Regardless of what happens in coming days and weeks the issue is joined, as never before since independence, between the forces of national integration and disintegration. This is the implication of the widespread student revolt against V.P. Singh’s decision to Mandalise India, with the students representing the forces of national integration and the Raja heading (not constituting) the forces of disintegration.
Moves to remove the Raja from the office of Prime Minister have clearly gathered momentum as the student agitation has intensified. Self-immolation and attempts at self- immolation by students in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and UP have shocked even cynical politicians with an eye on electoral arithmetic. Rajiv Gandhi’s call for the immediate resignation of V.P. Singh speaks of the growing concern that the Raja’s continuance in office would spell disaster for the country. His early exit will doubtless ease the confrontation between the State and the students and, as such, it must be hoped for and worked for. But it would not settle the issue between forces of nationalism and Lebanonisation.
Indian democracy has been reduced to a crude exercise in head count and its ultimate vulgarisation by the likes of Sharad Yadav and Paswan does not permit much scope for optimism in the near future. The drift in that direction has been evident for over two decades. The Raja’s Mandalisation move represents at once a partial consummation and acceleration of that process.
Not to speak of the Naga or Mizo insurrections which are behind us, even the Pakistan-backed terrorist-secessionist movements in Punjab and Kashmir cannot bear comparison with the present struggle. For, none of them has threatened to divide the Hindu society, which must, in the nature of things, constitute the mainstream the smaller streams (minorities) can join to form the Indian nation.
On the conscious level, V.P. Singh and his supporters may have sought only to carve out a political constituency for themselves among the more aggressive and economically well-off sections of the so-called ‘other backward castes’ such as the Yadavs, Kurmis Koiris, and Lodhas in Bihar and UP by reserving, for the time-being, 27 per cent jobs for them in the Central government and public sector undertakings, and by promising (by implication and not by explicit statement) to extend reservations for them in stages in schools, colleges, universities, the private sector and possibly even the armed forces.
Similarly, on the conscious level, students may feel that their future prospects have been put into jeopardy by the Government’s decision, leaving them no choice but to fight to the bitter end, whatever the cost to them in terms of loss of lives and disruption of studies. Indeed, they have good reason to feel threatened. As it is, 22.5 per cent seats in educational institutions and jobs in the government are reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes; an additional 27 per cent reservation on caste basis cannot but blight their prospects.
Unknown to them, however, both sides are instruments of the larger forces that have been struggling for supremacy for over 100 years, if we take the Muslims into consideration, and for around 40 years, if we exclude them. Muslim separatism, it may be recalled, began to assert itself soon after the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, culminating finally in partition in 1947. The caste factor began to intrude into our body politic with the first general election in 1952; it acquired considerable sweep and power by 1967; it now dominates the politics of the Janata Dal. The decision to implement the Mandal report marks a mid-point in the casteisation of Indian politics; it can legitimately be compared with the resolution the Muslim League adopted at Lahore in 1940 voicing the demand for a Muslim ‘homeland’.
That would, I hope, explain why I have compared V.P. Singh with Mohammed Ali Jinnah in this space earlier; Rajiv Gandhi’s reference to the Raja’s use of the Jinnah cap is interesting but not pertinent. More relevant would be to draw attention to the several common points between Jinnah and the Raja.
Jinnah was not much of a Muslim; he, for instance, loved pork which is wholly taboo among Muslims; it is at least not certain that he could recite the Kalima in Arabic; at any rate, he was too Westernised to be able to empathise with poor and illiterate Muslims reluctant to move into the modern world; he had no use for the Shariat and is known to have rebuffed efforts, after the formation of Pakistan, to push him in that direction.
The Raja does not belong to the ‘other backward castes’; he is a ‘blue-blooded’ Rajput who can trace his ancestry to Raja Jaichand who ruled over the biggest kingdom in north India, with Banaras as its capital, at the time of the Muslim invasion in the eleventh century; his lack of empathy for the ‘OBCs’ found expression in his ‘anti-dacoity’ campaign as the UP Chief Minister in which, according to Mulayam Singh Yadav, then, hundreds of their members were brutally murdered by the police in allegedly fake encounters.
The Pakistan demand meant for Jinnah a repudiation of his own past – his commitment to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity and nationhood; his antipathy to Gandhiji played a significant role in his conversion to the cause of Muslim separatism, though personal factors, such as the death of his wife, may also have been at work.
For the Raja too, championship of the cause of the ‘OBCs’ represents a repudiation of his own past; he was first attracted to Jayaprakash Narayan and not to Ram Manohar Lohia, who fathered the casteist theory of politics in post-independence India, and hated J.P. with a ferocity then unknown in Indian politics; he has served Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi (Lohia held her in contempt) and Rajiv Gandhi whose passionate commitment to the Indian nation cannot be in dispute; once he developed antipathy to Rajiv Gandhi, he allowed it to become the decisive factor in shaping his politics.
Jinnah was obsessed with a sense of self-importance and search for self-vindication; he did not care for the possible cost to the Muslim community, not to speak of India as a whole; after all, he could not have been unaware that over one-third of Muslims would be left behind in India.
The Raja’s sense of self-importance was on display when as Finance Minister he humiliated captains of industry by summoning them to his durbars and raiding them; and there can be little doubt that he has been seeking to vindicate himself since Rajiv Gandhi first shifted him from finance to defence and then removed from the Cabinet and finally from the party as well.
In despair over his wife’s death and disgust over the triumph of Gandhiji in Indian politics, Jinnah even left India and settled down in London, when he was persuaded to return to lead the Muslim League, he looked for a slogan and landed on ‘Muslim homeland’; this might not have turned out to be the deadly weapon it did, if the British, angry with the Congress for its opposition to the war effort, had not made common cause with him.
The Raja thought of retiring from politics when Rajiv Gandhi forced him out of the government and party; he was persuaded to lead the Jan Morcha by Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammad Khan; I for one believe that he was sincere in his protestations that he would not contest election and seek, or even accept, office ever again; but once he had finally decided to fight Rajiv Gandhi to the finish, he had no difficulty in accepting the AJGAR (Ahir-Jat-Gujjar-Rajput) alliance concept because, in his own words, they constituted the reservoir of anti-Congressism; it did not bother him that the success of such an alliance could gravely damage the cause of national unity; even with all that and the Bofors payoff, he could not have amounted to much, if the B JP and the Communists, frustrated with the never ending Congress rule and fed up with Rajiv Gandhi, had not joined him.
Believe it or not, V.P. Singh’s platform (and language) is more or less identical with that of Muslim separatists. The latter too sought justification for their demand for separate electorate and reservations in the ‘grievance’ that the Hindus had come to dominate the administration as if the same route of education was not open to them. If the Leaguers invented the bogey of a brute Hindu majority out to crush the Muslims, the Raja’s men have invented the bogey of millennia of Brahminical tyranny. Incidentally, both theories are the handiwork of Christian missionaries and British administrators. One has to read men like Ibbetson and Russell to appreciate that Mandal is as much an offspring of colonialism as Jinnah.
As for the students, they did not emerge as an independent political force in pre-independence India, though they served as storm troopers of various movements. This was so because there was no dearth either of attractive platforms, or of acceptable leaders. Both these conditions do not obtain in today’s India. Almost all platforms have got discredited because of the performance and behaviour of their leaders, and not a single party possesses an attractive enough face for the idealistic youth. It is not an accident that no political party has been able to summon the necessary courage to come out in favour of justice and fair play on the Mandal issue. This paralysis speaks of the depth of moral degeneration in our political life.
Apart from certain casteist warriors, there is hardly a significant political figure in the country who is not opposed to the Raja’s move to polarise the Hindu society. This is certainly so in the case of Rajiv Gandhi and L.K. Advani and many of their senior colleagues, and, indeed, of several Janata leaders such as Chandra Shekhar and Arun Nehru. Casteism goes against their grain. Yet they have refused to confront V.P. Singh head-on and chosen to engage in diversionary tactics. There have, of course, been honourable exceptions, such as Vasant Sathe and Dinesh Singh in the Congress and Biju Patnaik in the Janata Dal. But these exceptions only prove the rule. Which is that our politics has degenerated into a cynical exercise in head count.
The Raja must either be naive himself, or he must have a very poor opinion of us all when he justifies reservations in the Union Government on the plea that administrations in southern states, where job reservations have been in force for years, are no worse than administrations in other states. For one thing, whoever told him that administration in benighted Bihar has not been run on caste lines for decades? For another, has he not known that Indian identity is a multi-level affair, that while it is tolerable that various sub-national and ethnic identity levels operate at the district and even the state level, only the concept of one Indian identity can be permissible in respect of Central services and Union government jobs if we are to preserve and promote our nationhood?
V.P. Singh has added insult to injury by suggesting that the government would offer dealerships of its products and financial assistance to ‘meritorious’ students; he is apparently thinking of those students who qualify for Government and public sector jobs but are to be kept out on account of reservations for ‘OBCs’. Equally significantly, it also shows that he has no comprehension of the nature of the problem his Mandalisation move his created; it threatens a principal agency (all-India services) for the sustenance and promotion of the Indian identity as distinct from the smaller identities that operate in our society.
The task of protecting this Indian identity has now fallen substantially on the students. This is a herculean task by itself. It is further complicated by the fact that the students do not possess a coherent and viable leadership capable of waging a long struggle. But developments in Eastern Europe and China in recent years suggest that the handicap may be overcome in course of time. And who knows the Congress and/or the BJP may finally rise to the occasion?
The Indian political scene has, as has been pointed out in this column earlier, been stalemated since the general election last November. The stalemate has now become wholly untenable; this is evident from moves to find a replacement for the Raja. It has to end. Once it ends, the process of political realignment can begin.
Sunday Mail, 30 September 1990