It continues to be said and believed that Mr Rajiv Gandhi was a most reluctant entrant into politics. This contradicts the earlier theory that he acted coy, in order to add to his own appeal, and enable his mother to fight the charge of wanting to establish a dynasty. But Mrs Indira Gandhi is long dead and the “Reluctant entrant” theory suits Mr Rajiv Gandhi and his image-builders, Indians as well as foreigners.
A reluctant entrant or not, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi took to the exercise of power as duck to water, to use a cliché. As general secretary of the AICC he collected a small band of his own, set up an office with his own secretarial staff and functioned as an independent centre of authority. He no longer saw himself as just his mother’s aide, who had joined politics only to relieve her of some of her burdens. He saw himself as Prime Minister in-waiting.
A number of individuals, including some of those Mr. Rajiv Gandhi soon got rid of, took the view on October 31, 1984, that in the context of the circumstances in which Mrs. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi alone could fill the resuming power vacuum. It is difficult to say whether or not Mr. Rajiv Gandhi shared this perception and whether his anxiety to move into the office of Prime Minister at once was influenced by this larger, even if not quite impersonal, consideration.
Not one visit
The fact remains that he allowed himself to be sworn in as Prime Minister, before he could be elected leader of the Congress parliamentary party. Perhaps he regarded adherence to the established convention of an interim Prime Minister being sworn in, as being both unnecessary and risky. On his own testimony, he has disregarded many conventions, one of these relating to regular visits by the Prime Minister to Rashtrapati Bhavan to brief the President on important state matters. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has not called on President Zail Singh even once, for months, to the great discomfiture and chagrin of the head of state.
President Zail Singh was more than willing to oblige on October 31, 1984, and so were others. But we are not discussing them. We are interested in Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s possible motivations and calculations. Rightly or wrongly, I, for one, am inclined to take the view that he regarded it his right to succeed Mrs Indira Gandhi. He took a dynastic view of Indian politics. He could have done so regardless of his attitude towards her and her political style.
Perhaps the Indian peopte too were just then looking for a King-Emperor. Their deep sense of insecurity had been aroused by Mrs Indira Gandhi’s assassination and they wanted to make sure that history did not repeat itself. This was especially true in the Hindi-speaking North, which had had to bear the brunt of foreign invasions and the consequences of fall of dynasties in the past. That was apparently why they gave him the kind of majority they did, in the poll to the Lok Sabha.
Vote Analysis
All such general propositions need to be qualified. This one is no exception. In terms of votes which are a better indication of the popular mood than seats, the Congress did not do as well as it was universally believed to have done. It secured only about 50.2 per cent of the votes polled against over 75 per cent of the seats it won. Even so, there was definitely a strong pro-Congress and pro-Rajiv wave, which swept off their feet even those who had been critical of Mrs. Indira Gandhi and her policies.
But having assured themselves that they had produced a stable government in New Delhi, the people resumed the political process, as they were bound to, at the time of the poll to various Vidhan Sabhas in March 1985. In the Hindi-speaking states they gave a majority to the Congress, but on a substantially reduced scale. In Karnataka, they returned to office the very Janata Party which they had sidetracked, less than three months earlier, in the elections to the Lok Sabha. All this should have served as a warning to Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and his aides. They ignored it and thereby demonstrated that they were not sensitive to the dangers ahead.
The charitable view would be that the results of the poll in the states did not pose a threat to their consensual and federal approach to politics. There cannot be much doubt that Mr Rajiv Gandhi saw himself as a practitioner of that kind of politics, as opposed to Mrs Indira Gandhi’s allegedly confrontationist politics.
Since Mr Rajiv Gandhi and his aides have not studied Indian history, it would be unfair to expect them to know one of its principal lessons. Which is that in India, an empire either expands or it shrinks; it never stays stationary. In today’s context, that would apply to the Congress party’s domain and to India’s influence abroad. Mrs Indira Gandhi was determined that the Congress hold must not shrink. Mr Rajiv Gandhi apparently does not care if it does. In the case of Punjab, he openly welcomed the party’s defeat. Since he happens to be Congress president also, and not only Prime Minister, he could have at least kept quiet. Instead he welcomed the Akali victory as a victory for India and democracy.
Both the personality and the political approach are involved in such matters. Mrs Gandhi was a fighter and therefore a confrontationist. Mr Rajiv Gandhi is not a fighter; that is one reason he is all the time looking for consensus (or compromise), whatever the issue. This is not to suggest that confrontation is of necessity good, and consensus bad, but that these positions spring from, and are underwritten by, personality traits.
Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s was a unitary view of Indian nationalism, which called for the Congress party’s domination over as many states as possible, regardless of the fairness or otherwise of the means. There was a contradiction in her approach. Her desire for personal dominance clashed with the need for a healthy Congress party and it prevailed. Unlike her father, she was not able to reconcile the two goals. Even so, the party remained important for her. Her ambivalence on the desirability of a changeover to the presidential form of government was a result of this contradiction.
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has not spelled out his views on the rival unitary and federal models of governing India. But he appears to favour the federal approach. There can be genuine differences of opinion on the legitimacy or otherwise of this approach to the governance of India. But the pertinent point to note, in the present discussion, is that the Congress party’s sway over the maximum number of states cannot be central to the federal approach.
Punjab Accord
That is one reason why Mr Rajiv Gandhi could reach an accord in Punjab which favoured the Akalis. Mrs Indira Gandhi could not possibly have been unaware of the dangerous consequences of a continued stalemate in the state but she did not conclude the kind of agreement her son could, for obvious reasons. She could not ignore the interests and sentiments of the Hindus.
Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s federal, and therefore, open-minded, approach to the governance of the states is not reflected in his dealings with his own cabinet, party MPs and other leaders. On the contrary, he has not stopped the practice of imposing chief ministers on Congress-majority states and appointing and replacing PCC chiefs; he is not accessible to his ministers, even of the cabinet rank, not to speak of MPs. All crucial decisions are taken by a small group. Indeed, in recent months, it has become difficult even to identify that group. The general view among senior ministers and MPs is that decision-making in New Delhi has never been such a closed affair as it has become under Mr. Rajiv Gandhi. And, of course, the biggest industrialists cannot meet him and in fact even his Finance minister. No Indian is now tall enough to command respect from the new rulers.
The tight security arrangements have doubtless added to Mr Gandhi’s isolation. But the problem is more basic. Mr Rajiv Gandhi is by temperament averse to meeting individuals for face-to-face encounters. His personal staff has drawn the necessary lesson. They too have become inaccessible.
The closed nature of the system is matched only by its arbitrariness. The cabinet has been reshuffled twice, without any clearly discernible purpose; senior bureaucrats, of secretary rank, have been shifted repeatedly, without anyone being told why, and without anyone finding out the rationale behind it.
Mr. Chandrasekhar Singh’s is a classic case. He was first denied a seat in either house of parliament and removed from the government; he was then allowed to contest a seat his wife had vacated for him; and on being elected, he was again given a berth in the ministry. In aid of what, was he humiliated earlier? And why was Mr Arjun Singh removed from Punjab when his presence in the Raj Bhavan in Chandigarh could have been useful for the implementation of the Rajiv-Longowal accord, then given the important commerce portfolio and then moved into the Congress organisation to the newly created post of vice-president?
This arbitrariness, which has reduced Congress leaders to ciphers, has been accompanied by a television build-up of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi on a truly fantastic scale. There is clearly a relationship between the two. The cult of personality has been in operation as never before. Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s exercise in this regard, looks like a childish prank. This love of the floodlight contrasts sharply with his earlier life as a very private person and family man. As in America, the Ad men in India, too, have taken over the task of packaging the Prime Minister. Perhaps to them he is another commodity which is to be sold.
This attempt to package the Prime Minister (the Motilal Nehru shawl style) is illustrative of a much wider phenomenon, which the rise of a large Westernised consumption-oriented class, utterly indifferent to the country’s cultural traditions and needs, has spawned. Politics for them has been a dirty word. Many of them welcomed the emergency. This was not an accident. The managerial approach is essentially a non-democratic one. One need not be a Marxist to know that it is contemptuous of not only the workers but of the people.
Augean Stables
The rise of this approach has been in evidence since the late sixties. Contrary to the general belief, the emergency was not without support in society. The executive types welcomed it, in the belief that this would help them clear the Augean stables the politicians had built. The issue is extremely complex and cannot be discussed in this article. But it might be said that by a strange logic this contempt for politics and politicians was a component in the upper crust intelligentsia’s opposition to Mrs Indira Gandhi and that it was not a mere coincidence that the agitation against her in 1974-75 was led by a man who had “renounced” politics, Mr Jayaprakash Narayan. It would appear that Mr Rajiv Gandhi shares this contempt for politics. His address at the Congress centenary celebrations in the last week of December in Bombay certainly suggests that to be the case.
The same managerial, nonpolitical approach can explain the decision to raise substantially the prices of petroleum products, the panic at the popular reaction, the manipulation of a “protest” within the Congress party and the partial withdrawal of the hike. The Muslim women (protection of rights on divorce) bill speaks of a similar panic. The attempt at consensus has broken down, in this case. Opposition parties have refused to be hustled into supporting this shocking piece of legislation. Educated Muslims have spoken out against it. But the government will persist with it, because it must try to defuse articulate opposition from whatever quarter, in this case the obscurantist Mullah.
Poll Results
When the Lok Sabha poll results were announced, almost everyone plumped for the formulation that the vote for Mr Rajiv Gandhi was a vote in favour of both continuity and change. Mr Gandhi certainly interpreted it as a vote, more in favour of change, than of continuity. This has become more and more evident, ever since. But it is interesting to note that in the sphere where change was most desperately needed, we have witnessed an aggravation of the old malaise.
All major institutions had come under strain during the Indira Gandhi era for a variety of reasons of which her personality was certainly one. So if Mr Rajiv Gandhi was to launch a new era, his effort should have been to restore to institutions some health and vigour.
He has not attempted anything of the kind. Instead, he has equated India’s “march into the 21st century” with the import of technology. Whatever one’s view of the place of the supercomputer and other pieces of hi-tech in our economy and society, these cannot ensure a reasonable measure of social peace and political stability. The engineer-manager cannot replace the politician, if India is to stay in one piece. The challenges are gathering, both at home and abroad. Only those with calm nerves and long sights can hope to cope with them.
(Concluded)
The Times of India, 27 February 1986