Why am I writing this? It is for a
purely personal reason. They say you don’t need to explain your stand to those
who don’t understand or are misinformed or uninformed. I disagree. Your silence
will only vindicate their stand. Coming back to the reason for which I chose to
write on this topic. It results from a corollary widely accepted these days:
‘If you do not support the right-wing dispensation, then you’re a Congress
supporter, led by Mrs Sonia Gandhi and her son Mr Rahul Gandhi. Also, it is in
the backdrop of the decimation of the scam-stricken UPA in the last polls that such
people judge and opine about previous Congress governments and even the
organisation’s history before independence.
They say it has always been such a
corrupt organisation and was run by the ‘Gandhi’ family. They, however, single
out leaders like Sardar Patel and Lal Bahadur Shastri and try to highlight
their so-called differences with Pandit Nehru to justify their claim that they
were not like him. Like D.K. Baruah’s famous ‘India is Indira and Indira is
India’, for such people, ‘Congress was Nehru and Nehru was Congress’.
Maybe the Congress is also guilty of
letting the name of Pandit Nehru be maligned by the vested interests as they
continue to seek votes in his name more than half-a-century after his death. They
also successfully ignored the role of those leaders in building the party and
the country whom the right-wing adopts as their leaders.
This write-up, however, is not to
support either of the claims. As I said, this is for a purely personal purpose:
To clarify my own stand that opposing Narendra Modi and the saffron camp and
admiring Pandit Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi doesn’t make me a supporter of the
Congress led by Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Rahul Gandhi, or worse, of Mr Robert
Vadra.
One may well argue that if you link
the past of BJP and RSS with Mr Modi or are still against these organisations
for the Ayodhya movement or Gujarat riots, then why not link Mr Rahul Gandhi to
Pandit Nehru? The argument, however, has no base at all as the BJP still has
those faces in its fold who were instrumental in the temple movement and the
ensuing communal flare-up-many of them are Union ministers in
the present Cabinet. Whereas there’s no point in linking Nehru’s legacy with
this Congress as this Congress is not that Congress, literally.
In 1969, Mrs Indira Gandhi, after
she was expelled from the party for indiscipline, broke the Congress into two
parties and destroyed the old guard. With this move of hers, she disassociated
the new Congress from its history of struggle against the colonial rule. To
this date, this Congress is known as Congress (I). After that followed a
battery of actions and decisions which established the difference between the
old Congress and the new, led by Mrs Indira Gandhi and her favoured son Sanjay.
Corruption and a dictatorial rule, carried out in the name of ‘restoring’
democracy and socialism, took the new Congress to a level where terming it a
carrier of Pandit Nehru’s legacy was like the RSS associating a communist,
Bhagat Singh, with itself.
It was this time when the ‘family’
or ‘dynasty’ caught hold of the party. Although, Mrs Indira Gandhi used to
assist her father in his work when he was in office, the role of Mr Sanjay
Gandhi was never of a mere assistance; he was always in control.
The very act of Mrs Gandhi of
dividing the party was against the Congress’ tradition. As noted author Mr
Ramachandra Guha, in India After Gandhi,
quotes an independent observer as saying that ‘in contrast to the incremental
approach of Nehru and Shastri, she represented something ruthless and new’.
With the imposition of internal emergency in 1975, obviously to crush the JP
movement and rendering the High Court decision threatening her chair
ineffective, Mrs Gandhi lost all the credibility she was left with as Nehru’s
daughter.
I had read somewhere that after the
1962 fiasco somebody had suggested Pandit Nehru to declare a state of emergency
to stop the barrage of criticism. However, he preferred personal criticism to
destruction of democratic values and rejected the idea.
That Mrs Gandhi’s actions were
against the culture of Nehru and the old Congress is evident from a letter her
fiercest opponent Jai Prakash Narayan wrote to her. ‘Please don’t destroy the
foundations that the Fathers of the Nation, including your noble father, had
laid down. You inherited a great tradition, noble values and a working
democracy,’ wrote JP, expressing hope that her rule will not last long because,
he thought, ‘a people who fought British imperialism and humbled it cannot
accept indefinitely the indignity and shame of totalitarianism’.
But alas! He was wrong. Totalitarian
rule seems to be extending forever, hidden under the cloak of ‘wish of the
majority.’ It is the legacy of this totalitarianism that the new Congress, and
even others who opposed it for the same, are carrying forward. None can be
called a true inheritor of Nehru’s socialism. Socialism is an idea which is alien
to all political parties now; even to those whose names have the word.
On the communal front too-precisely the reason for which one
denounces the right-wing-the new Congress doesn’t come clean.
Despite the division of the country on the basis of religion, the then Congress
leaders intended to make a pluralistic and secular India. But the way a
particular community was targeted after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and the way
her son and the new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi downplayed it with his famous ‘when
a big tree falls’ remark, showed how shallow was the addition of the word ‘secular’
to the Preamble by Mrs Gandhi’s regime in 1976.
In all the ways-nominal, ideological, moral, ethical
and historical-this is not the Congress the
Gandhians used to admire. It cannot place Nehru’s or Gandhi’s photograph on its
banners. And just because it does that, its opponents should not draw those
historic personalities in today’s political battle.
Neither of the camps, however, have
the allegiance of people like me. There seems no one out there who can break
this politics of fear and intimidation introduced in the world’s largest
democracy, sadly, by Pandit Nehru’s daughter and grandson. To bring such people
to the fore who can, India needs a massive electoral reform.
