Seldom before have opposition leaders cut such sorry figures as they do today. The people are by and large indifferent to what they do. They can split a party (Jagjivan Ram), merge their groups (HN Bahuguna and Raj Narain), propose the coming together of leading opposition parties (Madhu Limaye), and seek admission to the ruling Congress (YB Chavan) without making the slightest impact on public opinion.
It is easy to blame opposition leaders for this popular apathy. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the view that some of them have gone out of their way to invite the contempt of the people. YB Chavan, for example, who has offered no credible explanation for his decision to leave the Congress (U) and seek entry into the Congress (I). Or Raj Narain who talks of opposition unity after having done all in his power to bring down the Janata government and split the Janata Party in 1979. But a careful and dispassionate student of Indian politics cannot also help sympathise with opposition leaders.
They cannot build a strong and viable opposition, however skilful, principled and determined they may be. Indian society is inherently incapable of sustaining the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy if this implies, as it must, the existence of two parties of nearly equal strength so that the one in opposition can easily take over the task of running the government if the ruling party fails to deliver the goods and forfeits popular support on that or some other account.
This must be a highly disturbing conclusion for all those who believe that parliamentary democracy is best suited to meet India’s needs. But it is inescapable in the light of the history of the last three decades. Jayaprakash Narayan, it is true, led the assault on Mrs Gandhi’s government and can be said to have brought it down. He was also able to persuade major opposition parties – the Congress (O), the Jana Sangh, the BKD and the socialists – to merge and form the Janata. But the experiment was a short-lived affair. In fact, it is the failure of the Janata experiment that has made the common people so apathetic towards opposition leaders and their activities.
Shortcomings
Similarly, it is not possible to sustain the view that while out of office Mrs Gandhi was able to build an effective opposition party. For one thing, there was no viable ruling party for Mrs Gandhi to contend with. For another, the Janata collapsed as a result of its internal contradictions and not as a result of a popular upsurge organised and led by the Congress (I). In fact, the Janata so lacked credibility as a ruling party from the very start that a discerning observer of the Indian scene could not help coming to the conclusion that it was only a matter of time before Mrs Gandhi would be back in office.
This assessment had little to do with the strength of the Congress (I) which by common consent was more of a praetorian guard for her and her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, than a party with a reasonably well-defined organisational structure and rules of its own. The assessment was based largely on the strength of Mrs Gandhi’s personality and her pull with the people all over the country.
This brings us to the heart of the problem of Indian politics – the country’s critical dependence or an individual for political stability and order. This reality was obscured from public view till Mrs Gandhi split the Congress in 1969, indeed till she split it for the second time in 1978, largely because so great has been the British influence on Indian intellectuals and commentators that they have been unwilling to recognise the Indian socio-political reality for what it is. They have taken it for granted that like Britain, India, too, can produce coherent parties which do not depend for their survival on outstanding leaders.
This lack of understanding of their own society is truly amazing in view of the ease with which first Gandhiji and then Jawaharlal Nehru dominated the Congress and vanquished their opponents. Gandhiji, for instance, forced the duly elected Subhas Chandra Bose to resign as Congress president and virtually drove him into the wilderness. Nehru did the same to Purushottamdas Tandon some 13 years later, apparently to underline the point that henceforth only those loyal to him at least outwardly could hold important positions in the party and the government.
Reality
It is not at all clear whether Mrs Gandhi was aware of this Indian reality – the country’s dependence on a towering individual for political order – when she decided to challenge the organisational bosses in 1969 and whether she had already concluded that she was far taller than her opponents. Perhaps she acted with ruthlessness and determination because she believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were plotting to remove her from the office of Prime Minister. In the context of the present discussion, her motivation or compulsion is, however, of secondary importance. What is important is that the result once again demonstrated that the future of a mass non-cadre party depended not so much on its organisation and programme as on the presence or absence of a popular figure at its head.
But once again this fact was obscured from public view, this time partly because Mrs Gandhi’s decision to nationalise leading commercial banks, woo the CPI and give a left-wing orientation to government policies created the impression that she owed her survival, stature and finally the electoral triumph in the mid-term poll to the Lok Sabha in 1971 to her radical programme and not to her personality. The fact that she was Prime Minister when she split the party also promoted the view that her office was vital for her victory over the organisational bosses.
Clearly, none of these factors operated in her favour in 1978 when she split the Congress for the second time. She was not only out of power, but she carried stigma of the excesses of the emergency and the failure to restrain Sanjay Gandhi. Yet, within weeks of its “formation”, her Congress (I) pushed the parent organisation into near oblivion in the election to state legislatures in Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Now only the utterly naive could miss the significance of this development. It not only showed that Mrs Gandhi was set on the come-back trail, but also conclusively established primacy of the individual in Indian politics.
Stature
One additional point may be noted in relation to Mrs Gandhi’s stature. Her dominance of the Indian political scene is far stronger now than in 1971-72 when she won landslide victories in the polls, first to the Lok Sabha and then to state vidhan sabhas. After 1971-72, it was still possible for people to believe that opposition parties could unite to pool their vote and defeat the Congress. The collapse of the Janata experiment has put paid to that hope (or illusion) for a long, long time.
In 1971-72, Mrs Gandhi could not have publicly leaned on her son without weakening to some degree her moral position and authority. Now she is expected promote Rajiv Gandhi so that, in course of time, he is ready to step into her place. Some individuals continue to denounce the “dynastic principle” as if this is a worse evil than the risk of political disorder and anarchy, but the people pay little heed to this kind of talk. Mrs Gandhi did not acquire the status of “Empress of India” when The Economist, London, so described her after the liberation of Bangladesh in December 1971. She had acquired that position in the post-Janata phase. But emperors and empresses are no less vulnerable to shifts in popular mood than presidents and prime ministers.
Mrs Gandhi knows that from her own experience and, therefore, watches the public mood with great care, though she tends to mistake a symptom of popular discontent like newspaper criticism for the cause. She also possesses enormous patience and skill in defusing dangerous agitations. But that cannot suffice in so difficult and rapidly changing a situation as India’s. In the very act of asserting her supremacy over the Indian political scene, she has assumed the awesome responsibility of seeing the country through the turbulent eighties. Unlike in the past, she has now no cushion in that the people blame her and not her ministers and advisers for the failure of the government.
This raises a number of problems which I shall discuss in a subsequent article.
The Times of India, 19 August 1981