By refusing to be sworn in as minister of state on the ground that Sonia Gandhi has yet to contest from Amethi and get elected to Parliament, Rudra Pratap Singh has made history of sorts. In no democracy has a legislator perhaps ever taken up such a position.
Regardless, however, of whether he has won a place for himself in the Guinness Book of Records, Singh has cast a shadow over the future of the Narasimha Rao government. The shadow may appear small and temporary. In reality, it may be anything but temporary and possibly assume dangerous proportions.
For all we know, Singh has acted on his own, without the knowledge of Sonia Gandhi and even the so-called coterie still trying to install her in her deceased husband’s place at a suitable opportunity. But that is immaterial. Singh has drawn attention, not to the existence of a “Sonia brigade” which has not been in doubt since the very night of Rajiv Gandhi’s brutal assassination, but to its determination not to let the issue of Sonia’s succession to Rajiv Gandhi fade away.
Singh may or may not lead the campaign to draft Sonia to contest from Amethi. But that is immaterial. For, there is little doubt now that such a campaign will soon begin. Someone will go on fast in front of No. 10 Janpath in New Delhi. Someone will bring crowds from Amethi to demonstrate undying support for the Nehru-Gandhi family and plead that Sonia take up Rajiv Gandhi’s unfinished tasks.
This should suffice to produce uncertainty in the minds of ministers, Congress MPs and leaders of the National Front-Left combine who have decided to extend support to the government from outside to ensure that early poll is avoided.
Sonia’s personal inclination will, of course, be a factor in shaping the future course. No one can be sure what that inclination is or is likely to turn out to be in the coming weeks and months. Reports have appeared in a section of the press that she is now “inclined to join active politics” and that there has been a “perceptible change in her responses” to pleas by her admirers. Perhaps it is premature to take such reports at their face value. But it may be equally premature to dismiss them outright. We have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, two points may be made. First, Sonia’s much advertised dislike for politics will need to be pretty strong for it to survive the pressure that is sure to build up from Congressmen who feel “orphaned” by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in the absence of another independent source of “authority.” Secondly, Sonia is close to becoming an extra-constitutional centre of authority. I, for one, cannot see either how this can be prevented, or how it can be accommodated by Congress leaders trying to come into their own.
When Sanjay Gandhi emerged as a centre of authority during the Emergency, or when Indira Gandhi brought Rajiv into politics, appointed him general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee and invested enormous authority in him, it was not recognised widely enough that in addition to the ambitions and self-perception of the Nehru-Gandhis, the desperate need for a large number of Congressmen for a mai-baap (father-or-mother overlord) was responsible for facilitating this dynastic behaviour. This really is still not recognised well enough. That is why we are finding it difficult to identify this true source of Sonia Gandhi’s appeal and we have to invent a coterie with such improbable partners as RK Dhawan and ML Fotedar, or Dhawan and Sitaram Kesri.
Sonia Gandhi has just to be there to command the loyalty of such men. It is enough for them that she is Rajiv Gandhi’s widow. That is qualification enough in their eyes for her to occupy one of the toughest and cruelest jobs in any democracy.
In rational terms, it is a strange situation. After 1984 when the shock wave resulting from the terrorist campaign in Punjab and Indira Gandhi’s assassination gave him a landslide victory, Rajiv Gandhi did not help the Congress win a single major poll. Indeed, there is a broad consensus that had he lived through the election process, the Congress would have secured 30-35 seats less than it has. Yet not only is all that record forgotten, his self-proclaimed apolitical widow is regarded and projected as the only potential saviour of the party. However irrational, this is the reality. It cannot be wished away.
There is another aspect of the problem that needs to be kept in view. Frustration and anger among Congressmen is built into the situation. For one thing, the economic difficulties facing the government are too tough to be resolved quickly, as the professor-bureaucrat finance minister, Manmohan Singh, has honestly pointed out at his first press conference in that capacity. For another, even the attempt to cope with them involves a dramatic moving away from the shibboleths on which Congressmen have been fed for decades. It is only natural that rumblings against Manmohan Singh should already have started in the party.
Sonia Gandhi is the natural focus of hope for all those who feel frustrated on this account or any other, including the more personal one. As in Indira Gandhi’s case in 1967-69, no one can say for sure what she stands for, if anything. She can be all things to all men and all women.
Going by the popular view of the Lal Bahadur Shastri-Indira Gandhi tussle, it may be better for the Congress that Sonia Gandhi gets elected from Amethi and is accommodated in the Council of Ministers. Indira Gandhi was a failure as Minister for Information and Broadcasting. She did not have a clue to the job and leaned on New Delhi’s drawing room communication experts who were to become her bitter critics later. She felt so frustrated that she often spoke openly of her desire to go to London as India’s High Commissioner. At one stage, she even looked for a flat there which she could buy.
But the issue between Shastri and her was by no means settled by the time the former died suddenly at the conclusion of Indo-Pakistan talks in Tashkent under Soviet auspices. The war with Pakistan in 1965 had raised Shastri’s status in popular esteem. But it is open to question whether it could have survived the Tashkent accord whereby he had agreed to return the strategically vital Hajipur Pass in Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan. In any event, he did not survive the agreement.
The national political scene in 1991 is in a sense very different from what it was between Nehru’s death in 1964 and Shastri’s in 1966. The Congress then was still fully in command and its leaders could feel free to settle their internal disputes without having to care too much about public opinion and the advantage these disputes might give to other parties. The party is now in decline and two powerful challengers in the shape of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the National Front-Communist combine are waiting to seize on leadership disputes in it.
But the scene is different from the one in 1964-66 in another way as well. Then nothing like the dynastic principle was at work. Indira Gandhi commanded a certain amount of goodwill and popular appeal by virtue of being Nehru’s daughter. But she was not thought of as inheritor of the Nehru mantle in a dynastic succession. Since 1975 the dynastic principle has not been seriously disputed within the Congress. Those who were not willing to applaud it were finally got rid of in the second split in 1978 which Indira Gandhi engineered in as blatant a manner as in 1969, if not more.
The dynastic principle has been a source of internal cohesion in the Congress, on the one hand, and of weakness in dealing with its opponents, on the other. In the absence of this principle, Rajiv Gandhi could not possibly have remained the unchallenged leader of the Congress despite his inability to lead the party to victory in any poll after 1984, especially the one in 1989 which meant loss of power at the centre. Similarly, ‘anti-Congressism’ has in reality been largely a euphemism for anti-Gandhism. Indira Gandhi and not the Congress was the object of attack by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974-75 and other opposition parties subsequently. The same was true in the case of Rajiv Gandhi from early 1987 till the time of his death.
Only the politically innocent could have believed that organizational elections could have helped restore “inner party democracy” in the Congress, except either superficially, or at the cost of its internal cohesion. The dynastic principle, of course, operates only at the top; indeed, succession can be allowed at lower levels, as it has been in the Congress, only at the sweet will of the ‘emperor’ and that too in terms of seats in legislatures and not of effective power.
No chief minister, for instance, was ever allowed to feel secure, not to speak of a chief minister being allowed to groom his progeny or someone else for succeeding him, either by Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi. Every Congress chief minister was chosen by her or him. Rajiv Gandhi changed them oftener than India Gandhi perhaps because his need to assert his authority was greater than hers.
Inevitably genuine organizational elections would have interfered with the operation of the ‘monarchical’ system in the party and had therefore to be avoided on some pretext. Since the issue has not been tested, it is a matter of speculation whether cohesion in the Congress could have survived abridgement of this principle. I for one believe it could not have.
It is difficult to say at this stage how the Congress will deal with the situation and whether it will at all be able to deal with it effectively one way or another. The party is clearly caught in a trap. It cannot go on swearing by Nehru and the Nehruvian framework and yet hope successfully to move away from the dynasty; and it cannot stick to the dynasty and yet hope to avoid bitter opposition, especially from the intelligentsia. And tragically enough for it, other than Nehru and the Nehruvian framework, it has little else to lean on by way of an ideology which can possibly help it build bridges with the Left and confront the BJP with its anti-Nehru Hindutva platform. The Sonia phenomenon should be viewed in this context, and not in terms of personal ambitions, either her own or of members of some supposed coterie.
Sunday Mail, 30 June 1991