To begin with, let me state the obvious which is that Rajiv Gandhi is relatively new to the Indian political scene and so are some of his principal aides, Arun Singh, his parliamentary secretary, and Arun Nehru, minister of state for energy. It is, therefore, difficult to assess him the way one could Indira Gandhi and anticipate his moves, as one could hers. There is a generation gap between the new ruler and commentators like me.
Even so a couple of points can be made about him. Rajiv Gandhi and those around him – I exclude the Union cabinet for this purpose for the present – represent the post-independence generation. Their preoccupations are different from those of their predecessors. They have not been influenced either by Mahatma Gandhi’s religious outlook or by Jawaharlal Nehru’s anti-imperialist and socialist commitments. They are modernisers who call themselves pragmatists. Two of them, Arun Nehru and Arun Singh, were top executives in two multinationals before they took to politics.
Among the first move they made was to begin to use a computer in the All India Congress Committee which practice they have now introduced in government. They mean business when they talk of new work ethics. They work pretty hard themselves. They are determined to improve the working of government which has been rather lackadaisical. The management of public sector undertakings should improve considerably under them. This itself will be a great gain for the Indian economy.
Basically, however, we have to assess the forces at work in my country, the margins of manoeuvre these are likely to permit Rajiv Gandhi and the challenges he is likely to face.
As you know, it is virtually impossible to define forces at play in any country not to speak of a land of the size, complexity, variety and antiquity of India. Any attempt to do so has of necessity to be highly selective and general. One has to, as it were, paint with a large brush and in bold strokes. This is a risky enterprise. The risk cannot, however, be avoided. We cannot otherwise begin to probe the Rajiv phenomenon.
Popular Endorsement
It is, of course, a commonplace that Rajiv Gandhi is Prime Minister of India by virtue of inheritance as well as popular endorsement, that he represents continuity as well as change and that he can assure India both stability and rapid progress. But the commonplace raises the question of compatibility. I need hardly recall that Indira Gandhi faced a great deal of criticism when, following her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi’s death in a plane crash in June 1980, she decided to bring Rajiv Gandhi into politics and to groom him as her successor. Most educated Indians were appalled by the move because they saw in it an attempt to establish a dynasty. But the same educated Indians turned to him is if to a messiah in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s brutal assassination on October 31 last year.
Rajiv Gandhi took over as Prime Minister the same evening. No one else could have filled the bill. Her senior cabinet colleagues, Pranab Mukherjee (then finance minister and since dropped from the Union cabinet) and PV Narasimha Rao, then home and now defence minister must have known that the popular reaction would be less than happy if either of them took over as acting Prime Minister. They did well to opt out quickly.
In the circumstances, it would be logical to acknowledge that Indira Gandhi knew the Indian people and the Indian situation better than her critics, whether friendly or hostile. But I have not seen many people draw this conclusion. Within India, the old line of argument continues and a new one has been added on top of it. The old line is that Indira Gandhi had so emasculated the Congress party that no one other than her son was available to take over when she was suddenly put out of action. And the new line is that old controversies have become irrelevant in view of Indira Gandhi’s death. Rajiv Gandhi’s, rather than the Congress party’s, massive victory in the elections to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament), and his leadership style favouring, as it does, a consensual rather than a confrontationist approach towards the Opposition and emphasising, as it does, the removal of corrupt practices in politics and administration which had come to disfigure both in Indira Gandhi’s India.
Cellular Society
There is some merit in both these propositions. But neither is as conclusive as it is supposed to be. While Indira Gandhi did not do what she could to restore the supposedly old institutional method of functioning in the Congress after the two splits in the party in 1969 and 1978, she could not have produced a vigorous party however hard she might have tried. Indian society, still cellular and segmentary in character and still lacking in a firm commitment to large impersonal principles so characteristic of European societies, would have frustrated such an attempt. Though this is an important point in any discussion of India, it is seldom taken into account.
The reasonably conclusive proof in support of my contention in respect of the Congress party under Indira Gandhi is that with the exception of cadre-based Communist parties and to an extent the Bharatiya Janata Party, originally based on the RSS cadres, no political organisation has functioned very differently from it. In Indira Gandhi’s case the personal inclination conformed to the social reality. She had contempt for the party over which she presided. At the conscious level, as a member of the elitist Nehru clan, she perhaps felt superior to the “commoners” in the Congress. In reality she was being quintessentially Indian – indifferent to the need for institutions run along impersonal lines for impersonal social ends.
Indira Gandhi had in fact only two options. First, if she had been inhibited by the anti-dynastic democratic principle as her father Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was to an extent, and if she had cared enough for the opinion of the intelligentsia, as he did, she would have either left the question of succession open or tried to promote someone other than her son as he promoted Lal Bahadur Shastri. It is difficult to think of an acceptable candidate after the second split in the party in 1978 when YB Chavan left her. But we shall let that “small” matter pass.
Secondly, if she felt, as in all probability she did, that in view of the proven incompetence of other parties to provide an alternative to the Congress and of the lack of an alternative to her in her own party, especially after the 1978 split, she owed it to the country to provide a successor, she could not but project first Sanjay Gandhi and then Rajiv Gandhi unless she were willing to trust Menaka Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi’s widow, which she was not.
Messianic Personality
I say “first Sanjay Gandhi” because he had pushed himself forward at the time of the Emergency and he was too forceful a personality, almost messianic, to be easily denied. After his death in 1980, it was immaterial whether or not the other son was interested in politics or whether or not she thought he had the necessary qualities of leadership. He had to be brought in and projected as her successor.
This is not a case of wisdom by hindsight. No worthwhile appreciation of the nature of Indian society and history could have produced a different conclusion. India must have a monarch – by nomination or descent – or face the risk of anarchy leaving the scene open for some forceful personality to emerge and occupy the throne. It is doubtful whether the editorial writer of The Economist, London, had this point as well in view when he described Indira Gandhi as Queen Victoria’s successor after India’s victory over Pakistan and the birth, with India’s help, of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation. But the writer had hit the nail on the head. Indira Gandhi had emerged as queen empress of India.
This proposition flies in the face of certain well-known facts. India is a functioning democracy; it holds free and fair elections to legislatures at the Centre and in the constituent units; it possesses an independent judiciary and a free press, sections of which refused to be terrorised into silence during the Emergency; the people will not be denied their democratic rights; indeed popular pressure, though silently exercised, proved to be so strong in 1976 that within 18 months of the supersession of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, Indira Gandhi felt obliged to order a poll in order to feel legitimate in her own eyes. Above all, Indian society is becoming democratised as never before.
But Indian democracy has survived precisely because it has been able to throw up a monarch – first in Nehru and then in Indira Gandhi – who could hold in check the age-old Indian tendency to fragment, the Janata which was elected to power in 1977 providing the best known example of this tendency. God alone knows what would have happened if these masterful politicians were not available to look after India.
[To be continued]
The Times of India, 19 March 1985