Mr Harideo Joshi has gone the way of many otter Congress chief ministers in the past two decades. Two facts stand out in this case, as in similar ones earlier. First, Mr Joshi has been asked to stand down by the Congress president, and not by a majority in the state legislature party. Second, the party’s central leadership has not offered any explanation to the people for its decision to remove the Rajasthan chief minister. Indeed, it is doubtful that it has communicated its view of Mr Joshi’s inadequacies and failures even to him. There is, of course, nothing new, either about the manner in which Mr Rajiv Gandhi has dismissed a Congress chief minister, or about the manner in which the latter has submitted to the diktat of the former. As noted earlier, the Joshi episode belongs to a well-established tradition in the Congress party. But that cannot make the affair any the less deplorable, violating as it does the central principles of the constitution and well-recognised norms in any democracy. For implicit in the Congress president’s decision to ask a duly elected chief minister to resign is the proposition that the party legislators and the people in the state, who voted for them, do not matter. The same contempt for the legislators as well as the people is reflected in the leadership’s steadfast refusal to offer any kind of explanation to them for the decision. Surely this constitutes the negation of democracy, however defined.
It is not our case that Mr Joshi was a competent chief minister or that he commanded the support of a significant majority in the Rajasthan Congress legislature party. Our case is that the prerogative of assessing his competence or incompetence belongs to his constituents (party legislators) and that they should have been allowed to exercise this right. It is also not our case that Mr Joshi would have become chief minister in 1985 in the first instance, if the election of the leader had then been left to the state legislators or that he would have survived, if his survival in office had depended on their continuing support for him. We just do not know what would have been his fate if anything like inner party democracy existed in the Congress party. But to say that the Congress has been caught in a vicious circle for decades cannot mean that it must remain so trapped. It has to break out of that circle, if only because its chances of survival in office depend on its willingness or unwillingness to do so. Undue centralization of authority in the party president, who also happens to be the country’s Prime Minister has emasculated the organisation at every other level, which cannot but affect adversely its future prospects. This concentration of authority has also created a situation in which any action by Mr Rajiv Gandhi, however legitimate in itself, is likely to be seen as being arbitrary. In the absence of a public discussion of even important issues such as the appointment or removal of a chief minister, the people just have no means by which they can decide whether the action is justified or not. Indeed, in the absence of a public discussion, the Congress president himself can be influenced unduly by personal predilection, hearsay and intrigues by members of his “inner court”.
It has long been a commonplace that India is too large a country to be governed from one centre. That is precisely why the Founding Fathers provided for a federal system, even if for security considerations they armed the Centre with extraordinary powers. Since then as a result of the development process the country’s affairs have become too complex to be managed by one man or woman, with the help of a small group of advisers. On top of it all, it is only natural that with the spread of education, mostly in the regional languages, the growth of the economy, accompanied by the rise of regional interests and elites and the politicization of the people up to the village level, regionalism should become a major force in the country. In such a context, it is truly extraordinary that the Congress leadership should continue to function in the old ways, when the national scene was very different. The situation had changed when Mrs Indira Gandhi was still around. The Congress party’s defeat in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and the violence in Punjab were expressions of that change. It was, of course, too late for her to change her style of leadership. But Mr Rajiv Gandhi should have read the writing on the wall at the very start of his prime minister ship. If the compulsions were not obvious enough in 1985, they became more than obvious in 1986, when the Congress suffered electoral reverses in several states at the hands of essentially regional parties. That should have convinced him of the urgent need to accommodate regional aspirations within the Congress by allowing state leaders greater leeway to reflect those aspirations. Apparently he has not drawn that inference. That is why the Harideo Joshi episode has a wider bearing.