Mrs. Gandhi has seized the first possible opportunity after her election to the Lok Sabha to make a specific commitment which the Janata leadership should take note of. Since she has done it in her own peculiar style, the point is perhaps not as obvious as it might have been. But a careful scrutiny of her address to the Congress (1) parliamentary party in New Delhi last Thursday can leave no scope for confusion. Her statement that it is not necessary for her to pull down the Janata government because it is itself performing the task efficiently and effectively, is tantamount to saying that, unlike Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan and his supporters in 1974 and 1975, she does not propose to resort to extra-constitutional agitations in order to bring down the government. She has thus clearly hinted that she will wait for the Janata party to run its full term, if it can, and stake her claim to office at the next general election. Her repeated references to non-violence and Gandhian values are intended to underscore her willingness to abide by the rules of the game which, despite what some of the Janata leaders have advocated in the past, cannot in this country’s conditions include the right of recall and insistence on a premature dissolution of a legislature on the plea, specious or otherwise, that the ruling party or coalition has lost the support of the people and therefore the mandate to continue to hold office.
Mrs. Gandhi has not made her acceptance of the rules of the democratic game conditional on the Janata government withdrawing the cases it has launched and proposes to launch against her. On the contrary, when asked by newspaper correspondents whether she would press for the withdrawal of the cases against her, she shot back last Wednesday: “Why should 1?” That apart, it can be argued that Mrs. Gandhi’s continuing hold on the people cannot absolve her of the charges of abuse of authority during the emergency. In any case, the Janata leadership as a whole, including Mr. Morarji Desai, has gone too far in respect of prosecuting her on various charges to be able to retrace its steps and adopt a let-bygones-be-bygones stance. But the democratic system is bound to come under serious strain in an atmosphere of permanent confrontation between the ruling party and the main opposition party which is what Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress has so clearly become. A way to avoid such a confrontation should, therefore, be found. This is specially necessary in view of the gravity of communal and caste conflicts in large parts of the country — Punjab, U.P., Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra and so on. Thus the Janata leadership should, on the one hand, stop treating Mrs. Gandhi as a “fascist beast” and open a dialogue with her party on, for example, coping with the communal problem in Punjab and U.P. and, on the other, ensure that she is not unduly harassed even if the cases against her are to go on. It will be a gesture of goodwill on its part if, irrespective of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it drops the proposal to appoint a special court to try her.