An elected monarch is, of course, a contradiction in terms and India has not found it easy to live with this contradiction. But once we Indians have elected a monarch, we cannot afford to overthrow him or her unless we are prepared for a period of confusion. And we are not likely to do so unless he or she has committed what we regard as a terrible crime as Indira Gandhi did when she allowed her younger son to launch a programme of forcible sterilization during the Emergency.
The problem does not begin and end with the monarch. In India, a party does not elect its leader, the leader “elects” his or her party; indeed, only an individual so sure of himself or herself and so assured of popular support of whatever size can lead a party unless it deviates from the norm and is based on ideologically motivated cadres as the two communist parties are. And even the stronger of the two, the CP1(M), may lose power in West Bengal if and when Jyoti Basu is not available to lead it. Mahatma Gandhi clearly “elected” the Indian National Congress; it had little in common with what passed under the same name earlier. Nehru did not need to engage in a similar exercise; he was not so inclined either; contrary to the popular impression, he was a conservative quite content to live off his inheritance – the Congress Party as shaped by the Mahatma and the administrative machinery as established by the British. Indira Gandhi “elected” another Congress in 1978; it, too, had nothing in common with the party as it functioned before.
To underscore the point, permit me to refer to Charan Singh, by far the most important peasant leader North India has produced. He also feels free to do what he likes with his party; it is difficult to count the number of times he has changed the name and the executive committee of his “organisation”. Most of those who have revolted against his arbitrary ways have had to come back to him. And even the hitherto indecisive Chandra Shekhar, leader of the rump Janata Party brought into existence by his mentor, Jayaprakash Narayan, appears to have placed himself in a similar position. And you must know how desperately the A1ADMK in Tamil Nadu has clung to MG Ramachandran and the Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh to NT Rama Rao despite their serious ailments. MGR was lying in a New York hospital with a serious kidney problem when the AIADMK won the elections last December in his name.
Two-Faceted Problem
To clinch the issue – that in India, the old monarchical tradition remains well-entrenched – I might add that despite his genuine commitment to democracy, indeed to social democracy, Nehru too behaved like a monarch. He was not first among equals in the cabinet. He was the boss and he left no one in doubt that this was so. His ministers seldom dared differ with him in public, though some of them were highly critical of his basic policies of secularism and non-alignment in private. It will be fair to say that Rajiv Gandhi too has been cast in the role of an elected monarch. But that confronts him with a two-faceted problem – one facet resulting from tradition and the other from the adoption of the democratic process. Let us take up the first aspect.
From the very beginning of their civilisation the Indian people have yearned for not only a just king; they have yearned for an Indian version of Plato’s philosopher-king – the yogi king. Mahatma Gandhi gave expression to one aspect of this yearning when he spoke of Ramrajya as the objective of the freedom movement. I say one aspect because there is another aspect to the Indian psyche which emphasises what you westerners would call cold amoral realism worthy of a Machiavellian prince. Indeed, Kautilya’s Arthasastra is about two thousand years older than Machiavelli’s The Prince. And Kautilya is not wholly an exception in the history of India’s political thought, as is widely believed. The Mahabharat, one of India’s two great epics, contains a chapter which discusses statecraft in similar terms of realpolitik.
The yogi-king is evidently not a viable concept. A yogi cannot be interested in being a king. In our times, Sri Aurobindo gave up politics when he took to yoga in the first decade of the century, though he was the most eloquent exponent of the concept of Indian nationalism. Mahatma Gandhi was not prepared to accept office; he resigned even as an ordinary member of the Indian National Congress. Indeed, it was not possible to combine deep moral righteousness with the practice of realpolitik. But Indians expect their ruler to do so. Incidentally, this is true in the religious field as well. The yogi who has renounced the world is expected to produce miracles for those who turn to him for help.
Genuine Advantage
Here we run into another difficulty. For we are dealing with not only one people, with one
broadly consistent approach, but several. For the purpose of this discussion, we are concerned with the two – the westernised elite and the others.
The westernised elite tends to emphasise the moral aspect of public life at the cost of realpolitik. Thus a majority of them preferred Nehru to Sardar Patel. Thus, they never forgave Indira Gandhi for promoting allegedly corrupt men. In the Nehru-Patel contest, the people, too, sided with the former because he conformed better to their concept of a prince on a white charger delivering justice to the poor and the depressed. In Indira Gandhi’s case, too, a division did not come into play so long as she was seen to be battling men allegedly practicing realpolitik, the organisational bosses in the Congress, from 1969-71. It came into play when she had finally vanquished them in 1971-72 with landslide victories in the elections to Parliament and state legislatures. She did not turn out to be a righteous enough ruler for them. The presence of men such as LN Mishra in her set-up was enough to clinch the issue for them. In 1975, she committed the final crime of superseding the fundamental rights – the elite’s new dharma – which could never be forgiven. But the poor and the wretched stuck to her as their only hope, except briefly in 1977.
Rajiv Gandhi is trying to project himself as a righteous ruler and the circumstances appear to favour him in as much as he, unlike his mother but like his grandfather Nehru, is assured of easy ascendancy in the Congress and the country at the very start of his career as Prime Minister. This is a genuine advantage if it lasts, that is to say, if he is able to produce results. But what kind of results?
The answer is not as obvious as might appear on the surface. Broadly speaking, Rajiv Gandhi has set himself two objectives – clean politics and administration, and modernisation of the economy. He can certainly achieve significant results in both fields, but mainly at the top. While that will certainly be a worthwhile gain, one must not ignore the limitations inherent in the Indian situation. Corruption cannot be rooted out of the lower levels of the administration, whatever the government does; it has never been, not even under the alien British; too vigorous an effort in that direction can degenerate into a witch-hunt and destroy whatever effectiveness the administration possesses. This is not speculation; such a thing happened during the second half of the Emergency when the administration was paralysed by fear and the police came to rule the roast.
Sharp Contradiction
Similarly, too many units in Indian industry are too weak to withstand genuine competition; Rajiv Gandhi cannot afford too many bankruptcies and closures without risking his popularity; the problem in India has not only been the sheltered nature of the market, but also government policy which has deliberately kept the size of most units very small by any modern standard; while in economic terms it is desirable that this approach should change, its politics is a different proposition. It is not for nothing that the handloom industry has been so patronised, and sick and obsolescent units have been taken over to be run by the state. No government in India can be indifferent to the question of employment.
A sharp contradiction has arisen between development, especially of the infrastructure under government auspices, and corruption. Too much money gets stuck to too many fingers; so the costs of projects rise. Unconscionable delays in the sanctioning and implementation of projects also aggravate the problem of costs. There are any number of instances in which the cost has doubled or trebled on these counts. But it should not surprise you if I were to add that there could also arise a contradiction between the goal of a clean politics and administration on the one hand and rapid economic advance on the other.
Much of the health of the Indian economy whether we like to admit it or not, is the result of the successful evasion of taxes and government regulations by businessmen of all sizes. This could not have been possible without the cooperation of officialdom. If an attempt is made to end this cooperation without changing the policies which have necessitated it on the part of businessmen and made it profitable for officials, the result could be adverse, incidentally, not for officialdom which would continue to make money in a climate of fear, but for businessmen.
[To be continued]
The Times of India, 20 March 1985