In most discussions of a possible power struggle in the Congress, the spotlight has been focused solely on Sonia Gandhi as a potential challenger to Narasimha Rao. It is now obvious that it should have been turned on Madhavrao Scindia as well. Indeed, he may well pose a more serious problem in immediate terms. He has deliberately insulted and provoked the Bharatiya Janata Party. The consequences for the minority government can be pretty serious.
It is not clear whether there exists any kind of coordination between Madhavrao and the Sonia enthusiasts who remain determined to propel her into the political arena, with or without her implicit or explicit consent. But there can be little doubt that both are a cause for concern for Narasimha Rao.
Narasimha Rao is gravely handicapped and must tread the treacherous ground carefully. He is well past his prime and has had a heart bypass. He is neither a charismatic figure nor a rabble-rouser. He heads a minority government which survives at least partly because no major political party is yet willing to risk another early poll. Above all, he is landed with the heart-breaking task of coping with the awful mess Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi have bequeathed to the nation in the economic field.
The tragedy is he cannot even as much as hint that they are responsible for the near-disaster the country faces. Instead, he has to laud the Nehruvian framework and look for scapegoats in VP Singh and Chandra Shekhar’s governments, though he must know that not many people have bought, or are likely to buy, his proposition that they have brought us to this pass.
VP Singh is culpable to the extent that he was Rajiv Gandhi’s finance minister for two years and shared his approach. But he was not the boss and he did not make the policy. He only implemented it, though enthusiastically.
The Prime Minister’s reluctance to pick up the gauntlet is, therefore, understandable on objective grounds. As it happens, Narasimha Rao is also an extremely cautious person by temperament which obviously must have been reinforced by what he has gone through under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Indira, for instance, left him out of major foreign policy discussions with heads of government such as the US and Soviet presidents when he held the external affairs portfolio and Rajiv changed his portfolios several times without prior discussion with him.
Going by past record, Narasimha Rao is a survivor, not a fighter. The same, however, was widely believed to be the case with Lal Bahadur Shastri when he took over as Prime Minister on the passing away of Nehru in 1964. In fact, Shastri suffered from an additional handicap. He was perhaps the shortest major political figure in the land with nothing to compensate for it in terms of personality. Cinema-goers laughed when his picture appeared on the screen in some connection.
Yet the same Shastri cut down to size not only Indira Gandhi but also the organizational bosses headed by Kamaraj Nadar, who had played a significant role in his elevation to the office of Prime Minister. He had achieved all this before his bold decision to attack Pakistan across the internationally recognised frontier in response to armed Pakistani infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir in 1965 raised his stature in popular esteem. Such is the power of the office of Prime Minister if only one knows how to use it. Narasimha Rao is no novice.
It is thus possible that, like Shastri, Narasimha Rao will also be able to deal effectively with his tormentors. So we have to wait and watch his moves. But it is also obvious that he cannot sit on his hands as the challenge mounts.
In view of his junior status in the party and lack of political experience, it was rather surprising that Madhavrao’s name should have figured among candidates for election as Prime Minister in June. There was an element of mystery about it. But that could only reinforce the view that he had come to entertain such high ambitions. His subsequent behaviour shows that this was not a passing fancy.
This is understandable. Madhavrao can well argue that if Rajiv could move into the office of Prime Minister virtually straight from the Avro pilot’s cabin on the strength of his name, there is no reason why he cannot. If anything, he has a far more distinguished background. After all, the Scindias ruled over one of the biggest states in the country when not many people could have heard of the Nehru name.
If Madhavrao thinks in such terms, he is not the first former prince to do so. Another maharaja also saw himself as would-be Prime Minister on the same basis plus perhaps an astrological prediction by an obliging court astrologer. Indeed, there has been a remarkable resurgence of former princes, princelings and Thakurs since the rise of Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency (1975-77) and especially since 1980, when he began seriously to build his ‘new political order’, based not on Brahminical skills which he despised but on the Thakurian muscle which he admired. VP Singh was his nominee for chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh.
Along with his entitlement to prime ministership, Madhavrao discovered an ideology which is best described not as secularism but as BJP-bashing. In a sense the ideology is given like the ancestry. He has to be anti-BJP for the simple reason that his mother is a prominent figure in that party and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. BJP-bashing is, however, a different proposition. It is aimed as much at the Narasimha Rao government as at the BJP in view of the former’s need for working relations with the latter.
Madhavrao began his tirade against the BJP with the demand for the resignation of the Madhya Pradesh government on the plea that by virtue of having lost a majority of parliamentary constituencies to the Congress in the recent poll, the party had been shown to have forfeited the confidence of the people. This was an absurd proposition for a number of reasons.
The people, for instance, are known to vote differently in Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. In this specific case, Rajiv Gandhi’s brutal assassination is known to have produced a sympathy vote for the Congress. In the circumstances, it was no small achievement for the BJP to have improved its overall vote by three per cent to raise it to 41 percent.
It should have occurred to Madhavrao that since the BJP had annexed 20 out of 25 parliamentary constituencies in Gujarat against the Congress-JD-G (Janata Dal-Gujarat) and secured as much as 52 per cent of the vote, the case – for the resignation of the Congress- backed Chimanbhai government in Gandhinagar – was much stronger than of the BJP in Bhopal. He must also know that the Congress is ruling at the Centre with just 35 per cent vote.
Such details, of course, cannot inhibit Madhavrao. So he has followed it with the charge that the BJP is anti-national. And, instead of trying to explain or explain away this observation, Madhavrao on Wednesday last reiterated it in so many words in the Lok Sabha, obliging the unflappable LK Advani to threaten that the BJP would have to review its stand towards the government.
Unlike in the case of the VP Singh government last year, the BJP is not in a position to bring down the government. Indeed, it may not even be interested, so long as it has not consolidated the gains of 1989 and 1991. But things have a habit of going out of control. VP Singh’s Mandal decision last August is a case in point.
Working relations with the BJP are necessary for the Congress government in New Delhi because the latter would otherwise become too heavily dependent on the Janata Dal and lose room for manoeuvre it desperately needs. The Janata Dal is also not a coherent organisation and it is not easy to do business with it, as the Congress leadership must have discovered on the issue of the election of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.
If Madhavrao was concerned about the future of the government, he, his lack of political experience notwithstanding, would not have gone on a BJP-bashing spree. He is clearly carving out a place for himself at the cost of making it difficult for the Prime Minister to maintain working relations with the country’s principal opposition.
Sunday Mail, 11 August 1991