The impression has spread that as Prime Minister, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi is deliberately distancing himself from his mother’s approach to the problems of the country’s governance.
This impression is justified on a number of counts – his decision to drop Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, without doubt the minister closest to Mrs. Gandhi, from the cabinet and to remove Mr. R.K. Dhawan and other members of the former Prime Minister’s personal staff, his emphasis on clean government, the way he handled the resignation of Mr. Ramakrishna Hegde as chief minister of Karnataka in the wake of the Janata party’s dismal performance in the recent poll to the Lok Sabha and the respect he has shown the opposition in connection with the anti-defection legislation.
In a sense, there is no cause for surprise in all this. As he entered the political arena, apparently reluctantly and at Mrs. Gandhi’s insistence, he appeared keen to project an image of himself which was the very opposite of his younger deceased brother’s. And as it happened, among his first important acts as general secretary of the AICC was to put it on record that Mr. AR Antulay, who was facing the charge of having used his office of chief minister to collect enormous funds for trusts set up by him, would have to go. As a result of this and some other moves, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi came to be known as Mr. Clean.
It is difficult to say whether Mrs. Gandhi saw in this form of praise for the son a criticism of her own set-up, if not of herself. But the criticism was implicit in the praise and quite justly. She was presiding over a set-up which had become increasingly venal since her return to office in 1980. It was, therefore, to Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s credit that he sought to demarcate himself from this setup, even if more by implication than by explicit statement.
In another sense, however, Mr. Gandhi’s current behaviour is a cause for surprise. For rightly or wrongly, the impression had gained ground that as distinct from Mrs. Gandhi’s, his set-up, consisting principally of the two Aruns, had, on the one hand, been primarily responsible for the overthrow of Mr. Farooq Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir and Mr. NT Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, and on the other, accepted responsibility for collecting funds for the then forthcoming elections to the Lok Sabha. This impression does not square with the keenness Mr. Gandhi has shown to push an anti-defection law through Parliament and his emphasis on clean government reflected, among other things, in his and his key minister’s reluctance to meet leading industrialists, not to speak of their representatives in New Delhi.
Trust Of People
But whether Mr. Gandhi’s leadership style as it has been in evidence for over a month now should or should not cause surprise, is a relatively minor matter. By and large the people take him at his word. The popular view is that he is earnest and that he should be given a chance to prove himself and his bona fides. There are some uncharitable critics who either say that all this is PR or that he is still living in a dream world where things happen according to wish. But their number is insignificantly small. The intelligentsia trusts him as it never trusted Mrs. Gandhi after 1972, if it so trusted her earlier.
Obviously Mr. Gandhi is much better placed to function the way he wants to and to fulfil his promises than his mother ever was. It is a long and complicated story which cannot possibly be discussed at length in this space. Some aspects are familiar, her struggle with the organisational bosses leading to the split in the Congress in 1969, for instance. The others are not equally familiar – her need to resort to populist rhetoric not only to defeat the party bosses but also to rescue the Congress from the decline it had gone into and to lean on leftists, genuine as well as pseudo, former socialists as well as former communists, to checkmate the “grand alliance’’ ranged against her and the subsequent compulsion to control them in order to salvage the economy from the wreckage they were threatening to make of it – but these too are not wholly unfamiliar.
And then there are certain aspects of the story which have hardly figured in any discussions of Mrs. Gandhi at all — the inability of the Congress-dominated order to accommodate the aspirations of upcoming social segments comprising essentially the middle castes in the Hindu society, their revolt against it reflected first in the rise of SVD governments in the whole of North India and then in the Nav Nirman agitation in Gujarat and the movement led by Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar, the failure of these social groups to build and sustain a non-Congress political order which found expression in the fall of those coalitions, the collapse of the old hierarchy in the Congress as a result of the splits in 1969 and 1978, the need for, and rise of, a Praetorian guard around her during and after the emergency, especially after the emergency, and the inevitable tendency of such a guard to behave as if they were a law unto themselves
A Stronger Position
Popular discussions of such issues get simplified and sloganised in all societies. In our case, even the so-called intellectuals have not escaped this tendency perhaps because we react either in moral or in constitutional-legal absolutes on account of the nature of our freedom struggle under the Mahatma’s leadership and our lack of experience of statecraft before independence. This caused for Mrs. Gandhi a problem of legitimacy which she just could not resolve, except briefly in 1971-72 and 1980-81. This issue deserves to be discussed separately.
Here it will suffice to say that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi does not have to engage in the kinds of struggle the former Prime Minister could not avoid. His supremacy in the party and the country is assured. So given the necessary skill on his part he is in a much better position to shape the environment around him than Mrs. Gandhi was. For all we know, she was basically an insecure person. But she also had a lot to feel insecure about. And regardless of whether Mr. Rajiv Gandhi is basically a secure and self-assured individual, he has a lot to feel assured about.
Even so he cannot reshape either the government and the administrative machinery or the country to his (modem) design. Corruption in government is as old as any kind of known governance in India. Kautilya deals with the problem in his Artha Shastra. But since Mr. Rajiv Gandhi cannot possibly be so unrealistic as to believe that he can give India the kind of honest administration Britain enjoys, this reference to the existence of corruption from the beginning of time is not particularly relevant. Apparently he is referring to a specific form of corruption which is the result of the “marriage of convenience” between those in authority and those in business. We should, therefore, concentrate our attention on this aspect of the malady.
That old wise man from the south, Mr. C. Rajagopalachari (they called him a wily fox) summed up a popular view of the problem when he spoke of the permit-licence-quota raj. But this pithy description of the malaise suffered, as all such sloganised descriptions do, from partisanship. Thus inevitably the discussion had centred on whether India, given its objectives of economic development, prevention of undue concentration of wealth in a few hands and establishment of a less unjust socio-economic order than the prevalent one, could have opted for a different strategy and, equally inevitably, the proponents of the Nehru approach have always prevailed in this debate.
Need For Caution
The terms of the debate have, of course, determined the outcome. But behind the terms has lain the deeper political reality. The Indian political order resulting from the interaction of the British raj, represented above all by the ICS and the western-educated intelligentsia, Mr. Nehru being its most outstanding spokesman, has been biased against businessmen. The Congress under Mr Nehru had to deal with them, but it could not enter into an open partnership with them to the great advantage of India, as governments do with business houses in Japan to that country’s advantage.
The relationship was uneasy; Mr. Nehru allowed individuals such as Mr. Morarji Desai and Mr. S. K. Patil to collect money from businessmen and do them favours in return; he himself looked the other way as if some necessary crime was being committed. But the relationship was not wholly illegitimate and subterranean. This it became in the late sixties when the government banned donations by companies to political parties and the Congress came to depend on black money and began to collect funds even from anti-social elements such as smugglers. This was not even a marriage of convenience. It was a wholly illegitimate affair and it has produced bastards of varying sizes and descriptions. And inflation and a consequent feeling of want and insecurity among the salaried bureaucrats at all levels, reinforced by the arbitrariness of political decisions resulting from a series of political upheavals since the mid-sixties, have made their own contributions to the moral chaos we witness today.
This dangerous process has doubtless to be reversed. But it cannot be reversed in a hurry. Such an attempt can only unleash another evil of unknown dimensions – terror – which can paralyse the administration, the economy and destroy democracy. Even if we ignore this danger, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi would be well-advised to proceed cautiously. The liberalisation of the economy does not necessarily reduce corruption as the country’s experience in recent years would show. It is also a complicated business. Indian industry has led a sheltered existence. It has been free from competition, both domestic and foreign. To expose it suddenly is a risky enterprise – too many closures and bankruptcies in a country where the government has regarded it necessary to take over sick industries.
The Times of India, 6 February 1985