It is being widely assumed that substantial sections of the Muslim electorate in north India have decided to withdraw support from the Congress in the current elections and extend it instead to the Janata Dal headed by VP Singh. If this indeed turns out to be the case, the Muslims will be throwing away their precious votes. This point is so obvious that I wonder how any Muslim leader can possibly fail to see it.
The Muslims are said to be with the Congress leadership primarily on two counts. Since the riots in recent weeks and months have taken place only in Congress-ruled states, of them feel that the party has not done its duty by them by way of taking precautionary measures in advance, and of putting down the riots with a heavy hand. And they appear to have convinced themselves that the government could, if it had so decided, prevented the shilanyas in respect of the proposed Rama temple in Ayodhya on November 9-10. The shilanyas, more than the riots, is said to have clinched the issue for them.
It is open to question whether, despite their grievances, the Muslims would, in fact, have thought in terms of withdrawing support from the Congress if they did not see in VP Singh an alternative they could turn to. Thus the Muslims are taking not one but two decisions – that the Congress is not worthy of their support and that they can trust VP Singh.
I do not intend to deal with the first point as such in this article. I am interested in examining the validity of the second proposition. Again, as I see things, the proposition is so shallow, so devoid of substance, that I am surprised that any discerning Muslim should advance it.
At issue for me is not VP Singh’s sincerity but his capacity. It is not my style to begin by questioning the bona fides of those I am not in agreement with. In this specific case, I have an additional reason not to do so. My assessment of VP Singh is that he is inclined to see himself as a knight in shining armour on a white charger and to rush about dealing blows. It was the dacoits when he was briefly Chief Minister of UP in the early eighties; it was the leading industrialists when he was Rajiv Gandhi’s hand-picked Finance Minister and it is the Hindu “chauvinists and communalists” in addition to Rajiv Gandhi now.
It does not really matter for VP Singh if the armour is rusted and the “white charger” is only an old and tired donkey. The self-image is all that matters to him, as it did to his forbears who for generations saw no incompatibility between total subservience to the British Raj and the Raja title and the accompanying self-perception.
Individuals can, and are entitled to, change. So it would be unfair to recall that VP Singh was handpicked for the office of UP chief minister by Sanjay Gandhi in his search for instruments for the mafia rule he was determined to establish under his supreme leadership, and for the office of Finance Minister by Rajiv Gandhi in his equally “glorious” search for launching a technocratic Raj in which there was to be no place for dhoti-clad Congressmen, if not for dhoti-wearing Indians. But how quickly is VP Singh entitled to change? If he is anxious to jettison the deal he made with the BJP only a couple of weeks ago, one is entitled to ask some questions.
But that is not the centrepiece of the case I wish to present. I am willing to concede VP Singh’s reliability as readily as I am willing to concede his sincerity. I am concerned with his capacity to deliver what the Muslims expect of him. I wish to raise three issues in this regard – the nature of VP Singh’s hold on the Janata Dal, the basic composition of the Dal and the general political environment in which it will have to operate, like everyone else.
To take up the first point, most observers of the Indian political scene would agree that VP Singh is essentially a one-man band in the Janata Dal leadership. I for one find it difficult to think of a significant figure in that formation on whom he can rely as a long-term ally with the possible exception of Ramakrishna Hegde and that too only if we assume that the turn of events in his home state of Karnataka has persuaded the great PR artist to take a more modest view of his future role on the national stage. VP Singh is suffered in the Dal leadership because of his unquestionable popular appeal; he is not loved or even respected.
A comparison with Jawaharlal Nehru in the Congress before the death of Sardar Patel in December 1950 can come to the minds only of the political innocent. No Congress leader could ever think of sidelining Mahatma Gandhi’s designated heir, not even the formidable Sardar. And Nehru was not just the Mahatma’s heir; he was co-leader in the struggle for freedom; indeed, his was the vision which was to determine independent India’s programme of action. VP Singh is a rank outsider in the Janata Dal; he does not belong to the political culture of either the old Janata party or the Lok Dal. He can lead the party, if at all, from behind and not from the front.
As for the second issue, the Janata party has got more or less submerged in the Dal constituent and the Dal, as is widely acknowledged, represents nothing more or less than a search for state power on the part of peasant castes such as the Ahirs, the Jats, the Gujars and the Rajputs. This search, to be candid, is inspired, above all, by the distrust of Brahmins and businessmen, of the first because they have managed to command a disproportionate share in government and other white collar jobs in both British India and independent India by virtue of their intelligence and education and of the second because they have managed to stay more prosperous despite all the measures the state has taken, again, both before 1947 and after 1947, to place curbs on them.
Chhotu Ram, duly knighted by the British for his pioneering role in promoting casteist politics and in enfeebling the freedom movement in the United Punjab in United India, made no bones about his hatred either of the Bania or the Brahmin; in the case of the latter the arguments provided by the Arya Samaj against idol worship, the very heart of Hinduism, and other rituals came in handy.
Chaudhary Charan Singh was more circumspect, perhaps partly because he had not escaped altogether the influence of the Congress culture in which he had functioned for a major part of his political life, and perhaps partly because he was shrewd enough to realise that the unadulterated language of casteism could not pass muster in Lucknow, not to speak of New Delhi. But the ease with which he defected from the Congress at the first suitable opportunity in the wake of the party’s defeat in 1967, with the sole objective of becoming Chief Minister in however precarious an arrangement, speaks for itself. And so does his calm and calculated decision in 1979 to break up the Janata party in order to realise his “life-time ambition” (his own words) to become Prime Minister. Clearly he was not burdened with anything which can remotely be called political morality in the larger sense of the term, that is, a public morality which is not defined solely in terms of personal honesty.
The Chaudhary, it may be recalled, staked his claim to office of Prime Minister mainly on the basis of promise of support by Indira Gandhi whom he regarded as evil incarnate he had spared little effort to destroy, and whom he was not ready to thank face-to-face; when that support was duly withdrawn, as could easily be predicted, he refused to face Parliament and stayed on as a caretaker Prime Minister at the pleasure of President Reddy who has since been at pains to explain his conduct.
The Raja, it may also be recalled, was picked up by Sanjay Gandhi because he too was anxious to take over the Ajgar constituency as part of his larger plan to downgrade the Brahmin-Bania elements in the Congress who, as a rule, are rather reluctant to go the whole hog in the leadership’s disregard for democratic norms. Since 1987 VP Singh has been trying to inherit Chaudhary Charan Singh’s constituency, hopefully without wanting to inherit his mentor’s plans as well.
The Chaudhary had, of course, a plan of action which he would have sought to implement if by some miracle he had stayed on as Prime Minister. He wanted to tilt the economic power balance against urban India and in favour of rural India. The total failure of the Maoist anti-urban crusade, despite the indescribable cost in terms of millions of lives lost or distorted as a result of torture, was not so well-known then as it is today. But even in the late seventies it was obvious enough that prosperity of the countryside was wholly contingent on urban prosperity.
In plain terms, an Ajgar rule in New Delhi can only disrupt the existing arrangement; it cannot erect a viable alternative; and it certainly cannot implement a programme of economic development which can promote rural prosperity on a long-term basis. And if the current upheavals in one communist country after another tell us anything, it is that political power, unlike in the days of Chenghez Khan, is not self-sustaining even if internal power mechanisms within the system are sufficiently well aligned and oiled to crush any dissent or protest.
The inability of Akali leaders to hold together in office is notorious, especially in view of the havoc it has led to by way of terrorism in recent years. The Dal, if anything, is even more fragile. The Akalis cannot hold together because the Jats are too prone to individualism and factionalism of the extreme variety. The Janata Dal leadership has to cope not only with similar tendencies among its caste components but also with intense and endless competition among those constituents. Politics, as the saying goes, is about power. But power has to be about something else. That something else is missing as much in the case of the Janata Dal as in that of the Akali Dal. It can never provide government in New Delhi whatever its strength in Parliament; and it is effective government in New Delhi that the Muslims need above all.
As for the third point, it is my contention, which I hope to elucidate in coming weeks, that secularism, as defined by rootless Indian intellectuals duped by their Western mentors and, sorry to add, in many cases paymasters, has not been and is not a viable political doctrine; that the alternative to it is not a Hindu rashtra, as narrowly defined, that is, as defined in terms which are as characteristically un-Hindu or even anti-Hindu as they are characteristically Christian and Islamic; that the Hindu self-affirmation is already a fact which cannot be denied and negated by the kind of games that have been played in the past and are sought to be played now; that this self-affirmation will be beneficent for everyone if it is not frustrated; that if frustrated it will turn both upon itself and all others; that only an un-Hindu Hindu can be anti-Muslim, or anti-Christian; and that the Hindus should not be forced into a situation when for the sake of, and in the name of, self-preservation, they disown their own inheritance.
What then should the Muslims do? I answered this question, even if somewhat indirectly, last week. I have not the slightest doubt that a great divide, even bigger than the one we are familiar with, looms ahead and that it can close, as if by magic, if the Muslims were to come to terms with the BJP. I say the BJP because it alone has the honesty to do away with the dishonest shibboleth of secularism and the courage to speak in the name of Hinduism and the Hindus. Yet I would find a Muslim decision to return to the Congress understandable from the point of view of temporary expediency if such a return was to assure a Congress majority in the Lok Sabha. That possibility is being generally ruled out, with or without the traditional Muslim support. I am neither inclined nor in a position to pronounce on this assessment.
Sunday Mail, 19 November 1989