India

by Shashi Tharoor

  One of her ablest foreign ministers, the late M. C. Chagla, told me of the manner in which the rest of the cabinet was treated: Mrs. Gandhi did not respect her colleagues, he said, and “took days to grant appointments” to them. She was frequently imperious in style: another observer noted that she would “ruffle her colleagues by her speech” and often “startle them by her studied silence.” For their part, they betrayed an abysmal absence of integrity and self-respect in failing to respond to Mrs. Gandhi’s centralization of authority and initiative. Mrs. Gandhi made it clear that independent ministerial action would not be tolerated, and they gave in without a fight. During the Emergency she neutralized relatively senior ministers by increasing the authority of their junior ministers or by granting independent charge of part of their portfolios to ministers of state. But even before the Emergency, the prime minister controlled the meetings of the cabinet, whose agenda was subject to her approval. She could change the agenda, postpone a meeting, or bypass the cabinet altogether, and when it actually met, she could and did steamroll a consensus. The actual meetings were largely a formality.

  The extent to which her power had already superseded the cabinet’s was illustrated dramatically in the very decision to proclaim the Emergency, which was taken by Mrs. Gandhi without consulting her ministers. The Emergency declaration had to be issued formally by the president of the Republic, but Mrs. Gandhi had devalued that office, first by throwing her weight to a rebel Congress candidate (V. V. Giri), thus precipitating the party split of 1969, and then, when Giri grew restive under her dominance, by replacing him in 1974 with an old loyalist, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. Ahmed, despite being advised against the constitutionality of signing an Emergency proclamation without the approval of the council of ministers, acquiesced in the declaration without demur. The cabinet was then summoned at 4:30 a.m. on June 26, 1975, after the wave of arrests under the Emergency had already begun, and confronted at a 6:00 a.m. meeting with a fait accompli to which they raised no protest.

  If the cabinet was weak, the party system, both Congress and opposition, fared little better. One of the crucial indicators of the effective working of a democracy is the functioning of the opposition to the government. In the early days of independence, the Congress remained the party of consensus, its rivals parties of pressure, seeking to bring their criticism to bear on the dominant party, which had to respond in order to preserve its dominance. However, one-party dominance was not—as the Congress’s setbacks in the 1967 elections demonstrated — integral to the political system; it was merely the chief feature of the political situation. Some observers prematurely discerned a change in that situation in the elections of 1967. One scholar of Indian politics, the Briton W. H. Morris-Jones, described what he saw as the emergence of a “market” polity,

  a system in which a large number of decisions are taken by a large number of participants who stand in positions of both dependence on and conflict with each other. The decisions are reached by a process of bargaining; no one is strong enough to impose his single will. . . . [T]he consistent trend of Indian politics over the past twenty years is clarified if we regard it as one of movement from a system in which the market element was rather small to one in which it is predominant and decisive.

  That was credible from the perspective of 1967, but of course things did not stay long that way, and after 1971, to extened the metaphor, the “market” polity quickly gave way to one of state capitalism, with a virtual monopoly of goods and services in the hards of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The “market” is back in business after the elections of 1996, but there is no guarantee that what happened before cannot happen again.

  The Congress Party, with its control of power and patronage, its nationalistic aura, its unique organization, its network of vote-banks, its hold on both business and labor, its virtual copyright on the names of Gandhi and Nehru, was uniquely able to thwart all political opposition for more than four decades. Until 1977, and again during 1980-89, the opposition never posed the most effective threat of a parliamentary opposition, the potential that it could form an alternative government. Devoid of the financial, organizational, and charismatic resources of the Congress and hopelessly fragmented, it functioned essentially as a collection of pressure groups within the ruling elite. Parliamentary eloquence and occasional public agitation offered limited opportunities; it was often more productive to attempt to influence certain outcomes through informal contacts with the Congress. Within each party, other Congress standards also prevailed — a centralist structure with little accountability of the top echelons to their rank and file, and a one-way flow of power from High Command to ordinary member.

  During the years of Congress Party dominance, political opposition was a singularly unprofitable activity, since opposition parties had no patronage to dole out except occasionally at state level. Opposition politics was largely the domain of four types of people: those who resisted government simply, as Edmund Hillary might have put it, because it was there; the ideologues, who were dedicated to the proposition of a revolutionary change their own conduct did little to bring about (Calcutta overflowed with Communist leaders sporting Cambridge degrees and living in palatial ancestral homes); the “outs,” those who had enjoyed the taste of power as Congressmen but who were, for a variety of reasons, no longer in favor with their party establishment; and the “down-and-outs,” those whose direct interests were adversely affected by the policies of the national government. The last either turned to insurgency or were won over through policy concessions; the rest were either co-opted or ignored. (It was only in the 1990s — when literally any party could realistically contemplate the prospect of a share in power at the Center — that this paradigm ceased to be true.)

  Of course, the opposition had a powerful forum — Parliament — and, formally, Parliament’s powers were extensive. Above all, perhaps, it was the ultimate authority in regard to the budget, its financial control over the appropriations of each individual ministry affording it a means of influencing the government’s actions. The Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, met normally for three sessions a year, for a total of seven to eight months, so that the government was never really exempt from legislative scrutiny. The routine proceedings of Parliament included several devices for opposition pressure on the government. Each House began its day with a “Question Hour” five days a week, followed by a “Zero Hour” at which further issues could be discussed. Ministers and officials spent a good portion of their working days preparing briefs to respond to the questions arising in these forums. The preparation and paperwork this generated was reported to bring most other activity in the ministerial secretariats to a standstill. Nevertheless, the majority of “backbenchers” tended to be out of their depth: they knew how to get elected, but not how to legislate. (In 1971 the poet and journalist Dom Moraes penned an unforgettable picture of the Lok Sabha, where “in a far corner of the chamber, amidst the yells and the clatter of the bell, a few members from remote rural areas, heads pillowed peacefully on their arms, slept the sleep of the innocent and uninformed.”) When the opposition posed a serious substantive challenge, the Congress Party’s crushing majorities ensured that it was beaten back; as Atal Behari Vajpayee, one of the country’s more able parliamentarians, put it, “we have the arguments; they have the votes.”

  Mrs. Gandhi also tended to look beyond Parliament to “the people” for support. A senior Gandhi aide pointed out to me once that parliamentary opinion on most subjects (with the notable exception of Kashmir) was not necessarily representative of the views of a large segment of the population, and that the government did not therefore feel obliged to respect it. The principle of the delegated authority of the elected representative to speak for his constituency did not seem to have made much headway in official circles. These various strands fused under Mrs. Gandhi in a denial of legitimacy to the opposition that rapidly became a hallmark of the political ethos and reached its apogee in the one-party rule of the Emergency.
“Sometimes I feel that even our parliamentary system is moribund,” Mrs. Gandhi told an early interviewer. “Everything is debated and nothing gets done. Everything that can be exploited for political purposes is exploited. . . . Democracy implies an implicit acceptance of certain higher objectives; the government can be opposed but not national interests.” The problem was, of course, that it was the government that defined the boundary between the two. While Nehru had been described as “simultaneously the official leader of the ruling party and the covert leader of the opposition” — a man who built up democratic institutions by according them a respect they could not of themselves command — Mrs. Gandhi treated the right to oppose as if it were her gift to the opposition. By early 1975 perceptive observers found the opposition living in mortal fear of her resorting to one-party dictatorship and postponing an election she might lose. The declaration of the Emergency confirmed this fear, the ultimate denial of legitimacy coming from Congress president D. K. Borooah’s declaration that “those who are not committed to the policies of our beloved leader Indira Gandhi have no place in our body politic.”

  The fact that Mrs. Gandhi and Mr. Borooah are no longer with us does not mean that a future Indira cannot find herself a hundred other Borooahs. The problem is compounded by the illusion of consensus, a concept overvalued in Indian politics. The only consensus a democracy really needs is that it doesn’t always need a consensus. In India, however, the political consensus was not that it was enough to debate, to resolve differences through democratic disagreement and a show of hands. As revealed with startling clarity in the way India’s prime ministers have been chosen by successive victorious parties or coalitions, consensus in India transcended the democratic process. The need for unanimity in the political culture ran so deep that on the occasions of three out of the first four prime ministerial successions — Shastri’s, Indira’s, and Morarji Desai’s as a Janata leader in 1977 — an unelected caucus of elders chose the “consensus” candidate. The “consensus” choice was then endorsed without exception by legislators often in no mood to be consensual, but unable or unwilling to challenge the procedural model. After being passed over in this way for Shastri in 1964, Desai bitterly denounced the “unhealthy” practice of using consensus “to claim unanimous support for the choice of a few people who are in positions of authority.” But when he actually challenged Mrs. Gandhi for the prime ministry in 1966, he lost and learned his lesson: when he finally came to power in 1977, it was not after a vote among Janata Party legislators but as the hand-picked nominee of two elder statesmen, Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Kripalani. Of course, the manufacture of consensus around individuals is not always good long-term politics. Chandra Shekhar, outmaneuvered by V. P. Singh for the prime minister’s job in 1989, nursed his bitterness long enough to bring down the Singh government and acquire the throne for himself for six months in 1991.

  But consensus may disguise the absence of a choice based on criteria more substantive than caste or personality. Too often the quest for power has less to do with principle than with opportunism. Since there were no substantive issues except the question of whether the “outs” could get “in,” the political landscape presented an illusory uniformity that theorists mistook for consensus. Either way, the system changed little; the status stayed quo.

  This weakness for consensus in Indian politics might, at its worst, point to a susceptibility to autocracy. Indeed, the 1980 electorate’s decision to bring back Mrs. Gandhi just three years after the excesses of her Emergency appeared to confirm the theory that India values a firm hand over a democratically squabbling multitude. In Indira Gandhi’s India, “consensus” could be imposed in domestic matters and contrived in foreign policy. It did not necessarily represent shared political convictions or approaches to the world, but rather the preferences of a sociopolitical ethos that valued unanimity over dissension.

  The decline of the Congress Party from the accession to power of Mrs. Gandhi to its electoral defeat of 1996 makes these concerns all the more relevant. As Congress president for a year in 1959, Mrs. Gandhi had used the party to push issues ahead of the Congress government; her role in mobilizing the party to bring down the elected Communist government in the state of Kerala was instructive. As prime minister, however, Indira Gandhi quickly began to see the other side of the picture. Initially the creature of the Syndicate, she allowed the party leaders to intervene in some decisions, such as the choice of her first cabinet (she was pressured by party notables, particularly Congress president Kamaraj, to include some senior Congressmen against her wishes). Friction quickly developed, however, between her and the party leaders.

  Kamaraj had come to see a need for “new techniques of collective thinking” in the Congress, and called for greater coordination between the government and the party, the prime minister and the Congress president. During Shastri’s prime ministry he had expressed his views on a number of major policy questions and made it clear that he expected to be listened to. In his presidential address to the Congress Party soon after Mrs. Gandhi’s accession to the prime ministry, Kamaraj made clear his view of his own authority and the diminished importance of the prime minister. The party’s responsibilities after Shastri’s death, he announced, “have become too heavy for any one single person to shoulder.” Mrs. Gandhi’s “onerous responsibilities,” he declared, would be shared by the party organization. “It is with great sense of humility that I approach these grave responsibilities and I seek your sympathy and guidance . . . to cope with the burdens that the nation as a whole has to bear.”

  Indira Gandhi, on the other hand, declared that as the representative of the nation she stood above Kamaraj, the representative of the party. She told an interviewer in September 1966 that “here is a question of whom the party wants and whom the people want. My position among the people is uncontested.” Kamaraj, visibly angry, was reported to have been asking openly the next evening, “What did she mean?”

  She soon made it clear what she meant. By 1969, using the issue of the election of India’s ceremonial president, she split the Congress Party, holding on to power and driving Kamaraj into opposition — and irrelevance.

  Ironically, Mrs. Gandhi split the party on (among other things) the issue of democratizing its functioning and guaranteeing the “inherent right” of Congressmen to debate every party and governmental policy: the “basic issue,” she declared, “is whether the democratic process will prevail or not in the Congress.” Nevertheless, it did not take her long after asserting her own control to stifle that very democratic process. She delayed internal elections, appointed her own men to every significant post, and treated the party president as a junior aide rather than as the leader of the organization that had brought the country to independence. This was partially because, as with the nation, Indira Gandhi identified herself with the party:

  [T]he Congress is very dear to me because some people joined at the age of fifteen, some people at the age of twenty and some at forty or fifty. But I was born in the Congress. There was no time when my home, since I was born, was not the center of all the major political movements, decisions and the meetings that took place and the whole of modern Indian history was being made there. . . . Nobody could be closer to the Congress or even more emotionally involved than I have been and I still am.

  Her opponents, she claimed, “came in [to the Congress] when there was no question of sacrifice or suffering but merely of what could be got out of the party.”

  Though a travesty of the truth — Mrs. Gandhi, a daughter of privilege, never suffered the personal privations undergone by many of those she excoriated — this heritage, Mrs. Gandhi believed, qualified her to remake the party in her own image. The loss of the bulk of the Congress organizational wing in the 1969 split facilitated such a step, for she had largely to carry the party on her own shoulders. By 1969, at any rate, Mrs. Gandhi had come to the conclusion that the executive role of the party in government was more important than the organization wing �
� which, she now said, derived its own sustenance from the party’s representatives in Parliament and government. The rapid subordination of the new Congress’s organization to the prime minister followed.

  Indira Gandhi showed that she could do without an organization when she led her party to victory in the 1971 polls largely on the strength of her personal charisma. Congress candidates campaigned mainly on her name and backing; the typical election poster showed her picture, not the candidate’s, and mentioned him, if at all, in much smaller print than that accorded Mrs. Gandhi. Thanks in part to the opposition’s slogan of Indira Hatao (“Remove Indira”), Mrs. Gandhi became the primary, indeed the only, issue in the elections. Congress election posters, instead of stressing positions, displayed slogans affirming that Mrs. Gandhi was “the only national leader whose image is enshrined in the hearts of the people.” The 1971 elections were thus in every sense a personal triumph for Mrs. Gandhi, and firmly established her position at the top of both party and nation. With the historic military victory over Pakistan later that year in the Bangladesh War, Mrs. Gandhi was almost deified throughout India — the Muslim artist M F. Husain, “India’s Picasso,” painted a triptych depicting her as the Hindu warrior goddess Durga — and criticism of her in the party was treated virtually as sacrilege.