Rajiv Gandhi’s brutal assassination has thrown the Indian political scene into confusion. We have to wait for the election results before we can even speculate on the likely course of events. This is an eloquent tribute to the deceased leader and a testimony to the position he occupied in the country’s political life.
Rajiv returned to the political centre stage with the collapse of the VP Singh government last November and he occupied it with aplomb till his murder. Indeed, it will be no exaggeration to say that he continues to do so even after his death.
The former Prime Minister, however, had to share the centre of the stage with LK Advani and VP Singh. According to pollsters, he was ahead of them both in the electoral race. But a majority for his party in the Lok Sabha was by no means assured. Indeed, even if he had won such a majority, or managed to put together a coalition after the elections, he could not possibly have dominated the political scene as he had done in 1985 and 1986 in the positive sense and from 1987 and 1989 in the negative sense.
A significant change, as symbolized by LK Advani and VP Singh has, in my view, finally crystallized in Indian politics. Hindutva and Mandal have become electorally viable and powerful platforms for the first time since independence.
As in the old configuration defined in Marxist Left-Right-Centre terms, in the new configuration delineated by religious and caste categories too, the Congress occupies the middle ground. But that space has visibly shrunk. Rajiv was trying desperately to hold on to that space and widen it to whatever extent he could. So the key question his assassination raises is whether this is likely to help promote, or hamper, retrieval of Congress fortunes.
The issue has immediate relevance. That is why so much speculation on the strength or otherwise of the “sympathy wave.” But while it is difficult to be sure and wrong to be dogmatic, I, for one, am not inclined to attach too much importance to it. I doubt that the loss resulting from the elimination of the Congress’s main campaigner and candidate for the office of Prime Minister will be more than made up by the sympathy his assassination has aroused and, indeed, that this sympathy will hold by the time polling takes place on 12 and 15 June. A few other points may also be made in this connection.
Rajiv’s assassination falls in a different category from Indira Gandhi’s in 1984. She came to be identified in the minds of millions of people as a martyr in the cause of the country’s unity and her killers with the threat to that unity. The anti-Sikh riots, though utterly shameful and not wholly spontaneous either, reinforced that identification and helped Rajiv win an unprecedented victory in the elections that followed three months later.
Rajiv is not seen a martyr in the struggle against the threat to the country’s unity and his killers are not seen to represent those who pose such a threat. Maybe the Indian people are being complacent. Maybe they have lived too long in fear of the country breaking up and have become apathetic. But all that is not relevant for the purpose of the present discussion.
In 1984 there was also little scope for dispute over succession. Rajiv was the obvious choice. There could be no other. This time this has not been the case. Sonia Gandhi could doubtless have stepped into her dead husband’s place if she was so inclined. But she has not been so inclined.
For all we know, Sonia is in fact the intensely private person she has been known to be. In that event, her husband’s brutal murder could only have greatly strengthened her natural distaste for politics. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that Sonia is not free of political ambition, even then it would have been indiscreet for her to take the plunge right now. Support for her presently in the Congress notwithstanding, an adverse reaction could have set in. Almost certainly, rival party leaders would have drawn attention to her Italian origin, less-than-a-decade-old Indian citizenship and raked up old charges.
A number of senior Congress “leaders” would also have found it difficult to explain their decision to accept her as party chief to educated men and women in towns and cities. Their resistance to Rajiv had been broken when Indira Gandhi was still around. Even then, as we know only too well, the coterie around him was extremely nervous.
To avoid an interim Prime Minister lest he managed to gain support, they disregarded the well-established democratic convention of election of the new leader by the parliamentary party and got President Zail Singh to swear him in as Prime Minister when his title to that office had not been established in any bona fide manner.
All in all, Sonia did not offer a way out of the crisis Rajiv’s murder has plunged the Congress into. But the irony of it is that her refusal to held (uphold?) the resolution of the Congress Working Committee and the subsequent election of PV Narasimha Rao as party president are not likely to help either immediately.
Members of the so-called “caucus” who plumped for her even before the badly-mutilated body of her husband had been cremated, certainly acted in undue haste even if they were not guided, as has been widely alleged, primarily by personal considerations. But the much-maligned men also gave expression to the party’s desperate need for a leader who is very different from the kind of individuals who are available in their own ranks.
Frequent and unqualified references to the Nehru-Gandhi “dynasty” have dominated and confused the political discourse, especially since the Emergency when Sanjay Gandhi emerged as an “extra-constitutional centre of authority” mainly on the strength of being Indira Gandhi’s son. In reality, the issue calls for a new look at the very character of the Congress which made the election of Sonia as party chief by the CWC possible in the first instance.
To say this is not to deny that Indira Gandhi was possibly a dynast by conviction but to suggest that much deeper and stronger forces than the fondness of a widow for her sons, or the helplessness of a fond mother in dealing with a strong-willed offspring, might have been at work. Surely Indira Gandhi could not have prevailed merely on the strength of her personality.
Pusillanimity of Congress leaders, after the split in 1969 and proclamation of the Emergency, could well have facilitated her task of vesting authority in Sanjay. But that cannot explain her victory over the Congress(O) in the assembly elections in 1978, even if we do not wish to go farther back to 1971 when she won a landslide electoral victory against the combined might of much of the opposition.
We have to go back to Mahatma Gandhi in order to grasp the basic nature of the Congress. This is obviously a complicated subject. But the broad outlines can be delineated fairly quickly.
Gandhiji was not a democrat by temperament, self-training and self-perception. Even if we disregard the contempt he poured on the mother of Parliaments, his entire political career testifies to the correctness of this assessment. The ‘Mahatma’ title he assumed, or at least accepted, speaks for itself. As a Mahatma, he could have only disciples, not colleagues.
As if this was not enough, he called and allowed himself to be called “Bapu” (father). Other Congress leaders could only be his children. And so did he treat them.
On top of it all, he said he was guided in the final analysis by his “inner voice” and not rational arguments urged on him by others.
The way he obliged Subhas Chandra Bose, duly elected president of the Congress, to resign is well known. Not so well known are a number of other instances when he disregarded the democratic process. One of these related to the election of Nehru as Congress president in 1946 when it was known that the incumbent of that office could soon be Prime Minister of India. While Nehru had been nominated by just three provincial Congress committees, as many as 12 had favoured Sardar Patel. Gandhiji insisted on Nehru, obliging the Sardar to withdraw from the field.
Gandhiji was one of the greatest mass mobilisers the world has ever witnessed. He, of course, evolved various programmes for promotion, for example, of mass literacy, Hindi and the removal of untouchability. But his mass appeal rested primarily on his status as the Mahatma, the saviour. Gandhiji was meticulous about details and a good organiser. That, however, was not his main forte. His strength lay in his capacity to arouse the people.
To say all this is not to detract from Gandhiji’s greatness. No one can possibly do that. Gandhiji was the first truly all-India leader and he was the first mass leader on a country-wide basis. But it cannot be denied that a particular type of personality got stamped on the Congress under his leadership.
This personality requires obedience to the leader who in turn is required to possess mass appeal above all else. Thus whoever has not been willing to obey has had to go out of the party. Nehru, of course, often differed with Gandhiji. But he invariably fell in line when the crunch came. Subhas Bose was different and had to leave. After Independence, Nehru forced Purshottam Das Tandon to resign as Congress president because the latter had got elected against his wishes with Sardar Patel’s support. Other supporters of Patel, such as Morarji Desai, publicly lent support to Nehru’s policies of which they did not in fact approve.
Something close to genuinely collective leadership emerged in the Congress in the period of Nehru’s decline after 1962 and it survived up to 1969. So the quality of Congress politics and thereby of Indian democracy could have changed if Lal Bahadur Shastri had not died in early 1966 and Indira Gandhi had not taken over then. But that is speculation.
As it happened, Indira Gandhi split the party in 1969 precisely on the issue of her claim to untrammelled authority, humiliated her rivals at the hustings in 1971, imposed the Emergency in 1975 without the prior approval of the Cabinet, projected Sanjay as virtually Co-Prime Minister, split the party again in 1978 to drive out critics who had survived the 1969 phase, refused to hold organizational elections and turned the party into a Praetorian Guard, partly with the help of the goons Sanjay had gathered.
No one can possibly suggest that the character and functioning of the party changed under Rajiv. Clearly the leadership and unanimity principles continued to prevail. If anything, Rajiv applied the nomination principle with greater vigour, for he made changes far more frequently than Indira Gandhi. Thus everyone holds whatever office he or she does by virtue of nomination.
Inevitably, the elimination of the linchpin and the absence of a natural successor creates for the Congress a situation it has never faced since the arrival of Gandhiji on the scene during World War I. But that does not mean that we should be rushing to write the epitaph of the grand old party.
Along with an unprecedented challenge has arisen an unprecedented opportunity. The challenge is not easy to cope with and the opportunity is not easy to seize. But if the first is a grim fact, the second is a potentiality.
Sunday Mail, 2 June 1991