The Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee could not have taken a different stand without risking an immediate and serious split in its ranks. For while some of its leaders, including the state chief minister, Mr. Vasantrao Patil, favour co-operation with the Congress (I) if only to keep the coalition going and prevent the Janata from forming the government, some others, especially Mr. Y.B. Chavan, wish have nothing to do with Mrs. Gandhi. The compulsions of the situation are, in fact, so evident that it is difficult to understand why the MPCC leaders should have found it necessary to hold marathon meetings – the meeting of the executive lasted a whole night and of the PCC five hours – in order to devise the “unity without merger” formula. But be that as it may, the pertinent issue is whether this is a viable proposition. The answer must depend above all on the assessment whether or not Maharashtra is sufficiently a part of the national mainstream to be able to sustain a regional party which is all that the Congress can be in effective terms.
Even at the time of the split last January, it was clear to reasonably competent observers that in spite of its “arithmetic majority” the official Congress did not amount to much in the Hindi-speaking north. Since then events have confirmed this to be the case because its nominees have lost their deposits in every by-election that has been held in the north, the latest being in Karnal where its candidate secured merely 2,811 votes out of nearly four lakhs polled. And as for the south where the Congress was supposed to be better placed, the Vidhan Sabha elections in Andhra and Karnataka have shown that it is not much of a force there either. In Maharashtra alone – outside Vidarbha where the Congress (I) swept the poll and in Bombay where the Janata annexed all 34 seats in the recent Vidhan Sabha election – it is still a reckonable force. But can it stay that way? Much depends on the pull Mr. Y.B. Chavan continues to command with the Maharattas. This is the toughest test he has faced in his political career, in some ways tougher than before and during the emergency when Mrs. Gandhi tried to promote others in order to cut into his influence. In the personal sense it is comparable with the challenge Mr. Kamaraj faced in Tamil Nadu after the Congress split and the virtual disintegration of the Congress (O) in most other states in the early ‘seventies. Mr. Kamaraj was able to survive because he had dug himself in Tamil Nadu and the state, for good or ill, possesses a distinct personality of which DMK and AIADMK are two not very different expressions.
The issues of liberty versus authoritarianism (Mrs. Gandhi’s) and of norms in public life that Mr. Chavan is raising are doubtless highly relevant. But he and his supporters are sandwiched between two remorseless all-India forces – the Janata and the Congress (I) – which Mr. Kamaraj was not to the same extent because Mrs. Gandhi’s party was rather weak in Tamil Nadu and the DMK was a wholly parochial phenomenon. Whether Mr. Chavan likes it or not, he cannot fight for long on two fronts, as Mr. Patil has pointed out. He will have to give up one of the two fronts. The question is which one. Ironically enough, the answer depends more on Mrs. Gandhi than on him. The MPCC will cooperate with her party if she will let it.