one when not yet five years old. As a young girl, she had played with dolls that represented her fantasy of a freedom-fighting mob storming a jail and freeing the Congress Party prisoners incarcerated there. By the age of twelve, she was leading a children’s brigade committed to ending British rule in India and delivering fiery political speeches to the servants.6 Given this background, one should not be surprised by the prison term served in 1943. Involved in the struggle for independence, Indira was jailed—along with her father and her husband, Feroze Gandhi, a young socialist from the London School of Economics who was active in Congress Party politics—for participating in the Quit India movement for independence. As a law student in Allahabad, Feroze, like other promising students in the university, had been welcomed by Motilal to his home and caught up in the movement for independence. Although Indira denied that “one comes of age politically with one single event” and insisted that “it is a gradual process,” she later admitted that “my months in prison were a very important part of my life.” The experience, according to close friend and later biographer, Pulpul Jayakar, added a new focus to her life, one that brought her closer to her father

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and earned her a place in his world. Considered simply as a “hardship,” time in prison was seen as something of a rite of passage, as a “badge of honor.” 7 The previous year, the twenty-four-year old Indira had married Feroze Gandhi—whom she had met again in London in an organization supporting India’s case in Britain; he at the London School of Economics, she preparing for entry into Oxford University. Although a sympathetic biographer said she was then a “virginal pale faced beauty,” photographs showed “an angular, shy, plain looking girl with the prominent ‘Kashmiri’ nose.” 8 As seen, Feroze was something of a protégé—for some a hanger- on—in the Nehru family, but because he was a Parsi (born a Zoroastrian by religion) and came from a family of shopkeepers, Indira acknowledged she was breaking “age- old traditions.” 9 The couple had two sons: Rajiv, born in 1944; and Sanjay, in 1946. Over time, Feroze and Indira pursued different careers: he achieved some prominence as a member of the Indian Parliament, she became ever more involved in the Congress Party; in social welfare work; and above all, in the role of consultant, companion, and hostess for her father: undertakings to which she devoted herself. Her husband, in the thoroughly documented studies of Indira Gandhi, largely drops out of sight. Indira served as official hostess and then as her father’s confidante from about the time that Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated in early 1948 until Nehru’s death in 1964. Although finding his daughter unassuming and lacking in conversational skills, Nehru believed that he had no choice: Indira was the only available family member, and he could trust her. Madam welcomed visitors, organized banquets, and accompanied Nehru on his travels as his always- smiling, sari- clad companion. Yet initially aware of her shortcomings at socializing, she was “simply terrified” by the duties expected of her. Later, she recalled in her memoirs, when her father “asked me to come and set up house for him, there was nobody else to do it,” and she and her sons moved in with Nehru in the prime minister’s residence in New Delhi. A resentful Feroze, camped in a residence for MPs, increasingly becoming both a workaholic and alcoholic. Indira had chosen her father over her husband, or, as she saw it, had chosen to put duty to the nation first. It is also true that the two were considerably less than compatible: the robust, fun-loving—and unfaithful, yet intellectually serious husband contrasted sharply with the private, reserved, shy and sensitive wife. And when Indira chose to reside permanently in “Teen Murti,” the forbidding mansion of the

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former British commander in chief, with her father, she had essentially written off her marriage.10 During the two decades that she submerged herself in her father’s life, Indira remained active in social welfare work and in the women’s wing of the Congress Party. In 1955, she was named to the Congress Working Committee (the party’s national executive council), and in a matter of months in an election engineered by Nehru, to its presidency. Some voted for her to curry favor with Nehru; others because they believed she would be easily manipulated by the party bosses, the so- called “Syndicate.” Rumors that Nehru was grooming her as his successor were widely believed, especially by Morarji Desai, a veteran of the independence struggle, who assumed that after Nehru, he would govern India. Indira sought to ingratiate herself with party leaders, and she allied herself with those opposed to a communist government in Kerala, India’s southernmost state—the first democratically elected communist government in history—which she denounced as promoting Chinese interests. More to the point, the Indian Communist Party, which until then had been tolerated by the Congress Party leaders, was now seen by them as an effective challenger. Motivated to substitute a Congress government in the state, she was giving highest priority to the needs of her party, an indication of things to come. And when Nehru ordered the dismissal of the communist government, an unprecedented act, his daughter was accused of having inf luenced him to do so—and of displaying early signs of an authoritarian tendency.11 When feeling hurt, Feroze would talk of his wife in deprecating terms, and her designation as party leader in 1955 was the breaking point: both maritally, and because he was moving toward communism, politically as well. The two were unofficially separated, although brief ly reconciled in 1960, before his death later that year at of a sudden heart attack at forty- eight years of age.12 The years of acting as her father’s confidante served Indira well. Well bred, possessing good taste, and carrying herself well to begin with, she was now more shrewd: a keen observer; more outspoken; and for her future chief secretary and adviser, P.N. Dhar, only needed “stronger intellectual equipment”—denied to her in part by frequently interrupted schooling. She made sure that she, and not Madam Pandit or other relatives, filled the vacant post of “First Lady of India.” Dhar could not help but add that Nehru was “more genuinely liberal and open-minded and less temperamentally authoritarian and aristocratic than his daughter,” and that her proximity to her father made her a

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magnet for favor seekers who formed a kitchen cabinet that was more like a feudal court when she became prime minister.13 With her children in the hands of foreign governesses and then away at boarding school, Indira traveled extensively with her father. Nehru was constantly invited overseas and whenever possible, took his daughter to Indonesia; China; Europe; America; Russia; and Britain, where she attended the coronation of Elizabeth II. She also found the time to travel through numerous Indian villages, ostensibly to meet with grassroots party workers. Speaking with them and other inhabitants—and she had an uncanny memory for faces and names—she learned of their problems and in so doing, made herself more widely known. On one visit, to the United States in 1961, according to Schlessinger’s Thousand Days, she showed herself unresponsive to the Kennedy charm when at a White House dinner, she criticized American policy and praised the views of Nehru’s outspoken foreign minister, Krishna Menon. The urbane Kennedy was unperturbed. In the USSR, she begged for aid to her impoverished country. In acknowledging Chinese claims to Tibet at the Bandung Conference of neutrals in 1955, she echoed Nehru. The father and daughter, in turn, hosted visits by Khrushchev, Nasser, Chou- en-Lai, Eleanor Roosevelt, and numerous writers. While campaigning with her father, Indira’s confidence mounted on seeing that she could substitute for him, and on occasion, move crowds.14 After Nehru’s death in 1964—his health broken by the Chinese War that he had stumbled into—there was an interlude of Congress collective leadership under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, a party loyalist and moderate who was the choice of his Congress colleagues. The party strongman and boss, Kumaraswami Kamaraj Nadar, had “managed” Shastri’s election deftly, as he would that of his successor. A close associate of Nehru, Kamaraj had previously persuaded several inf luential ministers to resign and undertake work at the grassroots level, supposedly to revitalize the Congress. It was, in fact, a clever way to remove such powerful leaders as Desai, then serving as finance minister, in order to give Nehru’s daughter and only child a chance to shine. Denied Kamaraj’s support and ministerial power, Desai had struggled in vain to secure Congress’s backing for his “rightful” claim to Nehru’s office. He finally agreed to accept Shastri’s compromise candidacy, revealing that it was the “Syndicate,” the Shastri-Kamaraj board of collective leaders, that effectively ruled India.15 She so frequently, and diplomatically, insisted that she was unqualified to succeed Nehru—“I had no political ambitions”—that many believed her.16 And it was true that although freed of family responsibilities—her

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sons were in England: Rajiv in a university; Sanjay, training as an apprentice in a Rolls Royce factory, Nehru’s death had come too soon. Lacking any elective or cabinet experience, Indira was content to serve as minister of information and broadcasting in the Shastri government. She accepted the post offered by Shastri to lend his government prestige, both out of a sense of duty to continue her father’s work and, inasmuch as his only legacy to her outside of some property was meager royalties, because she needed a job. Her chief asset was her pedigree. Criticisms of the new minister as inarticulate, tentative, and overly reliant on incompetent advisors seemed well placed. Still, the modest post would enhance her political image, require her to travel, and teach her much about the media and thought control. A brief and apparently successful war with Pakistan in 1965 brought Indians together, and the country’s military edge again enabled it to reject a proposed plebiscite on the disputed area of Kashmir. Soviet Premier Aleksi Kosygin, seeking to have the USSR extend inf luence in South Asia, invited Shastri and Pakistani leader Ayub Khan for a summit in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) early in January 1966. Both sides agreed to use peaceful means to settle disputes, to pursue a policy of noninterference, and to repatriate prisoners. Then Shastri died of a heart attack within hours of signing the accord, and the path to power was now open, both for Desai and Indira. Indira Gandhi claimed that she decided to run for prime minister when she saw both the strengthening of ethnic—as contrasted to national—ties and the Congress Party’s drift to the Right as betrayals of her father’s socialist principles. Despite earlier protestations of unfitness, she saw herself as Nehru’s natural successor and promised to pursue his agenda. “I am a representative of all India,” she said, “which includes all shades of opinion.” She believed that her father, like Mohandas Gandhi, had always regarded “communalism” (the allegiance to one’s ethnic group rather than to the society as a whole) as one of the greatest dangers to India’s very survival. Both Nehru and his daughter held this communal spirit as responsible for the partition of India in 1947 and, before that, for the weakening of the national idea.17 Indira insisted on both democracy and socialism, although she acknowledged that each afforded different “interpretations and applications.” Only some form of democratic government, where people can “participate and feel involved,” could keep a country of “India’s size and diversity” together, while socialism was “imperative in a country that has so much poverty.” The two, she insisted, were in no way inconsistent: “democracy implies equality and therefore it implies socialism.”

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Even so, her socialism envisaged a mixed economy, one that did not establish state control but one that gave “greater importance” to the public sector. Madam once confessed to an American interviewer, “I don’t really have a political philosophy. I can’t say I believe in any ism. I wouldn’t say I’m interested in socialism as socialism. To me it’s just a tool.”18 But it was more Indira’s increasingly assertive personality (and of course her origins) than her ideological orientation that helped in the pursuit of leadership power. For her admirers, she showed herself as a woman with masculine determination tempered with feminine grace, as one for whom challenges brought out the best in her complex multilayered makeup. A struggle for the succession took place between Desai and Indira, the respective champions of the Right and Left wings of the Congress Party. The sixty-nine-year old Desai saw this as his last chance to govern, but it was Indira, although she possessed little administrative experience, who appeared as a national leader. She spoke both English and Hindi; displayed no caste or religious or factional affiliation; was popular among Muslim and other minorities; and, above all, was Nehru’s daughter. Hence her designation by the Syndicate. Desai, on the other hand, had never been overseas and spoke a limited English. Intensely conservative and religiously orthodox, he had renounced sex at the age of twenty- seven, rejected Western science and medicine, and believed in a regimen that included drinking a glass of his own urine every day.19 Moreover, Kamaraj knew that a Desai victory would bring an end to his own days of patronage and behind-the- scenes power, whereas Indira seemed humble and malleable. On January 15, 1966, the party boss convened a Delhi meeting of eight chief ministers and in “an hour of deliberation,” they unanimously approved her candidacy. A Congress parliamentary majority was secured, and four days later, both legislative houses voted her in as prime minister. At forty- eight years of age, Indira Gandhi was ten years younger than her father when he became head of government. She was fully aware that the power brokers in Congress had designated her because they could not agree on one of their own; because they required a leader apparently aloof from regional, religious, and caste rivalries; and, perhaps most important, because they believed that she posed no threat to them. She promised to honor Shastri’s Tashkent pledges. But Indira, at least initially, was a poor public speaker, who seemed unable to think on her feet and fell into lapses of silence, requiring notes passed to her from colleagues. Because she used prepared texts, she was deliberately interrupted by questions to see if she would return to her message. Easily

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embarrassed, she seemed bewildered and when heckled, became f lustered. These attitudes were reciprocated: Indira resented Parliament, which she called “a zoo”; its members, “clowns”; and as her secretary noted, preferred to rely on close advisers. A socialist opponent called her goongi gudiya, the dumb doll, and even some party bosses, following Desai’s lead, referred to her as chokri (little girl). The labels stuck, even after she gained self- assurance. Mrs. Gandhi’s supporters included socialist youth and women, although she denied any attachment to feminism. If in India, her gender was seen at the time as a liability, opponents failed to appreciate that she was also popular with liberals and minorities—specifically Muslims and Harijans (the name preferred by Mohandas Gandhi for Untouchables)—and that the days of her collegial critics were numbered: she would use the Syndicate bosses to win Congress Party support and then oust them as reactionaries. 20 Even so, the problems faced appeared enormous. Within days of her taking office, tribal rebels rose up in northeast India, requiring troops to put down their insurrection. The failure of the monsoon in 1965 threatened famine, and both drought and a fragile balance of payments made India ever more dependent on foreign aid. After Indira f lew to Washington in March 1966, American help in the form of food grains (suspended because of India’s war with Pakistan) began to arrive. LBJ, if charmed by his visitor, as a condition of U.S. support had required Mrs. Gandhi to devalue the rupee and set up an Indo-American educational foundation. Pressure had also come from the World Bank, and less than six months after becoming prime minister, she angered party elders— who found the bank’s demands humiliating—with her surprise declaration of intent to devalue the rupee. Indira had consulted them only at the last minute and had ignored their objections that India would become an American pawn. 21 Assured of American aid, and once back in India, Indira inaugurated the country’s fourth five-year plan. It was designed to lay the groundwork for a breakthrough in agriculture. Although India’s population then surpassed 475 million—but with national income only at $31.4 billion—she noted several signs of change as economically hopeful. In the previous year, two million kilowatt hours of power had been added to the national grid. New high-yield seeds were being tested. Sixty- eight million Indian children attended school, and there was growth in the technical and managerial skills acquired during the first three plans. 22 Indira’s insistence that devaluation was necessary to increase exports, in order to earn more foreign exchange, was courageous but unpopular. Resentful of what it was as the prime minister’s surrender

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to U.S. pressure, public opinion was hostile, and the press and even party colleagues joined in criticism. Its intensity affected her leadership style, heightening the paranoia and insecurity experienced since childhood. Government prestige sank, and the prime minister found it necessary to call for a national election in six months, the country’s fourth. Believing that she could trust no one, that anyone could betray her, and anxious to regain prestige and distance herself from the Syndicate bosses, she took the advice of her advisers and began veering further to the Left. And, indeed, Madam regained some popularity and restored a sense of independence from Washington by increasingly outspoken remarks against the American-led war in Vietnam. In July 1966. she condemned the U.S. bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. After Washington rejected the cease-fire that she proposed, another trip to the USSR led to the issuance of a joint Indian- Soviet communiqué denouncing American “imperialist aggression.” A consequent reduction in American aid was the first in a new wave of problems. Devaluation, deprivation (and accompanying food riots), and domestic dissent led analysts to predict sharp losses for Mrs. Gandhi’s governing majority in the Lok Sabha, the popularly elected lower house of Parliament. And in the general election of February 1967, although she herself won a parliamentary seat, her governmental majority fell from 200 to a bare 20, winning only 40 percent of the popular vote. At the provincial level, her party lost its majority of the total seats held, and the opposition established non- Congress governments in several states. Rather than campaign on issues or ideology, Indira, as biographer Katherine Frank put it, had sought a “more intimate, parental” relationship to the people, posing above parties as the “great provider and reconciler, and appealing to voters as “members of my family” over the heads of the party bosses. She had previously invoked her womanhood as a response to her opponents’ dismissal of her as chokri. Although too few in number to prevent electoral losses, loyal voters cheered and hailed her for the first time as “Mother India,” and the myth of the mother figure was born. Despite her party’s loss of seats, her own position was strengthened, and in the face of her personal victory, the Syndicate had to wait before taking on a new struggle for leadership. 23 To rebuild the party, Kamaraj persuaded Indira to ask Desai to serve as deputy prime minister. Aware that the 1967 vote had left the older and more conservative party leaders shattered, Indira agreed, piously invoking the need for party unity. Desai wanted the home ministry, too,

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but she refused him control over domestic policy, giving him finance instead. Party unity, however, was not achieved. The ousted old guard gathered its forces and fought to regain control, with Desai remaining convinced that he was the one best suited to lead the country. Fearing that Sanjiva Reddy, the highest-ranking member of Parliament, was the choice of her opponents in Congress for the presidency of the country and that once installed he would lever her from office in favor of Desai, Indira sought allies and found them among communists and socialists. This explains, in part, the strengthening of her leftist image, the transformation of her struggle for political survival into one carrying greater ideological overtones. In July 1967, the Gandhi administration issued a Ten Point Program with stress placed on the nationalization of banking. Yet expediency alone does not explain Mrs. Gandhi’s turn to the Left: she admired the principled and talented men (there were no women) of the Left whom she gathered around her, the nucleus of what came to be called the “Kashmiri mafia.” Chief among them was a former friend of Feroze’s at the London School of Economics and now a high-ranking diplomat, P.N. Haksar, who advised her to develop “wider progressive alliances” and who became her link to Moscow after Washington’s decision in April to resume the sales of arms and parts to Pakistan. Determined to regain confidence by embracing more of the socialism shown by Nehru, Indira had taken on a new and more radical image, one symbolized by her refusal to have India sign a nuclear arms proliferation treaty. 24 She defended her government’s policy to keep all new heavy industry under public direction. She proposed land reform measures and ceilings on personal income, private property, and corporate profits. On July 16, Indira ousted Desai and took control of the finance ministry. Three days later, the government seized control of fourteen major banks. The success of her candidate for the presidency—although a figurehead post whose nomination of a prime minister required parliamentary approval—showed that she was stronger and more popular than the party machine that had put her in power three and a half years before. As noted by historian Stanley Wolpert, the “interlude of collective leadership was over—that of Indira Raj had begun.” 25 Undaunted by complaints from the old guard that her nationalization policy was unconstitutional but with her popularity rising, Indira pressed ahead. Over half of the three dozen or so constitutional amendments added since the Constitution, adopted in 1950, passed in the nineyear period beginning in 1966. In a last ditch effort to retain power, the

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Syndicate mustered its strength within the party and expelled her from Parliament for “indiscipline” on November 12, 1969. Indira responded by rallying a majority of Congress MPs to her “New Congress” banner, a national left-wing coalition that included the Communists. What came to be called the “Great Split” brought an end to the Congress Party as a loose coalition containing both supporters and opponents. It allowed Mrs. Gandhi to centralize her power so that she would not be threatened again with a loss of authority. In control of her own party, she began replacing state leaders who had supported the Syndicate with people she could rely on. The “dumb doll” had emerged as a confident and assertive leader enjoying mass support. 26 The militancy displayed was foreign to the Congress tradition, and the apparent ruthlessness, the willingness to fight, even to split the eighty-four year- old party, both astonished and dismayed such party stalwarts as Vijaya Pandit, Indira’s aunt and political rival. As Indira later acknowledged: “My father was a saint who strayed into politics. I am a tough politician.” 27 The economy, too, was beginning to prosper as India experienced the benefits of a “Green Revolution,” thanks to the introduction (in Nehru’s time) of U.S.- developed high-yield Mexican wheat. Agrarian reforms, made a priority by the Gandhi government, were now paying off. More state subsidies; more electrical power, water, and fertilizers; and the elimination of taxes on agricultural income were all helping to make India self- sufficient in food and putting an end to the image of a starving nation. Despite a population growth of thirteen million a year, Indian caloric consumption rose to over 2,100 and average life expectancy reached fifty- one years. An annual 7 percent growth in industrial production further enabled Mrs. Gandhi to consolidate her base. When in June of 1970, she took control of the home ministry, keeping the atomic energy and planning portfolios as well, she now had more direct responsibility for central administration than her father did. Not only was the era of Indira Raj one of greater Indian independence from the West but of the consolidation of central power as well. Only a crisis on the country’s borders placed a cloud on the horizon. Supported by Washington, Pakistan was turning its eastern Bengalispeaking region into its own Vietnam. Vast cultural differences separated that country’s east and west wings: East Pakistan, with 55 percent of the total population but living on only 15 percent of the total land, was economically underdeveloped and impoverished. Its export of jute earned most of Pakistan’s hard currency foreign exchange, yet the East got back a smaller proportion of industrial development funds than did

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West Pakistan. The East was treated as a virtual colony of the West, and protest was severely repressed. When in July 1970, f looding in the East left 10 million people homeless, the turmoil in Pakistan once more affected Indian life: waves of refugees arrived in India’s adjacent Bengal State, and the congestion, especially in Calcutta, led to outbreaks of violence. 28 It was also in 1970 that Indira sought the abolition of the former maharajas’ privy purses and privileges, which had been granted by the government since independence. The proposed legislation secured the required two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha but failed in the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, by one vote. She thereupon got the obliging president to “derecognize” the 278 princes, with the loss of their purses, privileges, and titles adding $6 million to the national treasury, all to public acclaim. When the Supreme Court struck down the presidential order and at the same time several ministers refused to move ahead with her land reforms, the prime minister decided to call for new elections. They would serve as a referendum on her leadership, and Madam relished the prospect. As she told Newsweek magazine, “I am the issue.” 29 In a campaign that she personally directed, Indira used radical rhetoric but was careful to reassure middle class moderates. She campaigned intensely throughout the country and, as anticipated, made the election a referendum on herself. Her picture appeared on countless billboards and on pins worn by villagers. In forty-three days, she traveled 36,000 miles to hold over 300 rallies. An estimated 13 million people attended these rallies, and another 7 million lined the roads unable to gain entrance. Her opponents ran on the slogan “Indira Hatao” (“Remove Indira”). She responded with Garibi Hatao (“Remove Poverty”). On March 1, 1971, 150 million people cast their ballot and gave Mrs. Gandhi’s ruling Congress a stunning landslide victory with a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha. Indira was elated: “The elections have proved how strong the democratic roots in the country are and how discerning our people are.” As Desai was quick to notice, her ability to identify with her audience—wherever she went, she wore the sari customarily worn there—attested to her political skills. Almost at once, her administration began drafting plans for slum clearance, low- cost housing for the rehabilitation of their dwellers, and settling landless laborers on property of their own.30 The victory at the polls, which strengthened her position as leader of the government and—thanks to her vote gathering skills—of her party, immeasurably increased Indira’s confidence and instilled a belief within her that she was indispensable. Her government also proposed

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relevant constitutional amendments strengthening parliamentary authority to circumvent a hostile Supreme Court. An amendment (negating the Court’s earlier rejection) pushed through a compliant Lok Sabha finally and definitively deprived the princes of their taxfree subsidies and other privileges. Other more repressive amendments allowed arrests and imprisonments of up to a year without trial. The most contentious of them would allow the legislature, not the judiciary, to decide on the amount of compensation to be granted for confiscated property. For Mrs. Gandhi, these were “milestones in the progress of democracy” insofar as “democracy must mean the right of the largest number of people.” But for critics, they “reduced the Constitution to tatters.”31 There was one jarring note: the opponent she had defeated in her own constituency, the burly buffoonish socialist who had coined the phrase, “Remove Indira,” filed a lawsuit charging her with electoral irregularities. The suit was not taken seriously. On March 25, l971, talks between East Pakistan (the former Pakistani state of East Bengal and now calling itself Bangladesh) and West Pakistan broke down. Two months earlier, in the East, the Awamit League, favoring autonomy and led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, swept the vote in Pakistan’s first nationwide elections. In the West, Ali Bhutto’s People’s Progressive Party was the overall winner, but neither he nor the dictator Yahya Khan, who refused to relinquish power, were prepared to make concessions. Unnerved by the unrest and growing discontent in the East, the 60,000 West Pakistan troops stationed there opened fire on student dormitories and crowded Hindu bazaars when thousands were asleep and arrested Rahman. By the end of April, a million civilians had f led into India, arriving at a rate of 60,000 a day, a figure that would reach 10 million by December. Mrs. Gandhi appealed to the UN to take action, arguing that “the scale of human suffering is such that it ceases to be a matter of domestic concern of Pakistan alone.” Jayaprakash Naryan, or JP, as he was popularly referred to, the charismatic hero of the Quit India movement, called for the invasion of East Bengal and traveled to world capitals to win support. 32 Having placed priority on using Pakistani leader Kahn as an Asian middleman in negotiating with the Chinese, the Nixon administration ignored their pleas, even stepping up its arms shipments to Karachi. Haunted by the overcrowded refugee camps, Indira was determined to take responsibility for meeting the crisis. She had implored

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Washington to rethink its pro-Pakistan policy but came to realize that the American president, relying on political abstractions and referring to time frames and peace initiatives—and counting on Pakistan to help pave the way for the opening to China—failed to recognize the magnitude of the human tragedy. By September, India was spending $200 million a month to feed the hoards of refugees, whereas the entire 1965 war with Pakistan had cost only $70 million. Regardless of Pakistan’s pathetic record in East Bengal, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed that “we can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed by a conf lict with a friend of Russia’s.” When he suggested a meeting between Indira and Yahya Khan and the placement of UN observers, she replied dismissively, “I’ll think about it,” a response that considerably annoyed the American president.33 The Indian prime minister visited Moscow, Brussels, Vienna, London, Washington, Paris, and Bonn to press for a political settlement and to win support for the regime’s—now calling itself Bangladesh— newly declared provisional government. To no avail: the American government was interested in establishing ties to China, not in persuading Khan to negotiate. Aware of impending war with Pakistan, India’s third such war and the need for great power support, on August 9, Indira signed a twenty-year “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation” with the Soviet Union. If either was attacked, the two countries would consult “to remove such a threat.” Nehru’s long- standing policy of nonalignment (admittedly dependent on Anglo-American aid and goodwill) had been scrapped by his daughter in favor of a new Indian-Russian alliance. Washington’s response was swift. President Nixon, who believed that he had been “too easy on the goddamn woman” and had erred in having “really slobbered over the old witch” at the time of Mrs. Gandhi’s visit to Washington the previous November, sent the Seventh Fleet to the Indian Ocean, and on December 3, his government cut off all financial support to India. An impassioned Indira went on radio nine days later to tell her countrymen, “We will not retreat.” If the f leet was sent to unnerve her, the move failed, and the country rallied around her. The next day, December 13, 1971, Khan launched what he later called his “unlucky strike” when he ordered the bombing of Indian air fields and barracks. The war for the liberation of Bangladesh was underway.34 Indian military forces struck hard. With total air superiority—and Russian tanks and artillery—and bolstered by popular support, in two days, Indian forces defeated Pakistan in the East and staged a holding action in the West. With the Pakistani surrender on the fifteenth, India

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declared a cease-fire, and Prime Minister Gandhi told a wildly cheering Lok Sabha that “Dacca is now the free capital of a free country.” It was her crowning triumph. She had won the military victory that neither Nehru nor Shastri could gain and was praised by her deliriously happy compatriots as a new Durga, the Hindu goddess of war. The foreign press saw her as the new “Empress of India,” and a 1971 U.S. Gallup poll found her “the most admired person in the world.” The balance of power in South Asia tilted to India, and the nearly ten million refugees began to return. Responding to American charges that she favored the Soviet Union, Indira reminded her public that at the time she returned from her visit to Washington in 1966, she was accused of having turned pro-American. “I have been very much on my own since I was quite small and have never gone entirely to one side or another,” she wrote in a memoir. And, in fact, she was following her father’s policy of neutrality, defining “nonalignment” as “judging all issues independently, as not wishing to be tied to any group or to any country.” Rather than reflecting any ideological stand, she argued that the Soviet connection was “the only hardheaded, practical path that is open to any country which wants to keep its independence.” Denying that the treaty marked a departure from India’s traditional foreign policy, Mrs. Gandhi recalled that when Pakistani boasting of worldwide support had left Indian morale devastated, “the Soviet Union stood by us.” But unlike her father, who placed Indian interests in the context of world peace and international cooperation, Indira identified as goals national security, territorial rights, and India’s prestige in pursuing a “pragmatic” and “flexible” foreign policy. She recalled that when having reminded Nixon that, after all, Pakistan was supporting Arab countries, he had said, “yes, but Pakistan listens to us and you don’t.”35 Profiting from their leader’s celebrated status as liberator of Bangladesh, and thanks to the gains made in the 1971 election—Mrs. Gandhi’s ruling Congress had made a clean sweep of sixteen of the twenty- one Indian states and had routed the Old Guard—she could move ahead with her policy of socialization and more rapid development. To charges leveled by her opponents that she had “capitulated” to the communists and had scuttled “democratic principles” for political expedience, Indira countered that no selfish minority of “rich capitalists” was to hold India hostage to “monopoly interests.”36 To redeem her radical pledges, the prime minister sought more extensive land reform and greater nationalization of industry, as well as more government control over food markets. Yet the government officials

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assigned to enforce the tough new laws spoke for the same landed interests who would suffer from their strict application; the harsh taxes on profits and urban wealth continued to be evaded by the leading backers of the Congress Party; and the age- old problems of communal jealousy, distrust, and hatred did not go away. Indeed, regional antipathy seemed to worsen: Sikh versus Hindu, Bihari versus Bengali, Gujarati versus Marathi. Throughout 1972, the government strengthened its control over the economy. In May, the coking coal industry was nationalized; in August, the government took over the management of the Indian Iron and Steel Company without paying compensation; in September, general insurance companies came under state control. Shipping, gold, and copper soon followed. In October of that year, forty- six textile mills were transferred to the state- owned Textile Corporation. Wartime food riots and the need to feed the refugees had emptied out grain supplies, and a drought failed to replenish them. To alleviate the high price and to further revitalize her radical image, the following April, Indira transferred the wholesale trade in wheat and rice to public agencies. One tradition, however, endured: that of nepotism. Indira’s designation of her twenty-two year- old son Sanjay as the top manager of India’s new auto manufacturing industry and, thanks to his mother’s intervention, his award of a government contract to have India produce its first car, intended to be cheap and fuel efficient, left heads shaking and shoulders sagging. Land was given to him for a factory, requiring the relocation of a military base. Yet it would take five years before a prototype of the Maruti (named after the monkey god)—the “car of the nation”—saw the light of day, and it never went into production. Katherine Frank believed that since Feroze’s death, Sanjay, who lacked credentials or experience but had a reputation as a ‘hell raiser,” had “wielded a peculiar psychological power over his mother” and that Indira must have known that, despite her disclaimers, the contract would bring Sanjay into public life. Although Sanjay’s incompetence was not in doubt and the vast sums advanced by the newly nationalized banks were poorly used, the principal secretary who had opposed his plan was gradually eased from inf luence. Sanjay blamed red tape for the repeated delays, but for much of the press, the Maruti Affair was Indira’s “Watergate.”37 In 1974, India launched its Fifth Five Year Plan. It aimed at the “end of poverty” and the “attainment of economic self-reliance.” A population now nearing 600 million required even greater increases in

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food production, and Indira’s Raj planned to almost double its investment in birth control and family planning (from $400 million during the Fourth Plan to nearly $700 million in the Fifth). The Fifth Plan was to generate 8 to 10 percent more industrial production annually, and this was to be linked to increasing employment in areas where jobs were most needed. The 1973–1974 energy crisis that quadrupled the price of oil dashed these hopes but better ties to and an increase in trade with the United States after the Bangladesh War helped India to weather its inf lationary spiral. On May 18, 1974, the first successful underground nuclear explosion took place in the Rajasthan Desert. Mrs. Gandhi insisted on the difference between a “nuclear country,” which India had become, and a “nuclear weapons country,” which, she said, India had no intention of becoming. China no longer enjoyed a monopoly on nuclear power in Asia, and Pakistan had been duly warned when New Delhi refused to sign the UN’s Test Ban Resolution. 38 After a half decade of serving as prime minister, Indira had developed expertise and self- confidence. She was willing to take prompt action when she believed it was necessary. She used advisers responsible only to her and unaccountable to any democratic forum. A former foreign affairs minister, M.C. Chagla, told journalist Shashi Tharoor how the cabinet was treated. “Madam” did not respect her colleagues and “took days to grant appointments” to them. Another observer found her imperious in style, noting that she would “ruff le her colleagues by her speech” and often “startle them by her studied silence.” But they all yielded to her centralization of authority: she controlled the agenda; would change it at will; postpone meetings with the cabinet or bypass it; and when it met, steamroll a consensus. Actual meetings were often a formality.39 According to Tharoor, “her personal staff came to include crude wielders of political clout, men who rose from clerical ranks by adeptness at dispensing patronage and their penchant for political arm twisting.” The inf luence of officials transcended their nominal powers. A single phone call from Mrs. Gandhi’s “Additional Private Secretary” or even his assistant, was enough to goad ministers and secretaries into action. The journalist Kuldip Nayar wrote, “there were no rules, no regulations, no precedents, no principles . . . all in the government waited at the end of the telephone line.” The Congress she created was no longer capable of meeting an activist political challenge. Unable to trust others, feeling self- existentially “alone,” and convinced that

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her son Sanjay was the only aide whose loyalty to her was unconditional, she relied on him as her most-trusted confidante. That they lived under the same roof helped: he was always with her in meetings she held, while touring the country, and when giving instructions to party bosses.40 She appreciated the need to encourage science and technology: specifically atomic energy, space, electronics, defense production, and agriculture and was aware that agricultural and economic self-reliance were keys to safeguarding national security and development. Indira had inherited a reasonably well- developed scientific and technological infrastructure founded by her father, built on it, and would leave an impressive “high-tech” legacy when she left office. The growth of investment in science and technology during her term was impressive by the standards of developing countries. A silent social revolution had occurred; thanks to a quota system and reserved places, room was made for lower caste people in educational institutions and administrative posts. For the first time, a sizable middle class was emerging, especially among medium- size farm owners benefitting from the “Green Revolution.”41 To overcome the religious and socioeconomic differences that hindered progress, she cast herself as a progressive leader with a left-wing ideological orientation devoted to uplifting the poor and disadvantaged. Observers, however, noted that while disenfranchised people used to work through political parties, violent semi- organized groups were now gaining power. The founders of the Republic of India had visualized the resolution of political conf licts through a democratic process. They knew that India was composed of communities; that people were divided along religious, ethnic, and linguistic lines; but they believed that democracy was adequate to channel their demands through peaceful means. Their goal was to defuse intergroup conf lict by working through political parties. For her critics, the years of Indira Gandhi’s rule saw the disintegration of this process. By placing country above community, the prime minister showed herself hostile toward these regional parties and her efforts to disband them led to periodic—and unprecedented—outbreaks of violence, which required the police and the army to restore order. Indian federalism in practice was more strongly centralized than called for in the Constitution, all the more so under Indira Gandhi’s tenure as head of government. Her arbitrary appointments and dismissals of chief ministers, Tharoor complained, “reduced federalism to a farce.” “I came in because of Madam,” admitted one bewildered chief

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minister of Andhra Pradesh upon his unceremonious exit, “and I am going because of her. I do not even know how I came here.” Article 356 of the Indian Constitution permits the central government to dismiss a state government and impose federal or “President’s Rule,” a provision intended to be used in event of a breakdown of normal government but frequently misused by Indian prime ministers after Nehru to oust inconvenient opponents. It was used just eight times in the first fourteen years of Indian independence but on seventy occasions between 1965 and 1987. The ceremonial governor served far more as an agent of New Delhi to control the state government than as a distinguished constitutional figurehead.42 Indira spent time seeking a resolution to the problems of poverty, not only because it was morally correct to do so, but also to create social order. And because she saw the centralization of power as the means most suitable to achieve her goals, concerns arose about the authoritarian qualities many perceived in her. At the time of the 1974 nuclear test, Indira nominated a seventy year- old Moslem, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, as the next president of India, a man whom she knew she could control and who would remain loyal. She already dominated the Congress Party, including its leader, Dev Kanta Barooah, and most of the chief ministers in the various states. With her handpicked president, her position would be virtually unassailable. This was neatly summed up by the telling slogan coined by the faithful Barooah: “Indira is India, India is Indira.”43 The first woman prime minister of the biggest democracy in the world thus projected the image of a strong, aggressive, and cold leader. She gave to most people the impression first and foremost of a hard-headed politician who reached her objective by the shortest possible route and showed little patience for moral or intellectual justification for what she did. In both domestic and foreign affairs, Indira dominated, bypassing institutional mechanisms and according to one observer, “using men of ability almost as errand boys.”44 She suited action to the needs of the moment, tended to disregard ethical concerns, and rumors of increased corruption alienated even her admirers. Her assistants found her imperious, and she seemed to distrust everyone except Sanjay, who having started dabbling in politics was playing an active role in Congress Party fund-raising: seeing to it that cash donations were delivered directly to Indira’s home at 1 Safdarjung Road. His behavior, even if motivated by idealistic impulses, would contribute to his mother’s downfall. Secretive, resentful of criticism, she kept people guessing. The opposition, she believed, was trying to destroy her, and, indeed, it was to drive her from

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office in 1977. But it was three years earlier, in 1974, that two events took place that set in motion the Emergency of 1975, the underlying cause of her fall from power: a railroad strike in the late spring of that year and the political movement associated with Jayaprakash Narayan, now a fierce critic of Mrs. Gandhi’s administration.

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CHAPTER 10


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he nationwide railway strike was only one, although one of the most serious, signs of growing disorder and general malaise. A long-running China- oriented Marxist uprising in West Bengal resulted in up to 20,000 political prisoners and accompanying accusations of ill treatment, including torture. Over three dozen major strikes in Bihar took place throughout much of 1974, where tens of thousands of students and workers protested against inf lation and Congress Party corruption. Corruption in Gujarat led to the looting of ships and the burning of government property. Fearing growing anarchy, Indira fought back but nowhere more forcefully than in her decision to crush the railway strike. Trade unions constituted an effective pressure group, and the government, the largest employer in India, had a history of conceding to their demands. The Indian railroad system, with 1.4 million workers, 10 percent of all public employment, made up the single largest public sector. These workers sought a wage increase but fearing an inf lationary spiral, the government resisted. A widespread strike broke out, and by mid-May 1974, although declared illegal, threatened to paralyze the Indian economy. A further aim, as stated by the detained socialist trade union leader George Fernandes, was to bring down the Gandhi government. When resulting food shortages led to famine in parts of the country, the administration responded by invoking an emergency proclamation used in the 1971 war to mobilize troops and so keep the tracks secure. Twenty thousand railway workers were arrested, often brutally; and on May 28, after twenty days, the strike was called off. In retrospect, it appeared as a dress rehearsal for a growing opposition already taking advantage of the disturbances in northern and western

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India. That the issue was not resolved became apparent when the following January, the railroad minister and Indira’s chief fund-raiser was assassinated, and an attempt was made on the life of her handpicked chief justice. The prime minister became convinced that a conspiracy was working against her. In Gujarat, where the monsoons had again failed and two years of drought and an inf lation of 30 percent a year had wiped out the savings and the patience of middle class office workers, professionals, and students, Morarji Desai intended to embark on a fast-unto- death to bring down a corrupt Congress state government. Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan, who stood for rural revitalization and development, came out of retirement to join with Desai in putting together a broad-based coalition opposed to Congress, the Janata Morcha (People’s Front), to achieve what he called “a total revolution.” Within a year, it would include groups ranging from Maoists to conservatives and communalists. Seen at various times as a Marxist socialist, a Gandhian anarchist populist, and a revolutionary visionary, JP charged the prime minister and her government with mismanagement and corruption. A veteran of fifty years in Indian politics, he was especially inspired by an economic crisis worsened by drought and the oil price rise that had brought the government’s popularity to a new low. An early disciple of Mohandas Gandhi, he became a hero of the underground in the struggle for independence, sabotaging railway lines and British installations. His subsequent rejection of Nehru’s offer of a cabinet post only enhanced his moral stature. Narayan favored a radical agrarian solution, the wholesale distribution of land to the landless. But when it proved impossible to realize, he lost interest. He left Congress for the Socialist Party and then withdrew from mainstream politics altogether. During these years, JP led an austere self less existence devoted to social improvement and the welfare of the most oppressed sectors of Indian society. Now in his seventies and suffering from kidney disease, he threw himself into the agitation against Indira’s government and because of his reputation as an unyielding advocate of radical reform was able to unify her disparate opponents on both Left and Right. Favoring grand gestures and inspired by the students in Gujarat, he called for a sampurna kranti, a comprehensive social revolution in all aspects of life. It would be ushered in by the people, who in turn, would be led by yuva shakti, youth power. If found quixotic elsewhere, JP’s moral and political eminence lent credibility to his cause when he convoked a conference of opposition parties and independents in November 1974. He had earlier told a youth

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conference that he would not restrain an armed revolution and so made it impossible for the government to negotiate with him. Disgruntled political elements, taking advantage of Narayan’s advocacy (expressed in Gandhian moral terms) of extra- constitutional agitation, saw their opportunity. Even the moderate and accomplished parliamentarian, Atal Behari Vajpayee, a democrat—and future prime minister—acknowledged that one could not rely on parliamentary methods alone. The press reported that JP was “playing with explosives” and asked whether a duly elected legislature should be dissolved because student agitation, however eminently led, demanded it. Seeing him as a righteous crusader immune to criticism, opposition forces nevertheless rallied to Narayan and his crusade to bring down the Gandhi government. In response, the prime minister condemned what she called JP’s “cult of violence” and charged that it was aided by ‘ “foreign elements,” by which, it was clear, she meant the CIA. (Chilean President Salvador Allende’s ejection and subsequent assassination had only added fuel to her feelings of paranoia.) She blamed her opponents for the Gujarat agitation—a “dress rehearsal” for insurrection—and said that she was the next target. Antigovernment protests increased in number and intensity. The following February, JP asked the army and police not to obey “illegal” or “unjust” orders. In reality, he was asking them to join in a coup by paralyzing the state and central government. On March 6, he led a five-mile long march through Delhi to the Lok Sabha to present a list of demands to its speaker, the largest demonstration ever seen in the city and comparable to Mohandas Gandhi’s famous 1930 Salt March. Five days later, the frail seventy-nine year- old Desai began his Gandhi-like fast, allegedly undertaken to protest the government’s failure to allow state assembly elections to go ahead in Gujarat. (Indira had wanted to postpone the vote until after the harvest, which she feared would be disrupted.). As Desai confessed to an Italian journalist, his real motive was to start “the battle [with Indira Gandhi] I had been dreaming of ever since 1969.” The prime minister caved in and agreed to a state election scheduled for June.1 Then, on June 12, 1975, Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court stunned the country when he set aside Indira’s 1971 election and found the prime minister guilty of two (of fifty-two) counts of campaign malpractice in her race against Raj Narain. Narain was a colorful figure who sported a bandanna, behaved outrageously, and enjoyed a reputation as “the Clown Prince of India.” He had filed the petition accusing the prime minister of electoral irregularities. (Her office had delayed the required notification of a government employee’s

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resignation, and the employee had worked for her campaign.) The error was technical in nature, and the British newspaper, The Guardian, in its issue of January 16, 1975, compared it to a British prime minister sent to jail for a parking ticket. 2 If substantiated, the charges, although minor, carried a mandatory penalty that would deprive Indira of her seat in Parliament and bar her from holding any elective office for six years. The judiciary, which she had tried to undermine, was taking its revenge. For Indira Gandhi, it was the worst setback of her political life. For the jubilant opposition parties, it was the fulfillment of a mission. (They disregarded that part of the judgment that stayed the order for twenty days to enable the prime minister to appeal to the Supreme Court.) To compound her problems, the very next day, Desai’s coalition won the hotly contested Gujarat vote, ousting a Congress state government. Both decisions, the judicial and the political, came as blows against Indira, who had personally campaigned in Gujarat for her party. The Janata Morcha immediately organized a mass sit- down outside President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad’s house in New Delhi, calling on him to dismiss the prime minister. Politicians across India, including some in her own party, and many newspapers urged Mrs. Gandhi to step down, at least until the Supreme Court heard her appeal. On June 25, a huge opposition rally, chaired by Desai and addressed by JP, was staged in Delhi. The latter urged the police and the army to join a nationwide satyagraha campaign (Hold Fast to the Truth—Mohandas Gandhi’s method of nonviolent noncooperation) and not obey “illegal” orders issued by a “disqualified” head of a discredited government.3 What would Mrs. Gandhi do? Although arrogant and haughty, her initial reaction was to resign; win her appeal in the Supreme Court; and having been handsomely vindicated, return to office. In so doing, she would both declare her innocence and show her respect for the law. To ensure her safe return, she could name a compliant interim appointee, someone who would step aside at the right time. The advisers and colleagues with whom she discussed the plan enthusiastically agreed. The only family member consulted, however, was Sanjay, and he thought the idea “crazy.” If she “stepped down,” he argued, she would never “step up” again. The appeal process could take six months or even a year, a long time in politics; there was no guarantee an interim prime minister would yield after the appeal was heard; and the Court might decide against her. Aware that her resignation would affect his own prospects, Sanjay pleaded with his mother to stand firm and fight. All her problems, he insisted, were the work of fifty or so opposition leaders

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and some segments of the press. Curb them and your troubles are over.4 Meanwhile, her lawyer would ask the Supreme Court for an unconditional stay against the Allahabad verdict until the appeal was decided on, letting her remain in office. Although uncommunicative and withdrawn but determined that the work of government must go on, Indira agreed. While awaiting the Court’s decision, Sanjay and R.K. Dhawan, a devoted secretary, organized pro-Indira demonstrations and marches. Buses and trains were requisitioned to bring in supporters, and government employees were ordered to attend or else have their pay docked. The prime minister addressed a monster rally of 50,000 on June 20 at the Boat Club in New Delhi, showing she still had popular support (although the question of how many of her listeners were paid to come remains open).5 If Indira seriously intended to step down, clearly she had changed her mind. Narayan was outraged at her refusal to depart but an eminent constitutional lawyer, Nani Palkhivala, who agreed to take her case, stated that there was no legal or political reason requiring her to do so. On June 24, the presiding Supreme Court justice agreed that she could remain in office but could not vote in Parliament until the case was settled. Rather than wait for the law to take its course, the opposition mounted a campaign to force her to resign. When JP scheduled a mass antigovernment rally for the next day, Indira was informed that he planned to call on the police and army to mutiny. Desai told an Italian journalist that at the same time, the prime minister’s opponents would launch a gherao (protest demonstration) encircling her home and imprisoning her inside. Both men had unwittingly set their own trap: the threats to stage a coup gave Indira the justification—or the pretext—to suspend Parliament and impose a state of emergency. Civil disobedience, as in the Quit India movement of 1942, was defensible when people had little or no voice. India, however, was now an independent democracy enabling its citizens to vote the government out of power, if it so wished, in the national election scheduled for March 1976. Still, the mood had changed since the Bangladesh War: the cry, “Indira must go”—with the implication that if she did not, democracy would—was a cry that resonated. At 11:00 p.m. on the day following the Court’s decision and following Sanjay’s advice, Prime Minister Gandhi told President Ahmed that her government would declare a “State of Internal Emergency” and assume the sweeping powers it made available. At 4:00 a.m. the next morning, the government’s elite force of Central Reserve Police

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began arresting opposition political leaders including Narayan and the seventy-two year- old Desai. At 6:00 a.m., Indira summoned her cabinet to inform them of her decision to impose, and an hour later, the president of India proclaimed the state of emergency, suspending all civil rights, including those of habeas corpus, putting a lid on the press, placing armored units on alert, and grounding air f lights over Delhi. All was done with speed and decision. Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and other locales seen as possible sources of “subversive violence” were “secured.” Everything had gone as Sanjay predicted: there was no violence as thousands of “subversive” politicians, students, journalists, and lawyers were hustled off to jail. Campus dormitories in many states were surrounded and “trouble-making” faculty and students arrested: 1,500 in Bihar, several thousand in West Bengal, over a thousand in Maharashtra, and several hundred in Delhi. By August, the foreign press reported at least 10,000 political prisoners were being held. The opposition estimated up to 50,000; the government admitted to “a few thousand.” The world’s largest democracy had become a virtual dictatorship. Because newspapers had their power cut off, news of the arrests could not be reported. The plans to cut their electricity (and, later, to shut down the courts) were apparently conceived by Sanjay and two associates, Bansi Lal and R.K. Dhawan, involved with his car manufacturing scheme. Over the years, they had come to despise and distrust the press and unable to understand why it was giving “so much space” to the opposition, why it was being “very difficult.” Sanjay believed that the quickest way to defuse mounting agitation was by curbing the newspapers and arresting the leading opposition leaders. And if the closures came as a shock to Mrs. Gandhi, she had not countered the order. Not only did no cabinet member openly object to the Emergency, there was no real discussion as to why the decision was taken in the dead of night. In the morning of June 26, Indira went on radio to tell the nation there was no need to panic and that a “deep and widespread conspiracy . . . brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India” was responsible. A climate of “violence and hatred” had enveloped the country, and to reestablish stability, peace, and order; to safeguard democracy and national unity; some “precautionary arrests” and a “regrettable” censorship of the press, because of “irresponsible writing,” had to be made.6 India had experienced states of emergency before, most notably after Chinese aggression in 1962, but never had a total censorship been imposed upon the press nor had members of Parliament been arrested.

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Mrs. Gandhi later wrote that legislators were “initially” upset because they had not understood the situation but that on returning to their constituencies, their attitudes changed: most now welcomed the decision—and even believed that the Emergency should have been proclaimed long ago. In any case, she added, the opposition could not have been allowed to “paralyze the nation.” She was “not happy” to impose regulations on the press, “but some journals had shed all objectivity and independence and allied themselves with the opposition front and done everything to spread doom and defeatism.” 7 The prime minister’s principal secretary demurred. P.N. Dhar found the proclamation of emergency rule “a severe setback in the political evolution of India.” The rule of law was drastically abridged, citizens deprived of fundamental rights, the freedom of the press, curtailed. “Political dissent,” he later wrote, “was suppressed by arrests and harsh police measures [and] officialdom assumed arbitrary powers which it exercised without being accountable.” In addition to jailing opposition leaders or placing them under house arrest, twenty- six political organizations, ranging from a Hindu extremist party on the Right to Marxist groups on the Left, were banned (although not the Communist Party of India, which had endorsed the Emergency). 8 Yes, she was forceful, Dhar acknowledged, but he maintained that her own role was exaggerated. Shifting circumstances and a fickle public opinion had exaggerated both her virtues and her f laws. After she had defeated the entrenched leadership of the party in 1969, many thought she would transform Indian society through a personal magic. Three years later, Jayaprakash Narayan was blaming her for all that was wrong in Indian public life. For Pupul Jayakar, the greater the pressure from the opposition, the more defensive and abrasive Indira’s speeches became. They referred to plots made against her and to antinational forces working to destabilize the country, even to the involvement of foreign governments. Jayakar, who then chaired the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, pointedly asked her friend, “How can you, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, permit this?” In reply, Indira pointed to conspiracies “determined to destroy me and paralyze the government. I cannot permit it.” 9 Rajiv Gandhi strongly opposed the Emergency, but his mother was unaccustomed to taking advice from her older son. Had she done so, her fall might not have been as precipitous or have even occurred. But because she needed support from someone she trusted, she turned evermore to Sanjay, even though most of her advisors (including Indira herself ) saw him as little more than an adolescent. Although impressed by

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her son’s organizational skills, she knew his limitations. “Sanjay is a doer, not a thinker,” she said. (She had not said that as a child, Sanjay’s every whim and caprice had been indulged both by her and his grandfather.) When an astrologer told Indira that Sanjay’s stars were such that if she and her son lived under the same roof, he would destroy her, she had sent the astrologer packing. She drew strength from his youth, decisiveness, and quickness. And Sanjay stood by her side, taking on her burdens when she despaired, becoming her eyes and ears. According to R.N. Kao, Indira’s trusted chief of research and analysis, “she wrapped Sanjay around herself like a blanket to keep out the cold.” Now her son and his supporters, together with Congress Party workers, were imploring her to stand firm against “right-wing reaction.”10 She withdrew into her lonely self, said Dhar, distrusting everyone except Sanjay. He, in turn, resented his mother’s colleagues for having opposed his Maruti car project—including such aides as P.N. Haksar, Dhar’s predecessor as Madam’s chief secretary—or had not taken him seriously. Licensed by the government, despite competitive applications from Toyota, Renault, and Citroën, the small gas- efficient automobile designed for Indian roads and drivers, as noted, never went into production: the Sanjay- designed engine leaked oil, the money ran out, and only twenty prototypes were ever built. Indira dispensed love and care on both her sons but especially on Sanjay. She played down his shortcomings, and at the very least, her reliance on him eased her decision to take drastic action. The Congress Party ordained Sanjay as his mother’s heir when, in December 1975, it placed him on the executive committee of the Congress Party Youth Wing. To provide himself with a base for power, he would use the Youth Congress (not a political body but an organization of young volunteers) to “inf luence” opponents in the parent party. Having emerged as a rival to the larger body, the Youth Congress, as reported by journalist Inder Malhotra, degenerated into an umbrella organization that sheltered a variety of “thugs,” “criminals,” and “antisocial elements.” Sanjay, who took pride in letting himself be known as “the man who got things done,” had a knack for attracting dropouts and drifters, and his followers extorted “donations” for such ostensibly worthwhile goals as literacy and family planning from harassed Delhi shopkeepers.11 Jayakar contrasted the rebellious, rude, uninterested, and “altogether unmanageable” Sanjay with the courteous, well-behaved Rajiv. Unlike his older brother, a good student, Sanjay grew up a wild wayward youth, often involved in scrapes, always fiddling with cars. A school dropout,

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his despairing mother had sent him off to England as an apprentice in Rolls Royce. He had left after three years, having acquired numerous speeding tickets, informing Indira, “there is nothing more they can teach me.”12 Growing up a pampered child who witnessed the adulation shown Nehru and Nehru’s daughter, having never experienced deprivation, and continuing to live in the prime minister’s residence, Sanjay came to see India as the family’s personal fief. As with other scions of Third World rulers, nationalized banks had competed to advance him money for his automobile factory. Countering objections to his designation as the project’s director, his mother told Jayakar about her visit to a priest who had built a homemade plane: if he could build a plane, why couldn’t Sanjay build a car? Sanjay lacked the maturity of both Nehru and Indira that led them to doubt and question. A rebel against tradition and custom, he was impatient with rules and procedures but by no means dim. A newspaper reporter recalled one occasion when Sanjay addressed a gathering of foreign journalists. “He came alone, without notes and faced thirty hard-bitten, crafty, hostile journalists for over an hour.” It was, the Reuters man said later, “a masterly performance.” He simply displayed little interest in books or ideas, even confessing in 1976 that possibly his strongest intellectual stimulation came from comics. He only showed, from an early age, a preference for gadgets. Although Sanjay’s 1974 marriage to an eighteen-year- old model, Maneka Anand, left Indira relieved that her son was finally settling down, she was not sure—that years younger than he—this was the right girl. Still, the two were very much in love: both believed that it would conquer all, and Maneka would remain fiercely loyal to him. It was Rajiv’s wife, Sonia, the senior daughter-in-law, who performed at 1 Safdarjung Road, the same duties Indira had undertaken at Teen Murti. If Sanjay failed to understand the potency of symbols in an ethnic-based society, this was the man who would be placed in charge of the government’s family planning and slum clearance drives.13 None of this absolves Mrs. Gandhi from initiating the Emergency and accepting its worst excesses. Many blamed her “authoritarian nature.” For Inder Malhotra, however, this was not fair and was disproved when, on her own and without pressure to do so, she would call for fresh elections barely nineteen months later. Mary Carras, the author of a psycho-biography, contended that the prime minister was “democratic [in] temperament and personal style” and whose “self-respect [derived] in good part from this self-image.” Her “ambivalence” regarding the use of authority was complicated by the conviction that her “personal

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worth was tied up with her desire to do great things for her country.” Malhotra agreed that she so identified her fate with that of the nation that personal threats were perceived as state crises. Others attributed the proclamation to a personality f lawed by childhood experiences projecting her own fears and insecurities on to the nation.14 Regardless of the explanation, most biographers concur with Malhotra’s assessment that the eighteen-month Emergency was “her worst and most catastrophic mistake, indeed her cardinal sin.” It not only brought about her own downfall but destroyed chances before June 25 of reestablishing normal politics and of rebuilding a democratic consensus. The devastation of Indian politics that followed in its wake, centering on her, seemed irreversible. Even so, he concluded that Indira had acted not because she wanted to establish a permanent dictatorship, as JP, Desai, Socialist Party leader George Fernandes, and other critics believed. (In later interviews, Desai stated that “she tried to jump the rails and become a dictator because her election was nullified,” and Fernandes agreed that the Emergency was designed “to protect her political career when the Allahabad High Court had brought it to a standstill.”) “It was,” Malhotra insisted, rather because “having convinced herself that both she and the country were the targets of a malignant conspiracy, she was determined to stay in office by fair means or foul to fight her “enemies.” To do so, Narayan, Desai, and other opponents and dissenters had to be immobilized and the press, seen as hostile, silenced.15 Moreover, the decision to impose the State of Emergency must be put into a larger context.16 When Mrs. Gandhi told the Rajya Sabha on July 22, 1975, that “the decision to have [the] emergency was not one that could be taken lightly or easily,” she could point to an unprecedented number of strikes, sit-ins, and public protests; as well as corruption; tax evasion; and despite the gains made by the “green revolution,” the persistence of starvation. In the mid-1970s, fewer than 2,000 Indians admitted to annual taxable incomes greater than $1,300 while more than 400 million people spent less than twenty cents a day. With a third of the yearly 16 million college graduates unable to find jobs, it was not surprising to find educated young people leading the protests. Democracy was of dubious value in an underdeveloped country. Indira later admitted that the subordination of national to regional and local interests had concerned her and prompted the desire for greater centralization. “In every state,” she had complained, “the chief minister has more power than I have.” She found “the abuse, the shouting, the threats of intimidation . . . a constant feature” of parliamentary life, with

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the opposition’s “obstructive defeatism” making cooperation impossible. Scholars agree that land reform legislation left to the states had not been enforced, and that in times of crisis, strong governments tend to emerge. The rampant inf lation and stagnating economy, which generated much criticism from both Right and Left of “Madam’s” corrupt government, contributed to the emergence of the Janata coalition.17 JP was dismayed by what he saw as political malaise and the return of Indira’s party to power in the states from which it had been dislodged in 1967. Either he found a strong national presence irrelevant in India, or his opposition was based on his mistrust of Indira’s motives, or both. Mrs. Gandhi, on her part, preferred to repress her enemies and dissidents rather than fight them politically. Was it to prevent a loss of power? To apply shock treatment to bring India back to sanity? In any event, JP had driven her to the wall by asking the army and the police to dislodge her and by insisting on the immediate dissolution of a duly elected legislature. Dhar concluded that both JP Narayan and Indira Gandhi failed democracy and betrayed their faith in law. To the extent that he is correct, both parties contributed to her fall.18 Aside from the Janata leadership there was almost no visible opposition to the declaration of the Emergency; there was rather instant and widespread acceptance. Newspapers meekly followed the censorship rules, at least initially. “Indian people,” Inder Malhotra tried to explain, “are both anarchy-loving and authority-loving.” But if many discovered merit in what Indira and Sanjay had done, intellectuals did not number among them. Previously, Nehruvians and Fabians who favored state control of the “commanding heights of the economy” had rallied to her side. They had denounced an opposition led by the Syndicate as reactionary. Now, with the Emergency, most intellectuals either sided with her critics in condemning Mrs. Gandhi as power driven, or they remained silent. She, on her side, denounced them as “dupes of foreign elements and ideas hostile to us.”19 After June 26, Indira resumed her old pattern of work but at a feverish pace. Becoming more businesslike, she called on her ministers to tone up the machinery of administration, cut delays, and work harder. And she got an enthusiastic response. In its early stages, the Emergency was “widely popular” and for good reason. People relished the absence of strikes, protest marches, and skirmishes with the police. Prices fell, and shortages of essential commodities diminished. Beggars disappeared from the streets, as did most of the stray cows. Government officials turned up at work punctually and remained until closing time.

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People queued for buses. Trains ran on time. Peace and order were restored. Billboards with the prime minister’s gigantic image sprouted, carrying such slogans as “The Leader’s Right, the Future’s Bright,” and “She Stands Between Chaos and Order”; and “exhorting a need for discipline. 20 Five days after the proclamation of the Emergency, and seeing it as an opportunity to fulfill promises of social and economic change, Indira unveiled her Twenty Point Program of economic reforms (a replay of the older Ten Point Program set forth in 1967) on Radio India. It was designed to alleviate poverty by providing home sites for the landless; a moratorium on debt repayment; an end of bonded labor; workers’ training; and their “association” with industry, middle class tax relief, and measures to bring down prices (the worst enemy she knew). She sought to disarm her opponents. Critics saw it as a ploy to divert attention. 21 But if satisfied with the gains made, Indira’s government failed to provide mechanisms to ensure their continuation. These reforms were achieved by fiat, and unless structural changes took place, there was no guarantee they would endure. Although her Twenty Points looked good on paper, P.N. Dahr believed that the program’s assault on poverty— especially among the rural poor—could not succeed on a wide scale because the states lacked the administrative machinery and infrastructure to implement reform. 22 Before the end of July, Mrs. Gandhi reconvened Parliament to consider expanding emergency rule “indefinitely.” Because 123 members of the Lok Sabha and 76 in the Rajya Sabha had been “detained” and consequently unable to attend, there was little debate. Only thirty-nine members in the lower house and thirty-three in the upper opposed the measure, and as they walked out, they shouted “shame.” The following month, the imprisoned JP asked for a thirty- day parole to organize relief efforts in f lood areas. Still resentful of his criticism and convinced he wanted only to upstage her administration, Indira refused. Then the rump parliament approved two amendments to the Constitution proposed by the government: they would bar Indian courts from hearing challenges to the Emergency, which retroactively exonerated the prime minister from any pending legal charges and so protected her 1971 election and bar as well all future charges of criminal acts while in high office. This protection was also granted to the president, vice president, and speaker of the Lok Sabha. The amendments, which declared themselves immune to Supreme Court review, were passed unanimously, and within twenty-four hours endorsed by the twenty state legislatures with Congress ministries (only two were

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without). A subsequent amendment empowered Parliament to amend the previously unamendable basic structure of the Constitution, thus undermining—in the words of one analyst—“the very foundations of the political order established at independence.” On the twentyeighth anniversary of India’s independence (August 14), Indira went on radio. “Like freedom,” she said, “democracy too does not mean that everybody is free to follow his individual path,” and she called her Emergency “Raj Disciplined Democracy.” 23 The hard work and discipline were paying dividends. Nature, too, came to the rescue. A bumper crop in 1975 ended three years of near famine. Prices dropped to 1971 levels, and the victory over inf lation made India unique among the nations of the world. The elimination of strikes and the increase in the productivity of white collar and industrial workers raised industrial productivity by over 6 percent in 1975 and 10 percent in 1976–1977. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, man days lost from strikes (now banned) dropped by 13 percent. The business community was especially pleased, but even her left-wing critics acknowledged that much more land had been distributed and many more feudal ties on landless labor broken in the twelve months since the twenty point program was announced than in all the years before. Capital investment was stimulated by the climate of order and the “work is worship” ethic to 30 percent in the first year of the Emergency. Both urban dwellers and villagers took heart as black marketeers, smugglers, and tax evaders were hunted down; the powers of landlords and money lenders drastically curbed; bonded peasants released; the poor given employment on public projects; and inf lation down from 30 to 10 percent in less than a year. They had lost significant constitutional freedoms, including that of speech and assembly and the right of habeas corpus, but most people felt better off. 24 The greater efficiency shown, particularly with regard to traditionally lax and frustrating bureaucracy, came as a source of satisfaction. As journalist Shashi Tharoor noted, “Anyone who has had the frustration of standing in four separate queues to cash a check, or seeing forms glumly filled out in quadruplicate and duly stamped by three different supervisors before some perfectly simple transaction can be effected, or know the seething rage of having to bribe a clerk to perform the functions your taxes are already paying him to perform, will sympathize with the desire of many to see the bureaucracy firmly dealt with.” A 40 percent rate of absenteeism fell to practically zero. 25 Indira’s future, and that of her party, seemed assured. The alliance with the Soviet Union would bring in needed military equipment.

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Leaders of industry and finance were encouraged by the stability achieved and the promise of even greater centralization of the economy. Having lost a vote of confidence, the Janata ministry in Gujarat collapsed. Her opponents were apparently drifting away. In an attempt to reconcile the government with the opposition, JP was finally paroled in November (1975) on grounds of ill health. But because she believed that with more time, the gains of the Emergency would solidify, the government “postponed” for another year the parliamentary elections scheduled for early 1976 and that it very well might have won. In this, she was encouraged by Sanjay, who had also wanted to have elections delayed to buy more time to establish his base of independent power in the Youth Congress. As historian Stanley Wolpert wrote: “as long as prices remained under control, investment continued high and the monsoon was reasonably kind,” hers could be “a very popular Raj.” And “India’s patient, tolerant, long- suffering populace had been inured by millennia of cultural continuity to accept authority as part of the divine order (dharma), which was law and religion combined.” 26 If she had put off elections, a confident Indira planned to declare an end to the state of emergency in her Independence Day speech on August 15. Before delivering it, she heard the shocking news of a coup in Bangladesh that removed the new country’s leader. Indira had created the nation, and the ouster and assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his entire family (aside from one daughter) in a military coup left her devastated. She saw it as an omen of what could happen to her and her own family. The Emergency would remain in place. The event, moreover, led Indira instinctively to turn even closer to her son for protection, when Sanjay was, in fact, in many ways her greatest threat. Indira was yielding ground to Sanjay, working through the prime minister’s residence in a quest for power. Aware and approving of her son’s interest in the civic affairs of New Delhi—he knew the city intimately and disliked the slums, poor sanitation, lack of parks, and all the other urban ills—she effectively turned over control of the capital to him. Questions and requests relevant to the city were responded to with “Why not see Sanjay?” Word spread that the prime minister wanted matters pertaining to the city to be handled by her son. But he knew that he needed an official status, one that would enable him to forestall accusations of nepotism. What would be more natural for a conscientious young man of twenty- eight than to work through a youth party: above all, one affiliated with India’s ruling party and use it as a stepping stone for himself as a future national leader? He immediately sought far

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greater numbers for his Youth Congress by relaxing recruitment regulations, bringing into the organization not only graying and balding shopkeepers, but as Sanjay’s biographer put it, a variety of “antisocial elements police usually keep a record of.” 27 Building on this base, he was emerging as the second most powerful figure in India and reported on almost as extensively as his mother in the nation’s controlled press. His actions, especially the family planning program adopted in April 1976, were upsetting her official secretariat as complaints of forced sterilizations came to light. Reassured by her son, Indira rejected these criticisms as baseless and said they should be ignored. Only Sanjay’s interviews, designed to impress Washington, caused her concern inasmuch as she feared that his comments might upset the Russians, who supported the Emergency. It must also be said that while she wanted her son to succeed her, she preferred that he curb his adventurism, learn more about India and the world, and give up bad company; that is, become more mature. He, in turn, viewed his mother as a ditherer who would act only when pushed by someone with strong convictions or when there was no alternative. And because Maruti proved a failure and he had run out of money, Sanjay was all the more convinced that he had to do everything to keep his mother in power. Her chief secretary and close adviser found the prime minister’s ambivalent attitude toward her son’s recklessness alarming: because Sanjay could so easily exploit her vulnerability, her problem with him was psychologically more complex than a simple case of the widowed mother’s difficulty with an impetuous son. Even her most outspoken opponent, Desai, was convinced that “at that time, Sanjay took possession of her. It was Sanjay who dictated all that and became her master.” 28 The politicians who had contributed to Maruti to gain favor with Indira had whetted his appetite for political power. To help achieve it, Sanjay announced a five point plan as preferable to Indira’s complex twenty point program, and it captured the public imagination. To modernize India, make the country a first-world power, and beautify her cities (all worthy goals), he would increase adult literacy. “Each one teach one” was the slogan coined. Also called for was the abolition of the bride dowry; an end to the caste system; the undertaking of slum clearance; and most controversial, the initiation of a radical program of family planning. The mechanisms put in place to achieve these goals, however, tended to further Sanjay’s personal power rather than promote social improvement. In short, if he hadn’t originated the Emergency, he became its most ardent advocate. His power grew in tandem with it, and

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over the next eighteen months, as critics put it, India would become the “land of the rising son.” 29 Mrs. Gandhi applauded her son’s program, which, she said, complemented her own. In a memorable endorsement at the first Youth Congress in late November 1976, she said, “You have stolen our thunder, and it should be that way. I have firm faith in the youth of India. If they can look after this country then India’s future is safe.” Not only was her support for Sanjay and his Youth Congress unshakable, but she was sold on a more rapid dynastic succession. Her son would gradually take over running the government, while she would recede into the background. When responding to Communist Party criticisms of Sanjay (wholly understandable insofar as they came as responses to his attacks on it), Mrs. Gandhi came to his defense in a bitter speech: she made it clear that “the attack on him is very definitely on me.” Mother and son, noted Sanjay’s biographer, “had been emotionally inseparable, now they were politically inseparable.”30 Two of his programs, however, the slum clearance relied on to remake the cities, and the sterilization relied on to implement family planning, went drastically wrong. Both hurt the poor, the beggars, and the homeless farmers they were designed to help. Less concerned with the problems of slums than with getting them out of sight, Sanjay worked to implement decrees providing for the “relocation” of tens of thousands of people living in Delhi squalor to vacant land twenty miles away. Bulldozers leveled stores and shacks, their owners having been given forty-five minutes to clear out, homeowners (chief ly Muslim), slightly longer. After six days of wholesale demolition, uprisings broke out. The police used tear gas then fired, killing and wounding hundreds. When told of this, Indira would tolerate no criticism of him. Withdrawing into her own world, she denied that any show of force had taken place, telling a British journalist, “my family has been very much maligned, and of course my son is not in politics at all.”31 Modern medicine, improved hygiene, and a better diet had sent India’s population soaring. While the birth rate dropped slightly (from about forty- eight per thousand in 1922, the death rate had fallen drastically (from 47.2 that year to 17.4 in 1971). By 1973, India was adding over 12 million people to its population annually (over 14 million a year by 1978). A Department of Family Planning, established at the national level in June of 1975 had encouraged the subsidized sale of condoms and sterilization. However, voluntary compliance was rare, and Sanjay, looking for a major national ailment he could spectacularly remedy, took it on himself to enforce the policy.

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Fertility reduction, although called for by the major Western industrial democracies speaking through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was not a major goal of the Gandhi government in the 1970s, but a committed Sanjay convinced his mother to legally reduce the rate of population growth. Family planning became the lynch pin of Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency activities. Cheapest and most efficient was sterilization, usually of men (vasectomy) and occasionally of women (tubal ligation). The vasectomies were administered under local anesthetic, with no recovery period, but usually devoid of side effects. A shocked world learned of measures of compulsory sterilization and requirements limiting government employees to no more than two children. In a culture where fertility was crucial to a sense of self-worth and children seen as a source of income and insurance against destitution in old age, and where pervasive myths associated with the procedure abounded—most notably a loss of virility—voluntary measures could not be relied on. They would have to be imposed, and the Emergency made compulsion possible. Sanjay, who in any case lacked the time for gentle tact and sustained persuasion and wanted results, saw the potential of family planning as the central issue and goal of the “New India.” He, not the health minister, directed the campaign. A popular jingle of the day celebrated the drive: “Come, have yourself vasectomized, make your family systemized.” The vasectomy tents that arose in major cities and the sterilization vans that roamed the countryside were his doing, as were the issuance of “motivators,” the rewards given to those who submitted to sterilization, and the quota system imposed on government employees who had to produce a certain number of people to be sterilized in order to be paid.32 Incentives consisted of raises and government loans to sterilized men with small families, and branches of government competed for the most sterilizations of its employees. Cases of coercion, harassment, and sometimes forced compliance, inevitably emerged. Penalties included the withholding of maternity leaves to families with more than two children, denying government jobs to unsterilized men, and compulsory sterilization for couples with more than three children. Schoolteachers had to “motivate” a minimum of five people each, and if they failed to meet their quota, their salary was withheld. This rush to limit population growth led to botched operations that left about 2,000 men dead. In one town with a Muslim majority, a revolt against forced vasectomies resulted in gunfire—which Indira dismissed as “a stray incident of no great consequence.” The use of force to control family size was one

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of the most unpopular aspects of Indira’s rule and would contribute immensely to her 1977 electoral defeat.33 There was resistance both in Delhi and in outlying villages. Chief among the victims were the helpless and poor, especially Muslims, Harijans, and tribal peoples. In the six months following the establishment of the program in April 1976, two million sterilizations took place. One surgeon in Bihar performed ninety-two tubal ligation procedures in one day, establishing an all-India record. A new national record was set with 2,050 vasectomies in twelve hours in Bhalki, Karnataka. Two thousand beggars were rounded up on October 7, 1976, near the Taj Mahal in Agra, and on that same day, 1,800 of them were sterilized. Men were given certificates of sterilization, which had to be shown in order to meet such legal requirements as the renewal of drivers’ licenses for rickshaw and scooter operators, ultimately for any kind of license. Not surprisingly, a large scale forgery industry emerged. Others were coerced, and in big cities, hundreds who lived on the streets were arrested for vagrancy and taken to sterilization camps.34 When informed of such proceedings by a relative, Indira wailed, “What am I to do? They tell me nothing.” Admittedly, she had warned her chief ministers against the use of compulsion but insisted that “most of these allegations were lies.” Initially an enthusiastic supporter of the family planning program, the prime minister hesitated when more evidence of coercion surfaced. When Sanjay sought legislation requiring mandatory sterilization for couples having two or more children, Mrs. Gandhi astutely distanced herself from such a law. She would leave it to individual states to make the final decision. If concerned and aware of the arbitrary power of some of her son’s supporters, her blind spot for Sanjay inhibited her from taking a firm stand. Although uneasy, in public, she continued to defend the program, blaming officials for “overzealousness” and continuing to dismiss such allegations as groundless, as propaganda put out by antifamily planning activists.35 In early October 1975, Indira’s chief secretary sent her memos describing excesses committed in applying the family planning program. One such memo contained a report on schoolteachers subject to extreme coercion because they had not fulfilled the assigned quotas. “She fell silent after reading it,” he recalled. It was the first time that she had not dismissed the complaints as false. Finally, the government sent “stern messages” to all state chief ministers to the effect that “anyone engaged in harassment while propagating family planning will be punished.” Given the vast size of the population, the incidents of forced sterilization were relatively few, but they spread fear and panic. Stories

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of men dragged out of movie theaters and bus queues and taken to operating tables circulated. The public associated the sterilization project with the massive demolitions for slum clearance, and in both programs, the brunt fell on the poor, Indira’s traditional voter banks. Thus, when elections were later announced, a dam of pent-up fury would burst. The abuses were exposed, the gains forgotten, and Mrs. Gandhi and her son were to be punished.36 Indira began to have second thoughts about new elections. Previously, she had feared they would send the “wrong signal.” Now she waxed nostalgic about the success of her 1971 campaign and longed to regain her ability to reach people at an emotional level, to hear applause. More to the point, as a leader unwilling to stray too far from public opinion, she saw that the state of emergency, conceived as a tool for occasional use to preserve democratic forms, was in fact corroding them and costing her popular support. Although the prime minister refused to admit it, Sanjay’s excessive power, though he was unelected to any post, constituted its most negative aspect. Without the abuses in family planning and slum clearance, she might have won the election that she decided to hold.37 A less disdainful view of foreign criticism, especially that from the United States and Great Britain, also helped bring about a reversal of course. One cartoon in the Washington Post found especially upsetting depicted her as a witch holding an apple entitled “A State of Emergency.” The caption read: “Who were you expecting? Snow White?” In November 1976, Indira had for the second time—on Sanjay’s advice—postponed general elections, this time for a full year. Those close to him believed that he planned to keep putting them off indefinitely. In retrospect, the two postponements were mistakes: if held on schedule in early 1976, when the Emergency still held supporters, she might have won and so legitimized what she saw as a response to a crisis. Even members of the Congress Party who feared a defeat wanted elections held, such was their disgust with Sanjay and his associates. Indira brooded over her options; and then the Emergency, as suddenly as it began, came to an end.38 With as little warning as that given before her proclamation of emergency rule, Indira called it off. The prime minister had consulted only with her chief secretary and with her son before reaching her decision. There is no eye-witness account of the showdown with Sanjay but according to Pupul Jayakar, it was traumatic, leaving Indira looking ten years older. It was the first time she had overruled him. In any event, on January 18, 1977, she defied her son and stunned the nation by

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announcing the release of her leading opponents and an end to the ban on political parties and by calling for a general election to be held in two months. Relief was tempered with widespread skepticism: elections had been scheduled—and called off—twice before, and opponents feared that if held, they would be rigged. But with the release of opposition leaders and the lifting of censorship, indicating there would be no official interference with the process, such fears were dispelled. The growing conviction that the anti- Congress opposition would win the coming election left people puzzled about her motive, above all Desai, who had believed that Indira was determined to hold onto power at all costs.39 Experts doubted she could win and wondered why she risked the loss of power. To regain credentials as a democratic leader and assure her place in history? Because she believed that two months were inadequate for the scattered opposition to regroup and that therefore she would win? (Her controlled press convinced her of the popularity of her autocratic regime: years later, she told a journalist that she “was by no means sure I would win,” but “would just get through perhaps.”) Because she was bowing to international pressure, as some intellectuals believed? Others calculated that because Pakistani leader Ali Bhutto had announced a vote in his country, she had to do the same. Some said that her generals had advised her that it was time to take her party’s platform to the people and threatened a coup if she refused. Still others believed that she had “tired” of running the whole show alone and sought legislative support. A combination of all these things? Whatever the reason(s), the instinct for timing that had worked so well in the past had failed her.40 In her memoir, Mrs. Gandhi herself pointed to “the instability and indiscipline in the country,” which she said had been the reason for the Emergency. “We got over that position. So I thought it was time to have the elections . . . Now that the reason [for the Emergency] was no longer there, we should have the elections. It was just that. It was a purely democratic action.” Inder Malhotra agreed that she regretted the loss of democratic rights, felt herself trapped, and acknowledged this to her visitors.41 At the time, however, few believed she was seeking to regain democratic credentials. As S.K. Patil, a Syndicate pillar, said on his release from jail, Indira Gandhi was holding elections without giving the opposition time to organize and raise funds. She expected a victory, and armed with a popular mandate, would reestablish the Emergency. Only after Mrs. Gandhi was defeated was it believed that she had opted for elections because she believed she could win, a misperception common

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in authoritarian rulers. Some held that this self- delusion—if that’s what it was—issued from the absence of a free press and from dependence on sycophants. On the other hand, P.N. Dhar maintained that the prime minister was too mistrustful to rely on “yes men.” She called off the Emergency because she “was not comfortable with [it] and she wanted to get out of it, somehow, anyhow.”42 Indira was mistaken if she thought that because its leaders had spent two years in jail and had only two months to prepare, the opposition was “weak and fragmented.” Desai and JP quickly resurrected the Janata Morcha when four opposition parties with inf luence in the northern states joined forces to reestablish the coalition. Moreover, Jagjivan Ram, Indira’s former minister of defense and the most powerful Harijan political leader—supported by some hundred million Hindus at the bottom of the social pyramid—resigned both from her cabinet and her Congress Party to form his own “Congress for Democracy Party” and allied it to Janata. Ram had been Nehru’s colleague in the interim government in 1946 and, with one brief interruption, in governments ever since. He had been the longest serving and most experienced member of Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet, and his defection hurt morale and sent a signal to others. Ram’s letter of resignation denounced the Emergency and attacked Indira for destroying intra-party democracy. This unified opposition offered India’s 320 million voters the promise of “bread and freedom,” as expressed by JP, Janata’s “patron saint,” when he described the forthcoming vote as the country’s last chance to choose between “democracy or dictatorship,” between “freedom or slavery.”43 In early 1977, Indira campaigned vigorously, making use of military planes and helicopters. She lampooned the Janata coalition as khichri (a rice and lentil dish given for impaired digestion) and asked voters to choose between “stability and progress” and “confusion and instability.” Speakers for the opposition responded that she had failed the poor and hungry. When at their rallies Janata candidates asked whether people would again give power to the two pairs of hands that had “misused and abused it so grievously,” the audience chanted in response, “No! No!” Indira’s campaign rallies, however frequent, were dull by comparison. In five weeks, holding twenty gatherings a day, she visited all twentytwo states and spoke at well over 200 public meetings. Yet, the crowds were small and sometimes hostile. She was often shouted down, and people walked out. At one gathering, when a number of women turned their backs on her, an infuriated Indira descended from the platform and physically tried to turn them around. Other defectors had followed Ram. Her aunt, Mrs. Pandit, spoke for the opposition and publicly

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stated that Indira and the Emergency had “smothered and destroyed” democratic institutions. After having unsuccessfully urged his mother to cancel the vote, Sanjay decided to run for Parliament in a “safe” Uttar Pradesh constituency. While campaigning two days before the election, an attempt was made to assassinate him, but it received little coverage and Indira didn’t react strongly. She may have suspected, as had others, that it was staged to get him a sympathy vote, but if so, it failed. Despite sixteen-hour days of campaigning, he would be easily defeated.44 Two hundred million voters went to the polls in March 1977, and 54 percent cast ballots for the Janata coalition, only 28 percent for Indira’s Congress Party. (Other, smaller parties, accounted for the rest.) The night of March 20, 1977, was marked by “wild rejoicing” and dancing and illuminated by fireworks, such as had not been seen since the establishment of independence from the British. The election amounted to a referendum on the Emergency, and most voters were determined to reject it. Forced vasectomies were the biggest issue in North India, having an impact equal to that of the greased cartridges of 1857 (greased with animal fat; believed by Muslims to be that of pigs; by Hindus, that of cows; and inspiring both to rebel against British rule) and leaving Indira especially vulnerable. Mrs. Gandhi’s party won only one seat in the north and performed almost as poorly in the Hindi language belt, the traditional stronghold of the Congress Party. In the south, where it got all but a handful of seats, Congress suddenly became a regional party. It secured a total of only 153 while Janata and its allies won an absolute majority of 299 of the Lok Sabha’s 542 seats. With a clear majority, the Janata coalition brought thirty years of uninterrupted Congress power to an end. A political observer commented that the voters’ rejection of the Congress Party amounted to “the most remarkable event in Indian history since independence.” On learning the results, Indira looked stunned: Raj Narain had defeated her convincingly in her own constituency while her son had lost to a totally unknown wrestler.45 Congress politicians put forward a euphemism for the misdeeds committed during the Emergency, and the word “excesses” entered the Indian political vocabulary. For the newly freed press, Sanjay was responsible for most, if not all, of them, and almost every day news of a new Sanjay scandal emerged. Her older son Rajiv told Pupul Jayakar, who visited Indira at her home that night, “I will never forgive Sanjay for having brought Mummy to this position.” On March 22, Madam read a letter of resignation to her cabinet—received in grim silence—and then made a public statement: she accepted the verdict with “due humility” and took “full responsibility” for her party’s “serious reverses.” After giving

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the letter to President Jatti, Indira went to her house in the afternoon, having invited her secretaries, cabinet members, and staff to a farewell tea. Despite rumors to the contrary, she behaved like a thoughtful hostess, showing no signs of distress. But for the first time in her life, at the age of fifty-nine, Indira Gandhi found herself without a job, an income, or a roof over her head.46 Desai returned in triumph from provincial exile to New Delhi to become India’s fourth prime minister the next day. Having failed in 1971, he succeeded six years later because the Emergency had made Indira Gandhi the common enemy of the opposition parties. The sixtyeight-year old Ram had hoped to occupy the post, but JP, who served as Janata’s guru, persuaded him to let his senior Brahmin colleague take his “turn” first. Like Mohandas Gandhi, an ailing Narayan refused office himself: he preferred to be the “conscience” of his colleagues (who would soon forget most of their promises). On March 25, Desai went to 1 Safdarjung Road to pay a courtesy call. On his return, he commented on what he regarded as the excessive security around her. “What is she afraid of,” he asked. “It is not good for her to be surrounded by so many policemen.” Dhar explained that security was beefed up because of the hostile atmosphere. Desai disagreed: “No! It is her vanity” and could not be persuaded otherwise.47 In April of 1977, it appeared that Indira Gandhi’s career was over. Not only was her party toppled, but she and Sanjay had both gone down to ignominious defeats in Uttar Pradesh constituencies that were considered personal fiefdoms. After almost two years of silence and suffering, the people had spoken. It seemed all would be well—at least to those who did not understand the deeper currents of India’s “Wounded Civilization,” forgetting, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, “that most of life in India ‘begins’ with ‘the acceptance of distress as the condition of men.’ ”48

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CHAPTER 11


T

here was widespread delight when Indira Gandhi was voted out of office in March 1977. Still, unlike other authoritarian rulers, she had relinquished power and submitted to possible political extinction with integrity. In her first post- defeat announcement, she had stated that “the collective judgment of the people must be respected” and later added that she felt “as if tons of weight have been lifted from my shoulders.” Certainly, Mrs. Gandhi now had more time for her family, which had grown considerably. In 1968, Rajiv had married his Italian sweetheart, Sonia Maino, whom he had met at Cambridge. (As seen, Sanjay had married Maneka Arnaud six years later.) Indira was fond of Sonia, unusual for a mother-in-law in India, and she adored Sonia’s two children, Rahul and Priyanka. Pupul Jayakar believed that Sonia helped fill Indira’s need to be with people who were “warm and genial,” and that the time spent in seclusion helped her to heal and reemerge as a major force. Her relationship with Maneka, on the other hand, was troubled and would ultimately lead to an estrangement.1 Indira thought of retiring to her beloved Kashmir mountains, but fearing for Sanjay’s safety, the mother in her waited to see what action would be taken against him either by hostile opponents or by the new government. Indeed, on one occasion, after hearing a threat that her son would be forcibly sterilized in public because of his energetic role in the application of the family planning program, she broke down in fear. Under the watchful eyes of the Janata administration, the former prime minister retreated into silence, which led observers to think that she was finished politically. 2 Rumors circulated about what she would do next and what would happen to her. Retirement, an attempt to return to power, and criminal

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proceedings resulting in prison—or even execution—were all possibilities. And having been jailed under her emergency rule, Desai was now in a position to take revenge. That the defeat of a living prime minister was unprecedented added to the uncertainty. No provision for the return to private life of a former head of government had ever been made. Whatever corruption had taken place under her rule, it had not benefitted her personally. With little money of her own and at spiteful orders from Desai, Indira had to vacate her government bungalow and then give up most remaining perquisites: her secretarial staff, most of her security guards, and other official servants. Indira owned land outside of New Delhi, bought by Feroze in 1959, but the house Rajiv started to build there was only half finished. In any case, she did not want to live in the country and aside from occasional vacations in Kashmir, chose to remain in the capital. (The family home left by Nehru in Allahabad had been turned over to the nation in 1970 and was now a museum.) A family friend ultimately vacated his bungalow at 12 Willingdon Crescent and made it available to her. Although small, thirteen years worth of possessions, the belongings of five adults and two small children, five dogs, and boxes of books and papers all had to be crammed into it. She had not kept house for almost thirty years, and now had to buy or borrow utensils, air conditioning, and a refrigerator. Sonia Gandhi, not Maneka, would do much of the cooking and housekeeping, aided by Indira.3 Indians praised the new Janata government for restoring the civil liberties and democratic freedoms denied them during Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency. The newly installed legislators repealed many of the laws pushed through at the time and reestablished the balance between the judicial and executive branches that Indira had altered in favor of the latter. Breaking with its predecessor’s professed neutrality, or, depending on the viewer’s perspective, pro- Soviet orientation, the government turned toward the United States in its foreign policy. Ironically, with the return of civil liberties for the law- abiding, lawless elements emerged from the shadows. Crime increased in Delhi, and attacks on religious minorities rose sharply. Moreover, as the months passed, it was becoming clear that the doctrinal and personality differences among the various contingents that composed the coalition, and rivalries both among its leaders and ambitious members of Parliament seeking higher office, were preventing Janata from functioning properly. It appeared that unity was reached only in the quest for vengeance, in seeking ways

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to punish Indira and her son. The need to bring her down and Sanjay to justice seemed the only issue capable of achieving consensus. Jagivan Ram and the ambitious Charan Singh, formerly the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and now home minister, resented JP’s choice of Desai as prime minister, although no one of the three could secure more votes than the other two. The first official act of the new government was to set up no fewer than eight commissions of inquiry to investigate Indira’s and Sanjay’s role in the abuses committed during the Emergency. The most important was that headed by Jayantilal C. Shah, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court. That the government had embarked on a program of personal harassment was made clear when the new foreign minister, A.B. Vajpayee, announced that Janata would consign her to the “dustbin of history.” India’s Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI) tailed Indira and her family and tapped their phones. Agents descended on the half-built country house with metal detectors to unearth Sanjay’s “buried loot.” The income tax department unsuccessfully pursued Rajiv for tax evasion, and because of fears they would f lee the country, family members had their passports taken. Sanjay’s pilot’s license was revoked for the same reason. After the former prime minister showed up at a reception held by the British high commissioner in honor of the Queen’s birthday, the Indian foreign office asked the diplomatic corps not to extend further invitations on the grounds that it would embarrass the government.4 The stress soon showed. Indira began breaking down, often into tears, not so much over the loss of power as worry over the physical safety of her son and herself. When JP, displaying his old-world charm, called on her, a furious Desai stepped up his demands for punishment. Although Madam was still titular head of the Congress Party, party leaders distanced themselves from her, openly attacking Sanjay but blaming both mother and son for the party’s defeat. If Indira knew that she had in the past outmaneuvered them and believed that she could do so again, Sanjay remained her Achilles’ heel. Like a “tigress,” she would stand between him and her enemies, desperately afraid that he would be arrested and tortured. While aware that resentment of Janata’s persecution was reawakening support for her, it was the wish to save her son, and the realization that this could be done from a position of power, that initially inspired Madam to seek a political resurrection. She claimed no desire to remain politically active, but “Indiragate” was hot copy. Indira Gandhi had become the new Nixon, and media coverage showed no signs of letting up. Politicians willing to tell all

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published exposés in magazines. A spate of anti-Indira books was rushed into print, ranging, as one writer put it, from “barely illiterate innuendo to polished intellectual assaults.” The only work that endured, however, was Midnight’s Children by a then- obscure novelist, Salman Rushdie. It demonized Mrs. Gandhi as a “monstrous, devouring widow,” and although it won Great Britain’s esteemed Booker Prize in 1980, she would successfully sue for libel.5 The real threat came from the government. On May 23, Charan Singh, on the f loor of Parliament charged the former prime minister with having “planned or thought of killing all opposition leaders imprisoned during the Emergency.” The CBI opened an investigation of Sanjay but could not directly link him to heinous crimes he was charged with. It was only able to accuse him of having ordered the suppression of a movie critical of Indira and chose to do so under the criminal section of the Code, which carried a maximum sentence.6 In other matters, Janata seemed unable to contain the process of selfdestruction that would help bring Madam back to power. Inder Malhotra spoke of the “gross incompetence” and “constant in-fighting” displayed by its leaders, despite their repeated vows of unity. Most important to them was their relentless vendetta against the former prime minister. If an embittered minority found their tactics too lenient, there was emerging a quiet majority that believed that Janata had “nothing else” to do but persecute the “lone and defenseless woman” with whom she was becoming identified. Conversely, the praise initially bestowed on the coalition for restoring civil liberties and for repealing Indira’s constitutional changes was beginning to recede.7 The government’s release of numerous hoarders and smugglers at the time it repealed her Draconian laws unleashed anger, even among its supporters. Disciplinary action taken against the police for the zeal shown during the Emergency, moreover, created a backlash within—and outside—the force. Indira’s hopes rose dramatically when she traveled to Paunar, in central India, in response to an invitation to visit a disciple of Mohandas Gandhi. No security had been provided, and there was apprehension when a crowd was sighted at the nearby airport. Was it friendly? She instinctively knew that it was. It contained many women, and there were cries of “we the people are with you.” Madam put a red rumkum on her forehead, smiled when garlands were draped over her, and all signs of tension disappeared. Later, in a David Frost interview, she spoke of the attacks directed against her and her son as government inspired and maintained there was deliberate exaggeration of the sterilization issue. 8

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A sudden spurt in atrocities against Harijans provided another opportunity for a shrewd politician who, while expressing genuine sympathy for these unfortunates, knew how to project it to win back approval. The Hindu orthodoxy of the new government was such that in some areas, Hindus felt free to assault them. In July, in a remote village named Belchi northwest of Calcutta, in Bihar, a state that the Congress Party had lost in the 1977 election, upper class landowners instigated a massacre of untouchables. Entire families were murdered with scores burned alive. Because there was no telephone service, it took several days for the news to reach Delhi. The Janata leadership, whose base was anti-Harijan, took no action. The three heads, Moraji Desai, Charan Singh, and Jagivan Ram were either too old or too uncaring to travel to the scene, while others were indifferent. In contrast, Indira at once set out for Belchi with a handful of loyal Congress members. The trip was risky because Bihar was notorious for roaming bands of dacoits (Indian and Burmese criminals) who made it a practice to rob and kill travelers, and she still lacked security. They began in a jeep, crossing rain- sodden and, ultimately, impassable roads, which required the group to borrow a farmer’s tractor. One f looded river was crossed on the back of an elephant. Having arrived after dark, they were met by frightened villagers carrying f laming torches. But when recognized, Indira was welcomed as a savior. People threw themselves at her feet with cries of “we voted against you. Forgive us!” While aware that the episode provided a glorious public relations opportunity, Indira was genuinely moved by the dirt-poor, grief- stricken inhabitants and the sight of ashes from the communal funeral pyre of butchered relatives and neighbors.9 By her visit to the charred remains of Belchi, she had assured for her party millions of Harijan voters in future elections. The next morning, she went on to Patna, the state capital, where she met her old antagonist, Jayaprakash Narayan, who now lay dying. There was a fifty-minute conversation, followed by posing for photographers. Making peace with him was a politically astute move but also an emotional high inasmuch as it brought back the days when Nehru was alive, and Narayan’s wife and Kamala Nehru were close friends. Buoyed by the reception in Belchi and the reconciliation with JP, Indira decided on her return to Delhi to visit her former constituency in Uttar Pradesh, where she had been decisively rejected by the voters. It was a gamble, but it worked. Under a blazing sun, she got an enthusiastic reception and in surrounding villages, met with equally large crowds. She apologized for the “excesses” of the Emergency and then

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attacked Janata, challenging the government to arrest her. When she rhetorically asked, “Why is Janata afraid of a frail woman like me?” the crowd roared its approval. At the day’s end, soaked in sweat and dust, Indira showed no sign of fatigue. Although the Guardian in England reported that Mrs. Gandhi’s former constituents forgave her “in ten minutes f lat,” Delhi newspapers falsely stated they had met her with black f lags. At a large rally in New Delhi, Indira again apologized but reminded listeners of the economic stability then achieved, the virtual end put to smuggling, and her own call for elections and acceptance of defeat. At yet another gathering, in Agra, there was a stampede at the station. There she criticized Janata for mounting inf lation and growth of the black market.10 These demonstrations of support left the government both enraged and alarmed. It had created the Shah Commission to secure an indictment, but the masses were starting to worship her. Something had to be done. Rather than be left to travel, she should be arrested and tried. On August 15, Indian Independence Day, a top aide and crony of Sanjay’s, R.K. Dhawan, was taken into custody. Arrested, too, were her former campaign manager, the treasurer of the Congress Party, her defense minister, and two other former cabinet members. At the end of September, Shah finally opened hearings by his commission. The case compiled against Mrs. Gandhi showed her as a power- hungry politician motivated solely by the wish to keep herself in office. The charges included abuse of authority, excesses and malpractice, improper treatment of prisoners, forcible implementation of the family planning program, and unwarranted demolition of homes. Also specified was the settling of scores by people in authority: public servants and their friends or relatives. (These last abuses were not new, but they had taken place in unparalleled numbers and were experienced by people unused to being treated in such a fashion.) The hearings were fully publicized, and outside, crowds gathered, the waiting alleviated by occasional fights between Janata activists and members of Sanjay’s Youth Congress. Former ministers testified, and several, as Indira had anticipated, betrayed her by admitting wrongdoing but insisting they had been pressured by fear and the Emergencyspawned culture. They blamed the former prime minister, but it was becoming clear that the allegations directly tying her and Sanjay to the “excesses” could not be fully supported. The government now tried to show that the Emergency itself was illegal and unwarranted. Justice Shah stated that the proclamation was fraudulent because no law and

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order problem existed.11 And if illegal, Indira, as prime minister, was culpable. Shah made no effort to disguise his animosity toward the accused, and most of those allowed inside Paliala House, where the hearings took place, were similarly hostile, cheering every charge and citation and jeering all attempts at defense. Even so, the length of time taken to initiate the proceedings, along with the public sympathy building for Indira, weakened the government’s efforts from the outset. Madam’s travels and well- attended speeches became the main issue of discussion at every cabinet meeting. It was this wish to keep herself in the limelight, to reestablish her presence, that had persuaded Indira to reach out to citizens in distant parts of the country.12 The government took alarm at the growing sympathy for the fallen prime minister, all too aware that six months had elapsed without her being imprisoned. To show that it was not impotent, a Nuremburg-type trial was necessary. Charan Singh, on October 3, 1977, ordered her arrest, and it proved the mistake of his life. Pupul Jayakar and other biographers have provided the abovementioned description of the much talked- of attempt to take her into custody.13 The CBI car drove off, followed by cars with Indira’s two sons and their wives, lawyers, supporters, and journalists. On reaching a railroad crossing, the passing of two long mail trains necessitated a thirtyminute wait. Allowed to leave the automobile, Indira sat on the ground, surrounded by those who had accompanied her. Having been advised by her lawyers not to leave the city limits and New Delhi’s administrative jurisdiction, she refused to move, and this totally unanticipated opposition left the officers bewildered. They agreed to remain within the city and drove around a ring road for two hours while awaiting orders. After 10:00 p.m., the caravan entered a police compound, where it was finally decided that she would be detained in a guest house. With composure, she said goodbye, was saluted by the policemen, and still more photos were taken before she was locked up. Indira refused food, read a novel, and slept through the night. The next morning, she was driven to a magistrate’s court to be arraigned. News of the arrest had spread, and the streets outside were mobbed. One charge stated that during the 1977 election, jeeps donated to the Congress Party were later sold to the military. Another claimed that Mrs. Gandhi’s government had awarded a contract to a French oil company although bids submitted by domestic competitors were considerably lower. To the accusation that the former prime minister had

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planned to liquidate all opposition leaders jailed during the Emergency, she again pointed out that she had released those prisoners experiencing ill health, which totally contradicted the indictment and strengthened her credibility. During the proceedings Indira refused a chair, preferring to stand for a full eighty minutes. To the government’s consternation, the presiding magistrate released her unconditionally, stating that there was insufficient evidence to support the charges. Sanjay ran outside shouting “Dismissed! Dismissed!” to euphoric supporters. Janata had been rebuffed. The sudden arrest and lockup, followed by the swift release, unintentionally allowed the government to make a martyr of her, which would contribute immensely to her political recovery. Rajiv told foreign correspondents, “even Mummy could not have thought out a better scenario.” The British press agreed: Janata was seeking vengeance, not justice.14 The Shah hearings dragged on throughout the autumn and winter, with hundreds testifying or supplying written depositions. Although not televised as were those of the Watergate investigation three years before, they provided high entertainment and gripped the public’s attention. Indira’s seizure, which damaged Janata’s credibility and brought Madam back to the front pages, provoked more quarrels among the coalition’s leaders. Prime Minister Desai said he had approved the arrest because he had been assured that the case was “ironclad.” Indira’s popularity grew, as did the throngs that gathered outside her house. (They consisted chief ly of the poor and not Congress Party chiefs.) After her release, she made a triumphant three- day tour of Gujarat, giving speeches in the local dialect. People seemed eager to touch her. She was seen as the lone and fragile woman she described herself as, standing up to tough men intent on destroying her. But Indira knew that she needed Congress backing and that she would ensure her chances of securing it by continuing to win popular support. She worked relentlessly to regain approval by traveling throughout the country to make her presence felt. While they could not stop her, local Janata leaders did their best to whip up hostility. At Maduri Airport, her car was stoned, accompanied by cries of “Death to Indira, the queen of corruption.” On the train to Madras, she found her compartment door locked and on the return from the city, an attempt was made to assassinate her. The police fired back, leaving two dead. But the crowds that came to hear her grew steadily in size.15 Finally, on January 9, 1978, more than three months after the Shah Commission hearings opened, a summons forced Indira to attend. On

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the advice of her lawyers, she refused to testify, protesting that as the prime target of attack, rather than as a witness, she was entitled to the right of cross- examination. She also refused to answer questions on the grounds that she could neither violate the oath of secrecy she had taken nor incriminate herself. Shah rejected these arguments, and when Indira persisted in refusing to cooperate, lost patience as she emerged defiant. When the hearings came to an end on February 20, she was still refusing to testify on the grounds that she was not legally required to do so. Janata leaders had failed to recognize that in forcing her to appear, they had provided her with a stage. And Mrs. Gandhi was adept in political theater, all the more so when fighting for her and her son’s survival. Like Joan of Arc, her childhood heroine, she had not recanted, repeatedly replying that it was within her rights not to do so.16 The warm welcomes received in her travels revealed the extent of her growing rehabilitation. A visit paid to the ascetic Vinoba Bhave, one of the last remaining Ghandians, was especially fruitful inasmuch as he had supported JP before the Emergency. She took advantage of every opportunity. In April 1978, a violent demonstration broke out in an agricultural college in Uttar Pradesh over higher wages for workers. Police fired on the demonstrators, leaving eighty- one dead. Hastening to the site together with a British writer and a photographer, she was shown the remains of “blood and brains” left for her inspection. Expressing horror, Indira then met with the widows of those massacred. Then she was off to south India. In Cochin, in Kerala, sitting on a chair perched on a table—which allowed more people to see her—Indira spoke from a balcony. When it grew dark, according to one account, “she jammed a torch between her knees, directing the beam upwards to light her face and arms” and rotated the light. In spite of a heavy downpour, a quarter of a million people filed past to pay respects.17 The fiery and disheveled political leader who roamed by jeep through mud and dust to India’s villages contrasted vividly with the elegant, immaculately groomed woman whose silk saris had been the envy of society matrons in New Delhi. Time and again, people surged to her jeep. Women held up babies for her blessing, and a touched Indira could not help but feel renewed. Her populist promises would remain unfulfilled, but millions spent hours on the road under a scorching sun or pouring rain to attend her rallies and then squatted on the ground to listen to her. She gained the confidence of Hindus as she visited their places of worship, met with their holy men, and appealed to the glories of the ancient Hindu past.

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Not surprisingly, her national rhetoric, unlike that of Nehru’s popular secularism, began taking a pro-Hindu stance. Then, in early May 1878, while on a rare holiday to do some writing and indulge in her passion for walking in the mountains, Indira received devastating news that Sanjay had been jailed for having intimidated prosecution witnesses against him.18 Afraid that he would be physically harmed, she immediately f lew back to Delhi to see her son, locked up in the same prison that housed many taken into custody during the Emergency. Before television and film crews, she embraced him, telling him not to lose heart and that the incident would lay the basis for his “political rebirth”—unintentionally rebutting her earlier denials that he had ever been involved in politics.19 Sanjay would be imprisoned six more times, spending five weeks in various jails in the following year. Jail brought out the best in him. As was the case with his grandfather, he organized other prisoners in team games and in cleaning the area and helped sick fellow inmates. Meanwhile, the rains failed, prices rose, and renewed attacks on Muslim minorities further exacerbated communal tensions. Anticipating the demise of the Janata coalition and convinced that the government’s wish to disenfranchise her would be thwarted by membership in Parliament, Indira decided to run again when an opportunity presented itself. Again she turned to Sanjay for political counseling on building a new party organization. After a former minister had testified against her, those members who remained loyal met without the leaders who had abandoned her. Indira and her followers built on this nucleus to create a breakaway Congress (I) Party, the “I” standing for Indira. On New Year’s Day 1978, seventy MPs followed her, leaving seventy- six in the old rump party known as Congress (S), led by Swaran Singh, its chair. It was the second split in the Congress in a decade. Both factions fought to keep the party symbol of a cow and her calf; and in retrospect, Indira was lucky to lose this battle, given the comparisons her critics had made between the symbol and the former prime minister and her son. When the Congress (S) retained the icon, Indira’s new party took the more suitable one of a raised open palm. Although Indians in Great Britain denounced “dictatorial ambitions,” Indira, who seemed determined to have Congress (I) wholly under her and Sanjay’s control, squashed any talk of reunification. Her truncated but closely knit party won regional elections in two states. Gratified by its growing popularity, Indira campaigned for a female Muslim candidate in Chairman Singh’s stronghold of Azamgarh in a Lok Sabha by- election. Working ten to twelve hour days, in one

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stretch holding twenty-four rallies in thirty hours—excluding stops along the way to address groups of peasants—Indira noted that the collective anger previously shown against her Congress supporters was diminishing. On election day, Harijan laborers confronted the rage of hostile landlords to come out and vote. Her candidate easily won, striking another blow to Janata. As events unfolded throughout 1978, Janata’s relentless prosecution, perceived by many as having turned into persecution, provided fertile ground for Indira’s comeback. Having tried the opposition and finding themselves dissatisfied with it, many were willing to have her rule again. India, it appeared, had no alternative but Indira. Inder Malhotra recalled dining at a friend’s house, where the guests were critical of Madam. A servant interjected: “Inderajid did bad things [during the Emergency], but . . . she did good things in the past.” Another servant, that of an early biographer of Mrs. Gandhi, said that although he had voted against her in 1977, now that “Inderajid” was to run again, he would enthusiastically support her. When asked why, he replied, “Indira cares about us—the poor—while Janata did not.” 20 On August 6, 1978, six months after Shah Commission hearings ended, the Ministry of Information published the third and final volume of its report. (Two interim reports were published in March and April.) It found the proclamation of Emergency unconstitutional and fraudulent because “there was no evidence of any breakdown of law and order in any part of the country—nor in any apprehension in that behalf.” Prime Minister Gandhi had resorted to it as “a desperate endeavor to save herself from the legitimate compulsion of a judicial verdict against her.” The government over which she had presided and which had detained thousands of innocent people was responsible for “totally illegal and unwarranted actions involving untold human misery and suffering.” The three volume Report, which contained only a fraction of the complete hearings, proved disappointing. But although poorly organized and written in verbose legalistic English, it remains the only official record of the Emergency because full tape-recorded accounts of the proceedings have vanished. Katherine Frank found it “a dreary and predictable summary of J.C. Shah’s foregone conclusions” based on evidence from hearings with selected extracts from witnesses. His bias as spokesperson for Janata was unmistakable, and in a later interview, he conceded that his work was “purely investigatory.” Still, if the “chief villain,” Indira Gandhi, remains “intractably elusive,” the Report survives

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as a “treasure trove” of evidence for Sanjay Gandhi’s illicit use of power in the period leading up to and during the Emergency. Not surprisingly, Madam had all available copies of the Report expunged as soon as she regained power in 1980. 21 Having the ground cut from under him when Indira’s arrest backfired, Prime Minister Desai was not about to risk jailing her again, despite the Commission’s findings. Until Janata could set up legal machinery to prosecute her, she was legally safe and free to move about the country, relishing her growing popularity with the masses. By mid-1978, the former prime minister had gone through India, receiving warm receptions, especially from the rural poor who constituted a majority of the voters. It appeared that people preferred to dwell on her and her father’s achievements, rather than the recent events of the twenty- one month Emergency, which now seemed an “aberration.” Ignoring his rivals in the coalition, the austere and orthodox Desai held on to power. At his desk long after younger staff left for the day, he spent much time devising laws prohibiting intoxicating beverages and beef in a land of poverty and rising unemployment, industrial stagnation, urban violence, and poor housing. He considered U.S. investment in space exploration a waste since Indian yogis he claimed he knew “could go to the moon in just a few seconds.” And he was showing himself vulnerable to personal attacks. Like Indira, he had a son, Kantilal, who lived in the prime minister’s home, who closed deals, and envisioned ambitious and expensive projects. When Home Minister Singh, who had never concealed his ambition to head the government, launched an investigation of Kantilal’s rise to wealth, Desai demoted him. Singh thereupon accused the prime minister of incompetence and threatened to quit the coalition. To further complicate matters, Narain, who backed Singh and was seeking support from the Gandhis, reached out to Sanjay. The “old men” who ruled India and their unabated wrangling were becoming objects of ridicule, and public confidence in them sank. With the black market thriving, there was a return to economic exploitation. Smuggling, tax evasion, and hoarding proliferated. In only four months of Janata rule, the price of foodstuffs had risen 5 percent, signaling the return of inf lation, which reached double digits by year’s end. The surplus of 18 million tons of food was used up. In the two years it governed, the Janata administration would squander its inherited $3 billion of foreign exchange reserves. 22 Small wonder then that Mrs. Gandhi was able to rise from the ashes of her defeat to win a seat in a November 1978 Lok Sabha by- election.

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That July, in a long interview given to an American, Mary Carras, who had expressed interest in writing a political biography, she clarified the stand she would take. The Emergency was launched to save India from chaos. She had not consulted her cabinet because she feared the announcement would be leaked. Admittedly, some things “did get out of hand,” but reports of abuses, especially those concerning sterilization, were grossly exaggerated. She had lost the 1977 election because her government had “annoyed” certain segments of society and because Janata “had a lot of foreign help.” This admission of errors was calculated. Indira knew that she would be rehabilitated sooner if she took some blame. She had already apologized for certain “aspects” of the Emergency and now admitted that muzzling the press “may have been too strong a step” and that “some of our chief ministers arrested people for no reason at all . . . just personal enmity.” But aside from “the detention of political persons and press censorship, there was not much that was abnormal.” When pressed by a skeptical Carras, Indira denied that violence had occurred, “just one or two isolated cases.” Yet on accompanying Indira, and often mistaken for her by rapturous crowds, Carras realized that the public adulation of the former prime minister was such that she was “unassailable.”23 Indira ran in the rural constituency of Chikmaglur in the southern state of Karnataka. An isolated small coffee-producing district in the Nandi hills, it was an ideal constituency inasmuch as 50 percent of the voters were women, 45 percent belonged to backward castes or minorities, and nearly half the population well below the poverty line. 24 Still, the election was hotly contested. Janata had sent George Fernandes, its respected minister of industry, to vigorously promote Indira’s opponent, Veerendra Patil, a former chief minister of Karnataka. Patil was expected to win easily. Mrs. Gandhi began campaigning on October 19, driving up and down hilly roads through the rain and visiting coffee estates to speak to pickers and their families in their huts. Her fragility and dignity appealed to the locals, especially when visiting their temples and shrines. Following the example of her father, she used simple language and a conversational style of speaking, making the contents understandable even to those whose scanty knowledge of Hindi came from popular Bombay produced movies. She pointed to shortages and poverty, and her posters asked them to “give your vote to the Little Daughter!” Her opponents portrayed her as a double-faced witch, a murderess surrounded by skulls, and as a king cobra. In so doing, the Janata handlers displayed their lack of communication skills: in this

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isolated district, the Emergency was a nonissue, and the cobra was worshipped as a protector of the earth. 25 When it became clear that momentum had shifted to Indira, Janata resorted to harsher tactics. On November 3, the day before she was scheduled to address a rally, her opponents set up a roadblock. She changed cars, disguised herself, and went ahead. The enthusiastic crowds who came to hear her easily outnumbered those for Patil and Fernandes. On election day, November 8, women in long lines waited patiently to vote, and Mrs. Gandhi won by a wide margin. Two years after her defeat and although opposed by the full might of the government, she was back in Parliament. On taking her seat in the Lok Sabha, she was greeted with cries of “shame” from her opponents and cheers from her party. The victory was toasted in the Soviet Embassy. A well-publicized visit to London, made in an effort to improve her reputation abroad, provoked the Desai government’s last attempt to bring her down. (Smarting from international criticism, Janata had issued her a diplomatic passport, good only for travel to Great Britain.) While out of the country, a parliamentary committee charged her with obstructing an investigation into Maruti Limited, Sanjay’s car factory project. After Indira’s return to Delhi in December of 1978, members asked her to apologize, and in the event of an anticipated refusal, for the entire Lok Sabha to punish her. It would have been out of character for her to do so or even to express regret in an area concerning her son, and on December 19, a hawkish majority put together by Janata pushed through a resolution expelling her from Parliament and demanding a one-week imprisonment (to coincide with the one week remaining for the parliamentary session). The penalty had been decided on before the Lok Sabha found her guilty of the charges. On the f loor of the legislature, Indira responded with dignified rage to the sustained jeering. When able to speak, she once more apologized for Emergency- driven excesses and again reminded her listeners of her call for elections. Then, going on the offensive, she accused the government of provoking civil strife, weakening the secular base laid out by Mahatma Gandhi, surrendering India’s right to use nuclear technology, diluting the principle of nonalignment, and inviting multinationals to the controlling heights of the Indian economy. The coalition had not merely tarnished her image but had lowered the nation’s prestige throughout the world. And every salvo elicited shouts and catcalls from the ruling majority. When finished, Indira rose to leave and slowly walked down the aisle. On reaching the door, she turned round and raised her arm, palm

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outwards, and said simply, “I will be back.” The gesture strengthened the symbol put to good use by her party. Statues of her showing the defiant stand were later erected. 26 After her expulsion and dramatic exit, Indira was again arrested, taken in a police car to Tihar jail, and put in the same cell complex that George Fernandes had occupied during the Emergency. Allowed books, she spent time in meditation and reading—and on the yoga exercises she got up to perform at 5:00 in the morning. But the wooden bed lacked a mattress, the cell had no shutters, and at the end of December, was uncomfortably cold. The former prime minister hung blankets for warmth and privacy. Because she refused jail food, Sonia Gandhi brought her meals from home. When released, she was mobbed by enthusiastic party members. She did not look like a tragic figure but appeared to have enjoyed her compulsory rest and was in high spirits. Once more, Janata had blundered. In pressing formal charges in the Lok Sabha itself, and although he commanded enough votes to oust her, by sending Indira to jail, Desai had again made her a martyr and cost the government what was left of the moral superiority won in the aftermath of the Emergency. Madam’s followers saw their numbers swell. Her outraged (young) faithful mounted noisy demonstrations in major cities, stopping traffic, demanding justice, even hijacking an Air India plane. In choosing to incarcerate Indira after her election victory, the government had resurrected her from what a biographer called “the ashes of the Emergency” and made her more popular than ever. By the time of her release she was seen as a heroine. 27 Her happiness was tempered by an awareness that the judgment in Sanjay’s movie case was scheduled for late February (1979) and by rumors that he would be sentenced to a lengthy prison term. She feared for his survival and again became depressed. And on February 28, Sanjay received a two-year sentence and fined but allowed to remain free on bail until an appeal was heard. Indira’s delusions about her son had shown no sign of abating. For his birthday on December 14, she had written: “What can I wish you? Only that these dreadful days slide into the past, that you emerge unscathed in your innocence, your honest intentions proved, and that people recognize your worth and quality.” 28 Janata continued its process of selfdestruction when Moraji Desai and Charan Singh had another falling out. Desai’s son Kantilal was found guilty of crooked business deals and other corrupt practices, and Jagivan Ram’s son—a married man of forty—was photographed having sex with a college girl in her teens. (He claimed that he had

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been drugged.) These revelations made the government’s prosecution of Sanjay for holding back a movie look frivolous by comparison. Pupul Jayakar credited Indira’s sense of timing with having helped her to take advantage of all this discord. Mrs. Gandhi knew that any move on her part to profit from her growing strength, to reveal the likelihood of a return to power, would suffice to reunite the fractured opposition. Accordingly, she kept a low profile while working with Sanjay behind the scenes to ally herself with two of Janata’s leaders. In the late spring of 1979, Indira established lines of communication with Charan Singh, the Janata leader who had been dismissed by Desai and then reinstated in a lesser post, while Sanjay befriended Raj Narain, Indira’s 1971 opponent whom Desai had made health minister. (During her week in prison, Indira was both reaching out to her enemies and exploiting their differences when she asked that a bouquet of f lowers be sent to Singh.) Acting as a go-between for his mother, Sanjay suggested that Singh could achieve his goal of becoming prime minister and promised him Congress (I) support. Similarly, Sanjay responded to overtures made by Narain, hinting at the possibility of his (Narain’s) accession to power. Narain took the bait and stepped up his attacks on Desai. In maneuvers that would have made Machiavelli proud, Indira made further use of the differences among the coalition leaders when she met secretly with such Janata allies as her former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Hemuati Bahaguna, on hearing of his unhappiness with the government. 29 All this was done privately. In public, she continued grooming herself to win popular support. And even people who had forsaken her in the 1977 election now welcomed Madam with enthusiasm. Only in 1980, while campaigning in the national election held that year, would she refer to the persistent drought that had added to economic hardship by raising the price of potatoes and onions. She would make the high cost of food a major election issue and promise the people of India “a government that works.”30 The arrest and April 4, 1979, execution of Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto (who had blatantly rigged his last election) made comparisons with Indira’s crime inevitable and put her era of “dictatorial misrule” in a more tolerant perspective. “If she was so harsh, why had she permitted such free and fair elections?” More people began to believe that the political courage shown in defeat and the refusal to despair made her “a worthy heiress to Nehru.” Indira had never liked Bhutto (and the feelings had been reciprocated), but she publicly condemned the sentence and even telegraphed the army general who took over, Zia ul-Haq, to

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ask for clemency. She also wrote to other heads of state, asking them to apply pressure on Zia. Foolishly, Janata leaders had made no effort to save Bhutto.31 On May 31, together with several Maruti associates, Sanjay was again indicted, this time for irregular business dealings. But before further action against them could be taken, what remained of Janata unity exploded. On July 11, Moraji Desai lost the support of his coalition’s left wing when socialist leaders Raj Narain and George Fernandes resigned from the cabinet, taking enough members of Parliament with them to leave Janata without a majority in the Lok Sabha. For some time, these more progressive elements, composed of JP’s idealistic lieutenants, secular reformers, union organizers, and liberal journalists, despairing of Desai’s inertia and the incessant in-fighting, had worried about the growing power of orthodox Hindus—whose leader, A.B. Vajpayee, served as foreign minister.32 The prime minister, seemingly unaware of the situation at home, was then visiting the Soviet Union. Certainly, Desai had underestimated the discontent wrought by two years of drought and the highest rate of inf lation reached since independence. Police reservists mutinied; communal riots and public sector strikes had broken out. Only when Charan Singh, as leader of the opposition to him, moved a vote of noconfidence did Desai recognize that he had indeed lost his majority. He resigned before the vote could take place. Asked to form a new government, Charan Singh finally achieved his long-time ambition to become prime minister. To those not privy to Indira’s wooing of Singh and only familiar with his vendetta against her, the support given him by Congress (I) was found amazing. But although never made explicit, Indira’s continued support—and that of her seventy MPs—would depend on his government’s attitude toward the Special Court Act pushed through by Desai’s government in order to try Indira and Sanjay of Emergency-related crimes. This entire strategy, according to Pupul Jayakar, had been planned by Indira while in Tihar jail.33 When Singh refused to withdraw the bill—he never referred to Indira’s impending trial during his twenty-three days in office—Madam, in turn, withdrew Congress (I)’s support, fully aware that he could not win a vote of confidence without it. On August 22, President Reddy dissolved Parliament and ordered a new election for the first week of January 1980. Indira’s resurrection was at hand.

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CHAPTER 12


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he maneuvers to break up Janata’s unity succeeded beyond expectations, and Sanjay had played a leading role both in formulating and applying them. As a Gandhi supporter wrote, “Sanjay had literally demolished the artificial unity of the Janata government and they had to fight the elections as four different parties.” The most effective party, however, was that of Indira’s Congress. Even before Singh’s fall, Madam had gone on the campaign trail. With Sanjay’s help and a map of India, key people in each constituency were identified. But with almost all the old party leadership opposed, Indira would have to rely on the Youth Congress to ensure that vast numbers of rural supporters could get to the polls.1 She traveled by plane, helicopter, and automobile for hours at a time to reach as many constituencies as possible. She spoke to the economically underprivileged, to women, to Harijans in the most remote interior villages, and she dwelt on the everyday problems of the poor: high prices, kerosene shortages, inadequate drought relief, and crimes against women. “A Government That Works” was the campaign slogan relied on. Janata, confident that most voters were not about to forgive her, countered with the threat that a victory for Indira Gandhi meant a return to the Emergency and an end of freedom and democracy. They were wrong. Even voters who had doubts about her now saw Mrs. Gandhi as the only alternative to the fragmentation of the country. Ethnic clashes were again pitting upper castes against Harijans, Hindus against Muslims, Sikhs against Hindus, and Hindus and Muslims against Christians. (Ironically, it was Indira’s centralization of power during her eleven years in office and the resulting demands for state and regional autonomy that was responsible for much of the discontent.)

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When reminded of the excesses committed during the Emergency and asked how she would conduct herself if returned to power, the former prime minister replied, “I would not allow [conditions and the government’s reaction to them] to deteriorate to the point where such harsh measures are required. My fault was in not taking some measures earlier, which would have made unnecessary the harsh measures later.”2 In furious campaigning before the January 1980 election, Indira spent more than sixty days on the road—and in the air—covering 40,000 miles and addressing up to twenty gatherings a day. An estimated ninety million people, one of every four Indian voters, saw and heard her in the course of what proved her last and most arduous campaign. As early as November, her opponents, torn apart by quarrels, saw that she had outdistanced them. Polls showed that her Congress (I) candidates would win 291 of 524 seats in the Lok Sabha. Mrs. Gandhi believed that her party would secure 350. In fact, it would win 353, one more than in the 1971 election. Indira herself stood for two constituencies (which was allowed but if successful, could only represent one): the Nehru traditional base in Uttar Pradesh and a South India constituency—to show that all India approved of her. And in the country’s seventh general election, she carried her party with her throughout the country. Congress (I) candidates won two-thirds of the seats in the Lok Sabha, and she won both of the two seats she had contested. Indira chose the one representing the “Dravidian” South, which symbolically undermined separatist aspirations in the region. Sanjay, too, was elected. Once more, Indira Gandhi was India’s chosen leader and in acknowledging the astounding political turnaround, the banner headline in The Times of India read, “It’s Indira All the Way.”3 On January 6, 1980, President Reddy called on her to form a government. The sixty-two-year old prime minister designate, immaculately groomed; surrounded by family, friends, cabinet ministers, and members of Parliament took her oath of office eight days later, her astrologers having told her the fourteenth was more desirable. Her “interment” had lasted for almost three years, and her (fourth) swearing in revealed a mood that differed from the previous three. In 1966, she had been apprehensive; in 1967, with a reduced parliamentary majority and the “old guard” of the Congress Party set on a course of obstruction, grim; in 1971, euphoric; and now in 1980, somber, showing no trace of imperious arrogance. In 1966, Indira had taken the oath on a copy of the Constitution; in 1980, she invoked God in her pledge. Previously she had not identified with any one sect but now worshiped twice a day, visiting

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shrines and temples, praying and prostrating herself before images of deities. The cabinet that she put together was largely composed of newcomers, a fifth of its members from Sanjay’s Youth Congress, although it did not include Sanjay himself as had been expected. That would smack too much of political favoritism. But shortly afterwards, all the legal cases against her were declared unconstitutional by politically savvy judges. Those against Sanjay were simply withdrawn. The “interment” had left scars, which according to the friend who knew Indira well, inhibited her and left her suspicious and uncertain. A sense of possible betrayal and an inability to trust would mark her demeanor the remaining years of her life. The ability to take immediate action and to react with precision and strength, as well as the shrewd insights that often proved right, all shown in the past, had been diminished and replaced by hesitancy and caution. She would be fiercely protective of those who had stood by her in her time of trouble.4 Indira’s return in 1980 had proven that Janata was not a viable alternative to Congress. And insofar as Congress had not been able to produce an alternative leader, she saw herself as indispensable: to her party—and to the country. Her former adviser and future biographer, P.N. Dhar, thought that three years out of office would have provided an opportunity to ref lect on what ailed the nation. But even if inclined to do so, she had applied all her energy to the numerous inquiry commissions, most notably the Shah Commission, and had not come up with any serious analysis of what was wrong with Indian politics and how to fix it. She could only conclude that political stability had to be ensured, and that, in turn, would happen only if (her) Congress remained in power. Consequently, Mrs. Gandhi and her party would focus on short-term electoral prospects, regardless of the means used to ensure success at the polls.5 In several cases, this was to prove disastrous. Her government’s support for a young and virtually unknown young fundamentalist, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, to outplay a Sikh separatist movement in Punjab would go out of control and encourage its own secessionist movement in the state, which, in turn, would lead to the army assault on a Sikh holy place and, ultimately, to Indira’s assassination. But all this lay in the future. For now, things looked bright. Elected for the first time, Sanjay immediately reestablished his position as the second most powerful person in the country. His mother had encouraged him to plan an electoral strategy and select new candidates, and his compliance ushered in a generational change. The Times of India called it “India’s Cultural Revolution.” As head of the activist Youth

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Congress, Sanjay had personally endorsed 150 young hard- core supporters, almost half the new Congress (I) members. Many of these newcomers to the party were of dubious character, and a few had criminal backgrounds. They had been counted on to deliver votes, and they met expectations. Sanjay had been placed in charge of the party organization in Uttar Pradesh between 1977 and 1980 (when Indira was out of office), and much of the “youth” enrolled were apolitical types, some of whom relied on “muscle power.” As noted in The Economist, “the ability to deliver the goods [was] regarded as more important than moral purity, [and] loyalty to a person [as] more important than abstract principles.” Sanjay had exercised extra- constitutional power during the Emergency; and after the 1980 victory, he freely distributed political patronage to his cronies. The practice of amoral politics was to reach a zenith when combined with the appeal to nationalism, which would be readily manipulated at home—and with the nuclear option a known reality—abroad as well.6 Indira’s penchant for mysticism seemed to have increased. A solar eclipse on February 16 left her unnerved and fearful, according to Jayakar, who was “dismayed at her friend’s mounting susceptibility to “ritual and superstition.” (Indira had ordered the pregnant Maneka to her room because of the traditional belief that a solar eclipse was a direct threat to an unborn child.) Her friend wondered what had happened to “the robust Indira” of former days. As Jayakar observed, she had also fallen under the inf luence of Dhirendra Brahmachari, the swami who had been her yoga teacher for more than twenty years and whose persuasive power over her, both spiritual and political, was now immense. Brahmachari had allied himself with Sanjay, and Indira could not imagine that her teacher was motivated by self-interest. According to a relation, he had become “an integral part of the prime minister’s daily life—continually in and out of the house at all hours, often present at meals, where he behaved “like one of the family—except that his table manners were cruder and his appetite voracious.” 7 Sanjay remained and strengthened his role as his mother’s closest confidante, her adviser, and heir apparent, the third in the NehruGandhi Dynasty. Indira rejoiced for herself in her victory at the polls but even more so for Sanjay. His own impressive electoral success gave some legitimacy to his power and title to the throne, which had been hurt by the Emergency. He had gone through struggle and persecution without having been cowed and was no longer dismissed as an imposition on the country by a loving mother determined to establish

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a dynasty. And being seen as mother’s partner, Congress (I) Party regulars lavished praise on both of them and made him all the more acceptable as crown prince. Then, on June 23, 1980, tragedy struck. Recklessly f lying a stunt plane in defiance of local regulations (after having forced the dismissal of the upright director- general of civil aviation who had tried to curb his illegal joyrides), Sanjay crashed to his death over New Delhi. He had killed himself within months of achieving elected office. It was a shocking demise. He was mourned nationally, elevated in death to the status of martyr, with monuments created throughout the country to honor the memory of “The Son.” The funeral, saturated with overblown rhetoric, was an orgy of praise, with some party leaders going so far as to compare him to Jesus Christ. The idea was f loated to rename Delhi University after Sanjay but elicited howls of protests from alumni who shuddered at thought of having their education devalued by attaching the name of an uneducable dropout to their degrees. One student told journalist Shashi Tharoor, “For God’s sake, why rename a university after the man? Couldn’t they find a garage?” There was a posthumous personality cult, but it proved short lived. An outspoken editor commented that had he lived, he would have done to India what he did to his airplane. 8 Sanjay’s death gave rise to much speculation about the control he was said to have exerted over his mother. P.N. Dahr was persuaded that “in some ways [Indira was] afraid of her son, at least to the extent of incurring his displeasure.” By no means alone in sensing this, Jayakar ascribed it to Indira’s confession to her after Feroze’s premature death that Sanjay had accused his mother of having hastened her husband’s demise by ignoring him. It was Salman Rushdie’s reference to emotional blackmail that required him to tender an apology to Indira in the London libel case stemming from his allegations in Midnight’s Children.9 The death of her son cut Indira’s triumph short. Heartbroken, she began to lose confidence. While able to control her emotions in public, in private, according to the friends and relatives who rushed to her side, she was “devastated, deeply depressed and adrift.” Over a year later, she wrote to Jayakar that sorrow “can be neither forgotten nor overcome. One has to learn to live with it, to absorb it into one’s being, as a part of life.”10 Increasingly superstitious, Indira all the more sought solace in the “higher powers” that she believed could be reached through the medium of Brahmachari, although before the public, she stoically carried on with her own cure of “austerity, discipline and hard work.” The prime

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minister had shaped every step of her political career with the understanding that Sanjay was to be her successor, and his death could not be allowed to end hopes for continued family rule. Rajiv, who was an excellent Indian Airlines pilot and had shown no prior interest in politics, now had to take Sanjay’s place at his mother’s side. Accordingly, he was seen as the successor to Sanjay’s leadership in the Youth Congress.11 Only Rajiv (the name means “ruler”) could fill the vacuum left by Sanjay. Unable to trust anyone not related to her, her paranoia widened by the “betrayals” following her fall from power three years earlier, Indira was unwilling to have anyone around her remotely capable of turning into a political rival. Consequently, her subsequent cabinets would be composed of “yes men,” while her Congress (I) party would contain servile loyalists, dependent on her. Even senior ministers were viewed less as colleagues than minions serving at her pleasure. Indira was well aware that she had chosen to count on “men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely.” Above all, she could rely on Rajiv, although according to Jayakar she wondered aloud whether her older son, who “lacks Sanjay’s dynamism and his concerns,” could take “the brutalities and ruthlessness of politics.” Where Sanjay was frugal, Rajiv and his wife “need certain comforts.”12 Astute enough to make no move herself to elevate him, the prime minister left it to others to start a draft Rajiv campaign. A draft was necessary because Rajiv had made it known that he was content with a quiet life, and her faithful followers in Congress had to plead with him to enter politics on behalf of the distraught mother. Still, he faced the fierce opposition of his wife, Sonia. She admitted that she, too, could fight “like a tigress” to prevent his change of career, anticipating that her husband might be “sacrificed to a political system . . . [that] would crush and destroy him.”13 It took a year for Rajiv to make up his mind, but a strong sense of duty prevailed. When asked about his decision, he answered that “Mummy has to be helped somehow.” Having resigned his job with Air India on May 5, 1981, he ran for Sanjay’s seat in a June by- election. The hostile intellectuals who had objected to Sanjay’s being groomed as his mother’s successor signified this as “dynastic democracy” but were scarcely surprised. If they held doubts, the masses approved. “Indian history,” remarked Inder Malhotra, “is an unbroken saga of rule by hereditary monarchs.” Rajiv easily won the election and having also won over Sonia was sworn in as a member of Parliament. The only discordant note came from Maneka: Sanjay’s widow had wanted the seat, although two years too young and so ineligible.14

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Sanjay’s young and ambitious widow saw herself as her husband’s rightful heir and Rajiv as an usurper and unfit. That Maneka could succeed Sanjay was anathema to Indira; she disliked the young widow and clearly preferred Sonia. Sanjay’s critics, too, showed a willingness to accept the mild-mannered Rajiv. In sharp contrast to Sanjay’s abrasive and often ruthless behavior, he appeared respectful and level headed. His credentials came from the best schools; Sanjay’s, as Malhotra put it, from the Indian “mafia.”15 Indira convinced herself that Maneka was attempting to form an opposition party “under her own roof.” For one observer, the prime minister seemed to be behaving less like a politician than as a typical Indian version of the aggrieved mother-in-law. Indian journalist Khushwant Singh commented, “they both really behaved like rustic village women.” When, in March 1982, Maneka ignored Indira’s wish that she not speak at a gathering of Sanjay loyalists, the latter demanded that she leave the prime minister’s residence. She had her daughter-in-law’s luggage searched and tried to hold on to Sanjay’s young son.16 Unmistakable signs of an authoritarian style resurfaced after the 1980 election. Radio and television remained under state control, and the government was now armed with arbitrary power to arrest anyone “acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of the state or to the maintenance of public order.” A preventive strike protesting this ordinance resulted in the arrests of 25,000 Indians. And observers noted that when exploring ways to retain her renewed power, Indira showed herself more inclined to support Hindu preferences.17 Caste conf licts seemed unending. The “affirmative action” for Harijans and tribal people pursued by the government was generating resentment. A strike and then riots broke out in Gujarat when upper caste students were denied admission to medical courses in favor of minorities with lower grades. The students were mollified only when their stipends were raised. Hindu- Muslim riots intensified. When 1,300 Harijans converted to Islam, Hindu zealots demanded that India be declared a Hindu nation and that conversions by Hindus be made illegal. The government was forced to reply that India was a secular state. Mrs. Gandhi’s own actions contributed to the growing instability. To prevent potential rivals from building a power base of their own, she reshuff led the cabinet every few months and with alarming frequency changed chief ministers in states ruled by Congress (I). Nor was her protection of the chief minister of Maharashtra (containing what was

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then called Bombay) well received. He extorted huge donations, but he was Sanjay’s protégé and Madam would stand by her followers to keep their loyalty. (Or was she making sure he would not make damaging disclosures about her or Sanjay, as some believed?)18 When she forced the governor of Andhra Pradesh to dismiss his government and replaced the governor of Jammu and Kashmir because he refused to follow suit, it was apparent that loyalty to Indira Gandhi, and not to the Congress Party, which for all its faults sought a national consensus, opened the way to political success. Only a few bright spots emerged. India had already become the sixth member of the nuclear club in 1974. Now, in 1982, together with France, the country successfully launched a communications satellite. The government embraced environmentalism when it promoted tree planting in an effort to save the last major rain forest in India. It stated its intention to provide “a tree for every child.”19 The rise of Islamic fundamentalism accounted—and also provided a pretext—for a renewed and even more intense involvement with foreign policy. The return of Khomeni in Iran was a major cause for concern, as was Washington’s commitment to rearming Pakistan. The prime minister, who had kept the defense portfolio, sought arms to match those of her neighbor. From the Soviet Union, she got MIG fighter planes; from France, Mirage jets; from Great Britain, Harrier fighters; and from West Germany, submarines. These purchases inevitably opened her to criticism for excessive spending and offers of kickbacks. In the process, she made no less than eighteen trips overseas, to three dozen countries, during the four and a half years in office after her return to power. Only the good press at home, derived from these high-profile visits abroad, offset some of the negative criticism. Like JFK, Gamal Nasser, Willi Brandt, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and other leaders—whether dictators or democrats—beset by domestic turmoil, Mrs. Gandhi turned to foreign affairs. In December 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, a region long regarded as a buffer between India and Russia. At the time, Singh’s caretaker government was in power, but as the incoming prime minister, Indira was asked for instructions by the foreign office. Mrs. Gandhi’s government feared that the takeover could send waves of discontent through other Islamic populations. And although Moscow (determined not to offend Janata) had treated her shabbily after her fall, she continued to see herself as a Third World leader who would maintain her father’s determination not to antagonize the Soviets.

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Beginning with the absorption of Nehru’s view of world history, the sympathy long shown the Soviet state had endured. “The birth and development of socialism in the Soviet Union has been a major factor in shaping the course of world history,” she had told a Moscow audience in 1975. “To many of us in the developing world engaged in the task of consolidating political and economic freedom, your experience and success have been a stimulus.” In a 1977 interview concerning foreign policy, she argued that the Soviets had helped liberation struggles from Angola to Bangladesh and that the West was “not on the side of freedom . . . It’s only when they thought that Russian inf luence was coming, and that freedom would come anyway, that they jumped in.” Certainly this view complemented her left-wing domestic political agenda, her need for Soviet support against a U.S.-backed Pakistan- China axis, and her dark suspicion (arguably borne more out of personal insecurity than hard evidence) that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had that of Salvatore Allende. 20 With regard to Afghanistan and despite her concerns over the Russian invasion, Indira believed that a political solution had to be found. This willingness to give the Soviets the benefit of any doubt was ref lected in the instructions sent to Indian speakers at the UN. But if Madam did not at first condemn the invasion, the threat posed by 85,000 regular army Soviet troops in the region became clear, and her government began making diplomatic appeals for a withdrawal. In vain. Although no evidence pointed to an expansion of the invasion to Pakistan or to India itself, like the nineteenth- century fears of the Russian bear held by the British, the Indian government could not help but worry. Fearful that India was again drawing too close to the USSR, perceived in Washington as the “evil empire,” the Reagan administration had stepped up American shipments of arms to Pakistan, even though that country’s current military regime had executed former President Ali Bhutto. At a press conference, a Newsweek reporter asked her why India “tilted toward Soviet Union.” “We don’t tilt on either side, Indira replied, and laconically added, “We walk upright.” She did, however, acknowledge that “We don’t want to see America weak but don’t want them to do anything that will increase tension near us.” She also argued that the Soviets did not want her so strong as not to need the support of the Hard Left. 21 Another disappointment came in the wake of her decision to hold the Asian games at New Delhi in November 1982. Seen as an opportunity to let her inexperienced son show his worth as a manager, they

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proved more expensive than first thought. A scandal erupted when it was disclosed that bonded laborers lived under conditions of virtual slavery—of which Rajiv was ignorant or complacent—and the games were largely unsuccessful. As she moved further into her new term of office, it was the domestic problems that confronted Indira: a breakdown of law and order, rising inf lation, a scarcity of basic commodities, and refugees from poverty- stricken Bangladesh pouring into the northeastern state of Assam. Ethnic issues appeared especially threatening. Once again, in India’s troubled history, national unity was disappearing in the wake of communal riots, especially those caused by Hindu-Muslim killings and Sikh militancy. Martial law was imposed in Tripura, where a Bengali majority controlled the state’s Maoist government, and “rampaging tribesmen” murdered almost 400 “foreigners.” Harijans continued to suffer atrocities, and now Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka were receiving aid from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, whose people shared ties of blood and culture with them. Compounding her problems was the police brutality shown Harijans and criminals, who had little recourse in the courts, and when they did, trials seemed to drag on forever. Indira’s critics could hardly be blamed for believing that the prime minister was now abandoning Harijans and Muslims to win upper caste Hindu votes. To mobilize voters in the coming state elections and to realize her hopes for a dynastic succession, she searched for solutions to religious and ethnic issues by identifying herself even more closely with Hindu nationalist sentiment. The revival of Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of Sikh militancy in Punjab aroused Hindu fears, especially in northern India. It appeared politically wise to have her nationalist rhetoric take on an even stronger pro-Hindu stance, like that of Janata. Certainly the symbols and slogans used by the government, first in the Jammu and Kashmir elections of 1982, then against Sikh leaders in Punjab, were those associated with Hindu nationalism. 22 She repeated the precedent set by Janata in 1977 and upheld by the Supreme Court, where the party routed in national elections (then the Congress) was found to have forfeited its right to rule at the state level. Indira did the same, sacking Janata ministries, calling for new state elections, and winning them. In Kashmir, by bribing legislators, the prime minister engineered the collapse of a democratically elected government. In Punjab, where Sikhs were in the majority (although they comprised only two percent of the total Indian population), the Sikh party, allied with Janata, had formed a government. It was sacked by

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Indira, and the return of her Congress Party to power in Punjab left Sikhs enraged. She dismissed criticism that she was stooping to the level of her opponents. All other crises were minor compared to that created by Sikh demands for independence—or failing that, for greater autonomy in their own Sikh- speaking state. From the second half of 1981 onward, Sikhs were to be her chief concern, and, ultimately, to take her life. Because of their beards and turbans, Sikhs were the most visible of the many Indian minorities. Their religion, unlike Hinduism, was a revealed one, founded by the mystic Nanak, the first guru (the word in Hindi means teacher, and Sikh means disciple) over 400 years ago. Combining elements of Hinduism and Islam and seeking to reconcile both, it spread rapidly in the Punjab region where Nanak was born. Adhering to monotheism and believing that all religions posed a basic similarity, he downplayed idolatry, ritual, and a priesthood in favor of religious exercises and meditation as ways to reach out to God. At the time of the fifth guru, the religious shrine known as Harimandir, the Golden Temple, was built, and around it grew the holy city of Amritsar, for Sikhs what Mecca is to Muslims and the Vatican to Catholics. After that guru was tortured by a Mogul emperor, the Sikhs turned militaristic and created an army. The tenth guru wielded the Sikhs into a formidable fighting force; set forth demands for an independent state; and to keep a Sikh identity (prompted by fears of Muslim persecution and reabsorption into Hinduism), forbade males to cut their hair or shave. During World War II and although afraid that Indian independence would result in Hindu control, Sikhs gave full support to the British. Their contribution went unrecognized. The subsequent partition of the subcontinent gave west Punjab to Pakistan and east Punjab—where Sikhs outnumbered Hindus—to India. No separate Sikh state was created. (It was Nehru’s life-long policy not to yield to communal demands for separation but to create and preserve the unity of the new nation.) In 1966, ostensibly to satisfy Sikh demands but also to rally the Sikh population in border areas, Mrs. Gandhi’s government had split India’s Punjab (Nehru had anticipated but resisted this) into two states: a tiny Punjab, with its Sikh majority; and Haryana, with a Hindu majority. The centrally administered capital of Chandigarh was to be shared by Punjab and Haryana. The Sikhs were understandably furious, and their Akali Dal (Eternal Party) political movement gained popularity by renewed calls for an independent state. 23

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Their humiliation was all the more difficult to bear because hardworking Sikhs had given Punjab (the smaller state created in 1966) the highest per capita income in all of India, with more automobiles, tractors, and TV sets than in half a dozen of India’s larger, but more backward, states combined. Moreover, with their 2 percent of the total population, Sikhs supplied over 10 percent of the officers in the Indian Army. Despite this aff luence, or more likely because of it, the Aklai Dal, which controlled the holy shrines of Sikhism, continued to grow in strength and numbers. It had opposed Indira’s repressive autocracy during the Emergency, and when its leaders allied themselves with Janata and were elected to govern Punjab, replacing Congress, it left Mrs. Gandhi’s party embittered. This was the context in which Indira accepted the plan put forth by Sanjay and Zail Singh, Indira’s home minister and subsequent president of India—the first Sikh elected to that post—to undermine Aklai leadership by sponsoring an unknown young fundamentalist, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. If he could defy the established Aklai leadership, he might divide the Sikhs and reduce, if not eliminate, their political challenge to Congress. A thirty-year- old orthodox preacher with penetrating dark eyes and a long silken, black beard, Bhindranwale was a fundamentalist who wanted to “purify” Sikhism and return it to its orthodox, uncontaminated state. A demagogue, he quickly acquired a large number of die-hard followers, and Sanjay and Zail Singh (covertly) supported them and their leader. Indira agreed: faced with the restive Sikh party in Punjab, she deliberately set out to undermine it by sponsoring opponents even more Sikh than the Akalis. It corresponded with her new nationalism, designed to promote Hindu solidarity and so win the support of a majority of the population. 24 As Bhindranwale’s ambition grew with his strength, these extremists got out of hand. In 1981, he declared his independence: he would no longer to be a tool of Congress. His career seemed short lived when after having arranged for the assassination of a hostile newspaper chain owner on September 9 of that year, he was arrested. Angry protest demonstrations in Punjab persuaded the government to have him released three weeks later. Bhindranwale’s status was consequently elevated to that of a national hero who felt free to step up violence in the cause of an independent state. The illiterate thirty-two year- old Sikh preacher whom Sanjay had promoted to undermine the antiCongress Sikh ruling party in Punjab had turned against his sponsors and declared war on India. Soon, Indira would have no choice but to go after him. 25

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The assassination of the critical newspaper publisher was an opening salvo in the violent agitation for Punjabi independence. A holy war had begun. Hindus were murdered. Cows were decapitated, with their heads thrown into temples. Hit lists were published of those targeted for assassination, causing panic and the migration of Hindus from the state. Not only Hindus, but moderate Sikhs were murdered as well. Early in 1984, Bhindranwale and armed followers took control of the Golden Temple’s Akal Takht (Immortal Tower), a sixteenth- century holy site and pilgrimage center for Sikhs in Amritsar and vowed not to leave until New Delhi granted Punjab full autonomy. Terrorist squads emerged from this sanctuary to massacre Hindus, desecrate their temples, loot, and set fire to their villages. By the following May 1984, hundreds had been killed, and Mrs. Gandhi’s government faced a secessionist challenge. The arrival of international TV crews and journalists in Amritsar made Brindranwale a media star. Once capable of swift action, Indira hesitated. As attempts at negotiations failed, she sought advice from all quarters, even from academics opposed to her, leaving millions of Indians frustrated by Madam’s inability to take “strong action” against terrorism. 26 Indira made one last effort at a peaceful resolution when she offered a major concession to the Akalis: the government would give Chandigarh (the capital shared by Sikh Punjab and Hindu Haryana) to Punjab alone, but on the condition that Bhindranwale accept the deal before it was announced. He refused and demanded the establishment of a theocratic state in secular India. When the Akalis cut transport and communication lines in the area, there seemed to be no alternative to military action, and the government was finally reconciled to it. On June 2, the prime minister made a speech to the nation describing the murders, looting, and arson that had taken place and the use of the shrine as a shelter for criminals who, she said, threatened national unity. She blamed the failure of negotiations on the intransigence shown by Bhindranwale: because of his opposition, no agreement would hold. If that were so, one might ask, then why negotiate at all? The question was never answered. Some of her critics argued that although both sides were close to an agreement, it was she who backed out. The reason? Her desire to keep the “Punjab pot boiling” and avoid a settlement until Rajiv could be given credit for it. Insofar as this explanation is valid, it reinforces the notion that Indira Gandhi self- destructed because of her wish to promote a dynastic succession. Was the decision to attack the Temple made, in part, because it provided an opportunity for Indira to “stoke up Hindu xenophobia.” A general election was scheduled

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for late 1984, and to secure Hindu votes, the “Punjab problem” had to be resolved. Success in war always added votes, and her “strong action” would rally the Hindu majority. Was she inspired by memories of victory in the Bangladesh War of 1971? Certainly, she won much respect from Hindus when the assault on the Sikh terrorists was finally launched. Finally, as noted earlier, since Sanjay’s death she had become more fatalistic. Although always courageous and seemingly dismissive of threats, had she, in fact, lost much of her attachment to life? In any event, although later criticized for ordering the attack, at the time, a vast majority, including the public; the media; and by now, even many political opponents, approved. 27 Whatever the explanation(s), there was no response from Bhrinrandale, and the operation code-named “Bluestar” opened on June 5 to f lush the terrorists out. After a hundred Indian commandos were killed by Bhindranwale’s well-protected forces, tanks rolled into the sacred Sikh temple grounds. They relentlessly fired at the Akalm Takht until Bhindranwale and all his followers—as well as hundreds of innocent pilgrims trapped inside—were either dead or had f led from the burning tower, once the sacrosanct seat of Sikh authority. The combat lasted for two days and nights, resulting in an estimated thousand civilian deaths and many more wounded. Bhindranwale’s body was found amidst the others. Between 300 and 700 soldiers, in addition to the Special Force commandos, also died. The irreplaceable library of Sikh Scripture was burned. In Sikh eyes, the attack was the equivalent of sending tanks into St. Peter’s in Rome or against the Kaaba in Mecca. In authorizing Operation Blue Star, Mrs. Gandhi knew she had likely signed her death warrant. She had a long-held conviction that she was destined for a violent end. When as early as 1973, meeting with Fidel Castro, news arrived in New Delhi of Allende’s murder. Indira told the Cuban, “What they’ve done to Allende they want to do to me also.” She repeated this publicly, in a sanitized version, after the 1975 massacre in Dacca of President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family members, and again after the Bhutto execution in 1979. And there had been two attempts on her life: one in mid-April 1980 when an unemployed youth threw a knife; and another, six months earlier, when a cable was cut on her plane about to leave on a promotion tour. But any conspiracy claims were widely disbelieved. 28 This premonition that death was near had led Indira to speak about the possibility of assassination with Rajiv and Sonia and write out instructions for her funeral. Yet she appeared calm, as if resigned to her

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fate. A few days after her death, sheets of paper with her spidery handwriting were found containing the will she had penned shortly before. Although Indira had written, “I never felt less like dying,” she firmly rejected the proposal of her defense minister to have her security transferred from the police to the army. In a democracy, she remonstrated, the armed forces were kept “well out.” Similarly, when the head of the government’s intelligence bureau ordered all Sikh security men removed from duty at 1 Safdarjung Road, she immediately rescinded the order. “Am I a secular head of a secular state or not,” she had scribbled. The Sikh guards remained. 29 Although Indira was not outwardly religious, Pupul Jayakar described her as now performing (secretly) a Hindu ritual, a recitation of thousands of verses to invoke the primordial power and energy of Chandri, the all- encompassing mother in whose sanctuaries she sought protection for her deceased son. For Jayakar, Sanjay remained the key that explained her behavior, the son whose death had “left her shriveled.”30 After Operation Blue Star, Madam ceased making future appointments. On November 19, 1984, she paid a short sentimental visit to Kashmir, primarily to look at an old tree she had admired since childhood. When she learned the tree had died, she took it as an omen and told Jayakar that she wanted her ashes “strewn over the mountains.” She did not expect to see her sixty- seventh birthday.31 Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on October 31, Prime Minister Gandhi started her last walk from the house inside the walled compound of New Delhi’s best-protected area, a walk that led along a garden path to the Abkar Road office building. She was to meet actor- director Peter Ustinov for a video interview, the reason, presumably, she was not wearing her bulletproof jacket. Subinspector of Security, Beant Singh, a Sikh member of her guard for nine years, opened the gate. She smiled and folded her hands in greeting. He lifted his hand as if to salute. The hand held a revolver. He shot her in the abdomen at a distance of three feet. An instant later, Constable Satwant Singh appeared and fired twenty-five bullets from a Sten gun. One of the guards raised his arms and declared: “I have done what I had to do. Now you do what you like.” It was his way of saying that on behalf of the Sikhs, he had avenged the gross sacrilege committed at the Golden Temple. She was dead on arrival at the hospital, although surgeons futilely worked for hours, using up most of their blood supplies. The announcement of death was delayed until 2:30 p.m. By then, Rajiv had returned from West Bengal, and senior colleagues had assembled. If Sikhs in

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London and Texas were photographed cheering the assassination, for their counterparts in Delhi and across Northern India, it marked the start of a bloodbath. As word spread, rampaging mobs of Hindu hoodlums took to the streets of Delhi. Screaming “blood for blood,” they poured kerosene over every Sikh they saw, setting people, cars, stores, and homes on fire. They dragged bearded Sikhs from their homes and butchered them in front of their wives and children. (Many of those who survived did so because they had shaved their beards and discarded their turbans.) For three days and nights, India’s capital was the most lawless, terrorridden place on earth as arsonists and killers ran free, stimulated by self-righteous avengers of the fallen prime minister. The police on the scene, if they did not participate, looked the other way. Perhaps three thousand Sikhs were murdered in Delhi, and witnesses reported thousands of corpses in ravaged suburbs. The entire government seemed to have collapsed with her. President Zail Singh, at the time abroad in Yemen, rushed home when he heard the news. Rajiv had been sworn in as prime minister the evening of the assassination. That he should take over from Indira seemed as inevitable as a law of nature, though there was no precedent for his direct inheritance of power. (After the deaths of Nehru and Shastri, an interim prime minister had taken charge before a new head of government was elected by the Congress Parliamentary Party.) At forty, possessing no political experience, he was nine years younger than his mother had been when she assumed the office and eighteen years younger than Nehru. Not until November 3, when Rajiv put the torch to the funeral pyre, did the orgy of anti- Sikh violence end. The army was finally called out and ordered to shoot gangs of looters or killers on sight. And as the tanks came into view, the gangs disappeared. More than two years later, an investigatory tribunal recommended that no criminal action be taken against any culprits. Its report read more like an apology for official inaction than as a condemnation of “antisocial” behavior. Epilogue Indira’s efforts to create short-term advantages for Congress by promoting Sikh nationalism resulted in her death. Her similar efforts to advance the cause promoted by Sri Lankan guerrillas led to that of her older son.

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The assassination generated more sympathy for women candidates in the parliamentary elections that Rajiv scheduled for December. Although Sonia tearfully begged her husband not to run, he believed it was his duty. Congress (I) campaigned on the sentimental slogan, “Remember Indira” and won a greater victory than any Indira would have won. Rajiv’s sister-in-law, Maneka, Sanjay’s widow, challenged him in his Uttar Pradesh constituency but was easily defeated. In the greatest landslide victory in India’s history, Rajiv led his party to victory, getting 400 of 500 seats in the Lok Sabha. Not only was there condolence extended to him as Indira’s son and posthumous homage by a grieving nation but also support in the wake of his promise to provide both continuity and change. Moreover, he was seen as a hero, especially by women, for having married his own choice of wife. (By 1988, seventy-four women constituted almost 10 percent of all members of Parliament, the highest percentage since independence. Still, almost all enjoyed relationships to important men, and most would have little inf luence.)32 To show that he was progressive, Rajiv (in contrast to his mother) created a new ministry for women and social welfare and selected a woman to run it. The youthful prime minister also staked out a claim as India’s first technocratic politician, a claim buttressed by the cutting of much red tape, putting an end to licensing delays for imports of technology and promoting a reduction in taxes on wealth and inheritance. The country came to embrace the market liberalism that was so popular in the 1980s and which marked an end to the socialist rhetoric relied on for so long by Nehru and his daughter. However, the wave of enthusiasm on which he first rode dissipated as compromise followed compromise. There were charges of corruption in a major arms contract with the Swedish firm Bofors. A seventy-five-year old divorced Muslim woman won a Supreme Court decision requiring her husband to give her (the equivalent of $5 a month) alimony. Persuaded by his party, which feared losing the Muslim vote, Rajiv bowed to outraged Muslim orthodoxy and sponsored a law putting Muslim widows outside the civil code. His peace accords with rebellious Sikhs in Punjab, agitating students in Assam, and unreconciled guerillas in Mizoram, may have strengthened the country but undermined his party. By bringing disaffected minorities into the mainstream, he gave them power at the expense of Congress, and veteran politicians grumbled. But because Rajiv and his technocratic young friends drained the treasury in wasteful ventures intended to take India into the twenty-first century; because he committed the Indian army to a futile war in Sri Lanka; and because

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of repeated allegations of corruption, his government in 1989 had to yield to a union of opposition parties, including one committed to the cause of Hindu nationalism. The doom- swept story of Indira Gandhi and her sons came to an end on the night of May 21, 1991. The forty- six year- old Rajiv was in Madras, on the last leg of a series of popular campaign rallies undertaken to return Congress to power, and his party was predicted to win in new elections held that year. Like his grandfather and mother, he preferred to move into the crowds that had gathered to hear him. A young darkcomplexioned Tamil woman approached, apparently to place a garland around his neck. As she bowed before him she triggered a belt of explosives concealed beneath her clothes, blowing to bits Rajiv, herself, and eighteen others. The assassin was a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a terrorist group in Sri Lanka angered by India’s efforts to put down their insurgency. Rajiv was cremated two days later, his son Rahul lighting the funeral pyre. The dynasty that began with Nehru came to an end with the death of Indira Gandhi’s son and successor. Or had it? A year later, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, begged by fractious party chiefs to assume the leadership, was elected to Parliament. Twelve years later, in 2004, although having evoked a rapturous response in the electoral campaign fought that year, Sonia Gandhi chose not to become prime minister but remains party leader. And her daughter, Priyanka, seen by her admirers as a clone of Indira, reputedly more ambitious than her older brother, Rahul, is said to harbor political ambitions of her own.

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Conclusions

I

n his massive Study of History, metahistorian Arnold Toynbee says that the careers of extraordinary individuals are normally marked by phases of “withdrawal and return.” He added that “such a withdrawal may be a voluntary action,” or it may be “forced by circumstances beyond their control.” Regardless, they go back to the environment out of which they came, ready for renewed greatness.1 The fall of Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Indira Gandhi, the three heads of government discussed in this book, as well as those of the other twentieth- century leaders referred to in the preface, questions Toynbee’s assertion that the withdrawal might well be voluntary. Initially, Obasanjo may have been sincere in his attempts to leave politics behind and go raise chickens. Yet, resignation to his fate, if it existed at all, was short lived. Within months, Obasanjo had plunged into public activities, receiving prominent Nigerians and other Africans on his farm. And either from the outset or soon afterwards, the other two leaders were actively planning to reinstate themselves in office: Palme led his Social Democrats in opposition to their newly elected rivals, and Gandhi toured the country in a quest for reaffirmation, visiting as many constituencies as possible. While each account ref lects the individuality of the circumstances that prompted a fall and subsequent rise, the outlines of a pattern in the careers of the eight leaders nevertheless emerge. Still, commonalities should be taken more as empirically based observations than theoretical constructs leading to any taxonomy of political restoration. At best, they can provide material supporting such an effort. Each former leader, sooner or (in Obasanjo’s case) later, began planning and working to return to power. (The Nigerian’s timely involvement in continental and then in global matters kept his name in prominence, although whether done with this aim in mind is an open question.) All held a vision of how their nation could profit from stronger federal

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or regional structures. Obasanjo and Gandhi, in one form or another, produced memoirs of their term(s) in office. 2 These memoirs were selfserving, designed either to present their vision for their country (in Obasanjo’s case, continent as well), or to further their chances for a political revival or both. The two had to confront regional, ethnic, religious, and economic divisions within their respective nations, but all three believed in the larger role to be played by the state in the national economy. All voiced concern over foreign policy initiatives taken by the United States. The errors made and the disunity shown by their opponents eased their return to power. A shared conviction that each was peculiarly well equipped to overcome a national crisis contributed immeasurably to their political resurrections and accounted for their insistence on strong centralized government. Sympathy earned from having experienced unjust imprisonment helped send Obasanjo and Gandhi back to office. Lessons learned by all three from their “interments” included mastering the art of mending broken reputations and improving communication skills. This period thus provided experiences and developed attitudes that helps to explain their extraordinary comebacks. Ascent to Power: Gandhi, in her early parliamentary career, was dismissed and derided as an incompetent. Like Obasanjo, she was designated to head the government by powerful men who believed they could control their choice. Like Gandhi, Obasanjo gained ground against the northern godfathers by using the powers of the presidency to ally with some of them and to undermine others. Palme’s rise, furthered by a forceful mentor, was more direct, overcoming only minor opposition within his own party and beholden to no one. Left Leaning: Although having emerged from privileged backgrounds, Palme and Gandhi soon turned to the Left. Their political roots, which were based on distinct personality types, let them operate beyond their class—and times. Obasanjo, in contrast, came from very modest origins. Whether the result of sincere belief or participation in a common quest for consensus politics, all three at one time or another shared or came to embrace elements of socialism or social democracy, or at the very least, the legitimacy of strong government intervention in the economy. Obasanjo, Palme, and Gandhi believed that nation- states, Third World or otherwise, should be subject neither to Western capitalism nor Soviet communism but find their own course (although for Palme, democratic socialism was the obvious choice). They also maintained a Cold War

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Conclusions

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stance that ranged from self-proclaimed neutrality to less than fervent support for Washington’s overseas objectives. Insistence on Preserving National Unity: Obasanjo and Gandhi shared a clearly expressed desire for national unity and an impassioned effort to retain it—and so keep the existent state together. Both had to confront strong divisions within their respective nations, but all three held a vision of how their country could profit from stronger federal structures. Indeed, well-founded threats of national disintegration obsessed such heads of government as Obasanjo and Gandhi. A wish to overcome ethnic, social, and economic differences and promote national unity inspired both their rise and political resurrections. Obasanjo faced tribal and religious struggles in his quest to preserve the federal republic. Having made his military reputation by leading government forces against the secessionist Biafran state, he predicted that tribalism would become obsolete and that Nigeria—and eventually all of Africa—would move, as he put it, from “the politics of ethnicity to the politics of nationalism . . . and resource creation.” His esteem for the military was based in large part on his belief that in a nation like his, where fragmentation from tribal and ethnic differences threatened, the armed forces provided needed insurance against it, as the means by which national unity could be maintained in a pluralistic democracy.3 He worked to overcome discord between Yoruba and Hausa and between Muslim and Christian. Gandhi worked to overcome the problems among Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh (although she ultimately came to promote the majority Hindu preference). Palme dealt with and imposed his views on the issue of Swedish neutrality in the Cold War as an expression of national self-identity. He eased immigration restrictions on—and furthered the integration of—immigrants from south Europe and such political dissidents from Asia as Kurds and Vietnamese. Indira Gandhi claimed that she decided to run for prime minister when she saw both the strengthening of ethnic—in contrast to national—ties and the Congress Party’s drift to the right as betrayals of her father’s socialist principles. Despite earlier protestations of unfitness, she saw herself as Nehru’s natural successor and promised to continue his policies. “I am a representative of all India,” she said, “which includes all shades of opinion.” She believed that her father, like Mohandas Gandhi, had always regarded “communalism”—the allegiance to one’s ethnic group rather than to the society as a whole—as perhaps the greatest danger to India’s survival. Both Nehru and his daughter held this communal spirit as responsible for the partition of India in 1947 and for the weakening of the national idea.

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Promotion of national unity and strong centralized government both issued from, and resulted in, a tendency toward authoritarianism. Gandhi was accused of dictatorial aims. “In India,” she said, “democracy has given too much license to people,” and announced that the Indian state had “to ensure that our educational processes, the books we read, the radio we hear, the films we see do not distort the Indian mind but lead to integration and solidarity.”4 She called for the nationalization of banking and the elimination of subsidies for princes and maharajahs, while the well-funded Intelligence Bureau, to ensure her hold on power, was ordered to spy on opponents. She fought Communists in Kerala and Sikhs in Punjab. “Sometimes,” she was on record as saying, “bitter medicine has to be administered to a patient to cure him.” In the struggle waged against separatist tendencies throughout his adult life, from Igbo hopes for an independent Biafra to opposition to varied forms of tribalism, Obasanjo opposed the aspirations of his fellow Yorubas. Belief in the Larger Role to Be Played by the State in the National Economy: Accordingly, each demanded that their country have greater command of its own resources, to set controls over the marketplace, and pursue a policy of economic nationalism to make their nation more economically self- sufficient. Obasanjo sought greater state dominance of oil. The issue that weighed was whether ownership belonged to the nation or to the region from which it came. Like the predecessors he denounced, he denied Nigerians in the Delta their right to greater economic self-determination through the state created for them. In what proved a major contradiction between the federal nature of the Nigerian polity and the unitary nature of its funding, he insisted that the 95 percent of Nigerian foreign exchange derived from oil revenues accrue to the federal government. Federal funds, in turn, would go to the state and local governments that depend on it, but the formula for disbursing such funds remains contentious. This is as central to the issue of federalism and state creation as ethnicity. Gandhi, too, sought greater state authority with her Ten and Twenty Point Programs and management of the grain trade. Her government nationalized coking coal, shipping, an iron and steel company, and set up a state- controlled textile corporation. Even so, if possessed in varying degrees of an “authoritarian personality,” each of them permitted the democratic election that deprived them of power. Breaking with Their Party: Palme’s hopes to serve as head of government were momentarily threatened by his more radical stand (in contrast to others in his party) taken on Vietnam. Gandhi twice broke with her Congress opponents and twice split her party. Obasanjo broke

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with his fellow Yorubas to serve what he regarded as a larger national purpose. Wish to Return to Power: With the possible exception of Obasanjo, each from the outset planned and worked to return to power—and he, too, soon changed his mind about withdrawing from political activism. Use of “Memoirs” to Advance Their Resurrections: In one form or another, aside from Palme, all produced memoirs of their first term in office after their fall from it.5 The memoirs were written to gain or retain attention. Obasanjo, who had previously published his account as a general in the Biafran civil war, published his memoir of his first term in office as the campaign for the secretary- general of the UN got underway. He also used it as a vehicle to express his policies and beliefs for all Africa and on behalf of human rights and regional self- discipline. He named names and was sued for slander by one of the figures discussed. If published as part of an effort to get the UN job, it also served the purpose of retelling his activities as head of state and presenting his vision for Nigeria. In 1980, after her fall from power, Gandhi authorized publication of a memoir based on previously given interviews and other sources, an account to which she contributed a lengthy closing segment entitled, “The India of My Dreams.” Moving to an Emphasis on Foreign Policy: Whether deliberately conceived or not, all kept their names before the public by demonstrating an interest—opponents called it an obsession—in foreign matters. Although he had long held an interest in Third World developments, Palme was accused of showing excessive involvement in international, as opposed to Swedish, problems. Obasanjo, in pursuit of larger African goals, was sometimes ridiculed for neglecting Nigerian concerns. The latter’s international reputation soared after his voluntary retirement from the military and after relinquishing power to a civilian government. He was invited to serve on (and often chaired) various international committees ranging from Transparency International, an organization that set up anticorruption movements in various African countries, to the African Leadership Forum based in Ota. He also served as peace broker in Angola, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zaire. Obasanjo sought African unity, the departure of colonial powers, and the strengthening of peacekeeping efforts by the Organization for African Unity. Mrs. Gandhi resented persistent U.S. support of Pakistan. Along with Palme (although not as fiercely), she opposed America’s Vietnam policy. Twice in late 1976, during the Nixon and Ford administrations, the Obasanjo government not only rejected Secretary of State Kissinger’s

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proposed Anglo-American peace plan for settling the Rhodesian crisis but refused to allow the secretary to visit Lagos during the latter’s shuttle diplomacy concerning southern Africa. The Nigerian president insisted that before its “chief architect” would be invited, U.S. policy had to change “to reflect the broad interests of Africa.” Lessons Learned: At first, the defeats were found crushing, for some a blow to the ego and a cause for personal depression. For Palme and Gandhi, their party’s defeat ended years, even decades, of rule by their respective parties; for Obasanjo, his resignation brought an end to years of military rule. But, again, any personal retreat was short lived. If Obasanjo went to his farm, Gandhi toured Indian constituencies, while Palme worked from the outset to regain office. Before returning to power, all seemed even more focused on promoting a greater national identity for their people. Obasanjo worked more tirelessly for human—if not for legislative—rights than he did in his first presidency. He would cross ethnic and religious lines to define a national vision that encompassed continent-wide concerns. Gandhi, too, worked for a stronger federal government and a larger place on the world stage for India. This period provided experiences and developed attitudes that helps to explain their extraordinary comebacks. Gandhi learned the importance of proper decorum. She worked on improving personal public relations and played on her identity as Mother India. Palme’s resurrection came with the Social Democrats’ 1982 election victory. While softening the hard-line previously taken, particularly with regard to the employees’ investment funds, he, too, now avoided making personal attacks. Whether their ideals, ambition, reputation, or love of country did most to lead them back to office, when out of it, these leaders made the necessary changes that would further the likelihood of their political resurrections. The interments provided opportunities for improvement; rejuvenation of ambition and ideals; and increased status, ranging from a greater reliance on diplomacy to a different campaign style. (This attested to Toynbee’s insistence that “the withdrawal was an opportunity, and perhaps a necessary condition” for what he called a “transfiguration.”)6 Errors of Opponents Eased Return: The failure of successor regimes in Sweden, India, and Nigeria (where they ultimately gave way to dictatorship) ensured the return of the fallen leaders. The errors made and the disunity shown by opponents—and outbreaks of civil strife in the last two named countries—contributed significantly to their political resurrections. Noteworthy was their successors’ inability to counter

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the sympathy of the public for the fallen leader. On the contrary, the military governments in Nigeria, as well as the Janata government in India, thanks to their persecution or continued hounding of their defeated or deposed predecessors, contributed to the latters’ resurrections. Sympathy Earned for Past Experiences: The fallen leaders experienced growing popularity with voters, who came to believe that they owed the leader a debt for past sacrifices: Obasanjo, for a successful military career and international stature but above all, for having previously yielded power; Palme, for the role played by Sweden on the world stage but more importantly (and less controversially), for the forceful leadership shown and the economic prosperity maintained. The housing bubble growing in the 1980s that led to an economic crisis the following decade went largely unrecognized at the time. The sympathy earned from having experienced unjust imprisonment (Obasanjo, Mrs. Gandhi) helped to send them back to office. Self- confidence in Times of Crisis: A shared conviction that each was peculiarly well equipped to overcome a national crisis contributed immeasurably to their political resurrection. A Time of Crisis Necessary for the Emergence of a Charismatic Leader: Necessary for a political restoration is a popular perception of a crisis that the fallen leader appears peculiarly well equipped to resolve: Obasanjo, the necessity of transferring power from the military to a democratically elected government, as well as concerns over continued threats to ethnic and political unity; Palme, the unemployment, inf lation, and continued high taxes that marked the regimes of his successors and disappointed those who had voted their parties our of office; Gandhi, ethnic conf lict and fears of national fragmentation, as well a return to crime and corruption. Epilogue: Assassinations Seen as a Collective Disaster (in the Short Term): Gandhi and Palme were assassinated. In each case, a ritual repertoire was followed that included a display of f lowers, public mourning, and support for the assassinated leader’s immediate successors.7 In Sweden, for example, there was an unprecedented increase in church attendance, which had dwindled for decades. Palme’s successor, Ingvar Carlsson, got record-high approval ratings in the weeks following the assassination. So did Gandhi’s successor, her surviving son, Rajiv. Both (initially) enjoyed widespread support, and the victims’ parties, whether Social Democrats or Congress, thus retained and (for a time) strengthened their hold on power. 8

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But although the victims were held in higher regard after their assassinations than ever before, this esteem did not last. Each continued to evoke strong feelings of partisanship, and the assassination did not prove critical in reshaping the voters’ bases for their evaluations. Political scientists conclude that “critical events have a limited rather than a major long-term effect on attitudes towards fallen political leaders.” 9 As time passes, the effect of the assassination fades, and attitudes return to what they were. Palme, Gandhi, (and, it can be added, Yitzhak Rabin) are not only remembered as murder victims but also as formidable and ideologically oriented political leaders who fell from and rose again to political power.

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Preface 1. This list is not exhaustive: Benezir Bhutto, Daniel Ortega, and Fulgencio Battista are among others whose political careers were resurrected after falling from power.

1

Olof Palme: “Moral Duty Is Discontent on a Large Scale”: Creation

1. Hans Haste, Olof Palme (Paris: Descartes et Cie., 1994), 25. tr. of Haste, Boken om Olof Palme. Hans Liv, Hans Gärning, Hans Död (Stockholm: Tiden, 1986). Chris Mosey, Cruel Awakening: Sweden and the Killing of Olof Palme (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 80. 2. Olof Ruin, Tage Erlander: Serving the Welfare State, 1946–1949 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 53–54. 3. Olof Palme, La Rendez-vous suedois. Conversations avec Serge Richard (Paris: Stock: 1976), 40. 4. Palme, Rendez- vous, 14, 29–30. 5. Christer Isaksson, Palme Privat. I skuggan av Erlander (Falun: Ekerlios Förlag, 1995), 146. Haste, 37. 6. Isaksson, 147–148. 7. Robert Dalsjö. Life- Line Lost. The Rise and Fall of ‘Neutral’ Sweden’s Secret Reserve Option of Wartime Help from the West. Stockholm: Santérus Academic Press, 2006), 23. Modification of Swedish neutrality policy started early in the Cold War. Washington began applying economic pressure (delays and even stoppages of exports), which together with political and strategic considerations prompted Swedish acknowledgment of “ideological affirmation” in the West – although not participation in NATO, as the State Department had wished. Birgit Karlsson, “Neutrality and Economy: The Redefining of Swedish Neutrality, 1946–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 32: 1 (1995), 42, 46. 8. NSC 6006/1.Statens Offentliga Utredningar (hereafter, SOU – published reports by official commissions), discussed by Dalsjö. The Kennedy administration replaced NSC 6006/1 with a slightly stronger commitment.)

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9. Simon Moores, “Neutral on our Side: US Policy towards Sweden during the Eisenhower Administration,” Cold War History vol. 2 no. 3, (April, 2002), 29–62. 10. This second motive is emphasized by Nils Bruzelius, a Swedish defense specialist, in a draft article he kindly sent to me. 11. “Hemliga atomubåtar gav Sverige säkerhetsgaranti–Secret Nuclear Submarines Guaranteed Swedish Security,” Framsyn [The Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) bimonthly publication] 2005, No. 1. English translation available at the FOI website, www.foi.se, under “Polaris Diplomacy.”) 12. Nils Bruzelius, “Near Friendly or Neutral Shores: the deployment of the f leet ballistic missile submarines and US policy towards Scandinavia, 1957–1963,” Licentiate thesis, 2007, Försvarshögskolan (National Defense College), Stockholm. Accessed at URL: http:// www.diva-portal.org/kth/ thesis/abstract.xsql?dbid=4308). 13. Dalsjö, Life- Line, xi, 182–183. 14. Ruin, 59–60, 134. 15. Haste, 41–42. Mosey, 87–88. 16. Haste, 45. 17. Hans Ingvar Johnsson, Spotlight on Sweden (Stockholm: The Swedish Institute, 1999), 143. 18. Bertil Östergren, Wem är Olof Palme. Ett politiskt porträtt (Södertälje: Fingraf AB, 1984) cited in Haste, 57. Ruin, 61. 19. Mosey, 100. 20. Mosey, 101. 21. Ali Farazmand, ed., Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration (New York: Marcel Denker, 2001), 176. 22. Haste, 53–55. 23. Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek–Labour Movement Archives and Library, The World in the Basement. International Material in Archives and Collections (Stockholm 2002), 52. 24. Arthur Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), 141. Dalsjö, Life-Line Lost, 93. 25. Ruin, 287. Haste, 55. 26. Mosey, 98. Ruin, 287. Johnsson, 122. 27. Klinghoffer, 143. Ron Eyerman, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press), 1996), 168, note 6. 28. Palme, Rendez- vous, 75–76. 29. Dalsjö, 95. 30. Palme, Rendez-vous, 77. 31. Dalsjö, 96. 32. This summation may be found in Dalsjö’s precis, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line to the West,” published by the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP) of the Center for Security Studies (CSS),

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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Zurich. Accessed at http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch-introduction). Also see his Life- Line Lost, 93–96, 102–103. Dalsjö, Life- Line, 75–81, 274–76. Haste, 69, 71. Ruin, 158. Haste 66. Haste, 73, Mosey, 108, 109. Mosey, 113, 116. Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 289. Alf W. Johansson and Norman Torbjörn, “Socialism and Internationalism . . . Social Democracy and Foreign Policy,” in Klaus Misgeld, Creating Social Democracy. A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden (University Park, PA. Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1972), 365. Palme, Rendez- vous, 100–101. Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” Svenska Dagbladet, July 29, 2007. Framsyn Magazine, published by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). Accessed at http://www.foi.se/ FOI/templates/Page1622.aspx, 2005, No. 1. SOU 2002:108, 275–299, cited in Dalsjö, Life- Line Lost, 194–195. Wilhelm Agrell, Fred och fruktan. Sveriges säkerhetspolitiska historia, 1918– 2000 Lund: Historiska Media, 2000, p. 180, cited in Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” Dalsjö, Life- Line Lost, 213, 230. “Life-line Squandered.” Gunnar Heckscher, The Welfare State and Beyond: Success and Problems in Scandinavia (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 37–38. Haste, 72. Haste, 76. Mosey, 116–117. Arbetarrörelsens, 60. Mosey, 109–110. Minutes, Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsförbund SSO (Swedish Social Democratic Youth Organization) 20th Congress, p. 80, cited in Arbetarrörelsens, 57. Cited in Johnsson, 122. Mosey, 120. Misgeld, 368. Haste, 84. Palme, Rendez- vous, 79–80. Haste, 81. Haste, 83. Haste, 87. Palme, Rendez- vous, 110, 118, 121. Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme, La social- démocratie et l’avenir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 173–175, 177, 181–182. Nils Christie, A Suitable Amount of Crime (London: Routledge, 2004), 38. Misgeld, 367. Haste, 90. Palme, Rendez- vous, 119–123. Jan-Erik Lane, ed., Understanding the Swedish Model (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 61.

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1. Frans Berkhout, Radioactive Waste: Politics and Technology (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 103. 2. Mosey, 118, 119. 3. Berkhout, 104. Daniel B.Cornfield and Randy Hodson, eds., Worlds of Work: Building an International Sociology of Work (New York: Plenum Publishers, 2002), 331. 4. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 1996), 708–09. 5. Villy Bergström, “Party Program and Economic Policy: The Social Democrats in Government,” in Misgeld, 162–63. 6. Thage G. Peterson, Olof Palme som jag minns honom (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2002), 244. 7. Peterson, 247. 8. Mosey, 124–25. 9. Peterson, 271, 273. 10. Mosey, 125–26. 11. Berkhout, 105. 12. Mosey, 126. 13. Ruth Freeman, Death of a Statesman. The Solution to the Murder of Olof Palme (London: Robert Hale, Ltd., 1989), 168. 14. Haste, 97. 15. Haste, 98.

3


1. Peterson, 251. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references to the aftermath of the SAP defeat come from Peterson, 252–261. 2. Johansson, 143. 3. Gerhard Lembruch, ed., Renegotiating the Welfare State (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 123. 4. Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Lifeline.” 5. Dalsjö’s interview with Synnergren cited in Life- Line Lost, 223–225, 231. 6. Dalsjö, Life- Line Lost, 224, 234–235. “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” 7. Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” 8. Mosey, 128–129. Bjorn Elmbrant, Palme (Stockholm: Fischer and Rye, 1989), 204. 9. Ulf Jönson, “Africa in the Collections,” The World in the Basement: International Material in Archives and Collections Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek (Labour Movement Archives and Library), 2002, 66–67, 70.

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10. Senyo B.S.K. Adjibolosoo, The Significance of the Human Factor in African Economic Development (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), 194. 11. Socialist Affairs 26 (1976), 110. 12. Cited in Douglas Anglin, Canada, Scandinavia, and Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainsitutet, 1978), 11. 13. Misgeld, 367. 14. A review of correspondence of the three, Briefe und Gespräche. WB, BK, OP (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlangenstalt, 1975) appeared in Socialist Affairs 26 (1976), 26. 15. The so- called Third, or Communist, International (Comintern) was that established by Lenin in 1919 to gather the newly formed Communist Parties. The Second International, the work of democratic socialists opposed to Leninist communism, was revived the same year, and refurbished in 1946 as the Socialist International. 16. Socialist Affairs 28 (1978), 77. 17. Pierre Schori, The Impossible Neutrality: Sweden’s Role under Olof Palme (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip Publishers, 1994). Kofi Buenor Hadjor, ed., New Perspectives in North- South Dialogue. Essays in Honor of Olof Palme (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 256, 267, 272. 18. Hans Ingvar Johnsson, Spotlight on Sweden (Stockholm: The Swedish Institute, 1999), 86. 19. Östergren, 204. 20. Mosey, 129–131. 21. Haste, 94. Socialist Affairs 29 (1979), 77–82. 22. Richard, Le rendez- vous suédois, 111–115. 23. Haste, 104. Mosey, 131–132. 24. Dieter Strand, Med Palme: scener ur en partiledares liv (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1986), Mosey, 133–134. 25. Haste, 106. 26. Peterson, 260–262. 27. Palme, En levande vilja (Stockholm: Tiden, 1987), cited in Mosey, 137. 28. Socialist Affairs 30 (1980), 106. 29. Oscar Handlin, The Distortion of America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 80–81. The American hostages were released after Reagan administration took office in 1981. 30. Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1995), 248, 367. 31. Judith Fretter, “International Organizations and Conf lict Management . . .,” in Jacob Bercovitch, Studies in International Mediation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 113. 32. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 184. Arbetarrörelsens 32 (2002), 83. 33. Stellan Andersson, “An International Network,” Arbetarrörelsens, 83. 34. Elmbrandt, 236.

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35. Thomas M. Franck, “The Prerogative Power of the Secretary- General,” in Joseph Jude Norton, ed., Public International Law and the Future World Order (Southern Methodist Univ. Press, Dallas:1987), 39. Kevin M. Cahill, Preventive Diplomacy: Stopping Wars before They Start (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 27. 36. Socialist Affairs 32 (1982), 232. 37. Sassoon, 718–720. 38. Misgeld, 370. 39. Cited in Mosey, 149. 40. Mosey, 148.

4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.


Peterson, 264–266. Johnsson, 83. Sassoon, 710. Peterson, 265 Haste, 113–114. Peterson, 267. Strand, cited in Mosey, 150. Peterson, 268. Mosey, 150. Andreas Lowenfeld, International Economic Law (New York and London: Oxford U. Press, 2002), 536–537. Heckscher, 236. Donald F. Busky, Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey (Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2000), 37. Karl Molin, “Historical Orientation,” in Misgeld, xxxv–xxxvi. Sassoon, 711–713. Haste, 121–23. Mosey, 153–154. Johansson, 370. Misgeld, 370. Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” Dalsjö, Life- Line Lost, 239. The CNP’s report was published both in Swedish and English. Had there been a war . . . Preparations for the reception of military assistance 1949–1969. Report of the Commission on Neutrality Policy. Statens Offentliga Utredningar (SOU) (Stockholm: Fritzes, 1994), 11:264. The report was followed by another carrying the story to 1989. Peace and Security. Swedish Security Policy, 1969–1989. (Stockholm: Fritzes offentliga publikationer, 2004). Thunborg interview with CNP cited in Dalsjö, “Sweden’s Squandered Life-Line.” Andres Kung, “Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic States: A Report to the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation, April 13, 1999.” Accessed at http://www.rel.ee/eng/communism_crimes.htm.

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20. In 1999 (and again in 2003), a referendum calling for the euro to replace the krona failed to pass. 21. Mosey, 124, 154–55. 22. Allen Pred, Even in Sweden. Racism, Racialized Spaces and the Popular Geographical Imagination (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2000), 40. 23. Pred, 41. 24. Mosey, 155. 25. Stephen Padgett, William E. Patterson, A History of Social Democracy in Post-War Europe (London: Longman, 1991), 56–57. 26. Haste, 128–129. Mosey, 159. 27. Freeman, 31–35, 50. 28. Dalsjö interview with Ingvar Carlsson, in “Sweden’s Squandered LifeLine.” (Dalsjö, Life- Line Lost), 257. Rumors and stories of the ties to the West endured, and it was these that prompted the creation of a commission to verify or reject them. 29. Kofi Hadjor, ed., New Perspectives in North- South Dialogue. Essays in Honor of Olof Palme (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 3. 30. Speculative studies are discussed and criticized by Jan Bondeson (Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2005). See also H.H.A. Cooper and L.J. Redlinger, The Murder of Olof Palme (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003). Such speculation, accompanied by arrests and subsequent releases, ran rampant for months. The police found no evidence to support any of these theses, although many Swedes believe that the petty criminal and drug addicted Christer Petterson, cleared of the crime because of police blunders, was guilty. Gradually, the number of police investigators diminished. People thought of other things as Palme receded into the past as an historic personality. And by the end of the decade, Prime Minister Carlsson’s new and more cautious approach had reduced Sweden’s international role to more modest dimensions. With regard to the secret plans providing for Western aid in the event of Soviet aggression, the people who wanted to protect Palme’s memory limited any investigation. When Palme was shot, he was perhaps the only person in the government who held the secret, although he may have shared it with some ministers. (Framsyn, 2005, No. 1. Jan-Ivar Askelin, “Livlös Livlina till Väst–Lifeless Lifeline to the West,” Framsyn, 2004, No. 1.) Not until 1994 would the disclosure of an official commission designed to look into the matter confirm the existence of Swedish cooperation with the West.

5

Olusegun Obasanjo: “Look At What Has Become of This Country”: Creation

1. The New York Times, July 15, 1998. 2. Onukaba Adinoyi Ojo, In The Eyes of Time: A Biography of Olusegun Obasanjo (New York: Africana Legacy Press, 1997), 32–33. Akinjide

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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Notes

Osuntokun, Chief S. Ladoke Akintola. His Life and Times (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 177–178. However, Ojo carries the story only to 1975, to the start of Obasanjo’s first presidency. Ojo, 22, 43–45. Ojo, 79–83. Eghosa E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant. Nigeria since Independence (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 2, 6–12, 31. Osaghae, 18. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enegu: Fourth Division Publishers, 1998), 1. John Digby Clarke, Yakubu Gowan: Faith in a United Nigeria (London: F. Cass, 1987), 143. Ojo, 114–115. Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen. Midnight in Nigeria (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 13, 54. Ojo, 131. Obasanjo, My Command. An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Heinemann, 1981), xii–xiii, 102–146. Ojo, 154. Ojo, 158. Toyin Falola, The History of Nigeria (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 138, 142. Ojo,161. Ojo, 167–68. Falola, 147. Ojo, 182. Ojo, “Lest We Forget:The Obasanjo Years in Government,” in Hans D’Orville, Beyond Freedom. Letters of Olusegun Obasanjo (New York: Africa Leadership Foundation, 1996), 667. As the most senior of the three, Obasaanjo was initially asked by the colonels to lead the country, but he declined. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, Shehu Musa Yar Adua. A Life of Service (Abuja, 2004), 98. Ojo, 5, 185– 187. Obasanjo, Not My Will, (Ibadan: Ibadan Univ. Press), 5–6. Cited in Osaghae, 80. Olayiwola Abegunrin, Nigerian Foreign Policy under Military Rule, 1966– 1999 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 62. Osaghe, Crippled Giant, 79–87. Maier, 56. Ojo, 189–90. Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking (New York: Knopf, 2004), 32. Ojo, 196. Ojo, 191–193. Falola, 153, 159. Arthur Nwankwo, Before I Die: Olusegun Obasanjo/Arthur Nwankwo Correspondence on the One Party State (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishing Co., 1989), 212. Ojo, 22–24, 27. Yar’Adua, 122–123. Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2006), 185.

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243

29. Dan Agbese, 27–30, “Profile: Olusegun Obasajo” in Newswatch, 1999. Accessed at http://www.AFBIS.com/Newswatch/Profile.htm. 30. Harvey Glickman, ed., Political Leaders of Contemporary Africa South of the Sahara. A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 223. 31. Ojo, 28, 29. 32. Olusegun Obasanjo, Not My Will (Ibadan: University Press Ltd.: 1990), 169–170. Although often referred to as “president,” the military leaders who seized power called themselves “chief of state.” 33. Ojo, “Lest We Forget, 668. 34. Bennett Ade Odunsi, “The Impact of Leadership Instability on the Democratic Process in Nigeria,” in the Journal of Asian and African Studies 31 (June, 1996), 76. 35. Ojo, 192. Obasanjo, Not My Will,103–104. 36. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 65–66, 91. 37. Maier, This House, 15. 38. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 78. In practice, communal land, held in trust by traditional leaders and mostly in the south, was taken by officials who saw it as a new source of patronage. Yar’Adua, 106. 39. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 67–68, 83–88. 40. Ojo, “Lest We Forget,” 676. 41. Nwankwo, 152, 217. 42. Nwankwo, 215. 43. Ojo, in D’Orville, 675. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 88–89, 53. 44. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 1–2. 45. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 41, 46, 49–50, 103. 46. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 52. 47. Alan Rake, Who’s Who in Africa. Leaders for the 1990s (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 192), 254. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 62–63. 48. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, 15, 16. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 118. 49. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 102–103. 50. Abegunrin, 75. 51. Washington Post, October 15, 1997. Osagwae, 107. Africa News, Feb. 25, 1999. 52. Ojo, “Lest We Forget,” 678–79. Falola, 160. 53. Abgeunrin, 170. Ojo, 192–93. 54. Abegunrin, 73. 55. Not My Will, 132, 138. Osaghae, 107. 56. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 144–145. Abegunrin, 86–89. The New York Times, March 22, 1999. It was the UK’s colony of Southern Rhodesia which had unilaterally declared its independence in 1965 that became Zinbabwe. The former colony of Northern Rhodesia renamed itself Zambia the previous year. 57. Abegunrin, 91–92.

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6


1. Anthony Kirk- Greene, Douglas Rimmer, Nigeria since 1870: A Political and Economic Outline (New York: African Publishing Co., 1981), 29 (Italics mine.) 2. Rake, 254. 3. Rake, 254. 4. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 182–186. 5. French, 42, 43. Current Biography, July, 1999, 46. Jonothan Power, Like Water on a Stone: The Story of Amnesty International (Boston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001), 18. 6. Falola, 167. The subtitle of a Shagari biography is “President by Mathematics.” S. Labanji. Bolaji, (Ibadan: Automatic Printing Press, 1980). 7. Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 102–103. 8. Osaghae, 125–130. 9. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 181, 182. Obasanjo devoted an entire chapter (Nine) in his memoir to refuting Awolowo’s criticisms of the Shagari election. 10. “May 29, 2007 and Obasanjo: The Exit of the Best Nigeria Ruler So Far,” Nigeria World, May 21, 2007. Accessed at www.nigeriaworld.com/ articles/2007/may/21/html. 11. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 189–191. The letters are reproduced in an antiObasanjo account entitled Not His Will, a take- off on the title of Obasanjo’s book, by an Awolowo supporter, Ebenezer Babatope. He claimed that Obasanjo was noted for his fear of the North and its inf luential military officers, and had bowed to the group’s wishes. Not His Will: The Awolowo Obasanjo Wager (Benin City, Nigeria: Jodah House, 1991), 14. 12. Falola, 164. 13. Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, 99–100. Soyinka exaggerated Obasanjo’s alleged return to his tribal roots. 14. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 202. 15. Monsour Khalid, ed., Africa through the Eyes of a Patriot: A tribute to General Olusegun Obasanjo (London: Kegan Paul, 1999), 1–2, 8, 13. 16. Obasanjo (citing the words of an admirer), Not My Will, 210–211.

7 Olusegun Obasanjo: Interment 1. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 215. 2. Power, 3. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 203–205. 3. Anthony Kirk- Greene, Nigeria since 1870: a political and economic outline (New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1981), 79. 4. Obasanjo, Not My Will, vi.

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Notes 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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245

Glickman, 225. D’Orville, Beyond Freedom, 90. Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, 85. Falola, 170, 174–75. Larry Diamond, “Political Corruption: Nigeria’s Perennial Struggle,” in Journal of Democracy 2 (Fall 1991), 74. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, 42. Soyinka, Open Sore, 79. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 227. Osaghae, 110–111. Obasanjo, Not My Will, 226–228, 236. Olufemi Vaughan, Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s-1990s (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 156. Obasanjo cited in Nwankwo, 68. Diamond, 75. Maier, 44–45, 62. Cited in Maier, This House, 59. Falola, 186. Diamond, 76, 77. Richard A. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) cited in Diamond, 79. Cited in Maier, 45. Obasanjo, Challenges of Leadership in African Development (New York: Crane Russak, 1990), 30. Lagos: Friends Foundation Publishers. Nwankwo, 20. The numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Nwankwo’s book. Achebe, A Man of the People, (New York: John Day), 37. Michael Crowder, “Whose Dream Was It Anyway? Twenty-five Years of African Independence,” African Affairs 86:342 (1987), 7–24. Nkrumah (Ghana) presided for nine years; Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), for fifteen; Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), for twenty-four; Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), for twenty- seven; Hastings Banda (Malawi), for thirty; Félix Houphouët (Ivory Coast), for thirty-three; Léopold Senghor (Senegal), for twenty. King, 21. Xinhua General Overseas News Service, May 17, 1991. Alister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1991), 351–352. The New York Times, March 2, 1999. Sparks, 352. The Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 1985. Malcolm Fraser and Olusegun Obasanjo, “What To Do about South Africa,” Foreign Affairs, Fall 1986. The New York Times, Aug. 8, 1986. Glickman, 224–225, Ranke, 254. A full list of Obasanjo’s international activities may be found in Hans d’Orville, ed., Beyond Freedom. Letters to Olusegun Obasanjo, 683–684. US News and World Report Oct. 8, 1990, vol.109, p.20. The prize was criticized as elitist because the winners were chosen by foreigners who did

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

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Notes

not materially contribute to helping people who work to keep their communities alive. Toronto Star, Aug. 24, 1990. The Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 1987. I am obliged to Linda Most for bringing the interview to my attention. Obasanjo, Hope for Africa, 181–200. The New York Times, March 2, 1991. Africa News, May 20, 1991. Africa News, May 20, 1991. Xinhua General Overseas News Service, Oct. 7, Nov. 12, 22, 1991. Africa News, October 12, 1998. In 1993, he published Elements of Democracy: Africa: Rise to Challenge; and Hope for Africa. Xinhua General Overseas News Service, July 28, 1992. Falola, 191. Lewis, “Nigeria, An End to the Permanent Transition” in Journal of Democracy 10 (1999), 144. Soyinka, Open Sore, 36. The Financial Times, May 5, 1993. Lewis, “Nigeria,” 143–144. Norimitsu Onishi, “Nigerian Question Mark: Olusegun Obasanjo,” The New York Times International, March 2, 1999. Osaghae, 297. Newswatch, March 27, 1995. Richard Joseph, “A Laureate’s Lament,” Journal of Democracy 8 (1997), 168. Lewis, “Nigeria . . . Permanent Transition,” 146–147. Obasanjo, Challenges of Leadership in African Development (New York: Crane Russak, 1990). Falola, 196–197. French, 27. Falola, 199. Maier, This House, 3. Soyinka, Open Sore, 151. Fayola, 200. Lewis, “Nigeria . . . Permanent Transition,” 147. The Associated Press, Interpress Service, March 14, 16, 1995. Africa News, March 27, 1995. Deutsche Presse- Argentur, July 17, 21, 25, October 10, 11, 1995. The Daily Telegraph, July 20, 1995. The Economist, July 22, 1995. The Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 1995. D’Orville, Beyond Freedom, 20. Power, 2. Deutsche Presse- Agentur, July 12; November 19, 1996. The Independent, Nov. 20, 1995. Obasanjo, “The Country of Anything Goes,” The New York Review of Books, September 24, 1998. Accessed at www.nyrev.com/nyrev/ W W Warchdisplay.cgi?19980924055F@p1. Newsweek, June 7, 1999, p.55. Not My Will, 226. Olusegun Obasanjo, This Animal Called Man (Abeokuta: ALF Publications, 1999), 205. Another book drafted in prison, Women of Virtue. Stories of Outstanding Women in the Bible (Abeokuta, 1999) also served a moral purpose: to examine “the lives and qualities of some women who feature in the

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Notes

58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

247

Bible to see what lessons can be learned.” The method consisted of citing biblical passages and then discussing them at length. Lewis, “Nigeria,” 149, 156. The Independent, August 1, 1997.The Economist, September 14, 2000. In 2000, Finland was the least corrupt with other Scandinavian countries close behind. “Crippled Giant” is the title of the book by Eghosa E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant. Nigeria since Independence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). “World’s Most Populous Countries: 1994 and 2025,” in Almanac 1995 (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1994), 133. Cited in Godfrey Mwakikagile, “Nigeria,” in Martin P. Mathews, ed., Nigeria: Current Issues and Historical Background (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 17. Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent, Chapter 5, Note 7. Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, 9–10. Neal Ascherson, “The Writer and the Tyrant,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 2000, 20. Deutsche Presse- Agentur, Nov. 19, 1996. Amnesty International-Nigeria: Human Rights Defenders under Attack,” Accessed at http://www.amnesty. org//ailib/intcam/nigeria/obasanjo.html. 1997 Prize for Freedom- Olusegun Obasanjo. Accessed at http://www. worldlib.org/li/other/prize97.html. Speech by Chief (Mrs.) Stella Obasanjo.

8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

●


Power, 4. Obasanjo, cited in Newsweek, Atlantic ed., May 24, 1999. Power, 17. Lewis, “Nigeria, An End to the Permanent Transition,” 151. Falola, 208. Newsweek, May 24, 1999. “Nigeria: It’s Obasanjo at All Costs,” Africa News, February 22, 1999. Emmy Ejekam, “U.S. Africa Online,” accessed at http://www.usafrica online.com/Tribalism.html. The New York Review of Books, Sept. 24, 1998. News- Journal Online, June 6, 1998. The New York Times, July 15, 1998. USAfrica Online accessed at http://www.usafricaonline.com/Tribalism.html. Lewis, “ Nigeria, An End to the Permanent Transition,” 152. Francis C. Enemuo, “Elite Solidarity, Communal Support, and the 1999 Presidential Election in Nigeria,” in Issue: A Journal of Opinion 27 (No. 1), (1999) 3. Africa News, May 27, 1999. Lewis, “Nigeria, An End to the Permanent Transition,” 155. The New York Times, March 2, 1999, p.1. Enemuo, 3. Africa News, October 12, November 9, 16, 1998.

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13. Africa News, October 12, 1998. 14. Fela’s most famous song, “Coffin for the Head of state,” tells in street idiom how he and his followers tried to present the coffin to the general. The New York Times, March 2, 1999. 15. Maier, This House, 28–29. 16. International Herald Tribune, Feb. 16, 1999. Africa News, Feb. 12, 1999. The Daily Telegraph (London), February 22, 1999. 17. Enemuo, 4. 18. Enemuo, 4. Julius O. Ihonubere, “The 1999 Presidential Election in Nigeria: The Unresolved Issues,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 27, (1999) 59. 19. Current Biography, July, 1999, 47. 20. Daily Telegraph, Feb. 22, 1999, 12. 21. Daily Telegraph, Feb. 22, 1999. The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 1, 1999. 22. Ihonvbere, 59. 23. Cited in Newsweek, May 24, 1999, Atlantic ed. 24. Cited in Power, 45. 25. Enemuo, 4. 26. Abegunrin, 186, 191. 27. The Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 1999. 28. The Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 1999. 29. Newsweek, May 25, 1999, p. 32. 30. Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1999. 31. Inaugural speech accessed at http://www.nigeriahighcommottowa.com/ newdawn.html, accessed September 21, 1999. The New York Times, May 30, 1999. 32. Sklar, 1999, 106. Newsweek, June 7, 1999, 55. 33. Africa Today, September 1998. Khalid, 24–25, 28. 34. Maier, This House, xxi–xxii. 35. Obasanjo, cited in Financial Times, November 4, 1998. Lewis cited by Daren Crew, “The 2003 Elections,” in Robert Rotberg, ed., Crafting the New Nigeria (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 101. 36. R.L.Sklar, E. Onwudiewe, O. Kew, “Nigeria: Completing Obasanjo’s Legacy,” Journal of Democracy 17 (July, 2006), 110–111. The New York Times, February 21, 2007. 37. Rotimi T. Suberu, “Nigeria’s Muddled Elections,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007), 97. 38. The Banker, November 1, 2007. Jean Herskovits, “Nigeria’s Rigged Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 86 (July–August 2007), 115–130. 39. Kaniye S.A. Ebeku, “Niger Delta Oil. Development of the Niger Delta and the New Development Initiative,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43 (4) (2008), 408, 417. 40. The New York Times, November 24, 2006. The International Herald Tribune, Feb. 15, 2007, 6. Herskovits, 115–30.

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41. Sklar, 114. 42. Robert Compton, “Olusegun Obasanjo, Prophet of Nigeria,” Biography Resource Center, 296–97. Accessed at http://galenet.galegroup.com. Herskovits, 115–30.

9 Indira Gandhi: “Like a Tigress”: Creation 1. Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 266. Katherine Frank, Indira. The Life of Indira Gandhi (New York: Houghton-Miff lin), 2002, 423–424. (Another version had it that the phone line had been cut, and it was her staff that rallied support.) Jad Adams, Phillip Whitehead, The Dynasty. The Nehru- Gandhi Story (New York: TV Books, 1997), 241. 2. Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 153. Pranay Gupte, Mother India. A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 130, 148, 182. To distinguish her from the well-recognized Mohandas Gandhi, like many biographers I have used both the first name, Indira, as well as Mrs. Gandhi. 3. Indira Gandhi, India: The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975, 15, cited in Adams, 88. Jayakar, 148–149. Bumiller, 150. 4. L.N. Sarin, Indira Gandhi: A Political Biography (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1974), 118. Nayantara Saghal, Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (New York: Friedrick Ungar, 1982), 6. Ela Sen, Indira Gandhi: A Biography (London: Peter Owen, 1973), 9–10. Krishan Bhatia, Indira: A Biography of Prime Minister Gandhi (New York: Praeger, 1974), 226. Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi and Y. K. Malik, “India: The Years of Indira Gandhi,” Journal of Asian and African Studies xxii (1987), 135. 5. Henry Hart, ed., Indira Gandhi’s India (Boulder: Westview Press, 1976), 242. Yogendra K. Malik, “Indira Gandhi: Personality, Political Power and Party Politics,” Journal of Asian and African Studies xxii (1987), 141, 143. That both her temperament explains her recourse to “dictatorial power” and that she returned to power in 1980 to save her son Sanjay are the theses of Nayantara Saghal’s Indira Gandhi’s Emergence and Style (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1978) and Mary C. Carras, Indira Gandhi: In the Crucible of Leadership: A Political Biography (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 25, 40, 60. Her aunt, Vijaya Pandit, believed that Indira’s upbringing with an absent father and frequently ailing mother bred in her a sense of insecurity. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (London: 1979), 21.Cited in Adams, 69. 6. Saghal, 163–164. Bhatia, 119. Yogendra K. Malik, India: The Years of Indira Gandhi (New York: Brill Academic Press, 1988), 3–4, 22. Adams, 68. 7. Indira Gandhi, My Truth (Delhi: Vision Books, 1982), 51. Jayakar, 90–91. Indira Gandhi, What I Am. In Conversation with Pupul Jayakar

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

●

Notes

(Delhi: Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust, 1986), 17–18. Yogendra K. Malik, India: The Years of Indira Gandhi, 22. Vinod Mehta, The Sanjay Story: From Anand Bhava to Amethi (Bombay: Jaica, 1978), 8. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 50. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 69. Gupte, 109. Mehta, 14–16, 18. Bumiller, 158. Gupte, 239–240. Frank, 253. Adams, 154. Frank, 203, 251. Saghal, 161, 165. Sen, 43, 45, 49. Shashi Tharoor, India, from Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade, 1997), 31. Mehta, 133. Jayakar, 107. Gupte, 235–236, 238. Gupte, 261. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000), 371. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 86, 96, 102. Saghal, 166. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 90. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 95–96, Her line, “In India our private enterprise is usually more private than enterprising,” long resonated. Cited in Shashi Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone. Reflections on India. The Emerging 21st Century Power (New York: Arcade Publishers, 2007), 427–442. Frank, 289–290. For Desai’s own account of his fundamentalist social outlook, see Moraji Desai, The Story of My Life (Madras: Macmillan of India, 1974). Mohandas Gandhi’s Harijans, or “Children of God,” left beneficiaries unhappy, “for were we not all children of God.” Today, they prefer to be known as Dalits, meaning “Oppressed.” Wolpert, 310. Jayakar, 135. Wolpert, 378. Bumiller, 160. Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi. A Personal and Political Biography (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 100. Frank, 303. Ram Avtgar Sharma, Indira Gandhi’s Leadership (New Delhi: Raaj Prakashan, 1986), 184. Haksar cited in Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi. The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 436. Wolpert, 382. Arnold Blumberg, ed., Great Leaders, Great Tyrants. Contemporary Views of World Rulers who Made History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 89. Wolpert, 383. Malhotra, 124. Tharoor, The Elephant, 31. A.K. Damodaran, ed., Indian Foreign Policy. The Indira Gandhi Years (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1974), 76. Frank, 308. Wolpert, 386. Malhotra, 128–129. Desai, quoted in Sharma, 12. Jayakar, 159–161. Frank, 328.

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32. Dahr, 147. 33. Kissinger quoted in Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (New York:, 1987), cited in Adams, 208. 34. Surgit Mansingh, “India and the Superpowers, 1966–1984,” in Y.K. Malik, D.K. Vajpeyi, eds., India: The Years of Indira Gandhi (London, New York: E.J. Brill, 1988), 146. Nixon, cited in Guha, 460. 35. Malhotra, 141. William Richter, “Mrs. Gandhi’s Neighborhood: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policies toward Neighboring countries,” in Malik, Vajpeyi, 130. 36. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 120, 133–134, 155, 170. Surgit Mansingh, India’s Search for Power: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policies (Beverly Hills and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1984), 26. 37. Blumenthal, 90. Adams, 217. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Indira Gandhi: The Last Post (Bombay: Popular Prakasman, 1985), 12. Frank, 321–322. 38. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 147. Wolpert, 395. 39. Tharoor, The Elephant, 247. 40. Tharoor, From Midnight, 249. 41. R. Natarajan, “Science, Technology and Mrs. Gandhi,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 22 (1987), 232–233, 243, 247. The New York Times, February 2, 1984. 42. Tharoor, The Elephant, 353. 43. Sarin, 86. Frank, 360–361. Barooh was presumably unaare of a similar accolade made by Rudolf Hess regarding Hitler and Germany. 44. Mansingh, 43.

10


1. Frank, 369. 2. Jayakar, 201. Government engineers had also erected rostrums at her election rallies. 3. Wolpert, 396, 397. 4. Mehta, 77, 78. 5. Abbas, 19. Frank, 372, 373. 6. Malhotra, 171. 7. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 88, 169. 8. Dhar, 223. 9. Jayakar, 206, 217. 10. Mehta, 17. Dhar, 311. Jayakar, 222. 11. Malhotra, 177–178. Abbas, 105–106. 12. Jayakar, 191–192, 223–224. Mehta, 51. 13. Mehta, 46–47, 176, 178. 14. Malhotra, 169, 170. Adams, 223. 15. Desai and Fernandes, quoted in Ram Avtar Sharma, Indira Gandhi’s Leadership (New Delhi: Prakasham, 1986), 12, 71. Malhotra, 170, 171.

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16. R.V.R. Rao, “Mrs. Indira Gandhi and India’s Constitutional Structures. An Era of Erosion,” in Malik and Vajpeyi, 23. Dahr, 224–228, 231. 17. Wolpert, 398. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 161–162. Shashi Tharoor, India. From Midnight to the Milennium, 210, 225. 18. Dahr, 251–253, 262. 19. Rao, 31, 32. Malhotra, 173, 176. 20. Dahr, 304. Frank, 383. 21. Malhotra, 176. 22. Dahr, 265–266. 23. Wolpert, 400. 24. Frank, 388. A sympathetic journalist and future biographer listed examples of those who “liked” the Emergency, ranging from taxi drivers who received low interest rate loans from the nationalized banks to purchase their vehicles to tribal students (especially girls) who received free education in their ashrams. Abbas, 37–38. 25. Tharoor, From Midnight, 232–233. 26. Wolpert, 402–403. 27. Mehta, 82–85. 28. Dahr,, 317, 329–330. Desai, quoted in Sharma, 12. 29. Frank, 390–392. 30. Mehta, 100–103. 31. Mehta, 91. Pankaj Ishra, “Mother India,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 2001, 26. 32. Mehta, 109, 114–115. Frank, 405. 33. Malhotra, 180. Mehta, 123. James G. Chadney, “Family Planning: India’s Achilles Heel?” Journal of Asian and African Studies 22 (1987), 218, 223–227. 34. Mehta, 120. 35. Dahr, 340–341. Mehta, 130. 36. Dahr, 343. Malhotra, 181. 37. This is the view of Adams, 235. 38. Dhar, 344. 346–347, 349–350. 39. Jaykar, 245. Dhar, 350. 40. Rao, 39. Malhotra, 192. Frank, 410, Dhar, 350. Mehta, 106. 41. Indira Gandhi, My Truth, 166. Malhotra, 193. 42. Dahr, 351. 43. Dahr, 352. Wolpert, 404. 44. Mehta, 169–172. Malhotra, 195. Frank, 411, 413. 45. Malhotra, 196. Dhar, 355. Mehta, x. 46. Mehta, xi. Dhar, 356–357. Malhotra, 198. Frank, 414. 47. Dhar, 111. 48. Mehta, 131. V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1977), 20, cited in Wolpert, 405.

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Notes

11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

253


Malhotra, 183, 199. Jayakar, 254, 259, 260. Jayakar, 251, 253. Malhotra, 200. Jayakar, 254. Frank, 416. Jayakar, 258. Frank, 418. Frank, 418. Jayakar, 261. Malhotra, 201. Abbas, 47. Malhotra, 204. Jayakar, 262. Jayakar, 264. Jayakar, 266. Dahr, P.N. Indira Gandhi, the “Emergency,” and Indian Democracy. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press), 263. Carras, 217, 219, 230. Nayana Currimbhoy, Indira Gandhi (New York: Grolier, 1985), 91. See Note 1. Jayakar, 266–268. Malhotra, 211–212. Currimbhoy, 87. Frank, 424. Jayakar, 268, 270–271. Frank, 426, 427. Bumiller, 150. Jayakar, 280. Malik, “Indira Gandhi,” 152. Malhotra, 208. Malhotra, 201. Frank, 429–430. Wolpert, 408. Frank, 432–433. India Today, November 16–30, 1978, cited in Jayakar, 283. Abbas, 54. Jayakar, 288, 289. Abbas, 254–257. Frank, 436. Jayakar, 289, 294. Jayakar, 297, 298. Adams, 247. Malhotra, 207, 213. Malik, Indira Gandhi, 149. Frank, 438. Wolpert, 408. Jayakar, 300.

12 1. 2. 3. 4.

●


Ali Siddiqui, Son of India (Delhi, 1982), cited in Adams, 248. Carras, 235. Malhotra, 213. Jayakar, 305.

9780230107045_15_not.indd 253

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254 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

●

Notes

Dhar, 373–374. Jayakar, 313. Malik, Indira Gandhi, 149, 150. Jayakar, 314–316. Frank, 444. Malhotra, 225. Tharoor, From Midnight, 37. Dahr, 305. Malhotra, 180. Frank, 398–399. Bumiller, 162. Wolpert, 410. Jayakar, 426. Cited in Frank, 451. Guha, 545. Malhotra, 237–239. Pankaj Mishra, “Mrs. India,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 2001, 26. Malhotra, 240. Saghal, 170. Malhotra, 247. Bombay would not have its name changed until a more conservative government came to power. Jayakar, 318–319. Tharoor, From Midnight, 32. Malhotra, 219, 265. Malik, Indira Gandhi, 27. Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Princeton, 1965, 302–303. Wolpert, 417. Pranay Gupte, Mother India. A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 301. Tharoor, From Midnight, 37. Malik, Indira Gandhi, 151. Wolpert, 417. Frank, 456. Malhotra, 289. Frank, 483. Adams, 274. Malhotra, 303. Frank, 485. Abbas, 7, 106. Jayakar, 365. Malhotra, 17, Jayakar, 370. Wolpert, 419. Bumiller, 151.

Conclusions 1. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Abridgement of vols. 1–V1 by D.C. Somervell (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 217. 2. There is no published memoir, nor did I find a diary or journal in the Palme papers in the Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv (Labor Movement Archives) in Stockholm. Trudeau’s (abbreviated) memoirs appeared after his final term in office. 3. The Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 1987. 4. Nayantara, Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power, 1982, p. 37. 5. Certainly, this was true for Churchill, De Gaulle, Perón, and Rabin.

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Notes

●

255

6. Toynbee, 217. 7. The topic is discussed in Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual, by P. Post, R.L. Grimes, A. Nugteren, H. Zondag (Dudley, MA: Peeters Publishers, 2003). 8. This was very much the case, too, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. 9. JFK, held in unusually high esteem, is an exception. Peter Esaisson, Donald Granberg, “Attitudes toward a Fallen Leader, Evaluations of Palme before and after the Assassination” British Journal of Political Science 26, no. 3 (July, 1996), 438.

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CONCLUSION Esaisson, Peter and Donald Granberg. “Attitudes Toward a Fallen Leader, Evaluations of Palme Before and After the Assassination,” British Journal of Political Science 26, no.3. July, 1966. Post, P., R.L. Grimes, A. Nugteren, and H. Zondag. Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual. Dudley, MA: Peeters Publ., 2003. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. Abridgement of Vols. 1-VI by D.C. Somervell. New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947.

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9780230107045_16_wcit.indd 264

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Index

Olof Palme: “Moral Duty Is Discontent on a Large Scale” Ahlmark, Per, 39, 45 Allende, Salvador, 27 Andersson, Sten, 36, 64 Arafat, Yassir, 65 Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv (Labor Movement Archives), 40 Bahr, Egon, 52 Bergman, Ingmar, 33 Bildt, Carl, 61 Bohman, Gösta, 37, 39, 44, 47; criticism of Palme, 15, 23, 24, 27 Brandt, Willy, 18, 22, 24, 42, 43, 51, 69 Brandt (North-South) Commission, 40, 42 Branting, Hjalmar, 27, 40, 42 Carlsson, Ingvar, 36, 40, 55, 65, 69, 233 Center Party, 8, 25, 29, 30, 47 Communist Party, 7, 27, 57 Conservative Party, 7, 23, 57, 64. The name was later changed to the Moderate Party. Aside from the Social Democrats, Swedish political parties have changed names one or more times. Dagens Nyheter (newspaper), 15, 17, 23

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Dalsjö, Robert, 15, 19, 38, 69 Edenman, Ragnar, 2 Erlander, Tage, 11, 12, 16; relationship with Palme, 1, 2, 6, 14, 10, 15; and secret military ties to the United States, 4, 14, 19, 33; death of, 67. See also Palme, Olof: as Minister Fälldin, Thorbjörn, 24, 29, 39, 59; as prime minister, 36, 44, 45, 48, 53 Farmers (Agrarian) Party. See Center Party Green Party, 30 Hansson, Per Albin, 9 Harrington, Michael, 17–18 Holmér, Hans, 70 Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (Palme Commission), 51, 61, 62, 240 n.18 Kissinger, Henry, 22, 43 Kreisky, Bruno, 24, 42, 49 Krönmark, Eric, 38 Larsson, Sven-Eric, 27

12/13/2010 4:12:19 PM

266

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Index

Liberal Party (Folkpartiet), 7–8, 30, 57. See also Ohlin, Bertil Lindgren, Astrid, 33 Ljung, Lennart, 63 LO (Landsorganisationen, Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions), 30, 32, 56, 66 Lundkvist, Artur, 7 Lundvall, Bengt, 19 Meidner (Rudolf) Plan, 12, 30–32, 46–47, 55–56, 59–60 Mercouri, Melina, 15 Moberg, Vilhelm, 6–7 Moderate Party. See Conservative Party Möller, Gustav, 22 Moores, Simon, 5 Mosey, Chris, 39, 45 Myrdahl, Alva, 20, 43 Nilsson, Gunnar, 34, 57 Nixon, Richard, 17, 22–23 Ohlin, Bertil, 11, 12, 13 Palme, Lisbet, 35, 41 Palme, Olof; childhood and education, 4; as secretary of Student Union, 2, 3; joins SAP, 3; briefed on American-Swedish guarantee treaty, 5; influences on, 6, 9; criticisms of, 3, 13, 23, 67, 108; works for Erlander, 2, 5; as minister, 5, 9–11; speeches of, 11, 12, 16–17, 21–23, 30, 39, 40, 51; becomes prime minister, 16; and miners’ strike, 17; and European Community, 17, 65; and foreign policy (Europe), 18, 25–27, 61–62; views on socialism, 5–7, 20, 24, 39, 42, 49; views on governing, 23–24, 39; and Vietnam, 11, 12–16, 17, 21–23, 27; and Richard Nixon, 17, 22; and U.S. draft evaders, 21; and

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environmentalism, 30; refusal to divulge U.S. guarantee, 19, 38; on neutrality, 12, 18, 63–65; and nuclear energy, 12, 25, 29, 32, 45–46; reaction to 1976 defeat, 35; resignation, 34; record as prime minister, 1967–1976, 33; strategy after electoral defeat, 36; as opposition leader, 227; on Brandt (North-South) Commission, 40; as chair of Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (Palme Commission), 51–53; and national liberation movements, 25, 40–43, 49. See also Palme, Olof: and Vietnam; travels of, 17, 27, 40–41, 67; as UN mediator, 12, 49–50; and apartheid, 40–42, 49; debates with Fälldin, 24, 33–34; and Socialist International (SI), 12, 42–43, 51; return to office, 12, 57–58; and devaluation of krona, 58; and wage earner funds, 29, 32, and budget deficits, 58–59; and Palestine, 65; and immigration into Sweden, 65–66; and the Soviet Union, 15, 26, 49, 64, 66; allows “lifeline” to die out, 62–63; assassination and funeral of, 68–70, 241 n. 30; comparisons with Obasanjo and Gandhi, 227–233. See also Social Democratic Party (SAP): and Meidner Plan; Sweden: U.S. secret guarantee on neutrality Peterson, Thage, 32, 36, 40, 57 Reagan, Ronald, 50, 66 Richard, Serge, 14, 46 Riksdag, 16, 27 Schori, Pierre, 43 Social Democratic Party (SAP), 8, 10–11, 17–19, 26, 36; and Meidner Plan, 32; and penal reform, 26; and

12/13/2010 4:12:20 PM

Index nuclear energy, 29, 30; and Vietnam, 13; and austerity, 67 Socialist International (SI), 41, 42 Soviet Union, 16, 49, 61, 64, 66, 68, 102 Strang, Gunnar, 47 Sweden; elections in: 9 (1932); 20 (1970); 24–25 (1973); 27, 30, 32–34 (1976); 47 (1979); 54, 57 (l982); neutrality policy, 4–6, 15–16, 18–20, 38, 63–65; disarmament and human rights, 26–27; and nuclear energy, 48; openness of government, 3, 18, 68; U.S. secret guarantee on neutrality, 4–6, 15–16, 18–20, 38, 63–65; and sexual revolution, 9–10;

267

●

and Soviet submarines, 54, 61; and the UN, 26–27; and Vietnam, 11–14 Synnergren, Stig, 19, 38 Three Mile Island, 48, 48 Thunborg, Anders, 63, 68 Ullsten, Ola, 45 Undén, Östen, 43 USSR. See Soviet Union Vietnam, 11–15, 17 Waldheim, Kurt, 50 Wedén, Sven, 13, 15

Olusegun Obasanjo: “Look At What Has Become of This Country” Abacha, Sani, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128 Abiola, Moshood, 71, 117–118, 120, 124 Abubakar, Atiku, 130, 133, 139 Abuja, 83, 135 Achebe, Chinua, 105, 111–112, 125–126 Africa News (journal), 116, 132 African Leadership Forum, 104, 114, 115, 116 Alliance for Democracy (AD), 129, 130, 134 All People’s Party (APP), 130, 134 Amnesty International, 126, 127–128 Angola, 93, 94–95 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 72, 98, 248 n. 14 Aubakar, Adulsalami, 127, 128–129 Awolowo, Obafemi, 97–101

9780230107045_17_ind.indd 267

Babangida, Ibrahim, 107–109, 110, 117, 118, 134 Banjo, Victor, 76 Botha, P.W., 112 Buhari, Muhammad, 106, 107–108 Carter, Jimmy, 94, 123 Constitution (of Second Republic), 88, 97 Crowder, Michael, 111 De Cuellar, Javier Perez, 115, 116 Danjuma, Yakubu, 81, 128 Ekwueme, Alex, 133 Eminent Persons Group, 112, 114 Falae, Olu, 130, 133, 134, 135 Falola, Toyin, 105 Fraser, Malcolm, 113 Gowon, Yakubu, 76, 79, 80, 92

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268

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Index

Igbos, 76, 77, 131 Joseph, Richard, 109 Kissinger, Henry, 94 Mandela, Nelson, 113, 123, 129 Muhammed, Murtala, 81–84, 85, 86, 99, 110 National Party of Nigeria (NPN), 100, 105 New York Review of Books, 129–130, 134 Nigeria, ethnic and linguistic diversity, 74–75, 131; Delta region, 121, 122, 138; expelled from Commonwealth, 122; sanctions on, 122 Nkrumah, Kwame, 94, 112 Nwankwo, Arthur, 110, 111 Obasanjo, Oluremi (Akinlawon), 74, 76, 78, 79 Obasanjo, Olusegun, childhood and education, 72–74; regard for army, 76, 80, 91; and Biafran War, 76–78; grows cynical, 78; view of democracy, 80, 86–88; as minister, 80, 130; and 1975 coup, 81–82; in Muhammed government, 81–84; disclaims Yoruba favoritism, 84, 87; as military head of state, 1976– 1979, 85–95; governing style, 86–87; drafts Constitution, 88; domestic reforms, 88–91; and national unity, 90–91; and national liberation movements, 94–95, 112– 114; view of agriculture, 88, 136; and religion, 92; and foreign policy, 79–80, 93–95; role in 1979 election, 96–99; resignation (1979), 101; as farmer, 101–102, 103; on international commissions, 114, 245 n. 31; early refusal to condemn

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successors, 106; criticism of Babangida and Buhari, 110, 117; nomination as secretary-general of UN, 116–117; agrees to annulment of Abiola victory, 118; preference for strong executive and one party system, 88, 110–112, 138–139; opposes Abacha regime, 119–120; arrest of, 122–123; imprisonment, 124, 126; awards and prizes, 126; release from prison, 127; pre- and post election travel, 72, 129, 136; runs for presidency (1998–1999), 130–131; as president (1999–2007), 135–140; reelection in 2003, 139; legacy, 224–228; comparisons with Palme and Gandhi, 227–233 Obasanjo, Stella, 124, 126 Ojo, Onukaba Adinoyi, 79, 86 Ojukwu, Odomegwu, 76 People’s Democratic Party (PDP), 130, 135, 140 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 94 Power, Jonathan, 127 Saro Wiwa, Ken, 78, 122 Shagari, Shehu, 97–98, 101, 106 Shonekan, Ernest, 118–119 Soyinka, Wole, 72, 104–105, 109, 118, 125, 130 Suberu, Rotimi T., 140 Thatcher, Margaret, 95, 112, 113 Trans-Africa, 123 Transparency International, 123, 125 United Party of Nigeria (UPN), 101 Yar’Adua, Shehu, 119, 122, 130 Yar’Adua, Umaru, 140 Yorubas, 74, 98, 124, 131, 132, 135 Young, Andrew, 128

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Index

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Indira Gandhi: “Like a Tigress” Akal Takht. See Golden Temple Bangladesh. See Gandhi, Indira; Pakistan Barooah, Dev Kanta, 165 Bhindranwale, Jarnail, 211, 220–221 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 159, 206–207 Brahmachari, Dhirendra, 212 Carras, Mary, 175, 203 Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI), 193, 194 Communist Party of India, 150, 161, 173, 182 Congress Party, 146, 157, 210 Desai, Morarji, 151, 143; ambition of, 150; accepts Shastri, 150; religious views, 152; opposition to Indira, 167, 169, 185; imprisonment, 172; as prime minister, 189, 199–201; resignation, 207; Emergency, 233, 259, 271–274, 277–282, 285–293, 298 n. 24 Dhar, P.N., opposes Emergency, 173, 174; criticism of Indira, 178, 210; on Indira-Sanjay relationship, 182, 213; on Indira’s decision to hold election, 187; as biographer, 150–151, 238, 239 Dhawan, R.K., 171, 195 Emergency, 146, 170–173, 176–179, 188, 252 n. 24. See also Gandhi, Indira Fernandes, George, 176, 202, 205, 207 Frank, Katherine, 155, 162 Gandhi, Feroze, 148–149, 150 Gandhi, Indira, childhood and education, 146–148, 249 n. 5; early

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imprisonment, 148, 149; as Nehru’s hostess, 149–150, 151; on Congress Party executive, 150; authoritarianism of, 150, 156, 163–164, 215; as minister of information, 151; political philosophy of, 151, 152, 158; as prime minister (1966–1971), 146, 153–158; seeks U.S. aid, 154; devalues rupee, 154, 155; critical of Vietnam War, 155; turns to left, 156, 160, 161; splits Congress Party, 157, 200; and Ten Point Program, 156; abolition of maharajas privy purses, 158, 159; election of 1971, 158–159; appeals for recognition of Bangladesh, 159–160; relations with United States, 159– 160, 217; victory over Pakistan (1971), 160–161; and Soviet Union, 161, 215, 216; and centralization, 163–164; high tech legacy, 164; nuclear policy, 163; and Five Year Plan, 161–162; style of governing, 163–165; relations with JP (Narayan), 168; found guilty of campaign malpractice, 169–170; decides against stepping down, 170–171; declares State of Emergency, 13, 171; explanation for Emergency, 171–173, 176–177; reliance on Sanjay, 11, 173–174, 180– 182; and responses to Emergency, 177; and Twenty Point Program, 178; and extension of Emergency rule, 178; has Constitution amended, 179; postpones parliamentary election, 179–180; and charges of nepotism, 180; confronts Sanjay, 185; calls off Emergency, 184–185; supports new elections, 185; and 1977 election, 185–188; fears for Sanjay, 191, 192;

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270

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Index

promotional tours, 194–195, 199, 202; criticism of Janata, 195–196; arrested by CBI, 146, 197–198; and Shah Commission, 196–197, 198–199; harassed by Janata government, 198; wins 1978 byeelection, 202–204; expelled from Parliament, 204; second arrest and imprisonment, 205; exploits Janata discord, 205–206, 207; and 1980 election, 209–210; forms new government (1980), 210–211; becomes more superstitious, 212; and Sanjay’s death, 213; style of government after 1980, 213; and technology, 216; and neutrality, 217; and Islamic fundamentalism, 216, 218; and Hindu nationalism, 218, 220; fatalism of, 222, 223; assassination of, 222–223; comparisons with Palme and Obasanjo, 227–233. See also Emergency Gandhi, Maneka, 190, 214–215 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma), 146, 147, 149, 194, 204 Gandhi, Priyanka, 191, 226 Gandhi, Rahul, 191, 226 Gandhi, Rajiv, 146, 147, 151; opposes Emergency, 173; blames Sanjay for Indira’s fall, 188; marries Sonia Maino, 191; elected to Parliament, 214; as prime minister, 224, 225–226, 233; assassination of, 226 Gandhi, Sanjay, ix, 149, 151–152, 191; influence on Indira, 170–171, 213; and car project, 162, 173–174, 181, 204; and Congress Youth Party, 180–182; and slum clearance, 182; and family planning, 182–184; and 1977 election, 187–188; arrest and imprisonment, 200; indicted and fined, 206; and 1980 election, 210, 212; death of, 213

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Gandhi, Sonia, 146, 175, 214, 226 Golden Temple, 221. See also Sikh Green Revolution, 157, 164 Haksar, P.N., 156 Harijans (Untouchables), 195, 215, 250 n. 20 India, wars with Pakistan (1965), 152; (1971), 146, 159–160; diversity of, 162, 164, 218; Constitution, 165; elections (1967), 155: (1971), 158–159: (1977), 186–187: (1980), 207: (1986), 225; trade unions and strikes, 166, 167; and Soviet Union, 179, 181, 192; family planning, 181–185; women in Parliament, 225. See also Gandhi, Indira: turns to left; Gandhi, Sanjay Janata Morcha (People’s Front), 168, 170, 187, 192; harassment of Gandhi family, 193, 194; Hindu orthodoxy of, 195; infighting in, 194, 202, 205; prosecution of Indira Gandhi, 209 Jayakar, Pupul, 148–149, 173, 174–175, 191, 206 Kamaraj, Kumaraswami, 151, 153 Khan, Ayub, 152 Khan, Yahya, 159 Kissinger, Henry, 160 Kosygin, Aleksi, 152 Lok Sabha, 155, 200 Malhotra, Inder, 174, 175, 176,177, 194, 201, 214 Naipaul, V.S., 189 Narain, Raj, 159, 169, 206, 207 Narayan, Jayaprakash (“JP”), background, 168, 169; creation of

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Index Janata, 166, 168; aims at paralyzing government, 169; and Indira’s refusal to step down, 171, 177; imprisonment of, 171–172; paroled, 179; and resurrection of Janata, 187; calls on Indira after her resignation, 193; death, 195 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 146–147, 148, 150, 151 Nehru, Kamala, 147 Nehru, Molital, 147, 148 Nixon, Richard, 159, 161 Pakistan, 157. See also India, wars with Pakistan Pandit, Vijaya, 150, 187

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Rushdie, Salman, 194 Shah Commission, 193, 196, 197–198, 200 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 151–152 Sikhs/Sikhism, 210, 218, 223–224 Singh, Charan, 193, 195, 206, 207 Singh, Sarwan, 200 Singh, Zail, 220, 224 State of Emergency. See Emergency Syndicate, 150, 156–157, 228 Tashkent Summit, 152 Teen Murti, 149 Tharoor, Shashi, 163, 164–165, 179, 213 Vajpayee, Behari, 169, 193, 207

Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur, 159, 180 Rajya Sabha, 158, 176 Ram, Jagjivan, 187–188, 193, 195 Reddy, Sanjiva, 156, 207

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Wolpert, Stanley, 180 Zia ul-Haq, General, 206

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