So widespread is the discontent in the Congress at all levels against Rajiv Gandhi’s style of functioning that if his senior cabinet and party colleagues were not as supine as they are, his leadership would by now have come into question in the organisation and therefore in the country. Even so things have begun to stir. Ordinary Congress MPs are, for example, no longer as awed by him as they used to be only a month back. They have begun to express themselves. Witness the resentment over the increase in the prices of wheat, rice and petroleum products and over the “Rajiv’s India” documentary which contained derogatory references to Indira Gandhi.
As of now, the Congress party’s overwhelming majority in Parliament is a guarantee that Rajiv Gandhi’s power is secure. A major split on the pattern of 1969 is out of the question in the absence of a credible alternative leadership; a minor one, which could be a trend setter, has been taken care of by the anti-defection act the Prime Minister and his aides were clever enough and quick enough to enact with the willing consent of inept opposition leaders last year.
Rajiv Gandhi faces a contradictory situation. While he is not likely to confront a threat to his office in the foreseeable future, his image as the wonder boy of Indian politics has begun to show cracks. It would, in the literal sense, be inaccurate to say that many of those who came to pray have stayed to scoff. For, of the worshippers too, only a handful can reach him even now when he must know that his inaccessibility has begun to erode his position. But in the proper metaphorical sense, the description would not be too inappropriate. It has become commonplace that the shine is largely off.
In a sense this decline in Rajiv Gandhi’s appeal was unavoidable. Since he began his independent political career in the wake of his mother’s brutal assassination as Prime Minister at what may be the Everest of popularity, his “climb” could only be downhill. But that would be a superficial way of looking at the complex phenomenon we are witnessing.
In order to understand it, we have to deal with two different problems – the substance of Rajiv Gandhi’s politics and his leadership style.
First Problem
On a surface view, the first problem can be quickly disposed of. It can be said that like many other political novices of his generation, Rajiv Gandhi has come to politics armed with what, in political shorthand, may be called the Swatantra approach. But the issue is much more complicated. The leading figures in Swatantra party were not political neo-literates. They were veterans of the freedom movement. Rajiv Gandhi and his youthful aides belong to a different breed.
The Swatantra party, it may be recalled, was formed in the late fifties under the leadership of the first Indian Governor-General of independent India, C Rajagopalachari, with the help of some leading Bombay businessmen and others who were highly critical of Nehru’s economic policy with its preference for the public sector and of his foreign policy with its accent on friendship with the Soviet Union. The businessmen were by and large innocent of the compulsions of a backward economy and a poverty-stricken electorate. They favoured 19th century type free enterprise at home and friendship with the West abroad. But Rajagopalachari could not have thought of his role as anything more than a corrective to Nehru’s socialism and policy of friendship with the Soviet Union.
All that is, however, not too pertinent for our present purpose. What is pertinent is that while the Swatantra party never got off the ground and never acquired a worthwhile power base except in some areas where the former princes still enjoyed influence as in Orissa, the appeal of its approach spread among the upper crust. Ironically enough, this was particularly so after the party virtually disappeared in the sixties. Various reasons accounted for it – the relative inefficiency of the public sector, the corruption that the “permit-quota-licence raj” spawned, the steadily growing belief that centrally planned economies did not function well anywhere in the world, the decline in the appeal of leftist ideologies partly as a result of the disclosures of Stalin’s and Mao Zedong’s crimes in Russia and China, and the rise of a new vast class of entrepreneurs of various sizes within the country.
All these points call for a detailed statement. But that is not possible in this article. Here we are concerned primarily with the fact that the Swatantra approach found special favour among upper crust Indians and certain political parties, the Jana Sangh, for instance, which was rooted in the trading community in north India. Socialists too bought the pro-Western and anti-Soviet aspect of the Swatantra platform under the influence of Jayaprakash Narayan who had, for good reasons, become highly critical of the Soviet Union. A distinction has, however, to be drawn between the political activists and essentially naive upper crust youth who had no awareness of the complexities of Indian society, economy or polity.
Rise Of Janata
It would not be accurate to say that the rise of the Janata Party to power in 1977 represented the triumph of the Swatantra approach at the popular level. The Janata owed its victory at the hustings to the excesses of the emergency, especially in respect of family planning and slum clearance. But there can be no question that the Janata, with all its differences and personality clashes, stood for a broad approach which was not very dissimilar from the Swatantra’s. It was anti-socialist and anti-Soviet, though there were powerful exceptions.
The Janata government sought to reduce controls and liberalise imports; it would have loved to weaken ties with the Soviet Union and strengthen those with the United States; only geo-strategic compulsions prevented it from implementing its policy of “genuine non-alignment”.
Clearly the Janata phenomenon has to be discussed in the context of the emergency. But the emergency itself was the product of a polarization of Indian politics. On the face of it, the polarization revolved on the politics and personality of Indira Gandhi. But in reality deeper and extremely complex forces were at work, so complex indeed that these have not been fully and properly spelt out even today. This task cannot be attempted in this article.
Here we may content ourselves with some broad facts. The process of polarisation began with the first Congress split in 1969 when Indira Gandhi defeated her rivals on a leftist platform. This phase can be said to have ended in 1971 with her victory at the polls on the same leftist platform. Then we had a brief respite on two counts – the disarray in the opposition as a result of the defeat at the polls, and the Bangladesh crisis and India’s military victory over Pakistan. Opposition stalwarts then hailed Indira Gandhi as Goddess Durga. This truce ended towards the end of 1973 when a new kind of polarisation began in which the opposition headed by Jayaprakash Narayan managed to cast Indira Gandhi in the role of a corrupt and an authoritarian ruler. The emergency confirmed large sections of the intelligentsia in this view of her when she also forfeited the support of the Communist Party and other leftists because Sanjay Gandhi emerged on the scene and repudiated them and their programme.
New Consensus
Thus when Indira Gandhi returned to office in 1980 largely on an anti-Janata wave generated by endless squabbles among its leaders and the collapse of the Morarji Desai government, she did so without significant backing among the intelligentsia. In psychological terms, she was too much on the defensive to try and overcome this antipathy towards her. Instead she tended to surround herself largely with yes men out to feather their own nests. It follows that she could not take the initiative for producing among the intelligentsia a new consensus which would be in conformity with India’s genuine social, economic, political and foreign policy needs.
It is not possible to say what Indira Gandhi would have done if, on the one hand, the United States had not decided in 1981 to extend massive military assistance to Pakistan in view of the earlier Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan and, if on the other, the Akali agitation in Punjab had not taken a secessionist and violent turn in 1982-83. As events developed, she came to be preoccupied with the threat to the country’s unity and security and adopted a nationalist platform. But she was not able to sell this platform to a large section of the intelligentsia. Ironically enough, her achievement in 1971 and her personality partly accounted for this failure. The intelligentsia remained convinced that truncated Pakistan was no match to India despite US military aid and that President Zia-ul-Haq would not dare attack the country so long as she was around. It also believed that she exaggerated the Pakistani danger and that she deliberately avoided an agreement with the Akalis. Through their propaganda most opposition parties reinforced the anti-Indira sentiment.
Amidst this continuing polarisation, the anti-Indira (which in ideological terms meant anti-socialist and anti-Soviet) consensus got consolidated among large sections of the intelligentsia. It was essentially what the Swatantra party had preached. Young men divorced from village and even small town India, and unaware either of the political implications of mass poverty or of the trauma of partition and the creation of a permanently hostile Pakistan fell for this approach. Indeed, it will not be an exaggeration to say that they sucked it with the air they breathed. Rajiv Gandhi was one of them.
(To be concluded)
The Times of India, 19 February 1986