Nineteen eighty-five has truly been the year of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi in India. The year opened with his installation as Prime Minister following an unprecedented electoral victory in independent India’s history and it closed with the Congress centenary celebrations in Bombay over which he presided. In between, he took a series of decisions which could leave no room for doubt that he was fully in command of the country’s affairs. He has, for example, been personally responsible for the accords with the Akalis in Punjab and the student agitators in Assam.
The ease with which Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has maintained his ascendancy in the Congress party and the country in his first year has, to the best of our knowledge, only one parallel. Mahatma Gandhi had taken the Congress, as it were, by storm at the end of World War I. But the Mahatma had won his laurels in South Africa much earlier; he was a formidable political figure in terms of both experience and reputation by the time he arrived in India; above all, the Indian elite was restless. It was waiting for a leader who could preside over the next more radical phase of the struggle for freedom. The Mahatma was precisely that kind of leader.
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s ascendancy cannot be so easily explained. As he himself admits, his political career does not go back beyond 1981. Earlier, he was not even interested in politics either in terms of ideas or activities. Both bored him. His performance under his mother’s stewardship either as an MP or party general secretary was, by all accounts, unspectacular. Indeed, he and his close aides then (and now) cannot in fairness disclaim all responsibility for some of the obviously wrong decisions in 1984 such as the dismissal of Dr. Farooq Abdullah and Mr. NT Rama Rao as chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir and Andhra, and in fact for the events leading to “Operation Bluestar”. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was involved in the abortive secret negotiations with the Akalis.
Electoral Victory
We, of course, have the popular explanation. Which is that Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s brutal assassination ensured Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s succession to her as well as his sweeping electoral victory. There is considerable merit in this proposition. There was a wave of sympathy for him in the wake of his mother’s tragic death. More important, the pent-up fear of chaos and anarchy in the Indian psyche came to the fore on October 31, 1984. The people desperately looked for a figure who could maintain order and they opted for Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s son in the absence of an obviously more commanding figure.
This explanation speaks more for the dwarfish size of other Congress leaders than for the popular response to Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s sudden death. The people in fact did not have a choice since no senior Cabinet minister was willing even to press his claim to be sworn in as the acting Prime Minster so that the Congress parliamentary party could have an opportunity to meet and properly elect its new leader. The senior Congress leaders were afraid that they would be misunderstood if they suggested that the well-established convention in this regard be respected. They were not prepared to take the risk. Thus, fear guided them as much as it guided the people subsequently when they gave Mr. Rajiv Gandhi a landslide victory at the polls.
The contrast between the popular mood in 1919 and 1984 could not have been sharper. In 1919, the people were looking for a general who could lead them in the coming battles with the British. In 1984, they were looking for a ruler who could relieve them of the anxieties and fears which were haunting them. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has fulfilled that role.
As a reflection of the loose structure of the Indian personality and psyche, Indian nationalism is by definition accommodative rather than combative. By and large, its exponents seek accommodation and avoid fights. Mrs. Indira Gandhi was a rare exception and this fact did not add to her popularity. Even the victory over Pakistan and the creation of an independent Bangladesh under her leadership in 1971 were soon forgotten and not many Indians remember her either for the integration of Sikkim into the Indian Union in 1976 or for the underground nuclear explosion in 1974. Her concern for the larger national interest, as she understood it, prevented her from reaching accords in Assam and Punjab on the terms available to her. But she did not earn the nation’s gratitude for it. Despite “Operation Bluestar”, her electoral prospects in October 1984 were less than promising.
Anti-Akali Vote
This should help elucidate the true nature of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s mandate in December 1984. On the face of it, he won on a sympathy and an anti-Akali vote. But it was not an endorsement of Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s anti-Akali platform. If anything, the reverse was true. This distinction needs to be grasped if we are to understand the factors behind Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s popularity.
Facts speak for themselves. If the people had elected him on an anti-Akali platform, he would have forfeited his popularity when he not only reached an accord with Sant Longowal on terms Mrs. Indira Gandhi had personally found unacceptable, but also virtually handed over Punjab to the Akalis and indeed celebrated it as a victory for the nation. Even so, it is necessary to look behind the facts. The conclusion is uncomfortable but it is inescapable. Indian nationalism is weak.
Assam did not impinge on the Indian mind as Punjab did for a variety of reasons. The agitators in Assam did not threaten the country’s unity; they did not engage in terrorism in pursuit of their demands; and the Congress ministry headed by Mr. Saikia had managed to produce an order of sorts. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi could, therefore, have put off an agreement there if he had so chosen. He did not so choose perhaps because he failed to work out the implications of his decision carefully.
The general mandate was the same as in the case of Punjab – an early settlement with the agitators. But the composition of the people to be adversely affected by an agreement in Assam was different from that in Punjab. In Punjab, the adversely affected people were to be the Hindus who were not interested in a fight with the Akalis and, indeed, were willing to accept Akali rule for the sake of peace which would enable them to carry on their business. In Assam, the adversely affected people were to be mainly the Muslim immigrants who would never accept an arrangement which placed political power in the hands of the Assamese Hindus whom they did not trust.
The consequences were predictable. Anyone with any political acumen and experience could have told Mr. Rajiv Gandhi that an accord in Assam would lose him the Bengali-speaking people’s vote in that state, that it would adversely affect the party’s fortunes in West Bengal where it would alienate both the Hindus and the Muslims, and that it would cost him Muslim support in other parts of the country as well.
It is not possible to say either how much of the Muslim vote the Assam accord has cost Mr. Rajiv Gandhi in the rest of India or whether it will come back to him in view of the absence of an alternative banner to which the Muslims can rally. But that apart, he has, broadly speaking, lived by the mandate the people gave him a year ago.
Pact With Pakistan
It is equally difficult to say whether he will go ahead with the proposed treaty with Pakistan and thus give President Zia-ul-Haq all the advantages he has been seeking for the last five years. But if he does, that will be another feather in his feather-studded crown. A treaty with Pakistan will be warmly received by the articulate sections who are desperately anxious to believe that they face no danger from anywhere.
Pakistan may spring a surprise on Mr. Rajiv Gandhi as China did on his grandfather first in 1962 when it attacked India and then in 1964 when it exploded the bomb and placed itself in a different power league. But that does not worry Mr. Gandhi’s supporters. They yearn to return to their primordial ways. They want to turn their back on the world and immerse themselves in their small little worlds. For all the talk of change, India has not changed all that much in the deepest recesses of its psyche.
There is, unfortunately for Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, a pretty big catch in all this. The catch is that his approach will deny him a nationalist platform on the strength of which alone he can call upon the people in various parts of the sub-continent to overcome their petty loyalties and rally to his banner. Of necessity, he has to carry such a banner since no other banner is available to him.
Implicit in most of our discussions is the assumption that India has become a nation. This is a false assumption, though India is also not a mere congeries of diverse groups barely held together by the state. India is a nation-in-becoming. That is why the nationalist platform has an appeal, but an appeal that has to overcome other particularistic appeals. A nationalist leader must be combative precisely because Indian nationalism is so accommodating.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, the forces of communalism, regionalism and casteism have grown as the process of integration has gathered momentum. Not surprisingly because there is a relationship between them. As the traditional India of small loyalties gives way to the forces of modernization, the search for identity intensifies and expresses itself in caste, religions and linguistic idioms. These are adversary-partners of nationalism. They cannot be defeated but they must be contained if India is to become a nation. While Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s actions spoke of an awareness of this need even though she might not have grasped the point intellectually, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s approach does not. It is conglomerate and not integrative and is bound to fail.
The Times of India, 31 December 1985