The election to the eighth Lok Sabha has turned out to be a referendum. The Indian people have voted for Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party – in that order as far as we can see. They have by and large not cared for the candidates and their reputation and performance, good or bad.
This is, of course, not a wholly new development. The elections to the Lok Sabha in 1971, 1977 and 1980 too were essentially referendums. But in none of these cases did the winner overwhelm the opposition so completely as the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi has done now. And seldom before have we witnessed the kind of swing in the vote that we have seen this time, especially in UP, Bihar, Haryana and the Union territory of Delhi. So this is more of a referendum than any previous poll.
Two other differences are notable on this occasion. A significantly larger proportion of caste Hindus have voted for the Congress than ever before since the first general election. The substantial swing in the Congress vote could just not have taken place otherwise. And the people have voted for a leader who is new to politics and therefore not known to them. Indira Gandhi had been Prime Minister for five long years in 1971, and in 1977 the Janata party consisted of old war horses such as Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram, Atal Behari Vajpayee and so on.
POSITIVE VOTE
The vote in 1971 was clearly a positive one. The people preferred Indira Gandhi in her radical incarnation to the old organisational bosses in the Congress on the one hand and the equally familiar faces in the opposition on the other. It was a different story both in 1977 and 1980. In the first instance, the people did not so much vote the Janata into power as put Indira Gandhi out of office and in the second instance they reversed their previous verdict. This raises the question about the nature of the present vote. Is it positive or negative?
On the face of it, this is an idle question. Rajiv Gandhi is Indira Gandhi’s son, heir and successor; her assassination has played a critical role in assuring him the massive mandate he has got; and he has fought the election on the same political platform of the threat to the country’s unity and integrity. It is, on the face of it, reasonable to take the view that the people have voted for a continuation of the old regime under a new leader. But this apparently self-evident proposition deserves to be scrutinised a little more carefully.
NO IDEOLOGUE
Indira Gandhi was, of course, not much of an ideologue. She certainly was not a committed leftist. But not only did she ride to power on a radical populist platform in 1971, her natural sympathies lay that way. Witness her choice of economic advisers – Sukhomoy Chakravarty and KN Raj, among others. More important, witness her unshakable distrust of the United States which cannot be explained wholly in terms of US military assistance to Pakistan. While this programme remained suspended from 1965 to 1980, she was critical of America throughout her first tenure of office as Prime Minister and frequently accused the CIA of trying to destabilise her government. Surely Rajiv Gandhi does not suffer from any similar hang-up.
As is well known, in the post-1980 period, Indira Gandhi moved towards a more liberal economic regime which allowed the private sector more elbow room than it had enjoyed under her earlier. But she moved towards relaxing controls slowly, almost reluctantly, and in between initiated, or at least acquiesced in, decisions such as the amendment of the Companies Act which gave the government enormous powers over privately-owned industry. Certainly the business community has rallied round Rajiv Gandhi in the hope that he will give it its head. The world as a whole has changed since the mid-sixties when Indira Gandhi first came to power. Socialism is now a discredited ideology, a fact which is best illustrated by what is going on in China. Without doubt Rajiv Gandhi represents the new mood all over the world better than Indira Gandhi could ever do.
OBVIOUS FLAW
There is an obvious flaw in this argument inasmuch as it lends itself to the interpretation that in our view the people in rural India know these differences and have voted in that knowledge. Obviously that is not a viable proposition. But the people are fed up with “big” government which also happens to be corrupt and inefficient and it is just possible that instinctively they have come to the conclusion that Rajiv Gandhi could make a break with the past. The break is in any case necessary for the country’s economic and political health and Rajiv Gandhi should be predisposed to make it.
That does not answer the question whether the people have voted positively or negatively. Indeed, since they have clearly not voted against Indira Gandhi, the difference between her and her son may not even be pertinent for the purpose of this discussion, though in another way it is. For while the business community was always wary of Indira Gandhi, it has welcomed Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide victory enthusiastically.
Let us now examine the scene from the other side – from that of the opposition. Of the major opposition parties, the Janata has been visibly in decline for quite some time; the BJP has been on the defensive since the elections in the Union Territory of Delhi in early 1983 when the Congress cut into its support base in a big way; and Charan Singh’s Lok Dal, now renamed the Dalit Mazdoor Kisan Party, has relied essentially on caste divisions in Hindu society.
So it will be reasonable to take the view that the present poll has delivered the final blow to the Janata. But what about the other two? The fate of the BJP will primarily depend more on the Congress party’s ability or inability to hold on to the middle caste Hindu vote, which appears to have shifted in its favour, without alienating further the minorities, especially the Muslims, and the scheduled castes and tribes than on the BJP’s own exertions. And it may take a long time to recover, if it recovers at all.
And as for the DMKP, it is too early to say whether the caste factor in north India has weakened sufficiently to relegate a party based on caste divisions to the dustbin of history. The forthcoming elections to the state legislatures in UP and Bihar should provide us the answer for the medium-term future. If the DMKP loses, Charan Singh would be well advised to say goodbye to politics.
HOMOGENISATION ON
We know for a fact that the importance of the caste factor in Indian politics outside UP and Bihar, especially Bihar, has been declining. This time the threat to the country’s unity, as symbolised by the compulsion to send the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar and finally by Indira Gandhi’s assassination, has obviously weakened caste considerations in UP and Bihar as well for the purposes of the Lok Sabha poll.
We also know that the process of homogenisation has been at work in Hindu society as a result of the spread of education and communications, of closer links between the rural areas and urban centres, the breakdown of patron-client relations, increased politicisation and a host of other modernising factors. Modernisation does inevitably lead to a measure of homogenisation whereby class replaces caste as the determinant of one’s identity and outlook. But it is difficult to say how far this process has gone. Thus, taking these points together, while it is perhaps too early to conclude that the Indian polity has taken a new turn for the good, it does look as if the trend is in this direction.
It may not be much of an exaggeration to say that a majority of caste Hindus have over the years come to share the sentiment that the ruling party, the Congress most of the time, panders to the minorities and the Harijans and ignores their interests. A referendum will, for example, almost certainly go against reservations for scheduled castes and tribes in legislatures and government jobs and admission to schools and colleges. The Hindus on the whole no longer suffer from a guilt complex in respect of Harijans and tribals.
NOT STRONG ENOUGH
But this sentiment has never been strong enough either to overcome caste divisions among them or to enable the BJP in its previous militant incarnation to make a bid for power. Apparently in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s murder this sentiment got sufficiently consolidated to give Rajiv Gandhi the biggest mandate any Indian leader has ever secured. This is the form the so-called Hindu backlash, which has been talked about for so long, appears to have taken. As far as we can see, it is there to last but it cannot retain its present intensity for long. The Hindus are not that kind of people. That is why it is so much hogwash to talk of Hindu chauvinism and fascism. Both spring from very different religious backgrounds. But something like a Hindu assertion may well be on the cards.
India is not a land for sudden breaks and sudden new beginnings. On the contrary, it is known for its continuity. Appropriately, modern India is trying to combine change with continuity. So we may be participating in a modification of the ruling political order whereby its support base may be shifting and /or widening and with it the emphasis of its policies. Rajiv Gandhi’s rule may turn out to be at once a continuation of, and a break from, Indira Gandhi’s as was hers from her father’s. Dynasty is not another name for slavish imitation.
The Times of India, 30 December 1984 [Page 1 comment on election]