For years no politician in India has changed his public image so dramatically as Mr Raj Narain in recent months. While he was a member of the Union Cabinet, he was widely treated like a joker in a bad Bombay movie and as Mr Charan Singh’s hatchet man. All that is now an old story. Mr Raj Narain has emerged as the leader of struggle against RSS and the former Jana Sangh constituent of the ruling party both within and outside of it.
In the Janata party, this honour should normally have gone to Mr Madhu Limaye who has been the most consistent and persistent critic of the Jana Sangh’s continuing association with the RSS and of the RSS itself. But it has not, because Mr Limaye lacks the political clout which Mr Raj Narain has demonstrated he possesses at least in UP.
The former union health minister could not have secured the exclusion of the erstwhile Jana Sangh from the state ministry headed by Mr Banarasi Das without the backing of Mr Charan Singh and the co-operation of two of the finance minister’s bitterest antagonists, Mr Jagjivan Ram and Mr HN Bahuguna. But in this case he has not acted merely as Mr Charan Singh’s cat’s paw. He has taken the initiative and kept up the pressure, leaving the latter no choice but to support him, even if he was not inclined to go the whole hog with him.
The finance minister has been nursing a grievance against the former Jana Sangh; he has convinced himself that its leaders let him down badly in his contest with the Prime Minister, Mr Morarji Desai, and he has been more than willing to co-operate with Mr Raj Narain in the effort to isolate it, to begin within UP, where he has the biggest following. Even so, the equation between them has changed to Mr Raj Narain’s advantage.
Also Opposed
Outside the Janata the honour of being the most effective and stoutest opponent of the RSS in a sense still belongs to Mrs Gandhi. But she has not been able to embarrass it in any worthwhile manner since she lost power in March 1977, so much so that even the disclosure regarding the letters its leader, Mr Deoras, wrote to her during the emergency praising her 20-point programme was not made by her. And it would not be unfair to say that last winter she was prepared to concede the leadership of the anti-RSS-Jana Sangh campaign to Mr Charan Singh. After all, through Mr Devraj Urs, she had offered prime ministership to him in case he was willing to quit the Janata party and the two together were able to bring down the Desai government.
Indeed, that is not the end of the story. Even after her strategy of wooing Mr Charan Singh had failed with his return to the Union Cabinet last February, Mrs Gandhi’s followers in the UP Vidhan Sabha came to the rescue of the Banarasi Das ministry when the Janata dissidents, including former Jana Sanghis, tried to embarrass it by blocking the introduction of supplementary grants. She has since ordered a reversal of this approach and clearly at her instance, Mr AR Antulay, one of the general secretaries of the Congress (I), has issued a statement saying that his party does not propose to make common cause with others in order to fight the RSS. The Congress (I) Working Committee has also decided to revive and strengthen the Youth Congress (I) on the plea that it is necessary to take this step in order to fight the RSS.
This has not helped and is not likely to help. For one thing, Mrs Gandhi has done all this after Mr Raj Narain has consolidated his position as leader of opposition to the RSS and the former Jana Sangh. For another, the process of Mrs Gandhi’s own political recovery has suffered a set-back following the collapse of the talk for reuniting the two Congress parties and the decision to revive the Youth Congress (I), a euphemism for the re-emergence of Mr Sanjay Gandhi in active politics.
Constraints
Mr Raj Narain has not, with or without Mr Charan Singh’s support, tried seriously to secure the exclusion of the erstwhile Jana Sanghis from the government in Bihar and Haryana where the former BLD men, Mr Karpoori Thakur and Mr Devi Lal, are chief ministers. Perhaps he is not in a position to undertake the effort if only because Mr Jagjivan Ram does not seem interested in a general crusade against the Jana Sangh. But whatever the constraints under which Mr Raj Narain has functioned and may need to continue to function, these cannot either detract from his success in UP or reassure the Jana Sangh leaders that their place in the Janata is secure.
There can be genuine differences of opinion on whether Mr Raj Narain’s opposition to the RSS and its offshoot, the former Jana Sangh, is ideological and therefore reasonably firm and durable; whether it is the result of his and Mr Charan Singh’s pique and would end in the event of a fresh deal between it and them; whether the RSS is a communal organisation in the sense of being actively hostile to the interests of the minorities as it doubtless was at the time of the partition and for many years afterwards; whether the old intimate connection survives between this volunteer organisation and the Jana Sanghis in the Janata; whether the latter take their orders from the former and function as a well-disciplined group in the ruling party; whether they are trying to seize the Janata, especially at the district and the state level; whether they are helping the RSS men infiltrate into the administration and so on.
Mr Jayaprakash Narayan, for instance, came to accept the bona fides of the RSS during his anti-Mrs Gandhi movement in 1974-75 when he relied heavily on it for mobilising support for his cause and he has not gone back to his previous characterisation of the RSS as a communal and fascist organisation. Similarly, the present Prime Minister takes a favourable view of it and the former Jana Sanghis. They are his strongest allies in the Janata party and the government. But even assuming that Mr Raj Narain deserves to be taken at his face value on all issues listed earlier, it is not easy to take the second step and accept that it is possible to weaken the RSS-Jana Sangh to the point where it ceases seriously to matter in the country’s political life. Objective conditions do not appear to favour such a development.
For those who regard the RSS-Jana Sangh as a threat not only to the communal harmony between the Hindus and the Muslims but also to democratic institutions on the ground that it is organised on the pattern of authoritarian parties and would seek to impose the same pattern on the country if it is able to infiltrate into the administration and defence services, even so limited a success as its exclusion from the UP government must be a matter of great relief. And they are not mistaken in feeling relieved. For, faced with an adverse situation in politics as in life, it is useful for one to be able to buy time. The Christian Democrats in Italy and the Gaullists and their allies in France have been doing precisely that for years vis-à-vis the communist parties in the two countries.
But basically, the position is unsatisfactory from the point of view of the opponents of the RSS-Jana Sangh. The resistance to its political culture and personality is not particularly strong among any section of the Janata. It just cannot be among those who stand for Hindi, as all constituents of the Janata do. This is, of course, a theoretical proposition. But facts confirm it. For, except a handful of individuals like Mr Limaye and Mr Krishna Kant, there is hardly a leader in the Janata who has not wanted to secure the support of the Jana Sangh and, indeed, to enter into a full-fledged alliance with it. And even in UP, the Jana Sanghis are far from isolated. They are in as good or as bad a company as their detractors and opponents. The Hindu personality in the Hindi heartland does not admit of sharp ideological differentiation, though it admits of anti-Muslim bias and even fanaticism.
No Sense
When viewed in this context, the talk of realignment of political forces cannot and does not make sense. As it happens, those who are thinking and talking of realignment, wish to isolate not only the RSS-Jana Sangh but also Mrs Gandhi and her party. Since they are blissfully unaware of the possibility that Mrs Gandhi’s appeal can greatly increase in the event of a poor monsoon leading to a sharp rise in prices and that neither she nor the RSS-Jana Sangh may forever spurn an electoral adjustment, they have no appreciation of the magnitude of the task they may be taking upon themselves. They are perhaps mesmerised by the arithmetic of votes in Parliament and various legislatures as it exists at present.
But this vague talk of political realignment fits into the new pattern of politics that has been shaping up under our eyes for years. Politics is beginning to take the shape of Hindu society — loose, unorganised, directionless and purposeless, unless the purpose is defined in highly personal terms. Such a state of affairs has not yet fully materialised. Many relics of the bygone Nehru era are still around and the language of politics remains fairly similar to the one we used in that era. But the drift in that direction is obvious. The resurgence of caste as a powerful political factor in UP, Bihar, Haryana and Maharashtra is one indisputable piece of evidence in support of this proposition. And it is the smaller one. The disintegration of the Congress and the absence of an effective all-India substitute are far more conclusive and worrying pieces of evidence that our political system is in disarray.
(To be continued)
The Times of India, 4 April 1979