While the Janata is essentially a product of the emergency and some of Mrs. Gandhi’s actions since President Zakir Hussain’s death in May 1969, leading first to a split in the Congress and then to a host of other developments, a common, though for long invisible, thread in the form of opposition to Mr. Nehru’s policies ran through most of the party’s constituents before they decided to merge earlier this year.
The Jana Sangh, it is hardly necessary to recall, offered the most comprehensive and trenchant criticism of Mr. Nehru. It equated his policy of secularism with appeasement of the Muslims and of Pakistan – it was specially critical of the manner in which he handled the Kashmir problem – and mistook his policy of socialism for bureaucratism and statism. It criticised his entire foreign policy on the ground that it tilted towards the Soviet bloc including, to begin with, China, and towards the Arabs at the cost not only of the West, Formosa and Israel, but also of India’s security interests. It opposed his development strategy on the plea that his priorities were all wrong and that licences and controls stifled private initiative, and therefore development, and created conditions in which corruption and nepotism flourished. It even questioned the desirability of the federal structure and favoured a unitary form of government.
Dr. Lohia
Of the other Janata party constituents, the Lohia socialists were the most vociferous in their criticism of the former prime minister. Unlike Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan, Mr. Achyut Patwardhan and Mr. Ashoka Mehta and some other socialist leaders, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia did not like Mr. Nehru even as a person. He thought the former prime minister was a phoney both as an individual and as a leader. Indeed, in the latter phase of his life Dr. Lohia drew fairly close to the Jana Sangh, specially on the question of replacing English by Hindi as the language of administration and of higher education. No wonder, the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the RSS, today hails him as a source of ideological inspiration for the Janata party – not on a par with Gandhiji but not too far below him.
Since the Swatantra party never acquired much influence in any part of the country, it is on the face of it not particularly relevant to recall that it, too, offered a general critique of Mr. Nehru’s policies. But that would be a mistake. The Swatantra’s criticism of Mr. Nehru’s emphasis on heavy and basic industry, and on the steady expansion of the public sector on the one hand and of the policy of regulating the working of the private sector, including trade, through licences and controls, on the other, had had a fairly wide appeal.
In fact, it will not be unfair to say that many Congress (O) leaders shared the Swatantra party’s views on these issues.
There were doubtless substantial differences between the Congress (O) and the Swatantra leaders. Unlike the latter, the former could not as a group be described as 19th century-style bourgeois liberal democrats. For while some of them like Mr. Ashoka Mehta had a socialist background, the others had been influenced by Gandhism and, like all Congressmen, by what may be called, though somewhat inaccurately, populism which, incidentally, provided a link between the Congress (O) and the socialist followers of Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan on the one hand and Mr. Charan Singh and his supporters, mostly belonging to middle peasantry, on the other. Even so, the importance of the Swatantra approach to the problems of economic growth in the Janata party should not be under-estimated.
Mr Nehru was, of course, too decent an individual to rub men like Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Narendra Dev and other former colleagues the wrong way. And the policies he pursued often disarmed his opponents. For instance, the Jana Sangh criticism was inevitably blunted to some extent after the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953 and New Delhi’s refusal to accept any proposal for mediation or arbitration on the Kashmir issue. Similarly, if some of the big business houses in Bombay tended to be critical of Mr. Nehru’s policies and to support the Swatantra party, which they had helped set up, the business community as a whole had benefited sufficiently by his government’s policies to be willing voluntarily to finance the Congress. In other words, the objective conditions did not favour the rise of a united front against Mr Nehru during his life-time.
Mrs. Gandhi changed the rule of the game dramatically in 1969 and thus helped promote a united front against her at the time of the elections to the Lok Sabha in 1971. But it is wrong to put the blame for recent developments entirely on her. In fact things had started going wrong way back in 1962, when the armed conflict with China had forced Mr. Nehru to divert substantial resources from economic development to defence. The trend has not been reversed since.
Dependence
The war with Pakistan in 1965 and the widespread drought in 1966 aggravated the inflationary pressures and created acute shortage of essential commodities, exposed the country’s dependence on the United States for averting a massive famine and weakened the pull of the Congress with the electorate, with the result that in the general election of 1967 the party lost its majority in all northern states from Himachal Pradesh to West Bengal.
Be that as it may, can the anti-Nehru bias of most of the constituents of the Janata survive now that as the country’s new rulers they are required to tackle practical problems? And can this bias keep them united?
In some fields the answer to the first question is a loud and clear “No”. After a great deal of talk of “genuine non-alignment”, which would correct the alleged pro-Soviet and pro-communist tilt in the country’s foreign policy, Mr. Morarji Desai has clearly come to recognise that India needs Soviet friendship and that it has nothing to gain by diluting it. And Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee has been quick to emphasise India’s support to the Arabs on the question of Israel’s withdrawal from their territories and to recognise that Tibet is a part of China. And all this when Pakistan has ceased to be the threat it was perceived to be in Mr. Nehru’s life-time.
Similarly, there is hardly one influential Janata leader who would wish to deviate from the present federal structure either in the direction of a unitary form of government, as favoured by the Jana Sangh in the past, or towards far greater autonomy for the states and subordinate bodies like the district boards, as advocated by the Gandhians. The erstwhile Jana Sangh leaders’ position on the question of “Hindu Rashtra” is somewhat equivocal. But they are second to none in assuring full protection and equal rights for the minorities which is precisely what Mr Nehru meant by secularism.
Priorities
The impression prevails that the Janata leadership is determined to charge the priorities of economic development. But it remains to be seen whether they will be able to do so. For one thing, they are far from united on the relevant issues. Mr. Jagjivan Ram, Mr. Chandra Shekhar and Mr. Mohan Dharia, for instance, favour extension of the public distribution system, while Mr. Charan Singh is, or at least was until recently, opposed to it. Mr. George Fernandes, Mr. Biju Patnaik and Mr. H.M. Patel, among others, wish to encourage the corporate sector, while Mr. Charan Singh and some others favour the growth of small units located in the countryside.
Since heavy industry is not an important issue right now because the country is not able to use even the existing capacities in steel and engineering, the Janata leaders can be said to be agreed mainly, if not only, on the question of the desirability of extending the irrigation facilities more quickly than in the past. But that cannot be said to represent a major change in priorities, and it is open to question whether the necessary additional resources can be found without creating serious imbalances in the economy which the country can ill-afford despite the cushion in the shape of the foreign exchange and food reserves.
Thus the answer to the second question, too, has to be in the negative. An anti-Nehru bias cannot provide the basis for unity in the Janata because a consensus cannot be built on it even in the party, not to speak of the country.
The Times of India, 14 November 1977