If it is indeed true, as is widely said and believed, that Mr. Rajiv Gandhi wanted the Congress to lose the elections in Punjab, it is his and his party’s business. Even so the rest of us are concerned with the implications of such an approach, the most important being the acceptance of the proposition that the Akalis alone can restore normalcy in the state.
This view is widely shared in the country. It has found the fullest expression on the government controlled All India Radio and Doordarshan on the one hand and the independent press on the other. For once the supposed “adversaries” have come together — to hail the Akali victory in Punjab.
The argument in favour of the Akali victory as it has been put forward, is rather simplistic. The Dal is not a Punjabi equivalent of the CPM in West Bengal, or of the DMK or the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. The difference is obvious. Unlike them, it mixes religion with politics. In fact it subordinates the faith to its political requirements and interprets it accordingly. Inevitably mobilisation of the people on the basis of such an explosive mix has a logic which is very different from mobilisation on the basis of language or economic interests of a region or a class. Linguistic regionalism has not torn India apart, communalism has.
The CPM government’s battle against the Naxalites in West Bengal has been frequently invoked in connection with Punjab to draw the inference that the Akalis in office can be depended upon to wage war on the terrorists. We do not wish to anticipate developments in Punjab. But in West Bengal the fight against the Naxalites had been waged and more or less won under Mr. Sidhartha Shankar Ray and under President’s rule, that is, before the CPM came to dominate the scene in its own right in 1977.
CPM Tamed
Two other points may be made. First, the CPM had been tamed long before it came into power in West Bengal; those who are interested in this problem would do well to read the history of the communist movement in independent India, especially since 1955-56 when Mr. Khrushchev, on the one hand, inaugurated the policy of friendship with Mr. Nehru’s non-aligned India and, on the other, denounced Stalin whom communists in India as elsewhere had revered. The story would clearly have been very different if the communists had come into power in the wake of the Telengana uprising, or if the Soviet leadership had remained hostile to New Delhi, or even if the communists had not been thrown into confusion as a result of the attack on one member of their holy trinity by the “Red Pope” himself.
Secondly, the much misunderstood and reviled Indira Gandhi kept the CPM and its allies in West Bengal on tenterhooks. By their own experience in the late ‘sixties and early seventies, they knew that if they stepped outside the four corners of the constitutional arrangements, she would find means to push them out of office. This helped cool the “revolutionary” ardour of CPM activists in West Bengal and made it possible for sober men among them such as Mr. Jyoti Basu to run the affairs of the state in a sober manner. She kept up the pressure till the end.
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi could have sent a similar message to the Akalis if in the wake of their victory he had contented himself with the observation that while he and his party would respect the verdict of the electorate, he hoped that, on their part, the Akalis too would honour the same verdict by working within the framework of the Constitution and doing all in their power to enforce the law. Having missed this opportunity, he shall need to grasp the next in order to fulfil his obligation as Prime Minister of all India, including Punjab. The country will watch with interest how he handles the Akalis if they release even those prisoners who are prima facie guilty of charges of murder, arson and loot.
Leadership Lost
The comparison of the Akalis with the West Bengal CPM might, however, prove valid if it turns out that they have learnt the lessons of the convulsion Punjab and the Sikh community along with the rest of India have gone through in the last three years largely as a result of their activities. Thanks to their endless morchas, they had lost the leadership of a significant section of the Sikh community to Bhindranwale and his gang and they could never have rescued it if Mrs. Gandhi had not intervened in their favour. “Operation Bluestar,” whatever its other consequences, became in effect a rescue operation for Sant Longowal and therefore for the Akali leadership as a whole. The Sant alone was not Bhindranwale’s prisoner in the Golden Temple; all Akali leaders lived in dread of him wherever they were.
Secondly and far more importantly, it is difficult to recall the case of another community which has ever suffered so dramatic a fall in the esteem of its fellow countrymen as the Sikhs have in the past two years. The Rajiv-Longowal agreement has perhaps helped contain this problem. But it will be patently dishonest to suggest that it has restored the Sikhs to the status they enjoyed earlier in the eyes of fellow Indians. This should be cause enough for concern to the Akalis and persuade them to give up forever the kind of “dharma-yudha” they have waged in the last five years with such disastrous consequences to their own community.
There are two facets to the problem that arose as a result of the Akali morchas, the ascendancy of Bhindranwale in the Sikh leadership, his campaign of murder, the fortification of the Golden Temple, and “Operation Bluestar.” If the alienation of the Sikhs was one facet, the alienation of the other Indians from the Sikhs was the other. So if the first must be tackled in the interest of peace and national unity, so must the second. Indeed, the two are inseparable. One cannot be tackled without simultaneously tackling the other.
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has sought to cope with the first aspect. He concluded an agreement with Sant Longowal more or less on Akali terms at the risk of inviting the charge of surrender. Even if it was not his deliberate intention to hand over Punjab to the Akalis on a platter, he chose many unknown individuals as his party’s nominees and thus made an Akali victory almost certain. Finally, he has done something unprecedented in the history of the Congress. He has hailed the victory of an opposition party without reservation. Apparently he has done all this in order to apply the healing touch to the hurt psyche of the Sikh community.
But Mr. Gandhi cannot possibly attend to the other facet of the problem. Only the Akali Dal now in power in Punjab can by its actions reassure the other Indians that it is worthy of their trust.
It would be unfair to suggest that the Akali leaders are so insensitive as not to recognise the humiliation and suffering they have exposed the Sikh community to. Certainly Sant Longowal would not have concluded the agreement with Mr. Rajiv Gandhi even on virtually Akali terms if he was not cognisant of, and sensitive to, his community’s loss. Certainly his aides such as the new Punjab chief minister, Mr. Surjit Singh Barnala, would not have urged the Sant to ignore stalwarts such as Mr. Badal and Mr. Tohra and sign the deal if they were not similarly aware. But agitations (like the one the Akalis have waged) and victories (like the one they have won) have a momentum of their own, which, if not contained, can lay the groundwork for another disaster.
Dialectical Process
To use the Marxist phraseology for the sake of clarity, politics is a dialectical process. To any thesis, there must be an anti-thesis if there is to be a synthesis. In this specific case, ideally the Congress party in Punjab should have served as the anti-thesis to the Akali victory thesis. But it cannot play that role at least for the time being. It could perhaps have been galvanised into a reckonable force if it had been given a new effective leadership and platform and if it had been allowed to run a vigorous campaign. The attempt might have failed. But the tragedy is that it was not even made. So now the anti-thesis to the Akali victory has to be provided directly by the Centre. By hailing the Akali triumph in the manner he has, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has weakened his hand for fulfilling that essential role.
The Akalis are, of course, on trial. But to say so is to miss an important point. They face two trials, not one — the first before their own immediate constituents in Punjab who have without doubt been radicalised by the politics of morchas, bullets and secessionism and the other before the rest of the Indian people. They will be inclined to balance the different requirements of the two trials if the second trial is made to appear as urgent for them as the first. Any elementary student of political science would know this to be the case. We tend to discuss politics as if it is a morality play in which the hero deservedly wins and the villain rightly loses. Unfortunately for us, such neat divisions do not exist in politics. It is altogether a different kind of game.
The Times of India, 2 October 1985