If Nehru is remembered as a builder of modern India it is not merely because he laid the foundation for its economic progress but also because he helped to establish certain institutions – a framework for governance and the democratic process – and carefully nursed them until his death.
His reading of Indian history taught him that the absence of such a framework had been the country’s gravest weakness in the past and he wanted to ensure that it did not happen again. He did all he could but the effort has to be ceaseless. Institutions are like delicate plants. They die if they are not locked after.
We have been careless. The stress of events has also been too great. But to allow institutions to decay is to be trapped in a permanent crisis and throw away the means of mastering it. The risk is too great to be ignored. Mrs. Gandhi owes it to herself and the country to confront the challenge and answer it.
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India is not about to collapse into chaos and anarchy, thanks to the British, to Jawaharlal Nehru whose 92nd birth anniversary we celebrated yesterday and to Indira Gandhi whose birthday the country shall be celebrating four days hence.
The British built the institutions – a reasonably impartial, efficient administration, an independent judiciary, and apolitical police and armed forces – which have helped independent India tide over the period of considerable stress and strain in the last 34 years. These institutions have come under great pressure for a variety of reasons.
Nehru had imbibed the British value system and respect for institutions even before he entered the political arena and came under the influence of Gandhiji, one of the greatest moralists and disciplinarians of our age. And as he surveyed the country’s chequered past, the lesson was driven home. India, he knew, had fallen to marauders from within and without primarily because it had not been able to build an institutional framework strong enough to provide order and security in the absence of an able ruler. His concern in this regard comes through best in Andre Malraux’s account of conversations with him in his book Antimemoirs.
Nehru was highly critical of the Indian Civil Service before he came to occupy the office of Prime Minister. He often railed against its ways and procedures as Prime Minister. But he was careful to do nothing that would lower its morale and disrupt its espirit de corps. Instead he relied on it and it served him loyally. Similarly, there is not a single instance of his having attempted to interfere with the judiciary or manipulate it.
His respect for the right of the press to criticise those in authority is well known and so is his respect for Parliament. Despite the enormous load on him, he seldom missed the question hour in the Lok Sabha. On occasions he was extremely unhappy about some of the writings in leading English-language newspapers – in connection with the border dispute with China after the 1959 uprising in Tibet and attacks on Krishna Menon, for instance, – but it could never occur to him to call in an editor or proprietor and reprimand him.
After Sardar Patel’s death in December 1950, Nehru’s supremacy in the Congress could not be in doubt. The 1952 election settled the issue once and for all. It demonstrated his hold on the Indian people and made it obvious that the Congress party owed its power to his popularity. But he on his part seldom behaved as if he saw himself as anything much more than first among equals. He consulted his colleagues in the Cabinet and the top party bodies like the parliamentary board and working committee on all policy issues. The party high command therefore retained its position of authority and eminence.
He almost never sent for Maulana Azad. Whenever he wanted to consult the latter, which was quite often, he went to his office or residence. A sentence from the Maulana sufficed to ensure a second term for Rajendra Prasad as President of the Republic. Nehru wanted Radhakrishnan to take over.
At AICC sessions it was normal for delegates to criticise the government freely and fearlessly even in the presence of Nehru. He had made it a point to sit through these long and often tiresome speeches in order to ensure that this party forum retained its autonomy and prestige.
On occasions Nehru appeared intolerant of criticism, when he would shout and scream. But he never punished anyone for having opposed him within the party. Men such as Morarji Desai and S.K. Patil, who did not sincerely and fully subscribe to his concept of either socialism or non-alignment, continued to hold important portfolios in the Union cabinet. And outside the party, critics like Jayaprakash Narayan had free access to him.
The Congress in Nehru’s days also needed funds and raised them. But only specific individuals were allotted this task and there was no question of a quid pro quo. Those who helped the party were assured of general goodwill which was useful to them. But no deals were struck and individuals other than party treasurers did not go about raising money in the name of the party.
Nehru had been ruffled by the Chinese attack in 1962 and so had India. He died a sad man on this and many other counts. But when he departed from the scene on the morning of May 27, 1964, things were in place. The institutional framework was in good enough shape to ensure not only smooth succession to him but also continuance of orderly government, though the successor was in his own reckoning a much smaller man. India could prove wrong the forebodings of its friends as well as its detractors. President Ayub Khan of Pakistan miscalculated with consequences which became fully apparent only in 1971 when his country broke into two.
Mrs. Gandhi, the architect of victory then, is today India’s symbol of authority. She serves as a bulwark against the forces of disorder and anarchy. Her very presence ensures that the country can hope to tide over the turbulence ahead in one piece. Her return to office has produced a sense of security especially among the weaker sections, though the machinery of law and order has not been strengthened. But what if her hold on the people slips, as it did in 1977, or when she is no longer there? It has now become difficult to say with confidence that the institutional framework will be able to take up the additional load. It will be facile to argue that similar fears proved unjustified in 1964. The situation is now very different for a variety of reasons.
The ruling party, which served as India’s central political institution from the time of independence in 1947 to the declaration of internal emergency on June 26, 1975, is in a state of decay. This decay has been accompanied by a virtual collapse of public morality. As it happens, the state apparatus too, is in poor shape. Simultaneously, conflicts in society have sharpened greatly. Even the poorest and weakest sections of the community have become aware of their rights under the law and of the power the ballot box confers on them.
And, as a British writer has put it, “It is not only the poor who have become more politicised. Interests within every section of Indian society are far more self-aware than in Nehru’s life-time, and their links with similar interests beyond the local areas far more numerous and substantial. Competition between interests has quickened enormously over the last 15 years, and as people compete, their appetites grow”. And what appetites we have acquired!
Appetites and self-assertion were bound to grow as the country moved from near stagftation to development, as millions of people migrated to cities and towns, as schools, roads and the transistor radio spread to the smallest villages, as the patron-client relationship collapsed and as the message spread that good life was within reach. And with appetites were bound to grow social tensions. India’s tragedy is that as conflicts have sharpened, its principal mediatory agency in the form of the Congress party has decayed.
On this issue, there is widespread agreement. Mrs. Gandhi, too, will not claim either that social conflicts have not sharpened greatly or that her party is in a position to control them and defuse them. But there the agreement breaks down. There is no broad national consensus either on Mrs: Gandhi’s role or on the causes of the Congress party’s two splits in 1969 and 1978 and its decline. A much larger section of the articulate among the intelligentsia criticises her than supports her. This section has the interest of the country as much at heart as anyone else and is much too important in the making of public opinion to be ignored.
Neither Mrs Gandhi’s detractors nor her supporters are prepared to take an objective view of recent history. While the critics almost wilfully slur over significant facts, the admirers are loathe to recognise that even when Mrs. Gandhi has enjoyed supreme power, as she does now, she has been reluctant to enforce norms of decent and democratic public life and to take steps to breathe life into her party. As a result, we no longer have a worthwhile public debate on the central issues facing the nation; we have a series of slanging matches. India has become two nations not only in Disraeli’s sense of the rich and the poor but in another. One is either for Mrs. Gandhi or against her.
The facts, however, are stubborn. They cannot be wished away. The Congress party suffered an electoral disaster in 1967 when Mrs. Gandhi was by no means in control of it. It then lost power in all north Indian states from Himachal Pradesh to West Bengal!
The organisational bosses, who had lost the election, not only tried to hold on to their power in the party; but sought to cut Mrs. Gandhi down to size and if possible remove her from the office of Prime Minister. That was the purpose behind their selection of Mr Sanjiva Reddy as the Congress nominee for presidency. Mrs Gandhi had little choice but to fight back, leading to the first major split in the Congress since 1906.
In 1974 we witnessed the removal of an elected government and dissolution of the state legislature in Gujarat under the pressure of street politics and the rise of the J.P. movement whose principal objective was also Mrs. Gandhi’s removal from the office of Prime Minister. On top of it came the Allahabad High Court judgment unseating her. This time Mrs Gandhi suspended the constitution. Not one of the Congress leaders in the government or the party objected to the declaration of the emergency or to the way it was enforced. But after the electoral defeat in 1977, many of them turned on her as if they had no responsibility for what had happened. The result was the second split. Had the established and experienced Congress leaders shown greater foresight, Mrs. Gandhi would not have had to depend on the motley crowd that now surrounds her.
While Mrs. Gandhi’s critics ignore these and other facts and her spectacular achievements – the victory over Pakistan in 1971 and the containment of inflation in 1975-76, for instance, – her supporters turn their back on the way she has allowed the Congress to fall into desuetude, failed to organise membership drives and elections since 1969, tolerated buccaneers and go-getters around her, appointed men of little experience and integrity to such key offices as those of chief ministers and Union ministers, acquiesced in mass transfers of civil servants and in unjustified attacks on the judiciary and the press by her nominees and thereby created the impression that she is intolerant of any institution which she cannot fully control and that like Louis XIV, she believes in the maxim: “After me the deluge.”
Contrary to her earlier reputation for decisiveness and ruthlessness, Mrs. Gandhi has, since her return to office in January 1980, often been evasive. In Andhra Pradesh last year the state legislature could not meet for five long months because a sizable section of the Congress (I) legislature party, including ministers, had risen in revolt against the chief minister, Mr. Chenna Reddy, who faced serious charges of corruption. But she would not decide whether he was to be allowed to stay on or not. Finally, one day she asked him to resign only to change her mind when he was still in the air on the way back from New Delhi to Hyderabad. Mr. Chenna Reddy was subsequently removed. But who can compute the cost to the state and the Prime Minister’s own reputation?
The successor is a near disaster. His personal reputation in terms of integrity is not bad but he lacks the qualities of leadership and capacity for taking decisions. At one stage he appointed 61 ministers (one out of every three party legislators) and was planning to appoint even more.
Mrs. Gandhi could have been in no doubt that Mr. Jagannath Pahadia was not fit to be Rajasthan’s chief minister. His record as a deputy minister in the Union cabinet could not have been unknown to her. Yet he was appointed to that office. For months he failed to even put together a team of ministers. He refused to vacate his seat in Parliament and his residence in New Delhi apparently fearing that he might not make it in Jaipur. Literally several thousand files piled up in his office as prices were quoted and collected by intermediaries for the transfer or non-transfer of government employees including school teachers and compounders in government hospitals. Yet Mrs. Gandhi took over 18 months to pack him off.
And she has not said one word on the Antulay affair even to her senior colleagues. Like everyone else, they keep guessing whether he will stay on as chief minister of the country’s richest state or go. Since he has been allowed to drop two full-fledged ministers, the inference by normal logic would be that Mrs. Gandhi has decided to condone his fund-raising activities in connection with his controversial trusts and his Nawab-like style of functioning which totally disregards norms and procedures. But in view of her silence on the subject, the uncertainty continues.
Corruption has become the most important issue in the country. It is related in a very intimate sense with the rise of the black money parallel economy. But the main target of public criticism has shifted from blackmarketeers, hoarders, speculators, smugglers and operators in foreign exchange to politicians belonging to the ruling party. It makes no impression on anyone if you say that norms have collapsed all round or list Janata ministers who allegedly amassed vast fortunes. Even those not ill-disposed towards Mrs. Gandhi personally laugh in your face and tell you that you are trying to explain away the goings-on in the Congress (1). This erosion of faith has created a dangerous vacuum.
In addition to corruption, the people are fed up of the widespread disregard shown by her chosen lieutenants for administrative procedures, their arbitrary actions in punishing and rewarding civil servants and their ill-conceived and hasty decisions taken out of considerations which have little to do with the well-being of the people.
These Congress functionaries make it out that they can get away with all this if only at regular intervals they protest their loyalty to the leader. In reality they are least concerned about the effect of their actions on the image of the leader. Many of them are engaged in building a personality cult of their own. Day after day they bring out pamphlets and books on their supposed achievements and popularity.
The party’s image has suffered enormously. It is Mrs. Gandhi’s duty to stir herself and do all that is possible to refurbish it. If she does not act quickly and firmly enough, the deluge may well follow her.
The Times of India, Sunday Magazine, 15 November 1981