While it has once again become a commonplace to speak of Mrs. Gandhi’s mass appeal, indeed charisma, neither her admirers nor her foes have sought to account for it. Most of them have discussed her popularity and personality outside the context of political developments in the country.
By any yardstick, Mrs. Gandhi is one of the most skilful political figures around anywhere in the world. Largely on the strength of her personality she revived the fortunes of the Congress party in 1969 and won for it landslide victories at the polls to the Lok Sabha in 1971 and state legislatures in 1972. As Prime Minister, she presided over the break-up of Pakistan and the emergence of the new sovereign state of Bangladesh, something the like of which no other statesman has been able to achieve in the post-war period, the merger of Sikkim into the Indian Union and the first nuclear test by any country, other than the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
But however remarkable these achievements, there is not much appreciation for them even among those who throng to her meetings and wish to put her back into power. Foreign policy achievements are as a rule popular among the intelligentsia which in this case has been largely critical of her on account of her allegedly amoral approach to politics and lack of respect for the norms of a democratic polity.
More recently, Mrs. Gandhi has benefited a great deal from the internal squabbles in the Janata and the Desai government’s lacklustre performance in various fields. But she was well on the way to recovery by the autumn of 1977, that is, long before the tension between Mr. Morarji Desai and Mr. Charan Singh became acute and public. She had also won the elections to the State vidhan sabhas in Andhra and Karnataka in February 1978, that is, months before Mr. Singh was dismissed from the Union Cabinet in June that year. And whatever some of us may have thought of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s handling of our foreign relations and the government’s economic policies with its emphasis on liberalisation of imports and relaxation of controls on industry, there can be little doubt that both have enjoyed a considerable measure of support in the country. The prices also remained reasonably stable in the first two years of the Janata rule when the country reaped record crops.
Doubtful
This is not to suggest that Mrs. Gandhi’s progress would have been as smooth as it has been if the Janata leadership had displayed greater skill in managing the party’s internal affairs and if Mr. Charan Singh had not finally brought down the Desai Cabinet with the help of the Congress (I) and put himself in an impossible position by forming a government which depended on her for its survival. But while the Janata party could have continued in office up to March 1982 as a result of better management, it is doubtful that it could have checked the rise in Mrs. Gandhi’s popular appeal. There is a connection between the Janata leadership’s ineptness and her re-emergence as the single most powerful political figure in the country. But it is not as direct as it has generally been taken to be.
Before the beginning of the process of her recovery in the autumn of 1977, it was, on the face of it, not unreasonable to argue that initially Mrs. Gandhi owed her popularity to the adoption of radical rhetoric and the nationalisation by her of 14 major banks in 1969. But since her exit from office in March 1977, she has not indulged in populist demagogy. On the contrary, she has now revived the 20-point programme of the emergency period as if to emphasise that she intends to pursue a non-adventurist, conservative approach in the economic field. Also, while the CPI acted as her propaganda agent from 1969 to 1976, it has by and large been critical of her since her defeat in March 1977.
Mrs. Gandhi’s popularity dates back to the summer of 1969 when she displayed considerable ruthlessness in splitting the Congress and preventing the party nominee, Mr. Sanjiva Reddy’s, election as the Head of State. As such it has been taken for granted by a number of people that she owes her popular appeal to the courage and determination which she displayed then and has displayed more than once since. Perhaps she herself feels that way and that may be one of the reasons why she has been so reluctant to apologise for the excesses of the emergency period. For that would have shown her to be a weak character.
Untenable
But rightly or wrongly, most people have held Mr. Sanjay Gandhi and not Mrs. Gandhi to be responsible for the slum clearance and family planning drives and the conservative reorientation of economic policies, including the denial of compulsory bonus to workers and the curtailment of other trade union rights. And no one can possibly say that he does not continue to suffer in popular esteem on that account. Similarly, it will be untenable to suggest that Sardar Patel, known for his ruthlessness, ever commanded a larger following among the people than Mr. Nehru who was anything but ruthless. The suggestion is not that ruthlessness and courage do not pay in terms of popular appeal but that these qualities do not make one a charismatic figure on the national scene.
Westernised and Marxist intellectuals have often argued that the religiously inclined people of India look for a saviour, that Gandhiji and Mr. Nehru owed their hold on the masses to this yearning and that Mrs. Gandhi, too, is a beneficiary of it. But this is not a fully tenable proposition. Gandhiji’s piety helped him to be regarded as a Mahatma. But he did not become a cult figure. At the height of his own and his party’s popularity, Mr. Nehru did not command more than 45 per cent of the votes polled and more than one-third of the electorate did not exercise its franchise in any election in his life-time. Surely, this is not good enough ground to conclude that the Indian people looked upon him as a saviour. The same applies to Mrs. Gandhi. Unlike her father, she goes through religious rituals. But she acts like a believer and a devotee, not as a god-woman. If anyone has been entitled to the saviour role in recent years, it has been Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan and not Mrs. Gandhi. He has spoken in the Mahatma’s language and name.
As I see it, there is a connection between the decline of the Congress as expressed in the party’s defeat in the elections to various state legislatures in 1967 and the emergence of Mrs. Gandhi as a charismatic figure. And there is, in my opinion, also a connection between the politicisation of hitherto inert sections of the Indian society and the decline of the Congress. The two together help to explain the Indira phenomenon.
It is easy enough to controvert this view. It can, for example, be argued that the Congress lost the election to state legislatures in the whole of north India in 1967 because of the rise in prices resulting from the sharp increase in defence expenditure in the wake of the Chinese attack in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965, the widespread drought in 1965 and 1966 and the drastic devaluation of the rupee in 1966. Similarly, it can be said that Mrs. Gandhi could have faded away along with the Congress party if she had not displayed the capacity for dramatic and ruthless moves in 1969.
There is considerable merit in both these propositions. In fact, I do not need to dispute the second one at all. For, it is not my case that the rise of a charismatic figure was inevitable in the context of the decline of the Congress or that Mrs. Gandhi would have been that individual even if she had not possessed the qualities in question. But I hold that the power Mrs. Gandhi has exercised over her party has been qualitatively different from Mr. Nehru’s, that this has had at least as much to do with the fact of the organisation’s decline as with her personality, and that together these two factors account a great deal for her popular appeal. It would, of course, have been a different story if some other organisation had moved into the place vacated by the Congress. But there has been no such organisation.
Snag
This should help clinch the second issue. For if the decline of the Congress in 1967 was solely or even mainly the result of specific circumstances, other organisations would have stepped into the vacuum. None has.
There is a snag in this assessment. While it is easy enough to contend that as more and more and larger and larger sections of society became politicised and assertive, the Congress could not accommodate all of them under its umbrella and mediate their rival claims and interests, it is difficult to find out why other groups have not tried to set up properly organised mass parties – the CPM, the CPI and the RSS-Jana Sangh are different by virtue of being cadre-based and have instead sought a place for themselves in the power structure through ramshackle organisations centred on individuals, the most prominent of them being Mr. Charan Singh. Perhaps this has something to do with the fragmented nature of Hindu society or with the Hindu personality, if we can invoke such a general concept in respect of so heterogeneous a society as the Hindus. Perhaps the Congress was essentially a product of the Raj and cannot be replicated in the different circumstances of today. We do not quite know. But we do know that we have entered the era of mass politics of which Mrs. Gandhi is one expression. And we know from the experience of other societies that while it is possible, it is not easy to reconcile the claims of liberal parliamentary democracy with the pulls, pressures and compulsions of mass politics.
The Times of India, 3 October 1979