It is fortuitous that the confrontation between the Prime Minister and the party managers has taken place on the question of the selection of the Congress nominee for presidentship. The conflict between them had been building up for a long time and one issue could have been as good as another to bring it out into the open. The forthcoming presidential election has thus done no more than determine the timing of the clash.
Essentially the issues in dispute are starkly simple. Mrs Gandhi believes that the Prime Minister’s office is and should be the main centre of power in the country and that its incumbent must have a decisive say not only in the determination of the Government’s policies but also in the management of the ruling party’s internal affairs.
Effective power
The Congress hierarchs, on the other hand, contend that the Prime Minister owes her office to the party and must therefore listen to them and share effective power with them. In other words they are asserting the supremacy of the organisation over the government. The fact that Mr Morarji Desai, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Mr Chavan, the Union Home Minister, have reluctantly made common cause with the party managers does not in any way detract from the effectiveness of this argument.
Mrs Gandhi disputes the contention that she owes her office exclusively to the party. She believes quite sincerely that she inherits her father’s charisma, that her personal appeal goes far beyond that of the Congress organisation and that in electoral terms the party benefits from the fact of her leadership of the parliamentary wing. She said as much when she made the famous statement that she derives her power from the people. The bosses, not unnaturally, resent this claim and interpret it as an attempt on her part to place herself above the party.
It is possible that Mrs Gandhi’s approach to the question of the correct relationship between the party and the Prime Minister’s office would have been different if the Congress had maintained its near monopoly of power in the last general election in 1967. But it did not. Subsequent defections in Haryana, UP, and Madhya Pradesh and Bihar further weakened its position. In the new situation in which non-Congress united fronts ruled in a number of states, Mrs Gandhi was reinforced in her general conviction that the Prime Minister should not be a prisoner of the party machine and that he or she should embody a broad national consensus so that he or she could seek and win the cooperation of state governments run by anti-Congress coalitions.
Party managers
The party managers have reacted differently to the same set of circumstances. They fear that the Prime Minister’s consensus approach is detrimental to the party’s interests and that it will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Congress, to stage a comeback.
This divergence of interest and approach between the Prime Minister and the party managers’ is to some extent perhaps natural. The former is concerned primarily with the question of State-Centre relations, and the latter with the revival of their organisation’s fortunes.
But the interests of the Congress party and the Union Government headed by the Prime Minister are not necessarily contradictory. For example, the Congress organisation in Madras and West Bengal will not benefit if the Centre’s relations with the DMK and United Front governments deteriorate and the latter mobilise local nationalisms. But even when party managers recognise the complexity of the problem they cannot be expected to be enthusiastic over the fact of New Delhi leaning over backwards to accommodate non-Congress coalitions.
This is not to suggest that temperamental and policy differences have not played a part in creating and aggravating difficulties between the Prime Minister and the party bosses. They clearly have. All that is suggested is that policy differences are not the principal source of trouble. Mr Kamaraj and Mr Chavan are, for instance, as radical in their approach to economic issues as Mrs Gandhi.
Ganged up
It is also not suggested that all party bosses are aggrieved against Mrs Gandhi or that they have all ganged up against her. She has enjoyed the support of men like Mr DP Mishra and Mr Brahmananda Reddy. But it does appear that many of them do not operate on the same wave length is she does.
The question of the correct relationship between the Prime Minister and the party leadership first came to the fore soon after independence in 1947 when the then Congress President, Acharya Kripalani demanded a say in the shaping of the Government’s policy. The Acharya’s stand, it must be emphasised, was fully in conformity with the traditions of the party whereby it was taken for granted that the organisational wing was supreme and that the parliaments wing was subordinate to it. But the Acharya’s challenge was a non-event because it so happened that the effective party bosses had moved into the Central and State governments and because he could hardly claim to represent the organisational machine.
The first real confrontation between the then Prime Minister, Mr Nehru, and the party machine represented by Sardar Patel took place in 1950 when the latter backed Mr Purshottamdas Tandon for presidentship of the Congress. Mr Nehru did not involve himself directly in the contest. But men close to him supported the candidature of Acharya Kripalani and it was universally assumed that the Acharya was the Prime Minister’s nominee. But in this clash the party machine won. Mr Tandon was elected president.
Mr Nehru was able to secure a reversal of this verdict after Sardar Patel’s death when he brought such pressure to bear on Mr Tandon that he had little choice but to resign. From then till the time of his death in 1964 Mr Nehru saw to it that there was no conflict between the office of the Prime Minister and that of the Congress President. He achieved this objective by holding the two offices himself and by ensuring that only men acceptable to him were elected Congress Presidents.
As a result of Mr Nehru’s hegemony it came to be assumed that India had accepted the British practice of the Prime Minister being supreme in the party organisation as well. This assumption ignored the highly important point that Mr Nehru’s was a unique case.
Three factors are noteworthy in this context. First, Mr Nehru’s personality. He commanded the affection and respect of the people by virtue of his contribution to the freedom movement and of being Mahatma Gandhi’s heir. His electoral appeal was a great asset to the Congress. He possessed a dynamism which no Indian leader has matched since independence.
Secondly, after Sardar Patel’s death in December 1950 no one in the Congress had the necessary stature to be able to mobilise the party machine to confront him. Finally, in spite of his temperamental and policy differences with party managers, he accommodated them in the Government and thus eliminated the possibility of their ganging up against him. Mr SK Patil’s inclusion in the Union Government in 1957 after his performance as party manager in the Andhra election in 1955 is an instance in point.
Party machine
The situation clearly began to change during the latter part of Mr Nehru’s life. As his vigour declined, his status suffered after the debacle of his China policy and the consensus which he had imposed on the country by the strength of his personality began to crack up, the party machine started asserting itself through the then Congress President. That Mr Kamaraj was generally sympathetic to Mr Nehru’s approach and policies is not as pertinent in this context as the fact that the former emerged as an independent centre of power and the latter found it necessary to lean on him. Witness Mr Nehru’s use of the Kamaraj plan.
Mr Shastri who succeeded Mr Nehru was himself the product of the party machine. He owed everything to it and it is hardly necessary to emphasise the point that as Congress President, Mr Kamaraj played a key role in securing his election as Prime Minister.
On the face of it the choice between Mr Shastri and Mr Morarji Desai was not one between a party machine man and a charismatic leader who would ignore the organisation if he was made Prime Minister. Mr Desai had also made his way up through the party. It is possible that the attitude of Mr Kamaraj and his aides was influenced by considerations such as Mr Desai’s stand on Hindi and the personal equations between him and them. Mr Desai also favoured a strong state and would by implication seek to subordinate the party to it if he became the nation’s chief executive. In that sense Mr Shastri’s elevation represented the reversal of the process which Mr Nehru had initiated and promoted. The party had once again asserted itself as a living political force instead of being the transmission belt for the propagation of official policies which it had become under Mr Nehru.
Irksome
It is common knowledge that Mr Shastri came to resent Mr Kamaraj’s stature and status, that he found it irksome to have to consult him and defer to him and that he wanted to assert the primacy of the Prime Minister’s office over that of the Congress President. But as a party machine man par excellence, he sought to operate within its framework. Ho could not think in different terms, the misunderstanding between him and Mr Kamaraj did not therefore lead to a headlong clash and to a revival of the dispute regarding the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Congress President.
The issue was bound to arise when Mrs Gandhi succeeded Mr Shastri in 1966. She is not the product of the party machine and does not therefore defer to it to the same extent as Mr Shastri. She takes it for granted that in a parliamentary democracy the party should not seek to dictate to the Prime Minister. It was not an accident that the relations between her and Mr Kamaraj cooled off within months of her election as Prime Minister. The defeat of Congress stalwarts – Mr Atulya Ghosh in West Bengal, Mr Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu and Mr SK Patil in Bombay – in the last general election in 1967 indirectly strengthened Mrs Gandhi’s personal position. But the party bosses have refused to concede victory to her and have indeed fought back to the present position when they have confronted her on the issue of the Congress nominee for the Presidency,
It is significant that the Prime Minister has taken the position that the Presidency is not a party office, that its occupant should represent the broadest national consensus, that her two nominees – Mr VV Giri and Mr Jagjivan Ram in that order – represented such a consensus and that it is necessary to have a President with whom she can get on well.
It is equally significant that the Congress bosses should have taken the position that since their party commands a majority in the electoral college they need not worry about the preferences of other parties and that the Parliamentary Board has the unfettered right to name the organisation’s nominee for the august office.
In this complex, dangerous and fast developing situation it is futile to speculate whether the confrontation will continue or whether the two sides will take a second and a closer look at the possible consequences to themselves, the party and the country and search for a consensus. At the present moment things look rather dark. The issue has been joined and whatever the immediate sequence of events there cannot be a return to the status quo as it existed before the Bangalore session of the All-India Congress Committee.
The Times of India, 15 July 1969