Despite the defeat in the recent election to the Lok Sabha and the media rhetoric, the Congress remains the only national party and Rajiv Gandhi its leader. All political discussions and calculations should proceed on this basis. The party and the leader, as I shall argue, cannot be delinked.
If we were to go by the general trend of what has been said and written, we would find it difficult to explain how the party has managed to secure around 41 per cent of the votes polled. Which is just two per cent below its vote in 1980 when it was catapulted back into office with a two-third majority in the Lok Sabha. The 1984 poll was an aberration not only because it followed the traumatic assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh guards but also because the Congress had never secured such a high percentage of votes and so many seats in the Lok Sabha. It cannot, therefore, be used to measure the slip in the performance of the Congress.
It is reasonably certain that compared with 1980, a significantly smaller percentage of Harijans and Muslims has voted for the party in the recent poll. Logically it follows that its share in the caste Hindu vote has improved. How significant this improvement is we cannot say, because we cannot determine with any degree of accuracy the drop in the Muslim and the Harijan support for the party. But the inference regarding improvement cannot be contested. I regard this as an important development for the future character of the Congress.
The Congress vote is slightly bigger than that of the Janata Dal, BJP, and the left (CPI-M, CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc) put together. This fact is, of course, not reflected in their respective representation in the Lok Sabha. But it should not, on that account, be ignored, especially if we care to remind ourselves that the distrust between the BJP and the Left is greater than between either of them and the Congress and that the Janata Dal straddles uneasily between them.
As for Rajiv Gandhi, the almost universal view which I share is that his leadership has been a major factor in the Congress defeat. The inference has, therefore, been drawn and publicly stated that his replacement before the poll would have ensured the party’s victory and his replacement now can help revive its fortunes quickly and dramatically.
I regard such speculation pointless. There was no challenge to Rajiv Gandhi before the elections, the poor quality of his leadership, his unfortunate treatment of senior partymen and the charges of corruption against him notwithstanding, and there is no challenge to him now, despite the electoral setback. That should clinch the issue. The Congress will swim or sink with Rajiv Gandhi. However much we may regret this bond, we cannot denounce it out of existence.
Most people ignore the fundamental character of the party when they discuss it. I at least do not know of a single commentator who has so interpreted the history of the party as to draw the inference that its fortunes have been critically dependent on its acceptance of the dynastic principle and that it cannot disown this principle except at its peril. It may or may not sink with Rajiv Gandhi as its leader. But it will surely disintegrate if it seeks to replace him. A ‘democratic’ Congress is a contradiction in terms. It cannot survive ‘democratization’ and if it somehow manages to survive, it will lose its advantage over the other parties and with it much of its appeal.
Readers may recoil at the suggestion that Mahatma Gandhi was the founder of the dynasty. But the proposition would not appear bizarre if we were to try and place the Mahatma in the Indian tradition where he belonged. He was at once a ‘Raja’ who would brook no opposition to his leadership in his own ranks (witness the manner in which he forced Subhas Bose to resign as Congress president and his insistence on ‘dictatorial’ powers when he was leading a movement) and a rishi in the most far-reaching sense of the term in that his programme of Harijan uplift meant nothing less than the reordering of the Hindu society and its fundamental norms. He exercised both these functions when he nominated Nehru as his successor.
As a rishi, Gandhi was free to ignore his own progeny and thus to appoint Nehru as his ‘ideological’ heir; as it happened, Gandhiji’s sons were not in the race. The differences between the Mahatma and Nehru, it needs to be emphasized, were less significant than the areas of agreement because Gandhi’s principal concerns were Harijan uplift and accommodation of the Muslims in the economic-political order on terms acceptable to them. Surely no one can argue that any other Congress leader was better qualified to attend to these concerns than Nehru. Nehru was thus Gandhiji’s legitimate ideological heir. Nehru’s political status flowed from his ideological closeness to the Mahatma.
Nehru was, of course, not a monarch in the traditional sense. He could not possibly be in a democracy. He had of necessity to combine the two principles. He could do it fairly successfully in relation to the people but not in relation to the party. He doubtless maintained the pretence of inner-party democracy; the relevant bodies such as the Working Committee and the Parliamentary Board met regularly and took ‘decisions’; but these were no more than endorsements of Nehru’s decisions.
Nehru made his dynastic intention reasonably clear first when he manipulated Indira Gandhi’s election as Congress president in 1958 and thus put her in the race for succession to him and then in 1963 when he pushed Morarji Desai out of the government and indicated his preference for a much weaker Lal Bahadur Shastri as his immediate successor. It would be speculation to speak of a calculation on his part that Indira Gandhi would find it easier to overcome Shastri than Desai.
In the event, Shastri turned out to be made of sterner stuff than was generally believed. He managed to sideline Indira Gandhi so much so that she felt so uncomfortable as to think in terms of going to London as Indian High Commissioner. But this does not necessarily clinch the issue. I for one am inclined to take the view that the Congress would have faced trouble if Shastri had not died in January 1966 and Indira Gandhi had not succeeded him. Alternatively, if Shastri had succeeded in consolidating his own and the party’s position and lived long enough, he could have founded his own dynasty.
Be that as it may, Indira Gandhi firmly established the dynastic principle in the Congress when she allowed Sanjay Gandhi to become what is called an extra-constitutional centre of authority in 1975 and gave precedence to his ‘army’ known as the Youth Congress over the Indian National Congress. And on Sanjay Gandhi’s death in June 1980, she duly brought Rajiv Gandhi into politics, got him elected to the Lok Sabha, appointed him general secretary of the AICC and made sure that the senior-most party leaders would defer to him, indeed fear him. Rajiv Gandhi had in all but name been ‘anointed’ long before her assassination.
I am neither commending nor condemning what Nehru and Indira Gandhi have done. I would not even wish to point out that other politicians too have engaged in ‘dynastism’; Devi Lal, who has just installed his son as Chief Minister of Haryana, readily comes to mind; but there are others; Ajit Singh derives his title to leadership from the fact of being Chaudhuri Charan Singh’s son; indeed, even wives, daughters, sons-in-law are stepping into the shoes of their husbands, fathers, and fathers-in- law, living and dead. But other ‘organisations’ are shifting arrangements. So the dynastic principles cannot be decisive in their case. The Congress is durable; so the dynastic principle is also durable in its case. Only Rajiv Gandhi will do well to remember that a monarch too must demonstrate capacity for leadership.
But what is the relevance of all this in the present context? The reader is entitled to ask this question.
My first purpose is to drive home the point that the Congress is not likely to get rid of Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership even if the party fails to recover the lost ground in the forthcoming elections to the vidhan sabhas, and that an abortive attempt to do so can throw it into utter confusion. So, as I see the future, VP Singh should prepare himself to manage as best he can without help from the Congress. Congressmen are not likely either to overthrow Rajiv Gandhi or split and move over to him in significant strength.
My second purpose is to point out that the future of the Congress party hinges considerably on Rajiv Gandhi’s capacity or incapacity to absorb the lessons of the recent defeat. In his first tenure of office, he did not grasp the self-evident proposition that there was an inevitable gap between the dynastic principle operational within the Congress and the democratic reality in the country at large, that this gap needed to be filled, that experienced Congress leaders in touch with the people alone could help him fill it, that neither bureaucrats nor the products of the Doon and other similar schools could possibly be of much use to him in the management of politics, and that this management had to be undertaken if he was to survive. It remains to be seen whether he recognizes these facts now.
The changes he has made in Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh do not settle the issue. For, even if one welcomes the replacement of chief ministers, one has to acknowledge that the changes have been made in panic and therefore are not an assurance that he has come to accept the value of experienced Congress leaders on a long-term basis. Rajiv Gandhi has been dismissive and indeed contemptuous of the kind of men he has turned to and he will need to change a great deal to be able to bring them, as they must be brought, into his inner councils.
Mahatma Gandhi raised the Congress ‘army’ and provided it with a fairly well-graded ‘officer corps’. He was their Field Marshal and he ‘conquered’ India with their help. The ‘army’ as well as the ‘officer corps’ deteriorated under Nehru who felt more at home with the rival set-up inherited from the British but not too much; in any case, no worthwhile rival ‘army’ was in the field.
The deterioration continued under Indira Gandhi. To begin with, she was too insecure (and felt even more insecure than she need have) to wish to keep the ‘generals’ in place; she humiliated them and dispersed them; indeed, she twice put her own future at stake in the effort to get rid of the ‘generals’. Finally dynastic succession became her dominant concern; so ‘generals’ were either turned into courtiers or replaced by courtiers. All in all, it is quite remarkable that the Congress ‘army’ has survived Rajiv Gandhi’s neglect of it and that there are still some ‘generals’ he can call out of banishment for service. But the ‘reserves’ have been depleted to the point of near exhaustion and need desperately to be replenished.
All manner of charges have been levelled against Rajiv Gandhi. It has been said, at least partly on Maneka Gandhi’s testimony, that he would fly away on loss of office, that he would put off the elections as long as possible, and that he would buy up opposition MPs in order to stay in power. These charges stand disproved. While the charge of corruption and personal greed hangs over him like the winter cloud, there is precious little he can do to disperse it right now. But the worst charge a monarch-leader or leader-monarch can face is that he has allowed his ‘army’ to disintegrate. Rajiv Gandhi is guilty of that charge. He has had in his ‘court’ more entertainers than tested ‘generals’. At a time when the communist system is crumbling all over the world, it would be odd for one to recommend that Rajiv Gandhi should put together a politburo. But even a Soviet-style politburo would be an improvement over the way the affairs of the Congress and thereby of the country have been managed in the past 15 years – beginning with the emergency in 1975.
The Pioneer, 17 December 1989