While it is easy enough to ask the Janata leaders to compose their differences in order that they are able to give the country effective government and cope with the challenge Mrs. Indira Gandhi has begun to pose to their party, it is difficult to suggest how best they should go about the task.
Currently there is a great deal of resentment among the Janata leaders against Mr. Charan Singh and his principal lieutenant, Mr. Raj Narain, who, it is alleged, has exposed the party to ridicule. A number of them feel that his (Mr. Singh’s) presence in the government in charge of the key home portfolio is at least partly responsible for the alienation of the Harijans in large parts of north India, that his diatribes against Mr. Nehru have lost the party the goodwill of a substantial section of the intelligentsia, that his decision to arrest Mrs Gandhi on October 3 last year on rather weak charges has made it possible for her to present herself as a victim of the Janata vendetta, that his handling of the BB Vohra case has annoyed IAS officials, that his insistence on the diversion of well over 40 per cent of the proposed investment in the public sector under the sixth plan to the countryside can aggravate social tensions in village India since the benefits are bound to be appropriated mostly by rich and middle peasants and so on. Indeed, a point has been reached when it is difficult to be sure that his old allies like Mr. Nanaji Deshmukh and Mr. Madhu Limaye are willing to stand by him.
Peasants
But the Janata leadership cannot downgrade him without hurting itself badly in the process. The support he commands in the Janata parliamentary party is less pertinent in this connection than the fact that a substantial section of the peasantry in north India looks upon him as their representative in the government. Whether one likes it or not, Mr. Charan Singh is the first peasant leader after Sardar Patel to command so much influence in New Delhi entirely on his own strength and the peasants are naturally proud of him. The Janata will, therefore, not find it easy to retain their goodwill and support if he feels humiliated and decides to quit. And it does not at all follow that this loss will be automatically compensated by increased support among the Harijans and other weaker sections of society. The political arithmetic seldom works along such simple lines. On the contrary, one can easily lose one’s old constituency without acquiring the new one might wish to seek.
On the face of it, the former Jana Sangh’s role in the Janata has not been as controversial as that of Mr. Charan Singh’s. Indeed, it can be said that its representatives in the Union cabinet – Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr LK Advani – have not attracted much adverse comment from their colleagues. Unlike Mr Charan Singh, they have not been denouncing Mr Nehru and his policies – Mr Vajpayee has, on the contrary, praised him for his contribution to the evolution of the country’s foreign policy; they have observed discreet silence on the issue of the future of Urdu; they have not at all been aggressive in championing the cause of Hindi at the cost of English and in the economic field they have not espoused any sectional interest. In short they have maintained a low profile. And if their former party colleagues had, in fact, reached an understanding, as has been widely believed, with Mr. Charan Singh on the division of chief ministerships in the Hindi-speaking states after the Vidhan Sabha poll last June, they have of late been at pains to establish their non-partisan role in the Janata.
Unrealistic
But it will be idle for them to claim or for anyone else to suggest that they have succeeded in reassuring their other colleagues. They have not. With the exception of former BLD men close to Mr. Charan Singh, all non-Jana Sangh elements in the ruling party are in fact haunted by the fear that behind the erstwhile Jana Sangha-ites stands the RSS and that this combination will seize the organisation at the first opportunity. This is, indeed, the main reason why the Janata leadership has not launched a membership drive and has not held organisational elections almost one year after the party was formally launched on May 1, 1977.
It is difficult to be sure that when Mr. Madhu Limaye and Mr. Krishna Kant were campaigning against the RSS some months ago, the former entertained some hope that the RSS would dissolve itself and the two organisations, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Mazdoor Sangh it had set up, and the latter the expectation that he would be able promote an anti-Jana Sangh alliance within the Janata. But if they did, they were being thoroughly unrealistic, the first because the RSS leaders could not possibly be persuaded to commit hara kiri and the latter because the former Jana Sanghaites in the Janata were too numerous to be isolated. They also provide the party a substantial part of its cadre.
Mr. Krishna Kant made it appear that the issue was ideological. It might well be so basically. But in the immediate context the issue is organisational. A fairly large section of the Janata leadership is averse to a membership drive and elections because they fear that these will lead to a takeover of the party organisation by the former Jana Sangh with the covert and not so covert backing of the RSS. But while the Janata cannot even begin to move towards integration so long as it does not recruit members and enable them to hold elections at all levels, it may well come apart in the effort to become an integrated party. Who can be sure it won’t and how?
The Janata, it has often been said, is a child of the emergency. This is true but only in the sense that its constituents might not have agreed to merge if they had not been exposed to that terrible experience. The statement is not true in the more fundamental sense; the constituents had not waged an active struggle against Mrs. Gandhi’s authoritarian rule and had not developed a common leadership and outlook as the Congress, with all its differences and infighting, had done in the prolonged fight against the British. The leaders of the constituent organisations had been caught napping on the night of June 25, 1975, and most of them had been released only on the eve of the announcement of the Lok Sabha election on January 18, 1977. Even then they could not overcome their differences. They only patched these up because they felt that there was no other way to defeat the Congress. Thus in reality the party was little more than an electoral alliance at the time of its birth and so it has stayed in the past one year. It cannot easily overcome this handicap. In plain terms, the Janata has not possessed and cannot quickly acquire a sense of identity which only a prolonged struggle against an established authority can give a party.
Leaders who have engaged in bitter and long struggles, too, fall apart. Witness what happened to the old guard of the Soviet communist Party under Stalin and to that of the Chinese after the “Great Leap Forward” in 1957 and during the so-called cultural revolution from 1966 to 1968. But the memories of a common struggle help people of even diverse temperaments and outlooks to hold together.
Gandhism
It will perhaps not be quite accurate to suggest that the Janata leaders plumped for what they understand by Gandhism because they believed that this will enable them to give their party a distinct identity. It was also the result partly of the desire to cut Mr. Nehru down to size on the part of men who, with the exception of Mr. Jagjivan Ram and some others like Mr. H. N. Bahuguna, had had differences with him and had suffered at his and his daughter’s hands. In the case of Mr. Charan Singh and his supporters, the Gandhian emphasis on the primacy of the countryside without Gandhiji’s value system, which did not attach much importance to economic development as such, was also useful in that it enabled them to claim large subsidies for their constituents. But whatever the motivations and calculations, the move has boomeranged. Criticism of Mr. Nehru has come to divide the party rather than unite it and Gandhism has failed, as it was bound to, to provide a blueprint for economic development.
Meanwhile in the absence of a coherent national ruling party under a strong and skilful leadership, various problems – states versus the centre, the future of Urdu, the place of the minorities, especially the Muslims, in the Indian political system, the rights of the Harijans and the so-called: backward classes and so on – have acquired a sharper edge than they have possessed for some years. This constitutes a setback to the nation-building process and it can create difficulties which it may not be possible right now to envisage.
The Times of India, 29 March 1978