It is understandable that Mrs Gandhi should be trying to score points against the opposition and the press. Since the election to the Lok Sabha is barely some months away, it is only natural that she should seek to buttress her and her party’s position by undermining that of her critics. Whether we like or not, this is an unavoidable part of electoral politics. Even so in the interest of a healthy public debate on issues of the greatest importance for the future of democracy in the country, it is necessary to look at both sides of the story dispassionately.
The Prime Minister is quite justified in pointing out that Mr Charan Singh is not entitled to hold the mirror to others in respect of political morality. He was among the first group of second-rank Congress leaders who inaugurated the era of defections in 1967 after the party had suffered a major electoral reverse in the whole of north India. And his role in bringing down the Janata government in the summer of 1979 – Mrs Gandhi does not appear to have referred to this episode in her public speeches perhaps because she was party to it and its principal beneficiary – is too recent to need to be recalled. Indeed, there can be no question that Mr Charan Singh is ill-qualified to aspire to the office of Prime Minister and to head an opposition alliance system.
But three other points deserve to be noted. First, Mrs Gandhi sought and secured Mr Charan Singh’s support for her adopted candidate, Mr VV Giri, in the critically important presidential election in 1969 against the Congress party’s official candidate, Mr Sanjiva Reddy, whom she opposed. Secondly, it is just not correct to say that the press failed to condemn Mr Charan Singh’s defection in the ‘sixties.
Natural Desire
The press, it is hardly necessary to emphasise, is not, and must not be a monolith. It does not, cannot and must not speak with one voice. But it is common knowledge that major newspapers and magazines were highly critical of the defectors in the ‘sixties, that they have been pressing for an anti-defection law ever since and that if such a law has not been enacted, the press is not to blame. Finally, while Mrs Gandhi’s references to Mr Charan Singh might be understandable in view of her natural desire to discredit him, they did not make much sense in the context in which she made them, that is in relation to the storm of protest which developments in Andhra provoked.
The storm of protest, as we argued day after day in adjoining columns when the sordid drama lasted in Hyderabad, was wholly justified. The then governor of Andhra Pradesh, Mr Ram Lal, had violated every democratic norm in dismissing Mr NT Rama Rao and swearing in Mr Bhaskara Rao as chief minister on August 16. Indeed, he could be said to have participated in the plans to topple Mr Rama Rao. But that is not the central issue in the present discussion. At present we are also not primarily concerned with the morality of Mrs Gandhi’s response. We are interested above all in its relevance and effectiveness – and not just in respect of Andhra Pradesh.
It will be facetious to talk of facts which are difficult to establish. It is safer to talk in terms of the vaguer category of public opinion. And as far as we are able to determine, public opinion was on the whole favourably disposed towards Mrs Gandhi in the wake of the army action in Punjab so much so that she appeared assured of a majority in the forthcoming poll in the Lok Sabha. The dismissal of the Farooq ministry in Jammu and Kashmir in early July had come as a shock to a significant section of the intelligentsia. But on the whole the popular reaction to the event had been mixed and muted.
Three factors probably accounted for this kind of response. First, the respect for democratic values and norms has always been rather weak in Jammu and Kashmir on the part of those in office there. Even the last elections to the state assembly had been far from free and fair. Secondly, though Dr Farooq Abdullah has, unlike his famous father, Sheikh Abdullah, sought to forge all-India political links, his motives and actions in Jammu and Kashmir itself had not been wholly above suspicion for ordinary people who, for instance, did not know that Maulvi Farooq (Mir Waiz), supposed to be a secessionist, was in fact a pretty harmless person. Finally, since Jammu and Kashmir is a border state the status of which continues to be disputed by Pakistan, it is widely assumed that the Centre is justified in maintaining a measure of vigilance and control there. But Andhra Pradesh was a different affair from the very start.
Master Practitioner
Only the innocent can believe that manipulation can have no place at all in democratic politics. It has, and Indians have always recognised this to be the case, as the briefest acquaintance with the Mahabharat will show. Even Gandhiji was not a saint in the Christian sense of the term. But in Andhra the then governor exceeded the permissible limit. He did not just manipulate the democratic process; he led an assault on the Constitution.
As events developed, it is obvious that Mrs Gandhi should have been quick to cut her losses. It was clear on August 17, if not on August 16 itself, that Mr Bhaskara Rao did not possess a majority in the state assembly. Similarly, by August 20 when Mr NT Rama Rao and his MLAs reached Delhi, it was reasonably clear that Mr Bhaskara Rao would find it difficult to buy himself such a majority. Thus by the time the Prime Minister spoke in Parliament on August 21, she had good reasons, in terms of realpolitik of which she, according to Dr. Henry Kissinger, is a master practitioner, to get rid of both Mr Ram Lal and Mr Bhaskara Rao. For reasons which are not quite clear, Mrs Gandhi allowed a whole month to elapse before she acted through the new governor and in the process lost a great deal of popular support which was building in her favour earlier.
But what if after being sworn in as chief minister on a false claim Mr Bhaskara Rao had been able to secure a majority by buying or coercing the necessary number of legislators. The question is not whether or not that too would have constituted an attack on the democratic process. It would have. The question is whether the people in Andhra Pradesh and in the country as a whole would have risen in the manner they did.
I do not feel competent to say what would have happened in Andhra Pradesh. For I have no idea how far Mr Rama Rao’s popularity had in fact slumped among the ordinary people. It is common knowledge that he had turned out to be a poor administrator, that he had pursued many hare-brained schemes, that he had behaved oddly as, for example, when he had worn a saree, that he had allowed his son and son- in-law to throw their weight about and that in the process he had alienated many party colleagues as well as bureaucrats. But despite all this it is difficult to be sure how far popular disenchantment with him had gone and whether he could have won back the people when out of office.
Be that as it may, it would appear to be a safe assumption, however, that the people in the rest of the country would have “reconciled” themselves to a fait accompli in Andhra Pradesh. They have always done so. In this case, their alienation built up day after day as Mr Bhaskar Rao failed to win a majority in the assembly and to demonstrate it.
Radical Rhetoric
It is, however, necessary to enter a caveat here. The people in India are long suffering; they put up with a lot; they are also realistic; they recognise that life is not a morality play which is precisely why they do not divide the world into black and white. But they have developed a dependence – I use the word dependence deliberately in preference to faith – on the Constitution and they feel insecure if it is seen to be under attack. Not only in the legal but also in the psychological sense the Constitution has become the foundation on which the Republic rests.
This point is not sufficiently appreciated in our discussions partly because all of us have been influenced in varying degrees by radical rhetoric and partly because most of us are not sufficiently sensitive to certain facts about our social history. Three of these may be mentioned. First, contrary to the belief spread by scholars, the Hindu society has survived for millennia not so much on the strength of the great religious figures it has thrown up from time to time as on that of the caste rules. These have been the bedrock on which the Indian civil society has rested. In other words, our society has always had what we call the rule of law these days, though the sword was final arbiter in matters relating to power before the British consolidated their rule in the latter part of the 19th century.
Secondly, such a society was bound to take to law courts. For, even if they were unable to deliver justice and were in fact incapable of delivering it because they were corrupt and their procedures were dilatory, they held the promise of doing so some day. In any case, the court replaced the sword as the arbiter in disputes. Thus it is not an accident that Indians took to British jurisprudence as naturally as ducks take to water.
Finally, the dependence on the Constitution is a logical corollary to what has gone on before. So no wise ruler would wish to be seen to be violating it even if he tries and manages to bypass it. Mrs Gandhi is too sensitive to have missed the impact of the supersession of three Supreme Court judges on her political fortunes in the seventies. That it presumably why she is reluctant to try and bend the Constitution to provide for a presidential system. Why then Andhra?
The Times of India, 19 September 1984