If it is assumed, as it should be, that in its deepest recesses the Indian spirit looks for consensus and not contention, certain startling conclusions would follow for the political order we are seeking to establish.
The Indian spirit is, of course, not having a free play. For, the country’s western educated elite has not only borrowed western institutions but also accepted western yardsticks for measuring its own “progressiveness” and “backwardness”.
But this elite has not prevailed. The Indian spirit has shown an extraordinary capacity for survival and self-assertion. This self-assertion cannot in the nature of things be a straightforward affair. The ideas, ideals and institutions borrowed from the west clash with it and obstruct its flow at every turn. But, like any current in similar circumstances, the Indian spirit has learnt to bypass obstacles it cannot overcome. The inevitable result is the confusion of values and approaches we see all around us in every sphere of our activity.
To be accurate, the western-educated elite is itself not a monolith in its thought processes, aspirations and behaviour. It is divided against itself, indeed, every member of it is divided against himself or herself. While on the surface its thought processes are dominated by the west, they remain Indian in their deeper layers. Very few Indians, for example, are capable of the kind of rigorous logic which is quite common among educated westerners. Some rare exceptions apart, an Indian cannot, unlike a westerner, go on dividing and sub-dividing reality in order to understand it; he has to look for the principle of unity on which his entire cosmic scheme rests. That accounts for our initial proposition that the Indian spirit must look for consensus and not contention.
One conclusion of great practical importance must flow from this proposition. Which is that India cannot handle conflict situations with felicity. Its leadership must find conflict as something abnormal and must be keen to terminate it as soon as possible. Also India cannot be a fertile ground for the rise and growth of rival political parties.
Limited Appeal
The reality clearly conforms to the second inference. Apart from the two communist parties with their limited appeal and prospects, we do not possess a single all-India political organisation which can be described as a party in the original western sense of the term. For none of them is based on a reasonably well-defined ideology.
At the heart of whatever “system” we possess stands the Indian National Congress headed by Mr Rajiv Gandhi. So any attempt at definition of the “system” must begin with the Congress. The British rulers, of course, did not regard it as anything more than a political party, even if the most influential of them all. They were doubtless guided by practical considerations. But their theoretical framework too could provide only for such a description of the Congress. We have borrowed this framework and have, therefore, unthinkingly and unhesitatingly treated the Congress as a party.
In doing so, we have disregarded both the history and the organisational structure of the Congress. It was formed in the image of the Raj it wanted to replace. The Congress president was supposed to be the equivalent of the viceroy, his working committee the counterpart of the viceroy’s executive council, the AICC of the central legislative council and so on down to the district level. And, as in the case of the Raj, orders in the Congress travelled from the top to the bottom; grassroot initiative was rare even before independence.
This image of the Congress as the new Raj-in-waiting was reinforced by the ideology of nationalism whereby it saw itself as the sole representative of the Indian nation. There has been a great deal of confusion on the definition of the Indian nation. The Congress has seen itself both as an expression of an Indian nation that already exists and as the architect of an Indian nation it is seeking to build. But in either role it has not accepted any other organisation as a legitimate rival.
This self-view of the Congress has often attracted the charge of authoritarianism against it. But this charge has been as much of an alien import as the tools of analysis which most of us have applied to the understanding of the Indian political scene. We have only to look at the organisational structure of the Congress to realise how absurd the charge is.
Though the Congress was established in 1885 – incidentally by an Englishman (not an Indian) with the help of some British-educated Indians – nothing like an organisation existed till the consolidation of Gandhi-Nehru leadership in the twenties. They gave it the organisation which survives even if battered out of shape.
Loose Structure
At a certain level, Gandhiji thought of the Congress as a nonviolent army; that is why he gave his followers a uniform – khadi cap, kurta-dhoti or kurta-payjama. But the Congress did not become an army of any kind. In the looseness of its structure and in its openness, it continued to resemble the Hindu society from which it sprang. In the twenties, it contained those who favoured entry into the legislatures (Mr CR Das and Pandit Motilal Nehru) under the Montague-Chelmsford reforms as well as those who were opposed to it (Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru); it counted among its leading lights men who are generally described as Hindu revivalists (Lala Lajpat Rai and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya) as well as staunch secularists (Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru). In the thirties, it accommodated radicals of various shades – socialists, communists and Royists.
The Indian spirit’s search for a consensual approach in this new and wholly unfamiliar field of agitational politics could not be a frictionless affair. There were frictions, some minor and some not minor, the challenge Mr Subhas Chandra Bose posed to Gandhiji’s leadership in 1938, for instance. But despite all this, the Congress remained an expression of the Indian spirit’s search for consensus. For almost every element in society could relate itself to some individual or group in this organisation.
This situation did not change on independence either when the socialists left the Congress in the vain calculation that they would replace it as the country’s leading political organisation, or after Sardar Patel’s death in December 1950 when Nehru forced the resignation of Purushottam Das Tandon as Congress president on partisan considerations. The socialists fragmented and mostly played what can be called a negative role in the nation’s affairs. Even so they did not cease to have links in the ruling Congress. Tandon’s was a case of ritual sacrifice; it satisfied Nehru and he left other supporters of Sardar Patel in the organisation where they were – in positions of influence and authority – and they continued to prosper thereafter. Nehru did not have many personal friends in key places.
Rough Period
The Congress entered a very rough period with the general election in 1967 when it lost its majority in all north Indian states. At least partly this led to the split in 1969. This split seriously weakened the organisational structure of what finally emerged as the Congress – the faction led by Mrs Indira Gandhi – since leading organisers at all levels left her. This made the organisation personality oriented to an extent had never been before. This was a fundamental change which go further emphasised first in 1975 when Mrs Gandhi proclaimed an internal emergency and then in 1978 when the Congress split once again. This has produced a grave distortion in the character of the Congress and led to loss of influence in large parts of the country.
Our inability to throw up a national alternative to the Congress is not the only handicap our democracy has faced. It has had to live with another, equally formidable one. Our political culture has been deeply influenced by the prevalent poverty and lack of opportunities with the result that most of the actors have lacked what might be called courage of conviction. In plain terms, the internal political life of the ruling party has been deeply influenced by considerations of expediency.
In such a situation, a great deal inevitably depends on the personal qualities of a top leader. Since the internal mechanism for correction within the ruling party and indeed within the system is weak, an unscrupulous leader (we have not had one so far) or a leader under pressure can, as Mrs Indira Gandhi did in 1975, overthrow the system and institute personal rule.
In a sense, it speaks for the strength of the system that Mrs Gandhi fell obliged to order elections within 18 months of the declaration of the emergency. She knew that the emergency had run out of steam in about six months and that it could not be used for a socio-economic uplift of the country because the people had been alienated; she herself had felt imprisoned in her own house. But what if Mr Sanjay Gandhi had prevailed, as he could well have? He was opposed to elections and was busy establishing in the Youth Congress an instrument for terrorising opponents into submission.
The answer lies buried in the womb of history. We cannot open that womb and read the answer. We also do not wish to speculate on the ifs and buts of history. We only wish to take note of the fact that Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s rise as the second most powerful person in the land after his mother was an indication of the weakness of the system, indeed of its degeneration.
The Times of India, 25 September 1986