Indira vs. the ‘Syndicate’

The real challenge to Indira Gandhi after 1966 came not from the opposition parties, but from powerful leaders within her own party — the Congress. This group was known as the Syndicate.

Who was the Syndicate?

The Syndicate was an informal name for a group of senior Congress leaders who controlled the party’s organisation. They were not elected office-holders in the government, but they held immense power behind the scenes. The group was led by K. Kamaraj, who had been Chief Minister of Madras (now Tamil Nadu) and was then the President of the Congress party.

K. Kamaraj is an important figure in his own right. A freedom fighter who suffered educational deprivation, he worked hard to spread education in Madras province and introduced the mid-day meal scheme for schoolchildren. In 1963, he proposed that all senior Congressmen should resign from office to make way for younger party workers — this became famous as the Kamaraj Plan.

The Syndicate included other powerful state-level leaders:

• S. K. Patil of Bombay city (later Mumbai)
• S. Nijalingappa of Mysore (later Karnataka)
• N. Sanjeeva Reddy of Andhra Pradesh
• Atulya Ghosh of West Bengal

Both Lal Bahadur Shastri and later Indira Gandhi owed their position as Prime Minister to the support they received from the Syndicate. This group had a decisive say in Indira Gandhi’s first Council of Ministers and also in policy formulation and implementation.

The Conflict

The Syndicate had ensured Indira Gandhi’s election as the leader of the parliamentary party, and they expected her to follow their advice. Gradually, however, Indira Gandhi began to assert her position within the government and the party. She chose her own trusted group of advisers — from outside the party — and slowly, carefully, sidelined the Syndicate.

Indira Gandhi thus faced two challenges at once:

1. She needed to build her independence from the Syndicate.
2. She also needed to work towards regaining the ground that the Congress had lost in the 1967 elections.

The Bold Strategy: From Power Struggle to Ideological Struggle

Indira Gandhi adopted a very bold strategy. She converted what was essentially a simple power struggle into an ideological struggle. She launched a series of initiatives to give the government policy a Left orientation.

In May 1967, she got the Congress Working Committee to adopt a Ten Point Programme. This programme included:

• Social control of banks
• Nationalisation of General Insurance
• Ceiling on urban property and income
• Public distribution of food grains
• Land reforms
• Provision of house sites to the rural poor …