Gandhi and her rivals
Charles Douglas-Home
For 29 of the 32 years since independence, India has had a Nehru as Prime Minister.
Father and daughter between them have established an Indian identity which competing politicians have found hard, if not impossible, to emulate. As the preparations for January's election now get under way, the question —really the only national question — before the electors of India, is this: will they make the dynastic choice, forgive Mrs Gandhi the excesses of her emergency and return her to power; or will they avoid the risk? There is no other national issue in the election; the lady is the issue.
It may seem hard to believe that Mrs Gandhi has recovered so much ground since March 1977, when she was swept from power. Behind her then lay the horrors of an apparently coercive family planning programme; the suspicion that her son Sanjay had been allowed unbridled influence; the 100,000 unjustifiable detentions; deportations, press censorship, and all the emerging apparatus of an authoritarian and rancorous dictatorship.
Of course many — perhaps most — Indian intellectuals and urban liberals then received bruises from which they will never recover. And yet, two and a half years after the end of the emergency, there is evidence of a new desire for powerful leadership. Mrs Gandhi's appeal is stark, simple, straightforward, temptingly convincing in its emptiness. She gripped the country before and she intends to grip it again: the power of her will is an important element in the political situation. She has forgotten nothing and learnt nothing — unless it is that she should have called her election after one year of emergency rule and not two. She is stom ping the country tirelessly, with an exhausting itinerary, repeating a few simple truisms — half truisms more likely — which are not and cannot be answered by her opponents and which acquire, through endless repetition, some semblance of authenticity: certainly for the masses of uninformed electors and voters for whom Mrs Gandhi is the only truly national figure, right or wrong. During her career she has visited every district of India, something which probably nobody else in the country has managed — certainly none of the politicians who oppose her.
Of all her rivals for power, the present prime minister, Mr Charan Singh, can lay the least claim to an 'all-India' appeal. He has served his political apprenticeship entirely in Uttar Pradesh State. On the national stage, he is a 76 year old novice. He has never been in Calcutta and only last month paid his first ever visit to the south. Mr Singh is aware enough of his own. parochialism as indeed he should be: for here is the Prime Minister of the second largest country in the world, a veritable continent of peoples and climates of which he can know almost nothing.
There is also the main opposition leader Mr Jagjivan Ram, once picked by Mountbatten as a young politician to represent the lowest caste, the Untouchables. Mr Ram now 79, has seen it all — mostly from within government. His experience should make him the R.A. Butler of India, except that it is hard to find with him much evidence of that constructive political thought which emerged from Butler during his long years at the centre of power. Mr Ram has enormous influence, and would now be the prime minister were it not for a constitutional idiosyncracy on the part of President Reddy. His political position is at present a favourable one, and the most seasoned of India's political observers suggested this week that Mr Ram's Janata Party felt they were on the way up, while the newly named Lok Dal party of the prime minister felt that it was on the way down.
What could explain this ebb and flow of morale, when there is no hard evidence either way? Perhaps it is the discovery that Mr Charan Singh's government may be even worse than its predecessor. Janata governed for two years without distinction, indeed virtually without direction, before losing office by default. Now, for the last three months, Mr Charan Singh's govern ment has shown a similar inability to proceed anywhere. India's vast democracy has had to adjust to a weak central government while the 16 states have been able to assert themselves more and more.
The election, however, does not really touch on the issue of states' rights versus centralisation. It is not an issue because all of the parties seem to stand for centralisation at the centre, in much the same way as they might stand for the abolition of sin and the enrichment of India's poor. The real question troubling Indians is whether or not the last two years have proved that n00 authoritarian government in India Is unworkable. Should a country of 650 million' not be given longer to show that, difficult though a pluralist democracy may be, it cannot ju'stifiably be doomed after a two-year experiment following the years of central hegemony? It seems clear from Mrs, Gandhi's last period in power that she had come to some intuitive conclusion — consistent with her own peremptory personality — that casual, random, slow-paced, inefficient democracy of the Indian pattern was not good for the country.' What has democracy done for the Indian peasant? It is fashionable to decry Its, achievements, and to say it has failed' India. Yet now in 1979, facing a bad harvest and a poor monsoon, there has been no, suggestion of large scale Indian starvation. There has in fact been an improvement In the country's economy and its aviculture, which gives it an underlying strength and self-confidence. Trends such as this, °,t, course, magnified through a nation of 65v million people, inevitably take time. But Mrs Gandhi's conclusion seems to have been that there is not enough time for _ India's condition to improve, so long as t.11'_ direction of its affairs is left to the Westminster-style pluralist parliamentary democracy that it effectively absorbed from the British — although her own performan.ee_ in office undermines her authority to rnattf such a condemnation. The idea of a nation _": of 650 million people expressing them selves unpredictably through democran_c_ institutions is difficult enough to e.°11:. prehend. However, that should not toild _ democrats in smaller countries to conclun! that, because it is an incomprehensible pero cess, it is bound to be an unworkable on •
Previous page
