Since the Congress party has hurt itself badly in recent years, specially during the emergency, the process of recovery is at best likely to be slow and involve a setback now and then. But the four-day session of its working committee, the resignation of Mr Borooah and the expulsion of the former defence minister, Mr. Bansi Lal, from the organisation, show that its leaders are trying to tackle the tasks confronting them with tact.
In the wake of their rout in north India and the loss of office at the centre after thirty years, the Congress leaders have of necessity to pursue two apparently contradictory objectives at the same time. They have, on the one hand, to push into the background those who hopelessly compromised themselves during the emergency and to restore inner-party democracy after eight years of one-person rule and, on the other, avoid a major split. They will, therefore, have to temporise and plan their strategy as they go along.
Indeed, this make-shift approach was dominant at the last meeting of the working committee. Thus while the committee took the harshest action open to it against Mr. Bansi Lal, it only reprimanded Mr. V.C. Shukla, who was equally responsible for the excesses of the emergency. And it let Mr. Om Mehta escape without even a stricture, though he was the de facto home minister during the emergency and therefore directly responsible for the imprisonment of thousands of innocent people and the torture of prisoners.
Abdication
Similarly, while the committee rightly accepted Mr. Borooah’s resignation as the party chief, essentially because he had failed to assert the rights of his office, it did not as much as hint that Mr. Brahmananda Reddy and Mr. Karan Singh, too, could not shirk the charge of abdication of responsibility as ministers of home affairs and family planning. Indeed, it chose as interim president a man who compromised himself by virtue of his active association with the 42nd amendment and did so without any compulsion since he had been thrown out of the cabinet much earlier. Above all, it avoided action against Mr. Sanjay Gandhi, the most important architect of the party’s misfortune, on the unconvincing plea that he had already resigned from the AICC and that he had never enrolled himself as an active member of the organisation. It conveniently ignored the fact that only last February it expelled Mr. Jagjivan Ram, Mr. H.N. Bahuguna and Mrs. Nandini Satpathy after they had resigned from the party.
In a sense, this contradictory and in fact unprincipled behaviour on the part on the Congress working committee was unavoidable in view of its own composition. After all, most of its members had acquiesced first in Mrs. Gandhi’s personal dominance, then in the Emergency which could never be justified in terms of the law and order situation in the country, and finally in the emergence of Mr. Sanjay Gandhi as the second most powerful person in the land and the caucus around him.
But, surprising though it may seem, by quickly and decisively moving into the vacuum created by Mrs. Gandhi’s own defeat and the party’s debacle under her leadership, they have perhaps served the best interest of the organisation. They have certainly avoided, at least for the time being, a struggle for control over it between the group loyal to the former prime minister and members of the former Forum for Socialist Action, who are now trying to regroup themselves in the name of “Congressmen for Socialist Unity”, which could have led to a split even more serious than the one in 1969.
Inevitable
This is not a hypothetical proposition. Those who called for the resignation of Mr. Borooah long before Mrs. Gandhi accepted “full responsibility” for the party’s defeat as “head of the government” and an early session of the AICC to elect a new president and working committee, were acting as Mrs. Gandhi’s storm troopers. They wanted to instal as party chief someone – their first choice appeared to have been Mr. Brahmananda Reddy – who would be wholly amenable to her. And inevitably this had provoked a strong reaction on the part of members of the dissolved Forum for Socialist Action who retaliated by demanding that Mrs. Gandhi must publicly disown the caucus and that the caucus be removed from the organisation. Thus the struggle had been joined when the working committee met.
It is difficult to say whether or not those who called for and insisted on a frank discussion on the causes of the party’s debacle, had calculated that this was the most effective and civilised method of breaking Mrs. Gandhi’s spell on the organisation. But whatever the calculations and compulsions behind this seemingly futile exercise of trying to discover the obvious – no one could possibly be in doubt about the causes of the Congress debacle – the result is there for anyone to see. Mrs. Gandhi’s grip on the organisation has been greatly loosened.
This is a development the importance of which cannot be over-emphasised. Two obviously contradictory points deserve to be noted in this connection. First, even if the government had not ordered an inquiry into Maruti’s affairs, it would have been necessary for the Congress to dissociate itself from Mrs. Gandhi in order to win back the intelligentsia and other sections of society alienated by the emergency and the excesses under it. The fact of the inquiry makes that imperative even if only ten per cent of the allegations are accurate. Secondly, even after the party’s d debacle and Mrs, Gandhi’s own defeat in Rae Bareli it appeared that so dependent were many Congressmen on the mother figure that they would cling to her all the more desperately in this period of crisis for themselves and their party. The measure of support for the move to requisition an early meeting of the AICC at her instance lent support to this view.
Thus, before the working committee meeting, it seemed that either the Congress would go down with Mrs. Gandhi or tear itself apart in the effort to delink its future from hers. Both these threats have been visibly reduced as a result of its deliberations and actions.
It is immaterial whether the members of the working committee have opted for the proverbial safe middle path deliberately or instinctively. The pertinent point is that by maintaining publicly the myth that Mrs. Gandhi is not wholly responsible for the actions of her son and the caucus, by making an example of his oldest accomplice, Mr. Bansi Lal, and by turning down her nominee as the party’s interim president, they have weakened her position without attracting the charge of suddenly turning their backs on her. Mrs. Gandhi, it may be recalled, had said more than once publicly, that attacks on Mr. Bansi Lal were attacks on her.
All this is not to say that the Congress party is well set on the road to recovery, but that it has a reasonable chance to overcome the trauma of defeat provided, of course, it gets used to a new style of leadership and its leaders to functioning without the help of the state machinery.
Leadership
The first qualification is intended to emphasise that since the Congress has been used to being dominated by one person at the centre, except for a brief period between the decline in Mr. Nehru’s power in 1962 and the party split in 1969, it may not find it easy to function effectively under what Mr. Swaran Singh has called a collective leadership. Members of such a leadership are by definition not charismatic figures and cannot whip up emotions like Mrs. Gandhi could do in 1969 and in 1971. Indeed, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the Congress may look for a demagogue to head it if it does not fare reasonably well in the elections to the state legislatures whenever they are held.
The import of the second proviso is self-evident. The Congress leaders have been so dependent on the power of patronage and of raising money which office gave them that they may find it difficult, if not impossible, to function effectively as an opposition. The transition is obviously a painful one. It can also be quite demoralising for people who have forgotten the art of managing without enormous sums of money and the state machinery. The defection of some of such persons will not hurt the organisation. On the contrary, it can benefit from such departures. But what about those who stay on? The rot has gone quite far. It is not going to be easy to arrest it.
The Times of India, 20 April 1977