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COMMENTARY

The Last Satrap Revolt?


Radhika Desai

The regionally-based, vernacular-speaking, rural, but also rapidly urbanising, lower caste propertied and more or less bourgeois groups have been central to the Congresss decline and have already restructured the polity, regionalising it. The 1999 elections will hinge on the fate of these forces, whether or not the real issues and principles finally emerge from the outrageous opportunism these forces currently display.
I
THE bulk of comment on the recent revolt in the Congress Party focuses on the rebel trios stated objections. It ignores the elementary political truth that politicians leaving a party to form a new one make statements which have more to do with their political future in their new party than their political past in the old one. All the earnest discussion of the quality of the nations natural progeny or the provisions of other constitutions makes one wonder at the alacrity with which the bourgeois public suspends its normal cynicism, even that especially reserved for regional politicians, provided the principles in question are sufficiently reactionary. And since practically everyone believes that despite the controversy over her origins, Sonia will be the Congresss electoral deliverance (The un-passported, unvisaed masses, my dear, what else do you expect?!), allegations of political calculation have failed to stick on the rebels. This configuration of attitudes obscures the possibility that the Maratha satraps revolt might prove the last act in the long death of the Congress Party, not the first of its revitalised command over another century of Indian politics. What happened, and what can now happen, have little to do with the topics being most loudly discussed dynasticism, nor that family and certainly nothing with Sonia either her origins or even her competence. They have to do with others which have been silently passed over. Chief among these is the interests behind the rebel politicians, and regional leaders generally the regionally based, vernacular-speaking, rural, but also rapidly urbanising, lower caste propertied and more or less bourgeois groups. They have been central to the Congresss decline, have already restructured the polity, regionalising it (much to the irritation of the national bourgeois classes), and they
Economic and Political Weekly

can go still further. True their often outrageous opportunism masks their issues and principles, but then politicians, particularly those representing emerging forces are not always free to pursue them in splendid isolation: creative politics emerges precisely when political calculation and principle point in the same direction. Despite its opportunistic disarray and decay this can still happen in Indian politics. But whether or not it does, the 1999 elections will hinge on the fate of these forces, just as the 1967 elections, supposedly the test of Indira Gandhis charisma, turned out to have been the beginning of Congresss long death.

II
Sonias foreign origins could not have caused the revolt. During last Aprils political hustling none of the rebels gave any hint of hesitation on this count though their arguments surely apply to stop-gap PMs as well: their stand against foreign origins is a dangerous form of patriotism (the first refuge of the politically disoriented) but it is also vague, attesting to little more than the uncertainty they face given the speed of political developments and the length of the campaign still before them. Neither is the question one of Sonias competence. That, notwithstanding the trios own epistolary protestations, is undecided. Both Sonias own competence, or that of her mentors and aides (indeed, their very identity) has been too much of a mystery and the proof of the pudding, or at least some of it, can be expected in the October eating. Although it is true that a senior Congress leader leaving the party on an issue of national importance has succeeded in becoming PM by combining the very regional forces with whom Pawar would now consort, what is remarkable about the explanation that the revolt is all about Pawars prime ministerial ambitions is that it should be taken for granted that Congresss most powerful politician by

far should have to leave the Congress for an uncertain political future to fulfil them, that only a Nehru family member had any right to that post. When Sonia Gandhi emerged as the prime ministerial candidate of the party in the coming elections now no longer a stop-gap with the question of her succession after a general election still open, even Pawars weapon of last resort, Sonias foreignness, deployed in his last CWC meeting, proved a dud, and not because the members were convinced of the constitutional propriety of their stand. But not even dynastic mystique and sycophancy per se caused the revolt. Sycophancy is the usual idiom of a political system based on the exchange of favours: normally, both sides know what the other really means and those who actually believe in the praises heaped on them by favour-seekers are apt to pay dearly for it, as Indira Gandhi did in declaring the 1977 elections, for example. It is Indias political lingua franca and, even as late as their letter of departure, the rebels spoke it to Sonia: After the demise of Rajivji the party felt orphaned...We felt that the real respect the Congress Party had for your family would rejuvenate the organisation...the party so cherished by your family..., etc. Pawar was among those who approached Sonia to take up the presidentship of the party, and he had rejoined the Congress(I) after its first dynastic succession. (Indira Gandhis succession was hardly dynastic: she was not her predecessors daughter and she had spent long years in the party and had been its president. The succession to Sanjay having been aborted, that to Rajiv was indeed the first.) If under Sonia these phenomena have reached revolting proportions (no pun intended. It surely did not escape general notice that Sonias reinstatement at the recent AICC resembled, in the range of undemocratic spectacles, a fascist acclamation more than even a coronation), this is merely a symptom of the partys real and much deeper political malaise. Speculation that Pawar feared that even the ticket distribution in Maharashtra could go against him suggests that his moves were dictated as much by the imperative for sheer political survival as by ambition. It also points to the underlying problem, aligning the Amar-Akbar-Anthony episode with its numerous predecessors in the long decline of the Congress. A party in which such marginalisation is the reward for contributing its largest chunk of MPs from any state is a very sick one. And
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possibly suicidal: the Rajya Sabha Members and bureaucrats (as Pawar contemptuously refers to them) who today constitute the partys sycophantic durbari leadership generally cannot win elections for their own seats. In losing Pawar the Congress has probably lost the last of its great vote builders. And it could make things a lot worse for the few that remain: Sycophancy in the Congress increases in inverse proportion to the remaining number of leaders in the party who do not need to rely on the dubious charms of the Nehru family to win elections. Congresss fateful irony is that, while the other ingredients of its success were in place the Congresss legendary support bases in the countryside and Indira Gandhis knack for populist mobilisation (an acquired, not heritable, intimacy with popular culture and aspirations), for example the Nehru family mystique added a certain pizzaz, and some votes. By itself, however, it could never give the party electoral victories. Lacking any of these, Rajiv never won an election: it was the ghost of this dead mother who won in 1984, and he lost 1989. The reduction of security which caused his death in 1991 was ordered by Rajiv in a campaigning effort to get closer to the people. By then even he recognised that being a Nehru was not enough. As indeed it was not: even the sympathy wave after his own assassination could not reverse a decline in Congresss percentage share of the votes. From its high point in 1984 (48.1 per cent), the Congress share of the vote in the country has declined in every election to its near equality with the BJP at a little over 25 per cent in 1998. Sonias electoral value remains undetermined since the recent sweeps in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi came at a particularly bad time for the ruling BJP in the three states with Congress-BJP two party competition.

III
While the fate of Pawars venture is contingent many developments, by attempting to join other forces the leaders of the various regional bourgeoisies who are essentially his counterparts in the rest of the country, he is treading as surely as he can. Once the mainstay of the Congresss own regional electoral bases, their emergence from it, beginning with the rise of the DMK in the south and the SVD governments in the North, in a long, often patchy and halting, process, was also the decline of the Congress Party. Both the era of Congress stability that side of the historic 1967 elections, and that of its decline this side, attest to the strong, durable, and widely underestimated, grip of these forces over Indian electoral politics.
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Originating among the regional dominant caste peasant elite whom Mahatma Gandhi had started bringing into the Congress Party beginning in the 1920s, their political power had operated through the structure of the Congress Party. At the grass roots it rested on them and on their ability, created and maintained through patronage structures, to deliver the areas votes en bloc to it. In the proper functioning of this structure figures capable of brokering and arbitrating between the leaders of these groups at each level, from village to region, were crucial and a national leader, well above the regional interests he or she arbitrated was most so. This power also shaped government policy, both state and central. Congresss land reform of the 1950s vested land in the hands of the dominant agricultural castes where they were tenants. Substantial budgetary and plan resources were diverted specifically towards enhancing the private productivity and earnings of these market-oriented landowners, rather than the oft-invoked poor farmer of political rhetoric. While in a comfortable symbiosis with certain goals of state policy (like more marketable surplus), they usually prevented uncongenial state action such as taxing their increasing income and wealth. As this group of old and newly minted owners of the land grew more politically vocal, they demanded and got state-sponsorship of the Green and White revolutions. The popular impression that Nehru favoured industrialisation and went against the interests of Indias populous, but effectively disenfranchised, agriculture is not much more than the slogan under which these effective holders of the land proclaimed their independence from the Congress from the late 1960s onwards. What changed in the late 1960s was first, that their power to operate vertical patronage structures which cut deep into the social, caste and class structures diminished and they gradually became the horizontally linked caste groupings more familiar to us. Secondly, increased wealth and income had transformed the horizons of these groups in a way which was to be momentous for the shape of Indian politics for decades to come. These hitherto largely agricultural groups now began to look to towns and to commercial and employment opportunities therein, competing, for the first time, with the upper caste middle classes which had hitherto monopolised them. The Congress found it harder to reconcile these interests and it became victim to a haemorrhage of support among both these groups which was first apparent in the 1967 elections. But contrary to popular impression the caste politics which emerged soon thereEconomic and Political Weekly June 19, 1999

after did not mark the first assertion of the political power of these groups. It had long been effectively exercised from within the Congress Party. Things got worse after 1967: the Congress split and the turn towards populism reflected Indira Gandhis correct estimation that the Syndicates regional bosses and their rural minions had ceased to be reliable vote delivery men. But she also centralised the party, turned arbitrator into autocrat, increasing sycophancy, and made the maintenance of the already troubled patronage structures even harder, transferring upon herself personally much of the burden of vote-getting (at which she was far better than any of her successors). No wonder such a large part of the politics of the two decades which followed revolved around the centre-state axis. Regional groupings of the dominant agricultural castes were already going in and out of the Congress Party in her time. After her demise, the outflow increased. Without a wizard vote-getter at the helm not all the anti-defection laws could keep them in, and new ones, such as that against leaving the party for office being proposed after the delicate verdict of the Goa assembly elections, are likely to prove as ineffective. These forces, including non-party farmers movements, often represented themselves as the emergence of a farmers Bharat pitting itself against industrial India, arguing against urban bias and demanding more for agriculture. In reality they wanted state subsidies for inputs into capitalist farming, higher procurement prices for grain, in short, better terms of trade for surplus farmers with the industrial sector (now that they too were consumers of industrial products). The rise of regional parties from the late 1970s onwards reflected the complex reality of this propertied, often capitalist, groups more accurately. Their activities and aspirations were no longer exclusively rural and they invested in trade, finance, hotels, cinemas, etc, and in the professions of their sons, in provincial towns and cities. Regional parties demanded more industrial development in the regions and greater support for agriculture. The 1989 National Front government demonstrated how far they had already come then and also clarified the rest of the picture. The Congress was losing its urban upper caste bourgeois constituency to the BJP nationwide. The Left remaining confined to its own regional bases, the working poor, rural and urban, became prey to only the most opportunistic mobilisation. Finally, between the two sections of the propertied, Mandal and Mandir became the new axis of political competition.
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IV
Today regional parties are major contenders for power in all major states except three (the fourth, Maharashtra having succumbed as a result of the revolt): Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In these three states, the Congress itself behaves as a regional party representing the lower-caste OBC propertied groups and their urban aspirations in a two-party competition with the BJP. To stem its decline, to hold on to its remaining regional bases of power, and to stand by its anti-BJP protestations of secularism, the Congress would have to accept its political diminution and work in co-operation with other regional parties in concert against the BJP as the Left recently urged. However, the Congress has chosen not to. Sliding further in the past two elections, losing a few more of its satraps, it resorted to the only hope of the damned a miracle and went to Sonia Gandhi. It resolved at Panchmarhi to aim for single party government, in effect complete recovery to its former dominance, almost entirely on the strength of its faith in her. Apart from the usual and usually neglected resolve to set its organisational house in order, it launched the unrealistic slogan of single party government to target the regional parties and its unprincipled soft hindutva statement (Hinduism is Indias best guarantee of secularism) to win back at least some of the upper caste bourgeois vote from the BJP. The Congresss role in the parliamentary vote on the BJPs unconstitutional dismissal of the Bihar government, seemed it solitary relapse into both realism and principle: by April, when the most urgent task was the formation of an alternative government to keep the BJP out, the Congress refused anything but its own minority government, untainted by the stigma of unstable coalitions. A mysterious nexus with Laloo Prasad Yadav and the affections of the general secretary of the CPI(M), were to be the only souvenirs of its Bihar trip. That it left the BJP in power showed up its commitment to secularism. Even worse, it appears that the Congress might actually be aiming at a two-party system comprising itself and the BJP, mainly targeting the regional parties in the coming elections. The Congress has reacted to the Pawar revolt in its usual way, trying to undermine its lost satraps by claiming their lesser competitors. But this strategy may have played itself out in many states, leaving the Congress scraping the bottom of the barrel of available mini-bosses. This apart, the Congresss hopes for revival now rest on the enthusiasm frenzied Sonia worship,

supplemented by money can whip up among its party workers. Its ability to attract a certain quantum of the haute bourgeois intelligentsia of distinctly high quality the Manmohan Singhs and the Natwar Singhs seem such a relief from the Yashwant Sinhas and the Jaswant Singhs, not to mention the Brajesh Mishras has a certain cache but only among the educated urban middle classes. As for the new third force being discussed among the rebels, the SP, Chandrashekhar and others, it may be swelled by some of the BJPs regional allies not least because the BJP has usually used these initially to eliminate the Congress, and then turned on their own support bases. But what really dogs the emergence of the third front is whether a workable formula for the division of the spoils of government can be found. The Congress Party leader had earlier performed this function but not without consultation with the satraps (...your eminent grandfather-in-law had always encouraged a tradition of free and uninhibited exchange of views amongst Congressmen). After the collapse of the National and United Fronts, the pressure to ensure that the next such government does not fall foul of internal problems, and to convince the public, already fed the mantra of stability, that it wont, is urgent. Pawar has already made noises about federalism and clarity on this issue would seem a necessary ingredient of any such formula, and a potentially promising development for the nation as a whole. That leaves the question of secularism and here things are decidedly dubious. Under the United Front it had already been reduced to the urgent but limited aim of keeping the BJP out of power. The commitment of the regional parties to even this goal was shown to be hollow in the case of those who supported the BJP government, the latest being the DMK. While it was the anti-Congressism of the rest foiled the Lefts recent exertion in this direction, it needs to be recognised that unmoored from the secularism which the Left tried to infuse in the UF as they now are, except for the minority constituencies of many of these forces and this too is limited by the already degraded choices faced by the minority communities there is no obstacle to the emergence of at least a diffuse form of Hindu majoritarianism (we are a spiritual people and a democratic one and we cannot put restraints even on majority, indeed, especially on majority religious instincts an attitude towards which the BJP itself has been moving from its RSS purism) among these parties, largely representatives of caste Hindu upwardly mobile propertied groups.
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