It is as easy to empathise with, and indeed even admire, Chandra Shekhar as it is to predict that the government he has chosen to set up and head may not last more than a few months.
The first point can be taken care of quite quickly. If VP Singh can be said, justly in my opinion, to be the most devious leading political figure we have seen in our public life in a long time, Chandra Shekhar can, with equal justice, be described as the most straightforward.
It speaks for the man that he has had the courage as Prime Minister to own up his friendship with highly controversial persons like Chandra Swami, the high-profile jet-set tantrik, and Surya Narain Deo Singh, allegedly a Dhanbad mafia don. Unlike his predecessor and many other politicians, he does not engage in public protestations of self-righteous moralism; he is anything but a hypocrite. On the contrary, even his private life is like an open book which anyone who cares can examine without too much difficulty. Such men have always been rare in our public life. Now they are an extinct species.
I also do not believe for a moment that, like Choudhri Charan Singh in 1979, Chandra Shekhar has sought and taken up the office of Prime Minister in fulfilment of a life-long ambition. All evidence points to the contrary. He came to command national attention in 1967-68 and yet he has not held any office in the government since; in 1974 he openly opposed the still mighty, though beleaguered Indira Gandhi in her fight against Jayaprakash Narayan, and was on that account jailed on imposition of Emergency in June 1975. Even in 1977 when the Janata Party swept the polls, he stayed out of office.
Chandra Shekhar perhaps regards himself more qualified for the job than all his predecessors since Jawaharlal Nehru, with the possible exception of Indira Gandhi whom he admired as a leader and a ruler despite his differences with her. But that is a very different proposition. Chandra Shekhar is a born leader with no hang-ups. Such men normally do not crave for position and status. They are convinced that the head of the table is wherever they happen to sit. That is, incidentally, what Chaudhri Charan Singh often said to me of Chandra Shekhar’s self-esteem by way of complaint when he was Home Minister in 1977.
All in all, there is not much doubt at least in my mind that Chandra Shekhar has taken over as Prime Minister mainly, if not solely, because he is convinced that the country has been brought to the very brink of a precipice by VP Singh, and that right now he alone can try to stop it going over the brink. He is too experienced a politician to be unaware of the heavy odds he has to contend with. He must know that the chances of success are slight not only because the problems confronting him are so daunting, but also because the men and women available to him are so inadequate for tackling them. Only a passionate commitment to the country could have persuaded him to accept the awesome responsibilities of the office of Prime Minister.
To take up the more substantial question of the viability and durability of the government, the start itself has been extremely troubled and inauspicious. Chandra Shekhar was sworn in as Prime Minister on November 10 and it took him 10 long days to put together a council of ministers on account of the pulls and counterpulls in his breakaway Janata Dal (Socialist). That he found it difficult to secure agreement when he was in a position to offer a berth to every second JD (S) MP in the Lok Sabha speaks for itself. It is hardly necessary to underscore the moral of the story.
It is true that Chandra Shekhar sought and secured the vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha only on November 16. But that was assured. He did not need to wait for it to assemble his team. Indeed, convention and propriety demanded that he set up a council of ministers in advance and seek a vote of confidence for it. Clearly other obstacles had to be overcome.
One of these, as newspaper reports have said, related to the vote of confidence Mulayam Singh Yadav needed to secure in the UP Vidhan Sabha, which was scheduled to meet on November 19. Apparently there was a connection between Yadav’s support for Chandra Shekhar in New Delhi (18 UP MPs are said to follow his command) and the fate of the confidence motion in Lucknow. The Prime Minister had, perhaps, to deliver Congress support to Mulayam Singh in return for the latter’s favours to him. That link too speaks for itself.
As if all this was not discouraging enough, some top officials in Rashtrapati Bhavan made sure that the much-awaited swearing-in ceremony on November 21 would be as messy and bloody an affair as they could possibly make it. Blood flowed – the blood of reporters and cameramen anxious to perform their duty in the face of obstacles deliberately put by Rashtrapati Bhavan officials – in the majestic Ashoka Hall as a visibly embarrassed President Venkataraman hurriedly administered oaths of secrecy and loyalty to ministers. Chandra Shekhar sat glum as lathi-wielding policemen hit and kicked journalists.
This is not a minor matter which is easily and quickly set aside. It is going to haunt the government in the weeks and months ahead. For the believers, it is a sign that the stars are not favourably disposed towards the new experiment. And judging by his observation that an enterprise (read the new government) should not be launched on amavash, which is what November 17 happened to be, Chandra Shekhar himself appears to be a believer.
Turning to more mundane calculations, however, the Janata Dal (Socialist) is potentially even less capable of cohering and, therefore of surviving, than the parent body. While the latter possessed a ‘presiding idea’ inasmuch as a majority of its members believed in the legitimacy of communal-casteist politics, the former cannot be said to be guided by any one purpose. Chandra Shekhar’s own group consists of men who were appalled by the consequences of VP Singh’s leadership based on a communal-casteist ideology. But they are a small minority even among the 60-odd JD(S) Lok Sabha MPs. Devi Lal and Mulayam Singh certainly do not share their nationalist preoccupations.
In the case of Devi Lal, it is hardly necessary to make the twin points that he is so obsessed with the fortunes of his sons and supporters that nothing else matters to him, and that he cannot help acting like the proverbial bull in a China shop. He set out on the job of undermining VP Singh within weeks of the formation of the previous government. In Chandra Shekhar’s case, he was ready to cross back to the Raja’s camp even before the former could formally launch the JD(S) if only VP Singh would hand the leadership of the JD parliamentary party to him. And on the very day of the swearing-in of ministers on November 21, his aides made it known that they were dissatisfied with their share in the booty which is what the Government of India is for them. The question thus is not whether, but when and how, he will try and pull down the government.
As for Mulayam Singh, it is impossible to think of a political figure other than Jinnah and SH Suhrawardy (of the 1947 Calcutta killings notoriety) before partition, and of VP Singh after partition, who can compare with him in terms of recklessness and abuse of power. It is inconceivable that anyone else in his position, faced with the same problem of the Ram Janambhoomi temple, would have diverted train traffic, ordered search of railway passengers passing through UP, blocked highways around Ayodhya with thousands of trucks, created eight security cordons, arrested several hundred thousand Rama bhaktas, posted 250,000 policemen in and around the small town, and ordered the police to shoot to kill to prevent the ‘destruction’ of a derelict non-mosque (Muslims have not offered prayers there since 1936 and Hindus have worshipped the idol of Rama Lalla (Rama as a child) since 1949), which was not even on the agenda of those wanting to build the proposed temple there.
Whatever Rajiv Gandhi’s compulsions and calculations in New Delhi, I still find it unbelievable that he should have forced Congress legislators in UP against their will and judgement to help Mulayam Singh survive as chief minister in Lucknow. A Congress spokesman has said that the support is conditional. The condition has not been spelt out. But that does not really matter. Mulayam Singh cannot overcome the infamy of what he has done in one of the holiest cities of Hindus. Nor can he be tamed. For that would mean the end of his political career and ambitions. The Congress, I have little doubt, has inflicted on itself a wound which is not likely to heal. But this is a separate issue which I propose to discuss in a subsequent piece. Today I am interested in examining the Chandra Shekhar’s alliance with Mulayam Singh.
Clearly they have come together primarily on account of a shared antipathy towards VP Singh. Neither has ever trusted the former Prime Minister, though it is only after the split in the JD that Mulayam Singh has accused the Raja of having conspired with the BJP to bring down his government in UP. There is, however, little else to hold them together. They, it needs to be emphasized, come from very different political traditions, the former from the Acharya Narendra Dev and Jayaprakash Narayan tradition and the latter from Ram Manohar Lohia’s. By this reckoning, they are polar opposites in the same way as the BJP and CPI-M are polar opposites.
Acharya Narendra Dev, it may be useful to recall for the benefit of readers not familiar with leading lights of the freedom and the socialist movements, was not just a widely respected socialist leader; he was a considerable scholar deeply rooted in the Indian tradition; indeed, it would not be wrong to call him a major Hindu figure; it was one of his regrets that he could not help Nehru similarly root himself. The Acharya wrote extensively on Hinduism and his massive work on Buddhism in Hindi is the crowning glory of his life.
As in the case of Nehru, the Acharya failed to help Jayaprakash Narayan to own up his Hindu past. But JP, like his mentor, was quintessentially Hindu, though, unfortunately, in an unconscious and defensive way. Thus in the mid-fifties, he gave up politics (read the main battleground) in order to join Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. More significantly, however, in the early seventies, he took up the cause of morality in public life and made it the central issue in the country political life. In this effort, he leaned heavily on the RSS which he had come to respect, despite his earlier aversion to it, on account of the sincerity and dedication of its leaders and volunteers. JP did not discover a way for India, and in fact even for himself, out of the morass into which India and he had sunk, India because her leaders had not even thought in terms of self-affirmation as being the path to self-renewal in the public domain, and he because he could not come out of the iron cage the west has put us into via a variety of ideologies.
I make the point about JP’s association with the RSS not with a view to giving it a clean bill of health. It does not need such a certificate from anyone, though I might mention in passing that in a personal conversation Indira Gandhi also paid the highest compliments to it for its patriotism and selfless service in connection with its work at the time of natural catastrophes in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. My purpose is to draw attention to JP’s groping, towards the end of his life, away from the straitjacket of democratic socialism – he had repudiated statism much earlier – and his groping, albeit not properly thought out, towards a Hinduist view of polity.
Ram Manohar Lohia was in every sense the opposite of JP. While JP was, for instance, the soul of courtesy and politeness, Lohia revelled in harsh and often even abusive denigration of those he happened to disagree with, Nehru and JP foremost among them. Lohia’s obsession was not so much Nehru and Indira Gandhi whom he disparagingly called a dumb doll, as JP. A clash of personality was doubtless involved in Lohia’s diatribes against JP. But much more was at stake, as would be evident from Lohia’s casteist theory of politics whereby he cast the so-called ‘other backward castes’ in the role of being the agents of revolution a la Marx’s working class in industrialized societies. It would not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that Lohia was one factor that drove JP out of politics.
Lohia was an odd man out in the Nehru era, characterized as it was by a gentlemanly approach to politics. That perhaps accounted partly for his acerbity and, if I may say, irresponsibility and adventurism. So far George Fernandes has been regarded as the leading exponent of that kind of politics. Now he has been superseded by Mulayam Singh.
I have not even touched the problems of terrorism in Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, the growing presence of LTTE gangs in Tamil Nadu with the alleged connivance, and possibly support, of the DMK government, and economic difficulties, seriously aggravated by the Gulf crisis, for the good and obvious reason that one must be very naive indeed to believe that so feeble and transient a set-up can possibly deal with them effectively.
Sunday Mail, 25 November 1990