Crucial Ballot

Next week, as millions of India’s electorate go to poll, this nation will be turning a page in its history, whatever may be the verdict of the ballot box.

If Indira Gandhi manages to bag the majority of seats—as the Congress has been desperately trying to do in the last lap of the campaign with massive mobilisation of resources—even then, the Lok Sabha will never be the same again. Already the spectre of defection on the morrow of the poll results, haunts the Congress leadership. The hegemony of the Congress in Indian polity has been broken, and with it this country leaves behind an entire epoch. And if she fails to get the majority—as many indications suggest—then it means the formal end of the Congress Raj after three decades without interruption and without challenge.

Now that all the tub-thumping demagogy will be over with the campaign about to end, it may be worthwhile probing into Indira Gandhi’s calculations in going in for the gamble of the election. The solid reasons are known whatever may be the propaganda posture. They are essentially three: the poor prospect on the economic front in the coming year; the urgent need for a diversion from the mounting in-fight within the Congress; and the Western, particularly American, obsession for renewal of legitimacy of the Raj born out of Emergency.

But these by themselves do not explain why the Prime Minister chose to open the Pandora’s Box that the election ordeal has turned out to be. Or, more precisely, did she really calculate that the decision to go in for the election would be as serious as opening the Pandora’s Box? It is legitimate to hold that Indira Gandhi did not at all bargain for all that followed, finally ending up with the frantic struggle for retention of power that she has held for more than eleven years now. From the combined force built up by the Janata Party to Jagjivan Ram’s startling revolt, to the utter political liability that her son and retinues have turned out to be—how can one in all honesty accept the poppycock doled out by her cronies that she has got a grip over the situation?

The tenor of her electioneering—incoherence mixed with mis-timed provocations—has been in poor contrast with Jagjivan Ram’s skilful indictment of Emergency with occasional rapier thrusts; or with Chandra Shekhar and Bahuguna’s powerful exposure of the Establishment. If Emergency with its shameful record has been put on the dock, the Prime Minister has to thank mainly her son and also her own stubborn underwriting of the long list of his misdeeds.

The most plausible explanation about her decision to stage a snap election could be that the Prime Minister had been infected by a false sense of complacency generated by Emergency itself. The fact that she could clamp it down and continue with it without any visible, organised resistance or any open revolt from within the Congress, might have led her to believe that the Opposition had been practically put out of action without any reasonable possibility of unity, while the Congress party had reconciled itself, in her view, to its virtual displacement by the upstart Youth Congress and the State Chief Ministers reduced to the status of bonded sycophants.

Such an appraisal of the situation, patently unreal, could well have led her to expect that the election campaign would be a virtual walk-over with no formidable challenge to reckon with. And once the election was managed, the calculation was to stage a come-back with an authoritarian set-up in which the partnership of the Sanjay caucus could have claimed to have earned legitimacy.

The flaw in this calculation—which Indira Gandhi in all probability made—lies in the total absence of any understanding of the mass mood. How the common man and woman fared under Emergency despite all the lollipops held out by the Twenty-point Programme, how the slum demolition operations had hit the poor, how the bonus-cuts, lay-offs and retrenchment had embittered the wage-earner while the bosses got concessions galore; how the forcible sterilisation drive had enraged a large part of the poorer sections; how the press gag had helped to destroy the credibility of the Government in the eyes of intelligentsia; how the indiscrimiante use of MISA and other police powers had antagonised the public as a whole, even if they suffered in silence—all these were not gone into mainly because of the intemperate impatience that Emergency bred in Authority. In reality, the resort to unbridled Emergency powers cannot be reconciled with the accountability to the demos that any election presupposes.

This failure to gauge the mass mood today is in glaring contrast to what happened during the 1971-72 polls: at that time, circumstances led Indira Gandhi to a situation in which she could strike the right chord in rousing mass expectations with the slogan of Garibi Hatao. But those electoral victories made her dizzy with success, and that became the stepping stone to Himalayan complacency, coupled with an overdose of ego that she alone could understand the mass urge.

Whatever opening there was for the manifestation of mass grievances as well as expectations, was choked by the total banishment of civil liberties under Emergency. If the masses have had to suffer these thoughtless curbs, the Government in the final analysis became itself the loser because it was left in the dark about the simmering discontent in the community as a whole. The inexorable logic of Emergency crippled its capacity to respond to the mass urges and demands, and to that measure, narrowed the social base of the Government. It is, therefore, a matter of no surprise that Indira Gandhi should have been saddled with miscalculations as she went to the poll.

From a wider viewpoint, this election campaign has shown—more than anything before—that the Congress leadership has practically ceased to understand how the people as a whole would feel and react in a given situation. From the days of Gandhi right up to 1972, the Congress with all its serious shortcomings, could claim to know the mass mind and mould it for action. The successive General Elections helped it to test this out. Now that quality seems to have disappeared—a process accelerated by Emergency—and inevitably the Congress this time has been facing the poll extraordinary unsure of its own fate.

Throughout the present election campaign, the Congress leadership has harped on the imminent danger of instability if it was not returned to power—and the latest point in this argument is that Bhutto’s newly elected Government could be a menace to our security. In other words, the stability of the political system or the security of the country has been equated with the uninterruped rule of one single party—a sort of what’s good-for-the-Congress-is-good-for-the-country.

Now that this protracted tenure of the Congress as the Raj is threatened with collapse, new norms of political behaviour have to be enforced, all the more so after the experience of the Emergency regime. No doubt, the disappearance of the Congress hegemony will be followed by many ups and downs—even convulsions—in our political life. For a country of such magnitude, variety and unevenness as ours, political norms cannot be set overnight.

But there is no reason for despair. The election campaign has proved that the people of India have the genius to protect their own democracy. A powerful upsurge of popular discontent has come without any marked outbreak of violence or disorder. In fact, this has perhaps been the most peaceful election campaign despite the explosive issues churned up.

The valley of uncertainty need not be a valley of fear. The tempestuous Tomorrow can very well be the harbinger of a new era of hope.

(Mainstream, March 12, 1977)