SUCCESSES EXACERBATE INTERNAL PARTY TENSIONS
Because of its electoral successes, the Jana Sangh could not be ignored in the formation of United Front governments. It was a participant in United Front governments in Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. By joining coalitions with the Sikh Akali Dal and with the communists in several states, the party reneged on an earlier policy not to associate itself closely with ‘communal’ and ‘anti-national’ forces. There was relatively little opposition to cooperation with the Akali Dal; however, alliances with the communists aroused considerable opposition within the party. Golwalkar himself advised the Jana Sangh leadership against working with communists.65 At the party’s general council meeting at Delhi in April 1967 the leadership was sharply questioned for four hours by the delegates on the issue.66 The delegates eventually voted their approval of United Front governments, but with no great enthusiasm. A few weeks earlier, the RSS central executive had met at Nagpur and had given its approval to the concept of coalition governments, expressing the hope that such political alliances would ‘bring about mutual harmony among the various political parties as envisaged by Sangh’.67
By September 1967 the Jana Sangh experience in the rough and tumble world of coalition politics, which many in the party saw as unprincipled, resulted in a re-evaluation of United Front ministries. At the party’s working committee meeting in Vadodara on 15 September, the organizational wing of the party decided that Jana Sangh ministers could remain within the United Front governments. One month later, this decision was upheld by a meeting of the Jana Sangh ministers. The issue which caused the most debate was Jana Sangh participation in ministries which included communists. Madhok, for example, described the party’s decision to remain in governments which included communists a ‘grave blunder’.68 He hinted that the RSS was exerting pressure on the party to keep them in such ministries. He wanted the party to adopt policies that would protect property and free enterprise. Cooperating so closely with various socialist and communist parties was, in his opinion, bad policy and bad politics.
During this debate, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had been a party secretary at the national level since 1955 and was the leader of the parliamentary wing, emerged as the spokesman of the ‘left’ viewpoint in the party. He favoured continued cooperation with the communists and the parties of the ‘left’. He also proposed that the party make a more vigorous attempt to mobilize the underprivileged and discontented voters.69 Upadhyaya, while distrustful of the communists, tended to support Vajpayee. In supporting a shift to the ‘left,’ Vajpayee was probably closer to the class interests of the RSS cadre than was Madhok.
Madhok eagerly sought the party presidency in late 1957; however, Upadhyaya himself assumed the position and Sunder Singh Bhandari, a former RSS pracharak, was chosen to succeed him as general secretary.70 The organization, represented by Upadhyaya, intended to keep a tight control on its much expanded legislative wing. Upadhyaya’s assumption of the presidency in 1957 signified that the basic organizing phase of the Jana Sangh was completed and that it now intended to become a serious competitor for power on the national level.
This reorientation of the party did not go unchallenged, and the party faced its most severe internal crisis since the 1954–55 purges. Madhok fiercely resisted the party’s leftward turn. He adamantly opposed any form of cooperation with the communists and socialists. During the central government employees’ strike in 1968, for example, he advised the party leaders not to support the workers on the grounds that the strike was being orchestrated by the communists. The party leadership was forced to respond to public statements about the strike because the Jana Sangh general council had earlier decided to support the workers’ cause.71 Vajpayee publicly informed the party cadre that the Jana Sangh sympathized with the workers’ demands.72 When Madhok filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court with Minoo Masani, a Swatantra Party member of parliament, in 1969, challenging the nationalization of banks that year, the Jana Sangh working committee cautioned him to consult his colleagues before taking any action that would portray the party as a defender of big business. He was told that the Jana Sangh would, in the future, approach social and economic problems from the ‘common man’s point of view’,73 and the cadre was told that they were to ‘steer clear of the prevalent impression that the Sangh is a party of the “Right”.’74 The working committee called upon the government to implement more forcefully the law on rural land ceilings. It decided to survey the cadre on their views regarding urban property ceiling.75 None of this pleased Madhok and the conservatives in the party. They were irritated by the party leadership’s intention to portray the party publicly and aggressively as a political representative of the poor and dispossessed.
The conservatives were also disturbed by the leadership’s move to tighten party discipline over the local units. Party membership had grown rapidly since 1965. The party’s electoral success brought many non-RSS people into the legislative wing of the party. To prevent the legislative wing—particularly in states where the Jana Sangh was involved in United Front ministries—from acting independently of party directives, the leadership decided to place the legislative members more closely under the direct supervision of the organization. Legislators were required to report to the local party organization and to take their instructions from it. According to Upadhyaya, who announced the policy, this policy was implemented both to ensure that the legislators would not depart ‘from norms of propriety’ and to enable the organization itself to serve as liaison between the people and their representative within the coalition cabinets.76 To enforce discipline within the expanding party structure, the party decided to increase the number of full-time organizers.77 As early as 1960, Upadhyaya had set the goal of placing an organizing secretary in every district; the party’s rapid expansion after 1965 prompted the organizational leaders to implement that unfulfilled goal. For those, like Madhok, who sought to open up the party structure, the idea of recruiting more full-time organizers was an unwelcome move.
RETHINKING ALLIANCES
The United Front ministries which had been formed in several states lacked a common set of policy objectives and an effective system of mediation among the participants. They all disintegrated. After brief periods of president’s rule, mid-term elections were held in Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. The Jana Sangh leadership was disappointed with the United Front experience and opted to fight alone in most places. The Jana Sangh generally performed less well in the mid-term elections than in 1967.
Some senior figures in the Jana Sangh believed that the party could have done better had it worked out electoral agreements. The conservatives, who wanted the Jana Sangh to work more closely with parties of the ‘right’, put pressure on the party leadership to reconsider the Jana Sangh’s alliance strategy. Though the senior leaders remained apprehensive about alliances, they did agree to talks with other non-communist opposition parties to consider some kind of united front for the forthcoming general elections. Unofficial talks took place in March and April 1969 between leaders of the Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Kranti Dal, the Swatantra Party, and the Praja Socialist party, at a meeting convened by Prakash Vir Shastri, a member of parliament from Uttar Pradesh. In those talks, Vajpayee, who had become party president following Upadhyaya’s death in early 1968, insisted that any merger or electoral alliance must be preceded by a commonly accepted set of principles.78 The mysterious circumstances surrounding Upadhyaya’s death on 11 February 1968 led many Jana Sanghis to conclude that he had been murdered. The wave of sympathy aroused by his death probably helped establish among the cadre the legitimacy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Upadhyaya’s protege and member of parliament since 1957. Vajpayee had already become the party’s parliamentary leader and its most articulate orator and public spokesman. Following Upadhyaya’s death, he had considerable freedom to formulate policy and, as the opposition parties manoeuvred for alliance partners in the late 1960s, Vajpayee
’s preference was to avoid a relationship unless there had been a prior agreement on principles.
After the Jana Sangh’s 1969 annual session at Bombay, the leaders of the Jana Sangh, Swatantra Party, and Bharatiya Kranti Dal resumed their talks. Because the Jana Sangh representatives ruled out the option of merger, and because they continued to insist on a consensus regarding principles, the Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Kranti Dal leaders decided to continue their talks without the Jana Sangh.79 While Vajpayee and most of the working committee members were moving away from participation in any ‘grand alliances’, Madhok and his supporters argued for a merger with other conservative parties. Political polarization was, in their view, the wave of the future. The Jana Sangh, being neither ‘fish nor fowl’, would became isolated from the voters unless it committed itself to one or the other of the developing ideological configurations. They pressed for a merger between the Jana Sangh and the Swatantra Party, and even coined a name for the projected party—the Nationalist Democratic Conservative Party. Madhok was infuriated by the leadership’s refusal to heed his advice. In public speeches, he insinuated that the leftward tilt was due to some kind of collusion between the leadership and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He compared his differences inside the Jana Sangh to the disagreements between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. Madhok identified himself with the ‘nationalist’, ‘democratic’, and ‘conservative’ Patel; and he compared his opponents to Nehru. The Jana Sangh parliamentary board met in Delhi in September 1969 and censured Madhok for his remarks.80
Despite pressure from the right, Vajpayee was reluctant to change the ground rules for negotiations on political alliances. However, the situation changed drastically when on 27 December 1970 leaders of the Congress (0), Swatantra Party, and the Jana Sangh met in Delhi to consider an electoral alliance. On 3 January party leaders announced that they were considering a national electoral alliance. About a week later the Samyukta Socialist party (SSP) joined the discussions. The state units of the four parties were instructed to set up committees to allocate the seats among candidates of the four parties. On 25 January the coordinating committee of the ‘grand alliance’, as it was called in the press, reached an agreement on 300 of the 520 parliamentary seats.81 Despite the public show of harmony, the allies were still deeply divided; the one issue on which they all agreed was their opposition to Prime Minister Gandhi.
THE JANA SANGH IN THE 1970S: THE PARTY TURNS TO POPULISM
The Jana Sangh leadership, having established a firm organizational base, was also laying a programmatic groundwork for a ‘party of the common man’, a phrase used by some advocates of the new approach. This approach was opposed by a conservative section led by Balraj Madhok. However, it was more in tune with the world view of the RSS, with the pracharak network and probably with the class background of most swayamsevaks. This approach also offered greater prospects for expanding the party’s mass support base, and party leaders already envisaged the Jana Sangh becoming a major all-India party.
The Jana Sangh went into the 1971 general elections linked to the ‘grand alliance’, There was considerable grass-roots apprehension regarding this alliance and its ability to put up a viable contest against a prime minister whose slogan was ‘the elimination of poverty’, Many of the cadre were dismayed both by what they considered to be the blatant opportunism among the ranks of the alliance partners and by the rightist image of the ‘grand alliance’.
The results of the 1971 parliamentary election seemed to add substance to the fears of the cadre, though the Jana Sangh did make some scattered gains. In Bihar, it continued to do well and won one additional parliamentary seat. In Madhya Pradesh, the Jana Sangh, with the help of the former rulers of Gwalior,82 increased its parliamentary representative from 10 to 11 and polled over one-third of the vote. The Jana Sangh and a Jana Sangh-supported SSP candidate won all but one of the parliamentary seats in the Madhya Bharat region of Madhya Pradesh. The party also managed to win 4 seats from Rajasthan, one more than in 1967. Maharajkumar Brij Raj Singh and Raja Homendra Singh, members of the Kota and Udaipur princely families respectively, won 2 of the party’s 4 seats in Udaipur division. The party also did quite well in Rajasthan’s city elections which were held several months before the general elections. It ran 803 candidates in 103 towns where it won 252 seats, not counting the 33 independents backed by the Jana Sangh. It won a majority of the seats in 12 towns and emerged as the largest single party in Jaipur, the state’s capital city.83
Everywhere else, the results were a disappointment. The Jana Sangh lost its seats in Punjab and Chandigarh, and barely managed to retain one seat in Haryana. It lost every parliamentary contest in Delhi by substantial margins,84 and its representation from Uttar Pradesh dropped from 11 to 4. With 22 seats in the parliament, the Jana Sangh still remained one of the larger opposition parties. Among the opposition parties, only the Congress (0) with 10.42 per cent of the popular vote out-polled its 7.35 per cent. Only the Jana Sangh and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) managed to maintain their 1967–69 voting strengths, perhaps indicating greater partisanship among supporters of these two ideological parties.
When the general council of the Jana Sangh met at Jaipur, the leadership came in for severe criticism from the party cadre. Many delegates blamed the losses on the party’s unreliable coalition partners and on the rightist tarring it received from its association with the ‘grand alliance’. They demanded that the party stay out of future national electoral alliances, and proposed that the party contest the 1972 state assembly elections on its own. The party leadership was forced to reverse its alliance policy in the face of mass discontent from the cadre.85
Such open friction between the leadership and the cadre was rare, because the Jana Sangh leadership usually solicited the opinion of the cadre at the local level before reaching a final decision. The local units met at least once a month and were required to discuss issues brought to them by a higher unit. In the case of an electoral alliance to fight the 1971 elections, the Jana Sangh leadership did not have much time to canvass the local units, and it made a decision that the cadre strongly opposed. In the face of the criticism, Vajpayee concurred with the majority opinion that the party must more effectively portray itself as committed to social and economic justice.86
The Jana Sangh’s performance in the 1972 state assembly elections was also disappointing. For the first time, the party did not improve upon its performance in previous elections. Prime Minister Gandhi’s Congress party strengthened its position in the sixteen states and two Union territories in which assembly elections were held. In Madhya Pradesh, the Jana Sangh won only 48 of the 296 assembly seats, though it received almost one-third of the popular vote. In Punjab, without the support from the Akali Dal, the Jana Sangh lost every assembly seat. It also drew a blank in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal. Its representation dropped from 12 to 2 in Haryana, 33 to 5 in Delhi Metropolitan Council, and 22 to 8 in the Rajasthan assembly. The Congress had reached an agreement with the former ruler of Kota, and it won all 16 seats in Kota division, a region which had given the Jana Sangh 11 seats in 1967.87 However, the Jana Sangh was only 1 seat down in the Bihar assembly. It won 2 additional seats in Gujarat and one additional seat in Maharashtra; it retained 3 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly.
The leadership called the general council together to discuss the elections, and the delegates’ criticism of the leadership matched that of the Jaipur meeting the previous year. While party leaders blamed the defeat on the Congress ‘misuse’ of the government machinery and on the ‘credit’ it took for the military victory over Pakistan in late 1971, the delegates were not prepared to let the leadership escape at least part of the blame.88 Vajpayee admitted ‘full responsibility’ and asked Dr Bhai Mahavir, a Jana Sangh vice-president and member of the Rajya Sabha,89 to chair the meeting in his place so that the delegates could freely criticize him. Their criticism centred on the party’s conservative image and its weak support
base among the poor. Many delegates charged that the leadership had done little to dispel the popular conception of the Jana Sangh as a party of the rich. To cite a specific example, they blamed the leadership for not formulating a clear land ceiling policy. They passed a resolution proposing that rural land holdings should not exceed a size which could provide a Rs 1500 per month income for a family of five. They also passed a resolution limiting a family’s expendable income to Rs 2000 per month, with the excess income invested to generate greater production and higher employment. To mobilize additional support, they decided to establish front organizations among youth, women and the Scheduled Castes. They also decided to step up efforts among Sikhs and Muslims.90
The party leadership did not take much convincing to make the Jana Sangh a party ‘of the common man’. At the party’s 1972 session at Bhagalpur, Vajpayee reported to the party delegates that the Jana Sangh would launch a campaign to mobilize the support of ‘landless labour, small peasants, Harijans, workers, and employees in mills and offices, youths—particularly students, artisans, and small-scale entrepreneurs’. In line with Upadhyaya’s earlier justification of agitation as a tactic, Vajpayee informed the delegates that ‘we extend Jana Sangh’s activities beyond the confines of parliamentary politics. It is essential that our approach should not be merely reformist. Jana Sangh has to organize popular discontent and exert itself as a militant and dynamic party.’91
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