Finally the decision to merge the Janata party, the Lok Dal, the Congress (S) and the Jan Morcha has been announced by V.P. Singh. The details regarding the proposed Samajwadi Janata Dal’s programme and leadership are to be finalised by August 15.
The Haryana chief minister, Devi Lal, has been the moving spirit behind the new enterprise. Almost all other leaders involved in it have had reservations about the speed, if not about the goal of merger, itself. He has managed to overcome those reservations. He had announced July 27 as the final deadline. The deadline has been met.
This by itself is a notable development. Whoever heard ever before of a leader from the small state of Haryana being able to impose his will on veteran politicians from all over the country? If Haryana has attracted attention in the past in political terms, it has been either on account of Ayarams and Gayarams (frequent defections) or on account of the then chief minister, Bansilal’s high-handedness, especially during the emergency. Remember that Bhaan Lal walked away with the entire Janata legislature party to the Congress in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980. Quite candidly, I am baffled. I cannot explain this phenomenon. So I have no choice but to let it pass.
Cult of Personality
To take up the substantive issue of merger, I might begin by saying that I am in agreement with the others on the need for an alternative to the Congress which itself came to be subordinated to Indira Gandhi’s cult of personality (and subsequently of the family). But to say that it is a feasible proposition? This has been my point of departure from fellow journalists who have been enthusiastic about opposition unity. This remains my point of departure. The desirable is not necessarily feasible.
History is not a popular subject with most of us, not even recent history. But we cannot wish away history, just as we cannot wish away the Satan who tempts us away from the straight and narrow path. It dogs us, however hard we try to obliterate it, and history is not promising on the subject of merger of parties.
The story began with the merger of the Congress socialists, who had quit the parent organisation in 1948 in the fond hope that Nehru would soon join them and the supporters of Acharya Kripalani who had left the parent organisation towards the end of 1951 on the eve of the first general election in early 1952 to form the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. The new party was known as the Praja Socialist Party (PSP).
It was a strange merger. There was little in common between the Acharya with his Gandhian commitments and the socialists who, including Jayaprakash Narayan, still swore by Marxism. The merger was guided by arithmetical calculations. The two groups together had won over 16 per cent of the vote in the first general election against the Congress party’s 45 per cent. Together they could possibly constitute a challenge to the ruling party and provide the Indian people an alternative they could opt for if they were dissatisfied with the performance of the Congress. The CPI and the Jana Sangh had secured only 3.3 and 3.1 percent respectively of the total vote.
The experiment, it is hardly necessary to recall, came unstuck. Indeed, the tension among the socialists themselves resulting from the personality-policy clash between Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia exploded into the open, leading to a split in the PSP, with Lohia’s followers forming the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP). And while JP renounced politics to take up the Gandhian programme of Bhoodan and Gramdan under Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s leadership and to espouse the cause of partyless democracy, whatever it might mean, Lohia recast Marxism in caste terms to project backward castes as the principal instrument of the would-be Indian revolution. The PSP languished till it became virtually extinct and the SSPs influence remained limited to certain castes and constituencies in Bihar. And one would be hard put to trace the extinction of the KMPP.
The collapse of the PSP experiment and Nehru’s easy dominance of the national scene upto the Chinese attack in October-November 1962 apparently discouraged the revival of the merger theory. It was not revived even in 1967 when quite unexpectedly, though not surprisingly in retrospect, the Congress lost its majority in all north Indian states from Himachal Pradesh to West Bengal. Only coalition governments were sought to be formed exclusively on the platform of keeping the Congress out of office, the coalition experiment too failed. But that is another issue, even if a related one.
Grand Alliance
Then we had the grand alliance in 1971 as a reaction to Indira Gandhi’s highly provocative and aggressive style of politics leading to a major split in the Congress in 1969 and her subsequent alliance with the Communist Party of India. The grand alliance, which included the breakaway Congress (O) and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was led by stalwarts such as Kamaraj Nadar, Atulya Ghosh, Morarji Desai and S.K. Patil who, with their lieutenants, had formed the backbone of the Congress organisation before the split. But it failed to unseat Indira Gandhi, who in fact won a landslide victory in the poll to the Lok Sabha and it soon disintegrated.
The story of the formation of the Janata in 1977 and its disintegration is too recent and too well known to need being recalled, except to make the point that even when the Janata was alive, the constituent units retained their identity and leadership structures such as they were and all important leaders, whether in the government or the organisation, relied principally on their old colleagues and lieutenants in the original parties before the merger. This point is important because it spotlights the basic difficulty in the merger of parties.
It is a commonplace that ours is a segmented society, that it is a society in which reasonably well defined and easily identifiable segments are linked rather loosely. But it is quite uncommon to grasp the natural corollary that politicisation of such a society must proceed segment-wise and that every party must be based essentially either on the support of one powerful segment like the Jats in Haryana and western UP and the Yadavs in eastern UP and Bihar or an alliance of such segments if the party in question can win over the leaders of those segments as Charan Singh could do after he quit the Congress in 1967.
The Congress alone has been able to defeat this social reality. Most of us have rested content with noting the fact and drawing the inference that another party too can repeat this remarkable achievement provided it gives itself a wide base to begin with. We have as a rule not tried to explore deeply enough the factors that have made it possible for the Congress to cut across all divisions in the Indian society, especially the caste ones among the Hindus, which I for one regard as the most formidable obstacle in the path of a balanced political order in the country. So our conclusion that another party can do the same is an expression of our wish and not a result of careful and reasoned assessment.
Marginal Role
The issue is too complex to be dealt with even cursorily in this space. Here I can only state my conclusion that I do not see how a merger of representatives of diverse segments can produce a viable party. In my opinion, aggregation cannot make for unity of purpose and direction and must be followed by disaggregation both in victory and defeat. The Congress is not a mere aggregate of diverse segments. Though it is often described as an umbrella organisation, it has a unity which is not easy either to define or explain. The would-be Samajwadi Janata party cannot acquire that unity even if it manages to survive the problems of adjustment among unlikely partners. The name itself is unmanageable. Samajwadi (socialist) is, of course, a non-starter. Between them, Gorbachov and Deng Xiaoping have deprived it of such appeal as it might have managed to retain despite the crimes of the apostles (Stalin and Mao) and the failure of all socialist economies. The remaining two – Janata and Dal – will compete for popular acceptance. Both could lose in that race.
This assessment is not intended to bring any comfort to the Congress leadership. The widespread popular disenchantment with it is only partly the result of the activities of opposition leaders and the disarray among them cannot by itself help it recover the lost support. The role of the opposition even in the exposure of the Bofors payoff scandal has been marginal. In any event, the resulting damage can be undone only if the Congress leadership is able to put its own house in order (it is a huge mess) and to adopt and implement measures which can capture the people’s imagination. The Congress can continue to decline and lose support even in the absence of an organised challenge. Indeed, that is the dreadful prospect the country faces.
The Times of India, 28 July 1988