Political Regroupment in India
Plastrik, Stanley
What has happened is that all of a sudden India has been brought face to face with the total drama of its democratic professions and at a point equidistant from calamity and opportunity. It...
...The electoral campaign was conducted in an atmosphere of total freedom...
...In the other, he solemnly announced the impending disintegration of the Indian Union...
...But even though a considerable part of British intellectual hostility toward India is accounted for by an illconcealed contempt for one's former "subjects," we cannot discount the gravity of India's problems...
...Instead, a series of experimental patterns of government have emerged, ranging from "Left" Communist (Maoist) control in the state of Kerela to "rightist" Swatantra party control in the state of Orissa...
...Far from a docile vote for time-honored leaders and institutions, the electorate rose up in indignation to smite the dominant Congress party, hip and thigh...
...And all this, mind you, was accomplished in an "underdeveloped country," one that had been suffering from the terrible consequences of poverty, drought, mismanagement...
...A political revolution begun...
...still others (Rajasthan) are under direct control of Delhi, because they are unable to form a government of their own...
...It did, after all, receive 56 million votes (39 per cent of the total)—which is far in excess of its nearest party rivals...
...and to prepare for an eventual rejudgment of all parties...
...it means the democratic process still has every opportunity to function...
...but Congress is still a potent force...
...If Congress falls nationally, what then...
...That verdict came through with drama and clarity...
...I say "deliberately" because this required millions of voters to split their ticket by voting for an opposition candidate for state office but a Congress candidate on the national level...
...from the 500,000 peasant villages dispersed throughout the land and, finally, from the remote hills and mountains of the Himalayas, Assam, and other regions...
...Can one expect a party such as Congress to reexamine itself, reorganize itself, question itself...
...Elementary decency would have obliged the entire party leadership to resign after the drubbing it experienced...
...2) In terms of state and local control, over half of India's 500 million people are no longer under Congress rule...
...Stunningly repudiated though it was, the old party leadership proposes "business as usual...
...However . . . we don't disown you completely...
...with the single exception of Kashmir, where intimidation of voters and illegal actions by election officials seem to have been significant, the polling and the counting were conducted without complaint, violence, or disturbance...
...This crazy-quilt pattern indicates the will of the electorate to experimˆnt...
...The only thing that unites the Opposition is the determination to bring Congress down nationally and in the remaining states...
...Already, many of the state coalition governments are reported to be experiencing the first signs of falling-out among the coalition parties...
...It is impossible to say which way the country will move now...
...Unfortunately, India is not among the most respected of nations...
...But if it is to move toward opportunity, there will have to be more democracy, not less...
...How much strain can the frail political and social structure of the country stand...
...an old leadership repudiated...
...4) In bringing down Congress the electorate did not as yet indicate a preference for any other party...
...The British and others may prefer the "neater" solution of Ayub Khan's "directed democracy" in Pakistan, but the Indian people have clearly rejected such temptations and shown their intention to continue along the democratic path: weaknesses, shortcomings, and all...
...But its tendency to operate as usual and allow the opposition to take the initiative away from it, could quickly prove fatal...
...Any number of coalition governments have been formed, but, as in all coalitions, one force or the other predominates...
...Internal factionalism threatens to be speeded up by the defeats...
...If ever the power of the ballot needed demonstration, the people of India have given us this lesson...
...The Indian people firmly rejected the "Mexican way...
...the era of Gandhi and Nehru brought to an end...
...The Fourth General Election was a tremendous democratic feat...
...Why don't at least a few "Left" American intellectuals find this impressive—even if it does not satisfy their appetites for "revolutionary" rhetoric...
...Its early demise has been forecast since its birth...
...they would not, that is, tolerate the freezing of the political scene through domination by one party...
...Decent government, scrupulous conduct, full regard for the interests of the country, no more scandals, proper action on important problems like population control, maintenance of order, holding down of prices, increase of agricultural production, etc., and you may survive...
...The size and entrenched power of the party apparatus (as distinct from the party membership itself where many more than a "hundred flowers" bloom in inelegant discord) makes change a torturous process...
...The reigns of power have been handed over in more than half of the Indian states without bloodshed, without the suppression of any political tendency, or the denial of anyone's freedom to speak and organize...
...Perhaps we will now hear a word or two from those theoreticians of the "authoritarian Left" who keep lecturing us in pseudo-Marxist wisdom as to the impossibility (they mean undesirability) of democracy in the Third World...
...3) The Congress gives every indication of having learned little or nothing...
...Monolith, monopoly of political power, social and economic domination: all lay smashed a week after the voting...
...We'll put you in a position where you'll constantly have to be on the qui wive if you wish to keep your place...
...it is unlikely to occur here...
...This is a major consideration for the future...
...Never has history witnessed such a reappraisal by the whole of a repudiated party...
...Not one of the parties, covering the whole political spectrum, was pledged to any course but acceptance of the voters' verdict...
...a tradition destroyed...
...After the elections it engaged in vulgar maneuvers in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh to maintain control against the clear sentiment of the electorate that it ought to remove itself...
...They cast their ballots from dwellings in cosmopolitan cities like Bombay and Calcutta...
...others (Bihar) by the radical socialists (SSP), led by the erratic Lohia...
...In the end, these efforts backfired and Congress lost out...
...Pran Chopra, The Statesman, March 7, 1967 On the eve of India's recent election (February, 1967) the fourth national election since independence in 1947, the Delhi correspondent of the London Times sent home two alarming dispatches...
...The opposition parties run the risk of going too far in their harassment of the government and finding themselves in turn repudiated...
...Writing in Janata, a publication of the Indian Socialists, Shri Vivek has stated this clearly: The Congress has in effect been told "You have behaved badly...
...In one he announced the end of India's parliamentary democracy, predicting this would be the last election ever held in that country...
...Further, the electorate deliberately made sure that Congress was returned to power at the center even if repudiated in more than half the states...
...we no longer have much confidence in you, so we cut down your majority and throw you out in several States...
...The opposition will pursue a relentless course—a reckless one as well, the sole exception to this being the weak Praja Socialist party which takes its responsibilities to the nation seriously...
...from great industrial and steel-producing centers like Rourkela and Bhilai...
...Fail in these and out you go, certainly at the next election, perhaps even earlier India is on the edge of the most dramatic moment in its modern history...
...It is still far from clear whether they can rule...
...Any effort at full analysis would obviously be premature, but we offer a few tentative notes: • (1) The Congress party lost control over a majority of India's 16 states, nine of which today have non-Congress governments...
...Congress as we have known is no more...
...Democracy remains India's most potent political force and democratic leadership her most pressing need...
...The seven opposition parties, organized in one of the most unprincipled political alliances the political world has ever seen, have found a formula for undermining Congress —an electoral pact to avoid triangular competition between candidates...
...the old-line politicians steeped in smugness can no longer lead...
...Some states are now run by dissident Congress groups...
...This process of Congress disintegration has continued after its electoral debacle, leading to the loss of two additional states, most importantly, Uttar Pradesh (with a population of 80 million) which has traditionally been Congress's great stronghold...
...About 60 per cent of an eligible electorate amounting to 250 million people voted...
...The old ways of lethargy, passivity, acceptance will no longer make do...
...elementary sense would have called for the summoning of an emergency party convention for the election of a new leadership and reconsideration of the entire policy...
...In my view, this indicates an extraordinary sophistication on the part of Indian voters...
...In our view, the Indian people do not want Congress either to fail or to fall...
...The friends of Indian democracy watch this complex situation with anxiety and fascination: can a great national movement, which brought independence and kept a young nation firmly attached to democratic procedures, surmount its decline...
...to offer a chance to this or that political movement...
...The rest depends on you...
...And if not, will the people have sufficient political maturity and discipline to create another political agency to review their tormented struggle for plenty and freedom...
...Note: The author wishes to thank the Indian writer Anand Mohan for the information he provided for this article...
...In smashing the myth of monolithic rule by one political movement (in Mexico they call it, with seeming irony, the party of "Institutional Revolution"), the Indian people performed a significant political act...
...This is the basic meaning of the elections...
...the London Times doomster is but the latest in a long series...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
