In the excitement over the surprise election announcements, two points have generally escaped attention. First, the twin decisions on the dates and the linking of the poll to the Lok Sabha with that to a number of state legislatures have been as much of a surprise for most Congress leaders as for the opposition, and they are only slightly better placed to cope with the new situation. Second, in coupling the two sets of elections, Rajiv Gandhi has sharply raised the stakes, above all, for the Congress. While in the poll to the Lok Sabha alone the central issue would have been his own title to continue as prime minister, at stake now is the future of the Congress party itself.
Both compulsion and calculation have influenced the prime minister’s decisions. In the circumstances arising out of the resurrection of the Bofors scandal by N. Ram, of The Hindu, a poll to the Lok Sabha alone would almost certainly have taken the form of a referendum on him. This was not a prospect Rajiv Gandhi could have relished. So he had to do all he could to compel the opponents to accept a larger fight and there was no better way to do it than to hold elections to as many vidhan sabhas as possible.
Rajiv Gandhi and his aides must have calculated that a poll to several legislates right now would make it far more difficult for the opposition to come together, in however tenuous a manner, than one limited to the Lok Sabha. The calculation is, on the face of it, justified. But it would perhaps be reasonable to infer that the compulsion element has been stronger than the element of calculation in the prime minister’s decision.
The decision itself is fraught with a basic contradiction. While logically it marks a reversal of the leadership style in the Congress party which can, for the present purpose, be traced back to the Congress split in 1969 and especially to Indira Gandhi’s decision in 1971 to delink the poll to the Lok Sabha from that to state legislatures, Rajiv Gandhi cannot possibly be interested in restoring the status quo ante.
In plain terms, Indira Gandhi put aside whatever was left of the Congress organisation after the split and won the election in 1971 on the strength of her own appeal and effort; by this remarkable performance she not only put her senior colleagues on notice that she could dispense with them if they failed to “behave”, she also demonstrated that they could ride to power on her back. While Rajiv Gandhi is now seeking to return to office on the strength of whatever remains of the Congress organisation at the grassroots, there is even now no evidence that he is willing to leave decisions to chief ministers and PCC chiefs in the states. And, in any event, they are all his nominees and only some of them can claim to command battalions of their own.
All these constraints notwithstanding, however, the Congress party has shown unbelievable resilience in the past and it may do so once again now. It is, therefore, possible that it may be able to master the forces of dissidence and disarray within it, put up a brave fight and romp home safe and dry. This possibility will clearly be strengthened if VP Singh continues to waver in the choice of an ally between the two Communist parties and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and/or if the Janata Dal and the BJP are not able to agree on seat adjustments between them in the Hindi heartland.
This is, however one aspect of the situation. The other is that despite Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to link Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, it is unavoidable that the forthcoming poll will partly be in the nature of a referendum on his title to continue to hold the office of prime minister. A couple of points may be made in this connection.
First, the issue is not whether Rajiv Gandhi is indeed guilty of the charges that have been levelled against him for close to two-and-a-half years. For they can neither be proved nor disproved. The issue is whether the circumstantial evidence that has been built up, above all by N. Ram and Chitra Subramaniam of The Hindu, is strong enough to make the charges appear credible to those who are not basically hostile to him. Unfortunately, the answer has to be in the affirmative and this reality can only be reinforced if Ram comes up with further “disclosures” as he has been threatening to do.
Second, all general elections in India have partaken of the nature of referendum since 1952. It is common knowledge that in the first three general elections, Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership of the Congress was as important for ensuring its victory as the organization’s prestige as the party of the freedom struggle and its extraordinary spread. Indeed, one reason why the party fared badly in the next poll in 1967 was that Indira Gandhi had not yet acquired the personal pull Nehru had commanded. She had overcome this handicap by 1971 with the result that she secured a landslide victory in the poll to the Lok Sabha that year.
Three, Indian politics took a dramatic turn away from ideological considerations, as we understood them, in 1973 with the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat on the issue of corruption in public life, followed by a countrywide agitation on the same question under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan. This issue got submerged in that of civil liberty when Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in June, 1975. It resurfaced with the Bofors disclosures in the summer of 1987 and has refused to go away ever since.
Four, to sum up complicated developments briefly, in a fundamental sense Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan acted as if they were allies in the common cause of eroding the foundations of the political order – JP because he sought to bring down duly elected governments through the politics of the street, Indira Gandhi because she subverted the Constitution and Sanjay Gandhi because he constituted himself into an extra-constitutional, indeed anti-constitutional, centre of authority. The Indian political order has not recovered from the trauma of these developments, and it is unlikely to recover in the foreseeable future.
It was an expression of good sense on Rajiv Gandhi’s part that on assumption of the office of Prime Minister, he recognised the need to dispose of Indira Gandhi’s disturbing legacy. But it was a reflection of his innocence that he should have believed that he could perform such a miracle by the simple trick of dropping some individuals who were widely regarded to be particularly close to Indira Gandhi such as Pranab Mukherjee and RK Dhawan, and of appearing to adopt JP’s platform of morality in public life.
Rajiv Gandhi could perhaps have changed the course of history if he had recognised that the single biggest cause of Indira Gandhi’s tragedy – she was a lonely and tragic figure throughout her second tenure of office from 1980 to 1984, especially after the death of Sanjay Gandhi in June 1980 – was that she had concentrated too much power in her office not only in matters relating to the government but also the Congress party, and had set about the task of reversing the trend that began in 1969.
Instead, he set up his own variant of Indira Gandhi’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ whereby one junior minister, Arun Nehru, was perceived to be the Deputy Prime Minister in all but name and another, Arun Singh, to be his “Chief of Staff’. And overall he continued to function in the mother’s style to the point of continuing to nominate district Congress committee chiefs; indeed, he showed even less sensitivity to the feelings of senior colleagues whom he moved from one ministry to another frequently with no apparent justification. Possibly the explanation is the proverbial generation gap. But whatever the explanation, the result is there for anyone to see.
Finally, I would say that all elections between 1967 and 1984 were exercises in shadow boxing. They settled nothing on a long-term basis. They did not produce a government which could have provided the country a new sense of direction and purpose. In 1969-1971 Indira Gandhi gave a leftist-populist-amoral orientation to politics and in the process provoked the JP backlash, culminating in the Emergency; in 1977 the people rejected her on account of the excesses of the emergency; in 1980 they brought her back as a holding operation because the Janata had just disintegrated and there was no one else they could lean on; in 1984 they gave an unprecedented mandate to Rajiv Gandhi and it looked as if he could inaugurate a new era of hope and achievement. In that sense it is a tragedy of the first order that he should have got trapped in the Bofors scandal.
But it also deserves to be remembered that Rajiv Gandhi had hand-picked VP Singh as his finance minister. It is well known that VP Singh reveled in the harassment of leading businessmen, including those who had been “helpful” to the party or were personal friends of the prime minister. It is equally well-known that regardless of whether or not VP Singh set out to steal Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Mr Clean’ clothes, he stole them all the same. But the point that needs to be emphasized is that the choice was not an accidental one; it fitted neatly into Rajiv Gandhi’s half-baked scheme of burnishing his image with no change in the system. On the contrary, the Rajiv government, certainly the finance ministry, armed itself with frightening powers as it talked of liberalizing the economy that is, of releasing it from the bureaucratic stranglehold.
This in turn should suffice to clinch another issue. A leader who thinks of the government in terms which, in his opinion, entitle it to humiliate the tallest among our industrial magnates cannot effectively lead a campaign for a cleaner public life. For the minimum pre-condition for such an effort would be a sharp and steady reduction in the powers of the state. A so-called strong state must of necessity be a thoroughly corrupt state. No wonder, VP Singh has concentrated all his fire on Rajiv Gandhi and not attacked the system as such.
This incidentally is not the only issue in respect of which our political discourse has been thoroughly distorted. The same is true in respect of the so-called fight against “communalism and fundamentalism”. These words have long been divested of all meaning for the good and obvious reason that the Nehruvian framework in which they possessed some life has itself been in poor shape for two long decades. Nehru’s critics have failed to produce an alternative framework. But that cannot help restore it to health. That is precisely why India has been adrift for a quarter of a century and longer. The forthcoming poll cannot end this drift.
The Pioneer, 22 October 1989