The Inevitability of Mrs. Gandhi
Chopra, Pran
I WANT TO PUT INTO PERSPECTIVE the greatI split in the Congress party of India in the middle of 1969, its leftward swing since then, and the hesitation in that swing during the fall of 1970,...
...Despite steady economic improvement, tensions of dis content are growing, if only because mass elec tions have politicized the masses as nothing else could have done...
...Whenever it sees any opposition building up, it innundates the opposition by simply moving to the Right or Left...
...The establishment tried to pull the noose of the party's power around her neck...
...Since power followed numbers, as it must in elections, it moved out of the town into the country, out of the upper-middle-class intelligentsia into a broader lower-middle class...
...Under these pressures, the power of the Congress had to crack one day, and it began to crack just before our fourth general election in 1967...
...Most of the rest is nowadays under a rising pressure from extraparliamentary forces —alienated sections of religious and ethnic minorities, the rebellious young, industrial and farm workers who no longer accept their poverty as God-given—all of them grist for parties of insurrection...
...even at its height under Nehru, the Congress had always polled less than half the vote, which itself rarely exceeded 60 percent of the electorate...
...But she saw the signs otherwise, and saw them right...
...In the last week of December, she announced dissolution of Parliament, the first time any Prime Minister has done so in India, and advanced the date of the next general elections from February 1972, to the first week of March this year...
...Some old groups were getting eroded, as of caste for example...
...so were those few in the Congress who used to be thought of as progressives and socialists...
...The split came in part as the climax to a tussle between the party and the government, something that often occurs in a parliamentary system...
...But the political balance of our party system will be the same...
...The imprecations hurled by each side at the other—selling the country to "the Communists" was the favorite charge against Mrs...
...A constellation of chance, luck, daring, and political cunning has put Mrs...
...Gandhi routed them with the help of the CPI and the Muslim League, and at the same time reduced the Congress (0) and other conserva * See DISSENT, September—October 1970, for my report on the Naxalites...
...The reason for this delay is also the reason for the appearance of a swingback to the Right at the All-India Congress Committee meeting during the fall...
...It is, I think, the only hope in India for economic change through legitimate politics...
...But her hesitation can only mean a pause, not a halt...
...Old leaders were on both sides...
...When she made the announcement, it was generally expected that she would invite the more democratic parties into electoral partnerships and share constituencies with them in which mutual contests would be avoided...
...Gandhi hesitate by playing up the danger—not entirely unreal—of a Hindu backlash in the north against the alliance with the Muslim League in the south, and to some extent a socialist backlash against the alliance with the Communists...
...Gandhi, selling it to "vested interests" and "capitalism" against the others—only showed the public where each side stood in the other's eyes...
...She realized that the voters' disillusionment was neither with her nor the Congress, but only with the staleness of the status quo that the party had come to represent after 20 years in power...
...she was then, or so they thought, a political fledgling, likely to be a useful vote-catcher because she is the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru...
...The lines were not, of course, as clearly drawn as I here suggest...
...In the meantime, the people have to be persuaded that a change has occurred...
...Therefore she would be stronger than the party bosses, the very symbol of the status quo, if she went over their heads to show them who had the wider appeal in the country...
...And this it tried to remain even after independence, so as to retain a monopoly of power by pleasing all interests (while satisfying none...
...I WANT TO PUT INTO PERSPECTIVE the greatI split in the Congress party of India in the middle of 1969, its leftward swing since then, and the hesitation in that swing during the fall of 1970, soon after the party's ruling body, the All-India Congress Committee, met in the capital city of Bihar, politically the most unstable state in India...
...She has acquired for herself a reputation for radicalism while remaining within the constitutional system...
...She does not want to halt nor can she, and she certainly should not if the Indian experiment in parliamentary democracy is to prove more than a 25-year miracle...
...But Mrs...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS tive parties to an electoral joke...
...But the difference was as clear as between twilight and dawn, 116 February 27, 1971 and so it was seen by the people—which in politics is as important as the objective reality...
...the time had therefore come, the party bosses thought, to insist that she must either get out or govern according to their Dictat...
...Gandhi is bringing about...
...Whenever the political terrain justifies it—or makes not doing so electorally expensive—she has also joined hands with India's biggest party of minority communalism, the Muslim League, and with the Communist party, the more moderate (Moscow) wing of Indian Communism which seems closer to constitutional ways than the much bigger Maoist section, the CPI (Marxists) and, of course, the all-out insurrectionary CPI (Marxists-Leninists), known as the Naxalities.* This eclecticism has paid off handsomely in Kerala, the tiny state in South India which became in 1957 the first place in the world to elect a Communist government in a free and fair ballot-box elections...
...Even if she acquired the entire base of the former party intact, she would only be the leader of a minority...
...not only the rank and file and the cadres, but also many of the leaders who preferred to stay with the winning side...
...Ill-defined and amorphous, this elephantine party has a tremendous instinct for survival...
...but new ones were coming up, as of language, region, and economic class...
...GANDHI'S PROBLEM therefore is how to reconstruct the party system so as to widen the base support for the parliamentary frame...
...they have converted what was a relatively staid parliamentary system into a powerful drive for their demands...
...It has survived largely because of the fluid balance within it...
...parties that had singly been ineffective now formed all-inclusive anti-Congress fronts, and in 1967 took over half the states of the Indian Union, while reducing the Congress majority in the federal Parliament to a thin margin...
...Nehru's umbrellalike leadership helped most of all...
...The real test, however, lies not in proving that she is the true inheritor of the Congress party but in saving the system...
...During the struggle for freedom, the Congress party had been a monolithic yet all-inclusive movement, with one overriding objective to which all shades of interest in India could subscribe...
...MRS...
...Gandhi's position within the Congress itself...
...A party as large as the Congress, even after the split, pretty much reflects the country...
...Her opponents have accused her of programmatic gimmickry, and certainly there is much of that in her...
...But the myth of the Congress party's invincibility was broken...
...Opposition pressures mounted...
...But in elections held in Kerala last September, Mrs...
...they have been put through because they have a tremendous political appeal...
...In one phase she may opt for alliances with other parties of the democratic Left, as she did in Kerala...
...These it must satisfy if it is not to collapse, and it cannot do so if the party in power is largely conservative...
...The radicalism spouted by Mrs...
...Rural poverty was slower in COMMENTS AND OPINIONS carving out its politics but has been given a spurt, paradoxically, by the first economic breakthrough seen in Indian agriculture, which has brought some prosperity to the village but also more disparity in economic conditions and has lowered even the dumbest Indian peasant's threshold of toleration...
...But, encouraged by the current wave of popularity in her favor, her colleagues are pressing her not to be generous in handing over constituencies that she can capture herself...
...Certainly these parties themselves expected it...
...Gandhi in charge of this hope...
...By herself she cannot accomplish this, because she does not even have a simple majority, and because some of the system has been captured by parties which, although wedded to constitutionalism, are also wedded to economic conservatism, social orthodoxy, and total opposition...
...Gandhi had its content of moderation, and her opponents whatever their private opinions, were quite willing to mix a little socialistic rhetoric in their public pronouncements...
...This is the rationale for the realignment Mrs...
...it is the largest democratic political party in the world and the only one in the former colonies of the West that has continued to lead the country for more than ten years after winning independence...
...And behind this struggle of cliques and personalities, rival values were struggling for ascendancy...
...Only this kind of a broad left-of-center alliance might contain the pressure of discontent within the parliamentary frame...
...And a country like India has tremendous forces of economic and social conservatism, powerful within the Congress and still more so outside it...
...Gandhi fought back spectacularly, rushed economic reform measures through the government machine, and forced the party to a split— a risk from which her father had always shrunk back, choosing to compromise instead...
...Age, orthodoxy and conservatism on one side, and on the other youth, a strong desire for economic and social change, and a willingness to risk some dynamic instability in Indian life...
...But this only represents a shift in the level of ambition and not either a change in her own political direction or that of the party system as a whole...
...Since then, with the credit for more reform measures piling up on her side, she has proved in a series of local elections that her wing is almost the sole inheritor of the Congress party and the opposition wing, the Congress (0), only a splinter...
...the surprise is only that the moment has been a quarter-century in the coming...
...But if not she, someone else would have been sooner or later...
...and each phase of this movement gave rise to new groups...
...Therefore she is attempting the other tactics of crowding in on the democratic socialists...
...She told an audience in Washington in 1966, within weeks of being elected Prime Minister, that India could best be governed from a centrist position but with a leftist thrust...
...It has made Mrs...
...This enormously weakened Mrs...
...the inertia of India helped a bit more...
...But, beneath the surface, group interests were taking shape under the powerful incentive of general elections which, held on adult franchise, are the world's most massive...
...Therefore she has been trying to draw to herself all the democratic forces of the Left as well as the minorities...
...Its innate conservatism used to act as a break upon Jawaharlal Nehru, snuffing out many of his progressive initiatives and exploiting his almost sentimental aversion to a split...
...Gandhi's choice as Prime Minister in 1966...
...Rightist parties gained as much ground in some of the heartland states as leftists in the rim states...
...She proved a flop as a vote-catcher...
...Since then Kerala has been dominated by the "left Marxists...
...When the dust settled it was discovered that she had taken the bulk of the party with her...
...But in a tradition-bound country like India, which is full of well-established interests, real economic reform takes a lot of time and patience...
...Since the split there has been far greater ideological differentiation than at any time before...
...In another, she may move over and occupy more of the democratic Left area herself...
...The tactics may vary from time to time, but the strategy will not...
...An influential caucus in the Congress, imbued with a strong king-making complex, had engineered Mrs...
...The reforms on which she has concentrated so far have little economic significance...
...Now that she is firmly in the saddle, this is the kind of thrust she is trying to develop...
...gradualism and moderation are built-in restraints for anyone who does not wish to break up the country...
...But a clash began to build up as soon as she showed she would not be the mere puppet of the Congress machine...
...The increase in industrialization, for Indian conditions quite rapid, added a laborbased politics...
...The momentum of its heroic phase helped it to do so...
...That she may seek an alliance with the Communists or may herself capture their base support is a matter of detail...
...Gandhi has been convinced of this for a long time...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
