In spite of the fairly strong language Mrs. Gandhi has used to underline her determination to resist the demand for the dissolution of the Bihar legislature to the bitter end and the stern measures she is taking to cope with the movement in that state, it is difficult to say whether or not she has decided to arrest Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan. Contradictory agency reports that emanated from Patna in the forenoon last Monday can only add to the confusion.
The Prime Minister is possibly receiving contradictory advice from her colleagues in the government and her officials. But even if this is not the case, it cannot be easy for her to make up her mind.
Main Problem
Mr. Narayan has been a highly respected figure in Indian public life for decades and his stature has greatly increased in recent months. As such it cannot be a painless decision for Mrs. Gandhi to put him behind the bars. This is, however, the least of her difficulties.
Her main problem is that Mr. Narayan is likely to undertake a fast if he is imprisoned. This will embarrass the government to no end and in all probability compel it to release him soon in view of his delicate health. Also, the Prime Minister cannot be sure that the state administration will be able quickly to control the wave of violence that his arrest is bound to unleash in Bihar and possibly in other states.
Past experience does not offer a clear guidance on this question. While the government is reasonably well equipped to deal with individual acts of terrorism like those committed by Naxalites in West Bengal and Andhra in 1970, it has seldom shown similar capacity for coping with violent mass movements. More often than not, it has yielded to violent agitations, beginning with the one for the division of the former Madras state in the early ‘fifties. Mrs Gandhi has doubtless got the better of the Telengana and Andhra agitations for division of the state. But who can be sure that the same approach will work in Bihar?
That, however, is only one aspect of the problem facing the Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi cannot but be concerned that Mr Narayan is attracting large crowds wherever he goes, that he is planning on his own testimony to give an all-India character to his movement and that the prospect, from his point of view, of success has improved rather than deteriorated with the passage of time despite the impasse in Patna.
The Prime Minister apparently decided to resist the pressure for the dissolution of the state legislature in Bihar quite some time ago probably on the ground that concession on her part would greatly increase Mr. Narayan’s self-confidence and popular appeal and pave the way for similar upheaval in other; states. It is immaterial to argue whether or not her assessment was accurate. Mr. Narayan has emerged as a leader who is challenging the existing system at the national level and Mrs. Gandhi cannot possibly wish to leave him free to spread the message of what he calls total revolution unless she has concluded that it is far more risky to arrest him.
Similarly, the time is past when the Prime Minister could have either pacified Mr. Narayan and his non-party supporters in the Sarvodaya movement or taken the wind out of their sails by eliminating from the Congress and the government both at the Centre and in Patna, men whose integrity is badly compromised in the public eye. In the given context, such a move on her part would widely be regarded as a sign of weakness and encourage those who are now ranged against the system presided over by her. It is an extremely difficult situation. But nothing is gained by trying to evade the harsh facts.
The situation need not have taken this ugly turn if the Prime Minister had used the authority that the victory over Pakistan in December 1971, and over opposition parties in the election to various state legislatures in March 1972, gave her to purge the government of incompetent and disreputable men and adopt coherent and viable economic policies. However, that, too, is an old story. All that needs to be said in that regard is that, as in the case of the NEFA debacle in 1962, more than an individual or a group, however powerful on a surface view, is to blame for it. The dominant section of the political elite is not development oriented and neither its socio-cultural background nor formal education has equipped it to cope with the unfamiliar tasks of promoting economic growth.
Be that as it may, the country today is faced with a challenge to the very integrity of the Indian state on the one hand, and the inability on the other, of the political system to reform itself from within and thereby strengthen its legitimacy as well as viability. Both these issues are interlinked and no useful purpose can be served by partisan attempts to discuss them separately.
Calumny
The opponents of Mr. Narayan have accused him of being a “neo-fascist reactionary” and a tool, consciously or unconsciously, of the CIA. All this is cheap calumny and evades the central issue. Which is that he is too much of a democrat to be cognisant of the requirements of the Indian state. This is what populism essentially means. In his case, it is neither an accident nor the result of a decision taken in full awareness of all the pros and cons that he has shunned power and responsibility that goes with it. As an Indian in the deepest and truest sense of the word, he is anti-state and anti-power.
The formulation is open to question. But while the Indian state is democratic in that its ministers and legislators are elected, it cannot survive if it is not able to rise above, indeed dominate, the countless divisions in Indian society.
In a sense all democratic states need to be independent to some extent of their societies in order to be able to function effectively and purposefully. But India is an exceptional case because no other democratic polity is based on a society which is so fragmented. It follows that any plan to subordinate the state to the community would lead to its disintegration. Even in Bihar the tragedy is not that the government is divorced from the people but that it mirrors their caste divisions and failings too well to be in a position to uphold any standards and serve them. By the same logic, the introduction of proportional representation would be fatal to the Indian state.
Also if the Indian state has to rise above the badly fragmented society in the interests of both, the presence of national parties like the Congress is an absolute necessity. They alone can mediate between the two and sustain the state. The concept of partyless democracy is therefore a dangerous one. However hallowed its ancestry – Mr. Narayan legitimately traces it to Gandhiji’s advice in 1947 to the Congress to dissolve itself as a political party and convert itself into a social service organisation – it is basically an anarchist doctrine.
J.P.’s Thinking
Mr. Narayan, of course, denies that the movement in Bihar has anything to do with the concept of partyless democracy and he is doubtless sincere in his protestation. But even a cursory examination of his programme can leave no room for doubt that his thinking is wholly dominated by this concept. The candidates for election to the legislature, if the present one is dissolved, are to be chosen by non-party committees; they are to canvass support on a programme laid down by these bodies and those so elected are not to revert to party loyalties and discipline. If this is not a programme of party-less democracy, what else is it? Whether it can work even within the confines of Bihar and under the personal direction of Mr. Narayan, is an altogether different proposition.
It does not follow that Mrs. Gandhi is justified in taking the opposite extreme view that “the doctrine of direct mass action is incompatible with the spirit of representative democracy”. This proposition has no basis in today’s turbulent conditions anywhere in the world. She would have been on firmer grounds if she had drawn a distinction between a movement which seeks to secure a change of policy on a specific issue as the case of the campaign in the United States against the war in Indochina, and an all-purpose one like Mr. Narayan’s, and then taken the stand that the latter is corrosive of the state.
The trouble is that however valid such a stand, it is not likely to have much of an impact on the people for the simple reason that the Indian system has not shown the capacity to reform itself from within and thereby eliminate the evils that power in a poor and backward country breeds. This would not have been the position if there exited an organisation strong enough to threaten the Congress party’s monopoly of power and compel it to respect ethical norms higher than those that prevail today. But such a party does not exist and is nowhere in sight, partly because the Congress enjoys enormous powers of patronage and powerful groups are ranged behind it. This situation must produce apathy on the one hand and a utopian movement on the other.
The Times of India, 6 November 1974