A large section of the press has at long last recovered its voice. It is no longer mesmerized by Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s charms and his promise of a brave new India purged of its corruption, incompetence and even poverty. It has not yet overcome its hatred of Mrs. Gandhi but it is beginning to cease to be obsessed with her as it is beginning to grasp and grapple with the failures of the son and his aides.
By and large, the press began to speak up when the weaknesses of the Punjab accord became evident last January with the non-transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab, the occupation of the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar by the extremists and the resumption of terrorist activities on a pretty big scale; when the failure of the soft approach towards Sri Lanka and Pakistan could no longer be covered up in the rhetoric of good neighbourliness; and finally when the Prime Minister’s aides stage-managed a protest within the Congress party to justify a partial decrease in the prices of petroleum products which had been unjustly and sharply increased only a few days earlier. This unseemly retreat on the part of the leader exposed chinks in his armour which most people had not suspected.
As the criticism mounted, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi sprang a wholly unexpected surprise on his admirers and critics alike. He brought forth the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill specifically in order to undo the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Shah Bano case; he did so in disregard of the advice of the law and home ministries and under the pressure of the Indian Union Muslim League and other patently Muslim communal organisations. This was an unashamed retreat from the goal of secular nationalism and, as it happened, the bill could not be justified even in terms of Muslim personal law. Indeed, as has been argued by leading Muslim lawyers, the provisions of the bill fall foul of clear Quranic injunctions and Shariat provisions as evolved over centuries on the strength of the work of Islam’s most outstanding and respected jurists.
Loss of Calm
The developments on the ground and the spate of criticism must have caused a certain loss of the calm and superior self-confidence Mr. Gandhi and his aides have displayed since they rose to power on that fateful October 31, 1984. These developments have certainly given Congress MPs their tongues back. They have begun to speak out not only in the privacy of drawing rooms but in the central hall of Parliament as well. Indeed, some of them have expressed a willingness to speak out at meetings of the parliamentary party and risk the leadership’s displeasure.
Even so, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has apparently no good reason to fear a serious challenge. Among the old guard, only the spineless could survive in Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s entourage. These men are not about to acquire the qualities of leadership, including the courage of one’s convictions, they have never possessed. Most of the new Congress entrants into Parliament are too raw and too dependent on the favours of the leader to raise their voice openly against him, however unhappy they may be. And so compete is the absence of a credible challenger that some imaginative individuals have begun to cast a wholly unlikely Arun Nehru in that role.
But politics cannot remain frozen for long, as it has been for the past 18 months. In fact, in the deeper sense of the term, politics has not been frozen even in this period. For the caste and communal conflicts which engulfed Gujarat for months last year and have been witnessed in other parts of the country are also politics “by other means”, to use the famous formulation by Clausewitz. Recent events in Jammu and Kashmir should clinch this issue. Whatever the immediate cause, the riots in the valley were without doubt the result of an explosion of the pent-up feelings against the Centre over the overthrow of Dr Farooq Abdullah in 1984 and the installation of the widely dislike GM Shah in his place with the Congress party’s backing. And as in Gujarat earlier, this politics “by other means” achieved its objective in Srinagar. New Delhi was finally forced to remove Mr. Shah.
But it is not the politics of the knife and of molotov cocktails that we are concerned with. We are interested in the normal party and factional politics we have been familiar with not only among the opposition to the Congress but in the Congress itself before Mrs. Indira Gandhi tried to freeze it, first with the declaration of the emergency in June 1975 and then with the second split in the party in January 1978.
Indira regime
Ever since the first Congress split in 1969, we have discussed endlessly Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s calculations, motivations, character and personality traits, compulsions and her successes and failures. This debate is not over. Mrs. Gandhi has not passed into history so that we can discuss her dispassionately. All that is, however, not pertinent for the purpose of the present discussion except to say that the cost of the 1969 split which established Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s ascendancy in the Congress – called the ruling Congress or the Congress (R) – was high not only for the country but also for her personally.
The link between the 1969 split and the JP movement in 1974-75 leading to the declaration of the emergency has generally been missed, but it should be obvious. In the very act of placing herself above the party and her colleagues, Mrs. Gandhi made herself the sole target of opposition attacks. As the hopes of millions focussed on her, so did the frustrations of the remaining millions. Her electoral successes in 1971 and 1972 and the country’s military victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh crisis in December 1971 could not and did not resolve this problem. Nor did her return to office in 1980 after the Janata interregnum.
The failure of the Janata experiment in 1979 eased the problem for her, but only on a surface view. The challenge then took on a regional-religious-linguistic-cultural character. The troubles in Assam and Punjab were followed by the defeat in Andhra and Karnataka, the two states which had stood solidly with her even in 1977 when the anti-Indira hurricane had swept through the rest of the country. Throughout her 1980-84 tenure of office, Mrs. Gandhi was beleaguered not by aspirants to power in New Delhi but by commandos who, often unknown to themselves, were wanted to erode the Centre’s powers and authority. She, of course, knew that she was besieged. She tried desperately to break out of it. She died in the process.
The circumstances of her death ensured for Mr Rajiv Gandhi an unprecedented victory at the polls in December 1984. And the fact of her death removed from the scene the central issue of Indian politics; the country had been polarised on the question of her leadership since 1969. This produced the holiday from politics in 1985. The holiday period is now drawing to a close, though it is not yet over. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi can no longer play the distant Prince Charming shunning contact with the hoi polloi and issuing homilies from his fortified fortresses on Race Course Road and in South Block. TV build-ups and frequent interviews will also not do. Indian politics is a very complicated business because Indian society is very complex.
Awful Feeling
The course revived politics will take will depend to an extent on the responses of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and his aides. I have the awful feeling that they will continue to take a simplistic view of a complex reality.
Even if Mr. Gandhi had not been personally averse to his mother and her leadership style, there could not have been any dearth of people in his entourage who would have told him something like the following:
She deliberately avoided agreements with the Akalis in Punjab and the students in Assam for electoral considerations; the results were disastrous; he should lose no time to reach accords in the two states; she presided over a highly corrupt setup; this led to the J.P. movement and the emergency; he should project himself as Mr. Clean and choose a Cromwell for his finance minister who would frighten businessmen out of their wits; she pursued the politics of confrontation and thereby polarised the nation; he should follow the path of conciliation and accommodation. Of course, no one could have told him that Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s tragedy began, whether avoidable or unavoidable, with her bid to place herself above the party – and that no one is likely to tell him even in coming months.
Indeed, now that the impression has spread that he vacillates and yields to pressure, he must already have been told that he must appear to be strong. There is some evidence that he is being so advised. The notice to the former Gujarat chief minister, Mr. Madhavsinh Solanki, to explain the publication of his note to Mr Gandhi is one piece of evidence, and so is his undignified and unjust attack on the opposition in his reply to them in the Lok Sabha on the President’s address. Reports that a number of former chief ministers such as Mr. Jagannath Misra, Mr. Solanki and Mr. Vasantdada Patil and former ministers such as Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, Mr. AP Sharma, Rao Birendra Singh and Mr. VC Shukla, are planning to come together are likely to strengthen the appeal of such advice. But such a course, needless to add, would be as simple-minded as the earlier decision to reverse Mrs. Gandhi’s supposed approach.
The Times of India, 19 March 1986