The forthcoming election in ten states and two Union territories may well turn out to be far more significant than was thought possible on April 18 when the Union home minister, Mr. Charan Singh, took the country by surprise and announced that he had “advised” the Congress chief ministers in nine northern states to recommend to the governors the dissolution of the vidhan sabhas. This is by no means yet a foregone conclusion. But the possibility cannot be excluded. Two developments are notable in this connection.
First, when the Union government announced its decision to order elections in the states concerned and pushed it through in the face of Mr. Jatti’s reluctance to sign the proclamation dissolving nine vidhan sabhas at one go, everyone took it for granted that the Janata party would have an easy walk-over in eight states and that its alliance with the CPM in West Bengal at the time of the poll to the Lok Sabha would hold. The second assumption has already been belied and the first might well be.
The Congress is still in disarray. It has yet to adjust itself to the loss of office and the power of patronage, and the ability to raise enormous sums of money that went with it. But it has not disintegrated. On the contrary, it has held itself together surprisingly well. The Janata party’s incapacity to absorb defectors from it at suitable levels may largely account for this. But the cause is less pertinent than the fact that the Congress has managed to survive, at least for the time being, the worst shock suffered by it in the post-independence period if not in its history.
Significant
It is far from dear how the party candidates hope to live down the infamies of the emergency when Mrs. Gandhi is still in command and the “caucus” stands not far behind her. But it is significant that there has been virtually no outcry against her in the Congress in the Hindi-speaking states and that she has stayed, if not prevented forever, the defection of leading Muslims from its ranks. They reversed their tentative decision to leave the party largely as a result of discussions with her.
It is clearly too early to infer either that the reaction against the emergency is beginning to die down or that the Muslim community is veering round to its old view favouring the Congress. Indeed, it is possible that most Congressmen in Hindi-speaking states remain out of touch with the popular mood and that the Muslim MPs and others, who have decided to stay put in the party, do not reflect the prevailing sentiment in the community. But these propositions should not and cannot be taken for granted.
Thus, it is possible, though not certain, that the Congress will do distinctly better next month than it did last March in terms of both the percentage of the votes it secures and the seats it wins. This possibility has certainly been advanced by the fact that most contests will be at least three-cornered and the possibility that the Janata leaders will be working against one another, specially in U.P. and Bihar. If that turns out to be the case for whatever reason, the Congress will remain a reckonable factor in the country’s political life.
Secondly, though at the time of the announcement of the elections most people believed that the Janata party’s newly merged constituents would fight hard to secure as many nominations for their adherents as possible, few anticipated that the struggle would be as bitter and unseemly as it has been. And certainly it was nobody’s contention or calculation that the central leadership itself would be as badly split as it has turned out to be.
The inability of the senior leaders to act as a tribunal of appeal rather than as contestants, and the absence of any verifiable guidelines for the selection of candidates, have inevitably deprived the Janata party of some of the halo that the struggle against Mrs. Gandhi’s authoritarian rule and success at the polls last March had given it. It will almost certainly still win a comfortable majority in eight of the ten states which go to the hustings next month, but its vote is likely to drop fairly substantially from the one it secured two months ago. And it is almost equally certain that the power struggle among its constituents will continue after the election is over.
Key Issue
If the Janata party fails to secure a majority in West Bengal, this by itself will raise problems which its leadership does not appear to be, indeed cannot be, prepared to face. It will not find it palatable to form a coalition with either the Congress or the CPM and it will have hell to pay if political uncertainty leads to flight of capital as it did in the late ’sixties. Similarly, if the party does not do reasonably well in Tamil Nadu, it will find it even more difficult than it does today to live down the charge of being a party of the Hindi-speaking states.
The outcome of the elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu apart, the key issue is whether or not the intense struggle witnessed among the Janata party’s constituents in the selection of its nominees for elections to the state legislatures will continue after the poll. If the assessment that it will is reasonably accurate, the country will have to live with factionalism in the ruling party the like of which it has never seen in the Congress. For, in the Congress there was always a final authority, though with some qualification during certain periods – Mr Nehru from 1950 to 1962, the so-called Syndicate headed by Mr. Kamaraj from 1964 to 1967, Mrs. Gandhi from 1969 onward – and the factions in the Congress, unlike the Janata party’s constituents, had never functioned as independent parties.
It is often not realised that apart from the CFD members, who broke from the Congress either on the eve or after the election to the Lok Sabha and men like Mr. Chandra Shekhar whom Mrs. Gandhi drove out of her party, the Janata party’s other constituents have for most of their existence been engaged as much in a struggle against the Congress as against each other. But that is an indisputable fact. They came together in 1971 not only because they recognised that they could not otherwise prevent Mrs. Gandhi from establishing one-person rule in the country as she had done in the Congress but also, indeed mainly, because they came to believe, erroneously as it turned out, that they had only to unite to defeat the Congress and thus frustrate her design. Defeat put an end to the alliance and in 1972 they fought the state elections as before on their own.
From this it does not necessarily follow that once the main enemy, Mrs. Gandhi, has been put out of the way and the Congress party’s monopoly of power ended, the old struggle among the Janata constituents is bound to be resumed. But there has to be some commonly shared and overriding passion and objective if they are to hold together in more than a formal sense, merge their former identities and overcome former loyalties to form new and larger loyalties. No such passion or objective is in evidence, not yet at any rate.
Mr. Charan Singh and his former BLD colleagues – Mr. Raj Narain, Mr. Biju Patnaik, Mr. Karpuri Thakur and Mr. Devi Lal, to name the more prominent among them – have been more aggressive in pressing their claims than the leaders of the other constituents and in the process enabled the latter to appear to be eminently reasonable men. But with the exception of Mr. Morarji Desai, almost all of them have thought and acted in terms of the interests of their groups. Mr. Chandra Shekhar has been another notable exception. But he has never belonged to any of the units which now constitute the Janata party.
Affirmative
The pertinent issue, however, is not whether one group or leader has been more unreasonable than the others but whether the decision to go to the polls in the states has imposed an additional and heavy strain on the Janata party’s facade of unity or whether the internal struggle is likely to continue after the poll is over. Surely the answer on both counts must be in the affirmative. And if on top of it all, the Congress recovers some of the lost ground, the political scene in the country will look quite different from what it did just two months ago.
To refer to these possibilities on the strength of well-advertised developments is not to denigrate in any way the men involved. More often than not victors after a political convulsion fall out – Stalin and Trotsky in the Soviet Union, Mr. Mao Tse-tung and Mr. Liu Shao-chi in China, Gen. Neguib and Col. Nasser in Egypt, Mr. Ben Bella and Col. Boumedienne in Algeria, to list only the best known examples. And in India’s case the split between Mr. Nehru and Sardar Patel, evident at the time of the election of Mr. Purshottam Das Tandon as the Congress president in 1950 and the exit of Acharya Kripalani and Mr. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai from the party, could have hardened if the Sardar had lived.
The inference to be drawn from all this is that the process of realignment initiated by the dislodgement of the Congress and Mrs. Gandhi is going to be a more prolonged and painful affair than most people had expected and wished for.
The Times of India, 24 May 1977