When I wrote last week about some of the implications of Mrs Gandhi’s invitation to Mr AR Antulay to attend a meeting of the Congress (I) working committee on the eve of the recent AICC session in Bombay, it had not occurred to me that he would either initiate a move, or join with others in a move, to topple the chief minister, Mr Vasantdada Patil. But I am not surprised. Mr Antulay is that kind of individual – impatient, daring and scheming. All he needed to be able to return to his old tricks was some evidence that Mrs Gandhi had once again begun to smile on him. The invitation and the request that he second the resolution on the communal situation at the AICC session provided that evidence.
Mr Patil is, of course, not known for tact. He is a plain spoken man. Indeed, he tends to be rash at least in private talk if he has been hurt. This tendency has apparently been reinforced by his physical condition. Thus he has made little effort to hide his unhappiness over the choice by the party high command of the Congress (I) nominee for a forthcoming by-election to the state vidhan sabha; he feels that the individual in question is a weak candidate and can be defeated. This may or may not be the case. The point is that in today’s conditions a more tactful person in his position would have pretended to be enthusiastic over the leadership’s choice once it had been made. By not doing so, Mr Patil has given a handle to his opponents.
Opponents Numerous
The opponents too are legion. This has little to do with Mr Patil’s performance, or reputation, or behaviour as chief minister. It is an expression of the state of the Congress (I) in Maharashtra as in most other states. It is a motley crowd with any number of aspirants for every office of profit, especially for the office of chief minister. Even those who have never successfully contested an election, or been found utterly wanting for the job and therefore turned down or turned out earlier, too are once again in the race. Yet it is open to question whether the move to unseat Mr Patil would have gathered so much strength so suddenly in case Mr Antulay had not felt encouraged by the apparent softening in Mrs Gandhi’s and possibly Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s attitude towards him. The former chief minister is by far the cleverest among the anti-Patil league. Many of them are in awe of him. He can manipulate them without much effort. Their weaknesses and overweening ambition make them so vulnerable and pliable.
Mr Patil’s opponents are spreading the impression, fairly successfully it would appear, that Mrs Gandhi is distrustful of him. She is said to be afraid that he and Mr YB Chavan might make common cause with Mr Sharad Pawar, the Congress (S) chief, and let her down at the time of the election to the Lok Sabha whenever it is held. Only she can say whether or not there is any truth in this contention. On the face of it, it does not make much sense. For there cannot be much love lost between Mr Patil and Mr Pawar; the latter brought down a ministry headed by the former in 1978. In fact even the relations between Mr Chavan and Mr Pawar might be ambivalent: after all, the latter went his own way when the former decided to return to Mrs Gandhi’s fold in 1980.
But, as the saying goes, there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics. Yesterday’s friends can be today’s foes and tomorrow’s allies. Anything is possible in politics. This proposition, however, leads to two inferences, not just one as is widely assumed. While Mrs Gandhi has to be wary lest she is let down at some critical moment, she cannot afford to be guided by the past which incidentally also provides two lessons, not just one. Flatterers have let her down in the past as often as those who were known to dislike her style of functioning and the story can repeat itself. In the specific case of Maharashtra, the balance of advantage for her clearly lies in sticking to Mr Patil.
The case for this view should be obvious to anyone who has followed developments in the state since 1980 when the Congress (I) returned to power. Both the party and the administration had become subjects of ridicule before Mr Patil was appointed chief minister earlier this year. Mr Antulay’s wrong-doings are well known and need not be retold. So are Mr Babasaheb Bhosale’s ineptness for the office despite his honesty and its consequences, especially for the prestige of the Congress (I). And there is no one, literally no one, in the present Congress (I) legislature party who can replace Mr Patil without exposing it to the kind of risks which finally overwhelmed it in Andhra. Mrs Gandhi should know, if she does not yet, that the margin of safety in Maharashtra is pretty thin. Mr Pawar may not be another NTR. He is not so charismatic a figure. But he is well thought of as an administrator, the bureaucrats almost adore him, he is the tallest Maratha leader outside the Congress (I): he is good at getting along with other parties: and he is a competent organizer. The Congress (I) cannot afford to underestimate him.
Thus from whatever angle one looks at the scene in Maharashtra, one cannot help coming to the conclusion that the Congress (I) leadership will be ill-advised, from its own point of view, to destabilize the state government. Mercifully for it, some members of the hastily patched-up anti-Patil combination are pretending that the get-together at Mr Bhosale’s residence last week was intended merely to felicitate Mr Kamble on his appointment as PCC (I) chief. This is a blatant lie since Mr Kamble was named to that office in August. But it is a useful lie – for the party’s central leadership. It can accept the pretence at its face value. All that it has to do then to prevent uncertainty in the state is to tell Mr Antulay that once again he is being his own worst enemy – too clever by half – and to show in some way that it continues to back Mr Patil.
Bid To Buy MLAs
Mrs Gandhi is being ill-served by some of her partymen not just in Maharashtra. It is the same story in several other states. In Andhra, for instance, it is not able to take advantage of the growing disenchantment with Mr Rama Rao among the urban elite, especially government employees, because it has no local leader the people can respect. In Karnataka it has barely escaped a possible disaster – ironically because of a failure on its part: its attempts to buy MLAs failed. In Jammu and Kashmir, it is asking for trouble by trying to embarrass and, if possible, topple Dr Farooq Abdullah’s government.
To appreciate what has happened in Karnataka, we do not need to depend on Mr Ramakrishna Hegde’s account. Sunday Magazine has now published the verbatim text of the discussion that took place between a local Congress leader and a Janata legislator whom he was wanting to buy. Yes, buy. That is the word. The evidence is incontrovertible. This must compromise the party’s standing in the eyes of the people. But this loss is relatively small compared to the one the Congress (I) would almost certainly have suffered if it had succeeded in buying up Janata legislators and bringing down the Hegde ministry. It could have produced a revulsion among the electorate as strong as the one that led to the electoral disaster for it in Andhra last January. Karnataka is not Haryana. Another point is notable in this connection. One of the Congress (I) leaders who tried to arrange the defection of a Harijan MLA, used Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s name recklessly in this connection, thus besmirching it and denying the party the advantage his earlier “Mr Clean” image gave it.
The position in Kashmir is even more ticklish. However much we dislike it, the fact remains that the Centre has to handle it with great care because it is both a border state the accession of which to the Indian union Pakistan continues to contest and a Muslim majority state. It is dangerous to pretend that its Muslim majority character does not place it in a special category. It does. The secularization of our polity has not proceeded to a point where it would not.
Wrong Calculations
The implication is not that the Congress (I) should not have confronted the National Conference at the hustings. The implication is that the Centre must be seen to respect even more fully than in Karnataka or Andhra or West Bengal the verdict of the Kashmiri people which was clearly in favour of Dr Abdullah and the National Conference (in that order). The state Congress (I) leaders would have us believe that Dr Abdullah won because he rigged the poll and that they can manage the affairs of the state if they can somehow put themselves in power with the help of some defectors from the National Conference. Both propositions are false, the second one dangerously false. Dr Abdullah would have won in any case and they can rule the state at best with the help of the para-military forces with the army standing behind them.
Unlike his father, Sheikh Abdullah, Dr Abdullah is not confining his political activities to the state. He is openly hobnobbing with opposition leaders, though he has decided not to join either the Lok Dal-BJP alliance or the Janata-led United Front. It is not clear whether he is doing so in search of allies in order to strengthen his position vis-a-vis the Congress (I) or whether he entertains all-India ambitions. This may be inconvenient for Mrs Gandhi, especially if she thinks that he is likely to sway the Muslim vote away from her to some extent. But whatever his calculations or motives, he is behaving like a nationalist Indian, which fact Mrs Gandhi should welcome in the country’s larger interest.
Implicit in all this is a concern that Mrs Gandhi must not allow herself to be pushed into wrong decisions in the coming months. The country is in the pre-election period, regardless of whether or not she advances the date for the poll to the Lok Sabha. Her statements run counter to the available indicators. While she has said that the poll will take place at the end of the Lok Sabha’s normal five year terms, that is in December 1984 or yearly January 1985, her government’s and party’s actions point towards an early election – the AICC session in Bombay, the forthcoming plenary session in Calcutta, the proposed regional conferences before Calcutta, the takeover of textile mills in Bombay, the bonus for government employees and so on. But be that as it may, all political activity will from now on be guided by electoral considerations. The beef tallow controversy is a pointer. Mrs Gandhi’s and the nation’s interests converge. She should not queer the pitch against herself.
The Times of India, 9 November 1983