I cannot possibly establish the point to the satisfaction of modernist sceptics that in the mid-seventies the pendulum had to swing again – in the opposite direction – and that Jayaprakash Narayan only gave it a push. But I am reinforced in this view because the upsurge in 1973 in Gujarat was touched off by the antics of the then chief minister, Chimanbhai Patel, clearly the most interesting character to have got to that office in Gandhiji’s home state up to that time. And in my view, the people responded to JP precisely because they regarded him as a moral man out to fight evil. They could not have respected him for his political performance in the post-independence period. For it did not amount to much. Most of those who were attracted to him may not even have been aware of his role in the Quit India movement in 1942. His ideas were too woolly to impress anyone.
JP was an old and old-fashioned man who was willing to be disarmed in view of his life-long association with and regard for Nehru and of his wife, Prabha Devi’s friendship with Mrs. Gandhi’s mother, Kamla Nehru. Mrs. Gandhi could have disarmed him if only she had been willing to dump LN Mishra and Bansilal. But she was not willing, or possibly Sanjay did not let her, or perhaps she feared that, as in the case of Gujarat, any correction would be regarded as a sign of weakness and seized upon to make further demands on her. She failed to recognise that JP was in the Indian tradition and as such the chances were that a symbolic sacrifice would in all probability have propitiated him. In moral terms, she could have turned the tables on him if, after the Allahabad High Court judgment unseating her from Parliament, she had resigned. She might have even succeeded in salvaging the Congress party’s fortunes in the election to the Lok Sabha due in early 1976. Indians have always revered rulers who have given up the throne.
Free Rein To Son
There were reasons why she could not have resigned. But whatever her compulsions and calculations, by sticking to office she broke another rule. Her fate was sealed in electoral terms. The emergency she proclaimed could have postponed the day of reckoning; it could not have avoided it forever unless she was to fulfil certain conditions – demonstrate that she was a just ruler and demonstrate her willingness and capacity to wage war on adharma (corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, exploitation and so on). Instead, she allowed her son to unleash himself or failed to prevent him from unleashing himself on the scene as if India was a blank slate, to use Mao’s phrase, on which he could write anything. A callow, even if well meaning youth, could not but cause deep offence to the Indian people’s sense of propriety.
The result of the 1977 poll was by this reckoning a foregone conclusion even if JP had by then disappeared from the scene and the Janata constituents had not pledged to merge to form one party. The people just did not care who they were voting for. They wanted Mrs. Gandhi and her party out of office.
But the Janata was, in popular parlance, like “Shivji ki baraat” (Shiva’s marriage party); it was mostly a collection of rejects. The Janata leaders failed to hold together, as they were bound to fail. They reviled one another, as they were bound to, coming as they did from such diverse and contradictory political lineages and backgrounds. They had among them men such as Madhu Limaye, Raj Narain and Charan Singh, for example, who deliberately wrecked the party. The Janata had to collapse, and it collapsed.
But as Shiva’s marriage party, the Janata leaders suffered from a grave handicap from the very start. They were not bacchants, and in social terms, they were not criminals, outcastes and panchams (from outside the pale of the Varnashram.) But they were political zeros. They did not command much respect. None of them looked like a natural leader. Morarji Desai obviously did not fill the bill as Prime Minister. He saw himself as a deeply moral man, but no one else saw him in that light in view of the exposure of the activities of his son, Kanti Desai. He saw himself as a wise leader, but not many others agreed. His consuming passion for office was visible from behind his moral armour. His rivals, Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh, were even smaller men ill-qualified for the office they so desperately coveted.
The people had an image of an ideal Prime Minister firmly fixed in their minds – the image of Nehru. No Janata leader came anywhere near conforming to it. As if this was not a problem enough for them, they compounded it by denigrating Nehru. So poor was their understanding of the Indian people’s psychology that they regarded the anti-emergency wave to be an anti-Nehru wave. They swore by Gandhiji, little realizing that this would not work so long as they were not willing to live by his standards.
Craving Of People
So the pendulum had to swing again. It began to do so by June 1977 – within three months of Mrs. Gandhi’s defeat – when elections to arbitrarily dissolved state legislatures were held. The vote for the Congress rose in the whole of north India, though the party was a shambles and though the leader, Mrs. Gandhi, still in a state of shock and under attack from her colleagues for the excesses of the emergency, did not campaign. The grand old woman (the Congress was then 92 years old) was in bad shape. But the people were beginning to crave for her. By the time Charan Singh as home minister ordered Mrs. Gandhi’s arrest on October 3, 1977, the signs of the swing back were loud and clear.
Again, the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction. This much is clear from the rout of the Congress (I) in Andhra and Karnataka. Once again, the judgment of the people is that Mrs. Gandhi has given them as chief ministers, state ministers and, indeed, as Union ministers men they cannot respect. Gundu Rao was a standing insult to the people of Karnataka and so were those who engaged in the game of musical chairs in Andhra. And who has not heard stories of Union ministers, other influential worthies, their cronies and cronies of their cronies making piles of money? The stories may be false; in all probability, the sums in question are greatly exaggerated. But every businessman who is required to cough up whatever sum of money talks. And what they say is accepted at its face value and indeed gets garnished as it travels by word of mouth.
All in all, it is a reasonably safe bet that if Mrs. Gandhi were to order an election to the Lok Sabha soon, which, of course, she will not, she will have a tough fight on her hand. The tide is strongly against her right now. Bihar, UP, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh can fall to any credible foe. But Mrs. Gandhi has two more years and the opposition is in no position to force her to seek a fresh mandate.
In this period, the pendulum can swing in her favour unless she allows the present drift into immorality and incompetence to continue and the impression to gather that even a shock like the one she has received in Andhra and Karnataka cannot shake her out of her recent ways.
NT Rama Rao (election posters described him as Krishna in view of the role he had played in a Telugu mythological film) is a new phenomenon in Indian politics. We have not seen the like of him (MG Ramachandran’s is a different story). So it is not desirable to speculate on how he is likely to fare. And since his field of action is limited to Andhra, it is not also necessary to try and assess his future prospects.
But we are familiar with the likes of the Janata-Ranga alliance which has formed the government in Karnataka. And on the basis of our experience, we can say that it will be rather surprising if it does not run into difficulties. The tussle over the election of the leader speaks for itself. Such tussles are, of course, part of the democratic process. They take place in every democracy. But elsewhere, once the election of the leader is over, the others respect it. This is not so in India. That is why here the absence of a towering personality able to command respect at the very start can be crippling. Almost all legislators these days want office and only a towering figure can persuade them to restrain their appetites.
It is difficult to believe that non-communist opposition parties will come together now because in the wake of Andhra and Karnataka, Mrs. Gandhi does not look all that invulnerable. The Bharatiya Janata Party will never again agree to a merger with any other organisation. It is not going to repeat its bitter experience of 1977-79 and it is the largest and best organised non-communist opposition party. So far, the others have been so anxious to woo the Muslim vote that they have spurned electoral adjustments with the BJP. It remains to be seen whether this will change.
BJP Making Headway
We have often heard of the desirability of former Congressmen coming together on one anti-Indira platform. The theory is that such an organisation can attract people from the Congress (I) as well. But what a strange animal it will be if it ever comes into existence? Even the hydra-headed Janata of the 1977-79 period will look human in comparison. And who is to perform the miracle of putting the dismembered and withered limbs of the once great organisation together? Perhaps Hemavati Bahuguna sees himself equipped to play this role. It is said that Mrs. Gandhi fears him precisely because she, too, credits him with such ability. In fact, Bahuguna is not so equipped. No one is.
This does not mean that Mrs. Gandhi can sit back, allow things to drift and still hope to win the election to the Lok Sabha in 1985. The vote can get so fragmented that she can win on a 35 per cent vote, as she did in the election to the state vidhan sabha in UP in 1969. But in that eventually, she will have lost the moral title to rule the country. Moreover, how can she be sure that the vote will be so badly fragmented?
On the contrary, the chances appear to be that if the decline of the Congress (I) continues, a sufficiently large segment of the electorate may by early 1985 transfer its support to another party or even an alliance. It is too early to say that the BJP is well placed to emerge as an alternative to the Congress (I) in the crucial Hindi belt, but its performance even in Karnataka shows that it is making a significant headway. So we may well witness a major change in the next two years unless Mrs. Gandhi is able to get hold of the situation. She can begin by shedding some of the useless baggage she has been carrying on her train. She will have to drop many of the “passengers” if her train is to make the destination in 1985.
The Times of India, 13 January 1983