Towards the end of 1977, Mr. Nirad Chaudhuri wrote an article in the Encounter, London, broadly taking the line that Mrs Gandhi was running the emergency regime with the help of the Western-educated elite which, according to him, had shamelessly exploited the Indian people since independence. The reality on the ground was quite different. The intelligentsia had more or less been completely alienated from Mrs. Gandhi and her associates, especially Mr. Sanjay Gandhi, so much so that she could depend on the “loyalty” of only a handful of civil servants and police officials who were either out for quick promotion and other gains, or who were too weak or too compromised to resist.
Mr. Chaudhuri was clearly wrong on facts. A vast majority of lawyers, journalists and academicians were positively hostile to Mrs. Gandhi as she was hostile to them. She had clamped down censorship on the press, ordered the demolition of lawyers’ shacks in various cities, including the capital, and sent the police into campuses, including the one named after her father of which she herself was the chancellor. But in his own provocative way, Mr. Nirad Chaudhuri was making some pertinent points – Mrs. Gandhi needed the support of the intelligentsia and it needed her ruthlessness and skill if it was to continue to rule the country.
Mr. Chaudhuri did not go into the problems of the relative decline of the Western-educated elite and the rise of rural and semi-urban elites, that is, of men and women in small towns and the countryside, who had acquired wealth and influence in recent years and been educated through the medium of Indian languages, and who were no longer quite content with such gains as they could make through the Congress party. In order to discuss this phenomenon, we have to go back to the past.
New Burden
Mr. Nehru’s liberal-socialist- communist battalions – all of them derive their ideas and ideals from Western sources and are, therefore, broadly members of one family – were in disarray long before he departed from the scene on May 27, 1964. The Chinese attack in October-November 1962 had robbed him of a great deal of his prestige, and this at a time when his health had already deteriorated greatly. But much more important, the country’s economy was not strong enough to take on the new burden of a sharply increased defence outlay without the risk of inflation, shortages, black-marketing and the rise of a parallel economy. The margins of safety had been largely exhausted in some other fields also. It was, for example, not possible either to ease the problem of educated unemployment by expanding the bureaucracy, as had been done in the preceding years, or to substantially step up investments in basic and heavy industries with long gestation periods in the public sector.
These problems were further aggravated after Mr. Nehru’s death. The country was already faced with a widespread drought in 1965 when it had to fight a war with Pakistan. Thus Mrs. Gandhi took over as prime minister in January 1966 in an extremely difficult economic situation and it was greatly worsened as a result of a second disastrous drought in 1966. Only America’s generous help – 10 million tonnes of wheat and much else – enabled the country to avoid a widespread famine and runaway inflation. The result of the drought, shortages and the feeling of national humiliation as a result of the manner in which President Johnson extended food aid was evident in the 1967 general election. The Congress lost power in all north Indian states from Himachal to West Bengal.
This was a turning point in Indian politics, not only because the Congress was driven out of office in the whole of north India but also because the country then witnessed the rise of upper and middle peasant power in a far more dramatic form than ever before. Peasant leaders became chief ministers in UP (Mr Charan Singh), in Madhya Pradesh (Mr GN Singh) and in Haryana (Rao Birendra Singh). They could well have become chief ministers in Congress-run states. But in that case they would have been answerable to a non-peasant central leadership.
This development did not receive proper attention then for a variety of reasons. Most commentators viewed it in the context of the anti-Congress sentiment which was said to be sweeping north India. Even largely city-based parties like the Jana Sangh and the CPI thought nothing of supporting the peasant chief ministers. As SVD governments began to flounder in one state after another, the discussion came to be focussed on the non-viability of “unprincipled” coalitional politics. Hardly anyone recognised the truth for what it was – the rise of new local elites struggling to replace the existing all-India one.
Handicaps
The new emerging elites suffered from several handicaps. They could not unite or remain united because of the absence of a common intellectual framework. For example, there could be nothing in common between the CPI and the Jana Sangh or between either or both of them and Mr. Charan Singh’s BKD (the forerunner of BLD) in UP except the desire to end the Congress party’s monopoly of power. In fact, Mr. Charan Singh’s own following was liable to split along caste lines because the peasantry itself is so divided. Finally, a peasant-based leadership cannot in the nature of things secure the support of the Harijans and the landless or, for that matter, the Muslims in key states like UP and Bihar.
All this enabled Mrs. Gandhi to cope with this challenge within two years of the election except in West Bengal. Thus by the time she picked up the gauntlet thrown by the then Congress President, Mr. Kamaraj, and his close allies in connection with the election of a new President caused by the death of Dr. Zakir Hussain, she did not have to bother too much about it. Mrs. Gandhi worsted her detractors in the Congress as well. In the process, however, she not only split the party but sowed the seeds of distrust among the liberal section of the intelligentsia because she did not show much respect for the norms which it had to come to accept as an essential part of the democratic process.
Mrs. Gandhi was able to win a landslide victory in the election to Parliament in 1971. But she could not win for herself the affection and regard her father had commanded among educated Indians. Similarly, while she assured another spell of office for the Congress, she could not revitalise it. Her own moral authority began to weaken soon when she appointed Mr LN Mishra as the Congress party’s main fund collector and he resorted to extraordinary practices. As it happened, she also came to lean heavily – at least so it was believed – on Mr Mishra, Mr Bansilal and other men of no great stature or ability. Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s car enterprise compromised her still further. And on top of it all came the droughts in 1971, 1972 and 1973 and the shortages and the sharp rise in prices in 1972, 1973 and 1974.
Used as we are as a people to think of political developments in personalised terms, many of us have blamed Mrs. Gandhi for the decline in the standards of public life and the economic difficulties of the first half of the ’seventies. But it is obvious that she was not responsible either for the drought for three consecutive years, or the rapid growth of population which devoured the gains of economic development. Similarly, while it is true that Mrs. Gandhi need not have leaned so much on individuals like Mr. Mishra and Mr. Bansilal and pushed into the background more experienced and respected men like Mr. Jagjivan Ram and Mr. YB Chavan, it cannot be seriously denied that with the spread of commercial activities and, with them, of commercial culture and values and the relative decline of men who accepted the British concept of public morality, a drop in the tone of political life was not easy to arrest. Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan also faced this problem in his movement in 1974 and 1975.
The rest of the story is too recent and too well known to need be recapitulated at length. Briefly. by defying the verdict of the Allahabad High Court. Mrs. Gandhi further alienated the liberal wing of the intelligentsia who regard court verdicts in such cases as sacrosanct. At the time of the declaration of the emergency, only the pro-CPI elements were genuinely with her. But she alienated them as well when, under Mr. Sanjay Gandhi’s advice, she refused to nationalise any industry, virtually banned strikes and agitations by workers, abolished compulsory bonus and allowed him to undertake the forcible family planning and slum clearance drives.
Coherent?
All this would not have mattered if the Janata could not only replace the Congress in office at the Centre and in the states but also became a coherent party and if Congressmen could revitalise theirs. But the Janata is not even going ahead with organisational elections without which it is meaningless to talk of integration. The Congress has split into two and even the one headed by Mrs. Gandhi is badly divided. Factionalism in the Congress is, of course, an old story but it is now being repeated in a new context. For one thing Indian politics has become more competitive – this means that the dissidents have somewhere else to go to – and for another Mrs. Gandhi cannot impose her will on her party as effectively as she could when she was the Prime Minister.
Competitive politics is not by itself bad even in a developing country like India. But in our case, it is likely to undermine whatever discipline there still exists in various parties. Only those organised on authoritarian lines may escape this erosion of all discipline. The CPM is, for instance, the best organised party in the country today and the former Jana Sangh the most well knit group in the Janata. Mrs Gandhi, too, may be wanting to build a similar party. But she cannot succeed because loyalty to a person cannot take the place of commitment to an ideology.
(Concluded)
The Times of India, 6 April 1979