In some respects 1981 has been like any other year for India – average crops, a “tolerable” rate of inflation, not too dramatic a deterioration in law and order, a government without a clear sense of purpose and direction, a disunited and ineffectual opposition and and so on. Assam has continued to simmer. But it has not exploded.
In some other ways, however, 1981 has been far from an ordinary year. It is, for example, difficult to recall another episode like the Bhagalpur blindings of alleged criminals. It is equally difficult to recall so many Harijans having been murdered in cold blood in any one year. And, of course, in 1981 India secured from the IMF a loan which is the largest not only in its own but also in the IMF’s history.
Yet if one was to give a name to 1981, it will without doubt have to be called the Antulay year. His supporters and detractors alike will agree that Mr Antulay has been India’s man of the year. He has dominated the national scene. No other Indian has so monopolised discussion in the past six months. His name has become synonymous with a new style of government which is more reminiscent of the last days of the Moghuls than anything we have been familiar with in the past century.
Mr Antulay was not a dark horse when he was catapulted to the position of chief minister of the country’s most industrialised and richest state in 1980. He had been around on the scene for years, first as a minister in the Maharashtra government and then as one of the general secretaries of the Congress party in New Delhi. In the first capacity he had attracted unfavourable publicity on a rather unsavoury charge. Though he was cleared of it by his peers, the incident has pursued him ever since. And even in those early days he had come to be known for his “unorthodox” approach and abrupt manners. As one story would have it, the state chief justice and other high court judges were so enraged with his ways as law minister that there was talk of moving him to another portfolio.
Keep Out
In his capacity as one of the general secretaries of the Congress party, Mr Antulay perhaps issued more press statements than any one of his colleagues after the 1978 split. But he mostly stayed in New Delhi, leaving it, like many other Congress (I) dignitaries, to Mrs Gandhi to mobilise popular support for the party. He is not known to have engaged in any mass activity even during his frequent trips to his home town of Bombay.
When Mrs Gandhi formed her government in New Delhi after her party’s landslide victory in the election to the Lok Sabha in January 1980, Mr Antulay was confident that he would be included in it. But he was not. He was also kept out when she subsequently expanded the cabinet. No one knew why. Mr Antulay was disappointed, though he kept whistling in the dark to keep up his courage.
There are several versions of how Mr Antulay was finally selected for the second most powerful office in the land – second only to that of the Prime Minister – in view of Bombay’s importance as India’s financial capital. While these versions differ substantially from one another they agree on two points. First, that Mrs Gandhi was not particularly enthusiastic about Mr Antulay and that she only acquiesced in his choice. Secondly, the choice was not made on the basis of proven record of administrative ability. Indeed, it was a big surprise for most people in Bombay. When his name began to be mentioned for the office of chief minister, not many took it seriously. Indeed, even today; no one is in a position to say for certain why the party high command’s choice fell on Mr Antulay. All that is known is that Mr Sitaram Kesri, the AICC’s observer for Maharashtra, was asked to arrange a “consensus” in Mr Antulay’s favour and Mr Kesri dutifully did the needful. He produced and announced the “consensus” before another observer appointed by Mrs Gandhi, Mr AP Sharma, could reach Bombay. On the crucial day his plane could not land in Bombay because of bad weather and had to return to Delhi. Else, it might have been a different story.
It is not difficult to explain Mr Antulay’s subsequent rise to “prominence.” The explanation is starkly simple. No one in Indian politics today can match his daring, his indifference to established norms and procedures, his appreciation of the powers his office vests in him, his willingness to stretch them to the maximum, his grasp of the Indian psychology whereby full-fledged cabinet ministers can be depended upon to obey any order, legitimate or otherwise, if only they are allowed to retain their jobs, his awareness that politics, too, has become big business and that its practitioners no longer see themselves as servants of the people. He has loaded legislators in Maharashtra with powers and privileges which MPs and indeed even Union ministers would envy.
Specious Plea
Mr Antulay’s friends and supporters claim that he has not done anything which some other chief ministers have not done. If he has used his office to collect funds, they argue, so have the others. If he has transferred, promoted and demoted officials at his sweet will, so have they. If he has disregarded rules and bent them to his purpose, so have they. If he has kept ministers and senior officials waiting for hours till in some cases they are known to have dozed off in their chairs, so have the others. This is a specious argument. Mr Antulay’s scale of operations puts him in a different class.
He lives and functions in a style the Prime Minister cannot match. He has, for example, added a new floor to his spacious bungalow. Barricades have been built in towns which he has visited to keep non-existent crowds in check. He announces projects on the spot. So much the worse for officials if they say these projects are not feasible or the money is not available for them. And, of course, all his actions are recorded by TV cameramen who are always in attendance and the publicity department has published any number of pamphlets and books to immortalise him. One of them includes letters to the chief minister. And who in independent India has made a state government contribute Rs 2 crores from the public exchequer to a privately controlled trust? The list is endless. But it should suffice.
And he has done all this without the slightest sense of guilt, indeed a relish. There is not the slightest evidence to suggest that he has a sense of remorse over what he has done. Indeed, he is known to have boasted of his powers and the way he has used these – to reward friends and punish critics and opponents. It is difficult to believe that he genuinely feels that he is an innocent man who is being unjustly persecuted by some “malevolent” individuals in the press and the opposition aided and abetted by the “all-pervasive” CIA. He has been putting on an act which, unfortunately for him, has not carried conviction. Even so he is cast in a different mould – the mould in which adventurers are cast.
It is not known whether Mr Antulay has a hero after whom he has modelled himself. But it is obvious that he had not patterned himself after Mrs Gandhi though he swears by her day in and day out. Unlike him, she is extremely cautious and reticent; she would never boast of her powers as prime minister; she does not buy support; and above all she does not dispense “justice” on the spot in an open durbar. Mr Antulay issue orders on the spot and his secretary accompanying him on his tours carries a cheque book with him so that payment in “deserving” cases can be made without delay. Clearly Mr Antulay belongs to another age when princes went on horseback collecting “nazrana” (tribute) and dispensing “justice” on the spot. Government by rules and procedures is not for him.
Excessive Gimmickry
One episode illuminates his love for gimmicks – his midnight visit to vice dens in Bombay soon after his appointment as chief minister. This naturally invited derisive comments. Perhaps Mr Antulay thought of himself as another Haroon al Rashid. But there was no follow up action. Vice continues to prosper in the city.
This was followed by another gimmick – the move to get Shivaji’s possibly non-existent Bhawani sword from the British. He paid a visit to Britain for this purpose but offered no explanation for the inevitable failure of the mission. And, of course, simultaneously he continued to denounce the press, the parliamentary system and the judiciary, apparently in the belief that it will endear him to the leader, Mrs Gandhi. The numerous trusts followed in the latter half of 1980 as if he had come to office with a readymade plan. And, of course in every case, he made sure that they were completely under his control. Has it been a case of megalomania or unbridled ambition, the ambition to succeed Mrs Gandhi if not supplant her as Prime Minister and push her up as President? Who can say?
In a different age when personal government was normal or one of many Third World countries where there is hardly any distinction between the public exchequer and the ruler’s personal fortune and where it is quite common for princes to build palaces to demonstrate their power to their kinsmen – Mr Antulay has built a huge bungalow in his small village – he would have hardly attracted any opprobrium. But unfortunately for him, India is not another sheikhdom. It is part of the modern civilised world where the rule of law prevails.
Wild Ambitions
Mr Antulay could obviously not have got away with all that he has for so long if his ministers were not so supine, or if the legislators were not so ready to be “appeased” and frightened or if Mrs Gandhi was able to keep herself properly informed and willing to say “enough is enough”.
It is truly extraordinary that while last June she asked Mr Antulay to remove her name from one of the trusts he had established, she did not care to find out how he had collected the money for it and other trusts. What a pity! How much damage to the system and her own party could have been avoided as a result of timely action? By then it should have been more than obvious to her that Mr Antulay’s personalised style of governance was intended to promote only himself and his own ambitions whatever they are. If Mrs Gandhi was a student of history as her father was, she would have known that history was repeating itself – the history of the post-Aurangzeb Moghul empire when satraps paid only formal obeisance to Delhi and concentrated all effective powers in their own hands.
The Times of India, 30 December 1981