Mr Chandra Shekhar is the first Janata leader, indeed the first leading politician in the country, to make a favourable reference to the Congress split in 1969 in a long time. He has spoken in the context of the current efforts in his own party for a patch-up between Mr Morarji Desai and Mr Charan Singh and recalled the 1969 Congress split to make the point that all splits are not harmful either for the organisation or for the nation.
This is at once a measure of Mr Chandra Shekhar’s courage and desperation. Courage because while it has been conventional wisdom now for years that Mrs Gandhi deliberately split the Congress in 1969 for personal considerations and that this set in motion a chain of events which finally culminated in the emergency, Mr Shekhar has said that the split was the result of conflict on issues and principles and indicated, even if indirectly, that he is still inclined to take the view that the former Prime Minister was justified in doing what she did. Desperation because he would not have spoken in this refrain unless he was convinced that the proposed patch-up between Mr Desai and Mr Charan Singh had nothing to do with any programme and principle and that it could cause further complications.
In his inaugural address to the party’s political camp in Ujjain, Mr Shekhar has also said a number of other things which suggest that he and those who think like him in the party are deeply perturbed over a number of developments which are directly connected in one way or another with the actions and policies of the Janata. Imagine, for example, the president of a party deeply committed to the extension of the authority of the states and dilution of that of the Centre saying that communal disturbances should no longer be left to be handled by state governments and that the Centre should actively guide them, though “I do not mean to say that the Centre should send the central reserve police” everywhere (everywhere added).
Validity
Similarly, imagine the chief of a party committed to rapid transition from English to Hindi posing the question: “Is it the proper time for some of us to raise needless linguistic or communal controversies?” Surely implicit in this throw-away sentence is the acknowledgement of the validity of the criticism often voiced in these columns, among others, regarding the Janata’s priorities – prohibition, Hindi and reservations of jobs on the basis of caste.
All these are important issues. But for the readers of this column they are not new. What is new is Mr Chandra Shekhar’s statement on the 1969 Congress split which event, in my view, deserves to be discussed afresh dispassionately and objectively because it throws a flood of light on what we are witnessing today.
When the event was taking place in the summer of 1969, like many others, I took the view that essentially the conflict centred on the question of the primacy of the office of Prime Minister vis-à-vis the organisational leadership of the ruling party. I was inclined to side with Mrs Gandhi on the ground that she was justified in insisting on the supremacy of the leader of the parliamentary wing over the organisation because parliamentary government could not be conducted on another basis.
I was also predisposed, as I have been ever since, in favour of central authority because Indian history is a constant reminder to me, as doubtless to many others, that the country has gone down and the people have suffered terribly whenever central authority has been enfeebled for whatever reason. And, needless to add, I, like many others, regarded Mrs Gandhi as the upholder of central authority and her opponents – Mr Kamaraj, Mr Atulya Ghosh and Mr SK Patil, among others – as modern variants of provincial satraps of pre-British days, out to carve out their respective spheres of influence.
This was among the most favourable interpretations of Mrs Gandhi’s actions then. It took note of the fact that the struggle for primacy was an offshoot of the Congress debacle in 1967 when the party had been ousted from office in almost all northern states as well as in Tamil Nadu in the south, but only in a limited sense. The point was then made that if the organisational stalwarts had not been worsted at the poll in 1967, Mrs Gandhi might not have picked up the courage to challenge them and give them an option between virtually surrendering to her and quitting the party.
Defected
It is not at all clear even in retrospect that Mrs Gandhi had drawn from the debacle of 1967 and subsequent developments the lesson that in order for the Congress to survive it had become necessary to refashion it to increase its appeal to the scheduled castes and tribes, other landless and poor farmers and the minorities, especially the Muslims. But this point certainly did not occur to many others for a variety of reasons.
First, despite the emergence of middle caste peasant leaders as chief ministers – Rao Birendra Singh in Haryana, Mr Charan Singh in UP, Mr GN Singh in Madhya Pradesh, and Mr Karpoori Thakur in Bihar either as a result of the victory of their parties at the polls or of defection from the Congress itself – it was not clearly realised that the middle peasant castes had defected from the ruling party and its so-called vote banks had crashed. Most people saw those defections as being the result of personal ambitions and not of a shift in the attitude of their fellow caste men.
This misunderstanding, it must be said, was not wholly surprising. The election had taken place in the wake of two bad monsoons in 1965 (when we had a war with Pakistan as well) and 1966, and a wrongly timed, drastic devaluation of the rupee (June 1966) which had inevitably raised the cost of imports without stimulating exports and thus, on the one land, aggravated an already difficult economic situation and, on the other, reduced whatever prestige the leadership had enjoyed.
The issue was further confused by the fact that Mrs Gandhi made nationalisation of banks her battle cry – no one in the top Congress leadership was wholly opposed to this measure and Mrs Gandhi had not been enthusiastic about it – and that most people found it difficult to accept that the division in the Congress was between the progressives and the reactionaries. For who could subscribe to the proposition that Mr Kamaraj represented or favoured the capitalists and the landlords?
Retrieve
But irrespective of whether Mrs Gandhi recognised the need for measures to increase the appeal of the Congress to the minorities and depressed sections of the community in 1969, there was not much she could do about it then. For, as leader of a minority government at the Centre she lacked the necessary authority. Even so she managed to retrieve the fortunes of the party at the polls in 1971. Apparently a sizable section of the middle caste peasant vote had then come back to the Congress. Perhaps the good weather in 1968, 1969 and 1970 helped. Perhaps the new agricultural strategy of concentrating the maximum resources in select irrigated areas paid off. Perhaps the failure of all anti-Congress coalitions to hold on to office persuaded the peasants to give the Congress another chance.
Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that after the 1971 victory Mrs Gandhi set about the task fairly earnestly. She appointed Mr Barkatullah Khan as chief minister of Rajasthan in July 1971. This was a deliberate as well as a significant move because no Muslim had ever held such an office outside Jammu and Kashmir in independent India. She followed it up with the appointments of Mr Devraj Urs (belonging to a small non-Brahmin community), Mr Abdul Ghaffoor (a Muslim) and Mr Vengal Rao (belonging to the landed but numerically small Valema community) and Mr HN Bahuguna (a Brahmin) as chief ministers of Karnataka, Bihar, Andhra and UP with the clear intention of breaking the power of the dominant peasant castes.
The attempt, as we know, succeeded in Karnataka and Andhra but failed in Bihar, UP and Rajasthan at least partly because Mr Sanjay Gandhi was not particularly active in the first two states which he was in the last three during the emergency. In the latter states he successfully alienated the Muslims and the scheduled castes from Mrs Gandhi and her party. But gradually the 1967 division lines have reappeared with the landed interests ranged behind Mr Charan Singh and other Janata leaders and the scheduled castes, the Muslims and the Brahmans behind Mrs Gandhi.
The Times of India, 16 November 1978