India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Mrs. Gandhi then set about centralizing the party, which had in the past been a federal one characterized by strong state parties. She did this by reducing the power of the state organizations, eliminating the party bosses, placing her own nominees on key Congress decision-making bodies, nominating Congress chief ministers in the states instead of encouraging their free election by state legislators, personally appointing the Congress president, and deferring indefinitely intraparty organizational elections. Her control of the Congress presidency was an important instrument of her domination. After the party split, Mrs. Gandhi initially thought of assuming the position herself, but then decided to staff the presidency with frequently replaced loyalists. None of them was permitted to stay long enough in office to consolidate an independent base of support in the organization. Mrs. Gandhi bolstered her control at the top by ensuring that the Congress MPs below were dependent on her for political advancement, patronage, and party nominations (as well as material support) for elections.

  Some sympathizers have suggested that Mrs. Gandhi’s remolding of the party was aimed at making the Congress a more effective organization, a vehicle of performance rather than compromise. That interpretation may have been intellectually appealing to starry-eyed leftists at the time, but it is empirically difficult to sustain, for Indira Gandhi’s personalization of power increased precisely as the party’s ability to perform declined, through the economic and political crises of 1973-75. Her own record makes it all the more difficult to suggest that the changes she brought into the way the party was run could have been justified on the grounds of performance. The American political scientist Stanley Kochanek spoke of “de-institutionalization,” saying, “The new Congress system is too personalized. It has failed to establish mechanisms for building support other than through the use of populist systems.” This was as true of the party as it was of the cabinet. Indira Gandhi herself later admitted that the Congress under her “lacked a party apparatus,” and after her defeat she conceded that she had neglected the task of party organization entirely. Yet, when she came back to power in 1980, she did nothing whatsoever to restore inner party democracy to the Congress.

  The Emergency marked the culmination of a process of centralization that in its working had much less to do with performance than with the control of power. Even before the Emergency, the “new generation” of Congressmen in her leadership, far from being a well-knit “performance oriented” team, was an inchoate amalgam of her father’s rejects (like K. D. Malaviya), traditional politicians (like Jagjivan Ram), family friends (like Uma Shanker Dikshit), regional bosses (like Bansi Lal), fiery idealists without ministerial experience (like Chandrasekhar), un-ideological office-seekers (like V.C. Shukla) and lapsed Communists in search of power (like Mohan Kumaramangalam). Together they proved unable to stop the political or the economic drift. The entire official edifice had the weight and stability of a frequently reshuffled house of cards. It came, therefore, as no great surprise when the Congress Parliamentary Board, meeting in June 1975 in the wake of the adverse court judgment against Mrs. Gandhi that might have unseated her, not only did not ask her to observe the proprieties and step down, but instead resolved unanimously that her “continued leadership as prime minister is indispensable for the nation.” By then the realization had dawned that, as a letter-writer to The Statesman put it, “the Congress was so bankrupt” that it could not even nominate a temporary replacement for Indira Gandhi.

  Another legacy of Mrs. Gandhi’s style of governing was her use of advisers responsible only to her, of whose advice and services she availed herself as and when she chose — and who remained unaccountable to any democratic forum in the parliamentary system. Her personal staff came to include crude wielders of political clout, men who had risen from the clerical ranks by their adeptness at dispensing patronage and their penchant for effective political arm-twisting. The personal dominance of the prime minister was exercised through officials whose influence transcended their nominal powers. A single phone call from Mrs. Gandhi’s “Additional Private Secretary,” or even his personal assistant, was enough to goad ministers and secretaries into action. “There were no rules, no regulations, no precedents, no principles,” wrote the eminent journalist Kuldip Nayar: “ . . . all in the government waited at the end of the telephone line.”

  The stage was thus set for Sanjay Gandhi’s unconstitutional control of policy long before the Emergency was actually proclaimed on June 26, 1975. At the same time, with the core of the party and its organization etiolated, Indira Gandhi had little choice but to turn to her son for support and sustenance during the Emergency. The Congress she had created was no longer capable of meeting an activist political challenge. Mrs. Gandhi, congenitally unable to trust others, feeling herself existentially “alone” and conscious that Sanjay was the only aide whose loyalty to her was unconditional, relied heavily on her younger son and most trusted confidant. It also helped that they lived under the same roof. Sanjay participated in daily meetings with the prime minister, toured the country alongside her and on her behalf, made speeches, and issued instructions to chief ministers, state party bosses, and even bureaucrats, over none of whom he enjoyed any formal authority. In the process he took the “de-institutionalization” of India to the limit.

  His mother’s cousin, B. K. Nehru, a distinguished civil servant and diplomat, may appear in hindsight to have overstated the case against Sanjay when he declared:

  During the Emergency, Sanjay traduced all the fragile institutions of our democracy — the civil service, the judiciary, the press, the civilian control of the military. He gave preference to this civil servant or that judge, intimidated this journalist or transferred that soldier. He therefore demoralized the whole apparatus of government. In his short life, he destroyed all the fragile democratic institutions that had been nurtured in independent India. Thus, he made possible the dawn of a totally ruthless, disillusioned period, where each man is for himself, and for whatever he can get out of the society.

  Even if exaggerated — Sanjay, for all his unfeeling malevolence, could not destroy Indian democracy singlehanded, and the institutions survived him, as India has survived other despots through its history — the indictment of a member of the family points devastatingly to the direction in which he was leading the country.

  Sanjay Gandhi’s “five-point program,” the animating political philosophy of the Emergency, consisted of population control, slum clearance, tree-planting, literacy, and dowry abolition. Though it was a long way from the stirring aspirations of the Congress in its nationalist days, it was a useful enough agenda, if dreadfully limited in its vision — but it failed spectacularly on all fronts. The thuggish attempt to enforce sterilization and vasectomies, as well as to intimidate government servants (from officials to schoolteachers) into fulfilling arbitrary sterilization quotas or forfeiting professional preferment, set back the country’s voluntary family planning efforts by a decade. The bulldozing of half a dozen slums in the national capital and the relocation of their inhabitants into areas where they were deprived both of infrastructure and of opportunities to earn a livelihood demonstrated the futility of slum clearance as an objective in itself: slums exist because their inhabitants have nowhere else to live, and because their residents conduct viable lives from them; improving slum conditions makes far more practical, economic, and indeed political sense than clearing them. Tree-planting is a laudable objective, but it was not pursued with any great energy; worse, little was done to control the ravages of deforestation undertaken by contractors with political connections to the ruling party. Literacy rates continued to stagnate, except in such states as Kerala, where the impetus for education predated Sanjay Gandhi and was pursued most vigorously by those who were implacably imposed to his aims. And as for dowry abolition, not only did the practice burgeon in the aftermath of the Emergency, but the 1970s and 1980s saw a record increase in the grisly phenomenon of “dowry deaths,” with brides being burned in their ki
tchens by husbands and mothers-in-law for not having brought sufficient dowries into their marriage. Such crimes were committed, largely in the north, by precisely the kind of thrusting, materialistic, upwardly mobile middle-class urban families who formed the backbone of Sanjay Gandhi’s political support.

  The fate of his “five-point program” merely confirmed that no national figure in independent India has left a more futile political legacy than Sanjay Gandhi. When, a few years after his death, his widow, Maneka, along with a handful of former cronies sidelined by the post-Sanjay Congress, attempted to revive their political fortunes by starting an organization they named the Sanjay Vichar Manch (Forum for the Thoughts of Sanjay), they were greeted by a collective exhalation of disbelief, for how could anybody exalt the “thoughts” of a man who had no thoughts? A “Sanjay Action Forum” might have made some sense, for, in his impatience to “get things done,” Sanjay was arguably a man of action. But not even his most committed admirers could have accused him of being a thinking man; earlier, during the Emergency, he admitted in an interview that he read only comics. When, during the period of anguished mourning that Mrs. Indira Gandhi suffered after her younger son’s death, the idea was floated to rename Delhi University after Sanjay, the howls of protest from the university’s degree holders penetrated even the prime minister’s maternal shield. The very thought of having our education devalued by attaching the name of an uneducable dropout to our degrees was bad enough. As one Delhi University classmate of mine exclaimed, “For God’s sake, why rename a university after the man? Couldn’t they find a garage?”

  The passing of Sanjay and the elevation of Rajiv as Mrs. Gandhi’s new right hand did, however, illustrate the extent to which the Congress Party had come to be dominated by one woman. Sadly, this occurred just when new groups of political actors were entering the national arena — representing the downtrodden, the marginalized, the fanatic — and when the challenge of accommodating and absorbing them required the vision of the Nehru generation. Instead, the political transformations occurring across India encountered not a flexible, imaginative, and great-hearted ruling class, but an atrophying system paying court to a petty autocrat. This moment of bathos gave us the depredations of Sanjay (farce as tragedy), the sycophantic syncopations of a depleted Congress leadership (tragedy as farce), and the unwise inciting of Sikh fundamentalism leading to the assault on the Golden Temple in “Operation Bluestar” (tragedy as tragedy).

  “The Congress is no longer a party,” wrote political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, “but an undifferentiated, unanchored medley of individuals sustained by patronage.” Meanwhile, shorn of the opportunity to exercise real responsibility, Congress politicians used the party as a vehicle largely for self-gratification. By the time of Rajiv’s ascent, the party overflowed with the sort of professional politicians we of the educated middle classes had come to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in khadi who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable (and unaccountable) riches.

  Rajiv Gandhi’s searing portrait of his own party, in his presidential address to the Congress centenary celebrations in 1985, cannot be bettered as a portrait of its decline:

  Instead of a party that fired the imagination of the masses throughout the length and breadth of India, we have shrunk, losing touch with the toiling millions. It is not a question of victories and defeats in elections. For a democratic party, victories and defeats are part of its continuing political existence. But what does matter is whether or not we work among the masses, whether or not we are in tune with their struggles, their hopes and aspirations. We are a party of social transformation, but in our preoccupation with governance we are drifting away from the people. Thereby, we have weakened ourselves and fallen prey to the ills that the loss of invigorating mass contact brings.

  Millions of ordinary Congress workers throughout the country are full of enthusiasm for the Congress policies and programs. But they are handi capped, for on their backs ride the brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy. They are self-perpetuating cliques who thrive by invoking the slogans of caste and religion and by enmeshing the living body of the Congress in their net of avarice.

  For such persons, the masses do not count. Their lifestyle, their thinking—or lack of it—their self-aggrandizement, their corrupt ways, their linkages with the vested interests in society, and their sanctimonious posturing are wholly incompatible with work among the people. They are reducing the Congress organization to a shell from which the spirit of service and sacrifice has been emptied. . . .

  We talk of the high priorities and lofty ideals needed to build a strong and prosperous India. But we obey no discipline, no rule, follow no principle of public morality, display no sense of social awareness, show no concern for the public weal. . . .

  The speech made him deeply unpopular with the old guard of his own party, but (or because) it was true. In his five years in office, Rajiv Gandhi reshuffled his cabinet no fewer than twenty-six times, but he came no closer to finding the right combinations of competence, integrity, and commitment he sought in a Congress Council of Ministers. He did not, of course, trace its decline to its manipulation and hollowing out by his mother, but he could not arrest it, and his successor, P. V. Narasimha Rao, did not even try. In the Congress’s stint in power under the Rao government of 1991-1996 intraparty elections were not held for four years, party appointments were at the pleasure of the prime minister (who went further than Mrs. Gandhi by simultaneously holding the post of president of the Congress Party, thereby preventing challengers to his authority from arising within its ranks), and Congress chief ministers in the states were appointed by New Delhi; worse, the top party leadership acquired a nationwide reputation for unresponsiveness and lack of accountability. (It is because many voters sensed that the decay, corruption, and complacency of the Congress was less present in the BJP that that party managed to appeal to some who did not share its “Hindutva” agenda.) The interesting experiment from 2004 onwards of a powerful ruling party president and leader of the governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi, sharing power with a Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who served as chief executive of the administration rather than as the country’s most powerful politician, helped reverse the trend. The division of labor between the two worked surprisingly well.

  On the positive side, there is a remarkable stability to Indian politics, despite its apparent fragmentation. The French political philosopher Maurice Duverger classified political conflict within democracy in three ways: conflict over basic principles (as in Italy, where Communists and Christian Democrats Contended); conflict over subsidiary principles (as in Britain, which offered a choice between social democracy and conservatism); and conflict without principles (as in the United States, where voters chose between two liberal-capitalist parties). Looking at the divergent platforms of the various parties, it might be thought that India falls into the first category. Yet, the platforms of the two Communist parties notwithstanding, the tenor and thrust of oppositional activity in general did not challenge the established consensus. This was ironically reaffirmed in 1977 when the former opposition, then the Janata coalition, restored the democratic consensus after its suspension by a Congress government, and again in 1996 when the basic policies of the defeated government were echoed in the Common Minimum Program agreed upon by the thirteen-party United Front coalition that replaced it. Even the two Communist parties did not challenge the national consensus on governance when they came to power in the states of Kerala, West Bengal, and Tripura; they ran capable liberal-democratic regimes in the Congress mold, working for evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. Beneath the chaos in the streets, opposition politics actually shored up the Indian democratic system. Every party claimed to represent the totality of the national interest in the quest for consensual national objectives. A conflict over subsidiary principles thus seems the fairest description of Indian politics, though it strik
es many as a conflict without principles — in not quite the way Duverger intended.

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  Of the issues most famously raised by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself in his controversial speech to the centenary celebrations of the Indian National Congress Party in 1985, his excoriation of the political roots of Indian corruption resonated perhaps the most strongly with ordinary Indians. In remarks notable for their candor and freedom from cant, Rajiv declared:

  As the proverb says, there can be no protection if the fence starts eating the crop. This is what has happened. The fence has started eating the crop. We have government servants who do not serve but oppress the poor and the helpless, police who do not uphold the law but shield the guilty, tax collectors who do not collect taxes but connive with those who cheat the state, and whole legions whose only concern is their private welfare at the cost of society. They have no work ethic, no feeling for the public cause, no involvement in the future of the nation, no comprehension of national goals, no commitment to the values of modern India. They have only a grasping, mercenary outlook, devoid of competence, integrity, and commitment. . . . Corruption is not only tolerated but even regarded as the hallmark of leadership.

  There are a number of reasons for the dramatic growth in political corruption in independent India. The obvious ones lie in the power that politicians have arrogated unto themselves in the “permit-license-quota Raj” ushered in by Nehruvian socialism. When so much of the country’s basic economic activity is dependent on the issuance by government of permissions, waivers, licenses, and exemptions to regulations, the temptation for politicians and public officials to profit from their power to permit becomes irresistible.