Obviously sympathy and support for VP Singh right now outweighs concern for the country. But it is, on the whole, a muted affair; there is nothing like the euphoria we witnessed at the time of Rajiv Gandhi’s victory in January 1985; indeed, even his own supporters are rather subdued. I for one am not able to decide whether I should sympathize with him in his predicament, or blame him for the emergence of a weak central government and its possible consequences.
VP Singh’s predicament is obvious enough. Rajiv Gandhi duly resigned on November 29 when the results of the poll of the Lok Sabha were more or less in. It took VP Singh another full two days to get elected as leader of the Janata Dal and not surprisingly, Devi Lal had to be persuaded not only to give up his claim to the office of Prime Minister but also to agree to deceive an unsuspecting Chandra Shekhar. This naturally took time.
I am in no position to say whether VP Singh himself was an active participant in the formulation of the scheme whereby Chandra Shekhar was to be kept in the dark that after he had proposed Devi Lal for the Dal’s leadership with his consent, the latter himself would propose VP Singh’s name. Possibly it was devised by some ‘experienced’ politician such as Biju Patnaik. But there can be little doubt that VP Singh acquiesced in an exercise the like of which, as Chandra Shekhar legitimately pointed out, we have not witnessed in our public life ever. So much for the dawn of morality in public life!
VP Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister on December 2 by President Venkataraman who must have been waiting anxiously to receive him. It then took him three days to put together a list of 17 would-be ministers and one of them (Yashwant Sinha) hurriedly left the Ashoka Hall, venue of the swearing-in ceremony in Rashtrapati Bhawan, on discovering that he was being given the status of a minister of state and not of a full cabinet minister. The agreement on the distribution of portfolios took another day to be reached. Rajiv Gandhi must have been chuckling in his sleeves.
It would be an exaggeration to infer that the Janata Dal is already at sixes and sevens. The desire somehow to hold together remains strong among its leaders. This accounts for the adjustments in respect of the election of the leader, appointment of ministers and allocation of portfolios. But the internal contradictions in it are too strong to be managed on a long-term basis. The war of attrition has already begun in UP between the Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the defeated candidate for that key office, Ajit Singh.
Possible consequences for the country cannot worry the Janata Dal ‘ideologues’ many of whom believe, and proclaim publicly, that the weaker the government the better for both democracy and India. But the renewed call for Khalistan from the precincts of the Akal Takht must send shivers down the spines of old-fashioned people who value the country’s integrity. Hopefully, even the CPM and CPI, not to speak of the BJP, are not likely to accept the dangerous schemes for ‘accommodation’ with the Khalistanis that are almost certain to emerge from the influential sections of the non-government that is now installed in New Delhi and of the ‘intellectual’ community whose prayers for a ‘truly democratic’ set-up in New Delhi have been fully answered.
In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi was persuaded that he had only to distance himself from Indira Gandhi and her Punjab policy to settle the Punjab problem; now VP Singh has convinced himself that he has only to disown his predecessor’s Punjab policy to be able to persuade the terrorists to lay down arms. In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi was sold the illusion that Sant Longowal could and would deliver the goods: now VP Singh is placing similar hopes in Simranjeet Singh Mann.
I had little doubt in 1985 that Rajiv Gandhi was launched on a dangerous course and said so to him privately and wrote so publicly; now too I have no doubt that VP Singh is sending the wrong signal to the terrorists and their supporters. His visit to the Golden Temple at this stage can only convince them that New Delhi is back to the policy of appeasement.
I feel as uneasy over the allotment of the home portfolio to Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, former Congress chief in Jammu and Kashmir, as over VP Singh’s journey to Amritsar just now. This surprise allotment has been widely interpreted as a gesture to the Muslim community; indeed, it has been suggested that the Mufti owes his elevation to the Imam of Jama Masjid who apparently has acquired such clout that VP Singh visited him before being sworn-in as Prime Minister. I read in it an indication that VP Singh might be planning to dismiss the Farooq government in Srinagar.
Such a move will, in my view, be ill-timed and it will not solve any problem. The BJP leadership has acted rashly in demanding President’s rule in the state. It should reconsider its decision. Jammu and Kashmir is not just another state in the Indian Union; it has a constitution of its own; under this constitution, Governor’s rule cannot last more than six months, and whatever one thinks of Farooq Abdullah, one would find it hard to suggest a better alternative.
The Rajiv government played a balancing game between the Hindus and the Muslims. It yielded to the Muslims in the Shah Bano case and it is said to have played a role in opening the gate of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The result is there for anyone to see. This should persuade VP Singh to desist from playing a similar game between the Hindus and the Sikhs. The dismissal of the Farooq government and appeasement in Punjab will create serious problems for the country.
I am by no means suggesting that Rajiv Gandhi could have coped with these and other critical problems effectively if he had been returned to office. His record of mismanagement of the country’s and his party’s affairs speaks for itself. But Rajiv Gandhi headed what could be called a government. The present dispensation cannot be so described and for this state of affairs, VP Singh is substantially responsible.
VP Singh has, in my view, not shown even an elementary understanding of the electoral arithmetic in north India and has, therefore, followed an approach which has prevented, as it was bound to, a realignment of forces and with it the emergence of a viable non-Congress government in New Delhi. Even a political babe would have known that only a proper alliance between the Janata Dal and the BJP could possibly have produced a durable alternative to the Congress rule.
VP Singh was either oblivious of this reality, or chose to ignore it; instead he talked of the Left being his ‘natural allies’ and finally he worked out a loose electoral arrangement whereby neither the communists nor the BJP could, or would, join a government headed by him in the event of a non-Congress majority in the Lok Sabha.
Perhaps he did not expect the BJP to do so well and the National Front to do so poorly and calculated that an arrangement with the communists alone would assure a majority for him in the Lok Sabha. If that was in fact the case, it would only confirm that his grasp of political realities is rather weak. As it happens, the Janata Dal has been as much a beneficiary of the anti-Congress sentiment among the Hindus on the Ramjanmabhoomi issue as the BJP – a fact the ‘secularist’ intellectuals wish to ignore. More than the caste arithmetic that sentiment accounts for the Janata Dal’s sweep in UP and Bihar.
No one can say what the communists would have done if VP Singh had gone in for a regular alliance with the BJP. I take the view that they would have, after due protests, fallen in line and agreed to seat adjustments. But what if they had decided to stay out? They could either have gone it alone and faced the consequences, or sough a deal with the Congress.
Again, I do not believe that the second choice would have been easily acceptable to them or perhaps been even available to them. But if the choice was open to them and if they had taken it, the Congress-Communist alliance would either have lost or won. In the first eventuality, no one need have shed a tear, and in the second, Rajiv Gandhi would have been obliged to mend his style of functioning and V.P. Singh’s and the country’s main legitimate objective would have been served.
VP Singh is of course, not exclusively to blame for the denouement we are landed with. Most Indian politicians live in a world which has plainly ceased to exist. While in countries which were till recently called communist, it is difficult that to find leaders who still believe in the relevance of ideology, the ‘believers’ having disappeared from public view, our leaders and intellectuals talk as if ideology is all important. So it is possible that a proposal for an alliance between the National Front and the BJP would have met with opposition from others in the Front, especially in its Dal constituent. But it is a leader’s obligation to overcome such resistance. In VP Singh’s case, there is not the slightest evidence to suggest that he himself was at all sensitive to the compulsions of the situation, or that he sat down to do his arithmetic. On the contrary, his conduct more than bore the mark of strong antipathy towards the BJP; indeed, he put his antipathy on public display.
Another point needs to be kept in view in assessing VP Singh. Which is that to no small extent his political decisions have been influenced by the illusion that the Congress would split. As far as is known, he expected the spilt to materialize first when Rajiv Gandhi expelled him from the party along with Arun Nehru, VC Shukla, Arif Mohammad and others in the summer of 1987; he then expected it to occur on the eve of the poll and finally after the party’s defeat last month. The Congress has, of course, not split. But more pertinent for the purpose of the present discussion is that one could not have realistically expected it to split.
Congressmen as a rule do not revolt; they only grumble and that mostly in the privacy of some drawing room; and those who have chosen to leave the party, or have been expelled, have not as a rule prospered in politics. The failures include stalwarts such as Netaji Subhas Bose, Jayaprakash Narayan and other socialists, including the irrepressible Rammanohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani and YB Chavan.
In recent years the Congress has spilt twice – in 1969 and 1978. On both occasions the initiative was taken by the leader, Indira Gandhi. The ‘syndicate’ leaders were prepared to bury the hatchet after their defeat in the presidential poll in 1969 and forget Indira Gandhi’s extraordinary conduct when she opposed the Congress candidate she herself had proposed. But she was determined to get rid of them and she got rid of them. In 1978 Chavan and other detractors of the emergency – they summoned the courage to speak only after the electoral disaster in 1977 – were taken by surprise when Indira Gandhi again chose to split the party. Almost all of them returned to her on her terms which were worse than humiliating.
All in all, the Congress is a party of obedience and not of dissent, defiance. Its stalwarts seldom refuse any office offered by the leader and they are quick to adjust to his or her ways. VP Singh was one of them though apparently not without a little spark inherited from his Rajput forbears. He should have put known the Congress would not split and Rajiv Gandhi would survive defeat of the party as its leader. He has not recognised this reality. Indeed, it appears that he has not given up the hope. The only plausible reason why VP Singh should have kept the defence portfolio to himself can be that he personally wants to look into the Bofors gun, the HDW submarine and other arms deals in order to be able to fix the charge of receiving payoffs on Rajiv Gandhi, or at least on those sufficiently close to him to make it impossible for him to deny responsibility. Some of his admirers fear that such an exercise on his part will attract the charge of vindictiveness. Of course, it will. But I believe that his objective is not just to discredit Rajiv Gandhi; it is to split the Congress so that he can inherit a substantial part of it.
When VP Singh left the Congress party in 1987, it appeared as if he would seek to don the mantle of Gandhiji – remember the photograph in the Mahatma style with the trunk bare and the legs folded under him – and Jayaprakash Narayan who had made public morality the single biggest issue in our public life. He then quickly moved to take over the ideological legacy of Rammanohar Lohia, who had cast India’s ‘backward castes’ in the revolutionary role of Marx’s proletariat, and Chaudhari Charan Singh’s constituency. But it seems to me that his principal objective has been to take over Nehru’s ideological legacy and the Congress, the whole of it without Rajiv Gandhi, if possible, and a substantial part of it, again without Rajiv Gandhi, if necessary. His approach to the BJP, the Communists and the Muslims has to be seen in this light. The BJP leaders must feel uncomfortable with such an ally. Indeed, they are not making a secret of their discomfort. But they are bound to remain immobilized unless they begin seriously to look for an alternative arrangement.
The Pioneer, 10 December 1989