Rajiv in Retreat

...Gandhi and his circle are of course doing their best to change the subject...

...One of these, Sanjay Sharma, has of late been accused of participating in yet another kickback arrangement, involving the government's Oil and Natural Gas Commission...

...elections have not been held within Congress-I for years...

...It has been beset with divisive rumblings from the day it was launched...

...The alliance known as the National Front (Rashtriya Morcha) now comprises four national parties—the Janata Party, the Congress-S(for "Socialist") Party, Lok Dal, and Jan Morcha (headed by Singh)— plus regional parties in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh that are capable of delivering large blocs of votes in a countrywide contest...

...As for the onetime Congress-I monopoly on nationalism—typified by the slogan of Indira Gandhi's political storm troopers, "Indiais Indira, Indira is India"—no one takes that seriously anymore...

...Moreover, while there is no doubt that wiretapping of politicians deserves to be condemned, the practice is widely believed to be quite common in India...

...Bachchan was widely rumored to be considering staking his political reputation on a re-election bid, and indeed Gandhi repeatedly urged him to do so...

...Singh ended up trouncing the Congress-I candidate, Sunil Shastri (son of former Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri), by a margin of more than two to one...

...Darryt, D'Monte often writes for the NL on Indian and Third World affairs...

...Yet Rajiv Gandhi, like his mother, has shown himself willing to play to religious communities when political expediency dictates...

...Regardless of the merits of this and kindred proposals, they are not the stuff of which effective political unities are made...

...India would then be plunged into a period of political instability for several months at the very least...

...At the moment, in any event, it appears that Gandhi's party will go down to defeat next year...

...Congress-I's social base is similarly a legacy of the drive for independence...

...All three, though, have been attenuated under Rajiv Gandhi's stewardship...

...At the last minute, however, Bachchan thought better of it...

...For instance, the ground swell of Hindu revivalism that followed an act of sati (a widow's selfimmolation) not long ago in Rajasthan State was openly condoned by CongressI. To cite another case, Gandhi has neglected to introduce a much-needed law to regulate divorce for fear of alienating Moslems, among whom divorce is frequent...

...For the first time this decade the possibility of an India presided over by some formation other than Congress-I is being seriously discussed...

...Hence all the emphasis on the six "technological missions" set up within the central government by Satyam Gangrao Pitroda, an Indian electronics expert who recently returned from a stint in the United States to advise the Prime Minister...

...If anything, the way the whole incident turned out will probably strengthen the resolve of the National Front to oust the Gandhi government in the elections that must be held no later than December 1989...

...Recently I attended one of the slick media presentations given in Delhi by this "computer boy" par excellence...

...The three communities making up the party's bedrock of support have been the Brahmins, the Moslems and—paradoxically enough in relation to the dominant first group—the Harijans, or outcastes...

...The most resounding of the by-election defeats occurred in the city of Allahabad, where the former Congress-I Finance and then Defense Minister Virenda Pratap Singh was the united-opposition candidate...

...A sign of the ruling party's jitters was its recent maneuver to embarrass Karnataka Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde, whose Janata Party has been governing that state fairly successfully...

...Hegde even alleged that the CBI has bugged the phones of India's President, Ramaswamy I. Venkatraman...

...As for the Nehru-Gandhi family mystique, it must be said that Rajiv Gandhi has not inherited his mother's shrewdness in exploiting this waning advantage...

...In a thinly disguised reference to the kickback allegations, it advocates legislation requiring Indians at home and abroad to divulge their "foreign assets, holdings, secret and undeclared bank accounts...

...These groups still account for 40-45 per cent of the vote in India, but their support for the ruling party is being whittled away...

...Thus there is reason to think that any advantage Congress-I derived from Hegde's resignation will be short-lived...

...Although Hegde made it clear that in his view Delhi was the real culprit, initially his resignation was seen as a blow to the National Front, in which he is a prominent leader...

...Gandhi responded by kickingafew statechief ministers upstairs to the Cabinet in New Delhi, and in so doing earned himself further opprobrium by seeming to reward their incompetence...

...Several newspapers, though, have commented that it is ironic for the Gandhi government to be crowing over the ethical distress of an opposition figure when it is itself accused of taking massive kickbacks...

...Congress-I is besieged virtually all around India...

...Last June, Congress-I lost five out of seven by-elections for the Lok Sabha (lower house), even though the contested seats were all in traditional party strongholds...

...The Congress-I's secular/ nationalistic image is a vestige of the days when it led India to freedom from the British Raj, a struggle that required the putting aside of credal and community differences...

...But Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi shows no sign of concern about his declining popularity, and continues to rule the country with a handful of cronies...

...If Rajiv is not rattled by recent portents, his party clearly is, and especially because of the newfound unity among the opposition groupings...

...Only in Maharashtra—where the relatively young Sharad Pawar was recently appointed chief minister by Gandhi—and a few other states can Congress-I be confident of victory...

...The seat had earlier been held by matinee idol Amitabh Bachchan, who was forced to resign last year when his complicity in a kickback scheme involving the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors was revealed...

...Nevertheless, Gandhi has thus far made no move to submit the old party to the surgical measures it so desperately needs if its public image is to be renewed...

...The Front's flimsy manifesto, in the form of a 71-point program, calls for rooting out corruption...

...Instead, he has responded to each new round of criticism merely by reshuffling his Cabinet ministers (23 times in four years...

...Besides broadening the attack on the Prime Minister, this has disarmed those who claimed that the charges amounted to a one-paper vendetta...

...The rich peasants in northwest India known as the Jats, for example, have become the backbone of Lok Dal...

...Following disclosures that Hegde had authorized the federal government's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to tap the phones of some 50 political leaders in Karnataka, including many local opposition Congress-I members, the popular Chief Minister decided to step down...

...The hastily assembled National Front may be fated to re-enact the Janata Party's experience...

...INDIA'S NEW POLITICS Rajiv in Retreat BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay THE COMING TOGETHER of nine Indian opposition parties to fight the ruling Congress-I (for "Indira") Party in next year's national elections has created a sense of foreboding among government stalwarts in New Delhi...

...and leaning ever more heavily on a clique of trusted lieutenants...

...This carefully crafted pose, combined with protracted bickering within the Janata coalition, succeeded in bringing her back to power in 1980...

...The bruiting of corruption charges against the Prime Minister and his close associates used to be confined to a single national newspaper, the Indian Express (see my "Gandhi Bullies the Press," NL, February 8...

...Recently, however, the Statesman and the normally sedate Hindu have gotten into the act...

...At the same time the so-called "middle castes," which have been heretofore kept out of the economic mainstream, are today coming into their own and are increasingly backing the opposition parties...

...When Indira Gandhi was ousted from power by the ragbag Janata Party following the 1975-77 national state of emergency, she paraded herself before the country as the wronged widow, claiming that the "upstarts" who took over were seeking vengeance against her...

...In the south and east it faces a combination of regionalist forces and Communists...

...While it was impossible not to be infected with his enthusiasm, I couldn't help thinking that projects such as extending telecommunications and modernizing dairy production are no substitute for restoring Congress-I's inner democracy and re-establishing its all-India appeal when balloting time comes around...

...In the Hindi-speaking "hinterland" consisting of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, its strength is being eroded not just by parties belonging to the National Front, but also by the Bharatiya Janata Party, a coalition of Right-wing Hindu elements that has always had a strong base in the conservative merchant community in these states...

...Veteran commentators like the columnist Rajinder Puri have pointed out that the Congress-I identity has three traditional components: its secular/nationalistic character, its peculiar social base, and its permeation by a Nehru-Gandhi family mystique...