A great deal has been written about the limited nature of the challenge Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, Mr. Gundu Rao and their supporters can pose to the Congress and Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership of the party. We generally agree with this assessment.
This assessment is naturally based on the general appreciation of the pull and leadership qualities of Mr. Mukherjee and Mr. Rao. But not much attention need be paid to this aspect of the development. A fundamental change took place in the character of the Congress party on the achievement of Independence in 1947. To a substantial extent, it became dependent for its survival on its access to state machinery and the power of patronage this access provided it. Since then, there has been nothing like a heavyweight Congress leader outside office, except Mr. Kamaraj Nadar and other members of the “Syndicate” during the twilight of the Nehru era, when it suited him to lend them power and prestige. Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri was busy trying to cut them down to size, when he died in January 1966 and Mrs. Indira Gandhi finally accomplished this task in 1969. A Congressman out of power is not likely to prove effective, even if he is seen to enjoy a certain amount of sympathy and support.
After Power
The outcome of the struggle for power in the party in 1969, too, could have been different if Mrs Gandhi was not Prime Minister and if the “Syndicate” nominee, Mr Sanjiva Reddy, and not her candidate, Mr. V. V. Giri, had won the presidential election. Most Congressmen are great respectors of power and they go where they think power resides. The general view, then, was that in the event of Mr. Giri’s defeat, Mrs. Gandhi could not retain the support of more than 60 out of 282 Congress members of the Lok Sabha. As things developed, the “Syndicate” ended up with that kind of miserable support; Mrs. Gandhi walked away with the huge majority.
The ineffectiveness of the challenge posed by the expelled dissidents must please Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and those of his aides who advised him to get rid of the troublesome men. But basically, there is not much cause for satisfaction for Mr. Gandhi. He never had much to fear from the so-called dissidents, who were asking for nothing more than accommodation in the new dispensation. Search for some crumbs from the leader’s table is an essential part of the Congress culture. Gone are the days when Congressmen could stand for some cause or principle in opposition to the leader and when they sought substance of power and not a mere office and the perquisites that go with it.
Initial Hatred
If there is no challenge to Mr. Rajiv Gandhi from the Congress “dissidents”, expelled, suspended or under surveillance, there is none either from the opposition. Opposition leaders are clueless and dispirited. But this too is not an unmixed blessing for the Prime Minister. To appreciate this point, we shall have to go back to the Indira Gandhi period. Opposition leaders were then active, thanks to their initial hatred.
It will be partisan for us to say whether she adopted the confrontationist approach towards them out of her undying suspicion of them or they forced such an approach on her. But the fact of the confrontation between her and them is indisputable. And this, at least, helped
promote and sustain effort on their part to forge a common platform and come together. It is difficult to recall the number of opposition conclaves in 1984.
The confrontation did not endear Mrs. Indira Gandhi to the articulate section of the intelligentsia, which had convinced itself that Mr. Nehru, had followed what it called the
politics of consensus and that this was what the country required. But, as noted above, the confrontation was useful to her opponents and it was useful to her as well. For the so-called politics of confrontation was necessary, if she was to attempt to create the impression that the country was besieged by hostile forces, external and internal, and that the Congress alone under her leadership could hope to contain them.
Our view has been that the platform partly conformed to the reality. Mrs. Gandhi’s return to office was soon followed by resumption of U.S. military aid to Pakistan and a series of other moves by Washington to establish a dominant military presence in the regions around India; these inevitably placed the U.S. in a certain posture vis-a-vis India which could not be friendly, even if it was not deliberately hostile. These moves were followed by the Akali morcha, the rise of Bhindranwale with his cult of killing the Hindus in Punjab, the spread of extremism and terrorism in the state; the discovery of some evidence of Pakistani involvement with the terrorists. Mrs. Gandhi’s attempts to befriend the Reagan administration had also met, at best, with a limited response. So, in our opinion, the adoption of nationalist platform by Mrs. Gandhi was justified by the facts of the situation. But what choice did she have even otherwise? None, in view the internal decay of the Congress, leading, among other things, to its defeat in early 1982 in Andhra and Karnataka, two of party’s strongholds, which had remained loyal to her even in 1977, and helped her in her bid to stage a comeback in 1980.
Mr Rajiv Gandhi has given up the Indira platform of which confrontation with the opposition was only a symbol. He believes in the possibility of reasonably good relations with the United States, despite its continuing military assistance to Pakistan and of cooperation with the country’s neighbours, despite their record of distrust and even ill-will. He has been somewhat stymied in his efforts to strengthen ties with Washington because the Pentagon has been less than helpful on the transfer of high-level technology and with Pakistan because the evidence of Islamabad’s involvement with the Sikh terrorists has been irrefutable.
India’s Status
But basically his approach is different from Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s, which rested on a fundamental belief that the U.S.A. would never recognise India’s proper status in Asia, that Washington would use India’s neighbours to embarrass and harass her and that the neighbours would gladly lend their services to any external power, be it the U.S.A. or China, in its anti-India design. Also Mrs Gandhi did not have much confidence in the capacity of opposition leaders to understand the external reality and stand up to external pressures. Indeed, she suspected many of them of being so blinded by their hatred of her, as to make them unwitting g instruments of India’s enemies. Mr Rajiv Gandhi does not entertain such fears and suspicions.
It is no secret that we have been sympathetic to Mrs. Gandhi’s overall assessment and that we have been rather critical of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi’s. But that is not the issue we wish to press today. The issue that concerns us in this discussion is whether or not Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has worked out an alternative platform of his own, which can help him to keep himself and Congress in office.
It is not easy for Mr. Gandhi to work out an alternative platform, whatever some of his youthful aides might have believed in their inexperience. Indeed, we do not even know of many theoretical attempts at serious analysis, which can serve as the basis for such an alternative platform. This task cannot be attempted here. But a few points can be made.
First, India is most uncomfortably placed in international power terms. While she is not another Pakistan, which can accept US domination and the role assigned to her, she is not strong enough to exercise her natural pre-eminence in what is her natural sphere of influence – South Asia. The U.S. cannot give her priority over Pakistan in view of the latter’s geo-strategic location and closeness of Arab-Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia which occupy an important place in the American scheme of things; the Soviet Union can help India but not to the extent of tilting the balance in her favour; this has been especially so because China has sided with Pakistan. India has sought to break out of this impossible regional situation through the non-aligned movement. But NAM can at best be of limited help.
If anything, India’s dilemma has become more cruel since Mr. Rajiv Gandhi came to office. This period has witnessed an aggressive and successful use of force by the United States as in Grenada and Libya and repeated, even if indirect, acknowledgement by the Soviet Union that it cannot compete with the United States in the field of nuclear weapons. And China remains as intransigent as ever.
Personality Cult
Domestically, we can debate till the end of time, whether Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s cult of personality was the cause or the effect of the decline of the Congress. That partisan approach would not lead us anywhere, as it has not led us anywhere in the last 17 years. For it was both. Mrs. Gandhi could not have succeeded in her manoeuvres in 1969, if the organisation was not already in a poor shape; the so-called organisational bosses were beaten men, before she took them on. And the party would not have been reduced to the status of “her and her younger son” Praetorian guard if she had placed herself above the party. Imagine an elected Prime Minister being able to suspend the Constitution, just to avoid being unseated, get it approved by parliament and then virtually nominate Mr. Sanjay Gandhi as her successor.
But Mrs. Gandhi was able to cover up at least superficially the fact of the Congress decline, by her projection of her personality. The radical programme summed up in the ‘Garibi Hatao’ slogan served her well; so did victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh crisis in December 1971. But gradually, the decline, accelerated by her own authoritarianism, proved too much for her to cover up. The turning point appears to have been the defeat in Andhra and Karnataka in early 1982. She recovered some ground and morale in the elections in Delhi and Jammu in 1982 and 1983, to be able to soldier on. But she was close to the end of her tether by the time of her assassination.
Debate Taboo
Perhaps Mr. Rajiv Gandhi recognised that his mother’s strategy had been exhausted. Perhaps that was one reason why he decided to put some distance between himself and her. Perhaps that was why he announced his decision to have early organisational elections in the Congress. But he appears to have wavered in the very first test. The disciplinary action against Mr Mukherjee and others was not a sign of strength. It represented the continuation of the old discredited ways, whereby all debate is taboo in the party, and the leader does not have to bother about the norms.
A leadership wanting to reverse the clock, would have welcomed a measure of dissent, knowing, as it would have, that the absence of dissent had reduced the party to a corpse, which towards the end, even Mrs. Gandhi had found too heavy to carry. In any case, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi cannot practise the “cult of personality”. He has to do all he can to revive the party – by allowing an air of freedom, debate and dissent to flow through its corridors – if it is not to face a 1967. No one then, not even any opposition leader, expected it to be driven out of office, in all North Indian states.
The Times of India, 27 August 1986