The party hosted by Mr Arif Mohammed Khan last Friday was a political event. It happened to be the day after Mr V.P. Singh’s 56th birthday. But that was apparently a pretty thin pretext for the get together. Most of the invitees were journalists. In addition to Mr Khan and Mr V.P. Singh, only two other politicians were present – Mr Arun Nehru and Mr Satyapal Malik, also an MP from UP. The intention was clear – to get the maximum publicity for the “event”. This was an open acknowledgement of the importance of the role the press has come to play in the country’s politics. This is, however, an issue in itself, which deserves to be discussed separately. Right now, we are concerned with the possible purpose and calculation behind the get-together.
A firm assessment is clearly not possible at this stage. The situation in the Congress party is too fluid to admit of that. Indeed, if one is to go by what has been said for weeks, by those who claim to be knowledgeable, Mr Arun Nehru has been keen on a rapprochement with Mr Rajiv Gandhi. While that may or may not be the case, it cannot at all be disputed that he has publicly not said anything critical of the Prime Minister so far. It is not that he has not spoken at all, since the Fairfax affair came into the open in the middle of March. He has given interviews to newspapers and journals. But even a most careful reading of them cannot produce a suggestion of dissidence. All that, of course, does not clinch the issue. Nothing does these days.
Fluid Situation
Our intention in recalling the interviews and the statements of the “insiders” is merely to underscore the above point, that the situation in the Congress is too fluid to permit us to draw a clear conclusion from the “birthday party”. The same conclusion is reinforced for us by another point. Which is that it is far from clear that Mr V.P. Singh has decided to cast his lot with Mr Arun Nehru, even if it is assumed for the sake of argument that Mr Nehru has decided to be a dissident. Why then this article at all?
The question would be legitimate. Our answer is that if, indeed, Mr V.P. Singh and Mr Arun Nehru, have come together and plan to function as a nucleus of dissidence within the Congress, Mr Rajiv Gandhi should, in our view, welcome such a development. It can well be argued that Mr Gandhi’s position has been enfeebled to a point where he is left with no choice but to allow open dissidence in his ranks. This is a poor argument. Weakness can lead to desperate action. Mr Jawaharlal Nehru implemented the Kamaraj Plan to remove stalwarts like Mr Morarji Desai, Mr S.K. Patil and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed from governmental positions after the Chinese attack in 1962 had greatly undermined his credibility as a national leader. In any case, our reasons for welcoming the rise of a faction or factions in the Congress are not contingent on the decline in Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s stature in the country, and therefore in the party.
Two of these may be mentioned. First, in a situation like the present, when the Congress, particularly the Congress parliamentary party, has become a vast whispering gallery in which all kinds of things are said and believed about all kinds of people, it is best to allow various alignments to come out into the open. Surely, that would enable Mr Gandhi to better cope with his critics and opponents! Mr Gandhi is not another Mao Zedong who allowed “a hundred flowers to bloom” in China in the mid-fifties so that he could identify the “poisonous weed” and eliminate them. And democratic India is not another communist China where it is practical to crush “poisonous weeds”. Mr Gandhi will need to deal with his dissidents differently.
Sanjay’s Rise
Secondly, it is necessary to revive debates in the Congress, if it is to regain some measure of health and vitality. To begin with, the debates will be spurious because there are not many ideologically inclined individuals in the Congress. Mrs Indira Gandhi stifled all debate in it in the early seventies, when she disbanded the Forum for Socialist Action and the Nehru Study Forum, though she herself had inspired the formation of the latter in a bid to contain the influence of the former. The emergency (1975-77), the second split in the Congress (1978), the ascendancy of Mr Sanjay Gandhi (1975-80) and the return to power of what can only be called a Praetorian guard in 1980, ensured the near total elimination from the party of men of conviction, commitment (except to themselves, and for that reason, to the leader and the heir-designate) and therefore of character.
It is not at all clear whether Mrs Indira Gandhi took some of the steps because she deliberately wanted to pave the way for Mr Sanjay Gandhi or whether Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s rise itself was at least partly the result of the initial decision to end debates in the party. But there can be little doubt that the politics of manipulation could not have succeeded as completely as it did in the Congress if the two forums had not been disbanded. Mr Rajiv Gandhi, too, is the product of that non-political politics in the Congress. His ascendancy in the party was assured the day he was appointed general secretary, though, on the face of it, he was one of the several general secretaries. In plain terms, the end of debates in the Congress led to dynastic succession.
But there was an inherent contradiction in Mrs Indira Gandhi’s approach. When society was getting more and more politicised, partly as a result of her own activities since 1969, when she deliberately split the Congress and gradually adopted a pretty radical programme of socioeconomic change, she could freeze politics in her own party only at its and her own peril, this is exactly what happened. When she faced the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat in the winter of 1973-74 and the JP movement in 1974-75, she did not possess a political instrument which she could use to fight them. She became wholly dependent on the administrative machinery. The result was the emergency.
Unlike Mrs Indira Gandhi, Mr Sanjay Gandhi was consistent. He knew that the debate-less politics of conformity and obedience needed an instrument very different from the Congress, which he could use to dudgeon his critics into silence. He sought to forge such an instrument in the shape of the Youth Congress. He placed his “new” Congressmen in Parliament in 1980, when Mrs Gandhi again won a landslide victory. Their approach to politics became evident during the few months he lived after the victory. They were ready to shout down the opposition at the slightest provocation. If he had lived and become prime minister, he would in all probability have taken his politics to its logical conclusion. He would have sought to freeze politics in the country by terrorising the opponents. Whether or not he would have succeeded is a matter of speculation.
The pertinent point for us is that basically Mrs Indira Gandhi was not made for the politics of terrorisation. The result of Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s death could not be different from what it was. The partly new Congress of the son’s creation lost its “élan” and raison d’etre. The incompatible parts did not merge. The party as a whole became listless in political terms. Corruption prospered as never before. This was nature’s way of filling the vacuum. In the popular view, Mrs Gandhi presided over the Congress. In reality, she carried it on her head. It could not have helped her win the electoral battle if she had lived.
Rajiv’s Court
Mr Rajiv Gandhi was too non-political to realise that the mandate he received in December 1984 was a temporary affair, not only because it was given in an extraordinary situation, but because he did not possess an instrument which could have helped him consolidate the gains. His confidants, Mr Arun Nehru and Mr Arun Singh, could wield power which he had temporarily won. They could not help him retain power. The high profile of one and the low profile of the other did not make any difference to their role. They could only insulate him from genuinely political Congressmen.
The same applied to others who stepped into their place, when they began to lose favour with Mr Rajiv Gandhi, as they were bound to in the prevailing court atmosphere. If Mr Rajiv Gandhi was King-Emperor, as I once described him, his court could not consist of generals who had won great victories on their own. It could accommodate only sycophants. It is wrong to call those who have surrounded Mr Gandhi his friends. Princes do not have friends. They have only yes-men and/or experts in various fields. Needless to say, the era of yes-men is over, regardless of whether they are guilty of the charges which are being made against them or not.
In a previous article, I wrote that a demonstration of strength and resolution is necessary on the part of Mr Gandhi, if he is to survive. That argument stands. The plea for acceptance of open debate in the party does not detract from it. The axe has to fall elsewhere.
The Times of India, 1 July 1987