Indira Gandhi, as noted in the previous article, took a hand in the propagation of the Nehru myth. But she was not its architect. Indeed, the myth had no human architect or architects, though many, including Gandhiji, had contributed to it. It was the product of the collective Indian psyche, to use the Jungian phrase. No Indian we can think of, perhaps not even Gandhiji, has fulfilled so many psychological needs of so many Indians of so many categories as Nehru.
Nehru had many faces. It was not without reason that his detractors such as Rammanohar Lohia called him a Bahrupia (a man of many guises). Indeed, in the famous article Nehru wrote in the thirties in The Modern Review, Calcutta, under a pseudonym, he described himself as an actor without rouge and powder.
All these constituents of the Nehru myth are not pertinent to this assessment of the tragedy of Indira Gandhi. I am concerned primarily with one component – the universal Indian belief that he had resolved the problem of leadership and that it was possible for the daughter to follow in his footsteps in this regard.
I am not so persuaded. I do not believe Nehru had solved the leadership issue or, indeed, that anyone in his place could have solved it. He produced a patchwork. The patchwork wore off with the passage of time. It was in tatters by the time he left the scene in 1964.
The problem surfaced soon after independence when the then Congress president, Acharya Kripalani, demanded a say in the formulation of the government’s policies. Nehru could brush him aside and insist on the supremacy of the leader of the parliamentary wing on the pattern of the British Labour Party because the other party stalwarts, also members of his government, backed him and the Acharya was in any case a second-rank leader.
But it did not resolve the question of the proper relationship between the government and the party and their chiefs. This became evident at the time of the election of Purushottamdas Tandon as Congress president in 1950 with the backing of Sardar Patel and in the teeth of opposition by Nehru. Nehru saw it as a challenge to himself but decided to acquiesce in it for a variety of reasons, including perhaps the consideration of his own survival as Prime Minster.
Offices Combined
He picked up the gauntlet in 1951 after the death of Sardar Patel in December 1950. This time he sought to resolve the problem in another way. After securing Tandon’s resignation through a campaign not very dissimilar from Indira Gandhi’s in 1969, he combined the two offices of Prime Minister and Congress president in himself. But this itself was an admission that a proper solution on the British Labour Party pattern was not available to him. The model itself has subsequently been found inadequate. But its weaknesses were not known to most Indians. Nehru accepted the model but could not apply it.
On the face of it, the patchwork worked till the early sixties largely on the strength of Nehru’s personality. Then this strength declined rather dramatically in both the moral and physical sense. Nehru was already an ailing man on the defensive in 1962 – he had been unable to defend his China policy since the flight of the Dalai Lama with thousands of Tibetans in 1959 and had to engage in adventurism in the shape of putting up small military posts behind the Chinese lines – when the Chinese launched a well-planned attack in what was then known as NEFA. He never recovered from the blow. In early 1964 he suffered a stroke at the Bhubaneswar session of the Congress and died in May that year. As was to be expected the party hierarchs under the leadership of Kamaraj Nadar had begun to assert themselves in this period of his decline. Nehru recognised that he needed Kamaraj’s help to get rid of cabinet colleagues he did not trust and to ensure Lal Bahadur Shastri’s succession. We were back to square one.
Unlike Indira Gandhi, Nehru was not religious in the traditional sense. Religion in his case had got transmuted into patriotism; “Mother India” had become his goddess as it had Vivekananda’s and for a time Sri Aurobindo’s. His leadership style was deeply traditional.
At the conscious level the appeal of emperor Asoka for him was vague; it was part of the general appeal of Buddhism for him; he was a pacifist, though not strictly a Gandhian who would forswear the use of force as such. Perhaps he was not even aware that a victorious Hindu king seldom destroyed a defeated king, that the former was content with the acknowledgement of his suzerainty by the latter, and the “circle of kings” as defined by Kautilya in his Arthasastra included the defeated ones. But he practised this age-old Indian approach just as Akbar practised it without being aware of it. Thus Nehru was content with a symbolic victory over supporters of Patel in the Congress. The party for him had been purged of right-wing elements with the resignation of Tandon as Congress president. No Patel crony was penalised or demoted thereafter.
Challenge Dispersed
Clearly this approach could not produce a coherent party organisation and it could work only so long as the leader’s supremacy was not frontally challenged, as it was not in Nehru’s case from 1951 onwards. The Congress under Nehru ruled with the support of less than half of the electorate; it secured around 45 per cent of the votes polled. But the challenge was dispersed.
For all we know, Indira Gandhi might also have adopted and pursued Nehru’s leadership style if she had been similarly placed. But that was not so. The two main differences in her and the father’s post-1950 positions are well known to students of Indian history. But they need to be recalled because the Indian intelligentsia fail to draw the necessary conclusion. Which is that Indira Gandhi could not have acted very differently from the way she did not only if she was to survive as Prime Minister, but also if she was to preside over even a semblance of a political order.
First the party hierarchs who had secured her elevation to prime ministership and brushed aside Morarji Desai in the wake of Shastri’s death in 1966 were not willing to subordinate themselves to Indira Gandhi as they had done to Nehru. It was a minor version of the post-Stalin situation in the Soviet Union.
Indira Gandhi did not yield to them to produce an Indian version of the confusion called “collective leadership”. But she did not force and could not have forced a showdown. She lived with a sort of uneasy truce till 1969 and might have continued to do so if the hierarchs had not forced her hands. This is not to blame them. They were as much victims of the dynamics of the post-Nehru era as she was. But the fact remains that they fired the first shot when in the face of opposition by her as Prime Minister, they chose Sanjiva Reddy as the Congress nominee for election as President. Perhaps they were desperate. For several of them, including Kamaraj himself and Atulya Ghosh, had been defeated in the 1967 elections and feared total eclipse if they let slip the opportunity the death of President Zakir Husain had provided them.
Secondly, the Congress was in poor shape especially in north India, when Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. The erosion of its support base became evident in the 1967 election results. The Congress lost power in all north Indian states and its two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha was drastically reduced. This would have been a blow to the party leadership if this decline was accompanied by the rise of another party or a viable coalition, but not to the country. This was, however, not the case. A number of parties wholly incapable of working together had come up. This incapacity became obvious as one coalition after another yielded place to another equally unstable combination.
Impersonal Issue
What should Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister and therefore guardian of political order in the country have done? From the purely constitutional point of view, it can be argued that she should have let the governor in each state decide when to recommend dissolution of a vidhan sabha and fresh elections. But fresh elections could have led to a repetition of the same situation. And such a demonstration of incapacity to act would almost certainly have destroyed the authority of the Indian Prime Minister. The issue again was impersonal – the authority of Prime Minister and not of Indira Gandhi.
The issue is not as straightforward and simple as Indira Gandhi’s moralist-constitutionalist detractors would have us believe. In view of the bewildering heterogeneity of its society and that too in turmoil, India must have a towering leader or break up into pieces or pass under military-bureaucratic rule. A nationwide freedom movement capable of taking over from the British would have been inconceivable without Gandhiji and the consolidation of that freedom unthinkable without Nehru. Indira Gandhi would have presided over the country’s descent into anarchy or the rise of a dictatorship if she had sat idle.
She was not that kind of person. She would rather bend the constitution than allow political confusion to prevail; she could not be untrue to the memory of those who had died for freedom and those who had, wisely in my view, armed the Centre with enormous powers in order that it ensure the country’s security and internal integrity. But let us put Indira Gandhi’s personality aside for the time being and ask what she should have done ideally in order to secure the country’s internal cohesion. Between 1967 and end of 1969, she achieved two goals vital for Indira’s stability. She restored the Congress to power in much of north India and she achieved supremacy in the party.
To be concluded
The Times of India, 1 November 1985