India's Emerging Opposition
BLACKTON, JOHN STUART
CONGRESS' DIFFERENCES WIDEN India's Emerging Opposition By John Stuart Blackton New Delhi The orderly accession of Indira Ghandi to the office of Prime Minister has been justifiably...
...Desai's achievement is likely to have long-range effects upon the democratic process in India-particularly in relation to the parties of the opposition...
...In any case, Congress is no longer quite the same beast that it was before the Morarji-Indira struggle...
...This was certainly the case with Moraji Desai, who commands perhaps the most powerful one-man machine in the Congress party and posed the main obstacle to Mrs...
...His generally right-of-center posture and positive disposition toward the private sector of the economy has virtually no relation to the popularity he enjoys in his own region, whose special interests he has nonetheless served dutifully...
...Antagonisms have been mitigated by the fact that almost every segment of Congress has an informal link with some element of the opposition...
...The consolidation of the Desai wing of the Congress could help bring a halt to this leadership drain, if as a consequence the party decides it can no longer be so tolerant of dissent...
...Yet Desai managed to balk the attempt of Congress party President K. Kamaraj Nadar to railroad Mrs...
...Moreover, Congress has been willing to accept opposition leadership within its ranks, thus depriving the smaller parties of many of their most capable men...
...Even as Shastri's floral bier moved through the Streets of Delhi from the airport to his home at number 10 Janpath (the People's Way), the mourning crowds were buzzing with speculation about who would next lead the country...
...As many as seven or eight names were debated intensely in the clusters of arguing people dotting the roadside throng...
...Ghandi's accession...
...Further, the refusal of Desai to abide by the wishes of the Congress president may have strained the limits of party discipline too far, and thereby increased the possibility of more permanent fissures...
...One of Congress' great political strengths has been that, between moments of crisis when party leadership is forced to impose a single policy, it has generally assumed an amorphous ideological shape, accommodating ardent free enterprisers, Democratic Socialists, Gandhians, Hindu fanatics, secularists and even a few quite radical Marxists...
...But this time there was no chosen successor...
...Indeed, the general election in February 1967 might bring to Indian democracy the beginning of a genuine opposition...
...And for every name that arose, someone would protest, "If so-and-so is Prime Minister, to Kharaab ho jayeega" ("great misfortune will ensue...
...A case in point is Ashok Mehta who, tempted by the opportunity to put his Socialist theories into practice, quit as chairman of the Praja Socialist party to become the key man in India's Planning Commission-though sources near him indicate he has been disheartened by the lack of freedom he has been given so far...
...From the moment that the tragic news reached Delhi from Tashkent, aspirants to the post began to mobilize their personal machines within the Congress party...
...The lure of power is difficult to resist, and the opposition has been unable to stem a steady flow of its best brains and talent into the Congress...
...The national leader of each faction enjoys such intense personal loyalty from his followers, however, that he often can decide matters of principle or ideology without reference to the faction's mass base...
...CONGRESS' DIFFERENCES WIDEN India's Emerging Opposition By John Stuart Blackton New Delhi The orderly accession of Indira Ghandi to the office of Prime Minister has been justifiably hailed as a tribute to the strength of democratic traditions in India...
...Ghandi into office, and forced a vote in which he won the support of almost a third of the Congress Parliamentary party in full view of the Indian public...
...Ghandi because of her link with the pro-CPI grouping around V. K. Krishna Menon and K. D. Malaviya...
...Such ideological flexibility has made the task of running an opposition party very difficult...
...These machines are for the most part bound together by regional and communal interests and lubricated from the Indian equivalent of the pork barrel...
...John Stuart Blackton is currently studying the opposition parties in the Indian parliament...
...Her predecessor, the late Lai Bahadur Shastri, had been quietly tapped for the post by Nehru, and his installation by a consensus of the Congress Parliamentary party did not put the succession mechanism to a stringent test...
...For instance, it is widely held that the Moscow wing of the Indian Communist party (CPI) endorsed Mrs...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
