Congress & conservatives
Is it any surprise that India has never had a Left liberal PM, let alone a radical? Even the country’s first Communist CM was more of a scholar than a rabble-rouser, an austere Gandhian than a ruthless Stalinist. And that scholarly Communist CM was dismissed from office by the most erudite PM we ever had — so much for Nehru’s liberalism. And only a conservative politician could have enthroned his own daughter as his party’s president, establishing a dynasty.
All the Gandhis can now do is to play on their strength — the organisational control — while allowing its satraps to recapture the conservative core of the party.
Indian political ethos is essentially conservative and it is this conservative core that determines the country’s direction and destiny. This ethos defined one of the greatest upheavals in modern history: India’s freedom from colonial rule was achieved by a conservative consensus and through a transfer of power, without a bloody uprising. It is, of course, a sad fact that the colonial oppressors succeeded in leaving the bloody trail of Partition and festering wounds of identity politics.
Our founding fathers and even Mahatma Gandhi, the most creatively radical of them all, crafted a consensus among the most conservative not just to keep the flock together, but also to strengthen the Indian polity’s superstructure. The most radical idea that he got legitimised against Hindu orthodoxy was his campaign against untouchability and manual scavenging. As early as 1922, when Gandhi was forced to withdraw the Civil Disobedience Movement in the wake of the Chauri Chaura incident, one of the most important agenda items of the Bardoli-Delhi resolutions was, according to The Tribune, ‘the elevation of the depressed classes by the removal of untouchability’.
The leadership of the largest Indian national platform a hundred years ago could resolve to attack the core of Hinduism’s customs in words and deeds only because of this conservative consensus. By no stretch of imagination were Gandhi’s comrades radical; they included Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Swami Shraddhanand (all three were members of Gandhi’s Trust set up to create the Jallianwala Bagh memorial). Yet, they all came together to challenge and remove the worst tradition practised by Hindus.
Two years after the Bardoli-Delhi resolutions, the first Gandhian satyagraha for the entry of the oppressed castes into a Hindu temple was done by a Savarna Jatha captained by an entitled caste leader. The Vaikom Satyagraha was about three years prior to Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha. Then, Ambedkar too was a conservative who chose to join the colonial administration instead of pursuing radical agitational politics. If the British had succeeded in defeating the nationalists, Ambedkar would probably have continued as a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and there would have been no Constitution of the republic.
It is now fashionable to imagine our Constitution as a radical document. If it is so, one must again bow down to the wisdom of the conservative members of the Constituent Assembly who wrote it. The Assembly was indirectly elected by the landed and the moneyed and had the representation of less than 20 per cent of the eligible voters. Yet, this august assembly of wise men and women could write a progressive document that has attained the stature of scriptures for the Left radicals, whose political ancestors had decried it, saying ‘yeh azadi jhuthi hai’.
The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, insists that it is the sole legatee of the freedom movement but now it is obvious that the party has lost its conservative core. The Gandhi family no longer represents Indian conservatives. The central leadership of the Congress is more of an organisational requirement than an entity that represents any particular section of the population. The Congress desperately hangs on to the Gandhis to keep the organisation intact simply because the present-day party does not have a single non-Gandhi leader capable of keeping the dwindled flock together. Though the Group of 23 has rightly pointed out deficiencies in the leadership, it has fallen short of offering a credible alternative to the Gandhis. So, while the Gandhi family acts as an adhesive for a tattered book of frayed pages, it has stopped getting read by any particular section, class or community.
The process of the alienation of the conservatives from the Congress that began with the first split in 1969 could be reversed by Indira Gandhi with her stupendous war victory in 1971. Even after the Emergency and her personal defeat, she could reclaim lost ground to a certain extent in the 1980 elections. Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984 victory was again an endorsement by the conservatives, who wanted a stable, unified and strong India. But the duplicitous attempts to play the communal card — over the Shah Bano case, the ban on Rushdie’s book and the opening of the Ayodhya masjid locks — by an inexperienced PM’s cynical acolytes dented the conservative constituency very badly.
Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh instinctively appealed to a large section of the conservatives, who were gradually getting communalised over the years. But the present leadership does not seem to have anything to offer to the conservatives, apart from the Rajiv-era tokenism of soft Islamist/Hindutva/caste politics. All the Gandhis can now do is to play on their strength — the organisational control — while allowing its satraps to recapture the conservative core of the party. It is fine for a leader to go out to a night club, party hard, sport a stubble, have a few drinks with friends; in fact, it is most natural for anyone to do all these things. But there is a reason politicians do not do it in public — they fear the conservative opinion that insists that leaders be role models. Hypocrisy, yes. But that is how the conservative opinion is made.
And if the Congress leadership believes that it represents and communicates to a different constituency altogether, then it is high time it delineated this constituency’s contours.
