As we celebrate the 34th Republic Day, the spectre of political instability and disorder has once again come to haunt many of us. Indeed, some of us are beginning to wonder whether the dreaded “dangerous decades” are finally on us.
It is no longer possible for us to dismiss these disturbing thoughts. The immediate cause is, of course, the rout of the Congress (I) in its southern citadels and what this defeat has revealed about the state of the ruling party’s health. But even more worrisome is the widespread belief (or fear) that its and the nation’s leader does not have either the will or the capacity to reverse the process and the fact that no party or alliance exists which is yet ready to take the place of the Congress (I) and Mrs Gandhi.
Lesson Of History
During the inter-war period, it was common for educated Indians to say: the old order is dying and the new refuses to be born. The clichéd formulation suddenly went out of vogue even before independence. Perhaps the intelligentsia felt that a new order had finally been born. In the ‘fifties, Selig Harrison, then India correspondent of The Washington Post, wrote his well known book “India: The Most Dangerous Decades” arguing that India’s unity could come under strain as a result of the growth of regional forces.
Since the book underscored the popular lesson of Indian history, it has been extremely influential. Even those who have not read it have been influenced by what they have heard about it. So whenever the Congress, so far the only truly national party, has run into trouble, many of us rush to the conclusion that the dreaded decade has at last arrived.
The main reason for this response is that so used have many of us become to Congress dominance of the national political scene that a threat to it is automatically seen as a threat to the very integrity of the country. The Congress-dominated system has been unstable since 1967 when the party, while retaining control of the Centre, lost power in all northern states as well as in Tamil Nadu. Yet, so great has been the psychological dependence of a significant section of the Indian intelligentsia on the Nehru model that they have refused to come to terms with the fact that in view of the country’s rapidly changing social and economic scene, this model just cannot be restored.
Indeed, this is one reason why the intelligentsia has virtually been polarized for the past 13 years in its attitude towards Mrs Gandhi. While a majority of educated Indians have been opposed to her, many of them bitterly, because in their view she has not tried to retain that old system, a relatively small minority have supported her in the belief that despite all her weaknesses she has been not only the best bet for the country but also the best guarantee for the preservation of at least the façade of the Nehru model. The chances are that Mrs. Gandhi too sees herself in that light. Else, she might not have been so uncomfortable with the emergency.
But whether we, the members of the intelligentsia, like it or not, the Congress and the Congress-dominated system are in irreversible decline. Mrs Gandhi has somehow kept them going on the strength of her personality for 15 long years and she may keep them going for some more years if she is able to tap the remaining reservoir of goodwill for her, more importantly, the psychology of dependence among substantial sections of the populace. This will be a useful holding operation, if she is willing and able to perform it, because in the meantime some new party or alliance capable of serving as the spokesman of the critically important Hindi-belt might arise. But there can be no question that Mrs Gandhi can at best engage in a holding operation. She cannot establish a new, durable and virile political order.
As the story goes, when an old friend from the London days tried in the late sixties or early seventies to impress on her the need to reorganize the Congress Party, she said in her characteristically brief reply: “where is the Congress Party which I can reorganize?” When the friend persisted and spoke of the need for a strong political organisation, she is reported to have queried, “Why do I need the party? I can depend on the administrative machinery for managing the affairs of the country”.
The story may be apocryphal. But it sounds true. In any case, it fits in with Mrs Gandhi’s attitude towards the Congress Party. This attitude can, however, be seen in two ways, not just one as her detractors do when they allege that she has deliberately undermined the Congress Party in order to realize her “dynastic” ambitions. For it is equally plausible to argue that Mrs Gandhi has been making a virtue of necessity. That is, having concluded that the party was beyond redemption, she has not wasted her time and energy in the effort to revive it and renew it and has instead depended on her personal appeal to win elections and then on the bureaucracy to run the government.
Caught In Trap
But even on the second more charitable interpretation, Mrs Gandhi has been caught, as she was bound to, in a trap. In view of the democratic nature of the regime over which she presides, her aides had to come mostly from the moribund Congress. And they were bound to bring discredit on themselves and finally on her. Stooges do not as a rule make good ministers. That may be one reason why some of her advisers, if not she herself, have from time to time toyed with the idea of going over to the presidential system, the theory being that that system is not as critically dependent on a vigorous party organisation as the parliamentary one.
This has been an exercise in escapism. Regardless of the merits and demerits of the presidential system, there is not the slightest evidence that anyone close to Mrs. Gandhi has ever examined its pros and cons in relations to India’s conditions and needs. Apparently, she herself has not been particularly enthusiastic about the proposal. So it has been allowed to peter out gradually since Sanjay Gandhi’s death in June 1980, though AR Antulay tried to canvass support for it for some time. Both the mentor, Sanjay Gandhi, and the follower, AR Antulay, might have thought in terms of pushing Mrs Gandhi into the presidency and taking over the office of prime minister.
During the emergency when he behaved as if he was the de facto head of the government, Sanjay Gandhi also sought to bring into existence a new party (nominally labelled the Youth Congress) and as such a wing of the Indian National Congress which was to replace the parent organisation, consisting of restless young men of assorted backgrounds bound by no code other than loyalty to the chief was given strong representation in the Congress (I) list of candidates for election to the Lok Sabha and state legislatures. Almost all chief ministers and ministers in the Congress (I)-majority states were Sanjay Gandhi s nominees.
Thus, in a sense, the stage was being set not just for Mr Gandhi’s succession to his mother but for a new political order. It is an open question whether Mrs Gandhi was party to this design and whether she would in fact have handed over power to him. It is also open to question whether Sanjay and his roughnecks would have managed to operate a system once the facade of acceptability and respectability provided by Mrs Gandhi was not available to them. But some kind of alternative, however unpleasant and therefore in reality weak, was in the works. With Sanjay’s death, this alternative collapsed, leaving Mrs Gandhi in a vulnerable position. For the Congress (I) was a much weaker organisation than the Congress even during and after the emergency when its leading lights had been shorn of much of their power and prestige.
The subsequent developments like Antulay’s activities, the spread of corruption on an unprecedented scale, the elevation of non-entities to such respected institutions like the Rajya Sabha, cabinets and commissions of inquiry, poor performance at the polls in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, the upsurge of dissidence in one state after another, and finally the rout in Andhra and Karnataka have followed with the remorseless logic of a Greek tragedy.
But there are no fatal inevitabilities in human affairs. It is still possible for Mrs Gandhi to break the vicious circle and convince the people that she can give the country a reasonably effective and honest government at least at the Centre, if not in the states. It is by no means certain that this will ensure a majority for her in the Lok Sabha in the 1985 poll. But it can, and thereby buy for the country some more time in which to produce a new political instrument to replace the tired, old Congress.
Andhra Experiment
A new experiment has begun in Andhra where on the coat-tails of NT Rama Rao a number of educated young men, many of them with no previous involvement in politics, have got elected and become ministers. If they are able to resist the temptation which power places within one’s reach and compensate their lack of experience by their idealism, they shall have set an example which the people in other states can follow. Indeed, if NT Rama Rao is able to give Andhra a good government, there is no reason why he should limit his field of activity to Andhra.
The Times of India, 26 January 1983