It is not at all surprising that Mr. Y.B. Chavan should have ruled out a merger of the two Congress parties. He and those of his colleagues who feel equally strongly have had enough of Mrs. Gandhi’s leadership and do not wish to be exposed once again to the kind of humiliation they suffered in silence from 1971 to the end of emergency in March 1977. Many of them including Mr. Chavan were in a sense as much victims of the emergency as the country’s present rulers whom she had put in jail. They had retained their ministerial and other offices in name but they had little influence on the government’s policies during that period. If they also take the view that Mrs. Gandhi has not changed and is not likely to change her style of functioning and that she resorted to unfair tactics to split the party, they are not unjustified. But that is only one aspect, however important, of the story.
While at the time of the split, Mrs. Gandhi’s standing with the people could be in doubt despite the large crowds she had been attracting wherever she was going, it was reasonably clear that the official Congress did not possess a truly national leader and that this could be a serious handicap for the party, however good its intentions and credentials. The expectation then was that members of the so-called collective leadership would be able to mobilize sufficient support in their respective states to block the former prime minister’s re-emergence as the alternative to the Janata government. Inevitably the performance of Mr. Chavan in Maharashtra and Mr. Brahmananda Reddi in Andhra in the then forthcoming vidhan sabha election was regarded as being critically important to the future of the Congress. For their supporters calculated, and rightly, that if the party could retain power in these two states and perhaps in Assam as well, it would have a reasonable chance of remaining a truly national party. Needless to recall, the results have belied these expectations and therefore cast doubt on the party’s future. Mr. Chavan has responded to this challenge by enunciating some worthy principles but he has not provided an answer to it and it does not appear he can provide one.
It is not so much a tribute to the skill of Mr. Chavan and his allies as a testimony to the strength of the antipathy to Mrs. Gandhi among many of her former colleagues that there has so far been no big exodus from the Congress Parliamentary party to the Congress (I). But this is obviously a temporary situation which cannot last long, specially because many of the Congress MPs in the Lok Sabha come precisely from those states – Andhra and Karnataka – where Mrs. Gandhi’s party has done remarkably well and formed governments. Indeed, in Mr. Chavan’s own state of Maharashtra, the Congress (I) is an equal and more aggressive partner in the government and some of his colleagues like Mr. V.P. Naik are publicly advocating unity of the two Congress parties under Mrs. Gandhi’s leadership. All this need not worry Mr. Chavan if he is prepared, as he might well be, to lose the present status of the leader of the opposition and carry on with his policy “constructive opposition” with the help of such MPs as place principles above everything else. Losers are often better men than winners. But politics is a zero sum game. Winners take all.