Politicians....Organized Criminals ??? (part 2)

Indira Gandhi

        In the previous post, I went over the initial era or the golden era of Indian politics, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Lal Bahadur Shastri. Till this time the rot was only at the lower levels, while the Gandhian aura still persisted in the higher echelons of power. Politicians were still highly respected and revered in the society and great debates used to happen in the parliament. All this was about to changed very rapidly.

       

        Indira Gandhi had been the president of the Congress in 1959, but that was not something liked by Nehru. He never gave her a cabinet berth and he was frequently embarrassed by her ruthlessness and disregard for parliamentary traditions. Only due to growing nepotism in the party, Lal Bahadur Shastri gave her an unimportant portfolio in his ministry. However defeating Morarji Desai in the party election, she became the next Prime Minister of India. 

     
        Indra Gandhi stood for almost the exact opposite of everything that her father stood for. She nearly destroyed everything that her father had so painstakingly built over so many years. Indira Gandhi had huge personal ambitions and absolutely no respect for any institution or person. Her primary goal was to keep herself in absolute power, whatever may be the cost, and to ensure that the power remained within her family perpetually. In her own words to the journalist Bruce Chatwin - ‘you have no idea how tiring it is to be a goddess.’
      

V. V. Giri

        Nepotism and personality cult were now openly encouraged. Indira Gandhi first gave a Bharat Ratna to herself and then to V.V. Giri whose most important qualification was perhaps just his loyalty to Indira Gandhi. The Congress party now became a family business. Internal party democracy became a joke. Only loyal and subservient people were given important posts and even senior independence struggle veterans were sidelined and shrugged off. It created a huge furor in the Congress party, the result being that the party was split twice. But Indra Gandhi prevailed over all her opponents within the congress party and outside, majorly due to championing the socialistic cause, her hugely popular "Garibi Hatao" slogan and the Nehru-Gandhi family legacy.
  
        Instead of the corruption being bottom up and behind closed doors, it became top down and the norm of the day. Honesty and morality were thrown out of the window completely. Corruption spread to every government department and was institutionalized, with fixed percentages for every officer in the department, from top to bottom. With the official patronage given to corruption and an absolute guarantee of safety ensured to its perpetrators, corruption spread like cancer in the entire system.

   

        Indira Gandhi took the Nehru's socialism to newer heights with her nationalization drive, the abolition of privy purses etc. However her motives were completely different. Nehru genuinely believed that democratic socialism was for the upliftment of the poor and the welfare of the nation. Indira Gandhi had no such noble aims. She had rarely ever invoked the word 'socialism' before 1967. Socialism was only her way of cashing on the popularity of her father, engendering populist support for herself, creating more centralization with a concentration of power in her hands and generating more money through rampant corruption in the license-permit-raj. In fact under Indira Gandhi, the country started moving from democratic socialistic policies to communistic policies of Stalin and Mao. 
       

        Indira Gandhi believed in staying in power by any and every means. She resorted to open rigging of elections, booth-capturing and violence, using public machinery for party purpose, spending much more than the allowed limit etc. She even encouraged anti-national elements just to counter the rise of new regional parties. She was also notorious for imposing president's rule on flimsy grounds in a lot of non-Congress states. Constitutional posts like those of the president, the Governor etc became her puppets. There were interferences even in the appointment and promotion of Judges. The bureaucracy was obviously kept under an iron fist and good and honest people were promptly sidelined.

   
Total Revolution

Jayaprakash Narayanan

        While the Gandhian morality was dying in the Congress, a new ray of light appeared in the 70's in the form of Jayaprakash Narayanan. JP had abandoned 'rajniti' for 'lokniti', but in 1974, he came back to the national politics to fight against corruption and misgovernance. He gave the call for "Total Revolution" to redeem the unfulfilled promises of the freedom movement. He openly equated the Congress government with the British government. His movement soon spread from Bihar to the rest of India. His movement was so intense that to keep herself in power Indira Gandhi had to declare an Emergency.
    
Emergency (26 June 1975 – 21 March 1977) and Janta Party
        Oppression brings out the best in a country and the Emergency achieved just that. The vehement opposition of emergency in the country proved how deeply Indians care about their liberty and how deep were the roots of democracy in the country. The growing apathy to politics in the Indian society was replaced by the most popular public movement since Independence.

Morarji Desai
(India's First Non-Congress PM)

        Jayprakash Narayanan called for a united front against the Congress and hence Janta Party was formed. However the design was flawed from the beginning. The Janta Party was an amalgam of various parties who had just one thing in common - opposition to Congress and Indira Gandhi. They had no common ideology, agenda or even an acceptable PM candidate. Moreover JP was not that much concerned about the character and past record of people joining the Janta Party. However, to be fair to him, he was almost on his deathbed at that time and had no time to prune or mentor the party like Gandhi did for the Congress Party. 

        The Janta Party government proved to be no less corrupt that the Congress Party. It began to wither as significant ideological and political divisions emerged and broke up in less than three years. With the death of JP, the grand endeavor to create a credible alternative to Congress came to an end. Indira Gandhi came back to power but she was never as much in control as in her early years as the Prime Minister. More importantly, the country lost one of its best chance to reform the Indian Politics even after such great public mobilization and turmoil.

Dynastic Politics

Sanjay Gandhi

          Indira Gandhi made no bones about the fact that she wanted Sanjay Gandhi to succeed her. After his death, Indira began grooming her other son, Rajiv Gandhi, for the top job. This Dynastic tendency, though started by Indira Gandhi, was not just limited to the first family or the Congress(I), but it soon spread to most regional political parties. By this time almost all political parties had become like family businesses. Ideology was secondary and getting to power was the primary purpose. Most of them had tasted power in the State and had become more of less like Congress itself.
     
        Although the middle class constituted a very small percentage of the Indian population, they played a very central role in the independence movement. The Congress party itself started as a middle-class party and later it expanded to the lower class. However when it came to winning elections, the middle class had no significant at all and hence it kept getting alienated with time, from the political consciousness. After the death of JP movement, the disconnect between the politicians and the middle class became almost absolute. Voting percentages in the rural India increased but in towns/cities, it came down heavily. A large percentage of the middle class didn't even bother to enroll themselves in the voter lists.
   
Anti-Sikh riots 1984

        The Hindu-Muslim riots in 1946-47 had the open tacit support of the British Government. After that, initially, the Indian Government always tried it best to prevent or contain all riots. Later on, in many cases, due to appeasement policy, the Government went soft on riots. However the murder of Indira Gandhi by a Sikh led to state-sponsored riots for the first time in post-independence history. With this Indian politics touched a new low.
        

Rajiv Gandhi

        Curtsey his mother's death, Rajiv Gandhi came to power with a thumping majority (404/506 seats but only 49.01% votes!!). Since he was an outsider in politics, some people had unrealistic hopes that he might clean up the system. However that requires exceptional moral fiber and guts which he clearly lacked. He tried to introduce some reforms but quickly retraced his steps and went back to tried and tested vote bank politics. Moreover he lacked the basic political knowledge to cover his tracks and thus one after the other corruptions scandals kept coming out of the closets. His inexperience destroyed the Congress's absolute monopoly in Indian politics, forever.
      
        With the loss in 1989 elections, (and murder of Rajiv Gandhi shortly afterward) the second era of Indian Politics came to an end and the era of coalition politics had begun. Things are now about to get much more criminalized, murky and complicated. However against this backdrop of dirty politics, Indian society and many institutions would progress by leaps and bounds. I will continue with the third era of Indian politics in the next blog.

(to be continued...)