PV Narasimha Rao is a cautious leader. He is not given to making exaggerated claims either for himself, or for his party. That is why he has been reluctant to see in the result of the current by-elections to the Lok Sabha an endorsement of his government by the people. Indeed, he has gone on to add that “election results are one thing and facing the situation quite another.”
It is, therefore, a pity that some of the campaign managers of such a man should have resorted to deplorable practices and thereby sullied his reputation for fairness and integrity earned after decades of dedicated public service.
The Prime Minister’s election was a foregone conclusion. Not only the people of Andhra Pradesh but the whole of South India had a stake in his success. The presence of the first South Indian in the office of Prime Minister was a matter of pride for them.
NT Rama Rao, himself a product of the injured pride of the people in Andhra, gave expression to this feeling when he decided not to put up a Telugu Desam candidate against him. Thus even in cynical terms of expediency, it was not at all necessary for Narasimha Rao’s supporters to ‘overexert’ themselves. That they did so is a sad commentary on our political culture after 40 years of experience in democracy. Too many of us remain alien to democratic culture.
That apart, however, the results of the by-elections to the Lok Sabha are not so much an endorsement of the Narasimha Rao government and of its new economic policy as they are an expression of a popular desire for stability at the centre. The people are fed up with instability and frequent polls. They want the government at the centre to last and they have said so eloquently in the present poll.
Opposition leaders are agreed that the voter has shown preference for Congress candidates in respect of Lok Sabha even when he has been inclined to vote for their candidates for the Vidhan Sabha. Clearly this augurs well for the Prime Minister and his government in New Delhi.
This is one possible reason why opposition leaders are not anxious to press the issue of patent malpractices in the election campaign in the Nandyal constituency. They do not wish to be seen to be trying to embarrass the Prime Minister.
Narasimha Rao’s personality accounts partly for the opposition’s friendly attitude towards him. He has established reasonably cordial relations with them. They are willing to cooperate with him to the extent they can without compromising their platform too much.
This is best illustrated by the Bhartiya Janata Party’s willingness to attend the recent meeting of the National Integration Council and to offer the formulation that its government in UP would not violate the verdict of the Allahabad High Court on Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue.
But then, the BJP cannot possibly violate the rulings of the court and can at best (or at worst) seek to circumvent these by enacting an appropriate piece of legislation. This it may still try to do. However, if the BJP had stayed away from the NIC meeting or had persisted with its earlier stand that courts cannot settle such issues, that would not have encouraged it to disregard court orders, but it might at least have helped pacify its constituents, although at the cost of blatantly announcing its communal intent to the rest of the country.
The BJP’s stance could not have been very different in view of the calm that has descended on the country’s political scene since last June. It would be an exaggeration to say that Narasimha Rao’s personality solely accounts for it. It could not have defused the crisis provoked by the indecisive results of the polls to the Lok Sabha in 1989 and 1991 if other factors were not favourable. The other factors have been favourable and Narasimha Rao’s personality has helped.
The feeling of fatigue among the people and their yearning for a measure of stability have already been noted. One more factor may be recorded, which is the collapse of the Soviet system, State and Union.
This has fully driven home the lesson that we have no choice but to jettison the old economic system if we are to have a chance of surviving in the new post-Cold War world. The Left knows this as well as anyone else, whatever its leading lights may say for the record to avoid alienation and demoralization among their followers and supporters.
All in all, a kind of political truce has come about in the country. Narasimha Rao is, as it were, made to order for presiding over such a truce. It suits him and he suits it.
A truce, however, is by definition fragile. It can break down. The danger is obvious enough. A power struggle in the Congress can unravel the present arrangement. A party gets reformed to become a new entity when it splits in a big way as the Congress did in 1969 and 1978. Those who left it then cannot return to it at the leadership level without upsetting its internal arrangements which, as it is, are tenuous. It is thus rather surprising that so experienced a leader as Ramakrishna Hegde should advocate such a course of action.
It is equally surprising that many Leftist intellectuals have not yet woken up to the fact that the new economic regime has to be accompanied by the policy of the closest possible friendship with the United States in the interest of the country’s security in the new environment.
The BJP is a reliable supporter for the Congress government in the pursuit of both the new economic and the defence-foreign policy because the party has advocated this approach fairly consistently for quite some time, though it must be said that some of its old stalwarts and newcomers are not wholly free from an anti-US bias. The National Front, such as it is, cannot replace the BJP for Narasimha Rao for the obvious reason that its Leftist allies have to be opposed to the new economic policy as well as friendship with the United States for their survival.
Two additional points may be made. First, the BJP cannot be too adventurist and confrontationist in view of the strong representation in it of traders and other similar elements; moreover, having come into office in four states and being well placed to do so in yet another, it has no choice but to favour the status quo.
Secondly, the Muslim leadership was rather short-sighted when it convinced itself that the Janata Dal under VP Singh’s leadership could provide Muslims an alternative to the Congress and indeed a much greater leverage in the nation’s political life. It should have been obvious to any discerning individual at the time of the poll in 1989 itself, not to speak of the one last May-June, that the Janata Dal was not a viable proposition and that VP Singh was not a leader capable of consolidating a new electoral arithmetic.
It is now widely recognised that the Janata Dal is not a viable organisation and neither VP Singh, nor for that matter anyone else, can manage the contradictions inherent in a caste-based organisation. This leaves the Muslim voter little choice but to return to the Congress and stay with it for the foreseeable future.
VP Singh’s own reputation had suffered a great deal as a result of the Janata Dal’s poor performance in the May-June 1991 election and the endless squabbling among its leaders subsequently. It has now received another blow in Amethi. He dug in there in order to deny Capt Satish Sharma the seat earlier held by Rajiv Gandhi and he failed, his Janata Dal candidate ending a poor third after the BJP.
India has taken a dramatic turn in respect of economic, foreign and defence policies and the new shape of the country’s political life will be determined by it in course of time, and not by old outdated slogans. What that new shape will be, it is too soon to predict.
Meanwhile, it is no longer possible to ignore the threat to Indian democracy represented by casteist politics backed by the gun. This is, of course, not an altogether new development. Bihar has been known for booth capturing and other forms of rigging for years and Haryana has not lagged too far behind. But a qualitative change took place in 1989 when the Janata Dal headed by VP Singh managed to lend ‘respectability’ to this kind of politics.
It is only natural that attention should have been focussed since the early seventies on the nexus between politics and big money. But the public discourse on this issue has been rather lopsided. There has been a strange reluctance on the part of politicians to acknowledge that crimes such as smuggling, illicit distillation, bootlegging and narcotic ‘trade’ produce a great deal of that ‘big money’ and that this led to a nexus between politics and crime. Gunmen have stood behind that unholy alliance in places like Bihar for some years. Now they have come to occupy treasury benches.
This issue has therefore to move to the top of national agenda. It is on this question that political parties need to get realigned.
Sunday Mail, 24 November 1991