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Mainstream, Vol XLVII, No 17, April 11, 2009

No Time for Banality

Sunday 12 April 2009, by Nikhil Chakravartty

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Within the space of one month, barely thirty days, the national scene has conspicuously changed. After the traumatic experience Indira Gandhi’s ghastly end, there seems to be little realisation of the magnitude of the change that has overtaken not only the polity but the entire ethos of this nation.

On the surface, it looks as if things have continued to be more or less the same. Within hours of Indira Gandhi’s passing away, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the new Prime Minister. Followed all the ceremonials connected with the funeral of Indira attended by a huge crowd of VIPs from far and near, symbolically joining in the mourning but everyone wondering what would happen after Indira Gandhi. Then came the carefully prepared policy statement by the new Prime Minister who next called for fresh general elections for the Lok Sabha. Business as usual—with minor changes here and there. For instance, there is talk about Rajiv having poise and the right demeanour in contrast to Indira’s hesitant if not faltering steps when she became the Prime Minister in 1966. The violence that broke out in the wake of Indira’s killing subsided when the Army was called in. While it is put on the alert ever since, its deployment has ceased to be conspicuous except in Punjab.

And finally the scramble for election tickets, hordes of aspirants descending on Delhi, the deprived getting embittered or threatening revolt, while the Opposition kept engaged in never-ending talks and cross-talks to reach unity, which has been eluding them for months. At present, the mood seems to be that with the General Election, everything will settle down and normalcy will prevail once again bringing back the good old days.

But good old days never come back. Even under normal circumstances, every succession to Prime Ministership brings about certain changes, and the style and approach of each incumbent in office is bound to differ from those of his or her predecessor or successor. Between Nehru and Lal Bahadur, between Lal Bahadur and Indira, and Indira and the Janata—dissimilarity was pronounced though the matrix was not broken. This time, however, there is a qualitative change, a sharp turn in the very order of things. Not only shall the good old days not come back, but bad days overcast with black lowering clouds stare us in the face.

This perspective however has seeped down into the understanding of neither our political bosses nor of the intelligentsia spread wide over the country. Accustomed as we as a nation have become to fairly orderly conditions for nearly four decades since independence, more particularly since the enforcement of the Constitution in 1950, there has come about a certain inertia in trying to discern the significance of any new development. Apart from the horoscope and the palmist, there seems to be no effort at reading the omens as they appear in the realities of today.

The omens, however, are not difficult to discern. A Prime Minister gunned down down by her security—not killed by an outside assailant breaking the security cordon nor by an individual guard running amuck, and these too having been shot by those other guards who caught them—provides clear indications of a carefully planned plot, startlingly exposing the rotten state not only of intelligence but to a large measure of the administrative set-up itself. While Indira Gandhi had been warning loudly about foreign hands attempting at destabilisation, the executive showed up its incompetence even at detecting a plot—foreign or indigenous or both—to kill the Prime Minister.

While many factors contributed to this degeneration in the system of governance, there is no gainsaying the fact that in the last ten years the system itself has corroded largely because of the style of functioning that was adopted at the top. The collapse of the government’s morale after the running out of the euphoria over the sweeping electoral victories of 1971-72 coupled with the accolades brought by the Bangladesh liberation, could be seen in its inability to contain and overpower the mass discontent crystallising under JP in Gujarat and Bihar. This led to the panicky promulgation of the Emergency which in turn led to the poll debacle in 1977. During the three-year hibernation out of power 1977-1980, Indira Gandhi’s camp did not go in for any serious introspection about the state of things: rather it was preoccupied in exploiting the anarchic disarray brought about by the Janata Raj which further undermined the system.

After the ouster of the Janata and Indira’s return to power, the administrative machinery, particularly at the Centre, became an extraordinarily abnormal monolith in which all initiatives and decision-making were left at the hands of a single individual—an absurd practice which debilitated both the executive and political wings of the Establishment. Thus, while Indira Gandhi’s image grew, invested all the time with fresh glories and adulations galore, its fragility shocked her own people as she was brutality done to death within the supposedly safe precincts of her own residence.

The violent pogrom against the Sikhs that followed Indira’s assassination provides many lessons for our democracy. There was no doubt a spontaneous outburst of bitter anger which had been accumulating for a considerable period of time. The absence of Sikh condemnation on a large scale of the Bhindranwale terror killings for months coupled with the widespread condemnation by the same community of the Army operation to snuff out the Bhindranwale gang from the Golden Temple, had already created a sense of alienation between the Sikhs and large segments of non-Sikh opinion. And when the news about the Prime Minister having been brutally killed by her trusted Sikh guards suddenly came, the shock itself touched off a wave of hostility. It was at this crucial moment, the government and the leadership of all political parties were found wanting to intervene, leaving the field open to organised goonda gangs to indulge in carnage and looting. The fact can no longer be concealed that at many places, particularly in the Capital, these goonda gangs moved under the active protection of local Congress-I leaders, many of whom were originally part of the Sanjay mafia. It is not surprising that the opponents of the Congress-I have tried to capitalise on this point though unfortunately this has been made a subject of partisan politics by organisations claiming to be unconnected with day-to-day party politics: a fact which, there is good ground for believing, has distressed those in these organisations who would not like to be a cat’s-paw of current election politics.

From the point of view of the Congress, this has been a case of sordid degeneration. It needs to be recalled that Jawaharlal Nehru facing the avalanche of mass anger at the Partition killings, rushed to the busy shopping centre of the Capital, and gun in hand, chased armed mobs looting shops belonging to the minority community. Such illustrious precedents seem to have been forgotten nowadays. Instead comes the shocking spectacle of the Mayor of Delhi, a Sikh political personality, having been hooted down when addressing a government-sponsored meeting to observe the birth anniversary of Indira Gandh; and what was more amazing, none of the other leaders present, from the Prime Minister downward, did care to pull up the hooters. Equally unfortunately the Prime Minister’s speech at that meeting spoke of badla (revenge)—though in a totally different context—which cheered the crowd in its present mood of communal bias. Rajiv Gandhi missed an opportunity to elevate himself to the eminence of a leader, unencumbered by petty considerations of vote-catching.

The Opposition camp provides no elevating spectacle. Petty squabbles over seat allocations have persisted among these parties, big and small. Particularly regretful is the public display of mutual acrimony between the two CPs over claims and counter-claims on seats supposed to be within the Communist strangleholds. And in the midst of it all, a leader of seniority and distinction like Namboodripad has made the whimpering complaint about the Congress-I making political capital out of Indira’s assassination: what was extraordinarily objectionable about it, since Indira was herself the President of that party? Would the
CPI-M have behaved differently had it been faced with the mourning over its own dead leaders?

Banality has thus become the order of the day. Politics of all complexions and magnitude have now entered the poll game in the same old style that they had followed in the previous general elections. They seem to be oblivious of the fact that not only has the executive machinery been discredited and shown signs of mental fatigue but the election game itself might be fouled up by outbursts of insensate violence or communal or regional frenzy roused to the point of pogrom shattering the very fabric of the Indian nation-state. It is obvious that there would be forces abroad which would like to see India weakened and wallowing in its internal contradictions, but such forces can hardly be fought out so long as our own national morale and morals are allowed to be grievously eroded.

Beyond the excitement of electioneering must come the realisation of the need to build a patriotic consensus to save and uphold the basic assets and values of this great nation. Where is the leadership to bring about that awareness?

(Mainstream, December 1, 1984)

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