Whether the Lok Dal-Congress (U) alliance will survive is anybody’s guess. For all we know it may, because it is not inconceivable that Mr. Charan Singh may agree to drop his public criticism of Mr. Nehru and Mr. Devraj Urs to come off his hobby horse of “uniting” all Congressmen, especially now that he has been rebuffed by Mr. Jagjivan Ram and Mr. HN Bahuguna. The two parties also need each other in North India, the Lok Dal to meet the charge that it is little more than an alliance of certain castes and the Congress (U) to compensate to some extent for the loss of much of the party’s traditional support base to Mrs. Gandhi. But it is now clear beyond doubt that the alliance partners have nothing in common except perhaps the desire to avoid a total rout at the forthcoming poll to the Lok Sabha. Mr. Charan Singh and his Lok Dal colleagues belong to a political culture which is very different from the one on which Mr. Nehru brought up the Congress. The caretaker Prime Minister has denied more than once that he is anti-industry, anti-urban, anti-public sector, anti-labour, anti-Harijan, anti-Urdu, and so on. But his prejudices stand out like a sore thumb and he is neither interested in nor capable of disguising his passionately held views which are wholly at odds with Mr. Nehru’s broad approach by which the Congress (U) swears. Also, Mr. Charan Singh has a very high opinion of himself and his popularity. The first makes him unduly self-righteous and the second too unaccommodating to those who want to do business with him on the basis of something like equality. Thus even if the Congress (U) leadership chooses to ignore the ideological differences, it can, indeed it is almost certain to, run into difficulties with him over the allotment of seats, particularly in UP and Bihar. The Congress (U) faces another genuine problem. In Maharashtra and Karnataka, where alone the party matters in a meaningful sense of the term, it needs an arrangement with the Janata if it is to meet Mrs. Gandhi’s challenge. As such it cannot allow Mr. Charan Singh the right of veto in these two states. The collapse of the alliance cannot, therefore, be ruled out.
It is pointless to apportion blame for the strains in the alliance. From the very start it was a marriage between two wholly incompatible partners and it was bound to go the rocks. Despite the incompatibility, both had, however, good reasons to make the deal. For, if Mr. Charan Singh was so consumed by the passion to become prime minister as to be willing to enter into an alliance with the devil himself – communists are nothing short of that for him – Mr. YB Chavan and many of his party colleagues had convinced themselves that access to power alone could enable them to contain and beat Mrs. Gandhi. But it must be said that the Congress (U) leadership has made two blunders for which it is paying a high price and will perhaps pay a heavier one in weeks and months to come. First, it showed remarkable ineptitude in July in concluding that Mrs. Gandhi will keep in office a government which included men who were positively hostile to her to the point of wishing to send her to jail on criminal charges. It stuck to this absurdly erroneous view even after Mr. CM Stephen had made it quite clear that the Congress (I) would not support the new coalition. Secondly, when the Charan Singh government faced certain defeat in the Lok Sabha, it opted for a mid-term poll, though it should have known that it would be badly mauled. Its explanation has been that it could not have made common cause with a Janata party of which the former Jana Sangh is still an important constituent. But that only exposes its naivety. Surely, Mr. Chavan and Mr. Swaran Singh cannot claim to be more secular than Mr. Jagjivan Ram, Mr. Chandra Shekhar and the Socialists who have stayed in the Janata. And how is Mr. Charan Singh’s and Mr. Raj Narain’s social outlook more liberal than Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s? with the Congress (U) support, Mr. Jagjivan Ram could have given the country a stable and a reasonably efficient government and saved that party from the perils which it now faces.
The Times of India, 27 October 1979