Mrs. Gandhi has suffered a blow in Andhra and Karnataka. It was her election, not of the fiction called the Congress with or without the bracket with ‘I’ in it. And she has lost it convincingly.
This makes it tempting for her detractors, who are legion among the articulate sections of the community, to conclude that the old warrior is finally on the way out. Indeed, so heavy has been the blow that even her supporters must find it difficult to believe that she will recover from it. They may continue to pretend that it is business as usual and profess undying loyalty to her. But most of them will do so without conviction unless of course…
But it will be wrong to rush to any conclusion at this stage. I say so not because I have generally supported Mrs. Gandhi in the absence of a viable alternative, or because I still find no alternative to her on India’s political horizon, or because 1 am so scared by instability and lack of authority in New Delhi that I do not wish to face the reality. I say so on the basis of a cold analysis of developments in the past 15 years. This judgment, based on experience, may turn out to be wrong, but it should not be disregarded in advance.
I do not wish to join issue with those who argue that the results to the two southern states would not have been very different from what they are even if Mr. NT Rama Rao had not given up the cinema screen in favour of the political theatre. It is not necessary for me to challenge this proposition. In fact, it strengthens my appreciation of the Indian political scene as it has moved back and forth since 1967.
As I see it, the Indian voter has since 1967 tended to swing from one pole to the other in his search for a moral order and a political order, it will be ridiculous to call him immature or irresponsible. He has been neither. He has had good reasons to swing. For his twin aspirations have not been fulfilled under any regime. He has wanted both a moral order and a political order and he has been convinced that the one is meaningless without the other.
Punishment For Graft
In 1967, he was fed up with the Congress in view of shortages and rapidly rising prices. He was aware of the widespread drought in 1965 and 1966 which accounted for his immediate problems. But apparently he wanted to punish the rulers. Perhaps like his forefathers, he unconsciously believed that they had brought the drought on him by their sins. Many of the rulers appeared to him to be corrupt.
It speaks of the speed and the extent to which the moral rot has spread that the discards of yesteryear appear to many of us today as paragons of virtue. But it is good to remember that the country was as if electrified by hope when Mrs. Gandhi took on the organizational bosses, derisively called the syndicate (an expression from the mafia underworld) and routed them. In the public eye, they stood for all that was wrong in the system. This was, of course, an unjust judgement. The “syndicate” leaders were not the architects of the regime of controls and licenses which had led to corruption and abuse of authority on a so far unprecedented scale. But the people were not concerned with such fine details. Indeed, they distrusted the organizational bosses precisely because they favoured the private sector and had maintained close contacts with business houses.
In 1971, the voter gave Mrs. Gandhi a landslide victory. He believed in her and her promise to abolish poverty. He accepted the bona fides of Nehru’s daughter. He was impressed by the ruthlessness she had displayed in her fight against her opponents inside the Congress party. And he wanted to give her the necessary strength by way of a substantial majority in the Lok Sabha so that she could redeem her pledge.
But the current jargon of a “negative vote” applied in 1971 as well. For it was also a vote against the organizational bosses – Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, Atulya Ghosh, SK Patil and so on – and the opposition parties. The voter was angry with the opposition parties because he had given them an opportunity in 1967 (when they were not even expecting it) to prove themselves, and they had failed him and themselves. What an inept and quarrelsome lot they had turned out to be!
Use Of Governors
Mrs. Gandhi had taken advantage of the lack of cohesion and effective leadership among the opposition to arrange defections and bring down SVD governments in one state after another. She had managed to dispose of them by 1969 when she took on the syndicate (or was she forced to do so by their manoeuvres to contain her and possibly even remove her from the office of Prime Minister?). She used the Centre-appointed governors in the states also to attain her objective. But the voter blamed the opposition parties for falling a prey to her so easily, and not her for exploiting their internal troubles. On the contrary, the demonstration of determination on her part impressed him.
Here we might go, even if briefly, into the psychology of the Indian people. Strength impresses them provided they are convinced that it is being used for the larger social good. Once they are so assured, they are not particularly finicky about the means. They do not like it if someone tampers with the Constitution, as Mrs. Gandhi did between 1967 and 1969 in respect of Governors, as indicated above. But just as they were prepared in the past to allow the saint to ignore the caste arrangements and rules, they are willing to let the ruler bend the Constitution so long as his or her purpose is not suspect. Mrs. Gandhi’s was not in 1971 or earlier in 1969 when she used rather unorthodox methods to beat the syndicate.
What offends them most is corruption in the rulers. It offends their moral sense which is very deep-rooted. It violates their centuries-old ideal of good rulers. And in 1971, the bad men, in the eyes of the people, were members of the “syndicate”, with the exception of Mr Kamaraj. But they regarded him as a good man (a friend of the poor) who had unfortunately fallen among “thieves”. The “syndicate” bosses had collected money, even if for the party. They had maintained contacts with business houses, even if mostly in the interest of the party. They had distributed largesse and favoured their supporters. And, of course, “the syndicate” consisted mostly of those who did not agree with Nehru’s “socialist” policies.
Almost all commentators have ascribed Mrs Gandhi’s victory in 1971 to her populism – the nationalization of leading commercial banks and the promise to banish poverty. She herself may have regarded this to be the case. But there was the deeper truth, which is generally not fully grasped. In 1971, she stood for the Right (dharma) and her opponents for evil (adharma) in the eyes of the people – a point she would have done well to recognise subsequently. Ideologically, socialism fits into the moral universe because it stands for putting an end to exploitation and for promoting the well-being of the poor.
The people cast Mrs. Gandhi in several roles – Draupadi sought to be derobed by wicked men, a just Queen (daughter of an emperor, Jawaharlal Nehru, and grand-daughter by adoption of the great Mahatma himself) beleaguered by former imperial courtiers and others from outside the gate, and Jhansi-ki-Rani willing to die in a just cause. She had not quite become Mahisasurmardini, Durga who slayed the buffalo-headed demon. But she had come fairly close to being regarded as one.
I am not quite sure whether she acquired that status with the military triumph over Pakistan in December 1971, though Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee so described her. But Durga or no Durga, once fully installed (the 1971 poll being like a coronation), Mrs. Gandhi was expected to act like a just and strong ruler and not spawn a corrupt and/or inefficient progeny in the shape of ministers. She failed to live up to these expectations. Instead of banishing into the outer darkness characters like LN Mishra and Bansilal, she, in a manner of speaking, embraced them.
Violation Of Codes
She violated two other codes when she allowed her son, Sanjay Gandhi, to get into the automobile business and do so principally on the strength of state patronage which was available to him by virtue of her being Prime Minister. More accurately, she had only acquiesced in Sanjay’s activities. For Sanjay was too wilful a young man to be easily controlled. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that she tried to dissuade him from pursuing the Maruti project but failed. This was, however, not publicly known. Even otherwise, the people would hold her responsible for this breach of the other code – the use of official machinery for private gains.
The issue was not whether it was intrinsically wrong for the ruler’s son to go into business and/or whether the kind of patronage available to him was not in fact available to many others with political clout and/or money. The issue was whether Sanjay Gandhi’s activities conformed to the people’s stereotype of the Prime Minister’s son or they violated it. Without doubt, they violated it. Members of the ruling order were not supposed to hanker after money. Two traditions – the Kshatriya and the Brahmin – met in Nehru just as they had met in Emperor Ashoka and Janak, Sita’s father in the Ramayana. Nehru’s daughter and grandchildren were expected to be loyal to this synthesis of Brahminical and Kshatriya tradition. So it was bad enough that Sanjay took to big business; it was worse that he used state machinery; and it was an unmitigated disaster for Mrs Gandhi that he failed to make the car. The violation of the code is all the more reprehensible if it does not produce material success as well. Crime without profit is unforgivable.
(To be concluded)
The Times of India, 12 January 1983